Chinese Painting and Literary Contexts
- Course Code:
- 15PARH041
- Status:
- Course Not Running This year
- Unit value:
- 0.5
This is an advanced seminar for the MAs on Chinese painting and practice in reading Chinese ancient writings on art theories. Students will conduct research on independent painting and on related arguments. Focusing on both objects and the textual sources for Chinese art theories, this seminar will introduce the painter’s practice and the ideology behind the ancient writings. Topics will include method of reading classical Chinese, ways of appreciating objects, interpretation of documents and esthetical trends, location of sources, and other fundamental tools necessary for conducting a further research in Chinese art. Museum visits and handling sessions will be organised. Some knowledge of Chinese language and culture would be required.
Objectives and learning outcomes of the course
- To develop an understanding of the methods, practice and key issues in art history and visual culture in relation to traditional painting and the literary sources in China.
- To have a supportive context for critical appraisals by the students of the various approaches and issues developed in art history and visual culture.
- To develop a range of skills relevant to an understanding of painting, calligraphy and to general research and study skills through participation in the course.
- To have an appreciation of the variety of cultural values and explore their implications for equality issues such as class, space, material culture, representation and beyond representation.
Scope and syllabus
Core thematic Issue:
- Sinology or Art History?
- Didactic Teaching and Politics in Painting (Early figure painting)
- Filial Piety and Confucian Ideology (Han painting)
- Immortality and Art Theories (Six Dynasties painting)
- Connoisseurship and Authenticity (Tang and Five Dynasties Painting)
- Chan Buddhism and Ink Play (Northern Song)
- Three Perfections (Southern Song)
- Elite Writing and Lost Identity (Yuan)
- Drama and Popular Culture (Yuan –Ming painting)
- Biography and Self-Portraiture (Ming and Qing)
- Sexual Novels and Urban Painting (19th -20th century painting)
Method of assessment
3 essays of 3,000 words each = 100%Required reading
In English:
- John Pope, ‘Sinology or Art History: Notes on Method in the Study of Chinese Art’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 10 (1947), pp. 388-417 [Electronic resource]
Jerome Silbergeld, ‘Chinese Painting Studies in the West: A State of the Field Article’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46.4 (1987), pp. 849-97 [Electronic resource] - Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
- Michael Sullivan,The Birth of Landscape Painting in China (Berkeley, CA.: University of Berkeley Press, 1962), pp. 1~24 (前言), pp. 25~73 (漢代).
- Munakata Kiyohiko, Sacred Mountain in Chinese Art (Champaign, Illinois: Kranner Art Museum, University of Illinois, 1991), pp. 1~34: “Sacred Mountains in Early Chinese Art.”; pp. 65~110: “Early Symbolic Images of the Sacred Mountains.”
- Esther Jacobson,“Mountains and Nomads: A Reconsideration of the Origins of Chinese Landscape Reprensentation,” BMFEA v.57 (1985), pp. 133~80.
- Wu Hung,“Fantastic Mountains and the Beginning of Chinese Landscape Representation,” 1991 Conference paper.
- Pao-chen Chen,“The Goddess of the Lo River: A Study of Early Chinese Narrative Handscrolls”, Doctoral Dissertation, 1987. Princeton University (UMI. 1988), pp. 140~167.
- Pao-chen Chen,“Time and Space in Chinese Narrative Paintings of Han and the Six Dynasties Period,” in C.C. Huang and Eric Eürcher eds., Time and Space in Chinese Culture (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 239~285.
- Wu Hung,“Three Famous Stone Monuments From Loyang : ‘Binary’ Imagery in Early Sixth Century Chinese Pictorial Art,”Orientation, vol. 25, (May / 1994), no. 5, pp. 51~60.
- Wen C. Fong et.al., Images of the Mind (Princeton, N.J.: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984).
- Wen C. Fong,Beyond Representation (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 71~117: “Of Nature and Art: Monumental Landscape.”
- Lawrence Sickman,“Chinese Painting Before 1100,” in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting (Cleveland, Ohio: the Cleveland Museum of Art & Indiana University Press, 1980 ), pp. xiii~xxiv. & Catalogue entries.
- Eugene Wang, ‘Watching the Steps’, Peripatetic Vision in Medieval China’, in Robert S. Nelson ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance; Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 116-142
- Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, in Simon During ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, Second Edition (London and New York, 1999), pp. 126-133
- Jerome Silbergeld, ‘The Referee Must Have a Rule Book: Modern Rules for an Ancient Art’, in Judith G. Smith and Wen C. Fong eds., Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting (New York, 1999), pp. 149-70
- Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author ?’, in Donald Preziosi ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1998), pp. 299-314
- Susan Bush,“Tsung Ping’s Essay on Painting Landscape and the Landscape Buddhism,” in Susan Bush and Christian Murck eds., Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University press, 1983), pp.132~164.
- Lothar Ledderose,“The Early Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art,” in Bush & Murck eds., Ibid., pp.165~183.
- Ellen Johnston Laing,“Neo-Taoism and the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grave’ in Chinese Painting,” Artibus Asiae (1974), pp.5~54.
- Stephen J. Goldberg, ‘Figures of Identity: Topoi and the Gendered Subject in Chinese Art’, in Roger T. Ames with Thomas P. Kasulis and Wimal Dissanayake, Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (Albany, 1998), pp. 33-58
- Francesca Bray, ‘Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1997), Chapter 6, ‘Women’s Work and Women’s Place’, pp. 237-72
- Zhang Hongxing, ‘Re-Reading Inscriptions in Chinese Scroll Painting: The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Centuries’, Art History, 28.5 (2005), pp. 607-25 [Electronic resource]
- John Hay, ‘Construction and Insertion of the Self in Song and Yuan Painting’, in Roger T. Ames with Thomas P. Kasulis and Wimal Dissanayake, Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (Albany, 1998), pp. 59-88
- John Hay, ‘Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting’, in John Hay ed., Boundaries in China (London, 1994), pp. 124-70
- Jonathan Hay, ‘Culture, ethnicity and empire in the work of two eighteenth century “Eccentric” artists’, Res, 35 (Spring, 1999), pp. 210-33
- Jonathan Hay, ‘Painting and the Built Environment in Late Nineteenth-century Shanghai’, in Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith eds., Chinese Art Modern Expressions (New York, 2001), pp. 60-01
- Kathlyn Liscomb, ‘Social Status and Art Collecting; The Collections of Shen Zhou and Wang Zhen’, Art Bulletin, 78.1 (1996), pp. 111-35 [Electronic resource]
- Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London, 1997), ‘1: Introduction’ and ‘2: Positions of the Pictorial’, pp. 9-76
- Craig Clunas, ‘’Not One Hair Different…’ Wen Zhengming on Imaging the Dead in Ming Funerary Portraiture’, in Rupert Shepherd and Robert Maniura eds., Presence and Images (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 31-46
- Craig Clunas, 'Artist and Subject in Ming Dynasty China', Proceedings of the British Academy, 105 (2000): 43-72
- Shih Shou-ch’ien, ‘Calligraphy as gift: Wen Cheng-ming’s (1470-1559) Calligraphy and the Formation of Soochow Literati Culture’, in Cary Y. Liu, Dora C. Y. Ching and Judith G. Smith eds., Character and Context in Chinese Calligraphy (Princeton, 2001), pp. 254-84
- Qianshen Bai, ‘Calligraphy for Negotiating Everyday Life: The Case of Fu Shan (1607-1684)’, Asia Major, n.s. 12 (1999), pp. 67-125
- Li Zehou, The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics (Hong Kong/Oxford/New York, 1994), Chapter 10, ‘Main Trends in Art and Literature of the Ming and Qing’
- E. H. Gombrich ‘In Search of Cultural History’, in Eric Fernie ed., Art History and Its Methods: a Critical Anthology (London, 1995), pp. 223-36 [N.B. Full text available as E H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969), and in E. H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (Oxford, 1979), pp. 24-59]
- Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998), Chapter 5 ‘Art as Text’ and ‘Epilogue; New Contexts, New Texts’, pp. 290-336
- Katharine P. Burnett, ‘A Discourse of Originality in Late Ming Painting’, Art History, 23.4 (2002), pp. 522-58 [Electronic resource]
- Raymond Williams, Keywords; a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1983)
- Angela Zito, ‘Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries’, in Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago, 1994), pp. 103-30
- Charles Lachman, ‘Blindness and Oversight: Some Comments on a Double Portrait of Qianlong, and the New Sinology’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 116.4 (1996), pp. 736-44
- Stanley K. Abe, ‘No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky’, in Rey Chow ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory (Durham and London, 2000), pp. 227-50
