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

possible for a traditional visual culture based on brush and ink painting and rural handcrafts to retain its value even though the social and material conditions that created this relationship are being changed so fundamentally by industrialisation? The introductory section of this book examines how individuals might negotiate with tradition and understand the role of the natural world in determining a Chinese visual culture. A key document for the entire book is Wang Huangsheng’s introductory analysis, which sets out a theoretical model for understanding tradition as an ongoing process that can be augmented. Framing tradition as flexible and open to interpretation allows its practices to be rethought and reevaluated. Underlying his views is the notion that people are empowered to reinterpret tradition and make it meaningful in new circumstances once they understand that it is fluid. In the last section of the book, Transforming Tradition, there is more discussion around this theme.

In tracing the history of regionalism in Chinese art making, Wong Dongson establishes that the practices of traditional scholar painting are rooted in an intimate understanding of the landscape in which the scholar artist lived. The cultural knowledge of the scholars contributed to their sense of identity in terms of their intellectual understanding of the world (a cultural capital established through a study of the classics) as well as their interaction with it through an emotional and aesthetic engagement with the physical region in which they worked. In articulating the dialogue that traditional artists had with their immediate environment, Wong Dongson suggests that it is possible to transfer the working methods of the past into the new contexts of globalisation. In considering the fundamental ideological position that enabled the scholar painters to interact with the landscape, which he argues is still evident in contemporary China, Li Yong suggests that ideas about the relationship of the individual with the natural world are fundamental to a contemporary, aesthetically healthy mind. If this is the case, then art based on Daoist principles is as relevant to the aesthetic and social health of contemporary China as it was in the past.

In his chapter on new scholar painting of the last and present century, Wu Jinchuan examines attempts by twentieth-century artists using