In recent decades the previously assumed dominance within the international art world of western(ized) conceptions of aesthetic modernity has been challenged by a critically becalming diversification of cultural outlooks widely referred to as 'contemporaneity'. Contributing to that diversification are assertions within mainland China of essential differences between Chinese and western art. In response to the critical impasse posed by contemporaneity, Paul Gladston charts a historical relay of mutually formative interactions between the artworlds of China and the West as part of a new...