Xu Wei's 'Zahua': A study of genres (China).

摘要

This dissertation explores an overlooked yet critical issue in the history of art: Xu Wei's (1521--93) use of the special pictorial genre to which he applies the genre-label za (miscellaneous). This interesting genre-label leads us to Xu Wei's criticism of the classification system of art and culture in his day. In brief, za is to be seen as the antithesis of jidacheng (the "great synthesis"); za is heterodox and jidacheng is always orthodox in the Chinese context. The two kinds thus function as two extreme modes of cultural and artistic reorganization. Za can be regarded as a kind of "cultural miscegenation," whereas jidacheng is a kind of "cultural endogamy" within the network of canonical families.; Cultural battles between them start in the Warring States Period (ca. 403--221 BCE) in philosophical debates and then gradually extend into the exegesis of the Classics and into the field of literature. In the mid-Ming (around the 16th century), the art of painting becomes the final battlefield between za and jidacheng, in the form of "genre and counter-genre": the zahua (miscellaneous flowers and plants) genre versus the mountain-and-water (landscape) genre. Xu Wei reshapes the zahua genre and in so doing launches a frontal attack on classicism in the genres that aim for jidacheng . Through a new style and composition, Xu Wei presents a seriocomic social and aesthetic criticism and, by the same token, a new vision of a society, one in which multiple voices can make themselves heard, opening a new forum for later Individualist artists. Because of the nature of Xu Wei's art, it is natural to take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Artistic and cultural reorganizations happen everyday and everywhere, and Xu Wei's work, which reveals subtle clues hidden in the complex inherited classification systems of his time, enables us to see how diverse cultural currents conflict, separate, or merge within a shared context.