Contemporary Chinese Art

A Critical History

Paul Gladston

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780233086
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Art General

Since the confirmation of Deng Xiaoping's policy of Opening and Reform in 1978, the People's Republic of China has undergone a liberalization of culture that has led to the production of numerous forms of avant-garde, experimental, and museum-based art. With a fast-growing international market and a thriving artistic community, contemporary Chinese art is riding a wave of prosperity, though issues of censorship still abound. Shedding light on the current art scene, Paul Gladston's Contemporary Chinese Art puts China's recent artistic output into the context of the wider cultural, economic, and political conditions that surround it.Providing a critical mapping of ideas and practices that have shaped the development of Chinese art, Gladston shows how these combine to bind it to the structure of power and state both within and outside of China. Focusing principally on art produced by artists from mainland China—including painting, film, video, photography, and performance—he also discusses art created in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and diasporic communities. Illustrated with 150 images, Contemporary Chinese Art unravels the complexities of politics, artistic practice, and culture in play in China's art scene.

CHINESE ART IN CONTEXT

1

Cultural Interaction and Exchange from Antiquity to the Mid-twentieth Century

Cultural interaction and exchange between China and the West has no simple, clearly identifiable point of origin. There is material evidence of indirect cultural exchange between China and Europe via the Silk Road stretching back to classical antiquity.¹ This evidence includes jade and silks of Chinese origin discovered by archaeological investigations into sites of human activity in Europe and western Asia during the time of the Roman Empire. The first recorded instances of direct cultural exchange between China and the West took place during the thirteenth century as a result of trading expeditions to the East mounted by Europeans, which first established continuous trade routes linking China to Europe. In the account of his travels in China, the Venetian trader Marco Polo comments briefly on architecture and the decorative arts in China, but makes no mention of scholarly Chinese ink and brush painting.² European art is known to have been introduced to the imperial court in China in the fourteenth century through copies made at the request of the visiting Italian priest Jean de Monte Corvino.³

From the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, cultural interaction and exchange between China and Europe began to intensify as a result of maritime trade links established by the Portuguese, who reached Macau in 1516 and who subsequently leased a trading site there in 1557. These trade links were further developed by the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company who set up trading sites in Canton (modern day Guangdong) and Taiwan in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of the consequences of the development of maritime trade links with China was the increasingly large-scale importation into Europe of Chinese ceramics; the first major sales of which took place in Amsterdam in 1600 and 1603.⁴ This importation impacted not only on European ceramics (which soon began to imitate those brought over from China) but also on European painting. Chinese ceramics were first depicted in Dutch still-life paintings in 1630 and were included among the inventory of personal possessions registered at Rembrandt van Rijn’s bankruptcy in 1656.

As a consequence of the increasingly large-scale importation of Chinese artefacts (as well as the publication of writings by travellers in China), European interest in and admiration for all things Chinese grew significantly throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This in turn resulted in the development of the style known (since the late nineteenth century) as ‘Chinoiserie’, which saw the reworking of Chinese stylistic and technical influences as part of the production of European ceramics, decorative painting, architecture, fashion, interiors and gardens. One of the most important aspects of European Chinoiserie – much of which involves highly generalized interpretations of Chinese visual and textual sources as well as culturally non-specific combinations of differing technical and stylistic elements – is the production from the early eighteenth century onwards, by factories such as that developed at Meissen, of hard paste porcelain in imitation of Chinese models.⁵ Eighteenth-century European interest in Chinese artefacts was largely confined to the decorative arts. It did not extend to scholarly forms of Chinese ink-and-brush painting which, as Joachim von Sandrart’s treatise Teutsche Akademie of 1645 makes clear, were widely regarded as inferior to European painting because of their lack of perspectival realism.⁶

Chinese influences on Europe during the eighteenth century also include thinking and practices relating to the law, literature, politics and philosophy, favourable accounts of which were circulated in Europe via maritime trade links with China from as early as the seventeenth century.⁷ A major example of the impact of Chinese thinking on that of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be found in the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He developed philosophical concepts, including ‘simple substance’ and ‘pre-established harmony’, that were almost certainly informed by sinophile accounts of Confucian thought written by Portuguese missionaries working in China.⁸ In addition, Leibniz contended (incorrectly) that hexagrams found in the classical Chinese text the I Ching, which correspond ostensibly to the binary numbers from 0 to 111,111, were evidence of a sophisticated mathematical culture in China preceding that of Europe. The I Ching, one of Chinese culture’s oldest historical texts, contains a system of geomantic divination based on concepts of harmonious interaction between opposites and the persistence of change. These are still used in modern sinophone cultural contexts as part of fortune telling and the surveying of sites for building work.

Leibniz also argued that the non-phonetic (pasigraphic or ideographic) system of writing used to communicate between differing cultural groups within China – which, he assumed (following theories developed by the Dutch orientalist Jacob Gohl) transcended indigenous differences in cultural outlook – provided the model for a universal philosophical language, or characteristica universalis (universal character). In Leibniz’s view this would be capable of communicating abstract mathematical, scientific and metaphysical concepts as part of a universal logical calculation, or calculus ratiocinator, regardless of national-cultural divisions.⁹ Leibniz’s use of Chinese writing as an example to support the idea of a characteristica universalis was a response to continuing theological concerns within Europe regarding the communication of information across cultural boundaries. It was feared that this would, through the effects of cultural-linguistic difference, distort the truth of the word of God. It may also have supported a personal desire on Leibniz’s part to develop a pluralistic philosophy combining differing schools of thought and cultural ways of thinking.

European interest in Chinese philosophical thought is also in evidence in relation to Sir William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772). In the 1740s Chambers made three voyages to China, where he conducted studies of architecture and design. Although his vision of oriental gardening is largely a fanciful one, he nevertheless propounded the not entirely misplaced idea that classical Chinese gardens are a manifestation of the Daoist-Confucian philosophical concerns of China’s scholar-gentry.¹⁰ Chambers envisioned the Chinese garden as a site of flowing aesthetic experience in marked contrast to the Neoclassical style of his contemporary, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who constructed gardens comprising separate, picturesque and carefully premeditated vistas.

European modes of pictorial representation became known in southern China as a result of the founding of Jesuit missions there in the sixteenth century.¹¹ Jesuits first established a presence at Macau in 1557, where they characteristically set about training locals in the techniques of European drawing and painting in support of the dissemination of Catholic theology. However, it was not until the late sixteenth century that the teaching of European drawing and painting techniques gained wider influence in China. In 1592, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci became established in Peking as a teacher and adviser to the imperial court of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). During his time at the Chinese imperial court, Ricci was able to build the foundations of a durable Jesuit missionary presence that would, throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, serve as a focus for the exchange of thinking and practices related to the visual arts between Europe and China. Ricci not only introduced Western oil painting techniques, perspective geometry and chiaroscuro into the artistic workshops of the imperial court, but also illustrated treatises and engravings on European painting, sculpture and architecture.¹² Chinese representations of Catholic Christian imagery during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to exclude more troubling scenes such as the Crucifixion, however, because of established restrictions on depictions of violence in Chinese painting.¹³

Among those who built on Ricci’s pioneering work was the lay Jesuit brother Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese style name Lang Shining), who worked as an artist in the Chinese imperial court for over five decades from 1715, including the early part of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–99).¹⁴ Castiglione’s influence was not, however, solely limited to the teaching of Western drawing and painting techniques. During his time at the Chinese imperial court, Castiglione served as an architect, designing pavilions for the Chinese emperor in a distinctly Sinified Rococo style, and facilitated the gift of furniture, clocks, paintings and tapestries sent by the French king to the Chinese imperial court. He also served as a journeyman painter, producing decorative works that combine Western and Chinese pictorial elements, alongside others that pastiche various Chinese painting styles.¹⁵

The impact of European art on the work of Chinese artists outside the imperial court during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was relatively slight. While scholarly Chinese painters admired the spatial accuracy and consistency of perspective geometry and the illusionistic sense of depth brought about by the use of chiaroscuro, they nevertheless viewed European drawing and painting as an artisanal rather than as a truly artistic practice – the precise reversal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European views of Chinese scholarly painting.¹⁶ In some parts of China, however, the impact of European drawing and painting techniques resulted in the development of culturally mixed forms of picture-making that brought together aspects of the technical objectivity of Western illusionism with the more subjective renderings of pattern and form typical of traditional Chinese painting and drawing. Canton was one of the centres for this development, and from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century it also became a focus for visiting and resident European artists.¹⁷

During the second half of the nineteenth century, cultural interaction and exchange between China and the West intensified still further across a range of artistic and intellectual disciplines. In Europe and North America this included increasingly orientalized representations of Asia as a place of decadent and exotic otherness; as well as culturally hybrid presentations and representations of Asian artefacts.¹⁸ Examples of these orientalizing representations and hybrid presentations/representations include James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s carefully staged depictions of East Asian artefacts within European settings in paintings such as Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–4) and Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864) in addition to the artist’s heavily mediated appropriation of Japanese motifs as part of the redecoration of the Peacock Room (1876–7), constructed to house an extensive private collection of Chinese porcelain.

The combining of East Asian and Western styles was an important aspect of the development of the aesthetic movement in Europe and North America – of which Whistler was an early exponent – throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. The aesthetic movement – which embraced the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ (l’art pour l’art) expounded by, among others, Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, and Théophile Gautier – regarded ‘true’ art as an autotelic medium, necessarily separated from any moral, didactic or utilitarian function. For artists and writers aligned with the aesthetic movement, such as Whistler and Walter Pater, this refusal of functionality was not, however, an outright rejection of art’s critical and political significance. Rather, it was an attempt to secure the position of art as a focus for free cultural expression beyond any moral, conceptual and practical constraints, and therefore as the marker of a wider conception of social freedom and the self-actuating individual.¹⁹ Oriental influence on European art during the latter half of the nineteenth century was also felt in relation to the work of French Symbolists, including the group known as the Nabis, who drew on Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the metaphorical resonance of poetic imagery as part of their practice.²⁰

During the late nineteenth century there were also appropriations of Chinese cultural thought and practice as part of the development of Western philosophy. Crucially significant in this regard is Friedrich Nietzsche’s stated interest in Buddhism as a religion fostering self-reflexivity and in the classic Daoist text the Daodejing as a focus for intellectual relativism,²¹ both of which resonate with the pervasively sceptical tenor of Nietzsche’s own non-rationalist thinking in books such as Thus Spoke Zharathustra (1883–85) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

From the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, direct Western influence on China diminished significantly as the result of increasingly isolationist Chinese attitudes adopted in the face of encroaching Western colonialism. This was mirrored in the West by a growing understanding of the inherently corrupt and despotic nature of Chinese imperial rule. In 1854, a previously isolationist Japan was forced to open up to the outside world by the so-called ‘black’ iron-clad ships of the U.S. Navy. The forced opening of Japan, combined with China’s isolationism, led to the emergence of ‘Japonisme’, a late nineteenth-century genre of Western art and craft production involving the appropriation of Japanese styles and techniques. This effectively displaced Chinoiserie as the principal expression of Oriental influence on Western fine and decorative arts.

In spite of China’s isolationism, Chinese cultural thought and practice continued to have a significant impact on the West. In the United States there was, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the later twentieth, as part of the teaching of art an abiding interest in, and appreciation of, the formal techniques of traditional Chinese calligraphy and ink-and-brush painting, as well as the aesthetic traditions associated with those practices. Among those who incorporated Chinese artistic techniques and thinking into the teaching of art in the U.S. is the painter, printmaker and influential educationalist Arthur Wesley Dow.²² Dow was dissatisfied with the training he had received as an art student in Paris and, in response, began to make a comparative study of differing artistic traditions, which included research in...