Some Remarks on Chinese Painting and Its Influence on the West

China Review International: A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies

Studying Chinese landscape painting of the Southern Song period, I propose a semiotic paradigm to examine its artistic change from realist representation to self-expression. This conception is inspired by the Morrisian hypothesis about the pragmatical dimension of semiosis. In this light, I discuss the paradigm shift at two levels, the formal level of visuality and the conceptual level of ideology. Accordingly, I observe that the paradigm shift decisively redirected the course of the mainstream in Chinese landscape painting from being external sensitive to more internal sensitive, and thus a new paradigm has been set up in Southern Song. This is a study of the landscape painting of the Southern Song period (1127-1279) in Chinese art history. In this study I argue that the metaphysical Tao is both external and internal; it is embodied in nature and also in human heart and mind. Correspondingly, I observe that two cardinal semiotic paradigms, representation and self-expression, functioned in landscape painting when Chinese art history entered the period of Southern Song. The first paradigm defines the encoding of the Tao through representing the images of the external world of nature, which is found in the landscape painting of the Northern Song (960-1127), and the second defines the manifestation of the Tao through expressing the artist's personal sentiment and thoughts, which is found in the landscape painting of the Southern Song. This is to say that the Southern Song landscape painting demonstrates the paradigmatic turn in Chinese art history. The term " paradigm " is borrowed from linguistics; however, in the context of this article it is based on sign-relations, referring to the mode of art. The topic of this article, the paradigm shift from Northern Song to Southern Song is an ideological and stylistic change from the representational mode of the outgoing art to the self-expressional mode of the inward-turning art. Art historians in the West and China were aware of the change, and some of them tried to describe what the change was and explain why it happened, but failed to point out that this is a paradigm shift. Why did they fail? Scholars of today in the West tend to approach this issue from a political and economic perspective due to their postmodern-like point of view, whereas scholars in China tend to approach the same issue from a similar perspective due to their Marxist point of view. As a result, they both focus on the relationship between art and its socio-historical background, and missed an equally, or more crucial relationship.

International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2016

Despite geographical distance and cultural dissimilarity, the European and Chinese sides of the early modern debate over what constitutes "fine art" start from similar premises and arrive at similar conclusions. Europeans concluded that Chinese painting should only be regarded, at best, as decorative art and never as "fine art"-and so has no place in the tradition of the grand masters, and Chinese concluded that European painting, despite its technical mastery of the secrets of visual illusion, should only be regarded as illustration and so belongs to the craft of painting and not the tradition of fine art in China, the tradition of scholar or literati painting-their version of le grand gout "grand taste." The inability to see with different eyes or to judge except in terms of one's own cultural and aesthetic standards, the lack of trans-cultural objectivity, all these mark both the European and the Chinese mentality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prisoners in their own cultures, each side could only think as they did. The mutual enrichment that did occur despite such limitations of taste and judgment happened on the peripheries of art and not at its core-Chinese painting added significantly to European notions of decoration and design, and European painting added significantly to the art of illustration in China, all while leaving basic standards and assumptions intact. With the confluence of decorative and fine art in Europe during the nineteenth century and with the confluence of the popular crafts and the tradition of literati painting in China during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in China, the dichotomies that so marked earlier eras began to fail, to be replaced by increasing sensitivity on both sides to the possibilities of creating new visions, new expressions, new techniques, through the amalgamation and fusion of differences.

2024

Guan's (2024) main body is the thought of "aesthetic conceptions" in ancient China. This idea has been defined for a long time. It is one of the most important categories that constitutes Chinese classical aesthetics and it is also one of the raw materials that exerts the greatest value in the modern intersection of Chinese and Western aesthetics.

Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 2020

This paper attempts to delineate the relation of early Chinese views on vision and visuality to nascent reflections on painting arising in the Early Medieval period. Ever since that time, pictorial creativity has been associated with Buddhist ideas of spiritual perfection. Likewise, the Early Medieval concern for the visualization of spiritual journeys to exceptional humans (and superhumans) through imaginary landscapes seems to be of Buddhist origin. The first part of this paper gives a short sketch of the intellectual landscape in which theorizing on painting since the 5th century CE first arose. The main body of the study, consisting of parts two through five, close readings of pre-Buddhist texts on vision and imagination. From these exploratory investigations it emerges that the very terms that are key in early reflections on painting such as ‘spirit’ (shen 神), ‘perspicacity’ (ming 明), but also ‘imagination’ (xiang 想) and ‘symbol’ (xiang 象) are closely related to a specific conc...

Pauline Bachmann et al. (eds.): Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics: Narratives, Concepts and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries, Berliner Schriften zur Kunst, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017, 265–290. , 2017

Ars Orientalis, 2018

Many Chinese painters working in the medium of ink painting, or guohua, in the 1930s saw their medium at a historical turning point. They perceived a necessity to strengthen ink painting conceptually and formally in order for it to persist in a globalizing modern world. This essay studies how modern ink painters positioned their works through both an analysis of their texts and a study of reproductions in publications related to the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui). Many painters worked as editors for book companies, journals, or pictorials, and they were highly conscious of the possibilities and limitations of particular reproduction techniques. An analysis of the editorial arrangements, choices of printing techniques, and textual framings of the reproduced works sheds light on the social structures of the Chinese art world of the 1920s and 30s, and on the role that the editors envisioned for themselves, their associations, and modern ink painting in general. According to its mission statement, the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui 中國畫會), founded in 1932 by several prominent guohua 國畫 (" national painting ") artists working in Shanghai, had three main goals: " (1) to develop the age-old art of our nation; (2) to publicize it abroad and raise our international artistic stature; (3) with a spirit of mutual assistance on the part of the artists, to plan for a [financially] secure system. " 1 One of the activities by which the association aimed to fulfill the first two of these goals was the publication of a journal, Guohua yuekan 國畫月刊, or National Painting Monthly, and of a catalogue of works by its members across the country, titled Zhongguo xiandai minghua huikan 中國現代名畫彙刊 (Collection of Famous Modern Chinese Paintings). 2 The texts as well as the illustrations in the journal and the catalogue reflected the programmatic impulse that led to the foundation of the Chinese Painting Association. Because it became the largest art organization in Republican China and the only one officially registered with the government, its key publications are of crucial importance for a differentiated understanding of how artists working in the medium of guohua defined their practice visually and theoretically. Moreover, these artists positioned their artistic practice with regard to other media or other historical moments, most notably in relation to " Western " (i.e., European) painting and its global transformations. This aspect is

2024

The aesthetic conception in traditional Chinese painting is an essential concept in ancient Chinese aesthetic thought and serves as the supreme aesthetic criterion pursued in classic painting creation. Artists use unique works to showcase the aesthetic conception in traditional Chinese painting, thereby highlighting the distinctive features of Chinese painting. This article conducts a genealogical analysis of artistic conception in traditional Chinese painting. It combines it with specific cultural symbols for interpretation to unveil the philosophical ideas and cultural concepts concentrated in traditional Chinese painting.

2020

Art Bulletin, 2022