FAH262H1 Chap.8 Late Qing China and Early Colonial Korea
Late Qing China and Early Colonial Korea
The span of Week 8
The syllabus titles the week Late-Qing to Early Republican China and Early Colonial Korea and dates it from about 1842 to about 1926. The key-term list fixes the Chinese side with the late Qing, about 1842 to 1911, closed by the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, followed by a Qing-Republican transition.
Two regional names anchor the painting: the Shanghai School of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Ren Xiong, Xu Gu, Ren Bonian and Wu Changshuo, and the Lingnan or Cantonese School of Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng.
Joan Kee writes that Shanghai had drawn a large class of professional painters since the middle of the nineteenth century, painters keen to absorb anything new.
A Korean painter between court and colony
Kee's essay on Ko Hui-dong is the main reading.
Ko, born in 1886 into a prominent family of court interpreters, studied Western painting in Tokyo from 1909 to 1915, the years in which Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910. His three surviving self-portraits are usually praised as Korea's first oil paintings by a Korean, and Kee asks a sharper question: what did being contemporary mean when Japan's empire defined modern time as forward progress and cast Korea as the past?
She reads each portrait as a different answer, from defensive flatness to costume to uncomfortable exposure. In 1918 he founded the Calligraphy and Painting Association, the first professional artists' group in Korea, and around 1925 he went back to ink painting for good.
Cai Yuanpei and the purpose of art
The primary reading for annotation is Cai Yuanpei's essay on replacing religion with aesthetic education.
The syllabus dates it 1917 and the Week 8 reading list gives 1919, so state the source with the year. For context, cite how Andrews and Shen, the optional reference, describe Cai: back from philosophy studies in Leipzig in 1911, he made aesthetic education a pillar of his educational program, claimed Kant as his authority, and by the late 1920s had helped found national art schools in Beijing and Hangzhou.
At the opening of the Beijing Art School early in the 1920s, Cai contrasted Chinese painters' attention to brushwork with Western painters' concern for volume, light and shading.
Japan's hand in Chinese art history
Andrews and Shen argue that the first modern histories of Chinese art owed a forgotten debt to Japanese scholarship.
Late Qing schools taught drawing as a practical skill, often with Japanese instructors, and when art colleges needed a history of Chinese painting in the 1920s, teachers adapted Japanese textbooks. The Japanese account condemned late Qing orthodoxy as decline while praising earlier court painting, and Chinese reformers used that story of decline to argue for renewal.
After the Japanese attacks of 1931 and 1932, they note, mentioning the debt became unfashionable, which is why it was forgotten.
Their central case is Pan Tianshou's 1926 history, a close adaptation of a 1913 Japanese book; Zheng Wuchang's 1929 history marks the point where Chinese authors began building on that base.
A third reading on dress and empire
The Week 8 reading list adds, as Part III, Ikeda Shinobu on Japanese paintings of women in Chinese dress.
Ikeda argues that in interwar Japan pictures of Japanese women dressed in Chinese clothes stood for China as a colonial and gendered Other. Read beside Kee, it shows dress doing political work on both sides of the empire: Ko chose an old Korean aristocrat's hat to resist being filed as the past, while Japanese painters used Qing costume to file China there.
Ikeda's central example is Fujishima Takeji's Toyo-buri, shown in 1923, whose so-called Chinese dress was in fact a Manchu costume of the Qing past. She reads it as exposing a rift between Western style, Chinese costume and Japanese body rather than fusing East and West.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Late Qing China and the Xinhai Revolution of 1911
- 02
The Shanghai School and the Lingnan School
- 03
Ko Hui-dong's three self-portraits
- 04
Oil painting as a yardstick of modernity
- 05
Cai Yuanpei and aesthetic education
- 06
Japanese models for Chinese art education and art history
- 07
Women in Chinese dress in interwar Japanese painting
Worked example · free
Read Ko Hui-dong's graduation self-portrait against its setting
- 2Set the scene: the school required a graduation self-portrait, and Ko's mostly Japanese classmates showed themselves in Western jackets or haori against plain grounds.
- 2Describe Ko's choices: a three-tiered horsehair hat once limited to aristocrats, a royal blue jacket, a background tinted like portrait silk, the face partly in shadow.
- 2Interpret: the deliberate anachronism recalls a sovereign Korea and resists the colonial habit of treating Koreans as a people of the past, while also claiming a rank above his chungin birth.
Key terms
- Shanghai School
- The nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting circle of Shanghai, named in the key terms with Ren Xiong, Xu Gu, Ren Bonian and Wu Changshuo.
- Lingnan School
- The Cantonese painting school of the Qing-Republican transition, led in the key terms by Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng.
- Aesthetic Education
- Cai Yuanpei's program, meiyu, announced in a 1912 speech, which separated art from utility and treated cultivated taste as spiritual training for citizens.
- Nationalist Drag
- Kee's label for wearing dress clearly tied to one nation to declare allegiance, applied to Ko Hui-dong's Choson hat in 1915.
- Hyondae Misul
- A Korean term from the early 1920s for art of the present, used for both modern and contemporary art and shaped by Japanese gendai bijutsu.
Late Qing China and Early Colonial Korea FAQ
Who was the first Korean to paint in oils?
Ko Hui-dong is usually named, for self-portraits from his Tokyo years. Kee notes that some historians point to Chi Un-yong, who studied oil painting in Shanghai, and Yi Chong-ch'an, who trained in the United States.
Why was Ko Hui-dong's Self Portrait with Fan hidden for decades?
Ko never exhibited it or hung it at home. It surfaced only in 1972, when relatives prepared to sell the family house, and its poor condition suggests long storage.
What did Pan Tianshou borrow for his History of Chinese Painting?
His 1926 textbook followed the 1913 Japanese history by Nakamura Fusetsu and Oga Seiun, including its periods, and almost a quarter of his illustrations came from the Japanese book.
Exam move
Lay Ko Hui-dong's three self-portraits side by side and write two lines each on dress and on the handling of light, then add one sentence linking his Tokyo training to the Japanese models described by Andrews and Shen.
