Chang Yu, or Sanyu as he spelled his name in French, very nearly vanished from our cultural memory. The tragedy of his premature and solitary death in 1966 took place just as his native China plunged headlong into the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, a man-made cataclysm that brought disaster to virtually all Chinese and very nearly destroyed painting as a creative art. With his homeland in chaos, and communication difficult, how might anyone notice the passing of one genial soul?

Two decades after his death, the vividness of Sanyu’s paintings and of his effect on his friends and admirers in Paris, Taipei, and New York had dimmed to an almost imperceptible paleness, and nearly disappeared. The intense sensuality and poignant beauty of his paintings make the fragility of their survival even more profoundly moving. His friend Pang Xunqin, in an autobiography written shortly after the Cultural Revolution, rather courageously included a short chapter on Sanyu, whose modernism and sensuality would have made him extremely politically incorrect as a topic at that time. Pang Xunqin’s short essay is one of the rare published recollections of Sanyu by a fellow Chinese artist. Fortunately, the rediscovery of his painting in the 1980s and 1990s by a handful of passionate enthusiasts has saved his life’s work from complete oblivion.

Why was Sanyu’s art so moving to his fellow artists and collectors in the 1920s and 1930s? Why does it speak so powerfully to us today, whether in Shanghai, Paris, or New York? And why was much of his most brilliant and forceful late work almost ignored?

History played countless cruel jokes on Chinese artists of the twentieth century, and the fate of Sanyu and his art was that of his tragic, if talented, generation. The lovely suburban studio of the Japanese-educated Shanghai modernist Chen Baoyi, along with all his paintings, was destroyed in the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1931. Many more artists suffered similar destruction of artwork and biographical documents during the eight-year war with Japan from 1937-1945. Then, only four years later, bureaucratic policies of the early People’s Republic of China declared artists of both modernist and traditionalist orientation to be taboo, and purged them from the canon of contemporary art. In the Maoist era, the histories of art were written as though these artists, many of them China’s most innovative, had never existed. And finally, many paintings and documents that survived the perils of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and anyone tainted by foreign experiences marked as a traitor. China’s cosmopolitan artistic period, the era of Sanyu’s greatest success, was ripped out of the record.

Some artists lived on in the memories of their colleagues and students, but their art work and most details of their pre-war artistic careers have been lost. To take only one example, Lin Fengmian, who was educated in France in the 1920s and then founded China’s most important state art college in 1928, suffered the destruction of virtually all his early work during these catastrophes. His own longevity and the gratitude of his students kept his good reputation alive, but this was not enough to physically preserve his most important painting through the political disasters. As a result, Lin Fengmian is in many ways an empty name, stripped of the proof of his seminal art historical importance. In Sanyu’s case, on the other hand, his reputation almost perished, but the fortunate survival of his work makes his well-deserved, if almost miraculous artistic resurrection, possible.

The power of his painting to move us today is a testament to a particular kind of sensitivity and expressive talent. The historical and cultural circumstances that almost eradicated Sanyu from the history of Chinese art, moreover, were transformed by the 1980s and 1990s, and have made it possible to revive his reputation. At the same time, China’s new wave art movements of the 1980s echoed the modernist movements of 1920s and 1930s Shanghai-including the manifestos, the acts of rebellion, the bohemian experiments with lives creatively lived. The post-Cultural Revolution period brought a renewed appreciation for innovative creative struggles of both past and present.

As Rita Wong has described so well, Sanyu was born into a China in change-in the throes of a revolution more profound than that attempted anywhere else in Asia. However, to a child and adolescent experiencing the period immediately before and after the overthrow of the empire, the social and economic changes may have seemed more like natural progress toward a more up-to-date China than like the abrupt termination of a two-thousand year cultural tradition. Educated during the last years of the monarchy in the traditional manner customary for sons of well-to-do families, and trained in the arts of Chinese calligraphy and painting, he matured into a modernizing society. The emperor was overthrown a few days before his tenth birthday, and with adolescence Sanyu moved into a cosmopolitan world.

Sanyu’s early years and schooling follow in general pattern those of many young Chinese men and women of his generation who came from similarly prosperous families. In the first decades of the twentieth century, and particularly following the abolition of the Chinese traditional examination system, thousands of Chinese flocked to Japan for study, the majority seeking modern knowledge of science and technology. Around the time of the Chinese revolution in 1911, Sanyu’s second elder brother Chang Bicheng went to Japan to study engineering. Supported by their eldest brother, Junmin, who was extremely successful in the silk business-now mechanized in a modern industrial fashion-Sanyu, then about sixteen or seventeen years of age, was able to join his brother in 1918 in Tokyo, where he stayed until Bicheng graduated from Waseda University in 1919.

In its rush to modernize, which began in the 1870s with the Meiji restoration, Japan revamped its entire educational system, including art education. By the time Sanyu began his extended visit to Japan, the prestigious Tokyo School of Fine Arts had already been in existence for almost twenty-five years, and had developed a systematic curriculum that merged Euro-American and Japanese artistic practices. It had produced a large number of graduates who extended the school’s influence throughout the Japanese art world. A number of prominent Japanese artists had also returned from extended periods of study in Paris, creating a lively art scene in which different views of modernity in art competed for attention. The most prominent of the returned artists were Yasui Sotaro (1914), Umehara Ryuuzaburo (1913), Ishii Hakutei (1912), and Fujishima Takeji (1910). Ishii Hakutei organized an exhibition in the year of his return to introduce the art of Renoir and Rodin to Tokyo. Artists of modernist inclination established an annual exhibition called the Nikakai in 1914. This alternative national exhibition began exhibiting cubist and futurist work as early as their 1917 show. In 1915 the private Kawabata Art School in Tokyo began teaching oil painting, thus offering training to many artists who could not or did not wish to enter the state art or art education schools. Thus, when Sanyu visited Tokyo, he had ample opportunity to view and study contemporary work in post-impressionist, fauvist, cubist, futurist, and virtually all up-to-date modernist styles. Furthermore, the Teiten, or Imperial Exhibition of contemporary art, was established in 1919. This was an exciting time for a young person who loved art to visit Tokyo.
Exhibitions of both academic realist and modernist oil painting, as well as Japanese-style painting, were frequent during Sanyu’s stay in Japan. We do not yet know much about what the adolescent Sanyu did in Tokyo while his brother completed his engineering degree, but he certainly had the opportunity to see both traditional and modern art, as well as to experience the unique synthesis of modern Western culture and traditional Japanese culture that had been developed in Tokyo. Based on what he chose to do subsequently, it seems extremely likely that he took advantage of some of the opportunities to familiarize himself with trends in contemporary oil painting.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sanyu was not a person who joined the clubs and art societies that provided mutual support for artists, and a simple survey of such groups will not tell us much about his career or art. Although apparently quite gregarious in his social life, he chose to walk his artistic path alone. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he became a model of Parisian modernism to some important young Chinese artists, who viewed him with admiration from afar. Unlike politically and socially ambitious friends such as Xu Beihong and Zhang Daofan, Sanyu sought no such influence, but the originality and simplicity of his paintings spoke to fellow Chinese artists who saw them in Paris.
What was the artistic world of Shanghai like in the period of Sanyu’s greatest reputation, and what was his role in China’s cosmopolitan art world of the pre-World War II era? In 1919, the same year Sanyu returned from Japan to Shanghai with his brother, Shanghai’s most influential modern art society, the Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui), was established by a group of six young faculty members at Shanghai Art School. Some of the organizers, including Jiang Xin, and other key figures, such as Wang Yachen, had recently returned from Japan themselves. Jiang Xin spent five years in Japan, from 1912 to 1917. While in Japan, he and his fellow students Yan Zhikai and Wang Jichuan at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts organized their Chinese friends as the Chinese Art Association, Zhonghua meishu xiehui, which was still active during Sanyu’s stay in Japan. Upon Jiang Xin’s return to Shanghai in 1917 he was appointed dean of the fledgling Shanghai Art School, then only half a decade old.

The new Heavenly Horse Society aimed particularly to promote modern oil painting, but the group quickly absorbed many innovative ink painters, thus adopting an attitude toward China’s heritage that was much broader and more open-minded than that proposed by the cultural iconoclasts who emerged victorious under the Maoist regime after 1949. The Tianmahui advocated, among other things, opposing traditional and imitative art, along with a creed that emphasized the importance of developing society artistically and preserving the aesthetic sensibility of humankind. An earnestly worded manifesto published in 1923 also listed opposition to the frivolous enjoyment of art as one of its five tenets. The group never set up Chinese-style ink painting and modernist oil paintings as contending forces in a live-or-die battle, as some leftist revolutionaries urged, but instead situated the two as complementary trends in the contemporary art world.

An extremely important modernist Japanese art group, the White Horse Society (Shibakai), flourished in Tokyo from 1896 to 1915, and effectively transformed the practice of oil painting in Japan. The Heavenly Horse Society, founded in 1919 by young Chinese artists who knew the Japanese art scene, seems to have been inspired by the Shibakai. It is known that Chinese art students occasionally exhibited in the Shibakai annual shows, and the Japanese group was extremely well-known in the years leading up to the founding of the Tianmahui. The Tianmahui moreover adopted a pattern of annual exhibitions and publications similar to that of its Japanese forerunner, as it attempted to spread its innovative views of art throughout China. The first of eight Tianmahui exhibitions was held in Shanghai in late October, 1919.

The exhibition scene in Shanghai when Sanyu was there in 1919 and 1920 was quiet compared to that in Tokyo, but numerous reports of lectures and exhibitions by Japanese artists who worked in modernist styles appeared in the Shanghai press of the time. In early summer, 1919, Isshi Hakutei, a former Shibakai member who had just returned from Europe, visited Shanghai Art School. He also gave a lecture at the Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Education, which was the governmental organ responsible for Chinese art activities and education in Shanghai. Isshi, who would later teach many Chinese art students in Tokyo, jointly with a Polish friend exhibited paintings at a hotel on Nanjing Road in May. Several other Japanese exhibitions were held in Shanghai in the same period. The modern Shanghai art world was beginning to take shape.

China at that time, however, possessed no art schools that could teach at the level of modern schools such as Tokyo School of Fine Arts. No state art school had yet been foundedñthat would not happen until the late 1920s, when men of Sanyu’s generation returned from their training in Europe to establish them. The private Shanghai Art School was less than a decade old, its curriculum limited and its staffing in a state of constant flux. It was reorganized in December of 1919 with the establishment of a Board of Trustees comprised of prominent educators, artists, and cultural leaders. Directed by Liu Haisu, however, a young man with no advanced degree in art himself, the school served best in that period as a launching pad for further study abroad. It would have been evident to any young person in Tokyo or Shanghai that the center of the cosmopolitan art world, and the place to become an artist, was France. For any aspiring artist in the 1910s, Shanghai’s French concession might be a place to learn the French language and some basics of oil painting, but was only a stepping stone on the way to Paris.

After his return from Japan, Sanyu did not linger long in Shanghai, but departed in 1921 for Paris. Upon settling in France, Sanyu entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, rather than one of the established art schools, and did not much involve himself with clubs or formal organizations. Indeed, in reference to the ever-so-serious Heavenly Horse Society, he co-founded the Heavenly Dog Society, which seems to have been devoted primarily to dinner parties, as a good-natured joke. Sanyu and his student friends both satirized the seriousness of the Heavenly Horse Society artists in Shanghai and claimed for themselves the contrasting role of lazy dilettantes. However, by inclination, Sanyu may have been the best equipped member of the group to achieve the frivolity in life and art rejected by his Shanghai counterparts. Even fellow Heavenly Dogs Xu Beihong and Zhang Daofan became well-known as art administrators in their maturite years.

While the relationship between the development of Sanyu’s distinctive personal style, which had emerged by the second half of the 1920s, and trends in the Shanghai art world cannot be precisely documented, it is clear that the decade of the 1920s was one of active interchange between Chinese artists in Paris and Shanghai. Many of the founding members of the Heavenly Horse Society had very parallel travel experiences to those of Sanyu, and it is not surprising that their Shanghai network and Sanyu’s soon overlapped. One Heavenly Horse Society founder, Yang Qingqing, was in Japan in 1918 and 1919, almost exactly the same time as Sanyu. Wang Yachen, a key member and sometime administrator of Tianmahui, had also studied in Tokyo from 1915 to 1920. Tianmahui founder Jiang Xin, back from Tokyo only three years, travelled to Paris with sponsorship of the Jiangsu Bureau of Education in 1920, and remained in France until 1925. Co-founder Chen Xiaojiang travelled with Jiang Xin to Paris at his own expense and remained with him there for some time before returning to Shanghai. It is highly likely, although not certain, that the paths of the Tianmahui artists and Sanyu crossed during those years in Paris. In any case, the satirical stance of the Heavenly Dog Society seems to have been accepted by the Heavenly Horse group with good humor.

Sanyuís return to China from 1926 to 1927 happened to follow immediately upon a prolonged debate about the suitability of nude models for use in Chinese art schools. The confrontation between Liu Haisu, the director of the Shanghai Art School, and a conservative young Jiangsu politician, Jiang Huaisu, was played out on the pages of Shanghai newspapers, with each side rushing its latest epistle off to sympathetic newspaper editors on hope of immediate publication. The privately financed Shanghai Art School had used its classes in life drawing as a marketing tool in advertisements in Shanghai newspapers since the 1910s. In 1925, with establishment of the Shanghai huabao, a tabloid that employed some Shanghai Art School professors as writers and photographers, a photograph of a reclining nude woman in the Shanghai Art School classroom appeared on the front page. In a radio broadcast and newspaper article in the fall of 1925 Director Liu Haisu claimed, not completely accurately, to have been the first educator in China to bring this European method of instruction into the Chinese classroom. The Shanghai representative to the provincial legislature, Jiang Huaisu, responded by demanding legal action to ban the practice.

Jiang Huaisu’s letter, sent to President Duan Qirui, to the Minister of Education, and to the Jiangsu Provincial Governor, as well as to several Shanghai newspapers, was published on September 26, three days after Liu’s radio broadcast, and states his demand to ban nude painting and punish Liu Haisu. His letter reads, in part:

In recent years pictures of nudes were sold on the street, or in photographs, or in painted form, and all look just as though they were real. The immature young men and women who have been seduced by this degeneracy are countless. Their promoters beautify their names by calling them “models”... For example, Shanghai Art School lists this as a major, and uses money to attract young girls to use their bodies as a living specimen. Some shameless women, under the pressure of making a living, covet the thirty or forty yuan monthly salary and work naked in front of the crowd, reclining or lying down, bending into all sorts of positions; this scene is unimaginable. I have heard about this and witnessed it myself, and was deeply shocked. I don’t know who initiated this evil thing, but I saw in the education column of Shishi xinbao on September 8 of this year a letter from the director of the Shanghai Art Academy, Liu Haisu, to the Provincial Education Bureau about models. Using clever words to trick people, in bold phrases he claimed to have been the first to use models. In the letter he gave many reasons; “the model is used for observing the structure of the human body, the process of life, and the appearance of the spirit... The field of art is so broad, why do you have to stress nude painting? Furthermore, why do you have to use these young girls as models? Art school is not medical school. What importance is the structure of the human body and the process of life to art? Why does the appearance of the spirit have to be represented by a naked girl? Men and women all have human bodies. The students of the art academy are all male. Why can’t you use male models?”

The practice of nude drawing was so common in 1925 that Liu Haisu probably intended his public comments only to attract attention and more students to his school, which he believed to be protected by its location in the French concession of Shanghai. He was unlikely to have predicted that the ambitious young legislator would take this cause to heart, and put all of his sophisticated legal training into eradicating Liu Haisu’s program and, if possible to incarcerating its perpetrator. By the summer of 1926, the warlord who had taken control of Jiangsu province, Sun Chuanfang, had been persuaded of the rightness of the abolition cause and had written a threatening letter to Liu Haisu urging him not to further resist orders. After almost a year of argument, Liu Haisu finally gave in, responding to the warlord’s threat by publishing a letter to Sun Chuanfang in which he renounced the school’s use of nude models. Fortunately for Shanghai Art School, the warlord was defeated in August, 1927, and the new government installed more liberal cultural authorities.

Early in 1927 Sanyu attended the wedding celebration in Shanghai of Shao Xunmei, a novelist and Heavenly Dog comrade from Paris. Many other guests at the celebration were faculty or close associates of Shanghai Art School, including director Liu Haisu, faculty members Wang Yachen, Wang Jiyuan, and Zhang Guangyu, along with a British-educated art enthusiast, the romantic poet Xu Zhimo. Among the guests, Liu Haisu, Wang Yachen and Wang Jiyuan were organizers or key members of the Heavenly Horse Society. It is not surprising, then, to find Sanyu’s work shown in the eighth (and last) Tianmahui annual exhibition, which opened on November 5, 1927. When the Tianmahui exhibition was reviewed in Shanghai huabao, a Sanyu sketch was mentioned prominently in the review of the Western painting section. Sympathetic critic Zhou Shoujuan praised it for its strength of line and its remarkable technical skill. Oddly, he did not mention its subject matter, which one suspects may have been a female nude. In any case, Sanyu’s modernist personal style was certainly appreciated by an important sector of the new Chinese art world in the late 1920s.

It was in this period that Sanyu’s work profoundly influenced the young painter Pang Xunqin, who studied in Paris between 1925 and 1930. Pang would return to Shanghai to share a studio with Heavenly Horse Society administrator Wang Jiyuan, and establish a seminal modernist group called the Storm Society. The younger artist, recollecting Sanyu fifty years later, recalls vivid impressions of the man, his work, and his suburban studio. Although he does not date his friendship with Sanyu, which may have extended over many years, the liveliest details of their conversations seem to correspond to Sanyu’s situation in 1929 and 1930. He describes Sanyu with sincere admiration, first providing background--that Sanyu had lived in France for more than a decade and had exhibited at the Autumn Salon. Pang wrote with certainty that Sanyu and Picasso were old friends and that Picasso had painted a portrait of his Chinese friend. Fifty years later, Pang wondered where the painting might have gone.

Pang described Sanyu’s studio as being large and having high-ceilings, with excellent light and a tranquil atmosphere. The artist slept in a loft reached by an iron staircase, and the studio was empty except for a large pile of sketches of figures and nudes in pen-and-ink or Chinese brush. Pang Xunqin recognized that Sanyu’s outline drawing was unique in style, and considered it superior to that of the slightly older and more famous Asian artist, Leonard Foujita, who he recalled as being particularly successful in Paris.
Pang Xunqin comments that it was impossible to imagine that Sanyu’s early Chinese flower paintings and the later figure paintings were from the hand of the same painter. It was the latter that mesmerized the younger artist, and he admits that his own early work, like that of his Storm Society friend Zhang Xuan (fig.1), was strongly influenced by Sanyu’s figure drawing. Indeed, published paintings by Pang Xunqin from the years immediately following his return from Paris, most notably his line drawn Nude in a Cane Chair, strongly reflect this influence. Work by Liu Shi, a well-published nephew of Liu Haisu, also has strong echoes of Sanyu’s line drawing (fig. 2). To some of the most aggressively modern young oil painters in late 1920s Shanghai, Sanyu was the model.

Pang Xunqin desperately wished to see Sanyu’s oil figure paintings in his studio, but when he visited he was only able to see a landscape, the figure paintings apparently having all been sold. Pang Xunqin puzzles at Sanyu’s financial failure; he recalls seeing crowds of admirers and dealers surrounding Sanyu at various events, but believed that Sanyu rebuffed attempts to buy his paintings. He would, according to the younger artist, only respond positively to dinner invitations. At the same time, he complained that he had no money to buy art supplies. Although a very warm and kind person, with many friends, Sanyu vehemently warned the younger artist not to be tricked by art dealers, and vigorously opposed Pang’s plan to enroll in an academic art school program.

Sanyu began experiencing financial difficulties in 1929, with the decline in his brother’s silk business, and completely lost family support when Junmin died in 1931. We know from Rita Wong’s research that Sanyu’s dealer from 1929 until their split in 1932 was Henri-Pierre Roche, who supported him not only by selling his work to others but also by buying large number of his paintings himself. The empty studio described by Pang Xunqin, warnings about deceit by a dealer, and constant complaints about money correspond with Rita Wong’s description of Sanyu’s complex friendship with Roche, who was unable to tolerate more after three years and broke it off. During their three-year relationship, however, Roche amassed 711 paintings and drawings by Sanyu, which he highly prized.

A painting that seems to have been one of Sanyu’s favorites, his saucy Nude on a Tapestry, was acquired by Roche, presumably during this period. The same work is the one selected by journalist Ge Gongzhen for publication in Shanghai huabao on September 9, 1929 (fig. 3). The caption reads: “The French Painter Sanyu’s Recent Work” and is followed by this explanation: “His painting is extremely rich in Oriental color, and therefore is highly prized by Europeans. This painting was recently exhibited in Paris, and is a work of which he thinks highly himself.”

Sanyu’s work was appreciated in Shanghai, but by 1929 he had become, to Chinese eyes, a French painter. This mattered little in the cosmopolitan art world of the 1920s. Married to a French girl and socializing with a wide range of people, it is unlikely that anyone really cared that this French painter still carried a Chinese passport. The joy and sensuality of his painting spoke a language comprehensible to all.

For China, though, this time was a brief moment of peace. Once shattered by the Japanese war on Shanghai in 1931, the tranquility and leisure needed to savor Sanyu’s paintings became rare. Pang Xunqin and his friends in the Storm Society held a number of exhibitions to promote a similar vision of art in the 1930s, but they did not really succeed. It is difficult to know whether they might have in the absence of the 1937 Japanese invasion, but they were not granted that chance. Sanyu’s profound simplicity would remain his own, and French, once China became too complicated a place for it and for the cosmopolitan culture it represented.