The Invention of Body Representation in Modern China: Case Study of Liu Haisu and the “Model Event”

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes the “Model Event” that shook the Chinese art world around the 1920s in order to investigate the issue of aesthetic modernity by comparing two different épistémès of Chinese and Western culture. Totally different from Western culture, in China's premodern mainstreams culture, the naked human body was hardly represented except for pornographic purposes. In the West, the nude human body has been a frequent subject of representation in painting because it corresponds to ideas about form and perfection, making these ideals or the “essence” of a person or idea visible and concrete. Possibilities for bodily representation depend on the respective épistémès to which cultures, such as Chinese and Western cultures, are linked. In early twentieth-century China, Liu Haisu's use of naked models incurred great censure from many members of the gentry because he intended to represent the human body objectively in the name of art. But Liu Haisu and his allies won the battle at last by illuminating and convincing their opponents of the self-explanatory superiority of Western culture. Worth notice is that during this debate, Liu and his friends tactically replaced the difference between the épistémès of Chinese and Western cultures, one emphasizing practical wisdom, and the other truth, with that between premodernity and modernity, which undermined their victory because the crucial Western épistémè did not play its due role to reform Chinese culture. This further implies that representation of the body will again become impossible if the values of modernity are called into question.