This chapter develops a first sketch of a more systematic comparative analysis of Classical Greek and Han Chinese naturalism and to show how such a comparative approach can resolve some of the conundrums thrown up by the casual and implicit East–West comparisons of earlier studies. It shows that a comparative approach both requires and facilitates the development of a more sophisticated understanding of exactly what naturalism might be and that it permits a more persuasive account of the perceptual, social, political. And cultural coordinates of the artistic phenomena one categorize as "naturalism" in Classical Greece and Early Imperial China. The apparent parallelism in the development of naturalism in early Greece and China is problematic for both Gombrich's and Bryson's accounts. If, following Bryson, the depictive strategies that one call naturalism constitute a set of culturally specific purely Western conventions that have been arbitrarily designated as representing the real.