Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-186
Author(s):  
Minna Törmä
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

The endgame, and the Qing eclipse1

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
James Elkins
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The West ◽  
Unusual Structure ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Painting ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

Presented as an archival text for the Journal of Contemporary Painting, James Elkins’ ‘The endgame, and the Qing eclipse’ is an abridged version of the the final chapter of a book-length study, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Elkins demonstrates the unusual structure of the history of Chinese painting, whereby the Ming decline and Qing eclipse have no real parallels in the West. Yet, as a counter-hypothesis, he argues that Late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism. In itself, this represents a nuanced reading of the temporalities of modern and postmodern periods (which challenges comparative approaches and indeed the fundamental structures of western art history). Crucially, the account provides ways of thinking about how Chinese landscape painting is viewed through the lens of art history, a discipline that Elkins claims is partly, but finally and decisively, western.

Whose hobbyhorse now?: A revised Foreword for Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History1

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Jennifer Purtle
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

This article constitutes a new Foreword for James Elkins’s Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. Reflecting on this work a decade after it was first published, this Foreword seeks to position Elkins’s text with respect to current debates about appropriation, decolonization, race, whiteness, privilege and a problematic, colonialist, EuroAmerican notion of ‘the global’. Now the questions I asked ten years ago in response to Elkins’s text are more pressing than ever: how can the history of the art of non-western cultures be figured in their own terms, and how might such a project operate without transposing the object of inquiry entirely into western epistemological frameworks and strategies of academic inquiry? This article seeks to consider how Elkins’s text both de- and re-centres the discipline of art history so that the western tradition alone no longer dominates its master narrative and serves as sole source of its conceptual lexicon. Moreover, this article posits that from Elkins’s text we might contemplate a future in which the western tradition might become marginal within the discipline of art history, its established terms, discourses and practices incommensurate with newly centred analogues drawn from non-western cultures.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Human Interventions ◽  
The University ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

The chapters gathered in this volume are the product of a conversation at the Center for Global Ancient Art in the University of Chicago. They address a theme that has had exceptional trans-cultural traction for well over half a century in art history as a discipline—with long scholarly (“secondary”) and historic (“primary”) literatures as well as deeply established visual genres in both European and Chinese landscape painting. Likewise, landscape is a key issue in all areas of archaeology—from questions about the placement of monuments to the understanding of human interventions in natural topography through such methods as field archaeology....

The Peircean order of signification and its encoding system in Chinese landscape painting

Semiotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (221) ◽  
pp. 199-218
Author(s):  
Lian Duan
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Vertical Dimension ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Flowing Water ◽  
Horizontal Dimension ◽  
Formal Level ◽  
Visual Order ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting ◽  
The Way

AbstractApplying Peirce’s semiotics to the study of art history, this essay explores the order of signification in the Peircean theory and the visual order in Chinese landscape painting. Since the purpose of Chinese landscape painting is not simply to represent the beauty of scenery but to encode and manifest the philosophy of Tao, then, the author argues that the establishment of the encoding mechanism in Chinese landscape painting signifies the origination, development, and establishment of this genre in Chinese art history. In this essay, the Peircean order of signification is described as a T-shaped structure, consisting of a horizontal dimension of signs (icon, index, and symbol) while and a vertical dimension of the signification process (representamen, interpretant, and object). Correspondingly, the visual order in Chinese landscape painting is also described as a T-shaped structure as well: the horizontal dimension at the formal level consists of three signs (mountain path, flowing water, and floating air, the three constitute a compound sign), while the vertical dimension at the ideological level consists of three concepts (the way in nature, the metaphysical Way of nature, and the Tao). The significance of this order is found in re-interpreting the formation of landscape painting in Chinese art history.

Interpretation of Li Gonglin Ecological View of Landscape Painting Based on Chinese Soil Smoke Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 3344-3351
Author(s):  
Xinquan Ma ◽  
Xiaofang Yao ◽  
Kwon Hwan
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Northern Song Dynasty ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
The Aesthetic

Objectives: Cigarettes are not goods that have existed in China since ancient times, but consumer goods that were introduced into China by western countries and accepted and developed by Chinese people in modern times. The application of Chinese soil smoke culture in Li gonglin’s landscape painting is studied in this paper. Methods: From the perspective of art history, landscape painters in the Northern Song Dynasty, as a prosperous period of Chinese art history landscape painting, thought deeply about painting from the artistic form of nature, and integrated their own view of environment into their creation, forming many landscape aesthetic paradigms. Results: This paper focuses on the interactive dialogue between the literati and the environment with the involvement of how space planning and governance are allocated. It is aimed at the global perspective in the Anthropocene and a local position in the Northern Song Dynasty. Localization is not only the exploration of the ecological approaches of China and the West in space, but also the integration of the past and the present, observing its ecological image from the perception and practice of traditional environmental aesthetics to the harmonious coexistence of modern cities and nature. Conclusion: Local tobacco is not a traditional local consumer product. Under the public’s praise, it has gradually formed a unique thing in China - cigarette culture. People in the society are not only the observers of the environment, but also the participants of the environment. Through the aesthetic configuration of the classification of environmental belonging space and the transformation of the image and vision into such realistic or ideal landscapes as “Longmian Villa”, it goes towards ecological holism. Therefore, from the perspective of environmental aesthetics research, Li Gonglin’s paintings have research value.

Shitao and the Enlightening Experience of Painting

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-112
Author(s):  
David Chai ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Classical Approach ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Old Masters ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

Having reached its zenith in the Song dynasty, Chinese landscape painting in the dynasties that followed became highly formulaic as artists simply copied the old masters to perfect their skills. This orthodox approach was not accepted by everyone however; some painters criticized it, arguing it was better to learn the ideas behind the techniques of the old masters than to blindly copy them. Shitao was one such critic and his Manual on Painting exemplifies his desire to disassociate himself from the classical approach to painting. This paper will investigate the three major themes of Shitao’s text—the holistic brushstroke, brush and ink, and the method of no-method—in order to show how they shaped his view of landscape painting and how said paintings subsequently embodied them. Unlike the near-scientific approach taken by his contemporaries and predecessors, Shitao paints to capture the unifying simplicity of nature, an onto-aesthetic experience that is profoundly enlightening.

scholarly journals The grotesque as it appears in Western art history and in Ian Marley’s creative creatures

Literator ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
R. Swanepoel
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Western History ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Grotesque

This article presents a theoretical exploration and reading of the notion of the grotesque in Western history of art to serve as background to the reading of the original creatures in the “Tracking creative creatures” project.1 These creatures were drawn by Marley, based on imaginary creatures narrated by his five year-old son, Joshua. The focus in this article is on the occurrence of the grotesque in paintings and drawings. Three techniques associated with the grotesque are identified: the presence of imagined fusion figures or composite creatures, the violation and exaggeration of standing categories or concepts, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the horrible. The use of these techniques is illustrated in selected artworks and Marley’s creatures are then read from the angle of these strategies.

A Call to Otherness: Inscribing Digital Vernaculars into the Art Institution

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-115
Author(s):  
Gabriel Menotti
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Art History ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Digital Arts ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

In the mid-2010s, a number of renowned museums and galleries across the world held retrospective exhibitions positioning digital arts within western art history. While inscribing some techno-aesthetic forms and behaviours into the contemporary arts institution, these exhibitions nevertheless cemented the exclusion of others. By examining the role and shortcomings of curatorial practices in this process, this article seeks to frame curating as an art of inclusion able to carve institutional and epistemic space for otherness. In doing so, I argue for the relevance of devices for noticing, defined as a range of tactics that enable the apprehension of digital vernaculars – everyday, ‘lower’ expressions of digital media culture – within institutional sites and discourses. Through these tactics, curators may provoke under-represented cultural actors, forms and behaviours into recognition, reverse the violence of institutional occlusion, and fertilize art histories.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document