Period Style as "Life Cycle" in Euro-American and Chinese Painting History

Abstract

The notion that “styles” have a lifespan is still widely accepted by many art historians. In the late 20th century it became clear that there was nothing “universal” in these definitions which had also been defined in a gendered and socially biased form of knowledge. Although exercised in a different manner the urge to classify was just as strong in the Chinese world. Because of the creation in Chinese discourse of a type of Subject very similar to the one developed in the classical age in Europe, the desire for the definition of period styles became a very logical impulse when the first professional Chinese art historians began tackling the issue of historicizing the art of their culture early in the 20th century. Nowadays, since the fragility of the “period style as lifespan” narrative in art history has been undermined, to the point of creating entirely new narratives relying on types of universal that have the ambitions to avoid the biases of gender and social structure, the question remains as to why it still endures in contemporary academia and in the doxa.

Notes

Editor's note: As this article was written in Hong Kong, and refers largely to premodern figures, the Traditional Chinese script has been used.

Nian Xiyao wrote an extraordinary text on perspective, inspired by the Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum that was written between 1693 and 1700 by the Baroque painter and architect Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709).

In the Chinese context we might add that this type of art could also have suffered from the old bias against “low,” professional or popular art that most literati have supported; but this is also changing, and the paintings and posters of the Cultural Revolution are now being studied.

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Notes on contributors

Frank Vigneron

Frank Vigneron is Professor of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History from the Paris VII University, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Paris IV Sorbonne University, and a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Some of his publications include I Like Hong Kong … Art and Deterritorialization [Hong Kong, 2010] and Académiciens et Lettrés. Analyse comparative de la théorie picturale du 18^e siècle en Chine et en Europe [Paris, 2010].