Art in the marketplace: taste, sale, and transformation of Guohua in Republican Shangahi

The Republican period (1912-1949) was a crucial one which saw rapid development in the commercialization and professionalization of art and culture in China. This was also the period of the emergence of the autonomous artistic field as postulated by Pierre Bourdieu, in which earlier systems of patronage and the authority of established institutions both gave way to the art market. Using the art market as a point of entry, this paper seeks to examine the pricing logic and politics of aesthetics within the socio-cultural context of Republican Shanghai. Reaping the benefits of the commercialised art market of the late Qing dynasty, Shanghai had cultivated a fully-developed art market by the early twentieth century. Thanks to the rise of new wealth, the boom in the publishing industry, and the introduction of western commercial culture, the Shanghai art market—overwhelmingly dominated by guohua—underwent a ground-breaking process of modernization. It adopted newly introduced retailing tactics, advertising concepts, and exhibiting principles and became a battlefield for members of the art world competing for resources such as monetary return and recognition. Adopting the concept of an ‘artistic field’ postulated by Pierre Bourdieu, this paper will contextualize modern Chinese art by concentrating on the consumption of guohua. Guohua— literally ‘national painting’— has long been associated in the standard narrative of modern Chinese art history with tradition, backwardness, and conservatism. Through various binary lenses such as west versus east and modern versus traditional, the transformation of guohua in the early twentieth century has been erroneously attributed to the impact of Western civilisation. Therefore, it is the aim of this paper to correct the mistaken reading of guohua as essentially ‘traditional’. Focusing on a matrix of discursive practices and a well-defined body of institutions, this paper argues that although guohua had previously been criticized harshly by reformists who condemned both the prevalent practice of using allusive language (particularly the Four Wangs of the Orthodox School) in the creation of art and the lack of scientific analysis, guohua retained its prominent position in the artistic field via the emerging art market. This new status was achieved by the adoption of different marketing strategies, including the advertising of artists through newspapers and magazines; the creation of celebrity personas in the media; and the canonization of the history of Chinese painting through the adoption of a new historiography. Using as its basis the price-list—an indigenous Chinese textual genre that includes a brief introduction to the artist as well as a very detailed list of prices with respect to various formats, genres, and styles—this paper will survey the tastes, aesthetic choices, artistic activities, and pricing logic of the Shanghai art world. It argues that the transformation of modern Chinese art was to a large degree brought about by the rise of an open art market in which traditional aesthetics and values played an integral role. The success of the modern art market thus not only sustained the autonomy of the Shanghai art world but also ensured the survival and transformation of guohua during a period of social upheaval and cultural crisis.