Chinese Art History Research Articles

Analyzing Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains from a Pictorial Perspective

From the perspective of iconography, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, a classic work of traditional Chinese landscape painting. This work has been highly respected since the Tang Dynasty and is regarded as one of the important representatives in the history of Chinese painting. Its rich connotation and artistic value have always been the focus of scholars' research. The thesis aims to deeply interpret the historical and cultural connotations and artistic symbolism embedded in Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains through the iconographic method, from the levels of ex-iconography, iconography and iconographic analysis, to reveal its important position and value in Chinese traditional art. Adopting the iconographic method, the analysis is divided into three main levels. First, through pre-imaginative analysis, we focus on the physical facts and visual representations on the surface of the work; second, we use imaginative analysis to explore the information of the specific objects in the work and explore their connections and themes; and finally, we carry out imaginative analysis to reveal the deeper historical and cultural connotations and symbolic meanings of the work. Through in-depth iconographic analysis, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains demonstrates the core values of traditional Chinese landscape painting, presenting a fusion of natural landscapes and humanistic emotions. It is not only a work of art, but also a vivid expression of traditional Chinese culture and aesthetics. The findings of this dissertation will contribute to a better understanding of the profound historical and cultural connotations embedded in Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, as well as its important position and value in the history of Chinese art.

Artistic interventions: Art, community, and media in China and beyond

Artistic interventions in communities have become increasingly prevalent in the context of quality-led urbanization and rural revitalization in China over the past decade. These art practices reflect a narrative of resistance toward the institutionalization, professionalization, and marketization of contemporary art through direct interventions in social reality. Community is the most common site from which public aesthetic action and social activism emerge to increase public awareness and promote community engagement. With the rise of new media technologies, multi-media have gradually been combined in socially engaged art projects, which has blurred the boundaries between concrete materials and virtual media as well as that between physical places and the online community. This article first outlines a literature review on the changing avant-garde spirit in both global and Chinese art history to better understand the concepts of artistic interventions. Second, as a major intervention in this field, the focus on community reflects the interflow of the theoretical search for communicative ethics and community reconstruction movements worldwide. Third, the role of the media in socially engaged art and its future implications are discussed. In the conclusion section, a variety of specific contexts in China and beyond and the various intervention aims and methods of five selected articles are introduced.

The Historical Expression and Aesthetic Trends of Lotus in Literati Painting during the Ming and Qing Dynasties

The lotus, celebrated for its cultural symbolism and aesthetic allure, has been a recurring muse for flower and bird painters in Chinese art history. This article explores lotus paintings during the Ming and Qing dynasties, pivotal periods of ideological liberation and societal complexities. Traditional lotus artworks across dynasties have woven a rich tapestry in Chinese painting. Focusing on the lotus, the article intricately combines symbolic meanings and historical contexts, unraveling the flower's intrinsic artistic essence. It sheds light on the evolving aesthetic qualities within lotus depictions, using this exploration as a lens to understand cross-cultural exchanges and clashes between Chinese and Western influences. Emphasizing the inherent artistic will of lotus-themed painting, the research delves into the nuanced development and aesthetic significance of this genre. By elucidating the beauty expressed in the evolution of lotus images, the study provides valuable insights with contemporary relevance. It highlights the symbolic significance of the lotus in Ming and Qing China, incorporating concrete examples of renowned lotus paintings and artists. This comprehensive approach aims to enhance reader-friendly comprehension and explicitly articulates the contribution of these findings to current artistic practices. The research not only deepens our understanding of lotus culture but also serves as a reference for contemporary lotus-themed creative endeavors, connecting historical expressions with modern artistic sensibilities.

Short videos of Great Artists on the Douyin platform: Content Analysis and Value

Modern Chinese artists differ significantly in terms of their dissemination power. Some famous artists' short videos can receive hundreds of millions of likes, while others can only get sporadic likes. Xu Beihong, a Chinese modern painter and art educator, played a pivotal role in the history of contemporary Chinese art. The study aim is to explore the common value characteristics of great artists' short videos and fill the research gap by analysing the content, subject matter, and presentation forms related to the artist. Based on the theory of art economics, the study takes the top 100 liked short videos of Xu Beihong on the Douyin platform as the research object. First, the accounts that posted these short videos were analysed. Second, content analysis is used to categorise the content of these short videos. Finally, the value behind the data was assessed. Research has found that many short video accounts featuring artists include commercial windows, and many of these short video contents involve commercial aspects. Favourable evaluations of artists are often associated with higher commercial value of the artworks. The results indicate that audience participation and interaction with artworks offer considerable value on short video platforms. Artworks presented through these new channels provide aesthetic and experiential value. The commercialisation of these artworks represents the value derived from audience behaviour and engagement.

Between Shenguai and Science: The Visual Imagination of Technical Objects in Republican China

Abstract This article first examines the technical objects in three Chinese graphic novels (lianhuanhua) during the Republican era: Scientific Investiture of the Gods (Kexue fengshenbang), Scientific Demon King (Kexue mowang), and Black Bat (Hei bianfu). I regard the visual construction of technical objects in these works as a prehistory of Chinese-styled science fiction films between the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that early Chinese science fiction films share the same resources of traditional shenguai xiaoshuo with these graphic novels in Republican China. Scrutinizing the information about several early Chinese science fiction films, I locate the visual imagination of technical objects in the context of Chinese art history combined with local and imported conventions. I attempt to answer the following questions about the visual construction of technical objects in Republican-era artworks: how does the visual tradition of shenguai xiaoshuo connect to graphic novels and films in Republican China? To what degree could the hybrid modernity of shenguai combined with Hollywood films become a unique legacy for visualizing the technical objects in Chinese science fiction arts?

Bridging Cultural Perspectives: Developing a Sustainable Framework for the Comparative Aesthetic Evaluation of Eastern and Western Art

Sustainability in art is crucial for fostering intercultural understanding and preserving cultural heritage, which is essential to promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In previous research on Western and Chinese art, studies typically focused on individual artists and summarized their aesthetic values, often suffering from a lack of comparative analysis, a unidimensional sensory perspective, and a deficiency in comprehensive aesthetic evaluation standards. Consequently, this study selected representative watercolor works from five master artists in Western and Chinese art history as an example, constructing a comprehensive aesthetic evaluation system focusing on composition, color, themes, and techniques. Beginning with the influence of aesthetic and non-aesthetic perspectives by natural experimental method, the research employs correlation analysis and structural equation modeling to analyze the functional relationships between evaluative factors, perspective forces, and the overall aesthetic appeal of the paintings. Furthermore, the study reveals the distinctions between Eastern and Western paintings through multi-group analysis. Key findings include the following: Evaluation factors have varying effects on the influence of aesthetic and non-aesthetic perspectives. All factors, except conceptual expression (X12), brushwork expressiveness (X14), and watercolor language (X16), positively impact the overall aesthetic appeal. In mediation effects, X16 positively mediates between the influence of aesthetic perspectives and the overall aesthetic appeal. Factors such as warm–cool relationship (X8), X12, emotional atmosphere (X11), X14, and X16 positively or negatively affect the relationship between non-aesthetic perspectives and the overall aesthetic appeal. Multi-group analysis reveals significant differences in the evaluation factors and mediation effects that influence the overall aesthetic appeal. This study demonstrates the relationship between evaluation factors from different perspectives and aesthetics, providing valuable insights into evaluating Eastern and Western art. This evaluation system is applicable to academic research and practice in cultural heritage preservation and evaluation and art education, facilitating a deeper understanding of artistic values and promoting cross-cultural exchanges.

Bamboo, Landscape, Monumentality: Guan Daoscheng's View by the Bamboo and Streams Scroll

In this paper, I aim to reappraise the status of Guan Daoshen, one of the most well-known women artists across Chinese art history. Previous scholarship on her and her works has not only been scarce but also limited to her identity as a woman. I attempt to enrich the academic conversation on Guan through an examination of her painting View by the Bamboo and Stream Scroll (竹溪攬勝軸, 1309 b.c.). I argue that she contests the canonical modes to represent bamboo and the established conventions associated with the formats of scrolls. Specifically, the painting illustrates Guan’s innovative interpretation of shu hua tong yuan and obfuscation of the boundaries between hanging scrolls and handscrolls. In conclusion, the innovations presented by this painting broadened the repertoire of Yuan Dynasty literati paintings, which posits her as a significant figure within the genealogy of Chinese art history instead of a mere female counterpart of the male-dominated literati milieu.

The Inheritance and Innovation of The Knowledge System in Ancient Chinese Art History

The Inheritance and Innovation of The Knowledge System in Ancient Chinese Art History

Conceptualizing ‘Chinese surrealism’ through translation: a case study of the China independent fine arts association’s cultural identity and its translation of surrealism in 1930s

ABSTRACT This paper examines the questions of cultural identity in the surrealist related translation practices led by the China Independent Fine Arts Association (CIFAA) around 1935. It was the first time in the history of modern Chinese art that a group of artists translated ‘surrealism’ together and that an art association independently translated a modern Western art genre into China. Accordingly, the CIFAA’s work evidences that translation has played a vital role in the modernization of Chinese art. In this translation movement, the young artists-as-translators expressed their pioneering art concepts through translation, expressing their desire to be both ‘reformers’ of Chinese art and ‘mediators’ of Chinese and Western modern art. As reformers, the artists attempted to innovate Chinese art by introducing surrealism, while as mediators they sought to reconcile the contradiction between their desire for innovation and the mainstream left-wing Chinese expectations of realistic art by adding ‘realism’ to the Chinese semantic meaning of ‘surrealism’. This paper thus argues that the CIFAA’s translation of surrealism reflects a complex relationship between translation and the artists’ cultural identity, which ultimately conceptualizing an unprecedented ‘Chinese surrealism’ that is very different from the original Western surrealism.

A study of style migration generation of traditional Chinese portraits based on DualStyleGAN

Chinese figure painting is one of the most culturally and aesthetically valuable visual art forms in the history of Chinese art. Factors such as the high creation base and long creation cycle of traditional creative forms have largely restricted the innovative development of traditional Chinese portrait painting. In this paper, we use the DualStyleGAN deep learning framework to train the style migration of Chinese traditional portraits, and obtain the best data for generating models through qualitative analysis. Firstly, this paper collects and extracts images of Chinese portrait paintings to construct a dataset of Chinese traditional portrait paintings. Second, the self-constructed Chinese traditional portrait dataset is used as the target style dataset for style migration training. Finally, the optimal performance values are derived by comparing and analysing the effects of loss function and weights on the generation effect under this framework. The results show that DualStyleGAN can effectively migrate the styles of traditional Chinese portraits, and also adjust the degree of stylisation through the weighting values. This study combines Chinese traditional portrait elements with deep learning techniques to expand the application range of portrait style migration and generate Chinese traditional portrait style images with the best visual effect.

Art as Surgery: Hygiene Politics in Zhang Peili’s Glove Art, 1985–91

This article analyzes Chinese video artist Zhang Peili’s latex-glove-themed paintings and conceptual art from the 1980s. It argues that they are an important intervention into post-socialist China’s politicized discussions on art’s role in society. Building on Mel Chen’s discussion of animacy hierarchies as sociopolitical constructs, the article reads Zhang’s latex gloves as animate—transgressing boundaries of “aliveness” between humans and objects. It locates Zhang and his art collective, “Pond” Society, amid mid-1980s discourses on art’s emotional contagiousness, highlighting that the Chinese art establishment’s insistence on Realism and on the Maoist art methodology of “immersion into life” (shenru shenghuo) reflected anxieties about “healthy” art making that could promote national progress. Zhang’s series of X? glove paintings from 1986 onward represent strategic promotions of his medical conceptualization of art. Zhang was infected during the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A epidemic, and his subsequent glove-themed work called for an embrace of viral life. The figure of the glove was also central to Zhang’s first two video works, including Document on Hygiene No. 3, which signals a shift away from the insistence that art should reinforce the artist’s authority. Instead, Document uses the gloved hand to reflect on where, in a society obsessed with purity and in an art world obsessed with radicalism, we might fundamentally locate agency. This article shows that the history of contemporary Chinese art cannot be understood without considering artists’ responses to, and contributions in shaping, the deeply politicized notion of hygiene.

A Comparison of Folk Printmaking in China and the West

Chinese and Western popular printmaking art share common roots in primitive art. Deeply ingrained in the daily lives of the masses, Chinese and Western folk printmaking art, with its vibrant artistic energy, has become an integral part of people’s lives. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of popular printmaking in both regions, encompassing its history, representative works, and materials. The development of Chinese art can be broadly categorized into official art and folk art. Chinese popular printmaking art, as an art form directly derived from the people, possesses the characteristics of originality and authenticity. However, throughout Chinese art history, class status and artistic status were intertwined, leading to popular art being often as low-level and vulgar, rather than being recognized as art. In contrast, Western folk printmaking art did not harbor such hierarchical distinctions, instead directly acknowledging the originality and origins of art.

Spiritual Travel in Chinese Landscapes ---- Travelers Among Mountains and Streams and Murals from Yulin Caves

Chinese landscape painting is a non-negligible category in Chinese art history. Unfortunately, the intrinsic fragility of silk results in an obscure provenance of numerous existing silk landscape paintings from ancient Chinese art. Murals in Yulin Caves, located in the northwestern province of Gansu, China, emerge as an invaluable repository that complements these delicate silk paintings. This paper selects The Illustration of Samantabhadra from Caves 29 and 3 of Yulin Caves, both illustrations in caves were created after the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), to compare Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (Travelers) painted in the 10th to early 11th century by Fan Kuan (c. 950-1032). The visual comparison involves the panoramic view and the travel theme. The comparison based on the different mediums will discuss the elimination of physical constraints through painted landscapes with the contextualization of murals in situ. Natural light will also be considered as one external factor that influences the artwork viewing experiences of audiences. Comparisons involved in this paper aim to examine the underlying relationships between Song landscape paintings and the subsequent landscape murals, extend the conventional concept of travelers in Song landscape paintings by identifying mountains in murals, and explore how landscapes in silk paintings and murals encourage audiences to experience spiritual travel.

THE NOTIONS OF XIE-SHI («WRITING REALITY»), XIE-YI («WRITING IDEA») AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO REALISM

This article discusses terminological problems in the context of contemporary art practice and theory in China. Contemporary Chinese sculpture criticism has evolved in the context of certain influence of Western theories of art. Against the background of the integration of Western theories and terminology system of sculpture in the present stage, the Chinese sculpture community has perceived and internalized terms such as realism, depiction, figurative, abstract, and so on. This has greatly enriched the theory and practice of Chinese sculpture. At the same time, there are sculptural terms rooted in the Chinese national art practice, such as “xie-shi” and “xie-yi”. Unfortunately, limited by the cultural and linguistic contexts of China and the West, and by the fact that most Chinese sculptors still preserve the creative habit of relying on traditional experience and personal judgment, these terms lead to vagueness and speculation in defining the type of sculptural artwork. This situation can very easily lead to ambiguity and misinterpretation in interlingual translation, which becomes an obstacle to the understanding of Chinese sculptural art in other countries and limits the development of Chinese sculptural criticism. This is an important academic problem that requires long-term research. The author would like to express his gratitude to Prof. Maria Burganova for drawing his attention to this problem. According to the results of the author's search in the Chinese full-text database of periodicals, master's theses and doctoral dissertations CNKI, there are still no papers on Chinese art history specifically dealing with this relevant topic, which remains to be explored.

The occurrence and development of traditional Chinese painting of the regional Xin Jinling school and its prominent representatives

This article explores the emergence and development of the Xin Jinling school of traditional Chinese painting, focusing on its notable representatives. The main objective of this study is to investigate the school's formation, development, and the artistic features of works by renowned artists such as Fu Baoshi, Qian Songyan, Ya Ming, Wei Zixi, and Song Wenzhi. The scientific novelty of this research resides in determining the role and significance of the regional Xin Jinling school in Chinese art history and assessing its influence on contemporary Chinese art. Employing research methods such as historical and iconographic analysis, a historical and biographical approach, formal and stylistic analysis, and comparative analysis, the study delves into the school's main representatives. This article examines the geographical and chronological scope of the Xin Jinling school while elucidating the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of its formation. It also outlines the school's development trajectory, significantly impacted by China's political landscape during the twentieth century. Furthermore, the article scrutinizes the creative paths and artistic attributes of the school's primary representatives, analyzing the commonalities and distinct features of their works. These artists captured the spirit of their time and the everyday lives of the people, demonstrating a profound appreciation for nature. They devoted considerable attention to plein air activities, with each artist employing a unique creative approach. In conclusion, this article underscores the importance of the Xin Jinling school within the annals of Chinese art history. The findings of this research enhance our understanding of contemporary Chinese art by studying the Xin Jinling school of traditional painting as an integral component of China's artistic heritage.

The Image of the City in Chinese Cultural Tradition and Visual Practice: from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period

The article examines the problem of the artistic evolution of the image of the city in Chinese fine art. The focus of the authors’ attention is the study of the main stages of the development of the urban landscape genre. The purpose of the article is the analysis of the main stages of the development of the urban landscape genre in Chinese art, as well as the study of its structural formalization and the formation of the repertoire from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The subject of the research is Chinese art history discourse. The works of Chinese fine art of historical periods were used. The authors found out that the development of the urban landscape genre is connected with the general evolution of the Chinese cultural tradition and its visual forms. They are a constant factor influencing the formation of visual tradition. The article defines two stages of development of the urban landscape genre paradigm. The first continues from the time of the emergence of permanent pictorial forms (X century). Later, during the period of the Song dynasty (XII–XIII centuries) and the period of the Ming dynasty (XIV–XVII centuries), visual culture involved the urban landscape and urban everyday practices in the general artistic space of painting. In the context of the evolution of art during the Qing dynasty (XVII–XIX centuries), the urban landscape is represented for the first time with the help of genre features. According to the authors, these signs should be presented in the form of a combination of three components: 1) urban architectural landscape; 2) representations of typical models of urban life; 3) reproduction of typical city "cultural heroes". The authors prove that the evolution of the urban landscape genre at various stages of development is connected with the processes of self-awareness of Chinese art and the determination of the forms of its identity.

Study On Decorative Art of Greenbelt Pastel Lotus Embossed Wuzi Dengke Bottle In Qing Dynasty

China is a country with a long history of producing ceramics, leaving many exquisite and precious ceramic artworks. The ceramic involved in this paper is one of them. From the perspective of iconology, this study studies the Qing Dynasty porcelain “Greenbelt Pastel Lotus Embossed Wuzi Dengke Bottle” (GPLEWDB) through specific image analysis, including the form characteristics and symbolic meaning, historical background, and other contents of ceramic decoration. Then, according to the historical data, analyze the formation of the ceramic decorative art of social and cultural factors. This study attempts to change the traditional research methods of Chinese art history, in the form of case analysis, ceramic decorative elements of multi-level image analysis, to achieve a more in-depth study of ceramic cases. The study on the form and symbol of decorative patterns of GPLEWDB is helpful to link ceramic art research with ancient Chinese traditional culture, analyze the relationship between them, expand the perspective of traditional research, and promote the application of interdisciplinary research in ceramic research.

Chinese Oil Painting Nationalization from the Perspective of Traditional Culture

"Nationalization of oil painting" is an important phenomenon in the history of modern Chinese art. As a practice of Chinese oil painters actively establishing and integrating Chinese and Western artistic expression with cultural consciousness, it began at the beginning of the 20th century and ran through most of the history of Chinese oil painting in the 20th century. It promoted the development of Chinese oil painting itself, especially expanded the expression of realism, and created oil painting morphology with the characteristics of The Times and China. The nationalization of oil painting reflects the changing process of the integration of Chinese and Western cultures in a concrete form.

Pictorial principles in the system of formal connections: the limits of representation in modern Chinese painting

The purpose of the article is the study of formal connections in the pictorial system of modern Chinese painting. The authors focus on the analysis of the types of form representation. This makes the question of finding correspondence between artistic forms and reality, which is generalized with the help of figurative author's artistic language, urgent. As a subject of research, the mentioned problem is relevant for modern art studies. The authors show that the concept of "formal language" attracts considerable attention in contemporary Chinese art studies. This proves the importance of the study of formal connections for the analysis of both traditional art practices and for innovative artistic searches. Form as a component of the language of modern painting is represented using pictorial principles, which in the context of the conceptual categories of Chinese art history can be summarized within two interrelated groups, namely: expression and aestheticization of form. The first group unites structural questions, which are mostly related in one way or another to the interpretation of the technical features of oil painting. Within the limits of the second group, the issues of figurative (or, according to the terminology used in Chinese art history – spiritual) foundations of the representation of the image are considered. The authors concluded that in modern Chinese oil painting, form as a pictorial principle relies on the imitative nature of artistic generalization. Form as a pictorial principle is connected with the possibility for the artist to "appropriate" certain aspects of reality, to make their generalization his own point of view on the world. Within modern Chinese painting, the imitative form has a reflexive status, which is confirmed by a number of transformations in the oil technique. In Chinese painting, this principle has a direct reference to traditional artistic practice.

Research on Aesthetic Orientation of painting themes of Lingnan Temple Monks in Ming and Qing Dynasties

Monk painting is an important part of Chinese painting art and a unique cultural phenomenon in Chinese art history. Monks in successive dynasties have made great achievements in landscape painting, figures, flowers and animals. These eminent monks who have entered the Buddhist gate often have a deep understanding of traditional Chinese culture, a more thorough insight, understanding and interpretation of human and nature, and a more lofty perspective. Their works are obviously different from other kinds of paintings. The selection of painting themes is not random, but careful consideration based on life experience and emotional expression. They not only contain the artist's clever conception of objective objects, but also embody rich emotion and aesthetic consciousness. In the study of the aesthetic orientation of the painting themes of Lingnan monks in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the elements and means commonly used in the paintings of monks can be regarded as a form of the use of image symbols. This paper will try to use the research method of image semiotics to analyze its theme orientation from the perspective of painting specialty, trying to clarify the unique artistic features of the paintings of Lingnan monks in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and then reveal the uniqueness of the theme orientation of the paintings of Lingnan monks in the Ming and Qing dynasties.