Between Scroll and Ruin: Tradition, Iconoclasm and the Making of Art in China
To ask "What is art in China?" is to walk into a space, where different centuries speak at once: brush and ink whisper from paper, oil paint declares revolution from a museum wall, unreadable characters drift like ghosts across hanging scrolls and a broken urn insists on being looked at again. The question is not neutral. It cuts through the histories of empire, revolution, censorship and global markets. Rather than searching for a single, timeless definition, I argue that in modern and contemporary China art is best understood as a field shaped by two persistent tensions: the negotiation between tradition and modernity and the conflict between destruction and the preservation of cultural heritage, a conflict that is itself entangled with state power and ideology. To make these tensions concrete, I focus on four works from the twentieth century: Qi Baishi’s ink shrimp paintings, Dong Xiwen’s "The Founding Ceremony of the Nation" (1953), Xu Bing’s "Book from the Sky" (1987–91) and Ai Weiwei’s "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (1995). Seen together, they sketch not a single coherent story, but a layered history, of how "art in China" has been defined, controlled and challenged.
When we start from the notion of tradition, it soon becomes clear that it is more than a record of what once was, because tradition actively organizes our current ways of thinking and acting, influencing, which practices we repeat, modify or abandon. To see, how tradition operates as an active force rather than a static inheritance, we can turn to the work of one of modern China’s most celebrated painters. Qi Baishi6 (1864–1957) offers a particularly fitting place to begin. Born into a poor peasant household in Hunan, he rose to prominence in Republican China and the early People’s Republic through his seemingly simple ink paintings of crabs, insects, vegetables and, above all, shrimp (Figure 1). At first glance, a scroll with a few translucent shrimps floating in pale ink seems modest. Yet its elegance is grounded in the literati heritage: calligraphic brushwork, a deliberately limited palette and the dialogue between painting, inscription and seal. Nevertheless, Qi’s shrimps are not naturalistic studies, but performances of the hand. Through the interplay of wet and dry strokes, the brush conjures shell and flesh in only a few gestures: wetter, more saturated lines suggest the slick translucency of the carapace, while drier, textured marks imply the fibrous interior and the tension of the limbs (Figure 2). Moreover, the unpainted paper bears as much visual weight as the inked passages, so that empty space functions not as a background, but as water, atmosphere and interval, allowing the eye to complete the form and giving the shrimp a sense of movement and life.
Furthermore, what confers its specifically modern status, however, is the social and institutional apparatus within which it is situated. Interestingly, Qi is not a scholar-official painting informally for a circle of friends in retirement. Instead, he is a professional artist operating within an urban art market, his works circulating through exhibitions, commercial galleries and private collections. So, tradition here is not a static inheritance but a brand, a flexible visual and cultural code that can be replayed, repackaged and re-marketed for new audiences. In this context, art is defined as the extension of literati visual values - brushwork, restraint, the union of image and text - into a modern, urban art world shaped by markets, exhibitions and state institutions. It is therefore a survival of older forms, but also a transformation, as those forms are refunctioned to negotiate questions of identity, taste and cultural legitimacy in twentieth-century China.
Where Qi Baishi lets tradition ripple quietly through ink and empty paper, Dong Xiwen stages the same tension on a monumental stage. A different answer to this negotiation appears in his "The Founding Ceremony of the Nation" (Figure 3). Completed in 1953 for the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing, the painting employs oil on canvas and carefully constructed linear perspective (techniques associated with European academic art and Soviet socialist realism) to aggrandize Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic as he stands on the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate.
Moving on from theory to canvas, the composition centers Mao on the balcony, addressing the square through a bank of microphones, while a row of Party leaders stands behind him in a carefully staged line of solidarity. Below, Tiananmen Square stretches into the distance, filled with regimented ranks of honour guards and representatives of mass organizations, their flags catching the breeze. What is more, the perspective has been subtly manipulated to open up the balcony space and raise the horizon, so that Mao appears more directly connected to the people below, even though they are rendered as an anonymous collective rather than as individuals. This spatial adjustment not only elevates Mao physically and symbolically, but also folds the viewer into the imagined crowd, aligning our gaze with the mass audience that the new nation claims to represent. Nevertheless, colour and iconography intensify this sense of a new political order wrapped in familiar signs. A saturated red carpet, red pillars and red lanterns dominate the foreground, echoed by the red flags in the square. Red here signals not only festive joy, but also revolutionary transformation. Moreover, pots of blooming chrysanthemums mark the autumn season and carry connotations of longevity, hinting at the hoped-for endurance of the new regime. Finally, above the crowd, doves take flight as symbols of peace after decades of war, while the newly raised five-star flag becomes a compact emblem of the socialist nation, visually trying to unify leaders, people and territory.
At the same time, tradition has not vanished from this thoroughly modern scene. It has simply taken up a different position, as the imperial architecture of Tiananmen, once the gateway of dynastic power, now frames the leaders of a socialist state. The red walls, tiled roofs and stone balustrades are unmistakably "Chinese", yet they are subordinated to a new narrative of revolutionary victory and Party legitimacy. Nevertheless, Dong’s handling of space and colour also draws on indigenous visual languages: the bright, flat sky and strong outlines recall popular New Year prints (nianhua), while the dense patterning of carpet, columns and railings echoes earlier figure painting and mural traditions. Therefore, modernity shows itself not only in the imported medium of oil and the rhetoric of socialist realism, but in the state’s ability to select and re-code fragments of the past into a new national style.
Taken together, these two painters show that there is no single, fixed answer to what "Chinese art" should be under modern conditions. In both Qi and Dong, "Chinese art" emerges from an active negotiation with tradition, where for Qi it functions as a reservoir of techniques and symbolic prestige and for Dong it becomes a repertoire of images to be reorganized in the service of a new political and aesthetic order. By the time we arrive at Xu Bing’s "Book from the Sky" (Figure 4), first exhibited in Beijing between 1988 and 1991, the work casts the relationship of tradition and modernity has acquired a more sceptical, even mournful inflection. The installation occupies the gallery with printed volumes spread open on low tables and long scrolls hanging overhead. From a distance, the ensemble appears impeccably classical: hand-printed text running in vertical columns, cream-coloured paper and an overall order that echoes the clear geometry of a traditional library (Figure 5). It is only in the act of leaning in, when the eye begins to trace the lines of text, that the work’s muted shock slowly discloses itself: none of the thousands of "characters" are real. Xu has meticulously designed and printed an entire invented script that looks plausibly Chinese, yet resists any attempt at reading. The installation is grounded in traditional practices, woodblock printing and classical book formats, but it hollows out the inherited writing system, leaving only the shell of form without semantic content.
Seen side by side, these three works trace a slow shift from confidence to doubt in the fate of tradition. If Qi’s paintings suggest that the literati inheritance can endure and Dong’s canvas suggests that it can be redirected toward new ideological ends, "Book from the Sky" withholds that kind of comfort. It intimates that the very grounds of cultural life (writing, textual authority, the continuity of a shared language) may be unstable. In Xu’s practice, tradition no longer functions simply as a secure anchor, but emerges instead as an open, unsettling problem. In conclusion, across these three artists, the first thread of an answer emerges: in twentieth-century China, art is repeatedly defined through the ways it returns to, rearranges or unravels tradition, while confronting the demands of modernity.
Alongside the play between tradition and modernity runs a second fault line, between destruction and preservation, that cuts through both cultural practice and political authority. It asks not only what counts as art, but also what is allowed to endure, what is chosen to be carried forward, while other objects, images and stories are quietly abandoned. Within this dynamic, museums, catalogues and conservation studios recast countless Chinese bronzes, ceramics and scrolls as national treasures. Placed under glass, they come to stand as evidence of an unbroken, refined civilization and to walk through such collections is to be led through a carefully choreographed narrative of endurance and caretaking, in which the past presents itself as stable, ordered and safely contained.
Ai Weiwei’s "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (Figure 6) tears straight into that story. In this black-and-white triptych, the artist faces the camera head-on, holding a grey earthenware urn at chest level in the first frame. In the second, his hands release and the vessel drops, its descent captured in a single suspended instant that makes the act feel both - deliberate and irrevocable. In the third, it lies smashed at his feet, while he continues to stare straight ahead, his expression opaque, as if refusing to guide the viewer toward outrage, mourning or approval. The stillness of his body and the stark simplicity of the sequence turn a fleeting gesture into a kind of ritual, inviting us to dwell on the slow unfolding of a single, shattering decision. Nevertheless, if we imagine the intact urn in a museum case, it belongs to the category of heritage: fragile, irreplaceable, guaranteed by the authority of archaeologists and the state. In Ai’s performance, the urn slips out of that protected category in a single, irreversible gesture. The photographs record not only the moment of impact, but also the disquieting fact that this destruction can itself be packaged, exhibited and ultimately canonized as contemporary art. Value has migrated: from the preserved ancient object to the carefully documented act of annihilating it, from material continuity to conceptual provocation. In doing so, the work exposes, how fragile our categories of heritage and treasure are, and how dependent they are on the shifting frameworks of museums, markets and art history.
Ai’s triptych does not simply document an action. It stages an ethical and political dilemma that resists easy closure. The work raises questions that will not sit neatly within institutional narratives of innovation or critique. Is this an irreparable act of vandalism carried out in the name of artistic freedom or a necessary jolt that exposes the ways we fetishise and commodify the past? Does the artist’s steady posture, feet firmly planted, gaze locked onto the viewer, suggest cold indifference, open defiance or an insistence that we, too, are implicated in the decision to let the urn fall? Who holds the authority to determine, what must be conserved, what is restored, what is allowed to crumble and what may be deliberately broken? In a country, whose recent history includes state-led campaigns that have themselves destroyed temples, artefacts and archives, these are not hypothetical questions, but live, unresolved wounds.
On the other hand, Xu Bing’s "Book from the Sky" offers a different, more spectral form of destruction. No physical relics are harmed, instead, it is legibility that is quietly dismantled. The installation simulates the experience of entering a ceremonial archive: rows of printed volumes laid open on low platforms, banners of text cascading from the ceiling, walls effectively wallpapered with columns of characters. Only slowly does it dawn on the viewer that the seeming texts have dissolved into pure visual noise. In a culture, where written characters have long carried not only meaning but identity, law and memory, this unreadability feels almost like a conceptual vandalism. And yet, the work also heightens our sensitivity to the tactile and visual beauty of books and scrolls - the weight of paper, the rhythm of columns, the fall of hanging banners in space. In contrast, Qi Baishi’s shrimp paintings sit at a calmer point in this spectrum, but they, too, belong to a heritage story. Over time, literati painting and its modern heirs have been elevated into a kind of "national essence", taught in academies and guarded in museums. Qi’s work helps define, which forms of brushwork and subject matter are admitted into that protected canon. Put differently, earlier artworks are already entangled in the very processes of selection and elevation that later artists, such as Xu and Ai call into question. They do not stand outside the systems of value and exclusion that shape the canon, but help to build the frameworks that subsequent practices probe, unsettle and sometimes overturn. In conclusion, we might say that art in China is constantly bound up with choices about, what will be safeguarded and what will be relinquished. Some artists work in ways that appear to steady and consolidate cultural inheritance, while others draw attention to its fractures or treat its remnants as material for new points of departure.
By this point, it should be evident that the question "What is art in China?" cannot be settled with a simple, tidy formula. Rather, it opens onto a shifting web of relationships: between ink painting and oil, between the handscroll and the installation, between the scholar-amateur, the Party-approved painter and the globally circulating contemporary artist, between acts of preservation, habits of forgetting and deliberate acts of destruction. Firstly, Qi Baishi demonstrates, how the literati idiom can move into a modern art market and still retain its subdued authority. Furthermore, Dong Xiwen captures a moment, when the state attempted to stabilize both art and history in a heroic socialist framework, even altering the image, when political circumstances changed. What is more, Xu Bing transforms classical formats into a zone of uncertainty, where tradition appears seductive yet unreadable. Lastly, Ai Weiwei compels us to witness the shattering of a heritage object and to ask, whether the true shock lies in the act itself or in the assumptions we brought to its supposed sanctity. If the essay points toward an answer, it is this: art in modern and contemporary China is less a fixed, unified category than a contested arena, where conflicts over tradition, power and memory take material form. To trace these works is to watch ink, stretched canvas, printed pages and fractured clay become stages on which China’s past and present are negotiated repeatedly, line by line, image by image, fragment by fragment.
