Author ｜
Kevin Ting-kit Yau
Abstract ｜
The Aesthetic Education Movement led by Yuan-pei Cai (1868-1940) introduced numerous foreign literature and art-related books into China during the Republican era. It contributes to form the basis of knowledge in interdisciplinary fields of literature, philosophy (including aesthetics), and art in the 1920s, and serves as an inspiration for the future. Ji-fan Yu (1891-1968) is an important aesthetic educator in the Republic of China, and this article begins with his translation on Kunstwissenschaft, his Outline of Aesthetics and Outline of Art (1922) is the translation of Japanese aesthetician Hoshin Kuroda’s (1885-1967) Introduction to Aesthetics and Art (1917), indicating a new direction for the Aesthetic Education Movement in 1920s. The article traces the conjunction of European and Japanese aesthetics behind it and reviews the transcultural context of the Movement. Firstly, this article introduces the cultural context of Kuroda’s book in Japan, showing that Kuroda takes a different approach apart from Yoshinori Onishi (1888-1959) and Jirō Abe (1883-1959). It illustrates Kuroda and Yu shared common beliefs in Kunstwissenschaft and “to popularize.” Secondly, the article explains the concept of Kunstwissenschaft Yu introduced comes from a German aesthetics theorist Max Dessoir (1867-1947), representing one of the veins of the global aesthetics education thought. The article then selects two particular terms —“inner-artwork” and “outer-artwork”—as a translingual example and reveals the semantic change of these traveling concepts from Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), Ōgai Mori (1862-1922) to Kuroda, Yu and Zi-kai Feng. By recognizing their connotation in different contexts, the article suggests the target of discussion in this aesthetic education trend across Europe and Asia is shifted from “der Genius” to common people.
keywords ｜
aesthetic education, transculturality, Kunstwissenschaft