Language and Chinese Art History

Abstract

I would like to offer a consciously partial reflection, based on personal practice, on the teaching of Chinese art history at two universities, hoping it may lead to more general discussions. When I taught art history at the University of Glasgow (2008–11) and the University of Leeds (2015–17), I sometimes showed, in historiography and methodology classes, two uncaptioned landscapes and asked students for educated guesses on the dates and for their reasoning (figs 1 and 2). Always, the first was judged to have been painted earlier (because it was ‘more classical’) and the second, later (because it was ‘more modern’). Both landscapes were painted in the first half of the twentieth century by Huang Binhong黃賓虹 (1865–1955), the ‘more modern’ one predating the other. Designed to unsettle teleological assumptions of a linear, progressive stylistic evolution (and of the notion of stylistic evolution altogether), this exercise moved on to a probing into the poverty of our vocabulary. Simply by utilising ‘modern’ as a description, one situates an image in contextually charged terms, at once loaded and vacant. And so we experimented with ways of discussing the two Huang Binhongs. For instance, can we analyse by way of brushwork or pictorial space? What are the implicit references when we look at space in these landscapes, as opposed to space in a Constable, a C ezanne, or a Hockney? In doing so, we were obliged to pay attention to the very language with which to think, because, as quickly became salient, we thought in given lexical settings, and our ways of looking were (at least partly) linguistically conditioned. This three-way investigation of looking, thinking, and speaking as it happened, teasing out the limits of our language and those of our perception, through art historical debates no less, was a Wittgensteinian moment lived. To glimpse a different fly-bottle, so to speak, I then gave translated examples of writings on landscape painting by artists in eleventhand seventeenth-century China, where a sophisticated system of rhetoric was mobilised to picture the picturing of the world. If the students wondered, then yes, these artists wrote and theorised; they were critics, connoisseurs, historians, and collectors at the same time as they were painters, calligraphers, and poets. Such a mention in passing was my preferred way of bringing into evidence that art history as a history of writing did not begin with Vasari, as students are often taught and as we are supposed to ‘put to rights’, the raison d’̂etre for