Finally, some specialists take offense at the absence of Chinese scholarship in Elkins’s text.

Here, the
Westernness of Chinese painting history manifests itself twice over. First, Elkins does not read modern
Chinese, so cannot read this literature; he is, in this way, the archetypal Western scholar of Chinese
painting history. But second, were Elkins to read Chinese, and thus to more fully engage Chinese
language scholarship of Chinese painting history, this encounter would only reinforce Elkins’s position:
for, unlike its Western counterparts, Sinophone scholarship of Chinese painting, from all parts of the
Sinophone world, has, until the 1990s, tended to focus more on describing connoisseurial and
documentary detail than on crafting grand narratives informed by Western presuppositions about
historical and art historical writing. This stems partly from the fact that it is only from the late 1990s that
it has been possible to earn a PhD in Chinese art history in the PRC or Taiwan (and to write that thesis in
Chinese), and also partly from the fact that Sinophone scholars trained in the West often write in
Western languages, and from the vantage of the Western art historical tradition in which they were
trained. Thus while Sinophone scholarship serves as a foundation of the field—few among us in the field
of Chinese painting history could imagine working without the great connoisseurial contributions of Xu
Bangda (b. 1911),5 for example, and without the ground-breaking documentary contributions of Chen
Gaohua,6 Mu Yiqin,7 and many others—it is only recently, perhaps through a process that some might
call the globalization of art history,8 that Sinophone scholarship has become imbricated, institutionally
and intellectually, in the messy web of Western art history and its idiosyncratic expectations for Chinese
landscape painting. In the past, Sinophone scholarship did not leave itself open to Elkins’s critique, thus
reinforcing Elkins’s point about the Westernness of Chinese painting history. Specialists in the field may
not be the sole or primary audience for this book. Indeed, the number of rejections the manuscript has
received suggests that whoever has reviewed it does not see its worth, or a point in its publication. But if
Chinese landscape painting, and Chinese art history more generally, are Western art history (not all will
agree!), then perhaps it is interesting, and even beneficial, that Elkins’s hypotheses usefully explain, in
the language of a theoretically- and historiographically-informed Western art history, the cross-cultural
position of the field to larger art historical audiences. In an ideal world, I would hope that colleagues in
Western art history would read the scholarship of colleagues in Chinese art history; but in a more
instrumentalist world, I would hope that colleagues in Western art history would engage the idea of
Chinese art history, even if it is this book—and not a work written by a specialist—that serves as their
portal. The deck is already loaded in favor of Western art history; why not make that condition more
transparent to those seeking to study Chinese landscape painting?