Scientizing vision in China: Photography, outdoor sketching, and the reinvention of landscape perception, 1912--1949

In China's Republican era (1912-1937), there arose a number of novel artistic approaches to the depiction of landscape. While some artists responded to the nation's new global orientation by adopting Western styles, others found within their own history the basis for a redefinition of landscape. These traditional style painters developed an idiosyncratic understanding of perception, acknowledging the optical rules underlying Western perspectival pictures while not entirely accepting them as universally applicable. This dissertation examines how, by anchoring their landscape painting in outdoor sketching, these artists altered the ways painters depicted nature. My aim is to restore to this group their role as agents of change, and to provide an alternative account of modern Chinese art history and culture. The new priority that traditional style painting granted "perception" is found to resonate with a contemporary emphasis on observation that the New Culture Movement promoted as the basis for modern scientific knowledge.;Chapter One traces the development of Chinese designations for photography in the late Qing and early Republican period, and argues that, via conceptualizations of this technology, the credibility of visual representation came to be founded on the notion of a physical encounter between the image-maker and the object of representation. Chapter Two contextualizes the engagement of traditional style painters with outdoor sketching (xiesheng) as part of the prioritization of "perception" in New Culture Movement. Chapter Three discusses the traditional style painters simultaneous appropriation and rejection of formerly alien ideas such as framing and linear perspective, which resulted in a reshaping of optical knowledge as well as the Chinese painting tradition. The final chapter demonstrates the transformation of texture stroke ( cun), a key component of Chinese landscape painting, from self-referential marks of style to a specialized knowledge necessary for an accurate perception of nature. These activities enabled traditional style painters not only to claim epistemological expertise but also to define a new role for themselves in society.