As prices for contemporary art from China rocket in a newly globalised art market, it is a good time to think about an earlier generation of Chinese artists who set out to make Chinese art ‘modern’ in the early twentieth century.

This lecture will look at the debates about what might be taken as ‘modern art’ in the Chinese context, and at how the arguments of the past continue to shape the ways in which art is made and viewed in China today.

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Professor Craig Clunas
Craig Clunas is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford.

Born in Aberdeen, he studied Chinese at Cambridge and in Beijing in the last years of the Cultural Revolution, before graduate studies at London University.

He has been a curator of Chinese art at the V&A Museum, and taught art history at the universities of Sussex and Chicago, as well as at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

He is the author of many books on China’s art and culture, including Superfluous Things: Social Status and Material Culture in Early Modern China (1991), Art in China (1997), Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (1997), and most recently Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (2007).

Venue: Wolfson Lecture Theatre
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE)
22-26 George Street
Edinburgh
EH2 2PQ