Art and Empirical Inquiry in Pre-Modern China

Long before the “Scientific Revolution” in Europe, Chinese scholars, technicians and artisans explored their world and produced empirical knowledge of it. This aspect of the intellectual history of China has moved well beyond its Eurocentric framing using the term “science,” and instead has focused on the ways in which indigenous epistemologies have generated various forms of knowledge about the world, both abstract and concrete. While narrow studies on topics such as optics have explored the intersection between art and “science” in China, the active role that visual art has played in the production of empirical knowledge (and vice versa) has often been overlooked.

This session invites paper proposals that explore the relationships between any form of art production in China before 1700 in relation to indigenous Chinese empirical knowledge, such as the analogues of astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, or zoology (among others). Some questions for consideration might include: How does visual art enact or collaborate in the investigation of the physical world? What are the interconnections between fundamental concepts within Chinese cosmology, discrete areas of scientific knowledge, and visual imagery? How might the materiality of certain forms of Chinese art or visual culture contribute to concrete forms of scientific practice? How might the visual or descriptive aspects of different types of art act as adjacent or complementary forms of scientific investigation? Ultimately, this panel seeks contributions that advance understanding of how indigenous ways of knowing and representing relate to each other.