| 摘要: | 研究期間：10108~10207;It is commonly assumed that the print media played an important role in the process of Chinese modernization and enlightenment. Print gave a broader range of readers access to knowledge and enable generations to build on the intellectual realizations of earlier ones. While print embodies all form of printed text, as well as printed forms of visual communication, the latter has been relatively overlooked by print culture scholars, as if word were the only appropriate vehicle for transmission of knowledge. Nowadays, we believe that man-made images are not only able to convey knowledge, but also are able to alter and articulate our visual habits, which in turn will give shape to our visual experiences. This project aims at exploring early Chinese pictorials which flourished after the advent of new mechanical image reproduction technologies in late nineteenth century. This project benefits from recent reprint of early Chinese pictorials, ranging from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid twentieth. With addition of the earlier reprint of Dianshizhai Pictorial, they constitute an almost all-encompassing, though certainly not exhaustive, database waiting for investigations. This project will focus on three issues: First, how the largely present botanical and zoological images in illustrated pictorials, and also in school teaching and exhibition practices, helped to convey the positive value of realistic pictorial style, which will become a crucial argument in the 1920’s artistic debates; Second, how the images of landscape and monuments, both Chinese and foreign, helped to articulate a formulation of national and cultural identity; Third, before and after the use of image printing technologies capable of simulating continuous tone, for instance photoengraving and collotype, how the reproduction of images of works of art, both Chinese and Western, worked on the public perception of art, and what were the preferred class of visual skills specially relevant to the perception of works of art? This project intends to investigate on the above mentioned issues, in a loosely defined way of visual culture studies. |
