Perspectives In and On China

Stanford University's Richard Vinograd speaks on pictorial perspective systems in China.

From art historians like Samuel Edgerton to the contemporary artist David Hockney, the status of pictorial perspective systems in China has been a continuing topic of discussion and controversy. This subject opens up to larger issues, such as the validity of constructions of China and the West, the participation of visual systems in regimes of technological and political power, and the early appearance of multiple perspective systems in China. Richard Vinograd is the Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1989. His research interests include Chinese portraiture, landscape painting and cultural geography, urban cultural spaces, painting aesthetics and theory, and media studies. He completed Ph.D. degree at U.C. Berkeley in 1979, and has taught at Columbia University, at UC California, and at Stanford, where he was department chair from 1995-2002. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (1992), co-editor of the New Understandings of Ming and Qing Painting exhibition and catalogue (1994), and co-author of Chinese Art & Culture (2001).