Back To The Future

Scholar and museologist Kwok Kian Chow re-visits some 'ideas of Asia' proposed in the early 20th century.

THERE ARE MANY MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN Asian art that we could regard as important for the development of a critical regionalism. One such example is the Bengal Revivalist School of the early 20th century1, which is considered the high point of a particular sort of aesthetic sensibility - one that integrated Western representational art with inspirations from multiple traditional and indigenous sources. Its organic synthesis of the figurative, ritualistic and decorative created a new visual language that, importantly, always questioned the meaning of representation.²

We can draw many parallel examples of such impetuses throughout Asia. The Philippines, for example, also related indigenous traditions like religious iconography and multiple folk expressions with representational art in its long history of visual integrations. At more or less the same time that the Bengal School was established in India, the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l'Indochine was established in 1925 in Vietnam and the Nanyang School was set up in Singapore in the 1930s. As in the case of the Bengal School, the latter involved both an art school and an art movement. Just as Indian artists visited the Ajanta caves, Chinese artists too went to the Magoa Grottos in Dunhuang, the oldest Buddhist caves in China, in search of inspiration from the distant past. All these initiatives took place in the context of new institutions in Asia founded to build an awareness of the West's representational legacy. This occurred slightly earlier within the Philippines, Japan and India, but became widespread throughout Asia by the first decades of the 20th century although it never really fit comfortably within Asia's own expressive realms.

Over and above developments in modern art we can re-read the history of Asia by examining symbiotic aesthetic and stylistic connections between its component parts. These readings will shed new light on the way we look at Modernism in Asia - as a form of critical regionalism that goes beyond the mere transfer of Western stylistic elements. My own research in museology in Asia, in recent years, brought me to the re-reading of major art historical texts on Asian art. Among the titles that figured was Ananda Coomaraswamy's influential book, The Transformation of Nature in Art, of 1934.³ Coomaraswamy was able to draw from both Indian and Chinese aesthetic sources to explain that art in Asia was never about verisimilitude. Strangely, this debate remains relevant even today, since we are still trying very hard to explain that abstraction and figuration should not be treated as binaries, and, in fact, that the distinction is not a very meaningful one in much Asian art.

Coomaraswamy explained that the Indian aesthetic notion of sãdrsya refers to similitude or similarity. Sãdrsya refers to a quality wholly self-contained within the work of art itself, a correspondence of mental and sense-orientated factors in the artwork. Coomaraswamy correctly noted that this notion was akin to those of wuxing (formlessness) and yi (idea) in Chinese aesthetics. He then masterfully strung together these interrelated aesthetic concepts as they are expounded in the Six Methods of Xie He (c. 500 - 535 CE) with a clarity that has seldom been achieved on the subject in the English language.

Explicating the idea of yi (idea) further, the Chinese art historian Gao Minglu recently published his new book on the Yi Pai theory.⁴ (I am told that the English edition of the book will soon be available.) Gao's Yi Pai theory is most helpful in explaining the non-contradictory relationship between abstraction and figuration; embracing synthesis rather than fragmentation, through the explication of the 9th century concepts of li 理'principle,' shi 'concept,' and xing, 'likeness' found in Zhang Yanyuan's art historical texts. Gao also referenced some of the more recent articulations of triadic relations - such as the connection between abstraction, conception and representation - as well as Martin Heidegger's inter-linking of da-sein (existence), zu-sein (to be) and zeug (equipment). As we know, Heidegger extended Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, which explored consciousness as a first person experience, to consider the structural features of both the subject and the object of experience - speaking about the relational experience between an individual and the world.

Both Coomaraswamy and Gao see this sort of relational experience as always having been the basis of Asian art - which, therefore, cannot be understood through categories such as 'abstraction' and 'representation.' As Coomaraswamy put it, "it is, in fact, obvious that the likeness between anything and any representation of it cannot be a likeness of nature... it refers, actually, to a quality wholly selfcontained within the work of art itself, a correspondence of mental and sensational factors in the work."

We can, indeed, look productively at traditional Asian aesthetics in order to make critical interventions into the established hierarchies of 20th century Western Modernism. The early networks among artists in Asia might have been sporadic, but were always significant and illuminating. Santiniketan naturally comes to mind as an early vision of a nexus of Asian culture. One example of a Southeast Asian artist who attended Santiniketan was Bagyi Aung Soe, the pioneer of modern art in Myanmar, who was much inspired by the university's philosophy as articulated by his teacher Nandalal Bose.⁵ Some of the main principles, laid down by Rabindranath Tagore himself, included familiarizing oneself with one's own cultural and artistic traditions, being sensitive towards the environment, exploring one's own vision and experimenting with mediums and materials.