Professor Katharine Burnett’s newly released article “Contemporaneity in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, Theory, and Criticism” has been published in the latest issue of Ming Studies (Volume 2023, Issue 88, pp. 3-33).

Burnett explores the notion of originality in seventeenth-century Chinese painting. She notes that Chinese painting has often been considered timeless and unchanging, an art reliant on the copying of the ancients, and thereby forever reiterative. Closer inspection of the art, theory, and criticism, especially of the seventeenth century, however, challenges these notions. When time and again we see artists referring to the works of earlier acclaimed painters but yet transforming them—or even subverting them—Burnett asks what values are being promoted. In her essay, she argues that a shift occurred in painting criticism and practice from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, that seventeenth-century critical values emphasized the contemporary, new, and different, and that this resulted in an expanded canon of painting.

Read the full article here.