Expressing What Lies Within, A Comparative Study of Edvard Munch, Liang Kai and Xu Wei

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of three, for lack of a better word, ‘expressive conceptions of art’, that of the Chinese painters Liang Kai (1140-1210), and Xu Wei (1521-1593) and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944). I want to make the claim that we learn something by considering these artists and the thoughts that motivated them together, with their apparently divergent aesthetics and vastly different cultural and historical contexts. The way I will do this, is by focusing on the one thing I think they can be fairly uncontroversially be said to share: The belief that, when producing images, the important thing to do is not to depict things which are outside human beings, but that there is something inside of the painter which it is important to express. The thesis investigates their cultural contexts, the thoughts which motivated them and the techniques they used, and discovers that the Chinese painters help us keep two thoughts in mind at the same time: that Munch is an unique result of modernity, but that he is also an expression of an international phenomenon and similar to the Chinese artists; We can see them as distinctive results of a distant culture, but also that they have an important kinship to what Munch is doing. In other words, the thesis helps us have a less parochial view of these, each of them important artists.