"Chinese Painting Studies Narratives"

Rick Vinograd, Christensen Professor in Asian Art, Stanford University, examines how the study of Chinese painting changes over time as scholars' interests and approaches have shifted. He compares two seminal works, James Cahill's Chinese Painting of 1960, which was a major signpost in late 20th century Chinese painting studies, and Craig Clunas's Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, first published in 1997. Even a brief comparison of the two books reveals horizons of interest and approach so divergent as to suggest radically changed, if not fundamentally different, scholarly enterprises. Vinograd illuminates those differences by looking at their constitutive narratives — not only their explicit subjects, storylines, and expositions, but their unspoken, overarching and underlying, metanarrative structures.