SESSION: Questioning the Illusion/Materiality Polemics in a Transcultural Art History
Ever since the establishment of the perspectival system in Western art, pictorial illusion has been pitted against materiality. Seminal works such as Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form and Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ have helped to solidify this dichotomy. Panofsky’s Eurocentric perspective may have prevented him from engaging with non-Western examples, while Damisch’s limited references to Chinese painting, though commendable, lack historical rigour.
More recently, scholars have begun to challenge the perspectival paradigm by addressing the so-called ‘ground’ problem—arguing that the material ground of a picture often contradicts the illusionistic space constructed by linear perspective. However, these scholarly interventions have been largely confined to the European examples so far, with only a few specimens from the East, which, nonetheless, are not in critical dialogue with their Western counterparts. Not to mention the lack of three-dimensional art, African art, Islamic art, ancient American Art, and art from the rest of the world. Rather than upholding an unexamined dichotomy between illusion and materiality, it is urgent and necessary to re-address this question in a global and transcultural framework.
This panel welcomes proposals that actively forge connections, confrontations, or convergences between European and non-European examples in addressing the relationship between illusion and materiality. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to, the figure/ground, background, and surface of paintings and beyond.
Session Convenor:
Ang Li, China Academy of Art
Sumihiro Oki, Kyoto University
Session Speakers:
Wu Tao, China Academy of Art/Free University of Berlin
Cloud as Breathing Void: A Shanshui Alternative to the Illusion/Materiality Polemics
This paper initiates a transcultural confrontation to re-evaluate the illusion/materiality polemics, focusing on Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/. Damisch insightfully identifies the cloud as a problematic tache, or l’informe, that persistently destabilises the costruzione legittima of Western perspectival space. However, this European-centric analysis inherently presents a theoretical impasse.
To dismantle it, I confront Damisch’s /cloud/ with the metaphysics and aesthetics of Chinese representation of shanshui (literally, mountain and water). This counter-examination reveals an alternative ontological paradigm: the pictorial void is not a passive surface to be overcome by illusion but an ‘active, breathing ground’ that generates space. Through the concept of Qi (vital energy), the material substrate is ontologically equated with the liubai (void) it manifests. This void, as analysed by scholars like Wen Fong, James Cahill, and Shih Shou-chien, is not an absence but the very medium for cosmic principle (Li) and the structural-energetic matrix for the brushwork itself. Consequently, the Damischian ‘problem-cloud’—a signifier of representational crisis—is inverted. In the context of Chinese shanshui, the void, often represented as ribbons of cloud, is the fundamental, ontological solution to spatial and cosmological expression.
Beyond theoretical confrontations, this paper examines three-dimensional shanshui representation—the incense burner in Bo-Mountain shape—to further demonstrate the cloud’s function as a productive void. It separates and connects objects (shi), facilitating distance and depth (xu), thereby balancing the essential concepts of renversement and imbrication in Chinese cosmology. The cloud in shanshui is thus not a Damischian ‘blot’ but the unifying cosmic medium itself.
Matthew Robert Shirfield, Trinity College Dublin
Caro Factum Est: The Dialectics of Belief and Matter in the works of the Moroccan, Farid Belkahia and the Maltese, Antoine Camilleri
This paper explores how Farid Belkahia (1934-2014) (Morocco) and Antoine Camilleri (1922-2005) (Malta) challenge the ground problem by asserting a belief-materiality dichotomy, thereby reconfiguring the pictorial ground as a site of cultural and spiritual inscription. Both artists, working on the peripheries of the late twentieth century, were deeply engaged with the Mediterranean and postcolonial identity. Adopting a theoretical and comparative, vertical-horizontal methodology as developed by Professor Schembri Bonaci on Piotr Piotrowski’s Horizontal Histories, this paper seeks to provide an in-depth study of the importance of the ground in art in relation to two case studies: Belkahia’s Dawn (1983) and Camilleri’s Birth, Death and Resurrection (1998).
Belkahia’s shift from canvas to tanned leather, henna, and copper in the 1980s constituted a decolonial gesture, a rejection of illusionistic space in favour of a tactile, mortal surface imbued with the lingering memory of Moroccan craft and ritual practice. Similarly, Camilleri’s clay-glass icons dissolve the pictorial boundary between figure and ground. His experiments affirm materiality as a conduit for spiritual and existential reflection, etched into the Earth’s own skin.
By placing Belkahia and Camilleri in transcultural dialogue, this paper argues that both artists articulate a Mediterranean material epistemology that resists the Eurocentric separation of mind and matter, image and support. Their works embody a spiritual sensibility where material surfaces do not host a facade-illusion but rather generate meaning through their imbued memory and cultural resonances.
Eunchae Lee, The University of Edinburgh
Reframing Japonisme: Originality, Otherness, and the Aesthetics of Encounter
Who defines ‘us’ and ‘them’ in art history? The global narrative of art cannot be neatly divided into the West and the rest, yet Western art history continues to privilege Euro-American frameworks while marginalizing so-called non-Western contributions. This paper interrogates how Eurocentrism constructs hierarchies of artistic value and originality, positioning the non-West as derivative or peripheral. Within this context, Japonisme – a term coined by Philippe Burty in the late nineteenth century – exemplifies the asymmetrical exchanges between Japan and France. Despite its frequent citation, Japonisme remains conceptually unstable, revealing the tension between admiration and appropriation that underpins cross-cultural artistic encounters.
Drawing on transcultural approaches, this paper examines how Japonisme has been theorized and represented in Anglophone, Francophone, and Japanese scholarship, demonstrating how differing cultural frameworks construct divergent notions of influence and originality. While French artists such as Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Henri Rivière (1864-1951) are celebrated for their formal innovations, the Japanese sources of their visual language are often obscured or aestheticized as exotic influences. By re-examining Japonisme through the lens of cultural reciprocity and visual translation, this paper seeks to decentralize the Western narrative of originality and reconsider Japan’s active role in shaping modern art.
Ultimately, it asks: how much of Japan exists within Japonisme? What can be considered ‘Japanese’ in this cross-cultural formation? And how might rethinking these questions transform the boundaries of Western art history itself?
Han Zhang, Central Academy of Fine Arts
Surfaces of Translation: Rethinking Illusion and Materiality through the Three Teachings Motif across Porcelain and Painting
This paper reconsiders the illusion–materiality dichotomy through the transcultural transformations of Three Teachings imagery across China, Japan, and Europe. Centring on Cornelis Pronk’s Three Doctors design (1735), commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, it traces how a European perspectival drawing, originally conceived to evoke spatial illusion, was translated by Chinese artisans in Jingdezhen into blue-and-white porcelain, a medium whose curved, reflective surface resisted depth and privileged decorative flatness. The resulting Three Vinegar Tasters porcelains re-materialized the image, aligning it with the long-standing Chinese visual mode that valued texture, brushwork, and surface resonance over perspectival unity. When the motif entered Japan via the Nagasaki–Deshima trade, it bifurcated: painters of the Kanō and later schools reinterpreted it as Three Sake Tasters in ink and colour on paper, emphasizing pictorial coherence and Neo-Confucian allegory, while Japanese potters adapted it onto Imari wares, further accentuating tactile pattern and glaze depth. Comparing these pictorial and ceramic iterations reveals how the same theme oscillated between illusionistic representation and material presence, between perspectival vision and haptic ornament. The motif’s eventual return to China as Four Sages porcelains epitomizes how transcultural exchange continually redefined the visual logic of “surface” itself. Through this shifting interplay of image and medium, this paper argues that the global porcelain trade destabilized the inherited opposition between illusion and materiality, making the surface the true ground of cross-cultural imagination.