A Sino-Japanese Relationship on Display: The Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris, 1933

• In Event: Japanese Empire in Motion: 1930s Art Exhibitions on the Global Stage

Abstract

This paper explores Chinese artists’ responses to the Japanese proposal of a shared East Asian culture through a case study of the 1933 Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris. Featuring works from the Han dynasty to the early 1930s, this show was the first large-scale exhibition of Chinese art in France. It created a sensation in the Parisian art world, attracted unprecedented numbers of viewers and drew wide coverage from both French and Chinese media. Its significance, however, extended beyond its popularity. Motivated by the success of earlier Japanese art exhibitions in Paris, the renowned Chinese artist Xu Beihong (1895-1953) curated this event by collaborating with French art museums, private collectors and Chinese artists to organize an exhibition that aimed to construct new canons of Chinese art for European audiences. While previous scholarship has focused on Xu’s aesthetic taste, this paper uncovers a previously overlooked, yet crucial dimension of this exhibition: the competing narratives between China and Japan. In this show, Xu turned the exhibition into an art historical space by surveying the development of Chinese art, its position in East Asia, and its engagement with European aesthetic values. In addition to analyzing Xu’s rhetorical and curatorial strategies, this paper investigates the reception of this exhibition among the French, Chinese and Japanese art worlds. I argue that the overseas exhibition functioned as a significant transcultural agent that negotiated Chinese and Japanese cultural identities as well as their different visions of the past, present and future of East Asia.

Author

• Stephanie Su, Bard Graduate Center