Power, identity and antiquarian approaches in modern Chinese art

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Following various publications by Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Wu Yi 武億 (1745-1799) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728-1804) in the 18th century, the study and collecting of rubbings of Northern Wei stone inscriptions and steles was popular. Such spread of interest in jinshi, inscriptions on metal and stone, also formed a base for studying seal carving, epigraphy and archaic painting. While traditional antiquarians would cherish inscriptions which enabled them to correct mistakes in the transmitted historical texts and the Classics, however, much of the antiquarian activity was adapted to mere literary exercise or connoisseurship, for instance, to supplying materials which could provide models for seal-carving and calligraphy. Examples could be seen in the calligraphy works and seal carvings of the Xiling bajia 西泠八家 (Eight Masters of Xiling, i.e. Hangzhou), also known as Zhe School of Calligraphy and Carving. Their keen interest in seeking inspiration from steles for their artistic presentations has been recorded in their writing and painting. In addition, the way the scholar-collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries mounted the rubbings, seals, inscriptions, paintings, letters and textual evidence studies into one album shows a changing ideology: rubbings were not only for scholarly study in classical learning, but were regarded as part of the art form and were appreciated on various social occasions. The antiquarian movement ultimately served as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China. This paper aims to address the phenomenon and formation of the jinshi painting that dominated in late Imperial and early modern China. Through case studies of three important jinshi societies in Shanghai, I will investigate in what way literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced imperial patronage which was in decline after the Qianlong emperor’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to the southern regions from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspectives in history and the history of objects

A Survey on Deep Learning-based Architectures for Semantic Segmentation on 2D images

Semantic segmentation is the pixel-wise labelling of an image. Since the problem is defined at the pixel level, determining image class labels only is not acceptable, but localising them at the original image pixel resolution is necessary. Boosted by the extraordinary ability of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in creating semantic, high level and hierarchical image features; excessive numbers of deep learning-based 2D semantic segmentation approaches have been proposed within the last decade. In this survey, we mainly focus on the recent scientific developments in semantic segmentation, specifically on deep learning-based methods using 2D images. We started with an analysis of the public image sets and leaderboards for 2D semantic segmantation, with an overview of the techniques employed in performance evaluation. In examining the evolution of the field, we chronologically categorised the approaches into three main periods, namely pre-and early deep learning era, the fully convolutional era, and the post-FCN era. We technically analysed the solutions put forward in terms of solving the fundamental problems of the field, such as fine-grained localisation and scale invariance. Before drawing our conclusions, we present a table of methods from all mentioned eras, with a brief summary of each approach that explains their contribution to the field. We conclude the survey by discussing the current challenges of the field and to what extent they have been solved.Comment: Updated with new studie

Fragments Speak: Reexamining the Rejected Pre-Du Yu Commentaries on the Zuozhuan

As this paper shows, though considered largely philological or lexical in nature,early medieval (1st–7th c. CE) commentaries on the Zuozhuan ?? (ca. 4th c. BCE), anearly Chinese historical narrative, not only bring to the fore ambiguities in the text itself, but also generate divergent literary scenarios and character judgments under-examined by modern Zuozhuan scholars. Commissioned by Tang Taizong’s ??? court (626–649 CE), the imperial compilers of the Zuozhuan zhengyi ???? (Corrected meaning of the Zuozhuan) adopted Du Yu’s ?? (222–284) commentary on the Zuozhuan and implicitly rejected Eastern Han (25–220 CE) commentaries. This article considers marginalized commentaries written before Du Yu’s time as particularly valuable because such earlier competing interpretations could destabilize—in our latter day perspective—the readings “fixed” by the early Tang authorization of Du Yu’s commentary