There is a rich literature on Modern art in Taiwan. The most prominent for my thesis are books by Xiao Qiongrui (蕭瓊瑞) and Lai Yingying (賴瑛瑛). The book by Xiao is
102 Temenuga Trifonova (2007), The image in French philosophy, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, p. 161.
103 Matthew E. Pacholec (1999), ‘Time and the Sublime Self’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 6 (4), p. 71.
104 Joshua Rayman (2012), Kant on Sublimity and Morality, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, p. 174.
the third volume of An Illustrated History of Taiwan Art ( 說 臺 灣 美 術 史 ), which concerns the period from Japanese rule to the time after World War Two, thus it covers the time frame of Taiwan's Avant-garde art.105 Moreover, Xiao Qiongrui discusses Taiwan's Avant-garde in a separate article.106 The book by Lai Yingying directly researches Taiwan's Avant-garde.107 The chapter 'Alternative Chinas' in The Art of
Modern China by Julia F. Andrews and Shen Kuiyi examines the art world of Taiwan,
but not from the viewpoint of the Avant-garde art theory. In 2017 new books on Liu Guosong108 and Zhuang Zhe109 are published. Li Yuanjia's poetry receives a theoretical treatment in the article by Diana Yeh.110 Many artists of the 60s are interested in printing and estampes. These artists are covered among others in Printmaking art (版畫創作藝 術) by Zhang Jiayu (張家瑀).111The book edited by Kikuchi, Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in
Colonial Taiwan does not concern the period of Avant-garde art in Taiwan, but authors
of Refracted Modernity discuss problems crucial for this research. A lot of important analytical work on intercultural dialogue and modernization can be found in Kikuchi's105 Jason Gaiger (2009), ‘Dismantling the Frame: Site-Specific Art and Aesthetic Autonomy’ in The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 49 (1), p. 43,
106 蕭瓊瑞(2007),從創新到前衛──50-60 年代台灣美術發展. Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Online publication, p. 3.
107 賴瑛瑛(2003),台灣前衛：六○年代複合藝術. Taibei:遠流出版公司.
108 Xiao Qiongrui 蕭瓊瑞 (2017), Xiandai. Shuimo. Liu Guosong. 現代.水墨.劉國松, Taipei: Yishujia, p. 10.
109 Pan Fan 潘襎 (2017), Yuanqi. Pongbo. Zhuang Zhe. 元氣．磅礡．莊喆, Taipei: Yishujia, p. 10.
110 Diana Yeh (2008), ‘Contested Belongings: The Politics and Poetics of Making a Home in Britain’ in China Fictions English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story. (ed) Robert A. Lee. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 299-326.
111 Zhang Jiayu 張家瑀 (2001), Printmaking art 版畫創作藝術, Taipei: National Taiwan Arts Education Center 國立台灣 藝術教育館.
book. The authors also elaborate on questions important for the philosophy of art, such as what is 'modern' and what is 'traditional' art. Moreover, Refracted Modernity provides an interesting analysis of how the cultural background of Taiwan influenced the reception of Fauvism. The book covers the first encounter of Taiwan with the Avant-garde art. Jason C. Kuo's Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan112 deals with close material to the book edited by Kikuchi, but in addition he covers the time long after the Japanese period.
A deep analysis of Kantian aesthetics as well as a rich review of secondary literature can be found in An Introduction to Kant's Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems by Christian H. Wenzel. Although An Introduction does not discuss Avant-garde art, it has commentaries on Lyotard and represents all elements of Kantian aesthetics, from disinterestedness to the sublime in the context of contemporary debates in Kant's scholarship.
Until recently, Kant's theory of the sublime received little attention. It seems that Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting (originally published in 1978) revived an interest in it. Later, Lyotard linked it with contemporary art on a larger scale in his
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991). In the English scholarship there is no
literature dedicated to the problem of the Kantian sublime before 1989. However, after 1989 every year there is a new installment in the scholarship on this subject. Robert Doran believes it to be a result of the publication in 1989 of The Kantian Sublime: FromMorality to Art by Paul Crowther.
113 Crowther continued to research on this subject for thirty years, the last of his books on the Kantian sublime was published in 2010.114 During his work on the Kantian sublime, Crowther also made a considerable112 Jason C. Kuo (2000), Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 32-83.
113 Robert Doran (2015), The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 5.
114 Paul Crowther (2010), The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
contribution to the theory of Avant-garde art, such as in his book The Kantian Aesthetic:
From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde. Thierry de Duve tries to use Kantian aesthetics for
the understanding of one of the most enigmatic Avant-gardists - Marcel Duchamp in his 500 pages long Kant after Duchamp.115An interesting approach to the problems of the theory of the sublime can be found in
‘The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context’ by David Lloyd.116 Lloyd traces the origins of the idea of 'high culture' back to the formalization of aesthetic judgment by Kant. Not only Lloyd's notion of the autonomy of art is quite close to the one used in this thesis, his work is an interesting precedent of a research on sublime in a crosscultural context.
It is necessary to mention other fundamental contributions to the scholarship on the Kantian aesthetics made in the recent years. Such books as Kant and the Claims of Taste (1988) by Paul Guyer, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1992) by John Zammito, as well as Henry Allison's Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment (2001) greatly enriched the understanding of Kant's conceptions
of beautiful, art and sublime. Allison also touched on problems of contemporary art in his book. For example, Allison has discussed the applicability of Kant to the Pop art by Andy Warhol117 as well as has discussed with Guyer abstract art by Josef Albers118. Guyer recently put Kantian aesthetics in the context of the history of the philosophy of art in his fundamental A History of Modern Aesthetics (2015).115 Thierry de Duve (1996), Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press.
116 David Lloyd (2009) ‘The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context’ in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, (eds) Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
117 Henry Allison (2001), Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 275.
118 Ibid., p. 136.
2 Transition's point of departure
The transition from the aesthetics of the beautiful to the aesthetics of the sublime in Taiwan has started from some point. To define what is this point is the task of this chapter. There are two main components here.The first component is traditional Chinese aesthetics in a Japanese version and in the version of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) intellectuals who were mainly Chinese but often Manchu. The second component is Japanese cultural politics in colonized Taiwan (1895-1945). To develop a Kantian approach to Taiwanese Avant-garde art, it is necessary to locate both components in the coordinates of critical philosophy.