LCA/文 如何理解中国绘画？牛津大学荣休教授柯律格（Craig Clunas）以南朝谢赫的“气韵生动”四字为引，用严谨细致的学术考证与直溯源头的追踪意识，完成了一部新颖、易读且趣味十足的艺术史重磅新著——《回音室：1897—1935 年跨国的中国画》。有关中国绘画的部分答案，就藏在这本书中。

阅读过这本著作，恰收到编辑部邀请，希望我与柯律格教授就《回音室》一书进行一次采访对话。在文景的协助下，对话得以顺利进行。我不是一个熟练的对话者，好在柯律格教授的回答足够精彩，使这次交谈呈现出了更多闪光点。

《回音室：1897—1935年跨国的中国画》

以下是莫一奥与柯律格教授的对话内容，希望对大家有所启发：

莫：《回音室》是一个十分有意思也非常形象的书名。当一个人站在回音室里发出声响，声音将会来回穿梭，进而形成一个音域场。这个声音的每一次折返与再传播，都会有所变化，正是这种变化，使回音室变得丰富、复杂、有趣。在本书中，在理清这些回音及其传播路径时，您使用的写作方式，似乎也是“回音式”的——文字在中西文献、事例与讨论中来回穿行、验证，以追根溯源（当然，这种视野广阔的写作方式，在您以往的著作中一直有出现，而在《回音室》里，“回音式”的写作方式与文字内容，似乎尤为契合）。这样理解新著《回音室》的书名和您的写作方式，是否合理？

柯：I think that captures very neatly and very accurately what I am trying to say here, I could not have put it better myself. “Rich, complex, and engaging” is most definitely what I am aiming for, because I am trying to do justice to see what I see as essentially a very rich, complex, and engaging history, in the exchanges between artists and viewers of art in different parts of the world at the period which the book covers. So thank you very much for that. Whether the actual writing has an “echoic” style is maybe something that readers can judge for themselves better than I can. I don’t think I can claim to have set out deliberately to write in such a manner, but I’m very pleased if you detect that in the text. I certainly have set out to write an account which has a number of actors and a number of locations, and which tries to give substance to the idea – which is just a simple historical fact – of the mobility and interaction of artworks, texts, and people at this time. Hence the idea, which is reflected the chapter titles, of Kang Youwei being ‘in Rome’ (which he literally was), but also of Xie He being somehow ‘in Calcutta’, which he obviously was not in a literal sense, any more than Cezanne actually visited Shanghai, but in both cases their work was being read or viewed and discussed in those locations.

我认为这非常巧妙、准确地捕捉到了我想要在这本书里表达的精髓，我自己都想不到比这更好的措辞。“丰富、复杂和有趣”绝对是我想要实现的目标，因为我所试图展现的，就是通过在这本书所涵盖的时期内世界各地的艺术家和艺术受众相互交流的过程，去公允地呈现我认为本质上非常丰富、复杂和有趣的一段历史。所以非常感谢你的这个解读。至于实际的写作方式是不是“回音式”的，也许读者比我有更好的判断。我不觉得我是刻意用这种方式写作的，但如果你在文中发现了这一点，那我很高兴。不过我确实设定了要记叙一段包含多个人物和多处地点的场景，并试图通过这段记叙，使当时的艺术、文字和人物相互流动、交流的这个概念具象化——当然这只是一个简单的历史事实。恰如章节标题所反映的那样，康有为“在罗马”（他确实去过），以及谢赫不知何故“在加尔各答”，但实际上他显然没有去过，又如塞尚在上海，但不管他有没有去过，他们的作品都在这些地方被阅读、观看和讨论过。

莫：《回音室》仅有三个章节。仅用三个章节去书写一部学术类著作，意味着这是一部极为细致、考验细节的书，同时，它也意味着作者对每个章节的内容，有着更加充分的讨论与延展。章节少而内容充分的结构设置，是否会给您带来更大或更自如的写作空间？

柯：The structure of the book, with its three chapters, each of which foregrounds two individuals and the locations in which they were active – that comes directly from the fact that the book has its origins in three lectures delivered in person in Beijing in 2019 for the OCAT Institute. Maybe you can call this just laziness, that I did not seek to restructure what I had to say for publication, but I was quite satisfied with the way the structure worked in terms of the lectures, and the response from the audience was positive enough to make me think that this could work. As a result of many years of working with students on the structuring of their dissertations and theses, I have come to be quite sceptical about the existence of any sort of perfect structure for a piece of writing, it’s very much the content rather than the structure that matters for me. Maybe there could have been six shorter chapters instead of three longer ones, but part of what I’m trying to get across is an account that takes notice of things happening simultaneously, at the same time. So for instance, Kang Youwei is in Rome at the same time as the Six Laws of Xie He are being translated into English for the first time – that already seems interesting to me. I suppose this come out of deep distrust (which I would say is pretty standard now among British art historians of my generation, it’s not some individual trait of mine) of the Gombrichidea of a singular ‘Story of Art’, in which things succeed one another in a neat sequence. I find much more satisfying a history which accounts for the messiness of actual history, of things happening across and against and in relation to one another.

这本书有三个章节，其中每个章节都突出了两个人物及其活动地点。这种构思直接源于我 2019 年在北京为 OCAT 研究中心进行的三场讲座。也许你可以称之为偷懒，因为我并没有因为要出版就尝试重新组织我要发表的内容，但我对演讲时候这个结构的反响非常满意，而且观众的反应也十分积极，所以我认为这种结构方式是可行的。在与学生们一起研究学位论文、专题论文的结构多年后，我开始对一篇文章是否存在一种完美的结构这件事产生了怀疑。于我而言，内容比结构更重要。也许这本书可以由六个较短的章节组成，而不是三个较长的章节，但我想要传达的一部分内容就是，我察觉到了在同一时期同时发生的多个事件的视角（所以长章节或许更合适）。例如，康有为在罗马的同一时期，谢赫的“六法”正首次被翻译成英文——这对我来说已经是很有意思的事情。我想这是出于对贡布里希的《艺术的故事》中单线叙述的深度怀疑（我想说这在我们这一代的英国艺术史家中是相当普遍的，这不是我的个人特质）。贡布里希的《艺术的故事》认为，事情会按照整齐的顺序一个接一个地发生。而我发现，能够解释真实历史的混乱，描述交叉、对立或彼此关联的多个视角的历史，更能令人信服。

莫：书中提到，南朝时期谢赫提出的“气韵生动”在欧洲受到关注，与 20 世纪初 Rhythm（韵律）一词的流行有关，而谢赫理论的传播，更是带动了西方学者对中国古代绘画的重视与赞扬。我们是否可以这样理解，艺术及艺术理论的传播（及因传播而形成“回音室”效应），常常受制于隐性但强大的时代背景？

柯：I would start by stressing that the degree of interest shown in Europe in Xie He and his ideas, and particularly in the central notion of 气韵生动was (and indeed remains) really very limited, restricted almost entirely to the very small number of specialists in Chinese art at that time. There might be a few more such specialists today, but the absolute number is still tiny, and so this is by no means a widely-discussed or quoted idea. Certainly by comparison with the key modernist idea of ‘Rhythm’, which is everywhere in European literature, including in art crticicism, at this period. But what the book argues is that the specific ways in which 气韵生动was translated into European languages were deeply affected by ideas (including but not limited to ‘Rhythm’) that were already beginning to be in circulation at the end of the nineteenth century, as European art and literature were swept by the waves of change which we often bundle together under the label of ‘modernism’. This seems to me a very standard, and not particularly complex, pattern in world history. When a new idea comes along, people tend to try and make sense of it by relating it to things they already know, often saying, ‘Oh, so this new thing we have just learned about is a bit like….(an old thing we already know about).’ So I would absolutely agree with your proposition that ‘the background of the times’ has a very powerful determining effect on the reception of art and art theory. Remember that the late nineteenth century is a period in western art when all sorts of appropriations are going on, for instance in the reception of African sculpture in Paris, something where ‘the background of the times’ is inseparable from the progress of western imperialism in Africa. That has to also be seen as part of the background of the relationship with China too. One of the big differences is that western viewers (or at least some of them) become aware at this time not just of Chinese art, but of the existence of a body of theoretical writing about that art from within China itself.

首先我要强调的是，欧洲对谢赫及其思想，特别是对“气韵生动”这一核心概念的关注度在过去（现在仍然）非常有限，几乎完全局限于当时中国艺术领域的极少数专家范围内。现在可能有更多这类专家，但绝对数量仍然很少，因此这绝不是一种被广泛讨论或引证的观点。当然，这与欧洲文学以及这一时期的艺术评论中无处不在的“韵律”这一现代主义关键思想形成了对比。但本书想要表达的是，“气韵生动”被翻译成欧洲语言的具体方式深受 19 世纪末已经开始流行的思想（包括但不限于“韵律”）的影响，因为当时的欧洲艺术和文学被变革的浪潮所席卷，而我们通常将这种变革捆绑在“现代主义”的标签下。在我看来，这是世界历史上一种非常标准、并不特别复杂的变革模式。当一种新的思想出现时，人们往往会试图通过将其与他们已知事物相联系来理解它，我们经常听到说，“哦，我们刚刚了解的这个新事物有点像……（一种我们已经知道的旧事物）”。因此，我完全同意你的观点，即“时代背景”对艺术及艺术理论的接受程度会产生非常强大的决定性作用。别忘了19世纪末是西方艺术进行各种挪用的一个时期，例如巴黎接受了非洲雕塑，这与西方帝国主义在非洲扩张的“时代背景”是密不可分的。在与中国关系的时代背景部分，也必须看清楚这一点。但其中一个很大的区别是，这一时期的西方观众（或至少其中一些人）不仅开始了解中国艺术，而且意识到了中国自身内部存在的大量关于艺术的理论著作。

莫：《回音室》里隐含有一种变化，即欧洲人对中国艺术和日本艺术态度的变化。这种变化，似乎跟梵·高等 19 世纪末的艺术家接受日本浮世绘艺术，与康定斯基等活跃于 20 世纪初的艺术家赞扬中国艺术，有一定关联。如果这种关联存在，那这种变化，在多大程度上影响到了凡·高和康定斯基的艺术创作？

柯：It’s definitely a part of the bigger context in which the book is set, a broad change on European’s perception of the art of China and Japan, both in relation to each other and in relation to western art. You can see this quite clearly for instance in the collections of certain older museums, like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I began my career. In 1870, say, the view of curators there would have been much more favourable to Japanese than to Chinese art, but by 1920, fifty years later, that would have reversed, and Chinese art would have been held in higher esteem. There’s been quite a lot of interesting scholarship on this shift, which obviously does not have one single or simple cause. I’m not a scholar of European painting, so my understanding of this is certainly limited, but it seems to me that by the 1920s the whole interest in Japan which we subsume under the name ‘japonisme’ seemed old fashioned to artists working then. But I’m not sure that this interest was simply replaced by an interest in China – there were so many other possibilities as well by then, in the art of Africa, of the Pacific, of pre-Columbian South America, the sort of things you can see in the sketchbooks Henry Moore (1898-1986) made in the British Museum as a student in the 1920s.

这绝对是这本书设定的一个更大的背景，即欧洲人对中国艺术和日本艺术看法的普遍变化，无论是其彼此之间的关系还是与西方艺术的关系。你可以在一些老博物馆的藏品中非常清楚地看到这一点，比如我开始个人职业生涯的伦敦维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆。比如说，1870 年，比起中国艺术，那里的策展人对日本艺术更为青睐，但到了 50 年后的 1920 年，这种情况发生了逆转，中国艺术会受到更高的尊重。关于这一转变，有很多有趣的学术研究，但转变显然不是出于单一或简单的原因。我并不是研究欧洲绘画的学者，所以我对这一点的理解当然是有限的，但在我看来，到了 20 世纪 20 年代，对日本的全部兴趣——我们称之为“日本风”，对当时的艺术家来说似乎已经过时了。但我不确定这种兴趣是否只是单纯被对中国的兴趣所取代——那时有非洲、太平洋、前哥伦布时代的南美洲各种艺术可以选择，因而还有很多其他的可能性，这些你可以在 20 世纪 20 年代亨利·摩尔（ 1898—1986 ）作为学生时在大英博物馆制作的写生集中看到。

莫：《回音室》里有非常多有趣的信息，如钱锺书对“气韵生动”翻译的评价，如献给收藏家弗利尔的刻意炮制的收藏图录，又如罗伯特·维维安·登特在《北华捷报》对塞尚的批评。当这些本没有直接相关性的信息，被放置到一本由“气韵生动”贯穿起来的著作里时，总会使读者嘴角上扬。在翻阅资料过程中，您会因为发现类似这样的信息而感到惊喜吗？

柯：All the time! One of the most rewarding parts of research for me is coming up with that new nugget of fact, or that new source. Being surprised, often by unexpected connections, is what keeps the process of research stimulating. I have always tried to look away from the received story to the details which catch our eye at the edge of the picture. There are clear ways in which this is now easier than it was when I started out as a scholar, most notably in the digitisation of early newspapers and periodicals. So the whole debate about the work of Cezanne in the English-language newspapers published in interwar Shanghai, that is something I would neverhave found in the days before such newspapers were digitized, and hence searchable. If you search with imagination, and persistence, there is so much more material that we used to have, and it often brings to the surface people or events which were relatively important at the time, but which have been ‘written out’ of standard mainstream histories. I am constantly being surprised in the process of research, that is the main thing that keep is interesting, keeps me wanting to do it.

总是如此！对我来说，研究中最有收获的一部分就是挖掘出这种新的事实宝藏，或发现新的信息来源。我通常因为发现意想不到的联系而感到惊喜，这也是研究过程鼓舞人心的部分。我一直试图把目光从接收到的故事信息转移到画面边缘吸引我们眼球的细节信息上。显然现在有了一些更容易发现信息的方法，比我刚开始做学者时要好得多，最明显的就是早期报纸和期刊的数字化发展。因此，在两次世界大战期间，上海出版的英文报纸上关于塞尚作品的全部争论是在这些报纸被数字化处理之前的我永远不会发现的，而之后可以搜索到了。如果你带着想象力，坚持不懈地去搜寻，你会发现我们过去拥有如此之多的材料，而且那些在当时相对重要的人物或事件，已被主流历史覆盖了。研究过程不断给我带来惊喜，这是让我一直有兴趣的主要原因，是这个惊喜让我一直想做这件事。

莫：《回音室》引言中，有关《中国章节》这本小册子的简短文字，非常有趣。之所以对《中国章节》感兴趣，是因为它使我在第一时间想起了威尼斯双年展。近些年，威尼斯双年展开幕时，当地也会出现非官方的“平行展”，这使人感慨，当代艺术的某些组织方式，似乎与一个世纪前“当代艺术”的组织方式，有些相似。在《谁在看中国画》一书中文版第一章的开篇，您曾提到艺术家黄永砅，据我了解，您对当代艺术一直有深入研究。那么，对古代艺术的研究和对当代艺术的研究，彼此之间会有哪些互相启发、帮助的可能，或者有哪些微妙连接？

柯：I certainly would not consider myself ‘an expert on contemporary art’, and I have quite deliberately written almost nothing on this topic. In some ways I feel a bit bad about this – the very distinguished American art historian who was head of department when I got my first teaching job was very insistent that it was the moral dutyof the art historian to engage with the art of their own time, as well as with the art of the past. Maybe it is a lack of confidence in my own critical judgement, but it is also the fact that in some ways it is much harderto write about contemporary art and maintain the kind of distance which I feel is necessary for the historian. People (artists, galleries, critics) are all necessarily making their case, arguing for their importance, and I’m sort of more interested in what happens when that advocacy is sifted through by time. I agree in some ways with your perception that contemporary art now shows similarities in its organisation with that of a century ago, but the vast explosion of attention and interest in recent decades is quite unprecedented, I think. And I’m conscious that there are many real specialists who can write about this with so much more conviction and insight than me.

我当然不认为我是“当代艺术的专家”，而且我几乎没有刻意写过任何关于这个主题的内容。在某种程度上，我对此感觉有点惭愧。在我从事第一份教学工作时，当时的系主任是一位非常杰出的美国艺术史家，他坚持认为，艺术史家的道德责任是研究他们自身所处时代的艺术，当然也要研究过去的艺术。也许不写当代艺术是因为我对自己的批判性判断缺乏信心，但事实上，写当代艺术的同时还要保持距离感，确实更难（我认为距离感对艺术史家来说是很有必要的）。大家（艺术家、画廊、批评家）都在阐述自己的观点，为自己的重要性辩护，我更感兴趣的是，当这些主张经过时间筛选后会发生什么。我在某些方面同意你的观点，即当代艺术在组织方式上与一个世纪前有相似之处，但我认为，近几十年来激增的对艺术的极大关注度和兴趣是前所未有的。我知道有很多真正的专家比我更有见地和洞察力，可以写出关于当代艺术的文章。

莫：在过往的研究中，您写到过太多中国古代画家，包括在《回音室》里，也涉及很多艺术家——陈师曾、金绍城、林风眠、徐悲鸿等，您最喜欢哪几位？

柯：The issue of personal taste and the writing of history is an interesting question. Do you have to like work to write about it in an insightful way? Can you do good historical work on art you really do not care for that much? There are certainly major figures whose art does notmove or inspire me in any significant way, and people whose work I find consistently surprising or interesting. I am very struck by the sad coincidence that Chen Shizeng and Jin Cheng both died relatively young in the 1920s, when they were in their forties. They were both hugely significant figures in the course of painting in China, as theorists and organisers as well as artists, and I wonder what might have been the course of painting if they had lived longer lives. History is full of such accidents.

个人品味和书写历史的课题是一个有趣的问题。你一定要喜欢上某件艺术作品才能以一种有见地的方式来评述它吗？你能在自己不那么感兴趣的艺术内容上做好历史研究吗？当然会有些重要人物的艺术作品并不能深深地打动或激励我，而有些人的作品却一直让我感到新奇或有趣。陈师曾和金绍城都在 20 世纪 20 年代英年早逝，当时他们才四十多岁，这一悲伤的巧合让我非常震惊。作为理论家、组织者和艺术家，他们都是中国绘画史上非常重要的人物，我想知道如果他们活得时间更长，绘画史将会被如何改写。历史上总是充满了这样的意外。

莫：作为一位艺术史家，从事艺术史研究，人生中的许多时间沉浸在艺术之中，会给您带来怎样的变化？

柯：Having been, one way or another, a professional art historian, as museum curatoror university teacher, for forty-five years now, I find it very difficult to think of my life as being something which is separate from thinking about or writing about art. So I can’t really say how it has changed my life, it just ismy life, or at least such a major part of my life that I can’t really imagine a life separate from it. I feel hugely privileged that I have had the opportunities I have had to travel and to see great art in so many places, and I am constantly finding out about new things I had no notion of. I would say that my interests have changed too. I certainly did not start out as scholar of Chinese painting, but worked much more on the history of 工艺美术. And even before that I was a student of Chinese literature, that was my first strong interest. So maybe there is still time for another change of direction!

我作为（以这样或那样的方式）一名艺术史家、博物馆策展人、大学教师，已经四十五年了，我发现很难把自己的生活与所思所想或艺术写作分开。所以我无法说它是怎么改变我的生活的，它就是我的生活，或者至少说，它是我生活中非常重要的一部分，以至于我无法想象没有它的生活。我很荣幸有机会去旅行，去那么多地方看伟大的艺术，并不断发现我以前完全没概念的新事物。我想说我的兴趣也发生了变化。起初，我研究的是工艺美术史而非中国绘画，在我学中国文学之前，工艺美术是我最初的强烈兴趣。所以，也许我还有时间再一次改变方向！

莫：研究中国艺术史的人，似乎大都会有习书法、画水墨的爱好，您是否也是如此？

柯：The simple answer is no. I have no artistic talent, and certainly no artistic training. It’s a very distinctive feature of the Chinese academic world that – especially in the twentieth century – many of the key writers of art history were themselves significant artists (I have a sense this may have changed somewhat in the last forty years), but such a tradition never really established itself in the academic world of the west. I can’t think of any of the major figures, right back to the founders of the discipline of art history in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world, who had any serious engagement with art practice. I suppose that means that I am not as embarrassed by my failure to practise as an artist as I would be if I was working in a Chinese context. But it is an interesting intellectual question why this state of affairs came about – in Britain, in order to be taken seriously as a historian of music, you would definitely have to have some degree of skill as a musician, so why do art historians not make art? The answer must lie on the ongoing tension between our discipline as art history(i.e. we are basically historians, who most definitely do not‘make history’), and as arthistory (i.e. a subset of the practice of art making).

最简单的答案是：不是。我没有艺术天赋，当然也没有受过艺术训练。中国学术界有一个非常鲜明的特点（尤其是在 20 世纪），即许多重要的艺术史家本身就是重要的艺术家（我觉得这在过去的四十年里可能已经有所改变），但西方学术界从未真正有过这样的传统。哪怕追溯到 19 世纪德语世界艺术史学科的创始人，我也想不出任何一个重要研究者曾经从事过真正的艺术实践。我想这意味着，我不必因为自己不是艺术家而感到羞愧，而如果我在中国环境下工作，可能就不一样了。不过这是一个有趣的知识性问题，为什么会出现这种情况——在英国，要想成为一名真正的音乐史家，你必须具备一定的音乐家技能，那为什么艺术史家就不用艺术创作呢？答案肯定在于我们这门学科到底是艺术的历史（即我们基本上是历史学家，我们绝对不会“创造历史”）还是艺术的历史（即艺术创作实践的一个子集），这两种观点，一直存在着冲突。

莫：LCA 有众多艺术爱好者和艺术史读者，是否可以给他们一些建议？

柯：I suppose I would advise people not to pay too much attention to what somebody like me might think, but rather to pursue what seems meaningful and interesting to you as an individual. It’s ok to not be impressed by the writing of a ‘famous’ scholar, or the work of an ‘important’ artist, if it doesn’t work for you then it doesn’t work, and that’s the end of it. But the flip side of that is I would say it isgood to expose yourself to as much as possible, and keep an open mind, so you can find out what that thing you like is. Books and exhibitions are obviously one great way to do this, but there are also large amounts of interesting material out there on social media of various kinds – LCA is just one outstanding example. People today have access to images of art to a degree far in advance of what used to be available only a short time ago, so it is easy to get swamped, that’s why I think it is necessary to give yourself permission to not pay attention to everything that is going on. And your interests will evolve over time, certainly mine have, so give yourself permission to change.

我会建议大家不要太在意像我这样的人的看法，比起我的建议，去追求对你个人来说有意义、有趣的东西更重要。对一位“著名”学者或一位“重要”艺术家的作品不感兴趣，是完全可以的，你对它没有感觉就是没有感觉，事情到此为止即可。但另一方面，我想说的是，让自己尽可能多地接触艺术，保持开放的心态，这样你就能找到你喜欢的东西。书籍和展览显然是很好的方式，但在各种社交媒体上也有大量有趣的材料—— LCA 就是一个突出的例子。现在人们接触艺术图像的数量，远超之前，所以图像本身极为容易被淹没。这就是为什么我允许自己不必关注正在发生的每一件事。你的兴趣会随着时间的推移而变化，当然我也是，所以允许自己去改变吧。

我们的对话—— 对话艺术史家与学者，让思想和知识被看见。

受访者：柯律格（Craig Clunas），著名艺术史家，牛津大学艺术史系荣休教授，英国国家学术院院士。

采访者：莫一奥，艺术史研究者，写作者。

LCA X 世纪文景