Between remembrance and commerce: Writing a painting treatise in nineteenth-century Shanghai

Abstract

This study takes a socio-historical approach to analyze a case of how practical painting knowledge was historicized during nineteenth-century China. After the Taiping War (1850–1864), a civil war that left urban centers in the cultural heartland of China in ruins, scholars sought to recover and commemorate the past. The professional painter Dai Yiheng publicly engaged his traumatic war experience to cater to a new audience of foreign students in Shanghai. The tension between the commercial environment of Shanghai and his personal experience becomes visible in both his paintings and writings. Through a practice of temporal layering in his work, Dai managed to combine the demands of his profession and his personal trauma.