Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Alexander Soper was one of the first who suggested that landscape representation arose in the art of China due to the steppe influence, but he set the time to the age of Han Empire (206 BC-221 CE). Soper’s opinion received systematic critics from Michael Sullivan in 1953. Sullivan admitted that certain subjects and conventions observed by Soper, such as the chase-on-horseback and the animal-combat themes could be attributable to alien influence, but the evidence was too insufficient to “to account for the wide variety of themes and styles in which we find landscape elements represented in Han art.” Instead Sullivan displayed a larger corpus of Han landscape representation in various mediums such as clay, wall, lacquer, bronze, stone as well as woven stuffs and embroideries. According to Sullivan, the examples he collected include “a group of styles whose antecedents can be traced back into the bronze décor of Shang and Chou, entirely within the Chinese tradition.” As “motifs that are directly attributable to foreign influences are relatively few”, Sullivan asserted that “the emergence of a nascent landscape style during the Han Dynasty owes little to foreign contacts”, and “the crucial stylistic evolution took place within the Chinese tradition itself.” This paper reviews the art historic discourses by Soper, Sullivan and other scholars on the birth of Chinese landscape representation.