Jiachen Liu

The term realism has multiple meanings in the study of pictures. Roughly speaking, it concerns both what pictures depict—that is, “realism-what”—and how pictures depict, or “realism-how.” Realism-what reflects a particular interest in the selection of a picture’s subject matter, which is self-consciously championed by the 19th-century Realist school of painting but can also be found throughout the history of art. Realism-how, on the other hand, deals with a special way of depiction that is characterized by the accuracy and informativeness of pictures. Although both of these aspects of realism are of historical and theoretical interest, but it is realism-how that has received more attention in the philosophical discussion and is considered a central topic in the philosophy of pictorial representation within the analytic tradition. There are three widely accepted features of pictorial realism, as I shall call it. First, pictorial realism is a property that can be attributed to individual pictures, pictorial systems, styles, genres, and techniques. It makes perfect sense to say that the Mona Lisa is a realistic picture and color photography is a pictorial system that is realistic. Second, realism is comparative and a matter of degree. For example, arguably, Picasso’s last self-portrait (1972) is less realistic than his first (1896). Third, realism can be relative in the sense that the judgment of realism can vary due to different factors, such as cultural conventions, contexts of use, etc. In the contemporary literatures, there are at least three kinds of theories of pictorial realism: resemblance theories, information theories, and habituation theories. Both resemblance theories and information theories spell out pictorial realism in terms of the depiction of properties. The difference is that resemblance theories appeal to the concept of resemblance, or the sharing of properties between pictures and their subjects, whereas information theories focus on how the properties a picture depicts its subject as having can convey information about its subject. Nelson Goodman rejects both kinds of theories and proposes instead the habituation theory, which claims that realism is just a matter of familiarity or habituation. There are also accounts of pictorial realism that are hard to categorize which appeal to perception and make-believe theories but are closely related to one or other of these kinds of theories in various ways.

Since its emergence in the 1950s, analytic aesthetics has become the mainstream approach to aesthetics in the English-speaking world, and it has subsequently spread throughout most of the world, including mainland China. Although it was introduced into the Chinese academic world at an early time, around the late 1950s, and has been disseminated and researched in China over the past three decades, analytic aesthetics remains underdeveloped in China. Chinese academics tend to have little familiarity with, and exposure to, analytic approaches to aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, given this situation, Chinese contributions to analytic aesthetics have had a marginal impact on the international academic discussion. This paper aims at providing a picture of the development of analytic aesthetics in China. In section 1, I clarify the scope of the paper. Section 2 briefly introduces aesthetics in China so as to outline the context for our discussion about analytic aesthetics. In section 3, I first offer a brief historical narrative of the dissemination and reception of analytic aesthetics in China, and then explore how analytic aesthetics has been researched and taught in China.