Although aesthetics has been to some extent marginalized in western philosophy, within the Chinese philosophical tradition aesthetics plays a key role. This article explores Chinese aesthetics as a site of valuable resources for rethinking the ways in which we conceptualize philosophical activity. After introducing a few distinct features of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, the article examines aesthetic distance in terms of guan, he, and ying, Chinese conceptions of artists and participants, and aesthetic suggestiveness or the inexhaustibility of a work of (...) art, in order to suggest that the Chinese philosophical tradition might contribute its sense of connection between style or method of doing philosophy and aesthetics to a contemporary metaphor of philosophy as aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This essay has three parts. The first moves from what artists confronted when China was first opened to the west in 1978 to what two classical Chinese critics and artists said art was and how it was to be made. The second looks at artists’ works made between two exhibitions in the United States, one in 1998, the other in 2017, to find an uncanny reprise of the classical principles. The third looks at the ideas of the global, contemporary, and (...) art through the works of Peter Osborne and Arthur Danto that apply to the new art from China. (shrink)