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John Kohut

TRADITIONALLY, Chinese art has never cared much for the human form.

  ''Whether the four limbs are beautiful or ugly, has nothing to do with excellence,'' wrote the Jin dynasty painter Gu Kaizhi about 1,700 years ago. ''It is the eyes that show a person's spirit.''   That sort of thinking has deprived mainstream Chinese art of a field which has borne rich fruit for other civilisations: the nude.

  Yet the naked human form has recently found its way into the artistic vernacular of Chinese painting and sculpture.

   In small galleries and in private studios across the country, the nude is no longer the shocking rarity it was only a few years ago.

  ''In ancient China nude art was regarded as pornographic and was not classified as orthodox art,'' said Chen Zui, a professor and artist at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Chinese Art Academy, and one of the pioneers of nude art in China.

  ''Unlike the ancient Greeks, who believed the spirit and body are unified, Chinese people think that the spirit and body are separated. They think that the body and sexual feelings are all dirty and should not be expressed in art works.

  ''But it's much better now. We can say it's normal,'' said Professor Chen.

  Nude art existed in ancient China, as evidenced by the recent discovery of a 5,000-year-old terracotta nude goddess and the magnificent murals of the Dunhuang Grottoes in Gansu province.

  But during the Song dynasty, beginning in the 10th century AD, the dominant Confucian school of idealistic philosophy decreed that human desire should be exterminated and that life on Earth should reflect the heavenly order.

  That order strictly excluded paintings of the naked human body, and nude painting was relegated to the realm of pornographic pictures which circulated underground.

  In the 1920s, Chinese returning from studies abroad and deeply influenced by Western ideas created a sensation by painting nude models.

   But their work did not always go down well. One artist of the time, Liu Haisu, was jailed for painting nudes.

  Following the 1949 revolution, nude art became a taboo. In the 1960s, Professor Chen remembers painting nudes in his art classes.

   The exercise was purely academic though, a part of China's imitation of European-style oil painting.

   Chinese artists had to know how to paint nudes so that they understood the composition of the human body. But their nudes were never publicly displayed.

  Even in the late 1970s, when China started opening up to the West, Professor Chen did not dare write his masters thesis on the nude, which would have been his choice had the social and political climate at the time permitted.

  After graduating in 1981, Professor Chen began to research nude art, against the advice of his friends, who feared his work would end up being little more than a pile of waste paper which would never see the light of day.

  ''But I thought I should do it. It was a vacuum waiting to be filled, a vacuum that was shameful for a country of a billion people,'' he said.

  His first book, Un Nude Art, published in 1988, sold 200,000 copies. The same year, an exhibition of nude art in Beijing drew record crowds.

   Many of the people who went were interested less in art than in the rare chance to see portrayals of naked flesh.

  Over the past five years, Professor Chen has written nine more books on nude art. As the novelty wears off, sales of such books are dropping.

  ''There are many nude art books today, but few people buy them only to see naked bodies,'' said Professor Chen.

   ''No-one today debates whether nude art should be allowed in exhibitions. From top leaders to commoners, everyone believes nude paintings are art.''   The area where controversy arises is over nude photography. A former Chinese national who now lives abroad recently tried to put on an exhibition of nude photography in Beijing.

   The Culture Ministry would have nothing to do with him. ''They said it was low class,'' he said. Eventually, he managed to get a hotel to give him space for an exhibition.

  Officialdom is sceptical about nude photography because the lines between art and pornography are often so blurred.

   Indeed, in the name of art, many publishers are now putting out magazines which would pass for no more than soft porn in the West.



Redrawing the line on nudes