AN ARTISTIC EXILE
A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975)
By GEREMIE R. BARMÉ
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 471 pages, $60

reviewed by Pieter Holstein

I became an admirer of Feng Zikai during a stay in China in 2000. I happened to glance through one of his books in a bookstore and was attracted by the direct descriptive style, sense of humor, and realism of his black-and-white brush drawings. Also, I was intrigued by an evocation of something meaningful that seemed to be located in the most ordinary things and situations: a flower managing to grow in a crack in a wall; a man and a boy watching a train go by on the horizon. I was struck by the realization that those drawings of objects and people from a seemingly so different society could evoke in me memories of the small town where I grew up on the other side of the globe.

The biography An Artistic Exile, by Geremie R. Barmé, provides a wealth of information not only about Feng Zikai and his work but also about the cultural scene in China during the turbulent time of his life (1898-1975). Barmé writes:

A childhood during the autumn of imperial rule meant that he witnessed the ignominious fall of the state Confucian educational and examination structure and the rise of a new kind of education and literacy and a violent and fractious form of mass politics and student radicalism.

Feng's adolescence was spent in Hangzhou, a provincial capital in the new Republic, with a cultural heritage extending back many generations. Here, under the instruction of teachers like Li Shutong and Xia Mianzun, "he began to fabricate a personal, syncretic cultural sensibility, which he would pursue for the rest of his life." Thus he found the inspiration for his unique form of lyrical manhua (literally, caricature or cartoon) paintings that capture a stable world of simple pleasures and familial warmth.

Feng moved to Shanghai and became an educator and writer and found common cause with the early humanistic aspects of the May Fourth period. He experienced a relentless sense of estrangement in the late 1920s as he faced the crisis of his generation, when hope for meaningful change came up against the political reality of a state built on the economics of self-interest. His religious beliefs as a Buddhist caused an enduring sense of withdrawal, also strengthened by the deaths of several of his children and a loneliness and sorrow for the past.

Feng was professionally and emotionally aligned to a group of educator-writers who were sympathetic to progressive politics but who also embraced vital, reformulated traditions in their own lives and cultural activities. Eventually, his ever-present need for withdrawal caused him to move back to the place of his origin, Shimenwan. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War forced Feng and his family to flee west, to Guilin, in 1937. He had to leave behind his considerable personal library and the entire collection of his earlier paintings, which were subsequently destroyed. He continued teaching and drawing and later started translating from the Russian. Barmé writes:

Many writers have remarked that Zikai's life as a refugee during the war did much to bring him into contact with the outside world and incited in him a greater passion for "reality" and political engagement. . . . In 1949, like so many of his contemporaries, Feng Zikai was initially excited at the prospect of the political stability, economic prosperity, and social harmony promised by the founding of the People's Republic of China. . . . Although he was never jailed or rusticated for more than a few weeks for his beliefs and activities, he was an artist whose exile was both real and poignant.

An inspiration throughout his life was the contact in his adolescence in Hangzhou with his mentor Li Shutong, who later became Dharma Master Hongyi.

It was the combination of 'moral rectitude' renpin and 'artistic accomplishment' luapin that he first learned under Li Shutong's tutelage that would, in Feng Zikai's later life, most deeply inform his artistic practice and the way he spoke about it.

The contact with Hongyi led to Feng's embracing of Buddhism and the undertaking of a major artistic project, the creation of the six volumes of Paintings to Protect Life, that took the last years of his life to fulfill. The six volumes of calligraphic drawings and accompanying written text are an invitation and pledge to protect animal life and are meant to set an example and a standard for a vision of the world. The last two volumes were made secretly during the Cultural Revolution and were published in Singapore by his friend the Buddhist monk Guangqia, who was also a pupil of Hongyi.

Aside from being a most valuable source of information on Feng Zikai, I consider An Artistic Exile to be of very special value in the domain of art history. Feng Zikai again and again confronts reality and tries to examine what this reality might be. As Barmé writes in the epilogue: "Feng Zikai's story is one that can speak far beyond the limits of the Chinese revolution and the cultures that it spawned." Since Feng was an educator, writer, and translator as well as a painter, his concerns were wide-ranging and well thought out. Feng Zikai insisted on taking nature as a master and, as Barmé observes, "was to remain loyal to the idea of 'art for life' throughout his creative career, although his interpretation of the expression and his appreciation of artistic realism were his own."

Barmé uses exile in the title as metaphor for the positions Feng took in many aspects of his life, and in a quote elaborates: " . . . any major artist and truly creative mind is a foreigner in its [sic] own country." Whereas Feng Zikai would not survive the Cultural Revolution, his work and reputation would, and Barmé concludes:

. . . many readers now find in his work a spirit that has outlasted the evanescent changes of politics and the uncertainties wrought by economic weal and bane. In his exile, the condition of all humanity, many have come to recognize their own state of being, and in his work some find solace andas Feng would put ita temporary escape from the suffering, anger, belligerence, and sorrows of the transient world.