China and the West in the Art of the 19th Century: A Cultural and Historical Review of the Relations between Painting and Photography

The story of China from the late Qing (1644-1911) to the early years of the Republic established in 1912 is one of Empire, wars within and without, great social and economic shifts and deep cultural transformations, particularly in art, culture and photography. A review of the relations between painting and photography in China reveals as much about ancient China’s artistic expressions as derived from the philosophical “glorification” of nature and harmony of the human “spirit”1 as it does about the early beginnings of Sino-foreign crosscultural contacts. This paper will show that by the time of the Republic two artistic genres, the old and ancient art of traditional Chinese painting; and the new, innovative technical art of photography pioneered a mutual interrelationship between stylistic and compositional procedures - a progression of transformations that from the start proved to be extremely lively and challenging. The development of photography in China and its attendant relations to the artistic foundations of both East and West, dates back, not just to around the time of the opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century (wherein a defeated China was forced to reckon with one hundred years of foreign encroachment on Chinese soil), but even earlier, especially, with the opening up in 1757 of the only port open to foreigners, the southern port city of Guangzhou (Canton) a city that bore witness to the some of the earliest artistic cross-cultural interactions, a ‘contaminatio’ between East and West. This paper begins with an introduction to some of the early cultural contacts between East and West; then it reflects upon the relationships that the West willingly established in China after the invention of photography when Western artists came to work in the city ports; and finally it looks at the cultural origins of Chinese painting, the discovery of photography in China, and evidence of cross-fertilization between both artistic expressions