The Qing dynasty closed
China to maritime trade in 1757, just at the moment when European
nations were expanding their international commerce. Guangzhou (Canton)
was the only legal port for trade between China and the outside world
until 1843. This south-eastern region, which includes modern Guangdong
province, was commonly referred to as Lingnan, and produced some of the
most important political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, including Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who
advocated replacing the imperial system with a constitutional monarchy,
and Sun Yat-sen, who established China's first republic in 1911.
The development of a Cantonese manner of painting began in the
nineteenth century, but did not attain national visibility and a
distinctive style until the first part of the twentieth century. The
leader of the Lingnan School of painting was Gao Jianfu (1879-1950?),
who joined the Alliance Society (Tongmeng hui), founded by Sun Yat-sen
in 1905 to overthrow the emperor. After 1911 he devoted himself instead
to a revolution in art. In his painting, publications, and teaching, he
promoted the development of a New National Painting (xin guohua). He and
his followers, most notably his younger brother GAO Qifeng, combined the
local style with elements of Western and Japanese realist painting to
create an art that they hoped would be more accessible to the citizenry
of China's new republic than the literati painting of the past.
