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Valerie C. Doran

The Hong Kong Museum of Art's upcoming exhibition,  A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: The  Art of Lin Fengmian, could be described as a blockbuster. It's  certainly long overdue.

Organised in collaboration with the Shanghai Art Museum and held to mark the 10th anniversary of the  handover, the  exhibition  reveals the achievements of an  artist (1900-1991)  whose works you might read about in art history books rather than see in a museum.

Lin's work consists of gently modernist, richly hued ink-and-colour paintings depicting poetic subjects such as  women in repose  or wild geese flying across misty landscapes.

The  retrospective  of more than 100 works painted over 60 years  reveals Lin as an artist of deep complexity, a thinker of  daring   originality and a humanist whose faith in the transcendent value of  art survived  great tragedy.

More than 60 of the paintings are from the Hong Kong and Shanghai museums,  with most of the others on loan from private collections.

'We're particularly grateful to Lin Fengmian's god-daughter Feng Ye,' says Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMA) assistant curator Asta Ho Chi-ming. 'Without her support it would have been next to impossible to secure such important loans from private collectors around the world.'

Feng,  who studied extensively with Lin and is now an artist based in Hong Kong, is  lending her own collection of paintings from the artist's later period, from 1977  to his death in 1991,  when he lived  in Hong Kong.  The result is  a comprehensive exhibition, which  is a major achievement, given  that many of Lin's earlier works  were destroyed during the Sino-Japanese war.

Sadly, an even greater number of works (including those from Lin's middle and mature periods of the late 1950s to mid-1970s, when he lived in Shanghai) were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution - many by the artist himself.

Yet, as Feng   describes in her exhibition memoir of the Cultural Revolution years, even this didn't prevent him  being jailed for more than four years  and brutally  tortured as punishment for the  very achievements this exhibition now celebrates.

Born in Meixian  county, Guangdong province,  Lin  was 'contemporary with the 20th century',  according to chief  curator Tang Hoi-chiu. The trajectory of his life and of his  artistic development reflects that  of Chinese modernity itself.

The son of  a stone carver  and calligrapher, Lin was soon recognised as a  prodigy and sent to study ink-and-brush painting under private teachers.  When he was 20, he was one of the fortunate few chosen for  Chinese educator Cai Yuanpei's Work-Study programme, which sponsored young artists  to go  to France. Lin's experiences in Europe  spawned new aesthetic and personal potentials.

At the ecoles des beaux arts in Dijon and Paris, he breathed an atmosphere electric with the new movements of Fauvism and Cubism. Later, in Germany, he  was deeply influenced by the Expressionist movement and its  embrace of other  styles,  including African and eastern folk arts.

During this period,  Lin produced the first of a lifelong series of large Expressionist-style works  dealing with themes of human suffering that were an extreme contrast  with the light-filled depictions  for which he's best known.

The  HKMA exhibition, which opens on Wednesday,  includes several important examples of this rarely seen  style and  a chronology offering  insights into the passion and pathos  of a personal life  that deeply influenced his art.

Visiting Germany in 1924, Lin  met and married a young German-Austrian aristocrat, Elise von Roder, but a year later, both his wife and their newborn daughter fell ill and died.  In 1926, Lin remarried, this time to a young French sculptress, Alice Vattant, with whom he returned to China that  year to take up the position of director and professor of the new National Beijing College of Art.

There, Lin created controversy  by instituting life-sketching classes using nude models. A year later, he  escaped an apparent assassination attempt - a violent protest against his role in organising the three- week Beijing Art Assembly, which exhibited and encouraged the integration of different modes of art: Chinese ink painting with  western modernism, folk with fine art, music with painting - all radical concepts at the time.

Unfazed, Lin continued to court controversy, introducing his students to Cezanne and Matisse and encouraging  experimentation in a quest to revitalise Chinese art. As  artist Wu Guanzhong attests in his catalogue essay, when the young Lin was later appointed by Cai Yuanpei as director of the new National Hangzhou Academy of Art in Zhejiang province, he became an important mentor to a whole generation of innovative ink painters, including Wu himself and contemporaries such as Li Keran.

With its broad scope,  the exhibition will help audiences to discover - or  rediscover - the full  complexity of Lin's  technical and conceptual experimentation,  often  revealed only  subtly.

The seeming tranquility of many of his themes - from court ladies to still-lifes, opera figures to autumn landscapes - and the simplicity of his typical square format can belie the intricate choreography of colour and ink, surface and layering, time and space, in which the artist engaged over decades.

For example Lady with Fruit, dated to 1960, reveals the way  the superficially Matisse-like composition is actually built up  of a complex stylistic layering: the transparent line technique of Tang-dynasty murals, the colouration of Song ceramic ware, the geometric relativity of Cubism, and the luminescent infusion of ink and wash that is one of Lin's most inimitable qualities.

The show's  catalogue is an invaluable resource,  with analytical texts by  Wu  and art historian Lang Shaojun, among others,  and  a moving personal memoir by Feng, who will  speak at one of the museum's  lectures this month.

A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting - The Art of Lin Fengmian, Wed-June 3, 10am-6pm, daily; 10am-8pm, Sat (closed Thu), Hong Kong Museum of Art, 10 Salisbury Rd, TST. Inquiries: 2721 0116



Trajectory of modernity