Plurality of Chinese Modern Art

In my project, I am investigating why and how the concept and techniques of Western art have been indigenized and appropriated by Chinese artists since 1900. I discuss in detail the unpopularity of abstract art in China through analysis of aesthetic philosophies as well as social and economic conditions. Instead of looking at the development of Chinese modern art from a Western perspective, I provide an alternative narrative presenting a complicated Sinicized modernism that was formed in China. I conclude that even though Chinese modernism was heavily in debt to Western modernism and shared some commonalities with modernist localization in other regions such as Japan, Taiwan and India, the specific cultural and political contexts of early twentieth-century China determined the particular methods and strategies employed by Chinese artists to successfully modernize China and Chinese traditional art. By considering the plurality of Chinese modernism, my study offers a model and starting point for further evaluation of twentieth-century Chinese artists and their work