Sanyu: a Chinese Surrealist in Paris
By Eugene Wang

In 1946, Henri-Pierre RochÈ (1879-1959), an eminent art collector active in the heydays of modernism in Paris, was asked to send part of his esteemed collection for a planned exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For reasons unknown, the exhibition never took place. However, RochÈís list of entries for the exhibition remains a delectable document and a reliable insiderís assessment of the modernist canon. Comprising fifty paintings, the list includes two by Braque, four by Picasso, two or three by Duchamp, one by Modigliani, and one by Pascin. Ranked among the sparingly selected works of these paramount modernists are four by Chang Yu or Sanyu (1901-1966), a Chinese painter who enjoyed some fame in Paris around 1930 and who is only now being rediscovered. If the number amounts to any measure of significance, it suggests RochÈís high esteem of Sanyu whom he placed on a par with Picasso. This is all the more striking considering the acrimony between RochÈ (Sanyuís agent from 1929 to 1932) and Sanyu resulting from their growing mutual distrust.

Viewing Sanyuís works now, one is struck by how much they register the distinct modernist sensibility borne out of the heady vortex of the Parisian art world in the 1920s and 1930s. It is hardly surprising that Sanyu fits into the group of the canonically enshrined Modernist masters in RochÈís list. However, what kind of modernist Sanyu was then remains an intriguing question. Whereas one may make a compelling case for Sanyuís integration into the European modernist canon, his idiosyncrasy in the European modernist context is just as striking. European critics around 1930 regarded him as an odd man out, an artist from China who produced ìdrawings in Chinese inkî (ìdes croquis ‡ líencre de Chineî), and ìjoyfully accepted the legacy of the art of his ancestors but has also, in his way, profited from some new European ideas,î and whose work displays ìthe sensitive hand of the Chinese calligrapher.î Some even went so far as to pronounce that Sanyuís work is ìcompletely Chinese with a minor European influenceî (ìsa penture actuelle est complement chinoise, avec une influence europÈenne mineureî). Moreover, Sanyuís association with RochÈ that extended to Picassoís Cubist circle, his only written article in which he praises Picasso, and his one-time fame as the ìChinese Matisse,î have blinded us to one crucial aspect of his works: namely, in his heydays around 1930, he was a surrealist of a distinct kind.

Much of this is evident in a group of oil paintings he produced around 1930, in particular, the White Nude (fig.) <Wong, Sanyu, no. 3>. Stretched horizontally, the female body is here presented like a sea lion with its ostensible oval or reptilian shape, and its hands and feet drawn like animal claws and paws.
The painting is a culmination of many of Sanyuís fanciful and capricious renditions of the female body steeped in the Surrealist ethos. De-familiarizing the human body and transforming it into a bestial form, the painting resonates with the Surrealist poetic bestiary, i.e., nude body revealed as beast. The effect is further reinforced by the elongation and the emphatic outstretching of the reclining body, thereby spelling out the horizontality associated with the animal body as opposed to vertical axis associated with the human stance, a Surrealist mode of thinking derived from Bataileís concept of bassesse.
The force of the horizontal stretching and elongation also creates a sensation of the nudeóits contour already wildly distortedóswept along or washed out by the engulfing horizontal white swath. The body is on the verge of dissolving into the anamorphous, the gelatinous formlessness, and moreover, into pure space. Surrealists speak of such a hypothetical state as analogous to animal mimicry, the fusion of the insect with the natural environment, the loss of self-possession in merging into the ìvast outsidedness of space itself.î Surrealist works, as exemplified by May Ray, Le Primat de la matiËre su la pensËe (1931), capture such psychic states as formal apparatus for reverie, ecstasy, and dream.

Sanyuís White Nude, contemporary to Rayís photograph, works to the same effect. With her forearm covering the head, Sanyuís nude appears to float in the stream of a dream world teeming with a collage of disparate imagesóyet another surrealist hallmarkóhovering above her in a faintly shaded swath. The heavy and dark passage at the bottom lays out a gravity that offsets the ethereality of the hollowed forms with slender contoursóthe female nude, the fish, horse, roaster, and plants in the upper registeróthat take on a levitating and oneiric overtone. The painting enacts the Surrealist perception of the female body as a gateway into ìthe marvelous,î a horizon of redemption that offers glimpses of ìwhat lies ahead, beyond the real.î

Harmonizing with this surrealist tenor is Sanyuís drawing of the nudeís hands and feet in a fluid, but mechanic and compulsive repetition. The drawing recalls the Surrealist ìautomatic writingî and ìautomatic drawing,î advocated by Breton and exemplified by AndrÈ Masson, a practice premised upon the celebration of the spontaneous outflow of writing/drawing that brings out the true inner feeling unmediated and unshackled by reason, that purport to capture through churning lines the instinctual urge in a hypnotic trance. While the ìautomatic drawingî may have remained largely a programmatic aspiration for practicing artists, its formal mechanism provided artists with an apparatus to convey the effect of the unfettered articulation. Sanyuís surviving sketches (figs.) <IN-105> <Chen Yanfeng, San Yu, p. 45> testify to his frequent exercises in this vein.

Much of the proceeding analysis is of little interest if we merely think of Sanyuís White Nude as one more Surrealist painting. The significance of Sanyuís canvas resides not just in its full-range resonances with Surrealism; it in fact reconciles two nearly irreconcilable stylistic polarities in surrealism. Automatism and dream are the twin poles of surrealist preoccupation. Automatism takes the form of cursive writing/drawing; dream vision thrives on the palpability of academic illusionism. Hence, surrealist endeavors show two polarized tendencies: ìthe abstract liquefaction of MirÛ on the one hand, and the dry realism of Magritte or Dali on the other;î or, to put the opposition in starker terms, Massonís wandering cursive linearism vs. Margritte or Daliís oneiric realism. Masson defines this opposition as ìthe Surrealist dualism consisting in 1) freeing the psycheís menagerie [through automatism]Ö 2) new academism.î To the latter he lodged loud protest. How to reconcile these two visual modes then has long remained a vexing problem. Rosalind Kraussís solution to this problem is to regard Surrealist photographsówith their steep angles and surprising croppings that wrest anamorphous forms out of the human bodyóas the quintessential surrealist strategy that mediates between the two stylistic polarities. The more synthetically minded Surrealists are at times tempted by the impossible condition of reconciling the urge to give free reins to the cursive drawing on the one hand and the discipline required to sustain the plastic illusionism of a dream space on the other hand. The brute fact remains that cursive abstraction of automatic writing/drawing does not sit well with the full-bodied academic illusionism. It is hard to both have the cake and eat it.

Sanyuís White Nude is one such painting that reconciles the two irreconcilable polarities. Its cursive drawing enacts the Surrealist aspiration toward automatism as a way of articulating the inner urges; its retaining of somatic forms and the collage of images map out a dreamscape that remains a Surrealist obsession. The same reconciliation is realized differently in his Virgin and the Infant Mary (fig.) <Wong, Sanyu, p. 175, no. 70>. The canvas places the female figure in front of a large mirror whose surface squarely parallels the picture plane, and whose gigantic frame nearly fills up the entire picture, thereby providing a picture-within-picture and a meta-picture (i.e., picture about picture). Over the black frame Sanyu scribbled a continuous string of doodles in the vein of automatic drawing that signals the releasing of the unchecked overflow of inner compulsive urges. The legible image occupying the fictive spaceósuggestively epitomized by the iconic Virgin and Childóis dissolved into the startlingly de-familiarized bulging wraith of a doodle-writ-large that borders on the anamorphous or the informe. The latter demonstrates the inscription and ìinvasion of the body by space,î a familiar Surrealist conceit, intimating the ultimate dissolution of the boundary between the body and space. The tactility of spatial illusionism on this side of the mirror is counterbalanced by the apparitional mirror reflection rendered in anamorphous cursive drawing. The scribble in the mirroróor rather, on the mirror surfaceódeconstructs the illusionism usually sustained and reinforced by the mirror device. In this process of inscriptionóthis headlong plunge into the oneiric interiority of the mirror spaceóSanyu reconciles the irreconcilable twin poles of Surealism: the cursive inscription of inner thoughts and plastic vivacity of dream images. In this painting, the two modes, aligned in a mirroring relationship, are parasitic on each other for their respective existences.

Sanyu shared the Surrealist interest in exploring the mirror reflection as a means of creating the oneiric double. His Two Standing Nudes (fig.) <Wong, Sanyu, p. 114, no. 15> is a good example. Two female figures with distorted reptilian bodies stand facing each other, wedged between two vertical swaths of red that presumably define a doorway, thereby demarcating an interior and exterior space. The corresponding poses of the nudes suggest a mirroring relationship between the two. It is as if the left figure is facing her reflected self, only that the intervening mirror is eliminated and that the presumed mirror reflection paradoxically undermines the mirroring relationship by stepping out of the boundary, with its one leg protruding into this side of the divide. The empty space flanked or partially framed by the two vertical red swaths further complicates the figure-ground relationship. The doorway space that sets up the interior/exterior divide and the figural sketch that scratches the flat surface--or hints at the virtual mirrorócreate an irreconcilable disparity that can only be sustained as an oneiric effect of two apparitional nudes suspended in the virtual dream world. The twin poles of the Surrealist preoccupation--automatism (signified by the sparse drawing) and dream (signified by ethereal illusionism)óare thus brought into interplay. The canvas inadvertently pictures a surrealist hallucinatory state epitomized by the vision AndrÈ Breton obtained one evening before he fell asleep, ìthe faint visual image of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body.î As glossed by Hal Foster, ìThis image suggests neither a descriptive mirror nor a narrative window, the familiar paradigms of postmedieval art, but a fantasmatic window, a ëpurely interior modelí in which the subject is somewhat split both positionallyóat once inside and outside the sceneóand pyshicallyóëcut in two.íî He might as well have glossed Sanyuís Two Standing Nudes.

Sanyuís pictorial internalization of the mirror property harmonizes with his idiosyncratic practice of paintingóoften by way of sparse drawingódirectly on mirror surface in the early 1930s. (fig.) <Wong, Sanyu, p. 166, no. 62> The method speaks to the same visual interest: an effort to inscribe, by way of cursive linearism, the unmediated instinctual urges onto the illusionist space; in other words, to sustain both the release mechanism of automatism that scratches the surface and the unfathomable abyss of the plastic dream space, the twin aspirations of Surrealism.

This dual interest is further manifested in his sketches. The female figures in some of his sketches (fig.) <sin-006> and watercolors (fig.) <w-029> are distorted in such a way that the feet and lower half of their bodies are grossly and massively oversized while their head is drastically reduced in scale. The optical effect is that of a Surrealist photographic conceit derived from the surprising angling, dramatic foreshortening, or special mirror distortion, that emphatically magnifies parts of a female body to yield a biomorphous mass, such as seen in AndrÈ KertÈszís Distortion (especially, #6 and #40), produced in Paris in early 1930s. Sanyuís composition therefore both affirm the cursive drawing suggestive of automatism and the mirroring space suggested by the implied camera lens, a mirror with memory.
Sanyuís only written statement, ìReflections of a Chinese Painter on Picasso,î published in the Parisien LibÈrÈ in 1945, is thus to be read not so much as a pledge of allegiance to Cubism but a manifesto of his own artistic convictions, and moreover, his private visions:

The power in his work is immeasurableÖI contemplate the worksÖI am completely submerged in dreams, hallucinating because of these works. It is no longer just painting but something colossal and grand. It is a python as long as the Great Wall of China, a mosquito as large as the Pyramids, an athlete who lifts mountains, a thousand fireflies in the dead of nightÖThe deformation in Picassoís woks is simply a first step. Our race is too old, our bodies too fragile, our life too short.

The passage almost amounts to ìautomatic writingî of sorts. It certainly reveals more about Sanyu himself than Picasso. It carries the conviction that painting should have the hallucinatory quality that induces the viewer to ìcontemplateî it so the the viewer is ìcompletely submerged in dreams.î The passage delineates the contours of Sanyuís pictorially constituted inner world. There is a hallucinatory and fantastic Surrealist quality to the word picture: the Great Wall turns into a python; the dizzying vision built on wildly alternating scale equates the tiny mosquito with the colossal Pyramids. Moreover, the three graphic images are strung into a collage in a compressed space. The background to this word picture is a typical Surrealist canvas of cosmic magnitude, as Sanyu sinks into a brooding reverie about the contrast between the vast span of time and the ìfragile body.î His writing thus provides a fitting caption to Sanyuís own works, especially those vast landscapes engulfing a lone figure whose thinly delineated body is on the verge of dissolving into the surrounding spaceóagain, a Surrealist conceit.
It is interesting to reflect on the meeting of interests between an artist grounded in his native Chinese tradition that has much use for cursive linearism and the surrealist automatism that was the rage in the 1920s and 30s. European modernists were fascinated by the calligraphic possibilities of the ìOrient.î Trained in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, Sanyu was attracted to the potentials in the surrealist automatism. Each side was looking for an alternative force as a corrective to its own moribund tradition. Before he was exposed to surrealist automatism, Sanyu had been a practitioner of a long-standing Chinese pictorial tradition known as ìsketch conceptualism.î Postulated as the antithesis of the plodding realism that delineates outer appearances of things, sketch conceptualism is a mode of pictorial execution that seeks to capture the higher order of some spiritual or inner truth beyond the plenitude of appearance through an expressive economy of abbreviated and often sketchy forms. In some ways, sketch conceptualism is consonant with surrealist automatism. Just as apparent, however, are the differences in philosophical underpinnings between the two practices, as registered by their respective forms. Sketch conceptualism requires a highly codified discipline of the brushwork, whereas surrealist automatism, in surrendering to the dictates of the inner voice, is emphatically up against any codified regimentation in favor of a passive recording of the instinctual outpouring.

Sanyuís command of sketch conceptualism is evident in the watercolor Peony (fig.), the earliest surviving painting which Sanyu painted in 1921, the year after he arrived in Paris. The watercolor displays a hand trained in traditional ink painting. The stalks show a modulation stemming from the constant shifting of the brush tip. As is required of a traditional ink painter, one is expected to inflect or modulate the linear trace of the brush by changing directions and brush tips; the effect is further reinforced by the rhythmic alternation between deliberate pauses and jerking movements. These qualities are registered in the dark stems that display both the turning and gyrating of the brush tip as well as the varying speed of the brush movement. The fluid downward flow, thinning naturally, of the red stalk would have been considered an anomaly.

Sanyuís training in cursive linearism in ink brush predisposed him to surrealist automatism in Paris. Unlike his friend Xu Beihong who enrolled in the …cole Nationale SupÈrieure des Beaux Arts and the AcadÈmie Julian to receive more rigorous and regimented training in the academic style which still held respectability in the early 1920s, Sanyu chose to practice his painting in the more free-wheeling AcadÈmie de la Grande ChaumiËre. Even in the more relaxed atmosphere there, Sanyuís way of sketching the models was idiosyncratic and unconventional. Instead of using the more standard slate pencils or charcoal, Sanyu used brushes. Moreover, instead of portraying the models, he often sketched his peers and turned everyone, regardless man or woman, to a plump or even bloated female bodyóhe was acquiring a surrealist vision.

The surrealist automatic drawing offered something beyond the technical resources of sketch conceptualism. Its emphasis on release of the inner promptings and the continuous rapid speed of execution gave him a formal apparatus to gain the freedom to execute fluid lines uninhibited by the codified internal variations and modulations of cursive linearism required of the Chinese ink-and-brush discipline. With this acquired taste in automatic drawing, he was able to perform the proverbial linear ìarabesque,î made famous by Matisse, whose rapid and uninflected curvy line provides a striking alternative to the modulated linearism in traditional Chinese ink painting as practiced in Sanyuís time. The best example is Sanyuís illustration of Tao Qianís (365-427) poem, ìChassÈ par la faim [Driven by Hunger].î (fig.)<> The poem speaks of a hunger-driven man wandering into a farmerís house where he is entertained with wines and poetry-recitals. Thankful, he thinks of paying the host back from the world beyond. It is significant that Sanyuís illustration omits the main thrust of the poem and focuses exclusively on the beginning part of the poem:

ChassÈ par la faim, je míen vais
San savoir o_ me mËnent mes pas.
Cheminant, cheminant, je me trouve
Enfin dans ce village inconnu.
[Driven by hunger, I take to the road,
I did not know where to go.
Going, going, I found myself
Finally arriving at an unknown village.]
¦º¿++Xº+ÑhíCñú+¦¦ª=ñºíCªµªµª_¦¦¿+íC

The part contains enough of a hint of a compulsive hallucinatory sleepwalk (ìcheminant, cheminantÖce village inconnuî) within a dreamscape. Sanyuís illustration certainly accentuates this aspect. The hill slope is textured with compulsively repetitive parallel short bars (ìcheminant, cheminantÖî), which is resonant with surrealist mechanism alien to the emphatically modulated traditional Chinese texture-patterning strokes. Moreover, the shoreline is rendered in a fluid and unremitting (ìcheminant, cheminantÖî) wandering arabesque (ìje míen vais/San savoir o_ me mËnent mes pasî). Sanyuís rehearsal in automatic drawing is apparently pressed into service here.

Little is known about whether Sanyu had direct interaction with the Surrealist circle. The spell cast on the Parisian art world by Breton and his coterie of colleagues and their theories of art was so wide and gripping that it is conceivable that Sanyu vibrated to the Surrealist impulse. Like many surrealists (Masson and Moore) who started out on their own and were appropriated or even claimedóand some of them excommunicatedóby the Surrealist movement led by Breton, Sanyu may have acted uponówhether consciously or inadvertentlyóthe surrealist impulse in his compulsive quest for oneiric visions or dreamscapes, which was a distinct surrealist aspiration. In any case, he was practicing surrealism in broadly conceived terms. To frame Sanyuís works in the Surrealist context is not to fall back on, or fall prey to, the mechanics of the influence model. Rather, it is a way of articulating the unspoken subterraneous impulses latent, or lying dormant, in Sanyuís works, which were shared, schematized, and programmatically announced by the Surrealists around 1930s.

The Surrealist imagination anchored in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was in many ways ethnographic in character. It frequently embraced the ethnic Other as an exotic site to project its obsession with the ìmarvelousî and magical surreality. Had Breton and his circle included Sanyu, had AndrÈ Masson interacted with Sanyu, the surrealists may have found a viable way of reconciling the automatic drawing with oneiric imagism. Why that did not happen may never be known. What we do know is that Sanyu appropriated the surrealist apparatusóa doubly exotic otherness to a Chinese living in Parisóto structure his own dreamscape. A reticent man that he was, we can nevertheless peep into that world via the discursive channel of Surrealist pontificators who made a killing wearing their heart on their sleeves.