Chinese Histories of Art

Catalog description

Recent calls to decolonize the history of art have encouraged scholars to pursue interpretations premised on the emic perspectives of premodern and indigenous communities. Among historians of Chinese art, such perspectives often derived from the literature on Chinese painting written prior to sustained contact between China and Europe—namely the major treaties on painting compiled between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Through close readings of two treatises— Zhang Yanyuan’s Lidai minghua ji (847), and its sequel, Guo Ruoxu’s Tuhua jianwen zhi (ca. 1068–1077)—this course examines the viability of such texts as sources for reconstructing emic epistemologies of art. We consider the extent to which reconstructions, as key figures in the field have recently argued, can be justifiably termed “decolonial.” We will wrestle with the sympathies and contradictions between the respective drives to theorize, decolonize, and de-imperialize the field of Chinese Art.