History of Chinese Art: Ding Yanyong's Fusion of Eastern and Western Styles

Running Head: HISTORY OF CHINESE ART
History of Chinese Art
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HISTORY OF CHINESE ART
The Chinese painter Ding Yanyong has earned high reputation for associating the aesthetics
imbibed in the western art to that of his country. He is often referred to as the Matisse of the
East. This is because of the expansion of his reputation for merging the Chinese as well as the
western styles for achieving a perfect harmony of the two artistic traditions. The remarkable
painter was born on the 15th of April, 1902 in Maoming of China. As a child, his artistic talent
was up-surged by his father who used to feed him with literary aspects of Chinese poetry. He
was a significant member of the initial batch of the Chinese art scholars who travelled from
China to Japan for studying western painting in the earlier part of the twentieth century. In the
time span between 1919 and 1925, he attended the Tokyo School of Fine Arts1. Adopting the
individualistic attitude of Chinese Iterati, as well as the individualist traditions, in the later part of
the 1920s as well as the earlier half of the 1930s, he delved the styles in to the ancient styles of
calligraphy. The works of Yanyang show a strong reflection of some specific works of Bada
Shenren, an eminent 17th century artist. In the year 1949 he started to live in Hong Kong and
there he continued to teach as well as produce art until he embraced death in the year 1978.
The exposure to Western art that he got in Japan had been crucial to the development of
the artist in him. Many of his early works reflect vivid use of colors, flat decorative surfaces as
well as lively lines. These features exhibit the extent to which his works have been influenced by
that of Henry Matisse. In the early phase of his work, he won the repute as “the Oriental
Matisse”.
1 Qin, Ruili, and Zhuo Lin. "Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai: Interaction and Communication of Chinese Modern Art." In
2016 International Conference on Advances in Management, Arts and Humanities Science (AMAHS 2016). Atlantis
Press, 2016.

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HISTORY OF CHINESE ART
Image 1: Early stage painting of Ding Yanyong exhibiting use of bright colors
(Source: Onlinecollection.asianart.org)
As highlighted by Raymond Tang, who is the Assistant Curator of the Art Museum of
Hong Kong, even after the attainment of maturity as an artist he always looked up at the oriental
Chinese forms of art. This is because he had a popular perception that many of the popular forms
of Western art had gained inspiration from the African art like one of the highest grossing art
works of Ding Yanyong (the picture above), but also from the oriental art2. That is why, he also
wanted to reflect the oriental Chinese culture in the art works at the time when he was one of the
finest as well as the most profitable painters.
It is noteworthy to talk about the oil paintings of Ding which pertains to the earliest stage
of his professional career as a painter. The intensely used bold lines reveals his attitude of taking
2 Ho, Selina Chui-fun. "Curatorial agencies and the national museum dilemma at He Xiangning art museum in
China." Museum Management and Curatorship (2019): 1-16.