Superfluous Things——Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China/Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China
著者/Craig Clunas
  This is a book about pictures in China at a particular period in the past.It is not just about painting. One strand of the received wisdom is that much of Chinese art, sometimes defined rather narrowly as painting,reached a point 'beyond representation' at an early date, discarding an
early attachment to mimesis in favour of a self-referential attention to painting in and of itself. This is indeed the theoretical position adopted by most of the canonical artists and theorists (and it is a distinctiveness of the Chinese situation that they are frequently one and the same people) since the eleventh century. It is an account that has considerable strengths,
not least those of taking seriously statements from within Chinese culture.
 It is a necessary and salutary corrective to European accounts that view the discarding of mimesis as one of the central pillars of Modernism, to be made to realise that claims of this kind were being made in China many centuries before Paul Gzanne. But the aim of the present study is definitely not to position art in China as somehow 'really' winning the race to be 'modern' with that of Europe, a race in which China is perceived as showing great early promise only to fade in the crucial closing stages. Instead it is my aim to cast doubt on the very existence of that single, global race to the modern. Rather this book seeks to deal with some of that vast
body of Chinese picture-making and picture-viewing practices for which representation remained a central issue, indeed the principal justification for picture making at all. Some of these engagements fall within the Chinese discourse of 'painting' as historically constructed and presently sustained. Many of them do not. All need to be considered as part of a specific
historical visuality, Hal Foster's 'sight as social fact',3 although I have done no more than indicate in Chapter 4 some of the directions such an enquiry would have to take.