Competition

#78007

30″ X 40″ ac
30″ X 40″/24″ X 32″ Print

Dr. T.F. Chen’s Competition, featured in the “Globalism” section (p.687) in the university-level art history textbook “Art&Ideas”,9th Edition by Prof. William Fleming, publ. By Harcourt Brace. Globalism East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. So declared the writer Rudyard Kipling, and as a prophet he could not have been more wrong. The veil of mystery has now been lifted along with the image of the enigmatic Oriental. Through travel, trade, commerce, and cultural exchange west has indeed met east and east has met west. To round out the world picture, north has met south and vice versa. This certainly can come as no surprise. Ever since Marco Polo’s trip to China in the 13th century, the medieval crusaders’ adventures in the Near East, the 15th-century voyages of Columbus in search of India, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, the European demand for the importation of Oriental spices, the China and India tea trade that began in the 18th century, the colonial expansion and now contraction by Western powers, the whole world has been constantly coming closer togetherThis global situation has been tellingly dramatized by Tsing Fang Chen’s “Competition” (Fig. 23.17). Chen himself is a Taiwan-born Chinese, who studied in Paris where he wrote his doctorial dissertation at the Sorbonne on the relationship of Eastern and Western art and how they could combine to bring about a universal culture. He is now a resident of New York City. This painting depicts a dancing figure straight out of the popular Kabuki Japanese theater on one side, and a Picasso-like cubistic seated musician playing the mandolin on the other. Between them is a reclining figure taken form the French painter Ingres’s “Turkish Bath” (see Fig. 18.23). The work can be understood as a contest with the side figures representing Japanese and Western commercial productivity competing for the favors of a voluptuous woman symbolizing conspicuous consumption. Eastern and Western art forms also meet and merge in this picture.