Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture

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Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture is a forthcoming Saffron Books title, edited by Yang Chia-Ling 楊佳玲 and Roderick Whitfield.

This volume investigates the roles as politician, antiquarian, art dealer, and publisher, of Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866~1940), who, together with his circle of Qing loyalists (遺老), established modern historical and intellectual practices in late dynastic and early Republican China. Luo himself took the lead in defining Chinese culture at a critical moment in history, when an abundance of new materials, such as oracle bones and manuscripts from Dunhuang, were coming to light, and when new techniques could be employed in their publication.

History has portrayed Luo Zhenyu and his loyalist circle as traitors twice over: first as obsolete remnants of an incompetent Qing government, then as collaborators in the Japanese puppet state of Manzhouguo 滿洲國 (1923~1945). Art-historical scholarship has hitherto equated Qing loyalists' cultural production with outmoded traditions, in direct opposition to modernisation. In contrast, this project considers the engagement with traditional culture by dispossessed loyalists as essential not just to the constitution of modernity in China, but also to the conceptualisation of East Asian art as a whole.

In this edited volume, eight chapters explore tradition as articulated through ethnic and political identifications by figures who engaged in 'modern' practices such as publishing, collecting and the burgeoning fields of archaeology, art history and intellectual history. The chapters are organised according to three major themes: New Ways of Looking at The Past, Circulating Objects of Knowledge, and Qing Loyalists: Reviled Pasts and Unstable Present. We believe that one of the strengths of this volume lies in a breadth of inquiry that breaks through conventional disciplinary boundaries. Any historical treatment of Luo Zhenyu, the Qing loyalists and other minority constituencies of early twentieth-century China, inured to the vagaries of collaboration and resistance, must negotiate a thicket of overlapping histories. In this spirit, our examination of Luo Zhenyu and his yilao circle will confront the taboos surrounding their reviled past to reveal a complex but crucial aspect of Chinese cultural history.

About the Editors

Chia-Ling Yang 楊佳玲 is lecturer in Chinese art at University of Edinburgh. She received her degrees from National Taiwan University and University of Warwick and a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS). She was a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica, Taipei and the University of Heidelberg, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Art History at the University of Chicago. Dr. Yang was Lecturer in Chinese Art at the University of Sussex and at SOAS, before her appointment in Edinburgh. She is the author of New Wine in Old Bottles–Art of Ren Bonian 任伯年 in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (2007, Chinese translation 2011) and co-author with Yu Hui 余輝 and Roderick Whitfield of Classical Chinese Art: Selected Catalogue of the Paintings and Calligraphy, Wou Lien-pai Museum (吳蓮伯博物館, 2011). She researches principally on Chinese painting, archaism in modern Chinese art, visual culture in Shanghai and its interactions with Japan and the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Roderick Whitfield is Percival David Professor, Emeritus, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He studied with Cheng Te-k'un 鄭德坤 and Denis Twitchett at Cambridge, and with Wen Fong 方聞 and Shujirō Shimada 島田修二郎 at Princeton. From 1968 to 1984 he was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Oriental Antiquities, The British Museum, and from 1984 onwards Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology and Head of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art. Currently he is a Fellow of the Palace Museum, Peking, and Fellow of the Dunhuang Academy. He has written extensively on Chinese painting and on the Buddhist art of Dunhuang (The Art of Central Asia: the Stein Collection at the British Museum. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 3 vols. 1982-85; Dunhuang: Caves of the Singing Sands, London: Textile and Art Publications, 1996; Cave Temples of Mogao, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2000). With Professor Youngsook Pak, he has
also written on Korean art (Korean True-View Landscape: Paintings by Chŏng
Sŏn (鄭敾1676-1759), London: Saffron Korea Library, 2005; Handbook to Korean Art
series, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002).

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