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

All of the contributors to this book are Chinese, and their understanding of Chinese culture comes from their lived experience and the body of literature that has surrounded them during their education. This means that their cultural and academic reference points are not automatically those of the English-speaking world. With the exception of the towering presence of Michael Sullivan, it cannot be assumed that commentaries in English on Chinese traditional art are known in China. More recent texts on the applied arts are in the slow process of translation and distribution in China, and so a study that might be considered a key text in English might not necessarily be known in China. A celebration of the culturally different perspectives held by the contributors is one of the reasons for this book, but in the interests of the English-speaking reader who wishes to move from this introduction to a deeper examination of the issues raised, I have included an English language bibliography for each chapter. Any omissions are thus mine and not the authors’.

Finally, an understanding of the contemporary condition of traditional Chinese culture does not solely illuminate Chinese cultural practices; it becomes a lens through which an individual’s cultural circumstances can be read. I would argue that traditional cultural practices have the potential to allow an intellectual and emotional opposition to the emptiness of industrialised cultural production in the same way that was offered by the avant-garde at the start of the twentieth century. Chinese brush and ink painting carries with it a body of philosophy that is rich beyond compare. It can provide a way of looking at the natural world with fresh eyes, and it can make people rethink their relationship with the landscape and its flora and fauna. This is not just an idle romantic fancy but, it seems to me, a prerequisite for the successful custodianship of the natural world. In other words, traditional art making facilitates people’s understanding of their relationship with the world, which forces them to go emotionally and intellectually beyond surface interpretations. This, in turn, encourages people to engage with the unique artefacts of communities as well as their makers.

The seven gentlemen of the bamboo forest were third-century scholars who, disillusioned with court corruption, retreated from public life and