Chinese Art History and the Modern Universal Art Museum:On the Benefits of Belatedness

Style and connoisseurship as modes of knowledge must be defended not only as the only means to understand a different visual language,but also as the basic premise of cross-cultural study in the hotchpotch of multicultural society.However,many Asian art histories,especially of the Inter-asian connections,which for a variety of different reasons are not well understood in their own countries of origin,have remained underdeveloped scholarly topics.Comparing with the study of Western art history,Chinese art history as analysis of the style and iconography of works of art is still a fledgling discipline.In applying the fundamental issues in Chinese art history to a vertical rather than horizontal conception of world art,the belatedness of Chinese art historiography,on one hand,can help us to reconstruct and understand the mental processes behind what is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant creative moments in Chinese art history on one hand;on the other hand,can offer possibilities of both universal criticism and fresh paradigms that have been sorely missing in traditional Eurocentric art historiography.