Landscape, Canon, and Intermediality in Chinese Painting of the 1930s and 1940s

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese landscape painting underwent fundamental transformations. Artists working in the medium of ink painting not only had to position themselves vis-à-vis the arts of the European tradition, they also had to redefine their own tradition. The formal means, the theoretical foundations, and the history of ink painting (which was now called national painting, or guohua) had to be mapped out. The project investigates the complex processes of cultural translation that accompanied the formation of what was to be understood as national painting in the twentieth century, and in particular of landscape painting as the most significant genre in Chinese painting. These processes of translation include not only the reception of European painting, and of Japanese views on Chinese painting, but also the transmission of pre-modern Chinese painting methods and histories. They entailed a reconfiguration of what was considered the artistic canon, and extended discussions on standards of canonization. These epistemological shifts were accompanied by changing visual paradigms. Many artists traveled to famous mountains and spectacular sites to sketch in situ, and numerous landscape paintings from this period reflect these practices. Furthermore, painters employed various pictorial media to reflect their experiences, including photography and pencil drawing, and they used travel-size sets of traditional painting tools. The project examines how these innovations were reconciled with the mediality of ink painting and how the painters themselves discussed these issues. The focus of the investigation lies on a group of artists who were active in Shanghai in the 1930s and collaborated closely with one another. Their pictorial works dating from the 1930s and 1940s will be interpreted with and against their writings in order to pinpoint the tensions, consistencies, and inconsistencies between the different pictorial and textual formats. In terms of method, the project employs the concept of intermediality to describe the shifts and ruptures that occur during formal or semantic transfers from one pictorial medium to another, as well as the interrelations between images and texts. The concept of intermediality is combined with cultural translation, since it is in moments of intermedial transposition that movements and negotiations of meaning become visible. The project will thus explain how twentieth-century traditionalist painting was invented by engaging with media that were seen as genuinely modern.