Patterns of Interaction in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Painting

UC Berkeley presents James Cahill's discussion on observations about cross-cultural borrowings of styles and motifs between the three great East Asian cultures.

James Cahill, UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus

Put together as an opening "keynote address" for a symposium in Seoul titled "Beyond Boundaries: An International Symposium on Chinese and Korean Painting," this talk attempts some large observations about cross-cultural borrowings of styles and motifs between the three great East Asian cultures: how the attractions that foreign styles hold for artists in a culture may differ from the judgments that its critics and book-writers may make of them, so that the borrowings can be recognized only visually, not through textual research; how the prestige of Chinese painting  has led until recently to constructions of its interrelationship with Japanese painting that were not truly two-way; and how the same is still true of Chinese and Korean painting, a situation we should begin trying to remedy.

James Cahill, UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus, received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  In 1956 joined the staff of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he served as Curator of Chinese Art until joining the UC Berkeley History of Art faculty in 1965.  His many publications include the widely-read and much-reprinted Chinese Painting (Skira, 1960) and many other books and exhibition catalogs, in addition to numerous articles on Chinese and Japanese painting.  He was joint author of The Freer Chinese Bronzes, vol. I (1967), and undertook a five-volume series on later Chinese paintings, of which three volumes were published: Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty (1976); Parting At the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty (1978); and The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty(1982).  He has also published An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (1980, reprinted 2003), and, as a computer database, and began a similar index for Ming painting.  Professor Cahill retired from UC Berkeley in 1994.