Die Vorlesung findet in deutscher und englischer Sprache statt. Sprach- und Schriftkenntnisse des Chinesischen sind von Vorteil, für die Teilnahme an der Vorlesung jedoch nicht obligatorisch. Der Verlaufsplan und die erweiterte Literaturliste werden zu Semesterbeginn bereitgestellt. Ausgewählte Lektüren bilden Arbeitsgrundlage und Diskussionsschwerpunkt des thematisch vertiefenden Seminars „Lesen zwischen Zeilen und Linien: Kunstgeschichtsschreibungen der chinesischen Kalligrafie“ bzw. des Projektseminars „‚Schriftkultur und Schreibkunst in Ostasien: Magie, Mythos und Metasprache der Moderne‘, Projektseminar in Kooperation mit dem Museum für Asiatische Kunst zur Vorbereitung einer Themenausstellung im Humboldt Forum“ im Master-Modul Forschung am Objekt (Ostasien). close

The lecture is held in German and English language. Knowledge of the Chinese language is of advantage yet not mandatory for participation. A course syllabus and extended list of readings will be provided at the beginning of the semester. Selected readings form a working basis for the concurrent seminar “Reading Between Lines and Lineages: Art Historiographies of Chinese Calligraphy,” conceived as an intensive reading course expanding on thematic and methodological issues, as well as the concurrent project seminar, “‘Text Cultures and the Art of Writing in East Asia: Magic, Myth, and Meta-Language of the Modern Era,’ Project Seminar in Cooperation with the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Preparation of a Thematic Exhibition at the Humboldt Forum,” both within the module “Object-Based Research (East Asia).” close

The lecture offers an expansive introduction to the art historical genre and discursive field of Chinese calligraphy (Zhongguo shufa). The so denoted culture-specific phenomenon, which grounds itself in a culture of writing handed down over three millennia in China, and has found historical manifestation as well as continuous transformation through distinctive material, technical, and aesthetic frameworks, is in fact captured only deficiently, moreover misleadingly, in its common translation as “beautiful writing” (derived from the Greek kallo´s [beauty]; gra´phein [to write]). Shufa – lit. the “methods of writing” – first and foremost designate the various types and styles of written script as developed prominently through the brush-and-ink practices of scholar-officials and literati (wenren) in imperial China. Besides their inherent interconnections with the further classical genres of Chinese poetry and painting, the artistic expressive forms of Chinese script and cultural techniques of writing fulfill extensive complex functions fundamentally entwined with the identitary construction and negotiation of ideological-normative systems of value and knowledge. The choice of plural perspectives, as referenced in the lecture’s title, is thus grounded in the incentive to carve out and highlight, in the Chinese context, the manifold effective realms of these entanglements across time and space: of written text, textual script, scriptural image, pictorial script etc.; whose multi-layered and polyvalent nature carry far-reaching implications, e.g. of somaesthetic, characterological, power-political, socio- and religio-cultural significance.

The art- and culture-historical diversity, moreover disjunctivity, that have found and continue to find embodiment through various forms of art history writing (e.g. in form of art-theoretical treatises and art-critical essays; inscriptions, colophons, and seals on artworks; academic publications; contemporary exhibition narratives) likewise provoke a plurality of methodological perspectives. Rather than a stringently-linear chronological approach (suggesting the exhaustive, teleological account of a supposedly unique, uniform “Art History of Chinese Calligraphy”), the lecture is based on an exemplary, case study-based approach that aims, in particular, to identify dissonances, frictions and fractures, and herewith related processes of transformation in the discourse. It is through considering these processes that we are able to constitute a more complete art- and culture-historical understanding of “Chinese calligraphy” as an overall phenomenon, in all its complexity and mutability: as continuous dynamic processes of transmitting and negotiating “art” and “history” itself; whose (re)inscriptions and (re)inventions across time and space moreover narrate the pluralized arts and histories of “Chinese calligraphy.”

Following from a familiarization with essential techniques and materials, script types and script styles as well as aesthetic terms of the genre, and likewise the genre-specific vocabulary and toolkit used to describe and analyze calligraphic artworks, themes and complexes addressed in the lecture include: genealogies of “masters” and “masterpieces”; rite, body, and vessel (qi); calligraphy writing as mnemonic and meliorative self-practice; modular systems and cosmological analogy; phenomena of technical reproduction–historical transmission–artistic transformation as an overall historical continuum; epigraphy and antiquarianism; cultural nostalgia and reinvention through the past; canonical ruptures; modernization, internationalization, transculturation; semiotics, intermediality, translation; collecting and displaying, (re)narrations and (re)constructions in the exhibition space; centers and peripheries, minority discourses, identity discourses; global art history writing. In the manner of case studies, representative artworks, artifacts, artists and further actors pertaining to calligraphy discourse of different times and spaces are introduced and discussed in the historical contexts of their respective thematic frames; among these, both ones of well-established name and ones of lesser or hitherto unknown name. close

Gordon S. Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China (British Museum Press 2002); Gu¨nther Debon, Grundbegriffe der chinesischen Schrifttheorie und ihre Verbindung zu Dichtung und Malerei (Steiner 1978); Wen C. Fong/Robert E. Harrist, Jr., The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliot Collection at Princeton (The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999); Wen C. Fong/Zhongshi Ouyang, Chinese Calligraphy (Yale University Press 2008); Roger Goepper, Shu-p’u: Der Traktat zur Schriftkunst des Sun Kuo-t’ing (Steiner 1974); Maxwell K. Hearn, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (Yale University Press 2013); Shao-Lan Hertel, “Deterritorializing Chinese Calligraphy: Wang Dongling and Martin Wehmer’s ‘Visual Dialogue’ (2010),” The Journal of Transcultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2020): 113–149; Shao-Lan Hertel, “Creating Academic-Museal Dialogue In-Between Ivory Towers and Unwritten Pages: Tsinghua University Art Museum and Its Collection of Chinese Contemporary Calligraphy,” Cahiers d'Histoire 37, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 93–137; Birgit Hopfener, “Tradition and Transmission: Shifting Epistemologies and (Art-)Historical Grounds of Contemporary Art’s Relationship to the Past,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2/3 (2019): 187–206; Kim Karlsson/Alexandra von Przychowski, ed., Magie der Zeichen: 3000 Jahre chinesische Schriftkunst (Scheidegger & Spiess 2015); Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Calligraphy: Its Aesthetic Dimension and Social Function,” Orientations 17, no. 10 (1986): 35–50; Mathias Obert, „Leibliche Mimesis und Selbstsorge in den chinesischen Ku¨nsten des Pinsels“, in Fabian Heubel/Marcus Schmücker, ed., Dimensionen der Selbstkultivierung: Beiträge des Forums für Asiatische Philosophie (Alber 2013): 396–426; Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books & Inscriptions. With an Afterword by Edward L. Shaughnessy. 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press 2004); Yueh-ping Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Routledge Curzon 2005). close