“I like both oil painting and Chinese ink and wash painting. But if one uses the oil painting criteria to appreciate Chinese ink and wash painting, then I am afraid things will go wrong.” These words are from Yang Jiechi (杨洁篪), China’s minister of foreign affairs. Yang used this analogy while answering a question about mutual understanding between China and the West by a US journalist.

In China, “oil painting” is used as a synonym for Western style painting, since this technique wasn’t known in China before it was introduced to the country by representatives from the West. An ongoing exposition at Beijing’s Capital Museum (首都博物馆) entitled “Matteo Ricci: An Ambassador of Sino-Western Science, Technology and Culture” is dedicated to the man who, among other things, first brought the oil painting technique to China during the sixteenth century.

Taken too strictly, Yang’s statement could be interpreted as the expression of a cultural essentialism, which wouldn’t fit with a long history of exchanges and mutual borrowings. Artists like Giuseppe Castiglione and Xu Beihong (徐悲鸿), to mention just two famous names, illustrate the fact that Western techniques can very well accommodate themselves to the Chinese tradition.

The same is true for modern and contemporary China in general. The country has massively absorbed both Western ideologies and technologies in a conscious move to modernize itself and catch up with the West. Inevitably this has led to big transformations. But this doesn’t mean China has become a Western country.

Yang Jiechi as the representative of a party that has been leading the development of  its country by juggling between two Western ideologies, communism and capitalism, reminds us that history matters. He reminds us that each country has its own way and history, whose knowledge are indispensable for a true understanding.

Video of Yang Jiechi’s talk with English simultaneous translation

Chinese source: 杨洁篪:坚持原则与立场强硬是两码事

At its best, art can be a reflection about any aspect of  life. In a more and more technology-dependent society, the arts and entertainment can bring meaning,  fantasy, relief, etc. to what could otherwise be perceived as the cold logic of science and technology.  The particularity about the relationship between art and technology, is that technology can be the subject as well as the support of  a work of art.

At technological China, we follow how technology is treated and used in the arts and entertainment in China.

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