Tradition And Reformation:Zhengzhenduo's Research On The History Of Traditional Chinese Woodblock Prints

Literati painting has always been the major focus of the investigation of traditional Chinese painting history.Either ar-historical monographs like Painters of Successive Dynasties or paintings theories like Dong Qichang's“Southern and Northern Lineages”are both illustrations and theoretical assessments of the paintings by court painters and literati.Whereas woodblock painting was never appreciated as an high-brow painting format.According to evidential investigation,the earliest extant woodblock print is the cover of Diamond Sutra carved by Wang Jieshi,dated 868.In contrast,though the history of European print-making is as long as 1200 year,the earliest surviving work from this tradition is dated to around 1400;the history of Japanese print-making,on the other hand,only became preeminent until the Edo period.The history of Chinese print-making is the longest.As a practical medium,print was used to illustrate religious writings,geographical accounts,novels and dramas.In special occasions,prints were pasted on doors and windows to pray for the wellbeing of a familial lineage or the favorable weather of the following year.The earliest extant print made for aesthetic appreciation was the Four Beauties by artists from the Ji family of Pingyang,commissioned during the reign of Jin Emperor Zhang Zong?1190-1208?,which appears to be imitating the format of hanging scroll.The most exuberant period of paint-making in Chinese history was the Wangli era of the Ming dynasty.By that time,with the emergence of the bud capitalist economy,and the development of the production of commodities,common people's desire for knowledge increased to the most extant.Pint-making became one of the major enterprises in Jian'an,Jinling,Wu Lin and She County,almost all kinds of books published there was accompanied with illustrations.After the funding of the Qing dynasty,the ideological control became more instance,in the meantime evidential investigation became the mainstream in the academic field.Thereby,woodblock print-making gradually declined with the disappearance of publishing business.By the second half of the 19^thcentury,with the introduction of lithograph to China,woodcut technique lost it advantage,and wookblock print was pushed to the edge of elimination,became part of our cultural heritage waiting to be preserved.Only until the 1930s did the art of woodblock print attracted more attention from the artists of the neo-woodcut renaissance.Zheng Zhenduo is the first scholar who has systematically classified,investigated and published monographies on woodblock print.From his admiration for Xiuxiang during his teenage to his conscious collection and investigation of book illustration,until his attempt to write a historical work about the history of Chinese woodblock print,Zheng put a huge amount of time and energy.Of course,this endeavor was in line with the contemporaneous ideologies about“assorting the past”,“creating literature for everyday life”,the left-wing literary campaign,concepts of“unified observation,summarization and evolution”,the collection of ancient books and periodicals and his communication with such book collectors like Lu Xun,Wang Xiaoci and Ma Yuqing.This thesis tries to start from the historical background,the ideological motivations and the spirit of academic research of Zheng's study of the history of Chinese woodblock print.Focused on his monographs on the history of Chinese woodblock print,I explore their attributes,significance and value by untangling the process of his study of Chinese woodblock print.