Contemporaneity in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, Theory, and Criticism

Chinese painting has often been considered timeless and unchanging, an art reliant on the copying of the ancients, and thereby forever reiterative. Closer inspection of the art, theory, and criticism, especially of the seventeenth century, however, challenges these notions. When time and again we see artists referring to the works of earlier acclaimed painters but yet transforming them — or even subverting them — we must ask what values are being promoted. In this essay, it is argued that a shift occurred in painting criticism and practice from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, that seventeenth-century critical values emphasized the contemporary, new, and different, and that this resulted in an expanded canon of painting.