Love for home shines through

Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China, recollects a long car ride one winter morning in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comte region, eastern France in 2018.

Through the woods delivering "a poetic mood to remind one of the landscapes of Barbizon school", Wu and his colleagues arrived at the end of a country road where stood the former studio of Yan Dehui (1908-87), the Chinese sculptor who lived and worked in France since the 1930s till death.

They were greeted by Yan's daughter, Marianne Yen, who ushered the visiting group into the house, in which "sculptures filled almost every corner of the room, the desks and the top of packed book cabinets," Wu recalls, "and there were unfinished works and chunks of huangyangmu (boxwood) left for carving".

Wu says he had never met Yan, but "seeing his works, as if I had seen the man". He adds: "The works, carrying the marks of his hands and fingers, whether been done or not, touched us deeply, all the while conveying his homesickness."

The trip was arranged for a meeting with Yan's daughter who wished to donate his works to his home country.

The fruits of this journey — 40 works from Yan's oeuvre and a donation by his family — are on show at Shaping Techniques From Within, at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Part of the works are on show until Sunday and the rest through to Aug 14.

The exhibition provides insights into those clues in his work: his deep love for family, the modern art movements he was exposed to while in France, and the Chinese cultural roots that kept him warm and nurtured him while living far away from home.

Yan left for France in 1938, making him a member of groups of Chinese youngsters studying in Europe, a phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century.

Yan, however, did not find fame as much as his contemporaries in Europe — Xu Beihong, Liu Kaiqu and Wu Guanzhong — to name only a few who later became luminous figures and helped shape the Chinese art scene.

Before that, Yan had attended Shanghai Fine Art School, greatly inspired by the words of Liu Haisu, the school head and artist of repute, that "the mission of the school is to research on the latest developments of European art and meanwhile, to rediscover the treasures in the palace of our own culture, and blaze new trails for the revival of Chinese arts and culture".

Finishing his initial art education at home and teaching at his alma mater for some years, Yan thus traveled to France to follow the tenets of Liu Haisu.

The exhibition shows a typed recommendation letter for Yan in French and signed by Liu Haisu in his own hand, in which the latter described Yan's work as of "Eastern particularity" and "highly esteemed and appreciated".

Liu Haisu wrote that, Yan, to further improve his skills, went to France to draw inspiration from European arts to meld them harmoniously with the Eastern forms, a skill "which he was certainly able to master".

Yan's studies in France were fruitful. He enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, the time-honored school in Paris. His graduation thesis writing was halted during World War II, but he managed to finish his studies after the war ended.

"Yan's work shows his solid disciplines in school and a figurative method to master," says Wu Weishan, a sculptor in his own right. "He treated his subjects as delicately as Auguste Rodin and as expressively as Antoine Bourdelle," he adds.

Walking Alone, a work on display, sets a fine example. Shao Xiaofeng, a researcher at the National Art Museum of China, says the nude statue shows the results of the academic training Yan received in Paris.

"By giving a definition to her soft, well-fit silhouette, he hails the inner energy of life," Shao says, adding the depiction of a figure walking alone also reveals the confusion and loneliness of Yan in a foreign land.

Yan never forgot his roots. Born in Zhejiang province, he began to learn boxwood carving — his home province produced skillful artisans of the kind — at the age of 13 from famed carvers.

Several boxwood sculptures he made in France are also on show at the current exhibition.

During the decades he lived in France, he continued with this craft, a way to retain an emotional link with his homeland and also to source from Chinese elements.

While his Western-style sculptures were on show at Parisian exhibitions and collected by museums, he also endeavored to make his home art better known to Europeans.

He exhibited a wood carving, Hide and Seek, at a show at the Grand Palais in 1938. He joined the Chinese Society of Art in France which promoted traditional Chinese art. And his graduation thesis was a study of the sculptures of the Jin (265-420) and Sui (581-618) dynasties.

Wu Weishan says the Chinese side of Yan's art continued to influence his work, especially those in the later stage of his career.

"His works, enriched by spirituality and philosophy of his home art, allowed him to initiate a smooth dialogue between the East and the West," he sums up.