HENRY MOORE IN CHINA
THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT

It’s a willow pattern picture with a twist. Dawn in a Beijing park with mist drifting from a lake. Beneath a drapery of trees, shadowy figures perform the lithe balletics of Tai Chi.

This familiar scene is repeated across the Chinese capital this autumn morning. But here in Behai Park - once the setting for the palace where Kublai Khan greeted Marco Polo - the ritual is performed before an exotic addition to the landscape: a giant bronze by the British artist Henry Moore.

It is one of twelve placed at key points around the park - their soft curves offering stark contrast to the ornate angularity of pavilion and temple roofs.

They are the advance guard of the biggest exhibition of British art ever mounted in China. From late October to spring 2001, 118 of Moore’s works will be seen first in Beijing, then Guangzhou and Shanghai.

The event has already excited the intelligensia of Beijing. Professor Jin Shang Yi, Principal of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said: “This is the most important exhibition of Western Art in China since the foundation of the people’s republic in 1949.”

One of his vice principals, Professor Wang Hong Jian, an art historian, has travelled to Britain three times to see Moore’s work. When we meet at the crumbling old campus of the college in a Beijing neighbourhood well away from the tourist orbit, he clutches a photo album showing pictures of his 1982 trip to Britain when he visited Moore’s old home at Perry Green near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire.

After these visits, he wrote widely about Moore’s work for Chinese readers. He believes it will strike profound chords among ordinary people, for he sees echoes of classical Chinese landscape art in Moore’s forms. “In China you will see many garden stones called Taihu Lake Stones... stones with many holes in them, and I think we can compare his work to these stones. I think that lots of ordinary Chinese people will accept his work.”

Professor Qian Shaowu, is former head of sculpture at the Academy and one of China’s most successful sculptors. His monumental work is scattered across China - vast granite works like sets from sword and sorcery films commemorating heroes from every era of Chinese history.

He studied socialist realist art in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and this still influences his sculpture, contrasting sharply with his delicate watercolour paintings and calligraphy. Though now retired from teaching, he still works with students at the academy and is currently completing a figure of an imperial general, Guan Jian Pei. A clay model fills his little studio in a Beijing suburb.

He says Moore’s work has influenced him and that the forthcoming exhibitions will prove powerful for people who’ve never seen such sculpture.




“The most fruitful thing about studying Henry Moore’s work will be his spirituality. He has opened the window to other perspectives, other ways of seeing. We have been socialist realists, but he has been very liberating.”

The early verdicts of ordinary Chinese happening upon Moore’s work in Behai Park were more mixed. The works are sited around a lake crowded with Chinese families navigating pedalo boats or riding large dragon-headed pleasure cruisers past delicate arching bridges. A white Buddhist dagoba tower dominates the scene rising from an islet hilltop like a giant plunger.

“This does not belong here. It is wrong. It destroys Chinese harmony”, ventures an old gentlemen in a weather-beaten workers’ cap who leans forward in his Nike trainers to prod his cane at Moore’s: “Large Spindle Piece .“

Whether its Feng Shui is wrong, or he sees it as disrupting the important divine order of Chinese landscape and architecture is unclear. Linguistic limitations prevent deeper discussions. “I do not like it” he mutters as he wanders on.

The object of his disdain had been sited between two lions in a temple gateway. Across the water another bronze provokes puzzlement and delight. “ Is this art?” asks one young man. Another ventures: “ Is this impressionism?”

But one group of students pauses in delight. “Henry Moore! I have seen him in America. I never knew he would be here” says one. Another adds “I do not know this artist, but his design is beautiful. Like water flowing ”

By the park’s main entrance a larger sculpture, “Three Piece Reclining Figure”, is already a novel backdrop for a steady cavalcade of wedding photographers and family snappers. Local children encounter it in now traditional fashion - by clambering on it. The reclining figure has travelled all the way from the more sedate setting of the meadows of Perry Green where sheep graze alongside Moore’s old studios.

Perry Green is now the powerhouse of the Moore industry. From here the Henry Moore Foundation operates as custodians of his reputation and distributors of his posthumous financial largesse (It is said by many to be more generous in funding young British artists and students than the Arts Council). It manages the regular global showing of Moore’s work and co-ordinated this enterprise with the British Council.

Even as the Beijing show was being assembled, another was ending in Greece and in the spring another will be staged in Texas. Moving Moore’s work around the globe - and keeping it in shape - is a full time job.

In the West Moore’s work has become part of the mainstream, long defused of any power to shock. But Western art is little known to the Chinese public. Shows of French landscape painting and of Rodin sculpture have attracted crowds in recent years. And more controversially the paintings - and persons - of Gilbert and George trailblazed the Moore exhibition path in the early 1990s.

But this Western art has been a sideshow in a city otherwise working day and night to put on the accoutrements of the 21st century. Workers bulldoze entire old neighbourhoods, sweeping away narrow Hutongs, or lanes, to make way for the shiny edifices of globalised capitalism. Cars and coaches edge through jams along four lane highways in Beijing’s heart, flanked by shoals of bicycles while rickshaws weave through the melee.

One has a tottering tower of caged chickens, another is laden with computer keyboards.

Beijing is a lurid swirl of ancient and modern, overseen by an authoritarianism which is now largely exorcised of the idealistic dreams of Communism. Money not Maoism is the modern dynamo. Though the Chairman’s portrait still gazes across Tiananmen Square, it now faces the golden arches of McDonalds in the night. Souvenir stalls tout cheap Maorabilia to tourists from the provinces as smart young Beijingers in Gucci or Armani crowd into internet cafes and muiti-storied malls. A Starbucks logo adorns the facade of a teahouse in the Forbidden City.

This latest Eastern embrace of corporatism demands art to complete its replication of the West. In Beijing western style sculpture graces the public spaces of new office spires. In the newly minted Cosco tower, for instance, a large piece by one of Moore’s former assistants, British sculptor Richard Deacon, now dominates the steel and glass atrium, fabricated and installed by local workers under Deacon’s eye.

But as with Maoism, this modernisation is a layer which will be transmuted and shaped by the forces of an ingrained and ancient culture. Behind the facade of commerce the old China continues, its order and the outdoor energy of the Hutongs undimmed by the latest coil of a century of succeeding revolutions.


What this nation will make of Moore is an exciting question as yet unanswered. Orientalism has long intrigued and influenced Western artists, but any occidental impact on Chinese art has been little seen abroad beyond the dramatic iconography of revolution. Now western inspired design is pervasive in advertising, shops and on television.

Work by young Chinese artists will be coming to Europe next year - presently slated for showing in Austria, Paris and Germany. No British venue has yet been agreed. Mr Dong Junxin, the Head of China’s bureau of external cultural relations, says he hopes that we too will decide to take the show which the authorities believe will as important to East-West relations as the Moore exhibitions.

With that new mood stirring, why was Moore - whose greatest impact lies nearly half a century ago - taken to China, rather rather than something more cutting edge, perhaps work by a British controversialist such as Damien Hirst or Cornelia Parker?

Maria Day, who is coordinating the show for the British Council from the British Embassy in Beijing, says: “ I just don’t think the new Young British Artists would work here. They simply would not be understood at all.”

This opinion is echoed by Professor Qian: “I think Chinese people will understand Henry Moore better than later abstract or conceptual work.... his use of natural forms. With conceptual artists the ideas that they are expressing, their criticisms... I don’t really understand this.”

At least Moore’s pedigree seems apt for showing in the People’s Republic. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a miner, Henry Moore retained his working class credentials, even as his work became globally famous and he was garlanded with prizes and academic titles.

Henry Moore’s work crystallises a mid 20th century vision of art and is long established as peerless among his British contemporaries. Examples of his work can be seen across the world, but not, until now, anywhere in China except Hong Kong.

Henry Moore died in 1986 - a decade after Chairman Mao. What Mao would have made of this show is anyone’s guess, but what about Moore? David Mitchinson, Head of Collections and Exhibitions for the Foundation, says:
“Moore’s appeal was across all cultures and ethnicities. It has universality and a humanity that speaks to everyone, He wanted to dignify man. That was the key motive in his work.”