Bachelor of Arts (BA) - The University of Hong Kong

166FINE2026.The age of revolution: Art in Europe, 1750-1840 (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This course examines the radical transformation in European art from the age of kings to the age ofrevolutions, c.1750-1840. Painting, sculpture, and printmaking will be discussed in relation to varioushistorical developments, including the decline of aristocratic culture and Christianity; the rise of science,industry, and democracy; and new, Romantic notions of nature, individuality, nationalism, andprimitivism.Assessment: 100% coursework.Prerequisite: FINE1001.FINE2027.The formation of modernity: Art in Europe, 1840-1890 (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This course examines the early formation of modern European visual culture, from Realism toImpressionism. The underlying historical theme will be the rise of bourgeois society. Painting, sculpture,printmaking, and photography will be discussed in the context of related ideological issues such asindustrial capitalism, mass media, urban leisure, tourism, new gender roles, and colonialism.Assessment: 100% coursework.Prerequisite: FINE1001.FINE2028.Vision in crisis (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)In art, as in other fields of knowledge, the late 19th century and the early 20th century was a time whenpre-existing assumptions were challenged in a radical way. To certain artists in Europe, for instance,illusionistic realism or the conventions of perspective no longer seemed adequate tools for representingthe world and our experience of it. Amongst the factors provoking this crisis of vision was anincreasing awareness of other cultures and their differing modes of visual representation, and manynon-Western artists shared with their Western counterparts this new sense of the relativity of culturalknowledge, although they tended to respond to it in different ways.Assessment: 100% coursework.Prerequisite: FINE1001 or FINE1004.FINE2029.Modernity and its discontents (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)Although certain 20th century artists can be taken as celebrating the modern, many artists offeredinstead a critical engagement with the newly-emerging forms of experience they were encountering, orsought various forms of escape from them. While the response of European artists to the moderncondition is most well known, artists from other parts of the world were equally engaged with the taskof creating an art adequate to the new environment in which they found themselves.Assessment: 100% coursework.Prerequisite: FINE1001 or FINE1004.