This Assessment will first respond to and develop James Elkins’s comments about Chinese visual studies in his classifications of five different types of visual studies in the world. It will then reconsider the fruitfulness of visual studies applied to Chinese images.
The meaning of “visual studies” has to be specified in the Chinese cultural field. Visual studies has existed in recent years in the Chinese cultural area (the end of the 1990s in Taiwan and South Korea, and after 2000 in China) under the name of “cultural visual studies” (shejue wenhua xue or shejue wenhua yanjiu), in extremely varied departments of universities and colleges (cultural studies, religion, humanities, design, etc.).1 Visual studies in this cultural area are mainly related to cinema, photography, and contemporary art studies, and under the influence of Western methods (especially Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida) and of postmodernism,2 and, when focused on Chinese objects, are most often concerned with the relation between text and image and with modernity.3 While we understand Chinese visual studies as studies of Chinese images, then, in the West the expression “visual studies” concerns mainly photography and cinema, and it has recently attracted much attention.4
If the question of visual studies and visual culture in China and in the Chinese art field was not posed as such before the twenty-first century, this does not mean that what can be called a specific visual culture does not exist in China. In the West, actually, the well-known part of Chinese visual culture is mainly the literati forms of visual art, on the one hand (traditional painting and calligraphy, as seen in the great museum exhibitions), and the contemporary art forms, on the other,5 both seemingly having only a formal link. Another part of Chinese visual culture that draws a great deal of study is Chinese gardens and related topics, such as rocks, curios, paintings, and gardening.6
Additionally, a large part of Chinese visual culture remains much less known. It concerns both literati and popular forms of artistic practices, such as graphic design, fashion, architecture, interior design, lithography, and opera,7 but also visual culture not necessarily considered artistic, such as clothing, advertisements, road signs and signposts, street signs and notice boards with written characters, billboards, stamps, and so on.8 Thus, Chinese visual culture as commonly known concerns chiefly the ancient period, considered tantamount to a bygone past, which means detached from the present time and accordingly easier to scrutinize. But this kind of approach often misses the specificity of Chinese visual culture, by detaching a form of art (like calligraphy or painting) from its living contemporary cultural dimension.9 In such circumstances, the advantage of visual studies compared to art history is that it can cross the chronological divisions inherent to art history to connect past to present and study the actual practice of Chinese art practitioners.10 This point is fundamental in Chinese visual studies; for instance, today calligraphy, whether traditional or contemporary in its practice, is directly related to traditional theories and practices of the art.11 In this situation, art history is not sufficient, and visual studies are particularly well adapted. In this respect, visual studies should be very useful in forthcoming research.
The second issue discussed here is the legitimacy of “visual studies” in the case of Chinese artistic images. Usually, when Chinese visual culture is mentioned in the West, it is from the viewpoint of art-historical studies,12 and mainly as scrutinized by Western-trained scholars.13 In such a methodology, often based on semiology or on a rhetorical approach to images, a large part of Chinese visual culture is left aside or misinterpreted, if not misunderstood, as Li Xi explains in her comments on politics and the importance to the relationship to the image, when she says that “visual culture has emphasized the importance of logo culture.” In the case of Chinese artistic (and not necessarily aesthetic) images, this relation cannot be considered one-sided, as it involves an interaction between the image and the viewer, as well as between the viewer and the creator of the image.14
The “rhetorical” approach to images leads to examining the image as a visual object, bearing a language and self-sufficient in its meaning.15 Actually, the “visual” issue is not the right one to be raised about Chinese visual culture, since the most important question in Chinese art theory does not concern the visual object, but the relationship between the viewer and the artist or creator. In other words, Chinese aesthetic categories are mainly evaluative and focused on the link between the creator and the receptor,16 compared to European categories, which are descriptive and aimed at objectivity.17 Nevertheless, Chinese visual culture, with its own theorization, is now recognized even in the field of neuroaesthetics.18 In such a process, Chinese visual culture images, such as brushstrokes, are effectively considered a visible link, a visual testimony of an emotion first felt by the creator and transmitted to the viewers of the image, rather than studied as objects.
Actually, this kind of empirical approach, as claimed by Gustav Frank,19 is established on a universal basis, which is human emotionality. Thus, the perceived image does not work like a language; it is the embodiment (not the projection) of an emotion, which even a non-Chinese can feel.20 Through the Chinese brushwork, a work of pictorial art can express emotions in a nonrepresentational way, that is, in a non-“rhetorical” way.
In conclusion, visual studies are very useful and should develop in the Chinese artistic and aesthetic field in order to understand the representational background and functioning of Chinese images, whether traditional, modern, or contemporary. But the methods applied to this domain should evolve and take into account the Chinese theoretical and practical tradition too.
1. This corresponds to Michael Holly’s statement on “What is visual studies?”: “It isn’t a discipline; it isn’t a field.... Visual studies names an attitude in relation to visual things, rather than a department.”
2. 张春田 (Zhang Chuntian), 视觉文化与中国经验 (Visual cultural studies and the Chinese experience), 中国图书评论 (China Book Review), no. 6 (2011): 71.
3. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
4. For instance, see Chris Berry, Xinyu Lu [Lü], and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Images in History: Pictures and Public Space in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 2012).
5. The references on Chinese contemporary art are too numerous to be listed here.
6. The studies on Chinese gardens started long before the concept of “visual studies” existed, with William Chambers’s (1723–1793) books. For visual studies on gardens, see Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).
7. In Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization, edited by Christopher Crouch (New York: Cambria Press, 2010), landscape painting is examined in a diachronic way, and graphic design, fashion, folk arts, prints, and architecture are studied.
8. Laikwan Pang notably investigates lithography, opera, advertisements, etc. in The Distorting Mirror.
9. For instance, the reader of Robert E. Harrist Jr.’s The Landscape of Words (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008) would expect a development of the link between calligraphy on rocks and cliffs and Chinese living landscape culture, but it never comes, as the book is focused on a historical approach of a kind of Chinese calligraphy. I tried myself to show and to study this link in Montagnes et eaux: La culture du shanshui (Mountains and waters: the Shanshui culture) (Paris: Hermann, 2005).
10. This is a kind of answer to Paul Frosh’s question “Do visual studies scholars ever conduct research involving actual image-makers or image viewers?”
11. See, for instance, Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Across Trans-Chinese Landscapes: Reflections on Contemporary Chinese Cultures”; Norman Bryson, “The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, edited by Gao Minglu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 41–49, 51–58.
12. For instance, Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Hung Wu and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005).
13. As pointed out by Crouch, Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture, 2–3.
14. Zhu Qi criticizes the blindness of Westerners on this point in “Do Westerners Really Understand Chinese Avant Garde Art?,” in Chinese Art at the End of the Millenium: Chinese-art.com, 1998–1999, edited by John Clark (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2000), 55–60.
15. “Rhetorical” in the sense used by Georges Roque in his “Political Rhetoric in Visual Images,” in Dialogue and Rhetoric, edited by E. Weigand (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), 185–93; “Rhétorique visuelle et argumentation visuelle,” Semen, no. 32 (2011): 91–106 (semen.revues.org/9370?lang=en).
16. “Aesthetic” is to be taken in the broad sense of appreciation of forms, and not in the narrow sense of “study of beauty,” which would be nonsensical in the Chinese theoretical context.
17. See my book L’art en Chine: La résonance intérieure (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 215–32.
18. There is an ongoing research program, Visual Art and Emotion, established in 2010 and sponsored by the French National Research Agency, based on the study of Chinese graphic arts (calligraphy and landscape painting) and of its theoretical tradition, through Western experimental protocols from psychophysics and affective neuroscience applied to it.
19. “In terms of empirical approaches to image use and vision, neuroaesthetics also makes a strong claim.” Section 2 of the Seminars.
20. The first results of the Visual Art and Emotion program confirm the emotionality of Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes. See Jérôme Pelletier, Yolaine Escande, Marine Taffou, Kenneth Knoblauch, Aure-Élise Duret-Lerebours, and Stéphanie Dubal, “Brushstrokes with Emotion,” in Inter-culturality and Philosophic Discourse, edited by Yolaine Escande, Vincent Shen, and Li Chenyang (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 251–70.