Page 48 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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works available for touch, display, exchange, archaeologically discovered, or capable of

being damaged.

The Material Presence of Art History’s Objects
The exhibition ignited the enthusiasm of intellectual and artistic leaders in China

for the development of a more rigorous and systematic discipline of Chinese art history.

To them, art historical research was a practice based on the careful research into real

objects. Not surprisingly, while intellectuals in China criticized certain British

conceptions of art history such as specific dates and authentications, the same viewers

and researchers were also envious of the advanced state of British art historical research.

After all, Chinese art history, as a formal discipline, was itself a field of study that

developed through a network of nineteenth-century translation and exchange. Even the

twentieth-century term “meishu” did not denote fine arts until its introduction into China

through the Japanese translation of the French term “beaux arts,” first used in Japan in the

1870s in conjunction with the Vienna Exhibition of 1873. During the nineteenth century,

“yishu ᖵஔ” referred more to skills or technique, and appeared mostly in the titles of

courses that taught Western drawing to aid the acquisition of such modern “scientific”

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skills as geometry, mechanics, geography, and chemistry. By the 1910s and 1920s,
however, emphasis shifted from mere technique to the study of art, art history, and

technique as expressions of culture. For Chinese art history specifically, the first

Western-language monograph on Chinese art was Stephen Bushell’s Chinese Art, written

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in the last decade of the Qing dynasty and published in London in 1904. Bushell’s
Chinese Art was so popular that a second edition was printed in 1910. A French

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translation appeared in Paris that same year. In 1923, Shanghai’s Commercial Press