What is Modern and Contemporary Chinese Painting? (Art History Literature Review)
- Yiwen Xu
- May 25, 2019
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 26, 2025
A capstone essay written for my favorite class, Methods of Art History, during my sophomore year of college. The "complexity and hybridity of Chinese modernity" still fascinates me.
More food for thoughts as of today:
-How can we construct the "modern" for Chinese art vis-a-vis Euro-American Modernism without marking "modern" Chinese art as belated and derivative (aka self-orientalized) ?
-In an increasingly acclaimed "decentralized" world, does the hegemony of Euro-American art institutions and art markets still exist?
-When we define the East and the West and the binary in-between, are we really succeeding to trod the path for a wider education of the East or actually reinforcing the gap for the West to understand distinct cultures or traditions?
-In terms of contemporary Chinese art, to what extent can we continue the conversations of the tradition without making it sound "archaic" and "repetitive"?
-Is Art History essentially a discipline built with innate biases (following Kantian aesthetics etc.)? How or can we really reconstruct it into a more cohesive model considerate of its broadened scope, including the recently heated "Global South"?
...
As muddy as they are, these questions might hardly ever receive clear cut answers.
But I do think it is still worth asking, especially in a time when everything seems so polarized.
On a separate note: Beware of the so-called "democracy" vs "authoritarian regime". For some reason, I recall in Plato's Republic, the worst form of democracy could be tyranny...

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