An Extraordinary Journey The First Chinese Art Student To Visit Twentieth-century India
South Asia’s Freedom in Global Perspective Seminar
Speaker: Professor Yan Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Chair: Professor Sugata Bose, Harvard University
Abstract: Despite being the first known Chinese art student to study painting in India in the twentieth century, Chang Xiufeng (1915-2010) remains largely unknown in standard accounts of modern Chinese art history. However, his experiences in India and the diverse roles he played there speak to an intricate narrative of Sino-Indian cultural exchange during the twentieth century, a time that was fraught with political tension yet rich in artistic inspiration. Chang’s sojourn in India, spanning from the 1940s to the 1960s, coincided with a tumultuous phase in the SinoIndian bilateral dynamics. His social network included some of the most pivotal figures of the time, such as Tagore, Xu Beihong, Zhang Daqian, Nandalal Bose, and even Zhou Enlai and Nehru. These connections positioned him uniquely to witness and participate in this era’s shifting diplomacy. While enriching our understanding of twentieth-century Sino-Indian cultural dialogue, Chang Xiufeng’s artistic oeuvre during his sixteen years in India also showcases a fusion of Indian and Chinese art that goes beyond the well-studied Buddhist art that was dominant in the first millennium. Simultaneously, his art serves to dismantle and reshape fixed concepts of “China” and “India,” either as political entities or ancient civilizations, highlighting the unique agency of art in understanding the history of bilateral relations and cultural exchange.
Biography: Yan Yu is an Associate Professor of Art History and Curation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She holds a PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a BA from Peking University. From 2019 to 2022, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai, and the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research examines modern Chinese art reform and inter-Asian artistic exchanges in the 20th century, with a current focus on China-India artistic dialogues. She is completing a monograph on this subject, building on her interdisciplinary explorations of painting, calligraphy, woodblock prints, and dance. In 2023, she curated the VR exhibition “Flowers on One Stalk: China-India Artistic Interactions in the Twentieth Century” at NYU Shanghai. Beyond her research, she cultivates the meditative arts of calligraphy and guqin music.
Jointly sponsored by the GSAS Indian Ocean Worlds Workshop, Harvard Asia Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs