Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ever since Jean-François Millet (1814–75) was introduced to China in the 1920s through translations, Chinese artists’ fascination with him has resulted more from his life story than from the poor reproductions of his artworks. Millet’s focus on the imagery of the peasantry and his purported identification with the peasant made him a unique figure in the rise of a discourse on native soil, which conflates peasants, the land, the Communist revolution, and a distinctive Chineseness in art. This discourse first took form during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45) and continues to thrive in China today. This article examines the growing list of artists—from the well-known masters Gu Yuan (1919–96) and Luo Zhongli (1948–) to lesser-known artists whose professional work was supported by state painting academies and teaching institutions—who have been named the “Chinese Millets.” I propose that “Millet” continues to be effective as a trope in the discussion and imagination of art in China today because his life story provides multiple thrusts—the rapport with peasants, the simplicity and nobility of an artist’s character, an unflinching insistence on one’s own style in opposition to more fashionable trends—in support of a vague conviction of the vitalist force of the native soil. This simultaneously eases Chinese artists’ anxiety over their distinction in the international contemporary art world and echoes the civilizational nationalism increasingly promoted by the party state. Foregrounding the persistent phenomenon of likening to Millet in art discourse in China, this study reveals the challenges and dilemmas of an art world that simultaneously strives to rise in the global order and manages to work with an authoritarian state that both promises generous patronage and demands cooperation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".