Originally delivered in 2012 as the 61st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Chinese Painting and Its Audiences advances an argument that might at first appear counterintuitive: “Chinese painting” as a subject is unknowable, or at least any attempt to generalize about what it means, in terms however tentative, would be missing the point. Instead, Craig Clunas charts how the parameters of “Chinese painting” were circumscribed by viewers and audiences, and by historical actors who all shared stakes in defining what it was. Hence the palpable tension in the title: Chinese painting in the singular, and its audiences.
Chapter 1, “Beginning and Ending,” places the emergence of “Chinese painting” as a viable discursive subject around the year 1550, when a number of paintings produced by Ming court artists were assembled and adapted into the Safavid Album owned by...
