Lingnan School

Example works by the three Lingnan founders

Spring Scene in Lingnan (Chen Shuren, 1928)

Landscape (Gao Jianfu, 1926)

The Roar of the Night (Gao Qifeng, 1916)

The Lingnan School (traditional Chinese: 嶺南畫派; simplified Chinese: 岭南画派; pinyin: Lǐngnán huà pài) was an art movement active in the late Qing dynasty and Republic of China that sought to modernize Chinese painting through borrowing from other artistic traditions. The school's founders, Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren, were initially influenced by the teachings of Ju Lian, including the "boneless" technique. They subsequently travelled to Japan, where they learned Western techniques of perspective and colour through the syncretic Nihonga school of painting, the influences of which remained throughout their lives. The men also joined the Tongmenghui, an anti-Qing nationalist organization with which their movement was closely associated.

Returning to China in the late 1900s, the Gaos and Chen participated in the 1911 revolution; Chen later returned to Japan for further study, though the three collaborated on spreading their idea of a "New National Painting" that combined Chinese and foreign influences. Exhibitions and teaching positions allowed them to further promulgate their approach to art, and by the 1930s the Lingnan School had found broad acceptance and support with the Kuomintang government. Chen, the Gaos, and their students participated in national and international art exhibitions into the mid-1930s. However, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the movement's Japanese influences proved a liability, and it fell from prominence. Students of the Gaos continued the movement after the Chinese Civil War, both in mainland China and in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Stylistically, the Lingnan School was marked by a blending of traditional Chinese approaches and Western techniques, as mediated by Japanese understandings. These included matters of lighting and atmosphere, as well as depictions of subjects rarely found in earlier Chinese works. At the same time, members of the movement had marked differences; Gao Jianfu favoured atmospheric landscapes, Gao Qifeng large animals rendered realistically, and Chen Shuren delicately presented bird-and-flower scenes. Subsequent generations of painters varied stylistically and thematically. The Lingnan School has been considered one of the major art movements of 20th-century Chinese painting.