A European Distinction of Chinese Characteristics: A Style Question in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit China Missions

Title

A European Distinction of Chinese Characteristics: A Style Question in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit China Missions

Author

Hui-hung CHEN

Page

1-32

DOI

Abstract

This paper discusses the issues regarding Jesuit expression and characterization, and the question they raised regarding pictorial style in their China mission, focusing especially on visual materials. Style, or the history of representation in Western history, is an essential issue involving categories of expression and methods of characterization both in rhetoric and in the visual arts. Style, moreover, can indicate a quality or manner to present and represent a culture. The cultural encounters through visual materials, which took place between the Chinese and European by means of visual activity, are a kind of material contact. One perspective in material culture is to seek for materiality, which emphasizes not only the form of the object but also the human activity or practice caused by the object in question. This materiality is a useful concept in addressing the two terms "Chineseness" and "Europeanness" in the cross-cultural missionary framework. The sense of culture in "Chineseness" and "Europeanness" can be phrased as an anthropological quality, which can be well observed in the material contacts between the two sides and recorded in Jesuit own accounts, since materiality could evince not only objectivity but also subjectivity. By investigating these records, I would like to argue that how to in effect apply the concept of style—which might be thought of as an old approach in art history—to a cross-cultural historical observation

Keyword

Chineseness, Europeanness, style, the Jesuits, materiality

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