【中文版】
Li Xuying loved drawing from childhood, and with real talent to match, she always dreamed of going on to study art seriously at a higher level. After a few years of teaching, she managed to save a small sum of money. She then resigned from her post at the Xiangshan Orphanage, and in 1925 passed the entrance exam for the Department of Design at the National School of Fine Arts in Beijing, better known later as the National Art School in Beiping, or simply “Yizhuan.” (Note: For a detailed account of its history from founding through the Japanese occupation of Beiping in 1937, Li Zhonghua’s Pioneering the National Art Education is an excellent resource and one of the key references for this part of the biography.) Over the next two decades, Li Xuying’s career and life were deeply intertwined with the school.
In the early years of the Republic, President Sun Yat-sen put educator Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940) and others in charge of establishing the Ministry of Education in 1912. They laid out a new school system dividing education into three stages: primary, secondary, and higher education. Primary education (what we now call elementary school) lasted seven years; secondary education (including vocational and normal schools) four years; and higher education seven years (three preparatory + four undergraduate). That framework was largely implemented until 1922, when the durations of each stage were adjusted. The Beijing Women’s Normal School Li Xuying attended fell under the category of secondary education, a four-year program under the old rules.
The “Specialized Schools Decree” issued in October 1912 stated that the purpose of specialized schools was “to teach advanced scholarship and cultivate specialized talent,” and it explicitly included fine arts schools in the plan. Both specialized schools and universities counted as institutions of higher education. By then, art programs were already appearing across China: the drawing and handicrafts teacher-training program at Liangjiang Superior Normal School in Nanjing, or private ones like the Shanghai Pictorial Art Institute. In 1917, on Cai Yuanpei’s proposal, planning began for the National School of Fine Arts in Beijing. It opened with a secondary division offering painting and design courses. Like so much of Chinese education at the time, the teaching drew heavily from Japanese models. The school’s first principal, the painter and educator Zheng Jin (1883–1959), had studied in Japan at the Kyoto City Senior High School of Art and the Kyoto City Technical School of Painting. He was the first Chinese student to study fine arts in Japan as a major. The school was located on the west side of Xidan Pailou, along Jingji Dao in Beijing. Though its area was only about eight acres, the layout was exquisitely arranged, with abundant flowers and trees. Within the campus stood a sports field, a single-story building for Chinese painting classrooms, an applied art classroom building, a Western painting classroom building, and a magnificent auditorium. Covered corridors connected the classrooms to the staff dormitories, allowing people to move about the campus without an umbrella even on rainy or snowy days. The design was both practical and aesthetically pleasing, earning it the reputation of an “art palace.”
From its founding, the art school planned to add a higher division, but it was not until 1920 that it first enrolled students in the advanced teacher-training program. In 1922, the school was officially upgraded to a specialized school, with a secondary division, preparatory courses, and undergraduate programs, including a training track for teachers. In 1925, after student movements and other disruptions, the art school was shut down briefly, then reopened in November as the National (Specialized) Academy of Arts, and was often referred to as “Yizhuan.” Liu Baizhao (1889–1933), then Director of the Specialized Education Division at the Ministry of Education, became principal, while Wen Yiduo (1899–1946), who had studied painting in the United States, served as Dean of Academic Affairs. They admitted 160 new students that year, and Li Xuying was one of them. Having completed secondary education, she was admitted to the undergraduate program in the Department of Design. Tuition and fees came to about 50 yuan a year. We don’t have her exact salary from Xiangshan Orphanage, but for reference, Shen Congwen (1902-1988), who later became a renowned writer, earned 20 yuan a month as a librarian there in 1925. (See Qi Baishi and the National Beiping Art Academy: A Historical Examination) At the orphanage, everyone lived on campus. Teachers and students ate and slept together, and monthly living expenses were just a few yuan. (A Century of the Xiangshan Orphanage: Explicitly Advocating an Educational Policy of Comprehensive Development in “Virtue, Intellect, Skill, and Community”) Having worked for four years and lived frugally, Li Xuying was indeed able to save enough to cover the costs of attending the art school.
Before the name change to the National Academy of Arts, the school had three departments: Chinese painting, Western painting, and design. The Department of Design was further split into industrial design and decorative architectural design. When it reopened in 1925, music and drama were added. Announced reforms to the curriculum and structure never really took root; the school largely kept running on the pre-closure system. Li Xuying majored in industrial design. Her main courses included architecture, history of applied arts, principles of design, plate-making, printing techniques, and various practical drafting classes. The school required every major to take cross-departmental courses, so design students also studied both Chinese and Western painting. Beyond the major, there were shared foundation courses such as ethics, physics, art theory, foreign languages, applied natural history illustration, and electives like Chinese literature, music, and horticulture.
The faculty included many leading figures in the art world of the day: Chinese painting master Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Wang Mengbai (1888–1934), seal carver Shou Shigong (1885-1950), the first female sculptor in China Wang Jingyuan (1884-1970), and others. Wen Yiduo himself taught aesthetics to Li Xuying. Far from dry theory, his classes were lively and full of witty conversation. Xuying had a fond memory of Wen’s classes. The student body of Yizhuan was equally brimming with talent. Renowned Chinese painters such as Wang Xuetao (1903–1982) and Li Kuchan (1899–1983), the father of Chinese watercolor painting Li Jianchen (1900–2002), and the foundational figure in Chinese sculpture and art museum development Liu Kaiqu (1904–1993) were all pioneering contributors to modern Chinese fine arts and art education nurtured by the school. Among them, Li Youxing (1905–1982) initially studied Chinese painting at Yizhuan before going to France to specialize in dyeing and weaving patterns; he is remembered as the “Oriental Master of Color” for his masterful fusion of Eastern and Western elements and stands as a trailblazer in modern color education and applied arts teaching in China. Lei Guiyuan (1906–1988) is frequently hailed as the father of modern Chinese design. He laid the solid foundations of pattern theory and arts and crafts education, profoundly shaping the landscape of 20th-century Chinese decorative and two-dimensional design.