Modern transformations of visuality in late Qing China: Gong Zizhen, Ren Bonian, and Kang Youwei

摘要

Focusing on three important art and literary forms intensely involving visual images, namely, classical Chinese poetry, traditional Chinese painting, and travel writing, this thesis examines the modern transformations of visuality in the late Qing period (1800–1911). Casting doubt on the prevalent rhetorically motivated interpretation of the use of “xiang (象image/imagery)” in traditional Chinese literature and art, the study offers an alternative perspective to read those images, by drawing upon the concept of “visuality” from visual studies and interpreting the making of visual images in artworks as the subject’s literary or artistic construction of visual experience. The detailed investigations of late Qing visuality and its modern changes in the practices of poet Gong Zizhen 龔自珍(1792-1841), painter Ren Bonian任伯年 (1840-1896), and writer Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858-1927) constitute the main body of this thesis. These investigations illuminate the underlying relationships between the construction of the visual, the artist as the viewing subject, and the viewing world, as well as their interactions in the context of late Qing China. Meanwhile, new social and cultural trends were reflected in the visual practices of those artists, including the emergence of the modern subject, the rise of popular taste in art, and the Sino-Western comparative perspective on the modern West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In identifying these socio-cultural changes, this study argues that the modern transformations of visuality in late Qing China made an essential, if subtle, contribution to the shaping of modern Chinese intellectuals and the multiplicity of the Chinese modern.