Painting and Visual Culture in China
- Course Code:
- 15PARC043
- Unit value:
- 1.0
- Year of study:
- Year 1 or Year 2
This course explores the multi-polarity of the field of Chinese art history today by investigating the historical methodologies, canons, practices and other forces by which it has been shaped. The course is primarily focussed on the brush arts of painting and calligraphy, encompassing a reading of brush traces as special acts and sites of human endeavor, but considers other pictorial art forms, notably the reproductive media of ink-rubbing and printing, and contemporary media. Necessarily, this course builds on a preliminary survey of ‘art’ in China from medieval to contemporary times, before focussing more closely on themes and issues of the early modern/later imperial period and into the present. The artistic themes of modernity include, but are not limited to imperialism, colonialism and nationalism, the advance of technologies relevant to visual culture, and the roles of city life, travel and mass communication. There is emphasis throughout on current events and initiatives in the field, including the ways art is collected, displayed, accessed and communicated through exhibitions, conferences and websites.
Objectives and learning outcomes of the course
Course Objectives:
• An understanding of the methods, practice and key issues in painting and visual culture in relation to painting in China.
• A context for critical appraisal by the students of various methodologies for the study of Chinese visual culture.
• A range of skills relevant to an understanding of painting, calligraphy.
• Preparation for advanced or independent study of a specific research topic.
Learning outcomes:
- they have gained advanced knowledge and understanding of the themes, issues and debates of Chinese art relating to: social contexts; processes of representation; and ways in which meaning is constituted, through in depth examples.
- they are able to compare and evaluate different approaches to understanding art traditions in China.
- they are able to assess critically the materials and themes explored in the course through the use of particular examples from China.
- they have gained knowledge and understanding of the range of skills used in art history and to have developed independent study and research and presentation skills.
- they are able to provide a basis for further study at a PG research level for advanced students.
Workload
One two-hour seminar each week for 22 weeks.
Scope and syllabus
The course primarily complements other MA offerings in East Asian archaeology, art history and museum practice.
Sessions:
- Approaching Chinese painting – a practical guide
- Mapping the field: issues in periodisation, genres, techology and practices
- Collections, canons, objects and the mounting of exhibitions
- The didactic mode in medieval painting; the first ‘artists’
- Museum viewing (Admonitions scroll in the British Museum)
- A unified court style under the Tang empire
- Literati aesthetics in the Tang-Song transition
- The art of dynastic regeneration (Song-Jin period)
- Understanding the Yuan as a ‘renaissance’?
- Museum visit
- The agenda of Ming court art
- The city of Suzhou in the mid-late Ming period
- The ‘strange’ and ironic in late Ming art
- Refugee artists under the early Qing
- Museum visit
- High Qing court art – absolutism in the context of early globalisation
- The city of Yangzhou and the growth of professionalism
- Shanghai painting and modernity
- Art in the Republican period
- The enfants terribles: artists and the avant-garde since 1980
- Presentations; revision; preparation for slide test
- Presentations; revision; slide test
Method of assessment
1 essay of 3,000 words = 25% (due last Wednesday of term 1)1 essay of 3,000 words = 25% (due last Wednesday of term 2)
1 essay of 3,000 words = 25% (due first Wednesday of term 3)
Class presentation and discussion = 10%
Unseen written test of art images (slide test) = 15%
Required reading
- Clunas, Craig. Elegant Debts : The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470-1559. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.
- Clunas, Craig. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
- Fong, Wen C, and James CY Watt. Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.
- Harrist, Robert E, Jr, and Wen C Fong. The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B Elliott Collection. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999.
- Ledderose, Lothar. Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton, 1999.
- McCausland, Shane (ed.) Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll. London: British Museum Press in conjunction with the Percival David Foundation, 2003.
- Thorp, Robert & Richard Vinograd. Chinese Art and Culture. New York, 2001.
- Yang Xin, et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven & London: Yale University Press/Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1997.
