The present text addresses the following questions: Why is the history of ideas in pioneering contemporary Chinese art essentially a history of culture? Why and how is art a kind of historical cultural phenomenon? What kind of challenges will artistic production encounter in the course of China’s civilizational transformation, and which artworks testify to these? These queries constitute the central focus of the history of ideas in pioneering art understood as a history of culture.

Zha Changping takes inspiration from Western art theories and applies them to a contemporary Chinese context. The article has an ontological perspective, discussing how the concept of “relational aesthetics” manifests in Chinese contemporary art. It also discusses its relation to the history of ideas. The focus is on art, but the ontological perspectives on creation and humanity are universal.

This paper presents the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the so-called “world-picture logic” mode of critique. It also outlines the arguments—empirical, transcendental and creationist—upon which the aesthetic framework depends that has the world relational picture as its object. By laying out these arguments and inquiring into the nature of what is human, it sketches the relational theology central to the “world-picture logic” mode of critique.