Lin Fengmian was a charismatic pioneer of Chinese modern art, the teacher of both Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki.
Born in Guangdong in the last years of imperial rule, Lin Fengmian was a pivotal figure in the history of Chinese modern art. Having shown prodigious talent for drawing as a child, he won a government-sponsored scholarship to study in France in 1919, where he discovered Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Primitivism. He later travelled to Berlin and was radicalised by the German Expressionists Erich Heckel and Emil Nolde, who used their talents to critique the corrupting forces of the Weimar Republic.
On his return to China in 1926, Lin began teaching at the Beijing Academy of Art, where he attempted to reconcile traditional Chinese art and European practices.
He became one of the Four Great Academy Presidents, a rarefied group of pioneering teachers who sought to transform Chinese art education in the republican era. Another member of the group was the painter Xu Beihong.
At the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war, in 1937, Lin’s studio was ransacked by soldiers, and many of his paintings were lost. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, Lin chose to destroy all of his paintings to stop them being used against him. Yet his works are rare, as many paintings were destroyed in his lifetime.
It was not until the death of Mao Zedong that artists were able to exercise some creative freedom once more, and the protagonists of the early avant-garde were slowly rehabilitated. In 1977, Lin was allowed to move to Hong Kong, where he spent his remaining years making up for lost time, working on new paintings and remaking the work that had been lost during the Cultural Revolution. In 1989, at the age of nearly 90, Lin had his first retrospective, at the National Taiwan Museum in Taipei.