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Overview
Supervisor | Council for Cultural Planning & Development, Excutive Yuan
Organizer | Taiwan Museum of Art
Co-organizers | Shanghai Art Museum, Lin & Keng Gallery, Christie's (Taipei), Yageo Corp
In 1930s Shanghai, the rich and diverse culture of the foreign concessions fostered a vibrant concentration of intellectual and artistic talent, with publishing, art criticism, exhibitions, and cultural activities flourishing at an unprecedented pace. In the arts, a situation gradually emerged in which the “Realist School” and the “New Painting School” stood in opposition to one another. Against this backdrop, Pang Xunqin and Ni Yide shared the conviction that a new form of art should respond to the needs of the Chinese nation while simultaneously converging with modern Western art. Together with artists and intellectuals who had studied in Japan and France, they founded the Storm Society in 1932 (Republic of China Year 21), advocating “art for the sake of pure formal expression.”
By 1935 (Republic of China Year 24), the Storm Society had held four exhibitions. The “Storm Society Manifesto,” issued on the occasion of its first exhibition, articulated the artists’ views on the contemporary art world and affirmed their sense of artistic mission. In the manifesto, they passionately exhorted themselves: “Let us create a world interwoven with color, line, and form, with the passion of a raging storm and the intellect of iron!” As the first group in Chinese art history to explicitly champion modern art, the Storm Society existed for only four years, yet its emergence represented the culmination of the artistic advances of the 1920s and 1930s. Its historical significance as a landmark in the modernization of Chinese art, and its enduring influence, remain indelible.
In view of the fact that cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait in the past had largely been limited to exhibitions of antiquities, with relatively little attention given to comparisons of the development and transmission of modern art, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Shanghai Art Museum jointly organized the Memorial Exhibition of the Storm Society in Shanghai. The exhibition serves as a historical testimony to the efforts made during the formative period of Chinese modern art. The Storm Society, which had once resolved to “turn the tide” and transform the course of Chinese art, continued to cast its influence in Taiwan into the late 1990s. Through this exhibition, the public was given an opportunity to glimpse the artistic vitality of the Storm Society and the remarkable era in which it emerged.
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Publications
