Realism
Realism is a notoriously slippery aesthetic concept. Claims of art's correspondence to a prior reality often can be read usefully in reverse, which is to say the reality in fact is posited rather than captured, and the claim of realism itself is as much an assertion of a particular artistic or ideological agenda as a passive capturing or reflection of the real. Nonetheless, as any literary or cultural historian of modern China knows, realism was almost indisputably the most central aesthetic concept for Chinese artistic discourse of the twentieth century, the cultural debates of which more often than not revolved around that term in one way or another. Cinema and its surrounding critical debates were no exception. The complexity of the issue is evident from the fact that realism has had a number of different corresponding terms in Chinese. In traditional Chinese aesthetics, its closest equivalent in common use may have been simply zhen Zhen which would imply more a sense of authenticity or sincerity in art rather than a strictly mimetic relationship between representation and reality. However, by the early twentieth century, under the powerful influence of Western discourses of both science and art, mimesis emerged as a priority in modern Chinese aesthetic practices. In 1921, in an early example of Chinese film theory, Gu Kenfu championed cinema for its quality of bizhen Bi Zhen or 'truth to life' which he insisted was superior to any other form of drama. Later, in mainstream leftist and Communist artistic theory, the official term for realism was xianshizhuyiXian Shi Zhu Yi or an ism (zhuyi Zhu Yi of manifesting (xian Xian the true/real (shi Shi which might be preceded by modifiers to create terms such as proletarian realism, revolutionary realism or socialist realism. After the end of the Maoist revolutionary era, in an effort to distance themselves from the official Communist discourse of that era, artists and critics often returned to a seemingly more neutral term for realism, xieshizhuyi Xie Shi Zhu Yi or literally inscribing/ describing (xie Xie the true/real (shi Shi a term which had classical origins but had not been in common use before the twentieth century. More recently, jishizhuyi Ji Shi Zhu Yi which Chris Berry, in his chapter in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21 Century (Zhang Zhen ed. 2007) has translated as 'on the spot