Made in China: Looking at art, grasping art history - five online talks by Professor Oliver Moore

This talk sets the scene: what makes China? Western views have lurched from positive to negative. The 18th century bequeathed idyllic accounts of a peaceful land ruled by enlightened sages, infinitely preferable, say, to Bourbon despotism. The following century of aggressive western expansion regularly produced views of China’s hopeless prospects. In this darker period some Chinese painters agonised over whether it was worth training with traditional media; their rivals denounced them as selling out. The outside world fixated on the breathtaking Great Wall as the iconic monument of China, yet the Grand Canal, the world’s longest man-made waterway, is in many ways a more significant a creation within China, one which enabled centuries of artistic exchange from North to South.

Art history as a both a critical discipline and as a way of looking at the past has two roots in China. Like many academic subjects, it has over time adopted premises, agendas and entire disciplines (e.g. archaeology) from Europe, Japan, USA and the Soviet Union. We can imagine how this occurred through the visits of Chinese artists, diplomats and students to destinations abroad, and through the arrival of foreign teachers, soldiers and missionaries in China. Another root of Art History is firmly located in the indigenous skills and methods of Chinese biography, technical inquiry and antiquarianism, a passion for digging things up (and cataloguing them) with origins much deeper than similar pursuits in Europe. How art history has developed to the status it holds in China today is a fascinating story of harmonisation and divergence.

Until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, displays of art in China were discreet affairs held by members of the elite for small gatherings of invited guests. Gardens often formed elegant and theatrical backdrops to the viewing of art collections. Curators today would be outraged at the free handling of delicate scrolls outdoors and scandalised by a guest inscribing his or her opinions on the surface of an antique painting. At the time, painters frequently captured these gatherings in images that can be viewed as a genre in their own right.
The early 20th century saw the rise of the public museum. Its globalised norms of gallery visiting fostered a story of changing audience habits and categorisation. Even so, how the Beijing Palace and other museums work today also shows that the shift to new ways of viewing art have not been absolute.

To believe a painting is by a particular artist, western viewers do not expect a prolix statement written by the maker on the surface of the image. Yet such ‘witnessing’ is central to Chinese visual aesthetics. An artist’s inscription, detailing the authorship, date and circumstances of a work’s creation is integral to it. An image may also bear inscriptions by others; collectors, borrowers and earlier viewers, crowding the surface with diverse claims of authentication. Authenticity is also a theme in the rich Chinese tradition of copying. Technical excellence in accurate reproduction of a work is so esteemed, that copies sometimes supersede primary works in their evaluation. The tactile technique of rubbing stone engravings and bronze decoration with paper and ink is a foremost example of such elevation, where artistic authenticity is transposed from one medium to another. We will examine one famous example from the 1990s, a Chinese avant-garde project of rubbing sections of the Great Wall onto paper.

Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney’s artistic influences from Japan and China have attracted frequent comment, but borrowing eastwards much less so. This talk explores reasons for this lag, drawing from some of the factors examined throughout the series. More optimistically, it describes how scholarly and popular attitudes are changing. Touching on painting, printing, photography, cinema and architecture, we will consider new efforts to look beyond old assumptions. The ways in which Chinese artists have adapted to ever more globalised visual and material idioms, while responding to local needs, further reflects how the blending of tradition with innovation is an enduring strength of Chinese civilisation.