This landmark volume offers a long-overdue, theoretical framework for understanding modern Chinese art within the broader problem of cultural modernity. Developed through the author’s “Road of Modern Chinese Art” research project (est. 1999), it seeks to articulate a theoretical discourse grounded in China’s own historical and intellectual conditions.

Reassessing dominant paradigms of modernity, the study introduces a “future-oriented perspective in modernity discourse” shaped by the profound transformations of the modern world and the rupture of the “Modernity Event.” At its core is the concept of “self-awareness” as the critical threshold distinguishing tradition from modernity in late-developing societies. On this basis, the book advances the systematic framework of the Four Major Ideologies: Traditionalism, Syncretism, Westernisation, and Populism, as the principal forces structuring the development of modern Chinese art.

Spanning the period from 1840 to 2000, the volume traces the historical evolution of artistic practices and debates across a century and a half of social and political upheaval. By integrating theoretical reflection with close historical analysis, it offers a comprehensive account of how modern Chinese art has negotiated the tensions between inheritance, transformation, and global exchange.

An essential resource for scholars and students of modern Chinese art, global modernism, and the theory of multiple modernities, this work makes a major contribution to the rethinking of modernity.

Translated into Japanese and Korean.

Winner of the Seventh Outstanding Achievement Award for Research in Institutes of Higher Education (Humanities and Social Sciences) – First Prize

Recipient of the China Publishing Government Award and the “Three Hundred” Original Book Publishing Project Award, affirming its landmark contribution to the study of modern Chinese art and global modernism.