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Delineations: Linearity and Its Alternatives in Chinese Painting, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century

Fri, April 1, 3:00 to 5:00pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 6th Floor, Room 616

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel investigates intersections of visual, material, and intellectual histories in early modern China. The panel’s focus will be on line and linearity, with attention to how painters of the late imperial era utilized linear forms and developed alternatives to them. For artists, particularly those of the literati elite, the linear brushstroke served as both the formative component of visual depiction and as a fundamental conceptual rubric. Critical discussions treated line as essential not only to the history of calligraphy and painting, but as the decisive criterion for the evaluation of an artist’s achievements. At the same time, artists in China employed an array of techniques for the manipulation of materials and the creation of images. Such techniques included treatment of surfaces, modulations of texture and density, arrangement of visual elements and compositional strategies to evoke pictorial space; these and other artistic techniques diverged from, or extended, the technical and theoretical discourses of linearity. While painting is the panel’s focus, all papers address concerns relevant to the study of visual and material culture in early modern East Asia. Issues for discussion include how histories of craft knowledge can be derived from visual-material evidence; the possibilities and limitations of written sources for the study of images and objects; and how new techniques and conceptions of vision, developed both within and outside of China, were used, adapted, and at times contested by artists active from the sixteenth to early twentieth century.

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