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The article reports on the article "Chinese Paintings at the National Library" written by Walter Benjamin in late 1937 after visiting an exhibit in Paris which was published in January 1938 in a monthly literary magazine Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle. It states that Benjamin mentions a few ideas that are central to the art of painting in China such as painting of ideas and ink games.

The Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy's 1958 brush-and-ink painting The People Eat for Free was acclaimed as an exemplary work of collective production (jiti chuangzuo) in the early People's Republic of China. Within a history of theorizing communal creativity, collective production began as a practice of populist nationalism and became the medium of participatory socialism. An examination of the multiple versions and drafts surrounding the painting reveals the contested process of collective production and renders visible intersecting forms of state, official, artistic, and mass participation, while demonstrating the experimental nature of the socialist representational project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates a transformative encounter between the Chinese artist Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895-1953) and audiences in the Soviet Union during his 1933-1934 exhibitions of Chinese art in Europe. While Xu was exchanging perspectives and addressing questions about Chinese painting, a misreading of one of his paintings sparked in him a reconsideration of content and form that eventually led to the creation of some of the earliest Socialist realist ink-and-color paintings in China. This addition to his repertoire is arguably more significant to his legacy than his most popular works because of the way it heralded the coming Socialist realist evolution in guohua (國畫 national painting) and the manner in which Xu's choices would meet the ideological needs of the Communist Party well before it secured authority over the direction of China's arts. Special attention is paid to situating Xu's personal work vis-à-vis Republican and revolutionary art and explaining how the concurrent political milieu paved the way for both the prestige of his art in popular and cultural memory and the unprecedented stature of his art education methodologies in China's revolutionary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Michael Sullivan (1916-2013) bequeathed to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum a collection of twentieth-century paintings that the museum lauds as "the single greatest private collection of contemporary Chinese art in the West" (Telegraph 2013). This essay remembers Professor Sullivan, his wife Khoan (d. 2003), and the collection that they parented over a period of almost seventy years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the introduction of photography and etymology of the terms for photography in nineteenth century China. The article discusses ways in which the Chinese believed photography to be a Western style of portrait painting, the introduction of photography to China through Hong Kong following the first Opium War and the practice of retouching photographs or adding calligraphy. The article goes on to discusses the sense of wonder suggested in the terms the Chinese used to describe photography, including the use of the word for mirror, and the speed of photography relative to portrait painting.

The article discusses the importance of scale as an artistic device, noting that artworks are scaled according to a predetermined rule or a standard of judgment. The relationship between an artistic work's capacity to communicate a specific agenda and the way it uses scale is discussed. The author pays special attention to the social and political implications of the scale used in art through examples of 20th-century Chinese paintings, with particular focus paid to a large painting depicting Mount Yandang by the artist Pan Tianshou.

In 1970, Shi Lu (1919–82) created a group of paintings while suffering from a schizophrenic condition; they were the first paintings he worked on after his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. These historical and pathological circumstances have formed a blind spot shifting the paintings outside the scope of art-historical analysis. This essay pulls them back into the context of artistic and intellectual discourse of Maoist China by reading the paintings and inscriptions not as notations of ‘madness’, but primarily as artistic statements. The paintings are not only expressions of psychological and political stress, but reflect a cosmopolitan worldview that is informed by the Soviet model and the artist's experience of travelling to India and Egypt, as well as cultural events and debates, and political conflicts. These multi-faceted images thus condense a broad scope of cultural and ideological discourses of Maoist China before and during the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]