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Abstract

My dissertation project is centred on the artistic interaction between China, Paris and Vienna in the early 20th century. Academic studies have generally agreed that Asian modernism was affiliated with European modernism. Based on this consensus, scholars have cast Asian artists as the recipients of modern European art. My project challenges this argument by studying the interplay of spatial orders, communication systems and the dynamic mobility of art and artists in this time period. In my research, I found an interactive relationship between Europe and Asia in which it was not only Europeans who influenced Asians, but Asians also inspired Europeans. Each learnt equally from the other, and the formation of modernism was built upon this cultural exchange. Through tracing the circulation of various artworks and artistic ideas between China, Paris and Vienna, this research seeks to clarify artists’ underlying strategies of applying exotic cultures, the strong interaction of artistic languages, and the coexistence of values of understanding modern art. According to the instability and complexity of culture, the dissertation’s structure follows two artistic threads "drawings" and "decorative art" in order to analyze from a micro perspective. In the end, this research intends to demonstrate that the invention of modernism was an entangled and complex process based on cultural mobility.