Animal figures inspirations in contemporary Chinese art (original) (raw)
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Choice Reviews Online, 2012
Circle of Animals features twelve enormous bronze animal heads, each depicting a segment of the Chinese zodiac. Ai Weiwei's first piece of public art, it is an extraordinary accomplishment in its own right. But as this book explains, the origins and motivation behind the piece are as compelling as the work itself. Ai Weiwei based the sculpture on a similar work that was built for an imperial retreat in the eighteenth century. When the palace was looted by European soldiers, the sculpture was stolen-only seven of the twelve heads survive. By reimagining the work Ai Weiwei confronts uncomfortable truths within Chinese and Western history. This book compares Ai Weiwei's work to the original sculpture; features interviews with Ai Weiwei conducted at various periods during the sculpture's development; offers a historical overview of the events surrounding the original sculpture's looting; and follows the trail of the original heads as they are sold and resold amidst political furore. The book tells the riveting story behind a highly acclaimed piece of modern art, while providing an introduction to one of our generation's most important artists.
Hua Yan’s Commentaries on the Qing Empire in Paintings of Animals and Insects
Hua Yan 华喦 (1682-1756), a professionalized literati artist from Fujian, participated in the development, and expanded the spectrum, of the Yangzhou school of independent artists working in highly individualized styles and exhibiting diverse approaches to constructing visual rhetoric. The studies on Hua Yan have been focused on his evolving styles, and his relationship to earlier painters. Art historians have been inclined to attribute his artistic expressions as direct manifestations of his personal experience. Although individual experience significantly affected the artist’s perception of his immediate environment, and had an impact on his creative process, analysis restricting itself to this factor inevitably isolates his artworks from the larger discourse of social history. In reality, the socio-political climate had an enormous impact on the formation of the Yangzhou intellectual community, to which Hua Yan loosely belonged—the rising economic status of the merchant class and the declining reputation of governmental officials made it possible for the Yangzhou artists to create urban, individualized and commercialized artworks. The reason why previous scholarship avoided discussing Hua Yan’s work in relation to his socio-political context has to do with the difficulty of pinning down his paintings of seemingly innocent birds and idyllic inscriptions to concrete commentaries that criticize specific political events and social phenomenon. Nevertheless, examination on how his pictures worked as part of the history of the mid-eighteenth century helps us to decipher more precisely the meaning of his works, and facilitates understanding how the artist utilized the visual tropes to influence others’ thinking and behavior. Among his large number of paintings showing diverse styles and depicting various subject matters, I will study a cluster of paintings of animals and insects from the late 1740s, which appears to be “quite humorous” because of the humanized, cartoon-like expressions these animals and insects carry. Going beyond the superficial impression, I argue that these paintings could have recommended themselves to the interest of social debate by the depiction of humorous scene permeated by a satirical undertone. In fact, Hua Yan depicted animals in an unconventional anthropomorphic manner, playing off the parallel between the beasts and the animalistic side of the human society. Although the artist tried to conceal his discontentment from the general public, viewers who shared his education, would read these social commentaries with little difficulty. In effect, each of these paintings records a fragment of Hua Yan’s conceptual universe, and together they constitute a coherent narrative of his preoccupations during the late 1740s. The essay attempts to provide explanations for these paintings by analyzing Hua Yan’s selection of visual and literal references, and identifying possible events and phenomenon that affected or even predetermined viewers’ responses to these works. The essay starts with tracing the development of Hua Yan’s conceptual craft from the point when he discovered the theme of intense gaze in his bird-and-flower paintings. Such a strategy prevails in a great number of his works, and had a ubiquitous impact on painters lived in and after his time. I argue that the gaze helps Hua Yan to activate humanized expressions in the depiction of animals and insects. Following the brief discussion of Hua Yan’s approach to the thematization of looking in paintings dated to the early 1740s, the essay examines a series of paintings, analyzing them in relation to Qing Empire’s foreign relations and domestic policies.
Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 2020
This essay examines a number of statements on painting and visual perception by Chinese literati artists of the late Mingearly Qing periods. It argues that the approaches to pictorial representation and creativity entailed in these statements reveal a considerable impact of Buddhist theories of consciousness. In the theories analyzed, pictorial representation is discussed in terms of ways and modes of how the mind relates to the world. As will be demonstrated, the function of expressing cognitive organization in representation is given more prominence than the function of rendering an external reality. The view of pictorial representation as being essentially what the mind produces in its relation to the world provides a basis for the assumption of a fundamental affinity between the creation of an image and the process how phenomenal reality unfolds by virtue of cognitive operations. This assumption seems to broadly underpin the painting theories discussed. And it is this assumption that provides a clue how and why the literati artists adopt Buddhist theories of cognition to the understanding of art. In the last section of the essay, we turn to the sources which cast still another perspective on artistic practice, namely a practice which captures a single moment of pure direct perception.
Asian Studies, 2017
The paper deals with the relation of Daoist (mainly Zhuangzi’s) ecological ideas on inter- penetration and “communication-without-communication” of things to Chinese landscape and bamboo painting, more specifically, to the ideas about the harmonization of the painter with the things (scene) painted in the process of producing the artwork. Its purpose is to explore a more nuanced, philosophical and non-Eurocentric interpretation of this peculiar kind of harmony of things or their “unity in particularity”, as inspired by Zhuangzi’s ideas and seemingly embodied in Chinese literati painting. For this purpose, the paper introduces few conceptual models, formulated by Western sinologists, as the particular philosophical schemes for the understanding of Zhuangzi’s epistemology and cosmology, and then discusses their applicability with regard to the relationships between the painter and the world, as presented in early and classical Chinese painting aesthetics and theory.