This paper attempts to map out the main issues concerning visual culture studies. Visual culture studies recently emerged as a nascent academic formation that offers new conceptual tools and ideas highlighting and exploring fields of vision lodged in our everyday life. The critical issues of visual culture are mainly twofold. One revolves around visuality as a discursive pattern; it considers ways in which different discourses of visuality, such acts of seeing, the history of visual apparatus, and the seeing subjects, etc., negotiate one another.
The other is about image, the object of beholding. In an effort to dispute the traditional bias held by art historians for 'established' artworks or their selected imagesstead of artworks or the images in the artworks, that traditional art history takes as the material for study, visual culture scholars challenge the distinction between images of non-art and art. For example, visuial culture studies compare images in 20th-century advertisements and magazines with that of Renaissance paintings. This kind of ahistorical treatment of images from different periods and contexts is still criticized by many art historians and theorists. While jarring from the older disciplines across many issues and methodologies, visual culture studies continue to venture into the neglected dimensions of visual experience and interpret the visual fields of our everyday life. This paper will explore the scope of discourses that visual culture studies produced, and delve into the intersections of visual culture studies and art history.