Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

In March 1978 the National Gallery of China, now called the National Art Museum of China, held an exhibition of French 19th-century rural landscape paintings. The exhibition was organised by the French Ministry of Culture and included works by Millet, Courbet, Corot, Pissarro, and others. Xu Bing was then a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, very close to the National Gallery, and the exhibition made a deep impression on him. The rural landscapes and farm scenes depicted were reminiscent of his recent experience between 1974 and 1977 as an urban youth sent to the countryside for re-education. The style of the paintings was also familiar. Art instruction in China at that time followed a Soviet model, which was itself based on French Realism.

This small booklet is one of three publications related to the exhibition, produced by the National Gallery of China for restricted circulation at the time of the show as a ‘learning resource only for colleagues in the art world’. It includes full catalogue descriptions and discussions of each painting, as well as artists’ biographies and an afterword by Jean-Paul Desroches of the Musée Guimet, Paris.