Abstract

How do we understand Chinese scholar painting, which comes from a different tradition, a different culture of reading and producing works? My thesis addresses this hermeneutic problem by examining the philosophical background to Chinese and Western conceptions of the artist, the work, the reader and the history of painting, and contrasting examples of Chinese and Western painting. I use the concept of subjectivity as a bridge to Chinese scholar painting, which the tradition itself understands as "images of the mind." While the understanding of subjectivity as inwardness and the movement of mind is common to both traditions, cultivating and realizing one's subjectivity by embracing the past is not. This difference underlies the unique importance of "imitation" to Chinese scholar painting as a form of self-expression. ;I trace the transition from representational to non-representational painting in the Yuan to the aesthetics of self-manifestation, relating it to the Confucian notion of self-cultivation as the basis of cosmic order and creativity. This aesthetics extended to painting only when painting began to liberate itself from the function of capturing the verisimilitude of things. Su Shi, the Song literatus, introduced two pivotal ideas: only non-verisimilar painting could capture the dynamic principle and reality of things and the sketch aesthetics of quick brushwork was ideally suited to the task. ;Defining painting as a "practice", I argue that self-expression in the Chinese context should be understood as doing something in order to become a certain kind of person. Moreover, self-cultivation sets constraints on the range of subjects, emotions and moods that count as self-expression. This creates a new demand for painting to embody, to reflect, and to present within itself the movement of the heart/mind. The quest for a medium sensitive to the dynamic object of presentation was found in the integration of calligraphic brushwork into painting. The brushwork of calligraphy, with its well developed hermeneutic of personality allowed the artist to convey meaning through gesture and readers to read the painter's true self from his painting