'TASTING COFFEE AND ICE CREAM' WU GUANZHONG AND ABSTRACTION IN EARLY POST-MAO CHINA
「吃飽飯後才可嘗杯咖啡或冰淇淋」：後毛澤東時代初期中國的吳冠中與「抽象」
Dr. Jennifer Dorothy Lee
Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Theory, & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
美國芝加哥藝術學院 藝術史、理論與批評系副教授
2026 Visiting Scholar, Institute for Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong
香港中文大學中國文化研究所2026年訪問學者
2026年11月20日（五） 15:00-16:30
205 Room, Lesyue Building, National Taiwan University
國立臺灣大學 樂學館205室
國立臺灣大學文學院、藝術史研究所
趨勢教育基金會 【共作文明新趨勢】
* The talk will be conducted in English 演講以英文進行 *
「抽象」一詞承載著相當沉重的知識包袱，令人聯想起MeyerSchapiro那句名言：繪畫「由色彩與形狀構成，不表現任何內容」。在此次演講中，我將指出，二十世紀中國語境下的「抽象」承載著有別於西歐與北美脈絡的意涵，而這也讓我們得以在今日重新構思這一概念。本演講透過一種新的批評視角，聚焦畫家吳冠中（1919–2010）發表於「北京之春」時期的體制批判文字，探討「抽象」一詞如何在後毛澤東時代的中國被重新挪用。彼時，北京的政治精英對視覺或繪畫層面的「抽象」深懷戒心，將其與巴黎、紐約的資本主義藝術世界相連結；尽管與此同時，「抽象」一詞早已廣泛流通於毛澤東主義話語之中，是一個中立的、科學主義式的認識論術語。我將說明，吳冠中如何在《繪畫的形式美》（1979）與《關於抽象美》（1980）等文章中，施展了一套耐人尋味的文字戲法：他將「形式」從糾結難解的「形象」概念──亦即毛澤東主義「形象思維」論爭的核心──中撬離出來，並將「抽象」重新定位為植根於唯物主義、而非資產階級美學的中立化概念。一旦經過這套激進唯物主義話語的過濾，「抽象」便在後毛澤東時代初期的藝術界重新成為受到矚目的論爭術語，為日後中國當代藝術領域重大的公共論爭奠定基礎，也使我們今日講述「抽象」藝術全球化歷程的敘事變得更加複雜。
A term of art, abstraction carries considerable intellectual baggage, redolent of Meyer Schapiro's line about paintings "made up of colors and shapes, representing nothing." In this talk, I propose that abstraction in twentieth-century China bears meaning distinct from its resonances in Western Europe and North America, which informs how the concept can be reconceived today. Introducing the painter Wu Guanzhong (吳 冠中, 1919–2010) through a new critical lens that emphasizes his institutional critiques published during the Beijing Spring, I address how abstraction gets repurposed for China in the wake of the Mao era. At this time, political elites in Beijing regarded visual or painterly abstraction with great suspicion, owing to its associations with the capitalist art worlds of Paris and New York, even as the word (chouxiang 抽象) already circulated widely in Maoist discourse as a neutral, scientistic term of epistemology. I show how, in essays including "The Formal Beauty of Painting" (1979) and "On Abstract Beauty" (1980), Wu performed an intriguing sleight-of-word, prying form (xingshi 形式) loose from the fraught concept of the image (xingxiang 形象) central to Maoist debates on "imagistic thinking" (xingxiang siwei 形象思维), and repositioning abstraction as a neutralized concept rooted in materialism rather than bourgeois aesthetics. Once filtered through the language of radical materialism, abstraction took hold as a renewed term of engagement in the early post-Mao art world, setting the stage for landmark public debates on contemporary Chinese art and complicating how we narrate the globalization of abstraction today.