This course seeks to train students in the history of one the world's major traditions of painting, namely that of China, and in the methods for studying it — including in Sinological context and in dialogue with other traditions of painting. Weekly seminars will leverage Toronto collections, namely paintings in the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and painting facsimiles in the collection of the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library at U of T, so that students can acquire an object-based foundation for researching Chinese paintings using established and novel methods in the discipline of art history. Beyond gaining hands-on experience with objects of a medium that — while painting — differs significantly from dominant Euromerican expectations for "painting," this seminar will introduce students to theory, method, and historiography for studying Chinese painting, emic and etic, in dialogue with objects. This seminar will also position students to work meaningfully with a medium that, given its fragility and foreignness, many find difficult to handle and/or understand, teaching students, whether literate in Chinese or not, how to do research on these objects. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to enable students to mobilize knowledge of a distinctive premodern non-Western medium in the Eurocentric discourses of the discipline of art history. Knowledge of Chinese language not required; students who read Classical Chinese will have the option of reading primary source texts in the original.