Drawing on a wider canvas

Three exhibitions at the National Art Museum show the evolution of the country and its artistic expression.

In 1944, an overturned boat near Chongqing brought a premature end to the ambition of Tang Yihe, an artist and educator. He was on board, traveling to attend a conference of the China national fine arts council, before falling victim to the Yangtze River at the age of 39. He had directed the oil painting department of the Wuchang Fine Art School where he graduated, and he would have been elected a standing member of the council at the meeting.

Born in Wuchang, now a district of Wuhan, Hubei province, Tang took little interest in inheriting the family-operated traditional Chinese medicine practice. Rather, he engaged with the arts, and he saw art education an important means to empower his people and his country.

During his studies at the prestigious National High School of Fine Arts in Paris in the early 1930s, Tang won the long-standing Prix de Rome, a government-sponsored prize that awarded its winners scholarships for a residence in Rome to gain a deeper attainment of artistic appreciation. After graduation he returned to Wuchang and a country in turmoil, at a time when his motherland was confronted with the looming threat of war and social instability.

Tang, however, left behind a small legacy despite his short-lived career. The few of his works in existence embrace a strong patriotic spirit, and he focused on the anguish of people living on the lower rungs of the societal ladder.

One example is July 7, an oil painting created by Tang in 1940 to commemorate the Lugou Bridge (also known as the Marco Polo Bridge) Incident that marked the beginning of Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July 1937.

Tang didn't complete the painting due to wartime difficulties, leaving the background unfinished and blank. He only managed to depict a group of marching people, forced to leave their invaded hometowns, and who took to the streets to call for others to stand up against invaders.

The painting is now in the collection of the National Art Museum of China, and had been exhibited many times. It is currently on show again as part of an ongoing exhibition at the museum, Up from the Yangtze. Set to run until Oct 21, it highlights dozens of paintings, sculptures, watercolors and prints by both Hubei-born artists and those who once studied and worked in the province.

Ji Shaofeng, the director of the Wuhan-based Hubei Museum of Art, says Tang was one of those who pioneered the teaching of oil painting in the early 20th-century China; Tang and his colleagues at the Wuchang Fine Art School, a private institution, contributed greatly to the proliferation of oil painting in the province.

"They established a realistic approach with deep concerns with the common people's livelihood, and they forged a color scheme of purity and dignity. Their style distinguished Hubei as a rising art hub at the time from those in Beijing and Shanghai," Ji says. "Their legacies are being carried forward by artists in Hubei."