CAA Annual Conference
Chaired by Fong-fong Chen, Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University - fongnfong09@gmail.com

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed frequent cross-cultural exchange between Chinese and non-Chinese artists. Their artistic training, their presence in and exposure to their home and foreign lands, and their engagement with local and cross-cultural contexts shaped their life experiences, artmaking, philosophies, and aesthetics. Landscape painting is one of the major genres in East Asian and Euramerican art. While Western landscape traditions are largely realist, Chinese landscape (shanshui) paintings can be rendered in either fine-brush or free-hand styles for more naturalistic or expressive effects. The materials, tools, and techniques reflect these distinct artistic styles and cultures. By problematizing the conception of “Chinese” art, this panel invites papers to discuss the role of transnational memory in the representation of landscape by Chinese diaspora artists and non-Chinese artists in China. We will investigate questions including, but not limited to, the following: How have travel, education and personal encounters inspired Chinese artists, and how have they incorporated Japanese or Euramerican ideas and techniques into their art? To what extent have interactions—physical movement, cultural appropriation, and translation of ideas—between Chinese and non-Chinese artists contributed to the formation and transformation of modern Chinese art? How have artists transcended the boundaries of individual and collective memory and brought transnational memory into their works? To what extent were concepts, writings, and images translatable and how were these relationships created and mediated within the art worlds in China?