The Artification of Guohua: From Literati Practice to Modern Fine Art in Early 20th-Century China

The literati painting tradition – the ink painting practice accumulated over centuries of literati culture – entered the Republican period (1912–1937) as the most prestigious category in the Chinese cultural hierarchy, where it came to be renamed guohua. Yet within decades, its advocates were compelled to argue, in an entirely foreign discursive language, that it still counted as art. Drawing on Shapiro and Heinich’s artification paradigm and Bourdieusian field theory, and grounded in the discursive texts of key actors and historical materials from the 1929 National Art Exhibition, this article traces three phases of this transformation: categorical crisis triggered by the introduction of a western classificatory order; institutional embedding and intellectualization advanced through art academies, exhibition culture, and systematic art-historical writing; and a moment of consecration initiated by the 1929 Exhibition whose legitimating effects remained structurally incomplete and perpetually contested. The article's core theoretical contribution is the concept of defensive artification: a process driven not by aspiration for upward recognition but by an external categorical threat upon a tradition already occupying elevated cultural status. Unlike the standard artification trajectory in which a low-status practice seeks entry into the art field, defensive artification takes the form of a lateral paradigm shift – the legitimacy system undergoes fundamental replacement while the tradition remains within the cultural elite. This concept extends artification theory to non-western contexts and to indigenous elite traditions confronting the shock of modernization, where the central problem is not gaining artistic status but defending an existing one against displacement.