ABSTRACT
There were 11 issues of Art Exhibition (Meizhan 美展), the newsletter published every three days during the first national art exhibition in Shanghai in 1929. The major articles in those issues are here analysed as they related to art reforms, particularly the influential debate between Xu Zhimo and Xu Beihong, the formidable French-trained artist and ardent believer in realism. This analysis serves to delineate the main threads of thought about art and art reforms in that period and to demonstrate the major reasons for the subsequent triumph of realist approaches to visual representation. It also illustrates who the major players on the national stage were and how intellectuals considered art reforms to be integral to the modernisation project. This chapter will also briefly introduce the visual images published in Art Exhibition and demonstrate how the editors and the standing committee tried to strike a balance between traditional Chinese media and themes (ink-brush painting, seal carving, calligraphy, Buddhist sculpture, etc.) and recently introduced European ones (drawing, painting in oil or water colour, sculpture, photography, architectural models).
