In the first two years of funding, we have been working on the four case studies and have uncovered understudied aspects in the work of art schools. For case study 1, we are studying the role of two influential teachers in the early years of CAFA’s predecessor schools: Zheng Jin, the Japanese-trained first director of the National Beijing Art School, and Li Yishi, a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art who taught in Beijing after his return to China. These two artists stand for different types of training and different modes of painting that intersected in the Beijing academy in the 1910s and 1920s. We also study, for case study 2, the prewar history of the Hangzhou art school, founded in 1928 by young French-trained artists; here the focus is on how an entire institutional model is translated to modern China and how it is adapted to the cultural and political situation there. The socialist era (1949 –1979) is the main period of investigation for case study 3. We investigate how teachers and students were involved in the production of images and other visual materials as well as in the organization of various types of exhibitions – from art exhibitions to trade fairs, but also political campaigns such as the land reform movement of the early 1950s. For case study 4, topics of study are the training of Eastern European students in socialist China and the formation of modern genealogies in painting as well as the practice of painters such as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren and Xiao Shufang who painted in both oil and ink. In our research, we pay particular attention to more marginalized groups within the academies, e.g. in stressing the perspective of students and of female artists. We are compiling a sourcebook with key texts on art pedagogy and global histories of modern Chinese art and have recently begun with the translation and writing of commentaries of texts. The selected texts span the twentieth century and reveal insights into debates within art schools, about pedagogical questions, but also the political, social and economic factors that shaped artistic practices.
