Gazing into the Past: Cheng Shifa by James Cahill 2
Channel: Randy Chatterjee
Date: 2015-06-09

My first lecture in this new series was on an artist of the Yuan dynasty, and a painting done in the late 14th century. For this second one I will leap forward six centuries to the twentieth, and talk about an artist, Cheng Shifa, who lived and worked in China, born there in 1921 (five years before myself), dying in 2007—how many years before myself still to be determined.
In lectures that will follow this one, I'm going to be presenting a series of recent and contemporary artists I've known and a few that I never knew, painters of what is called guohua or "national painting" kind who somehow follow the main tradition of Chinese painting—who are not, that is, so-called avant garde artists (old term) who have joined the international mainstream and left behind their Chinese heritage. (That's a simplified version of the matter, but it will do for present purposes.) Over my long career I knew quite a few of these guohua masters, wrote catalog essays or blurbs for some of them, admired their paintings to greater or lesser degrees. But I want to single out one of them in particular, Cheng Shifa, for a longish lecture devoted to him alone, both because I was close to him for the last thirty years of his life and because I think he merits a reconsideration as an artist of real achievement, who I suspect is undervalued because he painted, along with his finer works, a lot of popular pictures that have hurt his reputation.
                                             ----- James Cahill