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Introduction Update, 2022
A measured article like
this one can fortify us against the media's current
efforts to stir up trouble between the West and China over
their respective relationships with Taiwan. Across the
brash news platforms, incendiary language is creating an
opening for dangerous conflict: "furious China,"
"military drills," "rising tensions,"
"U.S. government planes," "EU-China
crossroads," "Nato's defense plans,"
"rehearsing an invasion," "forceful
condemnation," and "threat of war."
Bolotnikov's is a
balanced and nuanced perspective. He reminds us that China
and the West have historically shared--and will continue to
share--cultural landmarks, among them the Bauhaus and
Kandinsky. Now is a good and important time to revisit his
piece on the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus with Chinese
characteristics.
Introduction [2019]
Lissa Tyler Renaud
Editor, "Kandinsky Anew" series
The surprising article that
follows speaks directly to my 45-year fascination with this
question: where in Asia has the early European avant-garde
impulse ever emerged? And related: how has Asia changed it?
Periodically, I've come
across references that add significant pieces to my puzzle.
A few examples: in Calcutta, there was a Bauhaus exhibition
in December 1922, which was considered "an entry point for
modernism in India." The show featured paintings by
Kandinsky—who was especially praised—as well as
by Klee and Feininger, alongside uniquely Indian painters.
Japan's radical, interdisciplinary arts movement, MAVO, was
led by Tomoyoshi Murayama, after he returned from Berlin in
1923 having seen Kandinsky's abstractions, Georg Grosz's
satires, and more. Korea's best-known avant-garde poet, Yi
Sang, wrote during Japan's 35-year colonial occupation,
mostly in the 1930s, influenced by his architecture
training and Western Dada and Surrealism.
This is a red-letter year
for provocative new answers to my question: it is the 100th
anniversary of the 1919 founding of the Bauhaus, Germany's
deeply experimental school of arts and architecture. The
Nazis closed the school in 1933, but it had already
irreversibly changed our ideas about buildings and the
things in them, about arts as well as crafts, about how a
revolutionary arts school could engage with new technology.
Germany's "Bauhaus100" birthday celebration has been having
programs, lectures, activities and exhibitions in at least
Argentina, Australia, England, India, Iraq, Israel,
Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, and the U.S. And, as we learn
here: in China.
All in all, the
multi-national, "transcultural" celebration makes an
energetic claim for the Bauhaus aesthetic as a lingua
franca of the world.China, as it turns out, had the
beginnings of connections to the Bauhaus as early as 1922.
What a pleasure to get a glimpse, through a Chinese lens,
of Kandinsky, Gropius, and painter-choreographer Schlemmer,
whose famous Bauhaus Theatre allowed the school's student
artists to explore space and form by performing. In a 1929
letter, Schlemmer wrote: "Kandinsky certainly saw many of
his own ideas realized on my stage."
In the article that
follows, China-based arts writer Kiril Bolotnikov gives us
a complex, insider account—and critique!—of the
Bauhaus as it has emerged in China today. And with this,
Bolotnikov has given me one more big piece for my puzzle.
*
The Bauhaus as Inspiration for Chinese Innovation:
Report from Hangzhou [2019]
Lobby of the China Design Museum in Hangzhou.
The China Design Museum, which opened its doors in the spring of 2018 on
a campus of the China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou, began its
acquisition of some 7000 design artifacts earlier this decade. Several
hundred were original Bauhaus pieces, and indeed, the China Daily reports
that the "Bauhaus is the reason the China Design Museum was created in
the first place."
Some have expressed uncertainty about a Chinese museum setting itself up
as a go-to destination for Bauhaus scholars. But let there be no mistake: the
CAA is not so much attempting to give the average museum-goer a
comprehensive understanding of the Bauhaus. Instead, it is using the
Bauhaus as a starting point for the CAA's attempt to inspire innovation in a
nation known for so long for its barely disguised copies and fake replicas of
name-brand goods, for factories pumping out foreign designs rather than
their own.
The most prominent exhibition, that of Bauhaus and closely related
artifacts, is there to show how design innovation came in the most
seemingly ordinary forms. That is, designs we don't look twice at today, the
curators tell us, were in fact innovations when they were created 100 years
ago, and have forever changed the way we interact with the objects around
us. Accordingly, the glass cases are full of chairs, lamps, plates, kettles,
doorknobs, wardrobes, and more, all designed by predecessors and
contemporaries of the Bauhaus, its teachers, or its students. Even a small
model of the faculty house shared by Kandinsky and Klee, as designed by
Gropius, made the cut. As exciting as it was to reconsider the revolutionary
aspects of these now-standard designs, I derived as much pleasure from
seeing genuinely fascinated groups of Chinese tourists trailing
knowledgeable docents from object to object.
The Gropius-designed faculty house shared by Kandinsky and Klee.
It is conceivable that those who planned the museum and its acquisitions
had painter and prominent Bauhaus teacher Kandinsky in mind when they
set about this enormous project. His landmark treatise Concerning the
Spiritual in Art was translated and published in China in the 1980s, less
than a decade after the Reform and Opening Up in the late 1970s. In its
introduction, Kandinsky wrote, "…[E]ach period of culture produces an art
of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles
of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born." Though the
museum is also funding research about the Bauhaus to strengthen its
credentials, it has made no secret of the fact that its eye is ultimately
focused on the coming period of Chinese art and design, not solely on the
art principles of the Bauhaus past.
The first Chinese edition of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
To the same extent that it does focus on the Bauhaus past, it focuses on the
Chinese past: Shanghai Daily reported in May 2018 that the Academy was
in the process of collecting Chinese designs of the past hundred years,
presumably to be shown in another permanent exhibition. The museum's
opening ceremony included a performance, in collaboration with the
Goethe-Institut, of Oskar Schlemmer's "Figural Cabinet"—as a student
research piece exploring the potential for dialogue with Song dynasty zaju
(poetic dramas). And a timeline on a long wall just off the main exhibit
placed both Western and Chinese cultural events. For instance, we see that
the Bauhaus was founded in 1919, but just to the left of that particular
marker, under "1917," the timeline notes that Cai Yuanpei, father of the
modern Chinese education system, gave a speech entitled "Substituting
Aesthetic Education for Religion." The intent is surely to draw attention to
the nature of the adjacent trajectories of China and the West, in order to
combat notions that Chinese thought is purely received wisdom devoid of
innovation.
The performance of Schlemmer's "Figural Cabinet" at the opening ceremony.
At the time of my visit in July 2018, not long after the Museum's opening,
the existence of a temporary show entitled "Bauhaus Imaginista" told a
further story in regards to the museum's refocusing the Bauhaus legacy
with Chinese goals in mind. Curated in collaboration with Goethe-Instituts
around the world to celebrate the centenary that was about to occur in
2019, it explored how the Bauhaus influenced local art and design
respectively in each country, and how local art and design had in turn
influenced local Bauhaus strains. The exhibit was composed of blocks of
text, prints of grainy old black-and-white photos, tables of old publications,
and occasional screens with informative videos, all emphasizing the ways in
which Chinese artists, architects, and designers have collaborated with and
built on Bauhaus design principles. It referred, for instance, to Chinese
scholars who had studied outside the country in the 1930s and 1940s with
this or that former Bauhaus teacher (Gropius, Mies van der Rohe), as well
as to Gropius's commission to work with Chinese architects on Hua Tung
University (a project abandoned when the Communists took over).
However, as ought to be expected, the museum's collection of artifacts, as
well as its presentation of both the permanent and temporary exhibitions, is
decidedly apolitical. China was never going to be quite the place for an in
-depth understanding of the Bauhaus, at least not in the current political
environment. The Bauhaus, its principles, its faculty, all of these were
inherently socially revolutionary in a way that curators seem loath to
address, hewing instead to a watered-down understanding of the Bauhaus
as the instigators of a design revolution. Even entering the exhibit, the
introduction reads, "…[T]he school developed an international modernist
style and permeated various aspects of the daily lives of ordinary people,"
conveniently echoing Chinese Communist Party rhetoric about "the people"
in a way that makes the exhibit socially relevant but leaves it politically
correct.
It is important, accordingly, to understand that classifying the exhibition as
a comprehensive retrospective would be a fallacy: if they are looking to the
past innovations of the West, it is simply as encouragement for China's
presumably surpassingly innovative future. It is worth noting that funding
for the museum came at least in part from the Zhejiang provincial
government. The emphasis on the Bauhaus and its innovations of a century
ago seems to be a concerted effort by the province to push its numerous
factories in the direction of innovation rather than imitation – Zhejiang
factories tend to be smaller, family-owned, and to produce for a domestic
consumer base, working therefore with more autonomy than the large
factories down south used by international companies looking for cheap
labor. Far from trying to create the next Bauhaus, the CAA in founding this
museum wants to encourage something far more homegrown.
The front entrance of the China Design Museum.
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