This dissertation explores the historical narrative and aesthetic characteristics of Chinese abstract art throughout the twentieth century. Its primary goal is to establish a chronological evolution of Chinese abstraction. It argues that the genesis of Chinese abstraction can be traced back to the early twentieth century. Although abstract painting was not created in this period, the earliest linguistic translations concerning abstract art and the emergence of modernist paintings, popular science, optical devices, new photographic techniques, and urban visual culture collectively shaped a new aesthetics of simplicity and rationality expressed in geometric abstract forms of fine-art photography, fashion, graphic, interior, industrial and product design. The case study of the creation of Chinese abstract art is Wu Dayu’s private experiments in the Maoist period. Wu’s manuscripts, correspondences, self-made canvas, small-size works, and other materials attested to his exploration of abstract painting, revealing an alternative art beneath the mainstream socialist realism. Wu’s art played an essential role in the history of Chinese abstraction as it links abstract art’s incubation in the Republican period and its boom in the post- Mao period. Following Wu’s experiments is the flourishment of abstract art in the reform and opening-up period when China established diplomatic ties with Western countries. However, this boom did not come without a price. There was a twisting path towards understanding and accepting abstract painting. Reformist artists and scholars reconstructed artistic and cultural meanings of abstract painting to respond to public criticism on the ideological implication of abstract art. Relevant to the historical narrative is the evolution in the stylistic features of Chinese abstraction. This dissertation investigates works by artists of different generations, including their abstract styles, techniques, media, and the natural and cultural resources upon which they enrich their abstract vocabularies. The elderly artists, like Wu Dayu, Wu Guanzhong, and Yu Youhan, maintained the traditional method of easel painting popular during the time, adopting an approach of reduction and simplification to create abstract paintings that stress the independence of painterly elements such as dots, lines, circles, colors, and brushstrokes. The younger generations furthered the movement by introducing non-traditional art media and forms. In so doing, they have redefined abstract painting as more than finite and static objects created for human viewing, but as autonomous and dynamic forces that connect the multiple entities of nature, artist, and viewer. Waves of social and political changes in twentieth century China made it particularly challenging to develop abstract art in Chinese society. The ultimate legitimacy of abstract art resulted from the collective efforts of artists of different generations—their firm belief in art and life, their continuous experiments, and their brave attempts to engage art in society. While this dissertation ends with twentieth century Chinese abstraction, it also recognizes a starting point of twenty-first century Chinese abstraction, where science and technologies become a new inspiration for artistic creation and only time will tell how the new trend in Chinese abstraction develops.

This dissertation views art education and exhibitions as important actors in state- and nation-building in the Republic of China (1912-1949). State-building constructed institutional infrastructure to bind and govern, and nation-building institutionalized cultural history to formulate the imagined community. Both state- and nation-building were institution-building. Gradually, the managerial leadership of Republican China became a meta-institution that further institutionalized other institutions into a system. This system assumed intellectual leadership, defined and evaluated art, distinguished art from non-art, and presented art to the artworld public. Through collective art activities and shared art conventions, the individual art institution and network of art institutions functioned as socializing structures that reproduced cultural powers reversely enhancing the socio-political institutions. Inspired by Cai Yuanpei’s slogan “aesthetic education as a substitute for religion,” the four-chapter dissertation goes from the iconoclasm of the heavenly mandate, to the voice for one’s own art history, then to the mass art that coalesced professional education and economic activities, and finally to the political officialization of national arts – a new form of enchantment in a modern nation-state.

The first chapter digs into the rapidly changing social and institutional properties of the in situ Institute for Displaying Antiquities (1914-1948). The public accessibility to the Forbidden City and emptied throne desacralized the cosmic and political symbols. The second chapter looks at the two state-subsidized art activities overseas. The two exhibitions spoke for the concept and history of Chinese art in Europe from the Chinese perspectives. The third chapter explores the interdependence between production, commerce, art, national salvation, nationalism and urban modernity. The chapter investigates the national products and the consumer identity, and examines how a spectator-market could redefine the masses’ spatiotemporal understanding of the nation and the presence. Last but not least, the fourth chapter on the Second National Arts Exhibition (1937) discusses how the eclectic assembly of arts and crafts presenting the past, the present, the future, the indigenous, and the foreign could together construct the presence of the imagined community in the geopolitical boundary.

My dissertation investigates the foreign and domestic forces instrumental in the development of modernist abstract painting in postwar Taiwan between 1957 and 1968. My work contributes to the discourse of postwar abstract painting and modernism by providing a critical study of the relationship between calligraphy, ink painting, and abstraction. Mainland-born, Taiwan-educated artists continued the unfinished project of May Fourth by conducting the first thorough re-examination of Chinese art traditions and interacting with European and American modern art currents. Against a backdrop of post-colonial cultural reorientation, post-civil war social reconstruction, martial law, and Cold War geopolitical realities, abstraction emerged as a style that upheld traditional Chinese aesthetic principles, that translated personal experiences of displacement, and that promised readability in the international arena. The first two chapters examine the emergence of abstraction from outward- and inward-looking angles, respectively. Chapter One examines the curatorial agenda and interests behind “The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists,” the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, 1966–1968. Chapter Two considers the pivotal role of two literature and arts magazines, Wenxing and Bihui, as cultural producers and dialogue generators in the formation of Taiwan Modernism. It highlights the tight relationship between the artists and poets as they constructed a discourse for modernism. Chapter Three traces the evolution of the meaning of abstraction in postwar Taiwan, paying special attention to the “abstract landscape” by Liu Kuo-sung and Chuang Che, the most prominent artists of the Fifth Moon Society. Chapters Four and Five look at the respective practices of Liu and Chuang and offer detailed formal analysis of their paintings, especially on their treatment of calligraphy and abstraction. In Chapter Four, I analyze the artistic trajectory of Liu and the development of his vernacular landscape paintings throughout the 1960s. In Chapter Five, I identify Chuang’s use of brokenness as an aesthetic that confronts the predicament of displacement. In both chapters I examine the patronage and reception of their work outside of Taiwan to place them in the larger discourse of postwar abstraction and show the challenges in traversing cultural boundaries for transnational artists of their postwar generation.

Usually, tings that have disappeared have a name, but not upcoming things. An old human social structure has been destroyed, and the structure of an unknown is about to begin.

A pillar of salt is a process of my imagination of another human being society. The three characters in this video are individual and independent. In my original plan, the ballet suit girl who wears a gas mask presents the fragile sense of art, the golden raincoat man with a bird face relates to logic thinking and philosophy, and the protective clothing guy reflects technology and industry, Some other elements involve in my work during the shot.

This dissertation focuses on the formation of multiethnic Pan-Asianism in modern art in Manchuria under the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. Responding to the rapidly changing political conditions from the era of the informal empire (1906–⁠1932) to the Manchukuo period (1932–1945), artists of settler and local communities sought to transform artistic practice by bringing their colonial and native identities into the state-endorsed visual productions. Rather than viewing the art of Manchukuo as a dark valley of wartime stagnation or as a confrontation/assimilation between the colonized and the colonizer, my approach is to recover the historical moment when the notion of transnational modernity in art was shaped, contested, and reappropriated not only by state actors but by unstable, multi-dimensional social relations. I pay special attention to the state art exhibitions in Manchukuo as the last piece of Japan’s intra-imperial salon network involving colonial Korea and Taiwan, which exposed and reproduced the subjugation and dynamics of intersectional identities: race, ethnicity, genealogy, gender, and class. Case studies throughout four chapters demonstrate how the field of power in the art scene shifted from “cosmopolitan” Dalian to “ultra-modern” Changchun after the birth of Manchukuo in 1932, and how artists selectively claimed their Asiatic traditional and modern identities amid the political shift. The first chapter examines the development of metropolitan art productions in Dalian shaped by settler communities under powerful railway imperialism and local government by appropriating visual spectacles of Chinese labor and ethnic culture. The second chapter explores the deployment of the state art exhibition in Changchun and the anti-state exhibition in Fengtian, which revealed multifaceted interactions between Japanese and Chinese. The third chapter provides a case study of settler artist Kai Mihachirō (1903–1979) and his research on Manchurian folklore and folk arts in demonstrating how Manchukuo’s local characters were appropriated by Japanese settlers and the state in classifying, collecting, and curating races. In the fourth chapter, I address Manchukuo’s machine aesthetics, featured in the state art exhibitions, as an embodiment of Pan-Asian modernity and Japanese imperialism engendered by advanced technology and science, which became mobilized as wartime rhetoric.

Making Modern China in Photobooks: Contested National Narratives in the Photographic Archives of China 1900-1950s examines encyclopedic photobooks produced in mainland China that rely primarily on photographs, rather than text, to convey a comprehensive knowledge of China as a modern nation-state. This research offers the first systematic and academic examination of these invaluable yet understudied pictorial records. It provides new insights into the cultural history of China, placing photography in dialogue with the modernization of knowledge production and the formation of national identity. To start with, I perceive these encyclopedic photobooks as curated and mobile archives that narrate a compelling story about “New China” as a historical construct. I trace the history of photobooks in China from the multicultural empire of the late Qing dynasty, through the republican nation-state of the Republic of China, to the socialism of the People’s Republic of China. Additionally, I study the production process of photobooks in relation to printing technology, publishing culture, and editorial contributions. Meanwhile, adopting a reader’s perspective, my analysis emphasizes the objecthood and materiality of photobooks, reconceptualizing the reading of photobooks as an embodied experience rather than a purely visual engagement.Theoretically, I draw upon critical theories of photography, the archive, and nationalism, to accentuate the multiplicity of narratives vying for authority and authorship in defining China through photobooks. Drawing on comparisons developed through case studies, this study illustrates how Chinese intellectuals and publishers utilized the persuasive rhetoric of the photobook to tell their own stories. However, beyond an epistemological resistance against the imperial gaze of competing world powers, the making of photobooks about China in China also contributed to a new master narrative dominated by specific political parties, intellectual elitists, and the ethnic majority such as Han Chinese people. My study probes into these complex power struggles by interrogating the tensions, negotiation, and competition among disparate standpoints in the cultural industry at the early stage of Chinese modernization.

Using contemporary art in China as a case study, this dissertation analyzes how artworks and art discourses move between different institutional contexts and are rendered meaningful according to processes of globalization. Employing a media-based approach this project, To Enter Art History: Translating Art History and Canonizing Contemporary Art in Reform Era China (1978-1993), analyzes the circulation of art history in the international art world as read through its reception and translation in China. The dissertation begins asking how art history was imported into China in the 1980s during China's initial period of opening and reform. By considering how artists and art critics responded to these imported texts, I argue that Chinese artists used art history as a readymade, appropriating books, magazines, and printed images as mass-produced, readymade objects in their art practices. Through their appropriations, Chinese artists, including Huang Yong Ping, Lin Jiahua, Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei, challenged not only the dominance of Western art history globally but also its universalist claims. At the same time, these artists began to reconsider the institutions that define and support the arts in China and abroad. Specifically, Chinese artists began to re-conceptualize their relationship to art history and the canonization of art. Despite critics' calls to establish a new canon of contemporary Chinese art, artists actively resisted this canonization. I further analyze how Chinese artists began to participate in the rapidly globalizing art world as their work was increasingly shown in international, perennial exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. My research demonstrates that the flows of movement that characterized the rapidly globalizing art world in the late 1980s and early 1990s were uneven—art history, theory and criticism were the main imports into China, whereas artworks by Chinese artists were increasingly exhibited in New York and Europe. As a result, the canon of contemporary Chinese art developed differently inside and outside of China. This finding is significant as it proposes alternative and competing ways in which the canon of contemporary art is constructed in the global art world.

This dissertation examines the historical formation of a Japanese term zōkei from the 1890s to the 1940s. The term zōkei refers to a cooperative relationship of eyes and hands in making forms out of substance. Observing practices informed by zōkei creates a historical condition for looking at “Japanese art” beyond state-defined parameters of fine art. This project examines such beginning moments in “visual practice” alongside modern Japan’s imperial framework in modern Japan. This dissertation examines four episodes of “visual practice” in the context of modern Japan from the 1890s to the 1940s. The first episode introduces the use of vision in the teachings of art anatomy in 1890s Japan. Rather than seeing anatomy from the angle of dissection, I point out the role of pathological observation in the teachings of art anatomy. The contact of vision with the surface of plasters creates a preposition of vision, orienting viewer’s body in the space for looking practices. The second episode details the use of tactile vision in the ethnographical drawings. Descriptively confirming forms of plastic objects, the observing practice of modernologist’s ethnographical drawings diminish the distinction between fine art and folk art, viewing the world as social spaces full of plastic arts. The third episode reviews Bauhaus-informed art classes at elementary schools during the 1930s and design education at the midcentury. Rather than art academicism, the aesthetic education emerging from this context prioritizes the use of vision for sensory experiences, thereby ensuring individual agency. The fourth episode analyzes how observing practices were disrupted during the wartime period, and being consumed by imperial politics as a wartime discourse “visual culture” to build an ideology of Greater-Asia. Throughout the four chapters, this dissertation outlines a framework around the term zōkei to speculate a transition of art-historical writings away from “Japanese art history.” Rather than reenforcing nation-based art-historical writing, or naturalizing vision as an empirical tool for the state’s politics, the project centers on the practice of vision itself and the historical deployments it had that contributes to term to be translated as “visual arts.” In my discussion, “visual art” presents a descriptive mode in orienting the body and plastic objects in a social world. In this context, the artist’s body exists in a multidimensional relationship between vision and plasticity.

Why do artists look to the past to find contemporary inspiration? This dissertation focuses on the reinventions and transformations of antiquity in the understudied genre known as bogu or “ancient erudition” paintings (博古图). Composite by nature, elements of archeology, epigraphy and as well as Western realism come together in these works forming mixed-media collages that distinguishes them from the paintings of previous generations. Originating at a time of great social, political and economic flux, bogu paintings are living examples of the ways in which art can transform antiquity into a modern visual language.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive account of bogu painting’s history and facture, as well as the first in-depth analysis of the artistic practice of pioneering antiquarian artist, monk Liuzhou’s 六舟 (1791-1858) in English. My research also presents the historical origins of popular Chinese floral still-life genres including qinggong painting, suizhao painting and related decorative antiquarian motifs. Together, this study constitutes an important introduction to the evolving imagery of “antiquarianism” in China.

There is no single paradigm of bogu painting; composite by nature, elements of epigraphy, Western realism, indigenous rubbing techniques and woodblock printmaking come together in these hybrid works to form mixed-media collages that are distinct from ink paintings of previous generations. Given their hybridity, this study adopts a material approach to social history that critically examines changes in cultural value and the meaning of technological forms over time. More broadly, this research contributes to discourses on the politics of labor, the economics of art, and the changing relationship between art and craft, artist and artisan in the late Qing. Also examined are issues of authorship, authenticity, imitation, and representation. Ultimately, this research on bogu painting helps define how antiquarian practices seeped into popular culture and offers a new and more nuanced understanding of the complex role that the classical past has played in Chinese modernity.

This dissertation centers on the formation of socialist lianhuanhua in China in the 1950s and 1960s. Lianhuanhua is a special genre of comics that was widely welcomed by urban readers in China from the early twentieth century to the mid-1980s. Aiming to reform readers into socialist subjects, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instrumentalized lianhuanhua for didacticism and propaganda. Following the Stalinist dictum of “socialist realism,” which mandated proletariat art to be “national in form and socialist in content,” lianhuanhua artists selected pictorial elements from European academic painting, folk art, and Chinese classical painting from different regions and periods in history to create an effective visual language that answered both the Party-State’s demand and urban readers’ taste. The dissertation first illustrates the CCP’s tactics for reforming the lianhuanhua industry in Shanghai in terms of production, circulation, and censorship. In the subsequent chapters, I examine three iconic lianhuanhua published by Shanghai People’s Art Press, including Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai’s Sun Wukong Thrice Beats the White-Bone Demon, He Youzhi’s Great Changes in a Mountain Village, and Ding Binzeng and Han Heping’s Railroad Guerrillas, to inquire into the following questions: What innovations and conventions were adopted by artists in the making of lianhuanhua? How have lianhuanhua artists recycled, reinterpreted, and redeployed cultures through time? How do these various reuses reflect their particular political, social, and cultural contexts? By dissecting the visual components in the lianhuanhua, I explore how socialist realism, as an aesthetico-political project, evolved and adjusted to fit the conditions in China after its introduction from the Soviet Union. The research adds to recent studies of Chinese socialist culture that question the common perception of socialist realism as a method imposed by the state and therefore is rigid, monolithic, and monotonous. In this research, I demonstrate lianhuanhua making as a complex process that involves negotiations between high politics, cultural policies, the target readers’ preferences, and artists’ understanding of their task of creating new works for a new nation.