Shitao

"Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China examines the work of one of the most famous of all Chinese artists. In this study, the first wide-ranging art-historical reevaluation of Shitao (1642-1707) in almost thirty years, Jonathan Hay undertakes a social history of the artist's achievement as a painter and theorist of painting. By focusing on different social, political, biographical, economic, religious, and philosophical issues, the author reveals the full complexity of Shitao's pictorial practice. Throughout this study, Hay also argues for the modernity of Shitao's painting, showing how his work is embedded in the socioeconomic context of the seventeenth century and how it involves a redefinition of subjectivity in terms of self-consciousness, doubt, and an aspiration to autonomy."--Jacket.