Lin Fengmian: 10 things to know

He had a strong social conscience

Born in Guangdong in the last years of imperial rule, Lin Fengmian was a pivotal figure in the history of Chinese modern art. An artist and teacher with a strong social conscience and a bold, international outlook, he became the man of the age in the 1930s, when he proposed a synthesis of Chinese and Western art.

He united Western and Eastern art

Before the advent of Communism in China, a short-lived moment of fragile liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s had seen the beginnings of a Chinese modern art. At its helm was the young revolutionary, Lin, who was attempting to revitalise what he saw as an ailing artistic culture by instigating European ideas about perspective, gesture and colour. He promoted a pan-Asian ideology, exhorting other Chinese artists to be outward-looking and adopt innovative practices.

Lin was radicalised by the German Expressionists

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. Works such as his ‘Opera Figures’ and ‘Seated Women’ series reveal his interest in Matisse portraits.

He began a modern art movement

In 1928, Lin established the Art Movement Society with the artists Lin Wenzheng and Li Puyuan, ‘founded on absolute friendship and uniting the new power of the art world’. They published an art journal, Apollo, in which they promoted their paintings and those of the European avant-garde.

In 1929, they wrote a manifesto championing collective action and likening artists to ‘farmers who work in the field of the spirit for all mankind’. Perhaps inspired by that rural vision, Lin’s paintings at the time showed a strong interest in nature.

He taught Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki

In 1928, Lin became the director of the newly established National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, introducing Van Gogh and Cezanne into the curriculum. Among his students were two artists who would become world-famous: Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki.

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.

Lin Fengmian suffered two great tragedies

While studying in Germany, Lin became interested in the thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, who conceived of the notion of philosophical pessimism. Schopenhauer was one of the first European thinkers to recognise certain similarities between Western and Eastern philosophy. In his book The Wisdom of Life, he suggested that aesthetic contemplation could be an escape from human suffering.

This resonated deeply with Lin, who had suffered two great tragedies in his life. When he was seven years old, his mother was sold into servitude and he never saw her again, although he spent much of his early adult life trying to find her. Then, in 1924, his Austrian wife Elisa von Roda and their newborn child both died. These events had a momentous impact on the artist’s creative output.

He was persecuted and imprisoned

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.

A banner was placed over his house that read, ‘Down with the bourgeois reactionary scholar-tyrants’. His fascination with opera and other ‘intellectual’ pursuits was used against him, and he was imprisoned for four-and-a-half years.

In 1992, Wu Guanzhong wrote in the preface to The Paintings of Lin Fengmian: ‘Most of his artworks were soaked in the water basin or bathtub and flushed away as pulp. As for oil paintings, after the siege of Hangzhou, they were used as tarpaulins by the Japanese army.’

His works — and exhibitions — are rare

Lin’s paintings are highly valued. In 2016, Fishing Village (thought to have been painted in the 1950s or 1960s) sold for HK$39,740,000, the equivalent of about US$5 million, at Christie’s in Hong Kong, which remains the record price for the artist.

Yet his works are rare, as many paintings were destroyed in his lifetime. A retrospective at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2007 took 10 years to organise, so difficult was it to find works by the artist. More recently, in 2024-25, Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing showed The Road to China Modern Art: Lin Fengmian and Wu Guanzhong.

Paintings by the artist can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Shanghai Art Museum.

He had his first retrospective in Taiwan

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.

Song dynasty ceramics were an inspiration

Lin Fengmian shocked traditional artists by choosing to paint on a square sheet rather than a long scroll. His bright colours, brushwork and unusual perspective were all thought to have been inspired by his time studying in Europe, but Lin wrote that, in fact, his greatest inspiration came from the figures on Chinese ceramics from the Song dynasty (960-1279) as well as prehistoric cave paintings.

Art d’Asie takes place on 10 June 2025, alongside Art of Asia online until 13 June. Both sales are on view at Christie’s in Paris until 9 June