Artistic Nude and the Human Body Model in Modern Chinese Art
Artistic nude and human body model study were introduced in China about a century ago by Chinese students who studied abroad and later returned bringing with them not only foreign ideologies and sciences but also something more.
The first school of fine arts in modern China was inaugurated in November 1912 by the painter Liu Haisu (刘海粟) together with Wu Shiguang (乌始光) and Zhang Yunguang (张聿光) in Shanghai. The school opened as the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting (上海图画美术院), the institution that would later become the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (上海美术专科学校). Liu Haisu, then only sixteen years old, effectively led the school from the start and was named its principal, making him one of the youngest art-school heads in Chinese history.
Liu Haisu and the Shanghai Art School
Liu Haisu, a pioneer of Chinese modern painting, combined Western and Eastern techniques and advocated for this fusion as a means of modernizing art education in China. He was a progressive and controversial figure throughout his career. The Shanghai Art School was the first in the country to admit both male and female students in the same classroom, a move that broke sharply with the practices of traditional Chinese education.
Introducing the Nude Model
The use of live nude models was introduced gradually and not without difficulty. Liu opened the school’s first life-drawing course in 1914, but at first could only find a male model willing to pose; the first female model appeared in the studio around 1920. A 1917 school exhibition that included nude works triggered public controversy, and Liu, rather than retreat, defended the practice publicly, writing an open letter on the subject in 1925.
The dispute reached its peak in 1926, when the warlord Sun Chuanfang (孙传芳), who then controlled the region, publicly clashed with Liu over the use of nude models and pressed him to abandon the practice; Liu refused. The exchange, carried out largely through letters published in the press, made Liu a household name across Shanghai and led critics to brand him an “art traitor” (艺术叛徒). The local authorities eventually moved to restrict the use of nude models at the school, but by then the episode had already made the very idea of nude modeling widely known throughout China. Liu found an important defender in the educator Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培), then head of Peking University, whose support helped shield him from the worst of the backlash.
Bringing Cézanne and Millet to China
Beyond the classroom controversy, Liu Haisu played a significant role in introducing European modern art to Chinese readers. He wrote and published biographical studies of Paul Cézanne and Jean-François Millet, and in 1919 authored an early essay outlining the history of Western landscape painting, helping bring Impressionist and Post-Impressionist ideas to a Chinese audience for the first time. He also founded China’s first art magazine, titled Art (美术), and continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s to promote a painting style that fused Western oil techniques with the brushwork and spirit of traditional Chinese ink painting, or guohua (国画).
Below you will find a selection of images, some of which were shot by the pioneers of the artistic nude.
Images of nude body art in China
Topic: nude art in China, artistic nude in China
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