UC San Diego

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.