Angie Chau’s discussion of five Chinese literary and visual artists who sojourned in Paris between (for the most part) the First and Second World War explores, in an academic way, the notion of “transposition”, a usage she has coined to describe how artists navigated the two environments—Chinese and French—they encountered and operated in. Non-academic readers might be drawn to the straightforward stories promised in the subtitle “Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters”.
Three writers are bookended by two reasonably well-known painters, Chang Yu and Pan Yuliang. These are perhaps the most approachable of the book’s subjects, because their “transpositions”, to use Chau’s term, are immediately visible. Both are marvelous painters (especially, in my opinion, Pan), whose renown was something of a slow burn; both remain less well-known (or perhaps appreciated) among the general public than they arguably should be. Pan also has an amazing backstory, orphaned, sold into a brothel, rescued by an official who married her and supported her artistic ambitions, let her go off to Paris on her own, a story novelized by Jennifer Cody Epstein in The Painter From Shanghai to which Chau makes a reference.
Between these two painters are three writers: the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei and the author Xu Xu. The former two are perhaps not terribly well-known in English, but Xu Xu has been translated in Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic.
Chau’s interest is “transposition”, a term she borrows from music and defines as
a fluid and strategic artistic process that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old …
More specifically, Chau writes that her book
bridges the fields of Chinese and French literary and art histories, by revealing how, through the circulation of diverse images of the artist, Paris served as a site of negotiation where Chinese artists and writers were motivated to emphasize recognizable aspects of Chinese culture and identity, or “Chineseness”—an imaginary concept whose contours became at once more pressing as a way to represent China to the rest of the world, and also more flexible and susceptible to experimentation outside of China.
That this place should be Paris almost goes without saying; the Chinese were relatively late to this party. Russians, Americans, Italians and many others had trodden this path already. The meeting of Chinese culture with its Western counterparts (via Paris) was however arguably something qualitatively different. And Chau tells this story from the perspective of the Chinese protagonists, rather than as a sidebar to the broader flow and development of Western art.
Academic language can sometimes appear to complicate what may seem to the non-specialist as being relatively straightforward. Chau compares her use of “transposition” (transposed itself, as it were, from music) with translation:
While translation relies on verisimilitude and emphasizing tropes of equivalence, transposition highlights the transposed work’s recontextualization, including into new media. This alternative mode allows us to think more openly and flexibly about cross-cultural intermedia encounters …
In a world of Netflix series reworked from Korean or Mexican originals, and vice versa, people who give much thought to the matter probably understand that translation and adaptation lie on a spectrum, can rarely be exact, nor in a creative environment, should they be.
But Chau’s academic approach is tempered by evident affection for, and appreciation of, her subjects, as people as well as artists. One does not need to be au fait with the academic discourse (and I am not) to appreciate the vignettes of these five artists and writers who always had a foot in one world and the other in another. Some managed this better than others. The painter Pan Yuling decamped for Paris permanently and even painted through the German occupation.
Chau’s including both painters and writers in a single study helps identify common cultural, social and intellectual ties and concerns; this is both interesting in itself and helps illuminate this Chinese history from a particular foot-in-both-camps perspective.
Nevertheless, the two art forms have in this regard different cultural feedback loops. The painters were (for the most part) working for audiences in France (that’s where their success or failure would be determined), while the writers’ audiences (since they wrote in Chinese) were largely in China. The visual arts are even more global that they were a century ago, but literature remains bound, at least in the first instance, by language and hence geography.
