Rock Art Research

The paper responds to an article entitled ‘The Western influence on the study of Chinese rock art’. The term ‘Western influence’ implies that there must have existed some kind of ‘Chinese traditions’ or ‘Chinese schools’ in the field with distinctive theoretical features before the former arrived in the Far East. Unfortunately, such traditions or schools have never been established so far; hence the proposition of Western influence becomes pointless. The misconception about its validity is the consequence of a long period of a pre-paradigm state of the subject and also relates to the residue of patriarchy deep in researchers’ cultural psychology. The paper also points out that the only real influence reshaping the study of rock art comes from science, but not the ‘West’. Furthermore, the rise of rock art science, a ‘scientific revolution’ reconstructing the fundamentals of the field, is the most significant achievement made in the past few decades, which will lead the discipline to the transition from pre-paradigm to post-paradigm.