Fabian Heubel (2008). “How to Compare a Nude and a Rock? Some Trans-cultural Reflections on Energetic Aesthetics”, in The Proceedings from the 2007 Asian Art Biennial Forum, Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, pp. 140-150. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Philosophy East and West 59/2, pp. 240-243, April 2009
The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics by François Jullien is a small book that is well translated and full of ideas. 1 Jullien argues-and illustratesthat the nude was not possible in China. The nude, he shows, is not just a naked body, but an idealization, an expression of essence and form, sensible, intellectual, and divine. It freezes a moment in time and evokes the eternal. The nude would not have been possible without the Greek metaphysics of logos, eidos, and hulē , form and matter. Viewed against this background-and assuming that it matters for the nude-it is no wonder that the nude cannot be found in China, where one simply does not have this metaphysical background, but instead is focused on transformation, process, resonance, movement, continuity, the indirect, the allusive, and the indicial. In Chinese painting it is not formal resemblance and fixation that counts, but grasping the energy of qi, the internal coherence of li, and the transmission of spirit, chuan shen. This also leads to an explanation of why in Chinese painting landscapes have usually been favored over human figures in general, not to speak of the nude. These, then, are the basic ideas of the book.
Nature, Body, Transformation: Practical Chinese Philosophy in Creative Acts
This paper was published in “Jing Shen - the Act of Painting in Contemporary China” by Silvana Editoriale at the occasion of the homonymous exhibition at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan, July 2015. It examines the act of painting in its (strange) genealogy in China, as informed by self-practice.
Introduction: Chinese Aesthetics in the Contemporary World
Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2020
Looking back at the reason why Western scholars in modern times demanded the birth of philosophical aesthetics, we can assess what role "Chinese aesthetics" should play in today's academic environment. As well known, by the time Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the new term "aesthetics" in his master's thesis (1735), the field of aesthetics, which had not been given a name yet, was already flourishing in European academia and life. 1 Reflecting the growing interest in artistic experience and sense perception of people at that time, Baumgarten endorsed human experience as an important source of knowledge. Ironically, however, he put this field in a secondary position by defining it as "the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition" and "the art of the analogue of reason." 2 Aesthetics arrived much later in China as part of the modern educational curriculum, but soon received an enthusiastic welcome. Contrary to the European intellectuals, who were reluctant to regard aesthetics as an essential discipline, Chinese intellectuals assumed aesthetics as a core academic framework for explaining Chinese intellectual history. Therefore, the so-called "culture fever (wenhua re 文化熱)" of the late 1980s China, which was a large-scale debate about the criticism and succession of Chinese tradition, can also be referred to "aesthetics fever (meixue re 美學熱)" by nature. On the one hand, this fever was auspicious in that the Chinese have noticed a modern discipline that takes emotion and experience seriously. On the other hand, the huge writings resulting from the fever were mainly consumed in China and hardly caused any chemistry with Western aesthetics. Three decades later, I believe that we are now able to soberly reevaluate the topics that have been discussed in the field of Chinese aesthetics thus far. The holistic nature of Chinese aesthetics, which
The Invention of Body Representation in Modern China: Case Study of Liu Haisu and the "Model Event"
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
This article analyzes the “Model Event” that shook the Chinese art world around the 1920s in order to investigate the issue of aesthetic modernity by comparing two different épistémès of Chinese and Western culture. Totally different from Western culture, in China’s premodern mainstreams culture, the naked human body was hardly represented except for pornographic purposes. In the West, the nude human body has been a frequent subject of representation in painting because it corresponds to ideas about form and perfection, making these ideals or the “essence” of a person or idea visible and concrete. Possibilities for bodily representation depend on the respective épistémès to which cultures, such as Chinese and Western cultures, are linked. In early twentieth-century China, Liu Haisu’s use of naked models incurred great censure from many members of the gentry because he intended to represent the human body objectively in the name of art. But Liu Haisu and his allies won the battle at last by illuminating and convincing their opponents of the self-explanatory superiority of Western culture. Worth notice is that during this debate, Liu and his friends tactically replaced the difference between the épistémès of Chinese and Western cultures, one emphasizing practical wisdom, and the other truth, with that between premodernity and modernity, which undermined their victory because the crucial Western épistémè did not play its due role to reform Chinese culture. This further implies that representation of the body will again become impossible if the values of modernity are called into question.
This dissertation traces the transnational praxes of contemporary Chinese artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, and Huang Yong Ping. Initially trained in painting, these three artists reinvent Chinese metaphysics in France, Japan, and the United States through site-specific practice to transgress cultural and linguistic limitations brought on by identity politics characteristic of 1990s art. Rooted in a mid-1980s fascination with metaphysics, the three artists materialized ephemeral, idiosyncratic cosmologies in their respective sites of “spiritual exile” to contest reified identity. While contemporary Chinese art has been well studied in surveys that create taxonomies to map out artist groups and movements, I suggest that closer analyses of these individual cosmologies, projected through particular biographies and iconographies, are necessary to nuance studies of Chinese contemporary artists, who are too often portrayed as politically driven to play the Chinese card and inflate their success in the global art market. Departing from narratives of activism highlighted in previous scholarship, I take up issues of metaphysics historians of Chinese art tend to underplay for fear of reinforcing orientalist attitudes that plagued the initial reception of Chinese contemporary art. I argue that placing their cosmologies in focused historiographies of contemporary art and science reveals the artistic agency exercised by Chinese artists to achieve parity as individuals on a global scale. Cai, Chen, and Huang aimed to rewrite the teleology of canonical art histories through praxes that embrace energetic languages and non-linear time. My study sheds light on a cultural trend that attempted to scientize paranormal phenomena as a means to reconcile art, science, and spirituality toward the end of the Cold War. Doing so remedies the imprecise connections previous scholars drew between Chinese contemporary art and pre-modern Chinese art, histories, and metaphysics that falsely privilege a sinological entry into this body of work. Instead, I suggest that these cosmologies are constructs of contemporaneity, practical strategies devised to spark creativity in contemporary situations rather than wholesale, uncritical deployments of ancient metaphysics. Part I of the dissertation, Earth, introduces a synchronic analysis of the intellectual milieu of the mid-1980s in China and Europe. It situates Chinese contemporary art in an intersection of primitivist “root-seeking” cultural movements and a popular somatic therapeutic qigong fever marking 1980s China to trace the sources of metaphysics informing these artistic systems. This revival of metaphysics in China coincides with utopian efforts in Europe to mitigate the failures of capitalism through artistic and spiritual practice that culminated in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris, setting stage for a global reception of metaphysical themes deployed by Chinese contemporary artists. Part II, Water, traces Huang Yong Ping’s deployment of anti-metaphysical, anti-utopian stances through paradoxical implementations of Chinese metaphysics in France in order to construct a formal language of time and teleology as intervention. Part III, Fire, examines the way technology and art in Japan shaped Cai Guo-Qiang’s position as an “artist of the East” who shifts the discourse of art from the global to the cosmological through volatile, time-based sculptures. Part IV, Air, unravels the microcosms and macrocosms of the human body and social metabolism Chen Zhen generated from the therapeutic efficacies of Eastern and Western medicine. Although each part of the dissertation forms its own autonomous cosmology, together, they cohere into a larger narrative of how contemporary expatriate artists negotiate their praxes in a globalized art system to dispel rather than reinforce orientalist readings under the aegis of the Beuysian “artist-as-shaman” thesis.
Chinese Bodies in Philosophy, Aesthetics, Gender and Politics: Methodologies and Practices
Chinese contemporary art series, 2020
In the fields of gender studies, body theories and aesthetics, comparative studies that involve both Western feminist and Chinese philosophical discourses deserve greater attention. My work addresses the meaningful revelations that have come through these comparative studies, which in return, should provide methodological innovations and advances in Chinese philosophy. This chapter was originally published as "Chinese Bodies in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics: Methodologies and Practices." In Tan, Sor-Hoon (ed.) The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 257-270. The original article has been revised, re-edited and published with the permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Chinese Aesthetics in the Contemporary World
Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2020
Looking back at the reason why Western scholars in modern times demanded the birth of philosophical aesthetics, we can assess what role "Chinese aesthetics" should play in today's academic environment. As well known, by the time Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the new term "aesthetics" in his master's thesis (1735), the field of aesthetics, which had not been given a name yet, was already flourishing in European academia and life. 1 Reflecting the growing interest in artistic experience and sense perception of people at that time, Baumgarten endorsed human experience as an important source of knowledge. Ironically, however, he put this field in a secondary position by defining it as "the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition" and "the art of the analogue of reason." 2 Aesthetics arrived much later in China as part of the modern educational curriculum, but soon received an enthusiastic welcome. Contrary to the European intellectuals, who were reluctant to regard aesthetics as an essential discipline, Chinese intellectuals assumed aesthetics as a core academic framework for explaining Chinese intellectual history. Therefore, the so-called "culture fever (wenhua re 文化熱)" of the late 1980s China, which was a large-scale debate about the criticism and succession of Chinese tradition, can also be referred to "aesthetics fever (meixue re 美學熱)" by nature. On the one hand, this fever was auspicious in that the Chinese have noticed a modern discipline that takes emotion and experience seriously. On the other hand, the huge writings resulting from the fever were mainly consumed in China and hardly caused any chemistry with Western aesthetics. Three decades later, I believe that we are now able to soberly reevaluate the topics that have been discussed in the field of Chinese aesthetics thus far. The holistic nature of Chinese aesthetics, which