The pictorial turn: realism, modernity and China’s print culture in the late nineteenth century LAIKWAN PANG This paper examines the popularity of lithography in late 19th century China and relates the cultural significance of this new mass medium to the construction of modernity within China’s semi-colonial experience. In contrast to woodblock illustrations, which had been widely circulated in China for more than a millennium, lithography fundamentally changed the way images are understood; they now emphasized and visualized change, the novel and the particular. The paper also analyses some pictures selected from the famous lithographic journal Dianshizhai to demonstrate a prominent realist desire. While Chinese readers desired to comprehend the basic forms and patterns of the new world objectively through these pictures, they also subjectively identified with the acts of seeing portrayed in these lithographs, desiring to see and be seen. I argue that while the oscillation between the desire for objective details and subjective identification gives lithography an extremely rich hermeneutic space, this new form of visual representation also helped stabilize the uncertainty and threat of modernity. In the last years before the end of Imperial China in 1909 the cultural discontinuity engendered by Western imperialism and the increasing mobility of capital and population fed off of and intensified each other. Despite painstaking attempts, the government of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) had little control over imperialist aggression and the rapidly transforming values and social norms, reinforcing people’s feelings of vulnerability and insecurity in the face of continual change. Cultural beliefs that had been taken for granted were questioned and people were forced to confront a new and complex set of concepts about time, space and body, through which a new world view and epistemology was crystallized. Late Qing Chinese gradually gave up the time system they had used for thousands of years for a new temporal measurement completely foreign to China (Loewe 1999, 76–79). Within a short period of time the Gregorian calendar replaced the Chinese lunar calendar and the Christian years were used widely alongside traditional imperial years. People also started to schedule their work and leisure using Western hours instead of Chinese shichen (Huang 2001, 175–229). New national and international maps were drawn and cartography became a new Westernized science, introducing people to a completely new geography and therefore a completely new world view (Smith 1996, 42–75). The introduction of telescopes, trains, automobiles and flying machines demanded that the Chinese reconceptualized distance and space, which were often associated with military aggression. Various kinds of new civil education and legal reforms taught the Chinese to reorganize and re- examine their bodies, so that they could be controlled and supervised (Huang 2001, 109–174). Rising patriotic sentiments also located the Chinese body as a site of national resistance against the West, on the one hand, and the past, on the other. Some relied on the Daoist tradition to fight Western cannons with the Chinese body (Cohen 1997, 17–19), while others referred to Western individualist concepts to emphasize control of one’s body (Liang 1978). As a whole, it was a period of mayhem, introducing to the people not only epistemological uncertainties but also psychological unease. In spite of all these abrupt changes around the end of the 19th century, one should be critical of the dichotomization between a modern and a pre-modern China. 1 It is highly artificial, although convenient and sometimes convincing, to consider distinct political events, such as the 1842 Opium War or the 1911 Republican Revolution, as discursive and epistemological divides after which changes were stipulated in almost all socio-cultural domains. While the high degree of disorder seen in Chinese culture and society around these and other political events is undeniable, one should question the assumption that the modern period is characterized by ceaseless change and social instability, while the pre-modern period became a protracted time-out in which history was almost suspended. As Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out, the idea that the past is static is a modern one (Chakrabarty 1998, 286). The discourse of modernity legitimates itself by positing a changeless past and privileging its association with the new. Acknowledging Laikwan Pang is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Building a new cinema in China: The Chinese left-wing cinema movement, 1932–37 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Cultural control and globalisation in Asia: Copyright, piracy and cinema (RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming). Visual Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, April 2005 ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/05/010016-21 # 2005 International Visual Sociology Association DOI: 10.1080/14725860500064888