Appropriating Antiquity for Modern Chinese Painting

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Since the Opium War I (1839-42), with a great concern about the direction that modern Chinese painting should take, many prolific artists sought inspiration from jinshixue (epigraphy) as a way to revitalise Chinese painting and the literati tradition when the country was in turmoil. By examining versatile trends within paintings in modern China, this book project asks to what extent historical relics have been used to represent the ethnic identity for modern Chinese art? Did the antiquarian movements ultimately serve as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China on purpose? In searching for the public meaning of inventively reinforced private collecting activity, this book draws on modes of artistic creation to speak of an apposite use of antiquities through their imaginative links between ancient civilization and modern lives. It also addresses artistic exchanges between China, Japan and the West and how modernity was translated and appropriated at the turn of the twentieth century. This book aims to define the phenomenon and forming of the new antiquarian painting that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries of China. My study will provide a better understanding of the way the new literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced the imperial patronage in decline after Qianlong’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to Shanghai’s International Settlements from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspective on history and the history of objects.