Chinese Traditional Painting In Modern Context

This dissertation is conducted according to the basic research methods of fine arts morphology, textual research and documentary analysis, with the careful use of open hypothesis, in order to ensure that historical data and theoretical arguments supplement each other and constitute an organic unity. The subject of this dissertation is traditional Chinese painting’s encounter with the modern culture since the early 20 th century, with a purpose to make an comprehensive theoretical investigation on the cultural propositions, aesthetic concepts and painting language evolution occurring in such historical encounter, and to explore the predicaments of traditional Chinese painting in its identity confirmation and commitment direction in the “modern” situation.This study sets traditional Chinese painting as the object and target of modernism(modernity) and puts it in an open and hypothetical modern context: its development in the last hundred years is divided into three major stages: “encountering modernism”, “participating in modernism” and “producing modernism”; and such progressive scrutiny is conducted with a horizontal reference to the development of western modernism. Accordingly, the years around May the 4th New Culture Movement fall into the stage of “encountering modernism”; the years from the middle and late 1920 s to the late 1930 s are included into the stage of “participating in modernity”; the years from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to the early Cultural Revolution are included into the phase of “reform of traditional Chinese painting ”, which is also the prelude of “producing modernism”; and the phase of “The 85’ New Tide Art” and the phase of “the New Painting” in the new century are subsumed into the stage of “ producing modernism ”. This dissertation conducts a comprehensive analysis of these historical periods from the perspective of cultural characters, cultural concepts and art forms, aiming at identifying the trajectory of traditional Chinese painting’s moving toward modernism.In the modern cultural discourse, tradition is not so much the loyalty to history as the criticism and challenge of history; the two forces contradict and supplement each other, and jointly foster a strong national cultural bond and long-lasting vitality in art creation. When the history of traditional Chinese painting’s encounter with the modern culture in the past century is retraced, it can be concluded that the questions, challenges and even deviations have worked together in advancing the modern development of traditional Chinese painting. In addition, such challenges have given more prominence to the position of traditional Chinese painting in the last century. In the contemporary international cultural context, traditional Chinese painting is open to different cultures, and begins to understand its locality by taking into consideration its relationship with the world. At the present time, in a fast changing media network, the survival of traditional Chinese painting is increasingly decided by its adaptability in the modern cultural communication system and its ability to borrow, assimilate and convert the new art media, which would unavoidably result in the significant changes in it cultural connotation and conceptual denotation. Under such cultural circumstance, the New Painting, which is proposed in this dissertation, is an open cultural hypothesis about traditional Chinese painting’s possible derivations and transformations in the future: the New Painting is getting rid of its old bondage of rigidity and self-closure, and is revealing its outward and active modern characteristics. In such process, center shift and edge crossover are the basic approaches to produce and construct the modernity of traditional Chinese painting.