Language and Chinese Art History

Mingyu Hu
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Abstract

I would like to offer a consciously partial reflection, based on personal practice, on the teaching of Chinese art history at two universities, hoping it may lead to more general discussions. When I taught art history at the University of Glasgow (2008–11) and the University of Leeds (2015–17), I sometimes showed, in historiography and methodology classes, two uncaptioned landscapes and asked students for educated guesses on the dates and for their reasoning (figs 1 and 2). Always, the first was judged to have been painted earlier (because it was ‘more classical’) and the second, later (because it was ‘more modern’). Both landscapes were painted in the first half of the twentieth century by Huang Binhong黃賓虹 (1865–1955), the ‘more modern’ one predating the other. Designed to unsettle teleological assumptions of a linear, progressive stylistic evolution (and of the notion of stylistic evolution altogether), this exercise moved on to a probing into the poverty of our vocabulary. Simply by utilising ‘modern’ as a description, one situates an image in contextually charged terms, at once loaded and vacant. And so we experimented with ways of discussing the two Huang Binhongs. For instance, can we analyse by way of brushwork or pictorial space? What are the implicit references when we look at space in these landscapes, as opposed to space in a Constable, a C ezanne, or a Hockney? In doing so, we were obliged to pay attention to the very language with which to think, because, as quickly became salient, we thought in given lexical settings, and our ways of looking were (at least partly) linguistically conditioned. This three-way investigation of looking, thinking, and speaking as it happened, teasing out the limits of our language and those of our perception, through art historical debates no less, was a Wittgensteinian moment lived. To glimpse a different fly-bottle, so to speak, I then gave translated examples of writings on landscape painting by artists in eleventhand seventeenth-century China, where a sophisticated system of rhetoric was mobilised to picture the picturing of the world. If the students wondered, then yes, these artists wrote and theorised; they were critics, connoisseurs, historians, and collectors at the same time as they were painters, calligraphers, and poets. Such a mention in passing was my preferred way of bringing into evidence that art history as a history of writing did not begin with Vasari, as students are often taught and as we are supposed to ‘put to rights’, the raison d’̂etre for
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语言与中国艺术史
我想在个人实践的基础上,有意识地对两所大学的中国艺术史教学进行部分反思,希望能引发更多的一般性讨论。当我在格拉斯哥大学(2008-2011)和利兹大学(2015-17)教授艺术史时,我有时会在史学和方法论课上展示两幅未经选择的风景画,并要求学生对日期进行有根据的猜测和推理(图1和图2)。通常,第一幅画被认为画得更早(因为它“更古典”),第二幅画则画得更晚(因为它更现代”)。这两幅风景画都是黄宾虹在二十世纪上半叶画的黃賓虹 (1865-1955),“更现代”的一个早于另一个。本练习旨在颠覆线性、渐进式文体进化(以及文体进化概念)的目的论假设,进而探究我们词汇的贫乏。简单地使用“现代”作为描述,就可以将图像置于充满上下文的术语中,既有负载又有空闲。因此,我们尝试了讨论两个黄宾虹的方法。例如,我们可以用笔触还是用图像空间来分析?当我们观察这些风景中的空间时,与康斯特布尔、埃赞尼或霍克尼的空间相比,隐含的参考是什么?在这样做的过程中,我们必须注意思考的语言,因为随着语言的突出,我们在特定的词汇环境中思考,我们的思维方式(至少部分)受到语言的制约。这种对所发生的观察、思考和说话的三方调查,通过艺术历史辩论,梳理出我们语言和感知的局限性,无疑是维特根斯坦式的生活。可以说,为了看到一个不同的飞瓶,我举了17世纪中国艺术家关于风景画的作品的翻译例子,在那里,一个复杂的修辞系统被动员起来描绘世界。如果学生们想知道,那么是的,这些艺术家们进行了写作和理论化;他们是批评家、鉴赏家、历史学家和收藏家,同时也是画家、书法家和诗人。顺便提及这一点是我更喜欢的方式,以证明艺术史作为写作史并不是从瓦萨里开始的,因为学生们经常被教导,我们应该“纠正”瓦萨里
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