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Western, Modern and Postmodern Gothic Churches in Twentieth-Century China: Styles, Identities and Memories

Boekbijdrage - Hoofdstuk

This chapter does neither trace the origins of Gothic architecture nor map the geography of Gothic (Kunstlandschaft) in nineteenth-century China, but tries to understand the seeming paradoxes of church architecture in twentieth-century China, by developing an approach based on architectural iconology and visual culture. This method, applied to many churches visited during fieldwork in different parts of China from 2011 to 2019, allows the author to structure this chapter around five questions. Firstly, why could a number of important Gothic and other Western-style churches be built in China after 1900 and strongly contribute both to Christian identity building and informal colonization? Secondly, why did some missionary societies continue to promote nineteenth-century Gothic patterns after the First World War, neither following the evolution of church architecture in Europe, nor accepting the inculturated indiginized Chinese Christian style that Rome tried to promote from the 1920s? Why did these missionary societies pretend that Chinese Christians preferred Gothic and other Western styles? Thirdly, modern Gothic churches with reinforced concrete structures were built in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other big cities in the 1920s and 1930s. Did Protestants and Catholics develop different modern Gothic building types? Fourthly, several Gothic-style churches built at the time of the foreign missions are today protected as key cultural relics of the People’s Republic of China. When did the heritagization process of Catholic and Christian churches in China develop and how should it be understood? Fifthly, why do many new churches built in China from the late 1980s continue to use Gothic forms inherited from and referring to the time of the mission? Why do Gothic references still contribute to the architectural representation of Christianity in twenty-first-century China?
Boek: Global Gothic. Gothic Church Building in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Pagina's: 178 - 201
ISBN:978-94-6270-304-9
Jaar van publicatie:2022
Toegankelijkheid:Closed