Toward a Sinicized Modernism: The Artistic Practice of Lin Fengmian in Wartime China, 1937-1949

This dissertation is a case study of the modernist practice of Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) during the wartime (1937-1949), a significant transitional period of the artist who is a key figure in the formation of modern art history of 20th century China. Through critical analysis of the formal and thematic issues Lin Fengmian dealt with in his wartime work that experimented with sinicizing modernism in an unusual historical period, it argues that modernism in China was not a simple derivative of its Western import but one of syncretism and hybridity that resulted from a complex negotiation of the Western and Chinese art traditions. The sinicized modernist art was Chinese artists' choice driven by specific social, political and cultural situation of China's search for a new cultural identity. This sinicized modernism had been constantly reoriented, reframed and redefined in a direction toward a new mode of Chinese type in the first half of the 20th century.;The first part of the dissertation starts with an investigation of how Lin Fengmian and his peers -- mostly artists returned from their studies in Europe -- dedicated themselves in prewar China to promoting a largely undefined modernism through institutional spaces, particularly the Art Movement Society, of which Lin Fengmian was a leading figure. It is followed by an analytical narrative of modernists' marginalization in the art world reshaped by China's national crisis and their response to the country-wide call for jiuwang (national salvation) and kangzhan (resistance against Japanese invasion). The focus of this part is on how Lin Fengmian's wartime life experience affected his modernist practice, with a detailed discussion of his loss of institutional authority and his journey from the urban to the rural. The second part of the dissertation focuses on Lin Fengmian's practice of a sinicized modernism in the genres of landscape, figure and still life, in which he developed his strategies of denationalizing the highly nationalist shanshui painting, incorporating a primitivist approach into his painting of rural and urban women, and deforeignizing still life to fit into a Chinese approach to painting. Throughout this case study, the dissertation explores significant issues of modern Chinese art such as the relationship between Western-style painting and Chinese ink painting, traditionalism and modernism, academic realism and formal modernism, nationalism and universalism. .