An Interview with Michael Sullivan

By Shelagh Vainker

Shelagh Vainker: Your writing and lecturing on 20th century Chinese painting is particularly admired for being underpinned by close personal involvement with the subject. How did you first become interested?

Michael and Khoan Sullivan with Zhang Daqian at Stanford, 1967

Michael Sullivan: Really by accident, because we were in Chengdu. Khoan and I had been in Guiyang at the Chinese Red Cross headquarters. In 1942 we moved up to Chengdu where I joined the university, while Khoan worked in a laboratory making smallpox vaccines. There were a number of Chinese refugee artists working there; one or two were in art schools but some were quite independent. I think it began by our going to an exhibition of the Modern Art Society in 1943 or 1944. Then we began to meet these artists; and of course Khoan, being Chinese and speaking so many dialects, opened the doors to me right away and we became friends. So that's how it started.

SV: The southwest was then a place of refuge for artists from many parts of China. Was that evident? Or did painters tend to work on their own?

MS: Well of course it depended where you were. If you were in Chongqing, Chengdu, Guilin and Kunming you would meet artists because they all gathered in one or two of these places. Some of them came with the art schools to which they had been attached and they continued to work there and gathered students around them. Others like Pang Xunqin who had had no attachment just came independently, but they also had a lot to do with the artists who were at the art schools; they exhibited together and formed little groups to encourage each other and keep things going. However, they tended to travel independently in the western borderlands. I haven't heard of two or three travelling together.

SV: Which friendships formed while you were in China have most influenced your understanding of Chinese painting?

MS: Two, I think. One would have been with Pang Xunqin, who was a close neighbour of ours in Chengdu and became a close friend. We saw a great deal of him. He had been in Paris; we always spoke French and he told me a great deal about the background to the modern movement. He had been involved with Juelan Shi (the Storm Society) in the early 30s. I got my first glimmering of understanding of the modern movements from him and that continued later on in correspondence after we went back to England. The other person who helped me a great deal was Yang Xianyi, not because he was interested in art but because he was an intellectual who'd studied at Merton College and was married to Gladys who was also an Oxford graduate. They were, especially Xianyi, extremely penetrating - witty, wise and informative on the intellectual climate and modern thought of this turbulent era.

SV: Was it easy to maintain those friendships after leaving China?

MS: No, because in the first years after we came back to England in 1946, the civil war was beginning to heat up and it was getting more difficult to maintain contact. I had letters from Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren and a number from Pang Xunqin. His letters and those of his wife, the painter Qiu Ti, who wrote to Khoan about life in China, gave us a very vivid and rather tragic picture of conditions. But with other artists we lost touch completely, for a very long time.

SV: What were your first acquisitions in China?

MS: They were paintings and drawings given to us by these artists in Chengdu, among them Yu Feng, Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren and Pang Xunqin. Xiao Ding the cartoonist and graphic artist gave us a number of his drawings; these were particularly interesting because they depicted places and people that no one had ever painted and drawn in China before: the west, the tribal life, the life of the peasants and so on. It was a completely new kind of world that they were revealing. But in fact the very first picture in our collection which unfortunately I can't find at the moment was a little sketch of bombed-out Chongqing given to Khoan by Lu Sibai in 1940 or '41 before I even met her. Lu had been in Paris and was one of the refugee artists in Chongqing during the war.

SV: Did you continue to acquire paintings after leaving China?

MS: That was very difficult. I was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London from 1947 to 1950 and of course we didn't buy anything then, but Zhang Anzhi was in London for a year on a British Council scholarship and he gave us two lovely little sketches he'd done in Hyde Park. When we went to Harvard we were still very poor; we were hardly able to acquire anything. We bought from Chen Chikwan a little painting from his first exhibition, and then spent all the money we had on some album leaves by Huang Binhong, very early and of wonderful quality, of which we still have the best six. At that time and for a number of years afterwards America was cut off from China by the Communist takeover and Americans were not allowed to acquire works from mainland China, so hardly any modern pictures got into the United States. No, we didn't buy anything contemporary, and there were no artists to give us anything either.

SV: Living in Malaya, what impression did you have of artistic activity throughout the Southeast Asian region?

MS: Not a very clear picture of modern art. We visited all the countries in Southeast Asia but our interests were chiefly archaeological. There were local institutions of course with some influence of Western art, although the modern movement had barely got off the ground. Singapore was almost a cultural vacuum, although there was a tiny art school, the Nanyang Academy, run by Lin Xueda (Lim Haktai) from Xiamen. Four other Chinese artists had settled in the colony, including Liu Kang, who had studied in Paris, and Zhong Sibin (Cheong Soo Pieng) who was far and away the best of them. We got to know him well. He gave us a number of his paintings, including a lovely portrait of Khoan.

SV: Your book Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, published in 1959, was a pioneering work. How were you inspired to write it?

MS: Well, I think I was so personally involved with the artists, with what they had achieved and gone through during the war that I felt the story needed to be told. Also, I hoped to become an art historian, and this seemed a good way to begin.

SV: In 1960, after returning to England, was it possible to expand the collection?

MS: It would hardly have been possible but for Geoffrey Hedley. He had recently come back from Dacca in Bangladesh and died of a heart attack in 1960, just shortly before we arrived in London, and left us nearly all of his collection. He had been in China from 1944 to about 1951. He'd gone down river again at the end of the war to Nanjing and Shanghai and on to Beijing, and kept in touch with artists we had known during the war, and some whom we had not known, including Qi Baishi and Fu Baoshi. He was an enormous help to me in collecting photographs for my book, as well as leaving us most of his paintings and woodcuts, which had either been given to him or which he had bought from these artists in order to help them. Now this was a wonderful thing for us because our own acquisitions only progressed in a very small way. We were out of touch with the artists, and of course the 1960s were a bad time anyway in China: there was little direct contact except for a number of letters from Yang Xianyi in Beijing that gave a vivid and very personal picture of the intellectual and cultural climate at the time. But I think we got one picture, a Li Keran, from Mrs Shen's gallery. I never had any sabbatical leave at SOAS - I hadn't quite earned it by the time we left. Then when we went to Stanford in 1966, it was much better, we were able to travel a good deal. We went to the Far East again in 1968 and that was when we discovered the Fifth Moon movement in Taiwan and the In Tao and Circle groups in Hong Kong who were the real initiators of the modern movement in the Chinese world. We came to know a number of those artists and several of them contributed to albums, and gave us pictures which greatly enriched our collection.

SV: You curated an exhibition of paintings by Zhang Daqian in 1967 at Stanford. How did it come about, and how was it received?

MS: We had met Zhang Daqian in Chengdu so he was an old friend, and when we came to Stanford he was already living down in Carmel about 50 or 60 miles south. Everybody knew him; he was quite a figure, so we had the idea to give him an exhibition at the Stanford Museum, and he was enthusiastic about this. The show attracted enormous crowds; all the Chinese on the West Coast wanted to come and see it. It was a tremendous success.

SV: How do you think responses to modern Chinese painting have differed in the US and Europe?

MS: Very little modern Chinese painting could be seen in Europe before Vadime Elisseeff brought back a collection from China to the Musee Cernuschi in Paris after World War II. In the fifties and sixties several wealthy private collectors in Europe took advantage of the fact that the United States, not having recognized the PRC, could not import things from China: they were Franco Vannotti in Lugano, Charles Drenowatz in Zurich and Arno Schuller in Prague, who built up their collections at least partly in exchange for books and art materials that Chinese artists longed for.

SV: Having worked in Asia, the United States and Europe, how do you think the international position of modern Chinese painting has evolved?

MS: I think one can speak of that really only in the last ten or fifteen years. Before that it was quite remote and exotic and not well known or understood. Since the opening up economically and culturally in the 1980s, China has become part of the global movement in modern art, with a conspicuous place on the map of the international art world. There have been Chinese participants at prestigious exhibitions, such as the biennales at Sao Paolo and Venice for several years now, and they are accepted as part of the cultural scene. But that's very recent.

SV: Moscow, Berlin, Paris and Oxford all have public collections of modern painting begun in the 1940s and 50s. As European collections of early painting are lacking, the field is not as strongly established as it is for ceramics or bronzes. How do you think it might develop?

MS: The position for public collections isn't as bad as it was. Drenowatz's pre-modern paintings are in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, Schuller's and Vannotti's collections are in museums in Prague and Berlin, while the Musee Guimet and British Museum have smaller but still important collections. But it is getting harder to find pre-modern Chinese paintings of high quality. Europe will never be able to match the huge resources available to American museums.

SV: Like those collections, yours has been built up in a way that minimizes the likelihood of forgeries. How serious has that problem been throughout the period of your collecting?

MS: Of course there's always been a tremendous problem with forgeries in Chinese painting. This is nothing new and I think that today, perhaps because there's so much painting circulating and such a big demand from collectors all over the world now for works by painters such as Qi Baishi, Fu Baoshi and Li Keran, that the number of forgeries is vastly increased and this is really becoming more difficult all the time. But we have been lucky in that we have known personally most of the artists, and I can say with confidence that there isn't a single forgery or doubtful work in our collection.

SV: The exhibition of your collection in the Ashmolean will be in two parts: works acquired from the 1940s to the 1970s, and those acquired from the 1980s to the present. How did your collecting differ in those two periods?

MS: In two ways. On the one hand, modern Chinese art has changed and developed beyond recognition. The works we acquired in the early years came out of the artists' experience as refugees, and then discoveries on their recent journeys; our more recent acquisitions reflect a much broader, deeper and better range of experience and knowledge of art on the part of a vastly increasing number of promising artists. On the other hand, our own circumstances have changed. In the early years we, like the artists, were poor (although not as poor as they were) and we gratefully accepted the works they gave us. In recent years we have been in the lucky position of being able to buy some works, and so to choose.

SV: How have you selected the exhibition?

MS: Of course one can't show everything, but it has been very difficult to leave anything out - in particular works that have been given to us. But we hope the selection we've made will cause as little offence as possible.

SV: Since 1979 and the first `Stars' exhibition, Chinese painting has become increasingly international. How much more accessible do you think that has made it for Westerners?

MS: I think that has made it infinitely more accessible. Partly because so much of modern Chinese art is in an international style; partly also, but perhaps, even more significantly, because Western art has changed so much in the last hundred years and our understanding of what can be good art has broadened so much to embrace the non-representational, abstract expressionism and so on. The result is that the West is now much more responsive to those aspects of Chinese art than ever could have been possible before: extending even to calligraphy, where people who don't understand what the calligraphy says can appreciate and enjoy the form because we are by now so attuned to abstraction.

SV: So it's an evolution in Western perception rather than in what the Chinese are producing.

MS: Yes, it's a bit of both, although there are still differences at a deeper level. For instance, a Westerner can look at Chinese calligraphy as pure form and appreciate it as such irrespective of its content. No Chinese would admire a passage of calligraphy, no matter how beautifully written, if the content were meretricious. For the Chinese, form and content are inseparable.

SV: Much 20th century painting is best understood with a knowledge of traditional painting. What do you think is the best approach to understanding the avant-garde of the 80s and 90s?

MS: The first is that some artists made a defiant gesture to repudiate tradition, as when the avant-garde artist Ma Desheng said, `I am against tradition because there is a tradition', and the neo-Dadaist Huang Yongping pulped Herbert Read's History of Modern Art in a washing machine. But these artists were also demonstrating how inescapable tradition was. There are other members of the avant-garde who, by contrast, have reached back into the very roots of Chinese culture to examine it, and use it in entirely new ways that seem to be a denial of tradition but are actually a regeneration of it - among them Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, who find their inspiration in the earliest forms of writing and pictorial imagery. The possibilities of this are endless, and I find it wonderfully productive and exhilarating.

SV: Artists in the third quarter of the 20th century were constrained by politics, while the very success of some recent painting lies in its political comment. How have you regarded the relationship between art and politics in China?

MS: I think it's unavoidable because one of the challenges that Mao and the Communists put to artists was a moral or ethical one: to forget themselves and work for the good of society. As this is a very ancient idea in China, it was very difficult to resist. Even while artists were wanting to repudiate Communism and fight against the imposition of party control, at the same time their consciences told them `we have an obligation to society', and so the interaction with politics is very close and intimate, and impossible really to disentangle.

SV: For half a century you have worked amongst painters; how would you characterize the different challenges young artists have faced?

MS: The challenges are changing. It was survival during the 40s - just to keep going, to keep alive. In the Mao period, integrity had to be maintained while fulfilling the obligations of a good citizen. Today it is avoiding the corrupting influence of commercialism.