Modernizing Sculpture: Print Culture and the New Discourse on Sculpture in China, circa 1880–1929

Abstract

Abstract Much of the current scholarship on the art of China in the 1910s and 1920s focuses on artworks, art academies, and art groups that were associated either with traditional Chinese painting (guohua 國畫) or with oil painting (youhua 油畫). By contrast, other mediums such as sculpture have rarely been discussed by scholars of modern Chinese art. Similar to guohua, the association of which with lofty literati values and imperial eras was hotly debated at the beginning of the Republic of China (1912–1949), the art of sculpture – a category that has long been considered as funerary art, craft, or decorative art – and its relevance to modern China was also discussed by artists and intellectuals at that time. In early twentieth-century China, sculpture eventually gained a new status within the fine arts. This article argues that one important factor that promoted the changing perception of sculpture in the public sphere was the blossoming print culture and its connections with photography and exhibitions in Republican China. Print materials such as newspapers, newspaper supplements, pictorial magazines, and exhibition catalogs/pamphlets promoted the process of modernizing sculpture.