UC San Diego

This dissertation is the first English book-length study of Jin Cheng (1878-1926). It reconstructs Jin, the leading traditionalist artist in Beijing during the early 1920s as a transnational elite whose artistic practices traversed borders of cultures, disciplines, and social sectors. Unpacking the plurality in Jin’s career and establishing the relationship between his artistic projects and other social and cultural undertakings, drawing on materials from Chinese, Japanese, and Anglophone sources, this dissertation offers an art historical and cultural historical account of the development of modern traditional-style Chinese painting in a transforming geopolitical context during the 1910s and 1920s.

This dissertation takes Jin’s multifaceted professional identities as a structuring framework to understand the intertwining relationship between Chinese art and modern political and intellectual culture. Each of the four chapters explores a different aspect of Jin’s social and cultural roles that shaped his efforts in promoting and reorganizing Chinese painting and its knowledge production. Chapter one introduces the background, the status of the field, and critical theoretical issues of the dissertation. Chapter two positions Jin as a transnational cultural elite navigating the newly formed global landscape of Chinese art stretching across the continent and the Pacific Ocean. It repositions Beijing as an evolving, cosmopolitan cultural hub in which Jin acted as a mediator between Han and Manchu officials, foreign travelers seeking for Chinese art objects and cultural objects, and the elite network in the Beiyang government. By examining the key sites and moments in the production of Chinese art knowledge and heritage preservation discourses, this chapter highlights Jin’s role as a middleman of cultural knowledge which shaped his vision of the future of Chinese painting in a globalizing world.

Chapter three and Chapter four focus on two lines of Jin’s artistic research on reorganizing traditional artistic knowledge and redefining “professional artists.” Chapter three focuses on Jin as a “copyist,” analyzing his exact copying of the "To See Large within Small" album. It argues that Jin’s copying practices were more than self-training or note-keeping, but a research method to establish professional artistic identity as a researcher of Chinese painting and specialist of Chinese culture. Chapter four examines Jin as “scientific illustrator,” exploring his late-career shift toward bird-and-flower painting and scientific illustrations. Reconstructing his unfinished project Album of a Hundred Birds as both ornithological illustrations and a modern manual of traditional bird-and-flower painting, I foreground Jin’s engagement in international scientific societies in Beijing in relation his vision of contributing to modern science with Chinese artistic techniques and aesthetic sensibilities. This chapter further reveals how scientific research of nature became integral to Jin’s ideal of a professional Chinese artist.

Chapter five reconstructs Jin Cheng as an “artist-diplomat” who, by co-organizing the first four Sino-Japanese Joint Art Exhibitions from 1921 to 1926, established a dialogic space for studying Chinese and Japanese traditionalist painting comparatively. This chapter focuses on exhibitions’ pioneering role in fostering artistic exchange and shaping a comparative cultural framework within East Asia. I argue that the Joint Exhibitions constructed a calibrated notion of “Eastern art” defined by Sino-Japanese polarity in addition to shared histories and cultural intimacy. Finally, the coda concludes how Jin’s case offers new understandings of Chinese painting as part of a cultural enlightenment project in the transitional period, which challenges the nation-based framework of art history writing and provokes cross-disciplinary conversation between modern Chinese art and cultural histories.