ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impact of modernity on China's visual and literary arts by means of a comparative analysis. The distinctions that separate Chinese and western art forms, along with their respective encounters with modernity, cast a tangential light on one of the study's principal questions–how to examine China through western usages. Consistent with China's multiple modernities, Laurence frames Bell's perceptions as part of a broader picture that represented the restoration of chinoiserie in twentieth-century Britain and 'shaped the way the British thought about Chinese culture' at the height of the modernist period. Chinese artists had demonstrated that they were neither immune to modernity nor reluctant to experiment with it, but unlike their Japanese mentors they nevertheless revealed a resistance to it. Modernity's interconnectedness across thematic boundaries is one of the most conspicuous observations and supports the view of architectural modernity in China more broadly.
