This thesis explores some issues related to directed change in Chinese literature and art from 1930 to 1955. The focus is on the performing arts. The main issues of concern are changes in the social organisation of literary and artistic activity, and changes in the conscious model of literature and art held by those leading these social changes. Fieldwork was done in China during the period 1974 to 1977. Since the main concern of the thesis is with an earlier period, extensive library research was done in China, the United States, and Canada. The formative period of the modern transformation of Chinese literature and art was examined by research into the changes of the Kiangsi Soviet, Yenan, and National Consolidation periods. Theoretical concepts derived from the works of Clifford Geertz on ideology, Eric Wolf on peasant political movements, Antonio Gramsci on intellectuals and hegemony, and Raymond Williams on the arts in society were synthesised to form an approach which could illuminate these problems. In this work literature and art were consistently analysed as modes of social activity rather than as purely aesthetic phenomena. The development within leading circles in China of an approach to literature and art based upon recognition of its social and political aspects and a concern with effecting change in these areas is examined, beginning with the rudimentary formulation of ideas:-on this subject in the early 1930's. The effort to transform literature and art by way of carrying out planned and organised alterations in the social practice of literary and artistic activities on the part of both professionals and amateurs is examined in detail. These efforts were found to be theoretically provocative and to have shown some signs of success, particularly in the middle and late 1940's. A partial revision of these policies is noted in the early 1950's, and some possible reasons for that are suggested. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation explores the use of new mass-media forms and technologies in early twentieth-century China to preserve and disseminate Chinese cultural heritage. It focuses on the contributions of Di Baoxian (狄葆賢 1873–1941), a publisher of art and Buddhist texts who established one of the earliest photography studios in Shanghai and a publishing house for art, the Youzheng Press (有正書局). Di pioneered the use of collotype reproduction to publish traditional Chinese art and founded the major newspaper Shibao, through which he preserved traditional literary genres in the form of newspaper columns. He was also interested in the practice of ghost photography to investigate supernatural elements associated with Buddhism and provide scientific evidence for these phenomena. This study situates Di’s work within the context of other art and Buddhist publishers and examines the emerging public art arena and political press as key sites for legitimizing Chinese Buddhism and creating new images of China’s past at a pivotal moment in the country’s history. The turn of the nineteenth century saw China’s territory partitioned among imperial powers, leading to the plundering of artistic treasures by rampaging armies and art collectors. Meanwhile, political reformers advocated art education to combat what they saw as superstitious Chinese religions obstructing China’s emergence as a powerful modern state. Despite these challenges, Buddhist literati like Di saw the miraculous aspects of Chinese religions as fully compatible with art education, modern science, and technology. Engaging with Victorian science and spiritualism, they used new technologies like photography to investigate supernatural phenomena associated with Buddhism, seeking to explain and substantiate them with evidence. Visualizing the seemingly invisible through practices like ghost photography became central to their efforts to preserve China’s cultural heritage amid the fall of the Qing empire (1644–1911). This dissertation argues that visual media became the preferred mode of authenticating the past and establishing a common Chinese culture in the early Republic, marking a shift away from a text-based literati culture. It brings Buddhist studies into dialogue with histories of art, print culture, and science and technology to explain how mass media and public art culture emerged in early twentieth-century China, how the preservation of art and literature became linked to Buddhist culture, and how Buddhist literati engaged with global trends of spiritualism, science, and media technologies.

This dissertation focuses on fiction and pictorials (huabao, 畫報) in the early twentieth century and its relation with the new visual technologies of the time, mainly photolithography, but also lantern slides and photography. It explores how these visual mediums were self-reflected in fiction and pictorials and how they connected these two literary expressions, as well as their constant transformation. It concludes that this type of intermediality and self-reflexivity came as a response to China’s modernization during the late Qing Empire (1868-1911). Most scholars agreed that photolithography was the catalyst for reproducing visual images in large quantities, which facilitated the hybrid publishing space of pictorials and, in tandem with the other visual mediums, allowed them to act as a multimedia platform. My dissertation demonstrates how fiction also participated in this new visual media ecology created by photolithography and thus contributes to the exploration of an aesthetic, social, and political moment in the late Qing Empire. Major texts discussed in this dissertation include Sequel to Dreams of Shanghai Splendor 續海上繁華夢, The Flower of the Sea of Sin 孽海花, The Tales of the Moon Colony 月球殖民地小說, and The Current News Pictorial 時事畫報, as well as other critical works that also reflect modernization, propaganda, anti-imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. It is widely assumed that this intermedial experimentation was introduced to China with the global trend of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. However, my dissertation demonstrates an earlier experiment in the 1900s in the literati’s first attempt to directly respond to modern visual and printing technologies. I argue this early experiment should be understood as one of the last attempts to revitalize the traditional Chinese chapter novels (Zhanghuixiaoshuo, 章回小說) during a time when they were gradually being displaced by Westernized modern fiction. I further demonstrate that by depicting the material production of the pictorials, the artists made them not merely a static medium that captured the development of the cities, but rather a transformative medium that developed alongside these cities. My approach will challenge the current methodology that views pictorials as the transparent publishing medium that passively recorded the sociopolitical changes, thus redefining the dynamics of the pictorial images, its production and modernization. These discoveries and analyses will illuminate the transformations of both Chinese pictorials and fiction, and the brave experimental spirit of their writers and artists during the technological transition at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1126, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) was faced with an exigent political crisis: after testing the borders for years, the neighboring Jin state marched its armies south, destroyed the capital city Bianjing, and reduced its territories by half. The dynasty’s collapse and reconstitution in southern China has prompted ongoing scholarly debate about what types of political, economic, and cultural differences emerged between the Northern and Southern Song periods. My project uses the narrative handscroll Illustrations of Auspicious Responses to study the development of the imperial cult and images of rulership in the Southern Song. It is the first monograph length study of the scroll since it was rediscovered in 2009 and examines how the reigning Zhao house effectively used visual and material culture to argue for its legitimacy, employing the rhetoric of moral justice and acculturation, rather than overt depictions of military dominance, to describe the establishment of the Southern Song and its first ruler. Works such as Illustrations demonstrate that the sophistication of court-based art was not destroyed along with its physical structures. Rather, with the move south artists became essential to promoting the political aims of the court: using cultural legacy as the most expedient way to purchase political legitimacy in a time of uncertainty. Illustrations acts as an expertly articulated defense of the court’s right to rule, echoes of which have filtered through the late imperial period and can be seen in how China positions itself in relation to the world today.

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Li, Kin Sum. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-148). / Abstracts in English and Chinese; includes Chinese. / Title --- p.i / Abstract --- p.iv / Acknowledgement --- p.v / Table of Contents --- p.vii / Chronology --- p.x / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter a. --- Literature review / Chapter b. --- Introduction to Tianxingguan (TXG) Tomb2 / Chapter i. --- Importance of the tomb / Chapter ii. --- Dating of TXG Tomb2 / Chapter c. --- Defining Chu religious art / Chapter i. --- "What is ""Chu""?" / Chapter ii. --- "What is ""Chu religious art""" / Chapter d. --- Methodology / Chapter 2. --- "The drum stand, the statue and the ""tomb guardian""" --- p.21 / Chapter a. --- General introduction to three artifacts in TXG Tomb2 / Chapter b. --- The drum stand in the form of two birds on two tigers / Chapter i. --- Development of our understanding of the artistic features of the drum stand / Chapter ii. --- Its musical function / Chapter iii. --- "Contextual relationship of the drum stand: dancing, feasting, hunting, taming animals and shamanism" / Chapter c. --- The statue of an antlered bird standing on a tiger / Chapter i. --- The statue and the antlers / Chapter ii. --- Roles of the deer / Chapter 1. --- Deer and music / Chapter 2. --- Deer as mounts: transcendence and immortality / Chapter 3. --- Deer antlers as weapons / Chapter 4. --- Multifunctional deer / Chapter iii. --- Functions of the statue / Chapter d. --- "The ""tomb guardian""" / Chapter i. --- "Typology of the ""tomb guardians""" / Chapter 1. --- Single and double-animal-headed sculpture / Chapter 2. --- Human-headed sculptures / Chapter 3. --- Sculptures in human shape / Chapter 4. --- Sculptures in animal shape / Chapter 5. --- Sculptures in abstract human shape / Chapter 6. --- Miscellaneous / Chapter ii. --- "Nomenclatures and functions of the ""tomb guardians""" / Chapter 1. --- Guarding role / Chapter 2. --- Musical function / Chapter e. --- "The drum stand, the statue and the tomb guardian" / Chapter 3. --- The bird-man figure and the toad --- p.80 / Chapter a. --- General introduction to the TXG Tomb 2 lacquered bird-man figure and hybrid toad / Chapter b. --- Bird-man figures / Chapter i. --- "ossible cultural interactions among Xin'gan, Sanxingdui and Chu cultures" / Chapter ii. --- Bird-man figures in the Warring States and Haneriod / Chapter 1. --- Bird-man figures on four bronze vessels / Chapter 2. --- ossible origins of the head ornaments / Chapter 3. --- Bird-man figures' taming animals / Chapter c. --- Toads / Chapter i. --- Sanxingdui stone toad / Chapter ii. --- Frogs in Dian culture / Chapter iii. --- Toads in Chu culture / Chapter iv. --- Toads in Han art / Chapter 1. --- Toads in the legend of Xiwangmu/Queen Mother of the West / Chapter d. --- Bird-man figures and toads / Chapter 4. --- Conclusion --- p.121 / Chapter a. --- The assemblage of religious art / Chapter b. --- Hierarchies ofower andower relationships / Chapter c. --- Religious transformation / Bibliography --- p.129 / Illustrations (separate binding) / Chapter 1. --- p.2 / Chapter 2. --- p.6 / Chapter 3. --- p.42

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This dissertation investigates the extent of knowledge of China in Europe and, more particularly, Chinese influence on European art and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It attempts to answer the following questions: 1. What visual and literature resources on China and Chinese art in Europe were available in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? 2. To which extent was there any understanding of Chinese art and architecture in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? 3. To which extent might this understanding have affected European art and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Although European contacts with China began in the early sixteenth century, few scholars have touched on the evidence that exists of the extent of European knowledge of Chinese architecture before 1720, even on the possible impact of the Chinese architectural designs that were depicted on Chinese porcelains and other merchandise imported into Europe for two centuries before that date. This dissertation examines the evidence for the employment of new and differing aesthetics derived from Chinese artifacts and then assimilated in European art, architecture and landscape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After examining the variety of resources from which the new aesthetics derived from Chinese artifacts imported into Europe was evolved, the dissertation analyzes Chinese influence in different nations in an order which follows the most consistently open and effective communications to the Far East. In the process, the dissertation quotes the contemporary historical descriptions of those Chinese artifacts as well as attempting to identify their influence on European art and architecture, thus providing evidence that the interaction between China and Europe served as subtle but active, generative force in European art throughout the period. In sum, the thesis attempts to explore the European understanding of Chinese art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to examine the consequences of that influence as they were reflected in European art and architecture. It analyzes some of the most influential and related social, political, and religious aspects that acted as powerful stimuli, which in turn affected in the growth of Chinese influence on European art, architecture and landscape. This dissertation thus attempts to push back the significance of the Chinese influence on aspects of European artistic styles from the accepted date of the early eighteenth century to the seventeenth and even earlier - the sixteenth century.

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

(in English) The master's thesis The Chinese Collection of Ludvík Kuba in Historical Context and the Context of his Oeuvre is focused on works, ethnographic interests and contacts of Czech painter Ludvík Kuba in connection with his collection of Chinese art and the context of the popularity of Chinese culture amongst Czech modern painters. The author will also pay attention to the history of collecting Chinese art in former Czechoslovakia and to some objects collected by Kuba in particular. The thesis aims to reconstruct the collection of Chinese art amassed by Ludvík Kuba, using period photographs and information from institutions that house the artist's estate (Náprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures, National Gallery in Prague, Polabské muzeum v Poděbradech, and others.) The artist's book Moje Čína (My China), as well as other sources (period articles, correspondence), will be used as source material, too. The information gathered about Kuba's former collection of Chinese art will serve the purpose of deeper reflection of the extent of Chinese influences in Kuba's art, as well as his role in the process of establishing of Asian art collecting by modern Czech artists of his day.