chinese painting

Our chronological and thematic exploration of Chinese painting focuses primarily on works from the tenth through seventeenth centuries (Song-Qing dynasties). We consider the stylistic development of major genres of Chinese painting including landscapes, figures, narratives, fur-and-feathers, as well as Buddhist and Daoist pictures. While we address major figures and canonical works, we also look at paintings by lesser-known and unidentified imperial court artists. We pay attention to diverse formats, types of brushwork, and the role of inscriptions, colophons and seals, all of which are important for understanding Chinese painting. Major themes include: patronage and collecting, paintings as social or political commentary, iconography of Buddhist and Daoist pictures, textual traditions of Chinese criticism and history, as well as connoisseurship and other scholarly approaches to the study of Chinese painting. Close examination of paintings from the Cleveland Museum of Art's world-renowned collection, particularly those on display, are an integral part of the course.

This course explores the artists, works, ideas, and reception of Chinese contemporary art from 1979 to the present. We examine the creation, expression, and performance of Chinese identity in painting, sculpture, ceramics, performance, photography, video/film, and installations. Key issues we discuss include cultural and artistic history; trauma and memory; political activism and censorship; the body, gender and sexuality; globalization and transnationalism; the rapidly changing urban and natural environment; global audiences and the international art market; and the role of expatriate artists. We examine art movements and exhibitions as well as individual works and artists through contemporaneous primary and critical sources (in translation) as well as through later scholarship. Visits to Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals: Zodiac Heads at the Cleveland Museum of Art, attendance at guest lectures, and regular viewing documentary, artist, and feature films are all integral to the course.

Visual Exchanges in Modern Chinese and Japanese Painting, 1860-1960

The political and cultural histories of China and Japan in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries are inexorably entangled. Forces of modernization, nationalism, reform, war, and revolution impacted the traffic in artists and practices between the two countries. Debates about the ways and means to preserve, reform, or reject traditional methods, styles, and subjects in the face of European modernism dominated cultural discourse. Artistic movements, schools, and individuals navigated between tradition and modernity and their efforts are reflected in manifestos of artistic societies, theoretical writings, exhibitions, and paintings of the time. Both Japanese and Chinese painters traveled to Europe to study, returning to East Asia with new ideas and techniques. Waves of Chinese artists trained in Japan, experiencing European modernism directly through exhibitions and concurrently through Japanese filters. The flow of Chinese ink paintings into Japan in the early twentieth century renewed Japanese artists’ engagement with pre-modern artistic traditions of their continental neighbors. Some East Asian painters focused on revitalizing their own native ink painting traditions, others embraced European oil painting, still others strove to achieve a distinctively Japanese or Chinese synthesis—all sought to express new modern national, cultural, and individual identities. The course covers yōga (Western style painting) and Nihonga (Japanese style painting) in Japan, and guohua (national painting) in China. Major artists addressed in the course include: Fu Baoshi, Zhang Daqian, Huang Binhong, Xu Beihong, Gao Jianfu, Kuroda Seiki, Yorozu Tetsugoro, Kishida Ryusei, Yokoyama Taikan, and Tomioka Tessai. This course intersects with the Fall 2011 exhibition Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Gallery visits as well as attendance at guest lectures and films form an integral part of the course.