Page 49 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

32

published the first edition of the Chinese translation of Bushell’s foundational book,

57
Zhongguo meishu. The Chinese translation of Chinese Art achieved the endorsement

of Cai Yuanpei, whose role in art education reform and social criticism is well known.

The book’s appearance coincided with the post-May Fourth frenzied advocacy for new

nationalist reforms in educational curricula. Dai Yue, a nationalist art historian active at

the height of calls for educational reform (by noted educators such as Cai Yuanpei), was

the translator. Bushell’s book thus created a founding text on Chinese art and provided

the basis of Chinese art historical studies in China. Ironically, Bushell’s work would not

have been possible without access to the material artifacts themselves, which he and other

Englishmen obtained from the antique market that grew out of the increasing circulation

of looted and sold objects from imperial palaces in and around Beijing at the end of the

58
nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Bushell himself based his
seminal study of Chinese art on early nineteenth-century books such as Jingdezhen Tao

lu, first published in 1815, which discussed ceramic production and was written by two

Jingdezhen residents. Despite the Jingdezhen-based nature of Bushell’s sources, the

modern academic discipline of Chinese art history - a concept based upon the implication

that each national culture had its own artistic tradition - came to China through European

works. Therefore, it is not surprising that intellectuals in China both admired and

criticized English scholarship.

Noticing that the British labeled Gallery 1 “Shang-Yin-Zhou” rather than the

usual term “Yin-Shang-Zhou,” Zhuang Shangyan declared that the British scholarship on

Chinese art was “superficial and thin.” But even though he claimed that the British were

quite “immature in matters of identification and display, such as hanging paintings too