Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Gl ...

Chinese visual culture (Zi, 1987). As the reader progresses through this book, it will become clear that the debates that surround visual culture are not purely aesthetic ones. An understanding of the ideological issues surrounding the appearance of things and the social circumstances that result in the making of traditional artefacts are as important as how a traditional object may look.

The attitudes towards tradition in China have not always been as benign as they are now. For the greater part of the twentieth century, they were held in contempt by many progressive intellectuals. However, this attitude was not universal, and at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there was a cultural divide between those who saw tradition as a bastion of resistance against foreign occupation and those who saw tradition as an impediment to modernising Chinese culture. In his 1922 preface to A Call to Arms, Lu Xun (see figure 1) observed sardonically that when as a boy he chose not to study the Chinese classics or take the examinations for the imperial bureaucracy (the Keju), but to study Western medicine instead, his mother was upset because ‘anyone who studied “foreign subjects” was looked down upon as a fellow good for nothing, who, out of desperation, was forced to sell his soul to foreign devils’ (1972, p. 2). The Keju, which had been in place for over a thousand years, was an educational and administrative mechanism designed to ensure that the brightest minds of the country were identified and then recruited to the service of the state, regardless of their distance from the imperial centre (Elman, 2002). The system also ensured the loyalty of these individuals to the government administration. To disregard a means of intellectual and official advancement of such longstanding tradition and fundamental importance to the coherence of the gigantic Chinese state was an act of cultural transgression that is difficult for a Westerner to understand, but Lu Xun saw China’s traditions as so overpowering and oppressively claustrophobic that, for a while, he even viewed his artistic struggle against them as futile. In the preface, he recounts a conversation with a young activist friend who visited him and then chastised him for copying traditional calligraphic epigraphs,