Chinese Painting and Its Audiences 9780691253022

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Beginning and ending
2 The gentleman
3 The emperor
4 The merchant
5 The nation
6 The people
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photography and Copyright Credits

Citation preview

chinese painting and its audiences

chinese painting and its audiences Craig Clunas

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts National Gallery of Art, Washington Bollingen Series XXXV: Volume 61

Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tr press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Du Jin (active c. 1465 – 1509), from The Eighteen Scholars, set of four hanging scrolls, Shanghai Museum All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clunas, Craig, author. Title: Chinese painting and its audiences ⁄ Craig Clunas. Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Series: Bollingen series ; Number XXXV. The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 61st volume | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016027789 | isbn 9780691171937 (hardback) Subjects: lcsh: Painting, Chinese. | Painting, Chinese — Appreciation. | bisac: art ⁄ Asian. | art ⁄ History ⁄ General. | art ⁄ Criticism & Theory. Classification: lcc nd1040 .c627 2016 | ddc 759.51 — dc23 LC record available at https: ⁄ ⁄ lccn.loc.gov ⁄ 2016027789 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This is the sixty-­first volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. This volume is based on lectures delivered in 2012. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series, supported by the Bollingen Foundation. Designed by Yve Ludwig. Composed by Julie Fry. This book has been typeset in ITC Galliard. ­ New paperback printing 2023

ISBN (paper) 978-0-691-17193-7 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-691-25302-2

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing “the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers. This edition is supported by a gift in memory of Charles Scribner, Jr., former trustee and president of Princeton University Press. The Press is grateful to the Scribner family for their formative and enduring support, and for their commitment to preserving the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for posterity. Images in this edition may have been altered in size and color from their appearance in the original print editions to make this book available in accessible formats.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Clunas (1929 – 2012).

Acknowledgments  ix

introduction 1

1 beginning and ending  5



2 the gentlem an  37



3 the emperor  85



4 the merchant  117 



5 the nation  155 



6 the people  193 

conclusion  229 Notes  237 Bibliography  263 Index  277

Photography and Copyright Credits  287

acknow ledgments

I owe a huge debt to all at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, who invited me to deliver the 61st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 2012, and who then sustained me while I did so in very testing personal circumstances, particularly: Elizabeth Cropper, Therese O’Malley, Peter M. Lukehart, Judy Metro, and Helen Tangires, but also Hayley Plack, Franklin Kelly, Elizabeth Kielpinski, Jessica Ruse, and Bailey Skiles. All the fellows in residence at CASVA in the spring of 2012 contributed by their energy and enthusiasm to sharpening the arguments here, but I would particularly like to thank Julian and Christa Gardner, David E. James, Sonya S. Lee, Estelle Lingo, Lorenzo Pericolo, and Jennifer Purtle. Friends and colleagues whom it is a pleasure to thank for generously supplying offprints, images, copies of books, intellectual support, and encouragement, as well as practical help of a myriad kinds, include at the very least (and with apologies for any omissions): Stephen Allee, Tim Barrett, Maggie Bickford, Timothy Brook, Rosina Buckland, Anne Burkus-­Chasson, Michela Bussotti, Cai Meifen, John Cayley, Pedith Pui Chan, Adam Chau, David Clarke, Unity Coombes, John R. Finlay, Magnus Fiskesjö, Joshua A. Fogel, Anna Grasskamp, Chen Pao-­chen, Chen Fongfong, Chen Yunru, Kee Il Choi Jr., Ju-­hsi Chou, Patrick Conner, Frank Dikötter, Frank Dunand, Anne Gerritsen, Karl Gerth, Mary Ginsberg, Guo Hui, Kiyoko Hanaoka, Jessica Harrison-­Hall, Jonathan Hay, James L. Hevia, Ros Holmes, Michelle Ying Ling Huang, Jiang Lijing, Burglind Jungmann, Yu-­chih Lai, Ingrid Larsen, June and Simon Li, the late Sonia Lightfoot, Kathlyn Liscomb, Lihong Liu, Andrew Lo, Ma Yazhen, Shane McCausland, Kevin McLoughlin, Julia K. Murray, Marco Musillo, Susan Naquin, Robert Nelson, Lara Jaishree Netting, J. P. Park, William Poole, Clare Pollard, David Porter, Martin Powers, Jennifer Purtle, Jessica Rawson, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Timon Screech, Adele Schlombs, David Shambaugh, Shao Yan, Carl Brandon Strehlke, Sun Liying, Jeremy Tanner, Minna Törmä, Melanie Trede, Wen-ti Tsen, Richard Vinograd, Rudolf Wagner, Wan Qingli, Wang Cheng-­hua, Aida Yuen Wong, Wu Renshu, Yan Geng, Chia-­Ling Yang, Yin Ji’nan, Yu Pei-­chin, and Zhang Hongxing. Members of the History of Art Department at Oxford were typically generous with time and support in the preparation of the lectures and of this book, both of which were improved in ways large and small by the critical comments and helpful suggestions of ix

Hanneke Grootenboer (who loaned me her copy of Victor Stoichita, and whose students in the class “Theories of Vision” were particularly stimulating), Geraldine Johnson, Gervase Rosser, Linda Whiteley, Hannah Williams, and Alastair Wright. Vicky Brown, Christine Robertson, Clare Charlesworth, and Rachel Leach have provided much more than impeccable technical support, for which I am profoundly grateful. I greatly appreciate the opportunity that Rose Marie San Juan, Tamar Garb, and other colleagues at the History of Art Department, University College London, gave me to try out for the first time the central premise of what has become chapter 1. In December 2013 the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, invited me to deliver the Pan Tianshou Lectures, giving me the valuable opportunity to test some of the central material of this book on a totally different audience with quite different expectations and levels of background knowledge. I am extremely grateful to the Academy’s president, Xu Jiang, and to Professor Cao Yiqiang for the invitation, and I am hugely in the debt of the many colleagues and students in Hangzhou who provided comments and constructive criticism, including Bi Fei, Gao Shiming, Wu Gan, Yang Zhenyu, Yu Xuhong, and particularly Zhang Ping, with whose aid I struggled over the translation of the term “meta-­painting” into Chinese. Dr Liu Yujen of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, generously gave up time from a busy schedule to read the whole manuscript and save me from numerous errors. The collegial and supportive reading by two anonymous colleagues on behalf of Princeton University Press is also greatly appreciated, and I hope they will feel that their benevolent input is visible in the finished work; those weaknesses that remain are down to me alone. It has been a great pleasure to work with Judy Metro, Sara Sanders-­Buell, and Ingrid Yeung at the NGA, on the sourcing of what has been a particularly taxing set of images; particular help in this regard has been rendered by Cheng Yi of the Suzhou Museum, and Huang Weili at the Liaoning Museum, also by Song Xinchao, Chen Xingcan, Lian Yingjun, and Tian Mingli. I have also benefited greatly from the professionalism and dedication of Michelle Komie, Karen Carter, Ben Pokross, Steve Sears, and other colleagues at Princeton University Press on all aspects of the production of this volume, as well as from the meticulous and sensitive editing of Pat Fogarty. Verity Wilson, as throughout my career, read the whole manuscript with an editorial and a critical eye on which I have never ceased to depend.

x

chinese painting and its audiences

introduction

This book has what some might judge to be a narrow focus, but it has somewhat wider aims. It engages with a small number of paintings out of the huge total made in China between about 1500 and the late twentieth century; it does so not in order to provide a better definition of what “Chinese painting” is (as we shall see, there have perhaps been too many such definitions, all of them based on no broader evidence bases than the one offered here), but to cast doubt on the viability of circumscribing one of the world’s longest, largest, and deepest cultural practices through definition at all. Like the lectures that were its first form of presentation, and whose format it closely follows, the book claims the privilege of not having to explain everything or deal comprehensively with everything, of being able to sometimes allude rather than explain in detail, in a way that would seem unremarkable in a similar project that dealt with, for example, painting and its audiences in France or Italy. It is not a survey but an argument. Having in many contexts and in many fora encountered questions or comments that begin, “I don’t know anything at all about Chinese art, but what strikes me . . . ,” I would be satisfied if the book was received as a contribution to making such interventions if not impossible, then just a little bit harder to utter. It is hoped that it does so in two ways. First, by telling readers who identify themselves as new to the subject some things about Chinese painting, its makers, and its audiences over a long time span, and (at least as important) by directing their attention to the large and excellent secondary literature that has grown up on the topic in the last fifty years, and on which 1

Detail of figure 2.48

this account depends to a profound degree that specialists in the field will at once appreciate. It is by now possible, without reading any language other than English, to learn extensive amounts about the biographies of painters, and the materials and contexts and contents of pictorial production, as well as to read the translated words of Chinese writers, both artists and critics, of many periods and many different social origins. The literature in Chinese itself (as well as in Japanese, and in other languages) is similarly large, by now in fact larger. It is very much hoped that this book may direct attention toward that formidable body of previous and current scholarship; this is by no means the last word, and on every topic touched on here there is more that has been and will be said. But the second way in which this book seeks to induce reflection in a broader art historical context is to make the reader think about what it means “to know nothing,” about the choices involved in “knowing nothing,” and about the ways in which a claim to “know nothing” about a topic is effectively a claim to know everything, in the sense of comprehending fully the value of knowledge or its absence on a given subject. How we are to position ourselves between “knowing nothing” and “knowing everything” about Chinese painting is a vein of concern running through this book. Chinese painting has been called (in the context of insisting that it “is” something called “Western art history”), “the Döppelganger of Western painting, the perfect double that is somehow less than perfect, the twin who differs in some fundamental and secret way.”1 While not entirely disputing that it has operated in this way, the attempt is made here to pose the question of whether it must necessarily do so. The mechanism for doing this is to turn the attention away from an attempt to define the essence of what makes “Chinese painting,” and to look at some of the ways that works have been viewed, over a relatively long span of time. To put it another way, and in the words of W. J. T. Mitchell, The point, however, is not to install a personification of the work of art as the master term but to put our relation to the work into question, to make the relationality of image and beholder the field of investigation. The idea is to make pictures less scrutable, less transparent; also to turn analysis of pictures towards questions of process, affect, and to put in question the spectator position: what does the picture want from me or from “us” or from “them” or from whomever?2

Quite who “us,” “them,” and “whomever” might be in the context of Chinese painting must of necessity also be part of the inquiry.

2

chapter one

beginning and ending

When did Chinese painting begin? Has it an end, indeed has it ended, and if so, when did that happen? The last question is perhaps easier to answer than the first, and it would not be an original point in doing so to gesture toward a work of art (fig. 1.1) produced in the 1980s, the decade that saw a renewed debate around a topic arguably dating back over 150 years, the very “death of painting” itself.1 On December 1, 1987, the artist Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954) placed two art history textbooks in his washing machine, gave them two minutes of mechanical destruction, and titled the resulting sludge “A History of Chinese Painting” and “A Concise History of Modern Painting” After Two Minutes in the Washing Machine.2 The two texts similarly purified and erased by this treatment were of different origins. The second was originally by the British author Herbert Read (1893 – 1968), and was first published in 1959, but was translated and published in Chinese only in 1983, four years before its violent demise in the bowels of Huang Yong Ping’s spin cycle.3 Despite its age, it had rapidly become a key textbook in the revived art schools of post-­Maoist China, a fluent introduction to (as its cover, shown in figure 1.2, suggests) the main narrative of Western painting. This particular copy shared its fate with a book published only one year before the translation of Read’s survey, Zhongguo huihua shi, “A History of Chinese Painting,” by Wang Bomin (1924 – 2013), published in 1982, although actually written nearly two decades earlier, on the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.4 Both books were therefore recent works, at least in their Chinese context, presented to Chinese readers within a year 5

Detail of figure 1.18

of each other, and neither more than five years old at the point when they met their watery and soapy grave. Whether Huang Yong Ping’s deconstructive gesture really marked the end of Chinese painting, or at the very least the unsustainability of it as a distinctive form of visual artistic practice, in the face of the dizzying economic, social, and cultural change experienced in China since the 1980s, is a problem that will be set aside for now. The more immediate task is to begin at the beginning, and consider when (and, crucially, where) Chinese painting started. Were we to somewhat arbitrarily step back a mere half a millennium in Chinese history, to the beginning of the sixteenth century, we would find that Chinese intellectuals of the Ming period (1368 – 1644) had a fairly well-­ developed sense of a story of where painting began, one that was already venerable by that date. For them, it had its origins, intimately bound up with the creation of the written script, in the actions of the primeval sage king Fuxi, who at the dawn of time systematized images that were already immanent in nature and were revealed to him in the tracks of birds and beasts in the mud. An album leaf (fig. 1.3) — that is to say, a small-­­scale painting suitable for mounting in a volume, by the painter Guo Xu (1456 – c. 1529) — shows Fuxi clad in the undressed skins and leaves that were human garb at the beginning of history; he is poised to make the third line (either broken or unbroken) that will create one of the trigrams, the ultimate signs from which all other forms of signification will pour forth to image the world in characters and pictures.5 In time, two 6

more culture heroes will create, respectively, the characters of the written script and the first pictorial images; as one late fourteenth-­­century writer put it: The sages appeared, and rectified the names of the ten thousand things, which were the lofty ones and which the mean, which were the animal ones and which the vegetable, and after this they could be apprehended. Thereupon the forms of sun and moon, wind and thunder, rain and dew, frost and snow above, the manifestation of rivers and seas, mountains and peaks, grasses and trees, birds and beasts below, and in the middle, the differentiation of human affairs, separating and uniting, the principles of things, fullness and emptiness were transformed through divine power, made appropriate through alteration, and achieved the needs of the people together with a fulfilment of the desire of things. If there were no writing there would be no means to record things; if there were no painting there would be no means to show things. Is it not that these two reach the same point by different routes? Thus I say that writing and painting are not two different Ways, but are as one in their origin.6

Here, however, in Guo Xu’s image of Fuxi, words and pictures have not yet divided; their shared aim of imaging the world is still pristine. However mythic the connections between calligraphy and painting were to prove in practice, in principle their roots were one, a unity that has retained its force into the present century.7 Some intellectuals of China’s Ming period, which began in 1368 and ended in 1644, were even willing to argue that actual images from this unbelievably remote era survived into their own day, at least in the form of the written characters of the sage kings. They are seen (fig. 1.4) in a collection of calligraphic rubbings formed toward the end of the fifteenth century at the court of one of the collateral branches of the Ming imperial family, precious traces of the heroic invention, by the Sage Kings of High Antiquity, of culture itself.8 However, even in the Ming period many intellectuals would have been skeptical to the point of derision about the authenticity of these purported traces of the first

beginning a nd ending

7

1.1.  Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954), “A History of Chinese Painting” and “A Concise History of Modern Painting” After Two Minutes in the Washing Machine, 1987/1993. Chinese teabox, paper pulp, glass, 76.84 × 48.26 × 69.85 cm. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2001. 1.2.  Cover of Herbert Read (1893 – 1968), A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959). 1.3.  Guo Xu (1456 – c. 1529), Fuxi Creates the Trigrams, from “Album of Various Subjects,” 1503. Ink and color on paper, 29.8 × 49.3 cm. Shanghai Museum.

writing, and no one was so bold as to claim to have traces of the very first painting. While the dramatic moment of the invention of the image could itself be pictured, learned opinion held that the earliest surviving actual painting dated from a very long way after the moment of painting’s creation as a cultural practice. Textual references well known to the educated referred to the activities of painters in the late Warring States period, around the third century before the 8

Common Era, though nobody thought that their work survived.9 A number of sixteenth-­­century writers mention their ownership of painted shells dating from the Han dynasty, some 1,500 years before their own time. Although they were very rare (and are even rarer today, fig. 1.5), they did circulate occasionally as wonders in the highly developed Ming art market, described by one owner, the connoisseur He Liangjun (1506 – 1573), as “something the world has never seen, indeed something the world did not know existed.”10 He saw them as impressively earlier than the works of the painters otherwise thought of as the canonical figures at the beginning of the art, the four great names of Gu, Lu, Zhang, and Wu. These refer to four painters of the deep past: Gu Kaizhi (c. 345 – c. 406), Lu Tanwei (active 460s – early sixth century), Zhang Sengyou (active late fifth – mid-­­sixth century), and Wu Daozi (active c. 710 – c.  760). Although vanishingly rare, and hence astonishingly valuable, works by these men were believed to exist and to circulate in the Ming world. One such scroll, the so-­­called Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies survives to this day in the British Museum (fig.  1.6). It was certainly known of and seen by many in the Ming period, when it belonged for a time to the great banker and collector Xiang Yuanbian (1525 – 1590), and it was viewed and admired by Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), the major painter, theorist, and arbiter of taste of the age.11 It is therefore not surprising that when in 1603 the woodblock printed book known as Master Gu’s Painting Album (Gu shi hua pu) sought to visualize the history of painting for the first time in an illustrated format, its very first image should be of a work putatively by none other than Gu Kaizhi (fig. 1.7). Here, then, was the beginning of the history of painting. And here, in textbook terms, it has tended to remain. Whatever the debates around the actual date of the Admonitions scroll (and other surviving works) attributed to Gu Kaizhi, the sense that he is the earliest painter of whose style and output we can have some idea, is a pervasive one. New readers can start here. beginning a nd ending

9

1.4.  Calligraphy of Cangjie, inventor of the Chinese script, from Antique Model Calligraphy Assembled in the Hall for Treasuring Worthies, 1489. Jinci Museum. 1.5.  The Kill, 300 – 100 bce , China, late Warring States period (475 – 221 bce ) to Western Han dynasty (202 bce  – ad 9). Painted clam shell, 7.5 × 9.0 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold T. Clark in memory of Flora L. Terry 1957.139. 1.6.  Traditionally attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344 – c. 406), Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (detail). Ink and color on silk, 24.8 ×  348.2 cm. The British Museum, London, 1903,0408,0.1. 1.7.  Work of Gu Kaizhi, from Gu Bing, Master Gu’s Painting Album, 1603. Woodblock print, 27 × 19 cm. National Library of Naples.

But it is the intention of this account to start somewhere very different. Figure 1.8 shows what it shall be tendentiously argued is the first (or at least the earliest surviving) “Chinese painting.” It is formed from two fragments of an early-­­fifteenth-­­century work showing a mighty steed and its two attendant grooms, painted on silk by an anonymous master of the early Ming imperial court. The picture may have formed part of a diplomatic gift exchange between the Ming emperors of China and the other Eurasian superpower of the day, the Timurid rulers of a great realm centered on what are now Iran and Afghanistan. It may just possibly be an image of the very animal given as a gift to the Ming emperor in 1412 by the Timurid notable Sayyed-­­Ahmad Tarhan, which was then brought back to China by a returning Ming embassy, with a painting of the horse then traveling in its turn to Herat in modern Afghanistan in 1417.12 The arc of the rein held by the groom in the robe fails to connect across the gutter of the book with the trajectory of the rein hanging from the neck of the white horse, making visible the dismemberment of the original composition, something also emphasized by the projection of parts of the pasted-­­in silk surface beyond the framing boundaries of the album’s pages. Both of these pages survive today in an album of paintings held in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, in what was the collection of the Ottoman sultans. The album (Topkapi Palace Museum H. 2154) is known as the Bahram Mirza album, after its 10

first owner Bahram Mirza (1517 – 1549), brother to the Safavid Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524 – 1576) of Iran, for whom it was assembled in the years 1554 – 1555 by the court artist Dust Muhammad (fl. 1531 – 1564). This album has a good claim to be better known as the first “world history of art,” since in addition to a quantity of works from different regions and different periods of the Islamicate world (fig. 1.9), it includes one European piece (fig. 1.10, described as farangī, or “Frankish”) and a rather larger number of pictures from China. An inscription in Persian above the heads of the grooms, whose hats (like the head and hooves of the horse itself) burst out of the frame to stress their foreignness, the fact that they do not really fit here, reads, “These paintings are from the collection of good works by the Chinese masters.”13 Using the Persian word for “Chinese,” khaţā’ī (cognate with “Cathay” in the European languages), the inscription identifies these as literally the first Chinese paintings, or rather the first paintings to be called “Chinese.” And this is where this account will begin. “Chinese painting” had, in fact, existed as an idea in the Persian-­­speaking world for some centuries before Dust Muhammad made his claim, which merely gestured toward a specific example (crucially here the earliest surviving specific example) he happened to have to hand. In the “Alexander Tale” (Iskandar-­­nāma), one of the “Five Poems” (Khamsa) of the Persian poet Nizami (1141 – 1 209), there is the tale of the trickster and false prophet Mani’s competition with Chinese painters, a battle of wits and representational magic between two equally tricky adversaries. One story tells how on his way to China to seek converts, Mani comes across a pool of water, which shatters the jug he throws onto it in search of a drink; in fact, it is made of crystal, with ripples painted on by the fiendishly cunning Chinese artists; Mani responds by painting an equally lifelike dead and maggoty dog on the surface, to warn others of the deception. Equally or even better well-­­known to educated Persian speakers beginning a nd ending

11

1.8. Anonymous, Horse with Chinese Grooms, 15th century. Color on silk, 49 × 30.4 cm (horse) and 39.9 × 28.2 cm (grooms), double-­page painting from the Bahram Mirza album, assembled 1544 – 1545. Topkapi Palace Museum. 1.9.  Eight paintings mounted together as an album leaf, late Turkmen and Safavid periods, Iran, from the Bahram Mirza album, assembled 1544 – 1545. Opaque pigment and gold on paper, 33 × 21 cm (picture area). Topkapi Palace Museum. 1.10.  After Bronzino (1503 –  1572), Portrait of a Young Man, Florence or Venice, from the Bahram Mirza album, assembled 1544 – 1545. Oil on paper (?), 36.5 × 24 cm. Topkapi Palace Museum.

is the tale in the same source of Alexander the Great’s dispute with the emperor of China over the merits of Greek and Chinese artists. A competition is staged, with both nations’ finest painters working at opposite ends of a room divided by a curtain that, when it is drawn aside, reveals two identical paintings, one of which then vanishes when the curtain is again drawn across between them. It transpires that the Chinese have polished their wall to such a level that it reflects the Greek painting exactly. The Chinese are then deemed best at polishing, as the Greeks are at painting, but in a context where “merely” reflecting carries a highly positive connotation of the reflection of the will and purposes of God Himself.14 In his preface to the Bahram Mirza album Dust Muhammad alludes to this story, juxtaposing the “Artangi Tablet,” an amazing image painted by Mani to “the Picture Gallery of China, which is known to contain images of all existing things,” and his way of praising at least one Persian painter is to claim that his skill had “never been equalled by the painters of China.”15 Calling the horse and grooms image in the Bahram Mirza album “the first Chinese painting” is very obviously not a claim that no paintings were done in China prior to 1544, when the scroll fragment was mounted in its Persian context, or prior to around 1418, when the painting was probably executed. Wang Bomin’s 1982 account of “Chinese painting” (the one lost in the washing machine) in fact begins with the painted pottery of the Neolithic era (c.  5000 – 3000 bce ), many thousands of years before these dates; for him “Chinese painting” has always already existed. The intention is in no way to show disrespect to the great tradition of painting in China, which created some of the most visually compelling images in the whole field of human creativity. What it nevertheless still seems necessary to draw attention to is the banal but obvious fact that no contemporary called the work of Gu Kaizhi in the fourth century or Guo Xi (1000 – c. 1090) in the eleventh century (fig. 1.11) or Wen Zhengming (1470 – 1559) in the sixteenth century by the name “Chinese painting.” For the first centuries of its existence, no one called Spring Trees After Rain (fig. 1.12) a “Chinese painting,” just as no one called Wen Zhengming a “Chinese master.” In the copious written record of the history and theory of painting available to people in the Ming era, a painter might well be identified by a regional label, or by reference to the dynastic period in which he was active. But no one was “a Chinese painter,” and certainly no work or type of work was “Chinese painting.” These things were all nameable simply as hua, using the Chinese word we translate as “painting,” which will provide the defining framework (as we shall see, a very loose framework) for this account. But they were not “Chinese painting,” Zhongguo hua. They have only become so in more recent times, and in reference to other possibilities. A thousand years ago, even in the presence of other possibilities, for imperial Chinese cataloging projects it was the painting of the empire itself that was the unmarked case, and the occasional import that needed the qualification. We can see this in the great catalog of the collections of the last Northern Song emperor, Huizong (r. 1106 – 1126), the Xuanhe hua pu, or Painting Catalog of the Xuanhe Era, its preface dated to 1120. At the very end of its three-­ chapter account of the canon of landscape painting, it discusses a small number 12

of images from “the country of Japan,” noting their heavy use of color and fondness for a gold ground.16 It could perhaps be argued that here we already see “Chinese painting” being defined in opposition (even if only an implicit opposition) to a something else. Certainly these are among the first images not made by Chinese hands to be categorized by the Chinese word hua in a Chinese text. And an awareness of Japanese painting as a distinct picturing tradition can be traced, if faintly, through subsequent centuries.17 But in general, for Chinese writers, as for all the other painting traditions with any degree of self-­­reflexivity, the indigenous is the unmarked case. By the twentieth century that was no longer so. The problem is made clear if we return to Huang Yong Ping’s booky sludge, and to the titles of the two works that went into the machine as separate and came out together, irrevocably washed out of individual existence. In the case of Herbert Read’s Concise History of Modern Painting, which takes its readers from Paul Cézanne (1836 – 1906) to Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), the content is geographically limited despite the unmarked totality of the title. Wang Bomin’s history of Chinese painting, which begins with Stone Age painted pottery and ends with the fall of the imperial system in 1911, marks its partialness in its title, and indeed by the twentieth century it could not do otherwise. The two books’ coverage only overlaps chronologically for a few decades of the late nineteenth century, but in fact they run on parallel lines that never meet, even to infinity, and there is in truth no overlap at all. A concise history of modern painting that beginning a nd ending

13

1.11.  Guo Xi (c. 1000 – c. 1090), Early Spring, 1072. Ink and color on silk, 158.3 × 108.1 cm. National Palace Museum.

1.12.  Wen Zhengming (1470 –  1559), Spring Trees After Rain, 1507. Ink and color on paper, 94.3 × 33.3 cm. National Palace Museum.

omits Qi Baishi (1864 – 1957) or Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953) is perfectly acceptable, or at least was unquestioned by Herbert Read’s intended readership in 1959; but imagine something called simply a “History of Painting” that was only about Gu Kaizhi, Guo Xi, and Wen Zhengming, and in which Rembrandt or Cézanne or Picasso went unmentioned. Even in China today that will not wash, and so the qualifier “Chinese painting” has become a globally necessary one. What still requires investigation is partly the process whereby that came to be so, and in particular the ways in which the category “Chinese painting” came to be constructed over the past five hundred years or so. How did it come to be natural that “painting” is on one side of the Mall in Washington, DC, in the National Gallery, and “Chinese painting” is on the other, in the Freer and Sackler Galleries, or that “painting” is in the National Gallery in London’s Trafalfgar Square while “Chinese painting” is in the British Museum? This separation, even as it comes to feel problematic and troubling, has by now such a long history that visitors to these collections, even those responsible for their curation, are perhaps unaware of how contingent it is, and are almost certainly unaware of how nearly things turned out differently. This sort of institutional separation was in no sense preordained or inevitable. To give just one tantalizing example, in 1927 Sir Charles Holmes, then director of the National Gallery in London, looked seriously into acquiring from the Japanese dealer Yamanaka examples of early Chinese fresco painting, as part of an expansion of that institution’s interest in “painting” in its widest sense.18 That did not happen. It would be easy to say, “That, of course, did not happen.” As just suggested, the process depends critically on viewers outside China, since it was only outside the sinophone world that the category “Chinese painting” initially made any sort of sense; for Chinese viewers it was once just hua, “painting.” As Richard Vinograd has pointed out, “. . . Chinese painting is and always has been bound up tightly with its historiographic constructions. . . . ‘Chinese painting’ indeed has its fullest and most meaningful (and perhaps sole?) existence as an intellectual category.”19 But this book is certainly intended to be more an account of artworks than of intellectual categories, and it is emphatically not simply a story of the imposition of a category from the outside. As will be shown below, the idea of “Chinese painting” has had its strongest and most vociferous advocates over the last century within China itself. It is therefore intended to carry the account from the sixteenth century, from the moment when (at least in the current conceit) “Chinese painting” was first identified in Safavid Iran, down to our own time. And if the category has depended crucially on the viewers of these images, this account will go further and explore the ways in which the viewing of painting by audiences both within and outside China itself has contributed to the creation, sustaining, and extending of the category of “Chinese painting,” to the point where it is unchallengeable today. It is certainly intended to show how it is that audiences, viewers, have made “Chinese painting” a viable term of description, as well as show at least something of the suppressions and elisions that have had to take place in order to sustain that viability. Partly, therefore, this will be a history of what has to be excluded in order to make “Chinese painting” both possible and visible. 14

It needs to be stressed at the outset that these exclusions are not simply some orientalist violence done to otherwise unsullied indigenous concepts. Within China itself, the category of hua, “painting,” has as often been deployed as an exclusive one as it has been all-­­embracing, with the effect that many images that today fall under the rubric of “Chinese painting” might not have done so in the past. With regard to the past five centuries, which form the focus of this book, this is most vividly seen in the case of religious icons, whether those used in the context of the organized traditions of Buddhism or Daoism, or those used in domestic contexts such as the offerings commonly made to ancestors. An image like the ritual funerary portrait shown in figure 1.13, preserved today in a museum context, would at its creation have occupied a space conceptually very different from that of other images perhaps owned by the selfsame wealthy household. Such images were not unproblematically hua, “paintings.”20 The cataloging practices of the imperial household in the eighteenth century similarly made a distinction between portraits and other images, as well as between religious images and other types of painting, the former listed from 1744 in a series of works under the title Bi dian zhu lin, Pearl Forest of the Secret Hall, the latter in a sequence of texts begun in the same year entitled Shi qu bao ji, Precious Lists of the Stone Channel [Pavilion].21 Religious icons were not necessarily relegated to a lower status by viewers at the time, but it is an empirical fact that they were largely (unless exempted by virtue of great antiquity) excluded from Ming and Qing dynasty considerations of the category of hua, and have been consequently marginalized in modern art-­historical accounts of “Chinese painting,” regardless of those accounts’ location of production. Their absence from this present study, and the consequent lack of attention in what follows to what might be broadly thought of as religious or devotional forms of viewing, is far from unchallengeable, but it has the virtue of confining the inquiry to more manageable proportions, by concentrating on those kinds of images that are less problematically acknowledged as “painting” within China and as “Chinese painting” beyond it over the past five hundred years or so. In situating the birth of “Chinese painting” as a category formed by external (in this case Persian) viewers, there is a real risk that any reader with even a basic knowledge of the history of painting in East Asia may feel moved to object. Did not China’s closest neighbors, in Korea and Japan, have a long acquaintance with pictorial works from China, and were they not, in fact, the first foreign viewers of “Chinese painting,” long before Dust Muhammad made his confident claim about “the good works of the Chinese masters”? Certainly in Japan, as early as the Heian period (794 – 1185 ce ), there was an awareness of and a keen interest in the differences between objects and images that had been manufactured locally, and those that had been imported from the East Asian mainland and that carried the prestige of the glamorous court of the Tang dynasty (618 – 906 ce ). In fact, such was the prestige of the Tang empire that it was its name, a temporal rather than a purely geographical labeling, that persisted in Japan in succeeding centuries. It was as karamono, “Tang things,” that the goods of China, including paintings (fig. 1.14), circulated among the elites of Japan.22 However, the way in which the idea of karamono (a word beginning a nd ending

17

1.13. Anonymous, Funerary Portrait of Lady Li, c. 1600. Ink and color on silk, 166 × 102 cm. National Museum of Denmark.

1.14.  Lü Ji (d. 1505), Spring, from a set of Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons. Ink and color on silk, 176 × 100.8 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

that appears in the first Japanese-­Portuguese dictionary of 1603) was used in Japan seems to be something fundamentally different from the Persian use of the term khaţā’ī for a specific faraway land, and indicative more of a sense of certain elements of a common high culture that might have specific local and continental inflections, but was at root a shared one. This sense of a shared high culture is even more powerful if we examine the Record of Paintings (Hwagi), a catalog written in 1445 by the Korean scholar Sin Sukju (1417 – 1475) of the painting collection of his patron Yi Yong (1418 –  1453), Prince Anpyeong. It lists nearly two hundred paintings and over thirty items of calligraphy by Chinese masters of the Song (960 – 1279) and Yuan (1279 – 1368) dynasties; all are lost today and their authenticity — for example, the genuineness of the seventeen pictures in the catalog attributed to Guo Xi — cannot be tested.23 Nowhere does the catalog give the sense that these are products of a foreign land or a foreign pictorial tradition; instead they are works of great masters of the past in what is once again a common tradition. They are not, it appears, being seen as “Chinese paintings.” In one sense, Dust Muhammad inaugurated a sadly robust if highly problematic tradition; he knew what Chinese painting was without having seen very much of it, and certainly without having seen the full range of pictorial production either in the China of his own day, or that which resulted from the great heritage of production of the past. He pronounced on Chinese painting on the basis of a very narrow base of knowledge. It is not perhaps a coincidence 18

that it was in the middle of the sixteenth century that he felt able to do so. It would be universally recognized that the century from 1500 to 1600, falling squarely within the Ming era in China, was one in which a number of regions of the world became more closely connected with one another through both trade and conquest, and one in which consequently (if paradoxically) many key ideas of difference, of what separates a number of versions of “us” from a number of “thems,” first came into being. I find myself unable to agree with David Carrier in his claim that the sixteenth century saw a coming together and that, “Soon after 1522 one unified art world began to be created.”24 Sympathetic as one might be to the generosity of vision this implies, there is equally a contrary view, that this is not the period of a coalescing, or of a recognition of unity, but rather is precisely the age in which difference came to be installed as central to the sustaining of what this new thing of painting as an art was to be. The sixteenth century was arguably the beginnings of the modern world in a much less benign sense than is sometimes invoked, in its recognition that “they” are not “us.” In defining, on the most tenuous base of evidence, that which is farangī and that which is khaţā’ī, Dust Muhammad was really involved in a new type of self-­definition of his own culture. Not so long after he was able to include “Chinese painting” in the album he assembled for his princely patron, another avid aristocratic collector, Archduke Ferdinand II of the Tyrol (1529 – 1595), was able to read about paintings from China that he owned, in the inventory of his Wunderkammer, his “chamber of wonders,” held at Schloss Ambras and compiled in 1593 (fig. 1.15). Europeans were at this point less well informed about difference than Iranians, and the three Chinese paintings in Ambras, one a scene of a swan on a riverbank and two scenes of figure subjects in palatial settings, are each cataloged as an “Indian cloth” (Indianisch tuech), using “Indian” in the sense of “coming from the Indies” — that is, from any of the non-­European parts of the world.25 The Ambras paintings are very rare survivors of the presumably quite small number (though definitely once a larger number than survives today) of paintings made in China that found their way into collections in what was becoming “the West” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 There they quite quickly performed the same role as they had already done in the Islamicate world, forming the evidence base for confident generalizations about the salient characteristics of “Chinese painting,” and in particular its strengths and weaknesses vis-­à-­vis native traditions of picturing. By 1675, the German theorist Joachim von Sandrart (1606 – 1688) could write of Chinese painting in his German Academy of the Arts of Architecture, Drawing and Painting (Teutsche Academie der Bau-­Bild-­und Mahlery Kunst) that: They set everything down singly in outline only, without shadows or modelling, but washed over quite simple with colours of their kinds. They do not know how to set off each figure according to its true quality, whether it is before or behind, or how to observe such other aspects of naturalism, upon which the European painters reasonably devote great diligence. . . .  It is not a little to be wondered at that such otherwise clever people have no knowledge whatever of the art of Perspective. . . .27 beginning a nd ending

19

1.15. Anonymous, Scene in a Palace Garden, late 16th century. Ink and color on silk, 171 × 105 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

He goes on to tell us about four actual “curious pictures, which I have obtained from the Chinese themselves, with ridiculous archaic figures.” Four may not be a large number, and their authority is further diminished by the fact that what Sand­ rart was looking at may well not have been Chinese paintings at all, but printed illustrations (fig. 1.16) in European volumes on China by writers like Athanasius Kircher (1601/2 – 1680) and Olfert Dapper (c. 1635 – 1689), but it is enough. Ten years later the learned Isaac Vossius (1618 – 1689) wrote his overview of “The Arts and Sciences of the Chinese” and, while at the same time acknowledging that “It must be allowed that the pictures which come to us are not the best ones,” was still able to be confident that “they observe neither the laws of nature nor of optics.”28 However flimsy the evidence base, “Chinese art” begins here as a known and a coherent entity, and it remains so in the Western tradition.29 This is so whether the knowledge is negative or positive or, broadly, speaking neutral. In 1804, John Barrow (1764 – 1848), who unlike Sandrart or Vossius had actually been to China, was dismissive: 20

With regard to painting, they can be considered in no other light than as miserable daubers, being unable to pencil out a correct outline of many objects, to give body to the same by the application of proper lights and shadows, and to lay on the nice shades of colour, so as to resemble the tints of nature.30

Statements like this were what allowed John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) to know that “The Chinese, children in all things, suppose a good perspective drawing to be as false as we suppose their plate patterns to be, or wonder at the strange buildings which come to a point at the end.”31 By the early twentieth century, a hundred years after Barrow’s dismissal of China’s “miserable daubers,” the great American connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865 – 1959) — who at the height of his fame just before World War I proclaimed in his letters, “Would I were young or at least well, & I’d chuck everything to go to China,” and “How I wish I were now starting out in life! I should devote myself to China as I have to Italy” — was much more positive: Among the reasons, therefore, to be given for the great superiority as religious expression of Buddhist to Christian art, we must place to the front the fact that Sino-­Japanese design is almost exclusively an art of contours, of values of movement, and, in its own way, not ours, of space-­composition.32

Maybe not much other than nationality links Bernard Berenson with the great sage of modernism Clement Greenberg, a man who certainly “knew what it beginning a nd ending

21

1.16.  Chinese Deities, from Athanasius Kircher (1602 –  1680), China Monumentis, qua Sacris, qua Profanis . . . (Amsterdam, 1667). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1382-­254).

was good for him not to know,”33 but they were both confident that they knew what Chinese painting was. Writing in 1950, in a tone that makes it pretty clear that for him Chinese painting had certainly come to an end, Greenberg uncannily echoed Dust Muhammad’s invocation of “the Chinese masters” (equally unnamable figures for both of them) when he wrote how it was: the absence of full color and strong modelling in Chinese painting and its, so to speak, passive naturalism [that] gave the decorative a foothold from the beginning. . . . It is my hunch that Chinese painting became as decorative as it now seems only towards the end of its development two or three centuries ago; and it is this that is responsible for the present insipidity of so much of it.34

In 1954, a generic “Far Eastern painting” was still on Greenberg’s mind, as he insisted on its incommensurability with the Western tradition he saw as essentially unbroken from representation to abstraction, claiming, “I find, down at bottom, that Mondrian and Piero and Rembrandt have more in common between them than any one of them has with a master of the old Chinese school.”35 Just two years after that, in the book that sprang from one of the most influential and important of all series of Mellon Lectures, Ernst Gombrich could make a generalized Chinese painting (fig. 1.17) the central plank of his influential argument about “the beholder’s share,” arguing that: Perhaps it is the restricted visual language of Chinese art, with its kinship to calligraphy, that encouraged these appeals to the beholder to complete and project. The empty surface of the shining silk is as much a part of the image as are the strokes of the brush.36

Gombrich’s 1956 Mellon series, entitled “The Visible World and the Language of Art,” became the book we know today as Art and Illusion, surely one of the most significant pieces of writing about visual art in English in the whole of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most widely read and admired.37 But it is necessary to insist on the point, here made in as non-­confrontational a way as possible, that Gombrich shares with Clement Greenberg, Bernard Berenson, John Barrow, Joachim von Sandrart, and Dust Muhammad a pervasive tendency to see “Chinese painting” as something graspable and definable on the basis of a very few, and often as few as one, key examples (fig. 1.18). When Dust Muhammad defined his horse and grooms as one of the “good works of the Chinese masters,” he simply had no sense at all of what his contemporaries in China would have defined as good work; he simply had not seen any of it, being restricted to those kinds of Chinese images that Persian taste and the vagaries of trade practices made available to him (fig. 1.19). When five centuries later Gombrich chose one painting from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to be “Chinese painting” for his purposes, he was choosing to narrow his evidence base to that which would support his powerful and supple argument, an argument that of course we would recognize as not really being one about “Chinese painting” at all, but about something quite different. Gombrich certainly knew more 22

about Chinese painting than did Dust Muhammad, or at least he had access via the age of mechanical reproduction to many more images, though he seems very comfortable in exploiting only a very tiny portion of what was available to him, itself only a small part of what actually exists from the history of painting in China.38 What they share, however, serves to illustrate one of the first key points of the argument presented here, that “Chinese painting” was created as something that was totally known, totally understood, totally defined, before it was ever investigated, and has remained so down to the present day. It would be possible (though a dreary task) to compile an anthology of passing mentions of Chinese painting in Western art history, glanced at en passant as the foil to the main subject.39 They would all serve to back up a point made by Eric Hayot, who has stressed the profound significance within Western culture of what seem like mere passing references to China in a situation where: . . . “China” has been most consistently characterized as a limit or potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather as the very distinction between otherness and similarity, and thus, because what is at stake in the era of modernity in the West is the dream of the universalization of culture, as a horizon of the very idea of horizons, a horizon, that is, that marks the limit of the universal as a transcendental field. “China” has been, in short, not just one name for the line that delimits inside from outside, one form of the concept of totality, but rather a form of all forms of totality, a figure against which other forms of totality have been measured.40

beginning a nd ending

23

1.17.  Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960), p. 175.

1.18.  Attributed to Xia Gui (active late 12th – early 13th century), A Fisherman’s Abode After Rain, Chinese, Southern Song dynasty, end of 12th century. Ink and color on silk, 144.5 × 101 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Special Chinese and Japanese Fund 14.54.

It remains a sad fact that fairly feeble generalizations about “Chinese art,” based on the most scanty bases of evidence, will still sometimes get a polite hearing today, with a degree of indulgence that would simply not be afforded to equally ill-­considered thoughts about the Western canon.41 Whether we like it or not then, “Chinese painting” has been in art history from its beginnings, and so at this point it is perhaps possible to take some shelter under the great shadow of Ernst Gombrich by drawing attention to the central role that he gives Chinese painting in what remains one of the major turns of the art historical discipline from its inception, and a turn the implications of which we are still working out today. This would be the insistence that 24

the history of art is not solely about what artists do, but is also centrally and crucially about what audiences and viewers see. From the idea of the beholder’s share, from Gombrich’s insistence that much of what is seen happens in the mind of the person seeing, surely springs (often in ways to which Gombrich himself was not at all sympathetic, and which he strove to hold back with all the prestige at his disposal) some of our current preoccupations with an aesthetics of the relational, in which the viewer plays a role as central as “the artist,” and where “situations and encounters” take the place formerly assigned to “objects.”42 It therefore seems curiously apt that for Gombrich it should be “Chinese art” that serves as the instantiation of the central idea of the beholder’s share, and that this towering figure should place the viewer of Chinese painting in some sense at the very heart of the discipline of art history, if in an unacknowledged way, for the last fifty years. The account that follows will explore the ways in which it is the viewing of what we now call “Chinese painting” — Zhongguo hua or Zhongguo huihua (as in the title of Wang Bo­min’s disintegrated textbook) — that has been central to our understanding of this object of study. If “Chinese painting” was an object created outside China itself, this does not mean that attention here will be concentrated solely on how foreigners have looked at the work that Chinese painters have produced. What there will be is a consideration of some of the ways in which, beginning in the sixteenth century, audiences in China and outside it have interacted to make the field of study we all engage with today; this interaction began at first very beginning a nd ending

25

1.19. Anonymous, Bird and Flowers, 15th century, from the Bahram Mirza album, assembled 1544 – 1545. Color on silk, 40.5 × 24 cm. Topkapi Palace Museum.

tentatively and tenuously and in very small numbers, although by the twentieth century it was occurring in much more large-­scale and profound ways. The account will begin in the sixteenth century, because that is the period from which we have the clearest evidence, expressed through the writing of Dust Muhammad, that people outside China were beginning to engage with what Chinese painting was. But for most of this volume foreigners will be only a very distant hovering presence, as an attempt is made to understand and try to explain some of the ways in which ideas about the viewing of painting within China itself changed and developed from the sixteenth century down to our own time. Hua, “painting,” is a term that has been continuously meaningful in Chinese over the past five hundred years, and that remains so today, even if the specific referents of that term have been altered, contested, and resisted through time. In beginning to talk about hua, “painting,” it should be made clear that this category, just as it is not here equivalent to all pictures of whatever type, is not being collapsed into that of “art,” a term that did not come into use in the Chinese language until the end of the nineteenth century. This means that the viewing of hua as it is discussed in this book is not to be taken as equivalent to the full range of types of viewing, particularly devotional viewing. The connoisseurly and the devotional, as modalities of viewing, were not totally distinct, as we can perhaps see in the prescriptions for which images can be viewed at which seasons or yearly festivals, found in the early-­seventeenth-­century Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhang wu zhi) by Wen Zhenheng (1585 – 1645). Here, certain icons and subjects are laid down as appropriate for certain occasions, but it is noteworthy that “old master” paintings escape these strictures, being viewable at any season; thus both of these types of viewing are acknowledged and, importantly, can take place in the same spaces.43 This book deals for the most part with only one of them. Such subtleties were, however, lost on all the early observers outside China. What generalizations about Chinese painting from Dust Muhammad onward share (and here it is essential also to include certain kinds of statements made since the twentieth century by commentators writing in Chinese) is an often radical underestimation of just how much material we have to deal with. This is so in terms of actual surviving pictures, but also in terms of the types of surviving material about pictures, and of the vast written record in which it is embedded. Most of these generalizations require us to take one type of Chinese painting, often with very precise stylistic and period characteristics, and make it stand for the whole thing. So, for instance, Dust Muhammad takes a very specific type of early Ming court painting, distinguished by its brilliant mineral pigments and attention to the details of costume, and makes it “the good work of the Chinese masters.” Gombrich takes a very historically specific type of landscape image associated with painters of the Southern Song court around 1200, and that is “Chinese painting” for him. I cannot stress too much how I hold it as axiomatic that the quantity and diversity of images that come down to us from China’s past undercut all such attempts to generalize about what “Chinese painting” is in essence. So it is absolutely not the intention here to provide a definition of 26

“Chinese painting” or to argue that the present author has a better grasp of this object than previous commentators. If anything, the range of pictures illustrated is designed to put into question all and every definition, by showing how very different things were being done at the same time. It is the intention to celebrate and emphasize “incommensurate synchronicities” or, more plainly, the scandal of incompatible things going on at the same time, within what would now be called in Chinese the huatan, the “field of painting.”44 The very large quantity of material, and the range of types of image with which this text will engage absolutely requires reliance on the work of others, and a dependence on a very broad range of scholarship, which was only beginning to get into its stride when Gombrich addressed the topic, but which since then has given us a huge body of meticulous and inspiring writing on individual works, individual artists, individual periods and schools of the Chinese tradition. No one, and certainly not the present author, is in command of it all, any more than anyone can do original research on the immense visual diversity and complexity embodied in “Western art.” Most of the huge body of primary literature written in Chinese over the centuries about the “field of painting” remains unstudied, in Chinese as much as in English or other tongues, and we have therefore arguably run before we could walk. The first big statements about what “Chinese painting” is came centuries before any serious attempt to investigate what we actually have. There is another reason to begin the account in the sixteenth century, or (in Chinese terms) in the mid-­Ming. For one thing, the same sort of quickening global connections that gave Dust Muhammad and Archduke Ferdinand of the Tirol the opportunity to form their views on Chinese painting were at this time leading to the creation of images made specifically for a market outside the borders of the Ming empire itself. A good example would be an image of the ancient Japanese statesman and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845 – 903), painted by an anonymous artist in China in the years 1510 – 1513, when the venerable Japanese Zen monk Ryōan Keigo (1425 – 1514), by then already in his late eighties, risked the sea crossing as part of a diplomatic mission (fig. 1.20). The subject of the image, the historical figure of Michizane, had by this time transmuted into a powerful and a popular deity, known as Tenjin-­sama, revered as the bringer of deep spiritual knowledge to Japan from the mainland (although in reality he never visited China at all), and hence an appropriate subject for a painting essentially designed to commemorate Japanese trips to the Ming; several such images survive, strikingly similar in a way suggestive of workshop production (fig. 1.21).45 Although created in China, presumably by a Chinese painting workshop used to producing the iconography required by visiting Japanese customers, and although inscribed by an (otherwise unknown) Chinese writer named Fang Meiya, figure 1.20 shows a picture destined for and meaningful to Japanese eyes. The iconography of Tenjin-­sama, the set of associations for which he stood, the feelings aroused by his direct and unflinching gaze — none of these had any purchase for Chinese viewers; indeed, there were no Chinese viewers of this painting, which was presumably exported as soon as it was made. It is therefore an outrage in the history of Ming painting, beginning a nd ending

27

something that can find no place in that history, something that does not fit, just as the grooms and the white horse do not fit into the frame of the Persian album, created at the other end of Eurasia only a few decades later. If the picture Tenjin Crossing to China comes near the beginning of the sixteenth century and is intimately bound up both with China’s place in a wider world and the complex biographical histories of certain individual paintings made in China, then less than a hundred years later we get a collection of visual images that, though purely indigenous to the Ming empire in origin, also have wider connections. Already mentioned, this is the illustrated book Master Gu’s Painting Album, also known as Li dai ming gong hua pu, “Album of Paintings 28

by Famous Masters of Successive Dynasties.”46 It was printed in 1603, having been composed by a somewhat shadowy figure, a minor court painter named Gu Bing, whose exact dates are unknown to us (and none of whose actual paintings survive), but who is claimed in an early biographical dictionary of artists to have worked within the imperial palace, and hence to have had access to the collection of masterpieces it might be presumed to hold. What the album consists of is 106 monochrome woodblock illustrations that purport to show work by the same number of painters, beginning at the beginning with Gu Kaizhi (fig.  1.7) and carrying on down to the dominant figure in the world of painting in Gu Bing’s own day, the elite artist and theorist Dong Qichang, a man who in 1603 still had decades of his long life to live (fig.  1.22). It is thus the world’s first attempt to produce a pictorial history of painting, to see painting as a whole from its beginnings in visual terms. Of course, what Master Gu’s album puts before its readers are not, in fact, paintings at all but the printed reproductions of paintings, executed in woodblock. It performs the same rhetorical move as the art history teacher does when she gestures toward the projected (now invariably digital) image on the screen and says, “In this work by Picasso . . .”47 It shows how by 1600 hua, “painting,” was a medium not merely in the narrow material sense, but in the broader construction that takes account of the full range of practices through which images can be materialized.48 Finally, it deals not with a binary of us/them, but with temporality of then/now, and pictorializes a late-­Ming awareness of a positioning within a history. It is the pictures that matter, and that distinguish “Master Gu’s Pictorial Album” both from earlier unillustrated Chinese texts on painting (which it plagiarizes for its biographies of the artists included) and from a sixteenth-­ century European work like Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, illustrated not with reproductions of works but with portraits of their creators. The pictures in the book are not, for the most part, reproductions of actual specific works (though a few are). Rather, they are attempts to convey the essentials of the subject matter and style of brushwork favored by the painters included. By allowing one image only for each figure they have to make some tough choices about certain figures, particularly figures of the recent past, who might have worked in more than one style. For example, the image of silkworms on mulberry leaves (fig. 1.23), which is Master Gu’s representation of the work of the Ming literati painter Shen Zhou (1427 – 1509), is very far from the massive landscape images (fig. 1.24) that are the source of his enduring fame today. “Master Gu’s Album of Paintings” was successfully exported to both Korea and Japan, in the former case within a mere three years of its publication, and played an important role in the development of painting there in the centuries following its printing, as a source of presumably canonical models.49 Indeed, it might be claimed that its impact there was greater than it was in China itself, where its format of reproducing supposed works by named individuals had no immediate imitators. The hua pu, “painting albums,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of very different types, showing, for the most part, examples of styles of brushwork, broken down to the level of individual strokes, which are seen as typical of individual masters of the past, rather than showing beginning a nd ending

29

1.20. Anonymous, Tenjin Crossing to China, c. 1510 – 1513. Ink and color on silk, 58.5 ×  30.1 cm. Private collection, Japan. 1.21. Anonymous, Tenjin Crossing to China, late 15th –  early 16th century. Ink and color on silk, 71.3 × 29.4 cm. The British Museum, London, 1913,0501,0.38.

1.22.  Work of Dong Qichang, from Gu Bing, Master Gu’s Painting Album, 1603. Woodblock print, 27 × 19 cm. Peking University Library. 1.23.  Work of Shen Zhou, from Gu Bing, Master Gu’s Painting Album, 1603. Woodblock print, 27 × 19 cm. National Library of Naples.

the viewer complete works. What is distinctive and new about “Master Gu’s Pictorial Album,” and what acts as the bridge by which this text is here linked to the claims advanced above that “Chinese painting” is something formed by an external view, is its audacious claim that “painting” can be viewed and hence grasped as a totality. It is all there. Here we have a much earlier version of the “near totality of painting — an effect that soon allowed painting to be imagined as Painting with a capital P,” which is associated locally in the traditions of European art criticism with the advent of “modern art” in the work of Édouard Manet.50 Painting through the ages (note not here “Chinese painting”) can thus in China by 1600 at the very latest be grasped in its entirety, and the 106 images can stand for the whole, in much the same way that a collection in a National Gallery can be “art.” It can be no coincidence that Master Gu’s collection strove for that totality when it did, in 1603, as China’s Ming dynasty moved toward its final decades. The great commercial prosperity that China (or at least certain urban parts of eastern China) had experienced in the previous hundred years, and that resulted to a considerable degree from the growing integration of previously separated global regions of economic activity, leading not least to the massive transfers of silver bullion from the Americas to East Asia, had major impacts on the world of painting and on its cognate areas. Printing, in particular, and the explosion of a print culture of which Master Gu’s Album was just one symptom, made available to much larger audiences kinds of images that had once enjoyed very much more restricted and elite circulation. More people, more kinds of people, saw more pictures, more kinds of pictures, in the Ming period than at any previous stage in China’s long history. So it was that, at the very point, in about 1550, when the concept of “Chinese painting” was being formed, its possibilities of coherence were coming apart under the pressure of too many pictures of too many kinds. “Chinese painting,” fantasized as a stable and knowable entity, was therefore subverted from the outset. But this 30

should be a joyous, and a productive, and not a negative starting point, for it allows the taking into consideration of a much larger and richer range of visual images, and allows us to enjoy and celebrate a much wider range of creative visual practices than has perhaps hitherto been allowed.51 So in the following pages there will be a turning away from the meta-­narrative begun above, away from the story of “Chinese painting” toward a more closely grained investigation of some of those paintings themselves. But there is a link between these two parts of the account, and it is provided by a renewed claim that, just as “Chinese painting” is a category formed by the viewers (in this case the foreign viewers) of pictures, so hua, “painting” itself in Chinese terms, is formed by viewers too. Or at least it is increasingly formed by viewers, from the very period in the sixteenth century when “Chinese painting” begins to come into focus. It is the paintings themselves that are the principal evidence for how this was done. The account will be chronological — that is to say, it will begin in beginning a nd ending

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1.24.  Shen Zhou (1427 – 1509), Lofty Mount Lu, 1467. Ink and color on paper, 193.8 × 98.1 cm. National Palace Museum.

the fifteenth century and will proceed through time down to our age, or at least to the very recent past and even to well within the living memory. It will start then because of the fact that from this period dates a flourishing of a particular kind of “meta-­painting,” in the form of images of people looking at painting. It is these pictures of people looking at pictures that will provide the structure of the account, from the Ming period to the death of Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976) and beyond. From about 1450 to about 1650 there was an upsurge of these representations of the act of viewing, though these are invariably acts of viewing that center around the hanging scroll (or vertical scroll) format of Chinese painting, a pictorial surface designed to be viewable all at once, as opposed to the sequential, “cinematic” viewing of the hand scroll (or horizontal scroll). In almost all of these images the painting being viewed is being held and manipulated, often by a servant but often too (as in the example in figure 1.25) by its elite viewers. This handling is an imaging of interaction with the image (there are almost no images of pictures hanging on walls being viewed), and it is this interaction, these historical forms of spectatorship, that are at the heart of this book. It is not mean to suggest that pictures-­within-­pictures are a total novelty of the Ming period; indeed, they can be found in some much earlier images as well. As early as the eighth century, the wall paintings of one aristocratic tomb portray court ladies who process past screens on which are painted other court ladies, in a scene one scholar describes as “a visual pun.”52 From a later period comes a range of such embedded images, often showing the viewing of religious images. A famous set of one hundred paintings of Buddhist saints (luohan) was executed by Zhou Jichang (active c. 1160 – 1180) in around 1178, in the early Southern Song dynasty. Originally in the possession of the Daitoku-­ji monastery in Kyoto, part of the set is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The paintings were acquired for the museum around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century at the instigation of Ernest Fenollosa (1853 – 1908), and were admired mightily by Bernard Berenson himself; indeed, they supply the comparative images against which he set his account of the achievements of Sassetta in 1904.53 One of the scrolls shows a moment of miraculous transformation, terrifying and inspiring at the same time, as the head of a Buddhist saint (normally shown in the guise of a gnarled old man) morphs into the radiant and all-­seeing deity Guanyin, savior of all suffering souls in the world (fig.  1.26). Another four saints pray around the throne, while five mere humans stand in front of it. Two of those wear the dress of Buddhist monks. One is a boy attendant, who turns his head in passing to look back at two middle-­aged male figures in secular dress. The one in brown holds a brush, while the one in yellow holds a painting-­within-­ the-­painting, in this case a sketch of a Buddhist deity. The suggestion that the figure holding the brush is a self-­portrait of the artist, while the man holding the painting is the donor or commissioner of the series, seems a very reasonable one.54 In other scrolls from the set, groups of luohan are seen unrolling scrolls bearing the image of the Buddha or contemplating an image of the bodhisattva Guanyin, which a servant holds aloft on a carrying pole.55 If these are, in fact, some of the earliest surviving embedded images, or at 32

least some of the first paintings-­within a-­painting (hua zhong hua) in the field of Chinese art, then they are very appropriate ones for the argument undertaken here, for a number of reasons. Multiplicity and repetition to incredibly large numbers play an important part in Buddhist theology, as an image of the pervasive omnipresence of the Buddhist law or dharma (as here also in the many heads of the savior Guanyin). The concept of mise en abyme, of the infinite regression of images, and of the relativity and instability of all sense perception, definitely has Buddhist resonances. But there is another reason these hold interest for the present argument. Zhou Jichang was a professional painter working in the port city of Ningbo, operating a workshop producing images to order, probably in multiple sets, which were destined in many cases for export to Buddhist communities outside China. Other examples of these sets, portraying the courts of the Kings of Hell (fig. 1.27), have within them elaborate representations of painted screens, the kind of setting for which some of the most prestigious surviving Chinese monumental landscape paintings were originally created.56 Given the place and context of their production in China, as sets and multiples destined for a possibly foreign market rather than as single images for some imagined form of indigenous solitary contemplation, the first viewers of these masterpieces of Chinese painting, works on which Bernard Berenson was to base much of his understanding of the whole of Asian painting, may well have been Japanese. Indeed, to take it a stage further, the image that we find within the Boston example from the Daitoku-­ji set is itself in a style beginning a nd ending

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1.25.  Xie Huan (1377 – 1452), Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (detail), c. 1437. Handscroll; ink and color on silk, 37.1 × 243.2 cm. Metro­ politan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift 1989 (1989.141.3).

of Ningbo artisanal painting destined largely for the export market. These are not the only pre-­Ming images of looking at paintings in a context that appears to illustrate religious practices, and a productive future line of inquiry might be to attempt to trace the connections between “religious” and “secular” uses of such meta-­pictorial devices.57 Such images and their much more numerous successors, in which what we have come to know as “Chinese painting” reflects upon itself, are eloquent ones. In order here to attempt to make the most productive use of them, recourse will be made to a series of abstractions of the ideal types of viewer that they seem to call forth — the gentleman, the emperor, the merchant, the nation, the people. It should be stressed that this is not the same as an empirically complete account of all of the contexts of viewing in which painting in China was situated over half a millennium. That would be a massive task, but the more limited attempt here still is put forward as possessing some value. Mitchell has posited that “Any interesting theoretical reflection on visual culture will have to work out an account of its historicality, and that will necessarily involve some form of abstraction and generality about spectators and visual regimes.”58 Such generalities have their dangers, some obvious, some less so. But historical abstractions also have their possibilities, and none more so than the most mythologized of all: the viewers of Chinese painting, mythologized by themselves as much as by others in the written record that they appear to control and to render univocal. This is the figure of “the scholar,” “the literatus,” “the man of culture,” “the gentleman.” beginning a nd ending

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1.26.  Zhou Jichang (active second half 12th century), Lohan Manifesting Himself as an Eleven-­Headed Guanyin, Southern Song dynasty, c. 1178. Ink and color on silk, 111.5 ×  53.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection 06.289. 1.27.  Workshop of Lu Xinzhong (active late 13th century), The Seven Kings of Hell, detail: The Dancing King, late 13th century, Song dynasty. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk, 85 × 50.5 cm. Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 1962-­14.

chapter two

the gentleman

The painting shown in figure 2.1 is part of a set of four hanging scrolls now in the Shanghai Museum, painted in the Ming dynasty, around 1500. Though not signed, they are today ascribed to the professional painter Du Jin, whose career is somewhat sketchy (he was probably active on either side of the turn of the century), but who is the accepted creator of quite a number of pictures in which the human figure in a lavish social setting is the dominant subject matter.1 These are not particularly large pictures by the standards of Ming hanging scrolls, at under a meter and a half high, but it would still have taken a room of considerable size to hang them all at the same time on walls.2 The set shows gentlemen engaged in four leisure pastimes, which by this time had coalesced into an accepted trope of the proper leisure activities of the man of wealth and taste. They are: playing the zither, playing chess, calligraphy, and painting, or in Chinese qin qi shu hua (fig. 2.2). All of these individually were activities with very venerable pedigrees, but they appear to have come together in the formula qin qi shu hua only at a relatively late date, and certainly such a set of scrolls showing them together in this way does not survive with a credible attribution from any earlier period than the Ming (1368 – 1644). Although the Tang dynasty writer on painting Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815 – after 875) makes use of the combination at one point, in describing the talents of the learned monk Biancai, the phrase is rarely seen in the vast textual record predating the Ming period, and it is only in the seventeenth century, in the transition from the Ming to the Qing, that the writer on taste Li Yu (1610 – 1680) grouped 37

2.1.  Du Jin (1456 – after 1528), Painting, from The Eighteen Scholars, set of four hanging scrolls, ink, and color on silk, each 79 × 134 cm. Shanghai Museum.

them together explicitly as the “four arts” (si yi) of the gentleman.3 It may well therefore — and this would be highly appropriate for my purposes — have been a combination that was expressed visually before it took a textual form. It certainly exists as a motif on high-­end material culture of the Ming period, particularly as the decoration of the lacquer boxes and porcelain jars (figs. 2.3, 2.4, 2.5) in which gifts of food were exchanged and wine was served in the course of upper-­class social intercourse, such as parties and gatherings, the very sort of activity that the images on the boxes, and the images in these paintings, themselves picture.4 An intriguing fact, and one perhaps not unrelated to the transnational origins of the category “Chinese painting” itself, is that many of the earliest references to the theme of “zither, chess, painting, calligraphy” as a painting subject appear in Japanese, rather than Chinese sources. A poem dated 1467 by the Japanese Buddhist cleric Ōsen Keisan (1429 – 1493) describes lost screen paintings showing this theme, in Japanese kinki shoga.5 It has been pointed out that “These four activities, first codified in China, were viewed in late-­medieval 38

Japan as quintessential signs of Confucian learning and continental culture.”6 However, this codification in China has been more often asserted than proved, and certainly the earliest mentions of “zither, chess, painting, calligraphy” as a subject for a set of paintings appear in Japanese and not Chinese sources. The fifteenth-­century Japanese Catalogue of Paintings in the Shogunal Collection (Gyomotsu on’e mokuroku, c. 1470) lists four paintings on the themes of “zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting” by the Song dynasty Chinese master Liang Kai (active early thirteenth century). These do not survive, and there is therefore no way of testing their authorship. Richard Stanley-­Baker adduces the Liang Kai attribution of a painting in the National Palace Museum showing Wang Xizhi Inscribing a Fan, as well as the existence of putative Kano school copies of the “Zither” and “Chess” paintings, to argue that there was once such a set painted in the early 1100s by Liang Kai.7 But was qin qi shu hua, especially as a subject for painting, really “first codified in China”? The evidence is surprisingly sparse.8 The alternative possibility that such sets of four do not long predate the fifteenth century, and were in some way related to the production the gentlem a n

39

2.2.  Du Jin (1456 – after 1528), The Eighteen Scholars, set of four hanging scrolls, ink, and color on silk, each 79 × 134 cm. Shanghai Museum.

of work specifically for the Japanese market by professional workshops, is certainly worthy of more than passing consideration. Whatever their ultimate origins, the survival in Chinese collections of sets of qin qi shu hua images, as well as the evidence from broader material culture around 1500, shows that there was by this time a market for the theme. If the set of four scrolls remains intact, as in the case of the example in the Shanghai Museum (see fig. 2.2), then there should be eighteen adult male figures (servants don’t count), which also makes the whole set a representation of the “Eighteen Scholars of the Tang Dynasty,” a semi-­legendary grouping of counselors to the future Tang Taizong (r. 627 – 649), one of the great emperors of one of the golden ages of antiquity.9 So we see here an ideal of elite male behavior, in the effortless mastery of four serious forms of amusement, right and proper for those who aspire to advise the Son of Heaven in the governance of the empire. But a closer examination of this set of activities reveals something striking, and it is something that distinguishes “painting” very clearly from its other four companion activities. The representation of “playing the zither,” in the first of the set to the extreme right, shows a white-­robed and bareheaded gentleman at the center of the composition playing a particular form of horizontal zither called a guqin; this was an instrument of great antiquity that was the choice of the gentleman, and an essential means of releasing the feelings and literally striking a chord in the heart of intimates. Four listeners wear the distinctive eared caps of imperial officials. The next painting to the left of “chess” (weiqi, a game of strategy played with white and black counters, often known in English by its Japanese name of go) shows four gentlemen seated at a table, two of them intent on the board placed in front of them, while two others follow the action with interest. “Calligraphy” (shu) is represented by a scene in which four men sit at a larger table. The figure on the right has a brush in his hand and a book open in front of him. Perhaps he dictates the text that the central figure in the white robe is about to write on the blank sheet of paper over which his brush is poised. A man between them in red holds a rolled-­up scroll on the table, while the fourth gentleman at the left turns to engage a servant, who brings a bound volume of rubbings or examples of fine calligraphy of the past. In all three of these paintings there is intense gentlemanly activity. Though there are spectators, in all three the gentleman performs; he strums the zither, places his chess pieces, lowers his brush to the page. However, when we come to the fourth pastime, that of “painting” or hua (see fig.  2.1), we see something quite different. We do not see a gentleman engaged in the production of a painting. Instead, we see another group of four gentlemen seated around a table. All turn to the hanging scroll that a servant boy holds aloft, using a bamboo stick with a forked metal fitting at the top (fig. 2.6). The central figure in white, in the hat and robes of a man living a life of retired ease, rests his hand on his knee. The figure in red on the left, in the robes of an official, seems to pause in the act of rolling up another scroll, presumably the image the group has just finished looking at. The standing man at the front raises his left hand, possibly in a pictorial convention that indicates he is speaking, and leans backward slightly as if to take in the scene. His posture is counterbalanced the gentlem a n

41

2.3.  Box, mid-­Ming dynasty, c. 1520 – 1560. Lacquered wood inlaid with mother-­of-­ pearl, 33.8 × 22.9 cm. The British Museum, London, 1974,0226.57. 2.4.  Wine Jar, Jiajing period (1522 – 1566). Porcelain painted in enamels, h. 45.7 cm, d. 35.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum 998 & a-­1910. 2.5.  Jar with Scenes of Ladies Engaged in Cultural Pursuits, Xuande or Zhengtong period (1426 – 1449). Porcelain painted in underglaze blue, h. 34.4 cm, d. 22.1 cm. Shanghai Museum.

2.6.  Du Jin (1456 – after 1528), Painting (detail). Shanghai Museum. 2.7.  Anonymous, traditionally attributed to Ren Renfa (1255 – 1327), The Eighteen Scholars, set of four hanging scrolls, c. 1500. Ink and color on silk, each 172.8 × 104.2 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

by the slight forward inclination of the seated man with his back to us on the right of the group, whose face we see only in profile. On the table in front of the group there are a further two albums of small-­scale paintings, four more small vertical hanging scrolls, and two horizontal or hand scrolls (the two types can be distinguished by the absence of protruding roller ends on the latter). In the foreground, a servant boy arrives with three more large-­scale hanging scrolls. Clearly these men are in for a long and serious session of viewing, for there is a lot of painting in this painting, and that is before we take into consideration the large single-­panel landscape screen that forms a backdrop to the whole scene, and the small painted table screen that appears just to the right of the final figure in the picture, an older servant who is preparing incense; this small screen is almost overlapped by the hanging scroll that is the focus of attention, and it forms part of a ring of painting that envelops and encircles the male figures, who are thus “within a painting” in more than one immediately obvious sense. In the context of the whole set of images of zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting, what is worth taking seriously is the fact that a painting of “painting” in mid-­Ming China is not an image of someone making a painting, but of people looking at a painting. Zither, chess, calligraphy — all these are things that a gentleman might do, but in the case of painting it is looking, viewing, that stands for the whole category. And this is pervasively so in all such representations, of which there are a number.10 A set of four hanging scrolls now in the Tokyo National Museum (fig. 2.7) bears the signature of the Yuan dynasty painter Ren

42

2.8.  Anonymous, traditionally attributed to Ren Renfa (1255 –  1327), painting from a set of The Eighteen Scholars, c. 1500. Tokyo National Museum.

Renfa (1255 – 1328), but they are not wholly believable as works from his hand or from that early date, and are surely Ming works of the kind exported to Japan in the fifteenth century.11 In the “painting” scroll (fig. 2.8), where the object of admiration is (uniquely) a painting of dragons, the party has got a bit more jolly than is generally the case in such sets, and one gentleman in the bottom left of the composition who has become tired and emotional is being helped away by a servant while the rest of the group concentrates on their viewing.12 A very elegant and highly finished set of paintings in Taipei showing the four pastimes carries a traditional attribution of a Song (960 – 1 279) date, which is no longer accepted by curators. Here the intensity of the connoisseurial gaze, 44

directed at a scene showing a traveler beneath a massive, strongly off-­center cliff (fig. 2.9), is echoed compositionally by the way in which bamboos and pine branches move strongly across the composition from left to right; here there almost appears to be at the bottom edge of the image an irruption of nature, or at least those parts of it portrayed in contemporary landscape painting, a genre much more prestigious than the type of figure painting we see here.13 The Yale University Art Gallery holds a set of three paintings of qin qi shu hua (fig. 2.10) that David Sensabaugh dates to the seventeenth century;14 the number of three as opposed to four is perhaps unusual, but the set is evidently complete, given that the themes of “zither” and “chess” are contained within the gentlem a n

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2.9. Anonymous, Painting, from a set of The Eighteen Scholars, c. 1500. Ink and color on silk, 173.7 × 103.5 cm. National Palace Museum.

2.10. Anonymous, The Eighteen Scholars of Tang, 17th century. Set of three hanging scrolls, ink and color on silk, overall 96.2 ×  57.7 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, Hobart and Edward Small Moore Memorial Collection, Gift of Mrs. William H. Moore, 1954.40.20.a – ­c.

the same painting, while “calligraphy” and “painting” are each given a hand scroll to themselves. In the latter (fig. 2.11), the painting being viewed is a figural subject that depicts the well-­known story of how an emissary of the Tang emperor Taizong (he who was the patron of the “Eighteen Scholars” depicted on the scroll) tricked a venerable monk out of a fabulously valuable piece of calligraphy that the emperor coveted. This is a scene that existed independently in Ming painting,15 and its presence here in a Ming rendering of a Tang scene only thickens the layers of self-­reference, as Ming viewers look at a scene of Tang viewers of a painting (in Ming style) of one of their own exploits. In many cases, the complete group of four paintings has been broken up over the course of time, and we have today a number of individual images of gentlemen looking at paintings, which may once have formed part of such a set. In an example in the Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 2.12), all four viewers are in the full dress uniform of Ming officials, while it takes two servants to manage the large scroll they view; the subject here seems to be a boating excursion in the shadow of a mighty cliff. The curious (and not elsewhere repeated) detail of a white cat to the right of the scene, hidden from the viewers by the painting’s surface, may just possibly imply a satirical allusion.16 And in an album leaf now in the Suzhou Museum (fig. 2.13), we as viewers are teased by being unable to see the painting-­within-­the-­painting, or rather we can glimpse only a tiny corner of it, as three viewers lean toward us to get a better view of its surface and brushwork.17 Though sometimes, as here, we may not see the embedded painting-­within-­the-­painting and sometimes (rather more often in this subject) we may see it very clearly, what we almost never see in Ming painting is pictures of gentlemen actually painting.18 Faced with the potential objection that there are indeed some Ming images of painters in action, the counterargument would be that these pictures are all 46

either images showing professional portrait painters (fig.  2.14), or fan painters (fig. 2.15) and hence de facto treat subjects of a lower social status, or else they are pictures that treat specific scenes from history; some of these will be discussed below. What is not seen in Ming painting is the theme of Ming gentle­ men in contemporary dress with a painting brush in their hands, and this, let us remind ourselves, despite the fact that the Ming dynasty is supposed by every textbook to be the highpoint of the “literati artist,” when practitioners of the art like Shen Zhou (1427 – 1509) and Wen Zhengming (1470 – 1559) enjoyed considerable fame certainly on a regional and quite possible on an empire-­wide scale. These were men of a type that, at least in what has come to be known as the gentlem a n

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2.11. Anonymous, Painting, from The Eighteen Scholars of Tang, 17th century. Set of three hanging scrolls, ink and color on silk, overall 96.2 ×  57.7 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, Hobart and Edward Small Moore Memorial Collection, Gift of Mrs. William H. Moore, 1954.40.20a – ­c.

the “literati myth,” painted out of pure and disinterested self-­expression, and who concentrated on the culturally more prestigious genre of landscape, in contrast to the paid professional like Du Jin and his ilk, whose work was dominated by types of figure painting that enjoyed less elite esteem. This “bipolar model” (to quote Maggie Bickford) of Chinese painting has undergone considerable deconstruction in the past few decades, as scholars have demonstrated 48

the more complex forms of social agency in which the elite amateur “literati” painter was embedded, as well as the empirical facts that style and social status cannot be so neatly correlated as the model would ideally imply.19 It might give us pause that, at least on the pictorial evidence, the four activities of a Ming gentleman are: playing the zither, playing chess, practicing calligraphy, looking at painting. It may well be the case that painting of all kinds retained in the Ming period much more dangerous associations of artisanal technical competence — the absolute antithesis of the gentlemanly amateur ideal than we might now realize — and that in a situation where by no means all gentlemen could paint, though all could write, showing a painter painting could be open to misinterpretation. Contemporary evidence shows that not everyone took claims for painting’s status as a “pure” activity as self-­evident; even the now ­impeccably “literati” artist Wen Zhengming was reputedly once snubbed as a “workman” (huajiang) by snobbish degree holders.20 More centrally to the argument here, what the emphasis on representing viewing over doing means is that we can in some sense understand painting as being in itself conceptually an activity that is created and sustained by its audience; it is looking that makes hua. This might chime with a growing sense at this precise period of painting as a distinct topic by itself, separate from the “calligraphy” with which it forms the common binome shu hua, “calligraphy and painting.” This term might be prevalent in Ming texts, and express the theoretically common roots of both forms of signifying, as laid out by someone like Song Lian (see p. 7 above). But material practices might be different. In 1495, an otherwise unknown merchant named Wang Zhen (1424 – 1495) was buried with the twenty-­four items of his painting collection and one piece of calligraphy, mounted in two separate hand scrolls. Whether or not Wang Zhen collected any more calligraphy in his lifetime we cannot know, but the fact is that he (or his descendants) chose not to have any more of it included with the furnishings of his tomb, and hence it is the gentlem a n

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2.12. Anonymous, Painting, from an original set of four paintings, The Four Accomplishments, Ming dynasty (1368 –  1644), late 16th/17th century. Ink and color on silk, 136.5 ×  99.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Guy H. Mitchell, 1926.378. 2.13. Anonymous, Early Summer, c. 1500. Ink and color on silk, 24.5 × 15.7 cm. Suzhou Museum. 2.14.  Qiu Ying (c. 1494 –  c. 1552), Spring Morning in the Han Palace (detail), c. 1540. Ink and color on silk, 30.6 × 574.1 cm. National Palace Museum. 2.15. Anonymous, Beverage Peddler and Fan Seller, early 15th century, Chinese, Ming Dynasty. Ink and color on silk, 27.9 × 27.9 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 1057:1920.

2.16. Anonymous, Nine Elders of the Huichang Era (detail), Song dynasty. Ink and color on silk, 28.3 × 246.8 cm. The Palace Museum. 2.17. Anonymous, Viewing a Painting, Southern Song dynasty. Ink and color on silk, 24.3 × 24.3 cm. Private collection. 2.18.  An Zhengwen (active late 14th – early 15th century), Yellow Crane Tower. Ink and color on silk, 162.5 × 105.5 cm. Shanghai Museum. 2.19.  An Zhengwen (active late 14th – early 15th century), Yellow Crane Tower (detail). Shanghai Museum.

principally as hua alone, not as part of shu hua, that these items accompanied their owner into the afterlife, unseen until excavated by archaeologists in 1982.21 The separateness of painting in the qin qi shu hua sets is underlined by the lack on any of the surviving examples of any sign of the apparatus of inscriptions, of colophons or seals marking viewership or ownership; these pictures of viewing give no sign of ever having been viewed themselves, something that only exaggerates the autonomy of the activity they portray. Unlike the great majority of high-­status paintings in China’s past, in these images textuality (in the plain sense of writing on the surface of the image) is strikingly absent. But this does not necessarily put them at variance with the pictorial tradition, deeply imbricated as it is with writing on and around the body of images we have. And so, just as it has been argued in chapter 1 that “Chinese painting” is indeed made as an object by its viewers (in that case by viewers outside China), so here the further argument is advanced that hua, “painting” pure and simple, is made, by the Ming period, by its viewers and by its collectors and owners inside China. They and not the painters alone are the creators of “painting” as a topic of culture. That is what a picture like figure 2.1 is telling us. It is worth reiterating that the “painting-­within-­a-­painting” formula is not an absolutely new invention of the Ming period. Numerous examples of pre-­ Ming “double screen” images, in which the figures do not actually engage with the screen painting typically placed behind them, have been treated in detail by Wu Hung.22 There are also some earlier images that show gentlemen examining paintings. Examples would include, from the Southern Song dynasty (1127 – 1279), Nine Elders of the Huichang Era in the Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig.  2.16) and an anonymous fan leaf of the same date in a private collection (fig.  2.17).23 However, paintings that, with greater or lesser degrees of prominence, include scenes of looking at paintings survive in greater numbers from the earlier part of the Ming period, in formats over and beyond the sets of the four gentlemanly activities. In a large hanging scroll, Yellow Crane Tower (fig. 2.18), the early-­Ming court painter An Zhengwen (active

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late fourteenth – early fifteenth century) puts the viewing of a hanging scroll literally at the top of the activities suitable for this famous place of gentlemanly resort in the city of Wuchang on the Yangtze River.24 A figure of an immortal seated on a crane floats past the tower, most of whose occupants raise their hands to him in prayer and exaltation, but the group of figures at the tower’s summit seem oblivious to the numinous manifestation taking place in the sky above them, as they peruse instead a hanging scroll (fig. 2.19), in a powerful image of the absorption felt appropriate for engagement with visual images of the past. One of the best-­known images of looking at painting within a Ming painting can be found in a great hand scroll in the Metropolitan Museum in New the gentlem a n

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York, entitled Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (fig. 2.20), by the court painter Xie Huan (1377 – 1452) or his workshop.25 But this is no generalized gathering of “gentlemen,” nor is it a vague grouping of shadowy figures of the remote past. Instead, it pictorializes a specific contemporary event, the gathering that took place on April 6, 1437, in the Beijing garden of the statesman Yang Rong (1371 – 1440), one of the central figures in the group of high officials who took command of the Ming empire when, for the first time in 1436, an emperor came to the throne as an infant. In this version (another version of the same composition survives in the Zhenjiang Museum in China [fig. 2.21], suggesting the production of multiples in a workshop context) there are nine men shown, the host and eight of his guests, all high officials in the imperial bureaucracy. The four gentlemanly activities are here alluded to in a way that is far more subtle than in the slightly later sets described already; as we unroll the scroll from right to left, and before we get to the central figure of Yang Rong himself (he is the figure in red robes at the left of the central trio), we see an empty stone table of a distinctive type used solely for playing the qin zither, and then a table prepared for chess, the white and black pieces still stored in their round jars ready for play to begin. To the right of the main group we see shu, “calligraphy,” and hua, “painting” (fig. 2.22), the former represented by a figure in a pale robe with brush poised, who looks straight out of the composition toward us. Beyond him, two figures are engaged with a painting that is held up, again by a servant, and again of which we can only see the bottom portion. The man holding the painting is Qian Xili (1373 – 1461), and next to him in red is Yang Pu (1372 – 1446), not related to Yang Rong, but along with him one of the triumvirate of the “Three Yang” who dominated the imperial government. 52

This image of amusement, in which the viewing of painting plays a central role, has a serious purpose, in that it demonstrates visually that things are calm, that the situation of the empire is peaceful and harmonious enough that the men in charge of it can quite legitimately spend time on the decorous pleasures of culture. Like many such images made across time and space to reassure the powerful that their position is justified, necessary, and natural, we might choose to call it propaganda, except that the audience for such an image was presumably a very restricted elite, centrally composed of the sitters in the picture themselves. We might see this restricted view as visually presented to us in the teasing half view we have of the scroll on which Qian Xili and Yang Pu are concentrating. They can see the whole picture, but we can see only partially. The corner of the painting requires the mobilization of Ernst Gombrich’s “beholder’s share,” that crucial notion, laid out in his Mellon Lectures and developed in Art and Illusion, to which his notion of “Chinese painting” was so central. But here it is a very different sort of share from the democratically psychological one to which Gombrich refers; rather, it requires knowledge and experience, and it is certainly not available to all. What we can see is just enough to let us know (at least if we are the kind of people who are properly informed) something about the kind of painting that Hanlin Academy Reader-­in-­Waiting Qian Xili and Grand Secretary Yang Pu are looking at (fig. 2.23), a compliment to the connoisseurly skills of those who do not need to see everything to get the whole picture. It is clearly a painting in monochrome ink alone, without color, and certainly without the striking areas of dazzling mineral pigment used by Xie Huan himself. There is a powerful visual contrast between the ink of the picture they are looking at and the background of scarlet silk on which it is set, the folds of a voluminous robe the gentlem a n

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2.20.  Xie Huan (1377 – 1452), Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden, c. 1437. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1989 (1989.141.3). 2.21.  Xie Huan (1377 – 1452), Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden, 1437. Ink and color on silk, 37 × 401 cm. Zhenjiang Municipal Museum.

of official rank rippling down to meet the ground. We can see just enough of the content of the scroll to make out that it is a landscape scene, with a mass of rock and trees crowded into the bottom-­right corner of the composition, and the beginnings of a larger peak or cliff rising to the left of that. The distinctively off-­ center composition and the concentration on monochrome ink wash is enough to give us a clue about the broad stylistic currents into which this tantalizingly hidden picture can be fitted. It looks either like a work of the court artists of the Southern Song period (1127 – 1279), or else it is a more recent painting in a Ming style that descends from Southern Song courtly landscape, which was preserved through the Mongol Yuan period in the former Song capital of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province, and that, from that geographical fact, comes in much later times to be identified as a “Zhe school.”26 It is hard to avoid pointing out the coincidence that it looks remarkably like the one (see fig. 1.18) that for Ernst Gombrich stood for “Chinese painting” as a whole.27 If this is meant to be a Southern Song work, then we are probably being told something about the access of these men to specifically courtly and imperial cultural traditions of the past. If what is being hinted at here is, in fact, the work of someone like the Hangzhou professional artist Dai Jin (1388 – 1465), who certainly was patronized by men like those we see in the painting, then what is being demonstrated is not only the up-­to-­date nature of their taste, but also their grasp of the ways in which current culture drew on highly regarded practices of the past. Either way, what is being pictured is a type of viewing that involves discrimination, knowledge, and access to restricted types of elite painting. But the men in the Apricot Garden are not only looking at the right things, they are looking at the right things in the proper manner. They do so together, interacting as friends and colleagues in a way that makes viewing a social act. The figure of Qian Xili, in blue, gestures toward the half-­hidden painted surface with his left hand, almost certainly indicating that he is speaking about it, while Yang Pu, in red, turns to pay attention to his companion’s exegesis and add a comment of his own. There is a proper measure to what they are doing, to how they are looking, also shown to us in the fact that the number of pictures they will examine is limited. A servant finishes tying up the scroll they have just been looking at, while three further hanging scrolls peep out of their carrying bag on the red-­lacquered table behind. The gentlemen will look in this session at no more than five paintings, a small group to which they are able to give full and lengthy attention, studying them thoroughly and sharing their erudition and experience. The pictures have been brought to the scene (as the carrying bag shows), telling us that an owner has chosen to share his collection with his peers, as also is right and proper. This is incidentally perhaps part of the reason why the horizontal hand scroll ( juan) much less frequently features in paintings of viewing scenes, which almost always show viewings of the vertical hanging scroll (zhou); as the figure of individual and solitary subjectivity, the hand scroll is the opposite to the social, collective viewing implied by the hanging scroll format. In Michael Fried’s term, it is all about “absorption.”28 An alternative (though not mutually exclusive) possibility sees the essential role of servants in the manipulation of the large hanging scroll as making it act as a further marker the gentlem a n

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2.22.  Xie Huan (1377 – 1452), Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (detail), c. 1437. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1989 (1989.141.3). 2.23.  Xie Huan (1377 – 1452), Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (detail), c. 1437. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1989 (1989.141.3).

2.24.  Lü Wenying (1421 – 1505) and Lü Ji (d. 1505), Birthday Gathering in the Bamboo Garden (detail), 1499. Ink and color on silk, 33.8 × 395.4 cm. The Palace Museum.

of elite status (the people who can look at paintings are the people who have servants), particularly relevant in the context of the qin qi shu hua sets.29 The genre of commemorative group portraits of high officials represented by Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden flourished in the fifteenth century, and another example from sixty years later also includes a scene of painting being viewed in the context of such a party. Dated 1499, the scroll is entitled Birthday Gathering in the Bamboo Garden and is by the court painters Lü Wenying (1421 – 1505) and Lü Ji (d. 1505); it celebrates the important sixtieth birthdays of three senior members of Ming officialdom (fig. 2.24). A preface makes it clear that the earlier Apricot Garden party and scroll were the conscious inspiration for this event and for the pictorial record of it.30 Although of undoubtedly lower social status than the distinguished protagonists of the event, the two artists responsible for the scroll have included themselves in the composition (fig. 2.25), but, tellingly, they are depicted not as practitioners but as connoisseurs of the art of painting, for it is they who bend over the scroll that two small boys expose to their view, one holding up the red-­lacquered pole while another obligingly keeps the bottom of the scroll from flapping in the breeze.31 Lü Ji, as the senior of the two painters, gestures with the reverse of his fan toward some detail in the painting, pointing it out to a rather impassive Lü Wenying. Nothing in their dress or deportment distinguishes them from the more powerful figures around them, and while they may embody “painting,” they do so certainly not by showing themselves doing it, but by looking at 56

it. Again, it is viewing that makes painting as a practice into painting as a discourse. In this case, the image they are viewing, like that in the Apricot Garden, is also in monochrome ink, and is also in the stylistic tradition that descends from the Southern Song court to that of the Ming. We can see a bit more of the image this time, as it is turned toward us, and what we see is a solitary figure of a gentleman in informal dress, seated beneath a pine tree, who gazes contemplatively into the distance from left to right. We are looking at a picture of looking, a point perhaps emphasized by the fact that there are no other scrolls portrayed within this one in the immediate vicinity of the two Lü (although a servant to the extreme left of the scroll is arriving with what looks like a bundle of hand scrolls, and two more boys carry a traveling chest that may perhaps imply other paintings). Both the 1437 and the 1499 scrolls of gentlemanly engagement with the pastime of painting share a theme of concentrated looking at one image at a time, which was the time-­honored way these things were supposed to be done. However, a whole tradition of complaints about promiscuous or excessive looking leads us to believe that not all actual viewings of paintings perhaps reached this ideal standard. If we now re-­scrutinize the image of Painting from Du Jin’s set of four images of “zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting” (see fig.  2.1), we might see some of the tensions that were ever-­present in the discussion of painting and its proper audiences in the Ming period. It seems likely that it was produced for a much less exalted or exclusive clientele than the illustrious the gentlem a n

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2.25.  Lü Wenying (1421 – 1505) and Lü Ji (d. 1505), Birthday Gathering in the Bamboo Garden (detail), 1499. The Palace Museum.

2.26.  Du Jin (1456 – after 1528), Painting (detail). Shanghai Museum. 2.27.  Du Jin (1456 – after 1528), Painting (detail). Shanghai Museum.

and berobed gentlemen in the Apricot Garden and Bamboo Garden paintings. Indeed, it seems probable that such sets were not commissioned to commemorate specific occasions, but were available more or less “off the shelf” from the workshops of painters like Du Jin, workshops whose inner working we are uncomfortably ignorant about, but that probably existed in all the major urban centers of the Ming empire. They probably were not cheap, and so we need to imagine purchasers who stood well up in the hierarchy of wealth in Ming terms, but we need not imagine that the viewers of these pictures were always quite so erudite or quite so close to the throne as the “Eighteen Scholars of the Tang” that they portray. As noted already, there are three pictorial images present within the painting that we are looking at now: the large screen panel, the small table screen, and the hanging scroll that is held up by the servant. All three of these are fully worked-­up miniature paintings in their own right, and all three are fully present to us as viewers, more so than they are to the main figure in the composition, who has his back to the large screen panel. The hanging scroll (fig.  2.26) is a composition of a rock surrounded by bamboos and overshadowed by a tall slanting tree in which birds roost and from which hang fronds of moss or creeper. Once again it is in monochrome ink, and when the whole thing was new there would have been a visual contrast more powerful than we see now between the main painting, full of vivid mineral pigments (alas now much faded) and the muted ink surface. The small table screen is the hardest image to read, on account of its scale, but it too is in monochrome ink and depicts a horizontal composition of low hills, possibly with figures in the bottom left moving toward them. The point needs to 58

be emphasized that in all these works the embedded paintings that are being viewed, the hua zhong hua, are invariably of a more prestigious, “higher” form than the framing images in which they are set; indeed, many of them are clearly intended to represent works by “old masters,” if never ones of any specific identifiable artist. A point related to this, and one to which attention has been drawn by James Cahill, is the fact that a whole range of paintings by professional, artisan painters of the Qing dynasty, whose works (until at least very recently) have fallen outside the main body of the canon of “Chinese painting,” contain highly competent renderings of “subjects and styles associated with the scholar-­amateurs. . . . These miniature paintings are often pure landscapes or other types in which the literati masters specialized, and are done with an unpretentious ease that belies the critics’ insistence on high-­minded cultivation as prerequisite for practising such styles.”32 In the “painting” scroll of the Shanghai “Eighteen Scholars” set it is the screen panel (fig. 2.27) that most directly echoes and reinforces the theme of the main image, since it shows a gentleman seated on a riverbank, attended by a servant, and gazing out over a large expanse of water toward a distant shore with a hut and small boat just passing in front of it. The style of this embedded image is fairly generic, and it might be harder to assign it to any one specific stylistic lineage, though the vast expanse disconnecting foreground from background perhaps alludes to types of painting that became more fashionable in the Yuan period, in the work of painters like Ni Zan (1301 – 1374; fig. 2.28). The gaze of the figure depicted on the screen follows in its direction that of the main character in white, and reinforces the theme of the whole complex image. the gentlem a n

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2.28.  Ni Zan (1301 – 1374), Purple Mushroom Mountain Dwelling, c. 1370. Ink on paper, 80.5 × 34.8 cm. National Palace Museum.

Its complexity is multiplied by the fact that the man on the bank sits in front of a small retreat; a figure can be seen inside it and behind them what looks quite plausibly like another screen. No attempt to depict its image is made, but its wooden frame can be quite clearly made out. Perhaps we could imagine that it contains another scene of a man gazing, with a house and screen behind him. We therefore have here what André Gide was first to call in 1893 (borrowing the term from European heraldry) a mise en abyme, a “placing into the abyss,” where a picture contains a picture that contains a picture that contains a picture and so on down to infinity.33 This vertiginous sense of pictorial instability is perhaps only reinforced by the sheer number of paintings present. Including visible and invisible images, the total is a minimum of thirteen, plus at least three albums, each of which could contain many individual paintings. There is a promiscuity or at the very least a profusion of visual images here that could be read as exhilarating but also as unsettling, as if the pictorial field was in some way getting out of hand, as if looking could no longer be kept so decorously under control. Here, unlike the perhaps more elite images of 1437 and 1499, everything can (the picture seems to say) be seen. Many things can be looked at once, not just one thing. A number of theoretical positions might give us some sort of purchase on just what is going on here in visual terms. It seems clear that these are all pictures about how to look in general, and about how to look at paintings in particular. In the language of Robert Nelson, they are pictures designed for “looking with”; they give visual information in such a way that they were themselves “models of and models for performance and subjectivity,” where “looking with was a performative act.”34 They are also what Victor Stoichita identified as “metapeinture,” describing such images as “genuine ‘theoretical objects,’ paintings whose theme is painting.”35 Almost simultaneously, W. J. T. Mitchell expounded the subtly different concept of “meta-­pictures,” defined as “pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is.” He further distinguishes between “art about art” (with which he is not concerned) and “pictures about pictures” (the focus of his inquiry, one deliberately cast wide in a way designed to exclude no type of image on a priori grounds of status).36 Not all pictures-­within-­pictures are for Mitchell pictures about pictures; the simple nested image is not a meta-­picture in this sense, although I would argue that the images such as figure 2.26 are, that they meet in full measure his criterion of being “pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the self-­knowledge of pictures.”37 Maybe they are part of a third term, which might be termed “paintings about paintings,” closer to Stoichita in that they partake of a self-­consciously prestigious subcategory of a broader pictorial field, known as “painting.” Alternatively, in view of the specifics of the Chinese case, we might perhaps term them “meta-­viewings.” The idea of the “meta-­picture” in relation to Chinese painting was opened up productively for the first time by Mitchell’s Chicago colleague, Wu Hung, in his 1996 book The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting, and in an article of the same year entitled “The Painted Screen” that both “summarizes and develops” its ideas.38 Seeing the screen (rather than as 60

in Europe, the mirror) as the central Chinese figure of the meta-­picture, he argues that it is the double-­sided nature of the screen that “destroys any sense of pictorial illusion but re-­establishes the materiality of the medium and redefines the concept of the surface. In other words, instead of erasing the surface, the images confirm its existence.”39 He sees the very many screens in paintings as functioning both as pictorial images and in relation to other images as well as to the paintings themselves. They structure space within the image in works like Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552), Evaluating Antiques in the Bamboo Courtyard (fig. 2.29), in which screens separate and juxtapose the spheres of nature and culture, or in Du Jin, Enjoying Antiquities (fig.  2.30), where they define an individual place for men and women.40 They also open out a “poetic space,” but one that reflects on itself as both medium and representation, two aspects constantly held in tension, “each in an effort to assert its primacy in order to produce the other.”41 In the Shanghai set, the image on the screen behind the group of viewers (see fig. 2.27) is certainly a poetic space, but it also flirts with the notion that it is not an image at all but a window, revealing a distant “real” vista of a man on a lakeshore, seated in front of a screen of his own. That indeterminacy between window and picture is enhanced and complicated by the common materiality of the bare silk that images “distance” both in the main framing painting (the hanging scroll) and in the painting-­within-­a-­painting (the painted screen); there is no differentiation between them, as there has to be in painting executed in oil on canvas. the gentlem a n

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2.29.  Qiu Ying (c. 1494 –  c. 1552), Evaluating Antiques in the Bamboo Courtyard. Ink and color on silk, 41.1 ×  33.8 cm. The Palace Museum.

2.30.  Du Jin (c. 1465 – c. 1509), Enjoying Antiquities. Ink and color on silk, 126.1 × 187 cm. National Palace Museum. 2.31.  Johannes Vermeer (1632 –  1675), Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664. Oil on canvas, 39.7 × 35.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Widener Collection 1942.9.97. 2.32.  Diego Velázquez (1599 –  1660), Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, probably 1618. Oil on canvas, 60 × 103.5 cm. National Gallery, London, Bequeathed by Sir William H. Gregory, 1892 ng 1375. 2.33.  Willem Van Haecht (1593 – 1637), Apelles Painting Campaspe, c. 1630. Oil on canvas, 104.9 × 148.7 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague, inv. no. 266.

How then might the specifics of the meta-­pictorial in “Chinese painting” inflect our understanding of the broader topic? Acknowledging its very existence would be a productive start. Although Victor Stoichita’s key examples of metapeinture stretch in time as far as a famous and much-­discussed painting by Vermeer in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Woman Holding a Balance of c. 1664 (fig. 2.31), he sees such self-­aware images as being born in the southern Netherlands, specifically in Antwerp, in about 1550. He restricts his discussion to one geographical region and one pictorial tradition, that of Europe, and hence appears to be unaware of the kinds of Chinese image reproduced here. It would be possible to go further and say that it is necessary to be unaware of something like Painting (see fig. 2.1), in order, for example, to argue in relation to the indeterminacy between window and painting found in Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (fig. 2.32) that, “perhaps for the first time in the history of art[,] the combination involves not only the painting’s moral function, but also the fact that it is inherently a representation.”42 Art history has needed “not to know” that a Chinese painting of the early fifteenth century could quite comfortably show the reverse of the pictorial surface (figs. 2.13, 2.22, 2.25), as one of the key ways of drawing attention to the fact that a painting is just a painting and not a window on a world, making the image refer to its own existence as an image.43 It is necessary not to know these things, so that the European meta-­picture can act as harbinger of a specter that stalks each and every address to the marked cases (“Chinese art,” “African 62

art”) that we oppose to “art,” that of “modernity,” so that it can be known “how the meta-­pictorial act forged the modern state of art.”44 The European self-­aware image is for Stoichita that very sign of “the modern,” its multiple images, its deployment of pictures-­within-­pictures opening up a breach in the simplistic idea that a picture stands for the thing it represents, making “art” or “painting,” in the sense of self-­conscious practices of modernity, possible. In discussing one European form of embedded image that is contemporary with the Ming period, the so-­called “Cabinets of Curiosity” paintings that show gentlemanly connoisseurs engaged in the act of looking at paintings (fig. 2.33), Stoichita stresses that their main theme is conversation, and that “The structure of the representation as a whole is dialogical . . . this information invites the spectator to imagine the dialogue between objects and images, thus eliciting an intertextual reading from him.”45 Yet it is impossible not to see the 1437 Apricot the gentlem a n

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Garden image (see fig. 2.22) or the gesturing gentleman in the Shanghai set of about 1500 (see fig. 2.1) as being every bit as dialogic in their fashion. Here we come to the basic problem, to that scrupulous but entirely circular attention to the links between the meta-­pictorial project and that thing called “modernity,” where modernity in the end is just the description of what one part of the world did. In order to constitute “art history” at all (and not just “Chinese art history”) it is necessary to know that it is in Europe (whether in the Low Countries after 1550 or in Rome around 1600 is in this context irrelevant) that the autonomous easel picture/tableau/quaddro/Gemälde, and with it “the modern state of art,” comes into existence.46 It is necessary to know (completely erroneously in factual terms) that a Chinese painting is more like a book, so that viewing it is more of a private than a social experience, and “By contrast [my emphasis], viewing a European painting always involves a social encounter between the viewer and other people who might enter the room.”47 It is a visible fact that the meta-­painting, or if a less loaded term is preferred, the embedded or “nested” image, comes into its fullest flowering in Europe at precisely the moment, somewhere around 1600, when it is falling out of use in China. There the sorts of Chinese pictures of gentlemen looking at paintings, paintings that are partially or fully rendered as legible images within the main work, seem to reach a peak in the early part of the sixteenth century, and to decline somewhat rapidly thereafter. Why should this be? One explanation might be that by 1600 the idea that a painting is first and foremost a painting, marks of a painter’s agency on a surface, is so well established in elite writing in China that the literalism of the earlier images seems somewhat crass. Long-­established views about the primacy of an artist’s creativity and individual manner over mimetic “form likeness” (xingsi) in painting had by that period reached the point where the dominant theorist of the day, Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), could claim that “in talking about the marvels of brush and ink, [real] landscape (shan shui) definitely cannot match painting (hua).”48 Even though qin qi shu hua remains a popular subject matter in elite material culture — for example, in porcelain decoration — pictures about pictures perhaps decline in China in their most explicit form at precisely the point they are on the rise in the West, because emphasizing the self-­reflexivity of painting had by then reached a level of obviousness, even of banality, which drains it of any force. Part of that banality is shown in the fact that, by around 1600 in the late Ming period, even children could be pictured as getting in on the act. A picture in Taipei bears the signature of the Song dynasty artist Su Hanchen (active c. 1101 – 1163), but it is certainly much later, not least because its subject matter of little boys engaging in the scholarly pursuits, alongside more childish forms of fun, so closely mimics the types of early to mid-­Ming painting showing gentlemanly viewing that has been discussed so far.49 In one detail (fig. 2.34), they examine with what look like varying degrees of comprehension a painting of bamboo; they are playing at being grown-­ups, in a kind of image of children mimicking adult activities that is pervasive across Ming visual culture, and as seen, for example, in the decoration of some sixteenth-­century porcelain jars, where little boys play out the procession of the successful examination 64

candidate, a lotus leaf taking the place of the ceremonial umbrella. In addition, there are a number of surviving paintings that parody the genre of gentlemanly dialogue about painting more explicitly, pictures of the wrong kind of people looking in the wrong kind of way. One anonymous sixteenth-­century work in the Freer Gallery (fig. 2.35) shows a group of peasants — women of various ages, an old man, and boys — entranced by a hanging scroll of the fearful protective deity Zhong Kui that is held aloft. They gape and gawp, and while an old lady prays, one woman peeps from behind her hands in terror, a response far from the decorum with which adult elite males discuss style and authorship.50 Even less decorous is a painting in the Metropolitan Museum, entitled Studying a Painting (fig. 2.36), by Zhang Lu (c. 1490 – c. 1563). Here a group of peasants examines a painting of a rabbit being seized by a hawk, the type of image for which Zhang Lu himself was well known; here we have, in Richard Barnhart’s words, an image of “how he imagined his paintings were being examined by this time, the humble villagers aping the gentry.”51 Aping the gentry is about right; the figures writhe and contort in bodily postures far from the calm and upright demeanor of the gentleman, and again this is mixed company, men and women looking together, something inherently improper in the strictly gender-­segregated culture of the Ming elite. It is perhaps the presence of images like this that helps to explain why the genre of images of groups of gentlemen looking at explicitly rendered paintings, after reaching a high point in the first half of the sixteenth century, begins to die the gentlem a n

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2.34.  Traditionally attributed to Su Hanchen (active 1120s –  1160s), One Hundred Boys (detail). Ink and color on silk, 30.3 × 525.5 cm. National Palace Museum.

2.35. Anonymous, Expelling Demons from the House, 16th century. Ink and color on silk, 190.8 × 104.1 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, f1916.554.

out in that particular form thereafter and indeed ultimately disappears. Social and cultural changes that took place in the course of that century, and which have in the last twenty years been extensively studied by scholars, meant that once-­exclusive activities like the connoisseurship of painting, which had been very much the preserve of the kind of elite we see pictured in Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden, had become extensively commercialized and so more widely available to broader sections of society.52 Put simplistically but bluntly, as the sixteenth century went on, it became more possible to buy culture, or at least the semblance of culture. Painting became more and more enmeshed in a nexus of market relationships that was deeply troubling to the kinds of 66

elite theorists who dominate the written record of the period, as an ideal social order of “four kinds of people” — hierarchically arranged from top to bottom as scholars, peasants, artisans, merchants — was twisted and subverted by the power of money.53 It is certainly not the case that pictures that comment on their own pictorial status disappear totally after the Ming period. They may, however, take very different forms from the scenes of group viewing, like the extraordinary set of colored woodblock prints relating to the drama The Romance of the West Chamber (Xi xiang ji). These date from 1640, at the very end of the dynasty (fig. 2.37), and use a startling array of meta-­pictorial devices to comment on the gentlem a n

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2.36.  Zhang Lu (c. 1490 –  c. 1563), Studying a Painting, 16th century. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk, 148.9 ×  98.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ex coll: C. C. Wang Family, Purchase, Bequest of Dorothy Graham Bennett, 1990 (1990.6).

2.37.  Scholar Zhang Arrives at Pujiu Monastery, illustration to the drama The Romance of the West Chamber, published by Min Qiji, 1640. Color woodblock print, 25 × 32.3 cm. Cologne, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Inv. No. r61, 2 [No. 1]. 2.38.  Xiang Shengmo (1597 –  1658) and Zhang Qi (active mid-­17th century), Venerable Friends, 1652. Ink and color on silk, 38.1 × 25.5 cm. Shanghai Museum.

the range of ways of seeing present in a crowded visual field, one that was by that point arguably negotiating with the presence of imported European forms of picturing.54 The sophistication and complexity of such images may perhaps be seen as a response to the saturation of that visual field with too many and too blatant versions of the embedded image. It may therefore be very significant that in a painting of elite subjects like Venerable Friends of 1652 (fig. 2.38), the scroll at the center of the composition, which holds the group together, is a blank one. This might look at first glance like the absolute opposite to, a stolid refusal of, the “encyclopedic labyrinth of pictorial self-­reference” found in a work produced four years later, Velázquez’s Las Meninas.55 But in context it is a work that has its own complexities of self-­reflection on painting and its audiences. For these are gentlemen at the highest end of the social scale, and individuals most intimately bound up both with producing and talking and writing about images of the most sophisticated kind. The man in the red robe at the center who raises his hand in the speaking gesture is none other than Dong Qichang himself, the central figure in a group of cultural luminaries who had all been intimates of the scroll’s author Xiang Shengmo (1597 – 1658), the man at the top right. With the exception of Xiang, all of them were dead by 1652; the group portrait is a posthumous one, as can be seen by the fact that all wear Ming dynasty dress and probably Ming hairstyles, since they are by virtue of being deceased forever “in the Ming.”56 By this date and for this audience (the picture is one Xiang had created for himself as a place of memory for lost friendship), the idea of “filling in the blanks,” making explicit what it is they are looking at, whether calligraphic text or painted image, is crassly literal and to be avoided. The blank scroll of Venerable Friends is here indeed a declining, even a refusal, but it is a conscious refusal of the mise en abyme of infinite regression, of 68

2.39.  Zhang Ruitu (1570 –  1641), The Four Luminaries of Mount Shang, 1625. Hanging scroll, ink on satin, 144 × 44 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum fe10-­1970. 2.40.  Li Shida (c. 1540 – after 1620), Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (detail). Ink and color on paper, 25.8 ×  140.5 cm. Suzhou Museum. 2.41. Shitao (1642 – 1707), Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (detail). Ink and color on paper, 36.4 × 328 cm. Shanghai Museum.

pictures within pictures within pictures. There is just this one surface, it seems to indicate; this painting is all there is. Now it is all there is. The blank scroll is seen as a new pictorial theme on other early-­seventeenth-­ century images, such as a work dated 1625 by Zhang Ruitu (1570 – 1641) now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig. 2.39). Such works might show too a shift in stress at this period toward potential, toward figures being about to paint, in the same way as calligraphy had always been imaged by the moment of luo bi, “lowering the brush,” before the first stroke is made. Hence it pictorializes inspiration and creativity, and is temporally quite different from images of the viewing of a completed painting, stressing as it does process over completion. In a work dated 1816 by the mid-­Qing painter Gai Qi (1774 – 1829), the Song philosopher and lotus-­lover Zhou Dunyi (1017 – 1073) stands pensively at a table, his hand on the back of his chair, his gaze on the blank paper as his servant boy grinds the ink with which he will picture his beloved blooms. It is an image of the moment before painting can begin, and one that would perhaps be only rendered banal for its intended audience by showing the completed work.57 A textual example of this preference for the imagined over the actual in connoisseurship can be found in the writing of Zhou Lianggong (1612 – 1672), who concludes a reverie on lost ancient masterpieces recorded only in books by exclaiming, “Dong Qichang used to say that famous paintings should not be looked at too quickly, and that to see them three or four times in one’s dreams before actually seeing them was a fine thing. I say that never managing to see them at all is so much finer.”58 This preference for the imagined over the imaged appears widespread in later centuries, and we much more rarely find examples of paintings from after 1600 in which a painting-­within-­a-­painting is fully realized for us. Where they do exist, they are most often found in contexts of self-­conscious historicist recreation of the remote past, most particularly in the theme of the “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden.” One such is a painting by Li Shida (c. 1540 – after 1620). This hand scroll in the Suzhou Museum (fig. 2.40) depicts this “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden,” the celebrated (if, in fact, mythical) eleventh-­century model for all the other “elegant gatherings” of subsequent centuries, like those pictured in figures 2.20 and 2.24.59 This was an event graced by all the luminaries of Northern Song culture, and we can see the great scholar Su Shi (1037 – 1101) preparing to write, while the painter Li Gonglin (1049 – 1106) pauses in the completion of a monochrome-­ink hand scroll depicting the famous “Excursion to the Red Cliff.” The fact that we can see the painting on which Li is working is relatively unusual in a seventeenth-­ century painting of this type, and seems to have something to do with the fact that this is not a contemporary scene; rather, it is an event of the deep past, an ideal realm of literati subjectivity when no risks attached to the picturing of picturing. Note here that while the painting can be shown, the page on which the calligrapher Su Shi is about to write is completely blank — that is, writing (shu) cannot be represented, for then it would be writing; there is no such thing (at this date) as meta-­calligraphy (although we occasionally seem to glimpse it). Painting and writing are here separated by a “before and after” temporal logic, where the latter is about to happen while the former has happened. In works 70

created after the traumatic Manchu conquest of 1644, it is hard not to see any pictorializing of “before and after” as conveying a political allusion. That is the same disjunction, and the same realization of work-­in-­progress by Li Gonglin, that can be seen in a somewhat later version of the “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden” (fig.  2.41) by the seventeenth-­century master Shitao (1642 – 1707), himself a scion of the fallen Ming imperial house, and a man noted for the complex and mordant nature of his nostalgia and alienation.60 Other meta-­pictorial works of the era of Ming-­Qing transition may have specific purposes of subversion of the genre, as we can perhaps see in a section (fig.  2.42) of a hand scroll by Chen Hongshou (1598 – 1652), painted in 1650 — that is to say, early in the new and still to many alien dynasty — for Zhou Lianggong (he of the preference for not seeing famous masterpieces of the past) and illustrating the prose poem “Homecoming” by the ancient poet Tao Yuanming (365 – 427). Tao is the classic example of the high-­minded recluse in Chinese literature, abandoning bureaucratic office and worldly fame for rustic seclusion and simple pleasures, but there is nothing simple about Chen Hongshou’s picturing of him here. Nor is there anything simple about the complex negotiations of status and identity, on the part of both painter and recipient, in the midst of which this picture is situated.61 In other sections of the scroll, executed in the consciously archaic style that was Chen Hongshou’s trademark, we see the poet inhaling the fragrance of chrysanthemums, composing verse, arriving home in a litter carried by servants, his headscarf bedecked with flowers. As James Cahill has written of these images, including that in figure 2.42: They are charged, again, with consciousness: even when T’ao sits with closed eyes, the self-­consciously folded hands and the irony implicit in the style impart unmistakably that flavor to the image. . . . The postures and gestures of the figures are conventions in which we read the poet’s unworldly high-­mindedness, his aesthetic refinement, his attachment to an ideal past; but they are exaggerated, dramatized, and the quality of awareness erodes the ostensibly intended effect.62

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2.42.  Chen Hongshou (1598 –  1652), The “Homecoming” Ode of Tao Yuanming, 1650 (detail). Ink and color on silk, 30.3 ×  308 cm. Honolulu Museum of Art purchase, 1954 (1912.1). 2.43.  Yu Zhiding (1647 – after 1709), Amusing Oneself with Calligraphy and Painting (Portrait of Qiao Lai) (detail). Ink and color on silk, 37.4 ×  29.3 cm. Nanjing Museum. 2.44.  Yu Zhiding (1647 – 1709), Wang Xizhi Inscribing a Fan. Ink and color on silk, 132 ×  55.8 cm. The Palace Museum.

That erosion is surely only furthered by the activity that the poet, as avatar of the painter himself, is portrayed carrying out. For he is painting fans, and fans that bear the now-­hackneyed figural themes of Tao Yuanming’s reclusion (not the pure and remote landscapes of the literati ideal). Chen Hongshou is perhaps telling us here that, whatever the classical ideal of unworldly withdrawal may hold, the grubby reality is that reclusion is not a realistic option — rather, it has failed — and that in the ruins of the Ming dynastic collapse livings still have to be made. There may or may not be something of the same potentially troubling nature, or at the very least of a deliberately playful inversion of decorum, in a rare work like that shown in figure 2.43, a hanging scroll by Yu Zhiding (1647 – after 1716), a proponent of what Richard Vinograd has called “anecdotal portraiture,” in which possibly hermetic meanings of personal significance to the sitters are portrayed through idiosyncratic events.63 Yu was the creator of an image of Wang Xizhi (306 – c. 365), greatest of all calligraphers, about to inscribe a fan, his brush paused at the horizontal and the surface still blank as the “propensity” to write takes hold of him (fig.  2.44).64 The conventional nature of this makes all the more perplexing an unusual image (fig.  2.43) done by Yu where, working as he often did in collaboration with another artist, Gu Songchao, he pictures the disgraced high official Qiao Lai (1642 – 1694), in one of a series of works he executed for this still-­wealthy patron.65 The trappings of the scholar-­gentleman are all there, the bronzes and ink stones, the library of books, the studiedly archaic costume (probably quite different from the dress Qiao Lai actually wore). As in the paintings of Ming gentleman viewers, a servant holds a landscape hand scroll aloft, although this boy slyly peeps around its edge as if, Vinograd comments, “to verify that Qiao is paying the right kind of attention.”66 The painting is presented fully to our view, although equally prominent is the blank rectangle above the 72

scene of a boating excursion; this is the shi tang, literally “poetry hall,” a space for inscription, but by whom? Qiao is most definitely not shown (as his Ming forebears are) as part of a network of gentlemanly social interaction, discussing, commenting, and inscribing. Rather, he is alone, and if he looks at all he looks past the picture-­within-­a-­picture rather than at it, as if bored with the conventions of an elite life that has in some respects disappointed him. Solitary viewing here may not quite have the connotations of solitary vice that it memorably has for the fictional Jia Baoyu, the protagonist of the great eighteenth-­century novel Hong lou meng (variously translated as Dream of the Red Chamber and Story of the Stone), who enjoys a wet dream after his lone viewing of a work of erotic content by the Ming painter Tang Yin (1470 – 1524),67 but it is an activity far removed from the decorous and unproblematic conviviality of the “elegant gathering” of two hundred years before. It carries more private meanings (meanings perhaps reinforced by the small and intimate scale of the scroll), and is expressed in a picture that was to have few, if any, exact parallels in Qing art. How then did the theme of viewing paintings come to be problematic in this way, such that the scroll within the painting Venerable Friends (see fig. 2.38)

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2.45.  Title page to encyclo-­ pedia Categorised Tripartite Orthodox Knowledge for Myriad Occasions, published by Yu Xiangdou, 1599. Woodblock print. 2.46.  Title page to encyclo­ pedia Categorised Tripartite Orthodox Knowledge for Myriad Occasions (detail), published by Yu Xiangdou, 1599.

is itself unpicturable? If we go back to the late Ming itself, we can see very clearly the kind of thing against which Venerable Friends is reacting, and off which Chen Hongshou’s image of the fan painter is playing, in the printed frontispiece to a book published in 1599, right at the end of the century, a popular leishu or encyclopedia entitled Categorised Tripartite Orthodox Knowledge for Myriad Occasions, of a sort offering knowledge on all sorts of subjects to all sorts of people, though it is presumably not the most scholarly end of the spectrum at which it is aimed (fig. 2.45). The work was popular enough to be republished in essentially identical form in 1607.68 In four crowded and relatively crude vignettes on the title page, we see none other than the four scholarly pursuits: zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting. Painting, as we might by now imagine, is represented in the approved style but in the most basic fashion (fig. 2.46); a group of standing figures gathers around a scroll held up by a servant, and one of them points at it as if to say, “You see, that’s what a painting looks like.” The pointing gesture probably is again meant to indicate speech, just as it did in the case of the Apricot Garden (see fig. 2.22), but here the interpellated speaker, the purchaser of the book, is not assumed to have the erudition of a Yang Pu (otherwise why would he be buying it at all?). It is worth noticing that the picture being gestured at appears to be a figural subject, possibly some sort of narrative (rather than, say, a landscape), and hence one that is necessarily some way down the hierarchy of Ming images, very far from the kind of painting being done by arbiters of taste like Dong Qichang. A mere four years separates this image from the publication of another book, from Master Gu’s Painting Album, that offers the purchaser comprehensive information on the totality of painting, including the reduction of the work of men like Dong Qichang to a simple and easily graspable formula (see fig. 1.22). It even includes its own take on the “painting-­ within-­ a-­ painting” formula (fig.  2.47), fathering such a subject on the tenth-­century master Gu Deqian (active c. 961 – 975), whose genuine works are all lost to us now and were probably all gone already by the Ming period, but who is represented in Master Gu’s 74

album by a scene that is very like the work of a Du Jin (compare fig. 2.30), and that shows two gentlemen examining a hand scroll painting of bamboos, while a third contemplates a group of bronze and porcelain objects proffered to him by a servant. No wonder the squeamish were offended. Their disquiet was voiced in a number of late-­Ming texts that might be called manuals of taste, guides on how to live an elegant life, in which prescriptions about how to look at painting were numerous. One such set of late-­Ming picture viewing rules would, for example, cast doubt on the acceptability, in any terms, of sets of images like those of the zither/chess/calligraphy/painting variety, insisting that only the hanging of single images was in keeping the gentlem a n

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2.47.  Work of Gu Deqian, from Gu Bing, Master Gu’s Painting Album, 1603. Woodblock print, 27 × 19 cm. Peking University Library.

with elegant taste.69 Another succinct version of such rules can be found in the writings of Dong Qichang, who more than anyone is associated with the codification of a set of attitudes to painting as a self-­aware engagement with the painting of the past. He writes: In displaying calligraphy or painting there are five don’ts: don’t show it under a light, on a rainy day, after drinking, in the presence of a vulgar person, or in the presence of a woman.70

2.48. Anonymous, Two Women Looking at Paintings, Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644), 15th –  16th century. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk, 145 ×  104 cm. The Art Museum, Princeton University, DuBois Schanck Morris Collection.

Dong Qichang may have been at the particularly misogynistic end of what was, in fact, a spectrum of opinion, and, of course, sets of rules like this give us an interesting light on what forms of looking were actually going on in his day, as they presumably forbid actual practices of which he disapproved. It is notable that all of the images showing groups of gentlemen looking at painting take place in the (potentially rainy) outdoors, though this has more to do with pictorial convention — indoor scenes are rare in pre-­Qing painting — than with actual viewing practices.71 The prohibition of mixed-­sex looking is particularly interesting, although we should not assume that no women ever looked at any paintings, but it is the gendering of the act of spectatorship as male that is significant here, and that parallels the equally gendered idea of “the connoisseur” in early modern European thought. It is certainly the case that there do not appear to be any women in any of the “four gentlemanly pursuits” sets (see fig. 2.2), where all the servants are male. Female servants do exist in some paintings of the viewing of paintings by Qiu Ying, the professional painter from the city of Suzhou whose lavishly colored images of palatial and luxurious lifestyles were among the most desirable pictures of the early sixteenth century (see fig. 2.29).72 The set of male anxieties around women and painting in the Ming period renders all the more intriguing one of the very few Ming images we have of women looking at paintings in a context that is clearly not parodic or negative (as is the case with the pictures like figure 2.35 or figure 2.36 involving peasant women). It is anonymous, but probably dates from around 1500 — that is, it is contemporary with the high point of production of the genre of gentleman viewing painting in social contexts (fig. 2.48). Two women are seated outdoors under an overhanging rock; they seem to be dressed for winter, with fur collars and hats, and they both handle a small hand scroll depicting bamboos. At least four more hand scrolls in two bundles lie on the rug in front of them. Jennifer Purtle has drawn our attention to the fact that the painting-­within-­the-­painting is arguably meant to represent the work of Guan Daosheng (1262 – 1319), the doyenne of women artists from the Yuan dynasty who was famous for her depictions of bamboos. Purtle also makes a convincing case for the production of this image in the context of the imperial court, whose particularly powerful female members might well, in around 1500, have been able to have themselves represented in this guise of dialoging connoisseurs.73 It seems highly likely that there were once many more such images of women viewing paintings. A Song dynasty bronze mirror (of a kind that must have once existed in multiple copies) shows a scene of beauties studying a painting of plum blossoms.74 A work 76

of the early seventeenth century by Chen Hongshou, perhaps another of his subversions of the threadbare literati ideal, A Scholar Instructing Girl Pupils in the Arts (fig. 2.49), depicts a woman viewing (under male tutelage) a hanging scroll of bamboo and rocks (again the theme associated, above all, with Guan Daosheng and hence with women painters).75 It is perhaps significant that one of the very paintings we do have from a later period certainly shows a scene within the imperial palace, and comes from a set of pastimes of the imperial concubines by the eighteenth-­century court artist Chen Mei (fig. 2.50). Images of women carrying out the four pastimes of zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting appear in ceramic decoration as early as the period 1400 – 1450, and in the Qing dynasty this subject was often seen as decoration on porcelain objects (fig. 2.51); it is likely that it was in this form, and not in that of painting, that the subject was first viewed by European audiences, with a consequent bearing on orientalist fantasies of the gendering of both space and leisure in the Chinese context.76 What does not, by contrast, seem to have circulated outside the Qing empire is a rather intriguing group of pictures that show respectable, elite the gentlem a n

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2.49.  Chen Hongshou (1599 –  1652), A Scholar Instructing Girl Pupils in the Arts, after 1646. Ink and color on silk, 88.3 ×  45.7 cm. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 1967.12. Gift of Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, Class of 1925. 2.50.  Chen Mei (?1694 – 1745), Pastimes of the Imperial Concubines: Lost in Antiquity by a Charcoal Brazier. Ink and color on silk, 37 × 31.8 cm. The Palace Museum.

2.51.  Baluster Vase with Women Performing the Four Accomplishments and Children in a Garden, Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911), Kangxi period (1662 – 1722). Porcelain with overglaze enamel decoration, h. 43.8 cm, d. 19 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Edward H. Bennett 1950.1434. 2.52.  Su Hanchen (active 1120s –  1160s), Lady at Her Dressing Table in a Garden, Southern Song dynasty, mid-­1 2th century. Ink, color, and gold on silk, 25.2 × 26.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection 29.960. 2.53.  Illustration to the drama The Return of the Soul, or The Peony Pavilion, by Tang Xianzu (1550 – 1616), 1617. Woodblock print. National Palace Museum.

women not simply as the viewers and consumers of images but as their creators. We could take the genealogy of these all the way back to the twelfth century and point to a famous painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts attributed to Su Hanchen and entitled Lady at Her Dressing Table in a Garden (fig. 2.52),77 or even further back than that, to the British Museum and the Admonitions scroll (see fig. 1.6).78 Both of these venerable masterpieces show women creating their own images by viewing the polished surface of a mirror, which reflects back to us the faces we cannot see in the paintings themselves, where the back of the lady’s head is presented to us. These are perhaps meta-­paintings of a kind; certainly they are images that are aware of their own status as images, and that are designed to prompt reflection (pun intended) on the nature of these particular paintings and of paintings as meaningful surfaces more broadly.79 The mirror appears again in a woodblock illustration from 1617 (fig. 2.53), which shows Du Liniang, the doomed heroine of the romantic drama The Peony Pavilion, using such a reflective surface to paint her own portrait; her own face thus appears no less than three times within this image, illustration to a drama that had particular resonances for and was particularly beloved by female audiences.80 From the eighteenth century come a number of images of named contemporary upper-­class women in the act of painting, where the image they are producing is made visible to us, in a way that is never replicated for elite male artists. Examples would include a detail (fig. 2.54), from within a much larger scroll dated 1796, that shows the female disciples of the noted Qing dynasty 80

literary figure Yuan Mei (1716 – 1797), renowned for his willingness to train female students in the arts of high culture.81 In it, a student named Liao Yunjin raises her brush as if to make a point to her companions, pausing in the creation of an image of a branch of plum blossom that is quite legible to us despite being upside down from our point of view.82 The same sort of inverted image is visible in another scroll of the same broad date, a picture dated 1790 (fig.  2.55) — Wang Yuyan Sketching Orchids by Pan Gongshou (1741 – 1794).83 Both of the pictures-­within-­pictures here are notably fragments, works in progress, and hence are what Paisley Livingston would categorize as partial rather than complete “nested images.”84 Also from around the same point in the Qing

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dynasty comes an image (fig. 2.56) of a named elite woman as painter, though a fictional one this time, one of the heroines of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. This is Jia Xichun, who has been ordered by her relative the imperial concubine to paint a picture of the extensive family garden in which the characters of the novel dwell and where most of its action takes place. She has not yet begun her task, one that she is to find extremely difficult, but is poised with her blank sheet in front of her and her brush in midair.85 These are all women of impeccable lineage, engaged in a highly valued cultural pursuit, that of painting. Yet no men of equivalent status are pictured in this way at this period. Why should this be? The period when these images of women as painters were produced, the years around 1800, was certainly one that was suffused with a particular nostalgia for the culture of the late Ming, and in particular for its educated and elegant women writers and artists. The early nineteenth century saw the publication of the first collection of biographies dedicated to women painters, the Jade Terrace History of Painting, by the woman writer Tang Souyu.86 Yuan Mei, the patron and teacher in whose garden Liao Yunjin is pictured painting her plum blossom branch, was the author of a highly fictionalized biography of one of these paragons of womanly creativity, the lovely but doomed Ye Xiaoluan, who died at the tender age of sixteen, and the creativity of women was a major theme in the culture of the age.87 This might explain an interest in depicting women as painters, but it does not explain a lack of interest in depicting men, or at least elite men, in the same creative role. To understand why this might be the case it is necessary to direct attention away from the gentleman as ideal viewer of painting, and toward the ideal of a single powerful gaze, that of the emperor. the gentlem a n

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2.54.  You Shao and Wang Gong (active 1796 – 1820), Female Disciples of Master Suiyuan (detail), 1796. Ink and color on silk, 41 ×  308.4 cm. Shanghai Museum. 2.55.  Pan Gongshou (1741 –  1794), Wang Yuyan Sketching Orchids (detail). Ink and color on paper, 111.5 × 41.6 cm. The Palace Museum. 2.56.  Gai Qi (1774 – 1829), Characters from Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng ren wu tu), 1879. Woodblock print, page size 22.5 × 15 cm. National Palace Museum.

chapter thr ee

the emperor

If we wish to advance the argument that Chinese painting was substantially created and sustained by its viewers, and that it is in the act of viewing that painting comes to achieve its meaning, then it is necessary to pay attention to one of the distinctive contexts in which paintings were viewed, as well as being assembled for viewing, and indeed created for viewing. That context is the imperial court. The complex cultural politics of China, at whatever period, cannot be reduced to a stereotype in which an imperial despot invariably set the tone in moral and aesthetic matters for all educated subjects. However, courts have equally always acted in China, as indeed they did virtually everywhere in Eurasia, as centers of cultural power, and have been able to deploy distinctive visual systems, involving things like clothing but also paintings too, in order to make that distinctiveness visible.1 A main point of the partly seen painting in Xie Huan’s Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden of 1437 (see fig. 2.21) is that it is in a courtly style (whether an old one or a new one), thus reinforcing the message that its viewers are men at the center of power. The emperor is one of the earliest figures to occupy the place of an audience for painting, and much early painting, including what are now some of the most revered images of the Chinese painting canon, was made to be seen by rulers, or by those in the company of rulers at court. For example Early Spring (see fig. 1.11), by Guo Xi (c. 1000 – c. 1090), one of the most famous and most reproduced of monumental Northern Song landscape paintings, probably found its original context of viewing in some hall of the palace under Emperor Shenzong (r. 1068 – 1085).2 The work chosen by 85

Detail of figure 3.6

Ernst Gombrich to be for his purposes “Chinese painting” (see fig. 1.18) equally was almost certainly created in the milieu of the Southern Song (1127 – 1 279) court. By the Ming and Qing periods, Chinese emperors already had a long history as viewers of painting, but the power of their gaze was sometimes such as to wither the status of the creators of those paintings, whatever theory might hold about the status of the artist. A famous anecdote from the ninth-­century text “Records of the Painting of Successive Dynasties” (Li dai ming hua ji) by Zhang Yanyuan, regarding the figure painter and senior bureaucrat Yan Liben (d. 673), tells of the risks that such proximity might bring with it: . . . [emperor] Taizong [r. 627 – 649] and his attendant courtiers were once wandering about the park in spring. On the pond were some rare birds swimming at leisure along with the current. The emperor admired them ceaselessly, ordering the attendant officials to compose odes and summoning [Yan] Liben in haste to describe their appearance. Those in the council chambers transmitted the call for “the painting master Liben.” At this time Liben was already a Senior Secretary in the Bureau of Nobles’ Titles. . . . He rushed out, dripping with perspiration, to prostrate himself beside the pool. His hands flourished cinnabar and silk; his eyes were respectfully raised to the seated guests. He could not repress a mortified blush. Upon retiring, he cautioned his son, saying, “When I was young, I loved to read books and write literary compositions. Now, I am only recognized for painting and have to do menial tasks personally. What could be a greater disgrace? It is proper that I caution you seriously against practising this art . . . ” 3

This famous anecdote from the far past would have been quite familiar to the educated in the Ming and Qing periods, and perhaps goes some way to explaining further why, for the gentleman, “painting” is shown by the act of looking rather than the act of making; the taint of working to command, of being placed in the position of a minion, perhaps always to a degree hung around it. It also perhaps goes some way to explaining how a number of the images we do have from the Ming and Qing period that show painters at work show them operating in a court context. One such example can be seen in a detail from a long hand scroll dating from about 1540, entitled Spring Morning in the Han Palace (see fig. 2.14), by the Suzhou professional painter Qiu Ying (c. 1495 – c. 1552).4 As an artist (though not a court artist) who himself worked at the behest of wealthy patrons and hence did not enjoy the status of the literati amateur, Qiu Ying perhaps had a degree of personal involvement in the subject of the artist working to command. The scene, rendered in gorgeous pigment of gem-­like intensity, is set in a palatial interior of the remote past, where a single male figure — that of the artist himself — appears among a crowd of lavishly dressed palace ladies and their attendant eunuchs. There is an almost eerie verisimilitude to the image of the empress that he holds in his hand and to which he is putting the finishing touches. In another detail, a lady views a completed portrait of herself, every detail of her coiffure captured as if in a mirror (fig. 3.1). These tiny pictures-­within-­pictures appear here not as painting (hua) (in the sense that they have no signs of brushwork, of the all-­important 86

agency of the artist), but rather as a type of a double, an effigy. In theoretical terms, such images are scarcely part of hua, of painting, at all, but belong under some other category. Spring Morning in the Han Palace therefore pictorializes another role of the court as a setting for painting. As the place where large quantities of images were collected and cataloged, the court played a key role in defining which images were and were not within the truth of painting, what counted, and what did not. This was never more true than in the court of the high Qing period, when the Manchu rulers who had overthrown the Ming dynasty in 1644 established their court in Beijing on a scale of lavishness and spectacular brilliance that was of an order not seen before. As it was the last imperial dynasty, it is the images created in the Qing that tell us much of what we think we know about what imperial China was like. It is their Forbidden City that we visit today as tourists. It was their vast apparatus of court painting that created the images that give us the illusion of a clear view of what the Qing dynasty looked like. Courts have often been centers of pictorial newness,5 of novel forms of painting that necessarily imply novel forms of viewing, and the court of the high Qing era was a prominent example of this. They have often also been centers for the ordering and reuse of the culture of previous periods, so it is no surprise that it is the Qing court collection of painting, divided today between the two Palace Museums of Beijing and Taipei, that tells us much of what we know about the painting of the past. the emperor

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3.1.  Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552), Spring Morning in the Han Palace (detail). National Palace Museum.

3.2.  Leng Mei (fl. c. 1662 –  1722), Copy of Qiu Ying’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace, 1703 (detail). Ink and color on silk, 33.4 × 800.8 cm. National Palace Museum. 3.3.  Leng Mei (fl. c. 1662 –  1722), Copy of Qiu Ying’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace (detail). National Palace Museum.

It therefore seems appropriate that Qiu Ying’s scroll should have by the seventeenth century entered the imperial collection itself, where it was copied (fig. 3.2) by the court artist Leng Mei (active c. 1690 – c. 1742), whose career flourished under the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662 – 1722).6 One significant detail that differentiates the later Qing reworking from the Ming original is that in the former the painting-­within-­the-­painting is at the level of a preliminary sketch (fig. 3.3); it lacks the simulacral finish of the earlier portrait. Whether this betrays a certain squeamishness about the impropriety of portraying the visage of living rulers, something that was closely controlled and that only a restricted number of senior court artists were allowed to attempt, is impossible to say. 88

The same sketchy quality is visible on the painting-­within-­the-­painting that forms part of a large set of images (fig. 3.4) by unnamed court artists showing the pastimes of the Kangxi emperor’s son, who reigned as the Yongzheng emperor from 1723 to 1735.7 The emperor is portrayed as posing in a red robe of a cut worn under the fallen Ming dynasty (fig. 3.5), a type of garment he almost certainly never wore in reality, and by putting himself into the historic past in this way he is alluding to a work like the Qiu Ying Han Palace scroll, which similarly portrays not the contemporary scene but imagined glories of the past.8 The curious spectators, their demeanor somewhat at odds with the decorum that ideally would be expected in the imperial presence, add to the sense that this is a fantasy of imperial leisure time, the kind of xingletu, “picture of enjoying pleasures,” that is at the same time, as James Cahill has pointed out, part of a genre of “in effect images of power and possession.”9 The facial features of the Yongzheng emperor are here delineated in the main framing picture with some care, but the painting on which the bespectacled elderly artist works remains again at a very preliminary stage, not much more than an outline, as if to tell us that it is the sitter and not the artist who is the important actor in this imaginary scene.10 the emperor

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3.4. Anonymous, The Yongzheng Emperor’s Amusements of the Twelve Months: Painting a Portrait in the Tenth Month, 1723 – 1735, from a set of twelve hanging scrolls. Ink and color on silk, 187.5 × 102 cm. The Palace Museum. 3.5. Anonymous, The Yongzheng Emperor’s Amusements of the Twelve Months: Painting a Portrait in the Tenth Month (detail). The Palace Museum.

3.6. Anonymous, Palace scenes with figures, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period, third quarter of eighteenth century. Ink, color, and gold on silk, 40 × 37 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Charles Bain Hoyt Fund, 2002.602.1-­1 2.

But the courtly milieu of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was one in which it was possible to picture the painter at work in a way that was not possible (or at least not decorous) for non-­courtly elites. An anonymous album showing delicate scenes of courtly erotic dalliance, dating from the Qianlong reign (1736 – 1795), includes one in which a gentleman, again dressed in nostalgia-­invoking Ming fashions, paints fans for two ladies; one is finished and held up for inspection, one is scarcely begun (fig. 3.6).11 It fits into a pattern of masquerade and role-­playing that was a pervasive mode of Qing imperial court culture, but it reminds us that mimicking the scholar is also a way of distancing from him. Key to this process was the ruler known to us as the Qianlong emperor, whose long grasp on power from 1736 to 1795 (in truth, somewhat longer, since his retirement in that latter year was to a degree nominal) enabled him to sustain a political and a cultural program of unparalleled thoroughness and completeness, one in which painting played a crucial role, and in which his own role as viewer as well as creator of painting was central. Rulers prior to the Qianlong emperor were certainly willing to voice their opinions on painting (even if intellectuals remained consistently skeptical about their ability to act as the ultimate connoisseurs). We have already seen from as far back as the Tang dynasty, one thousand years before the Qing, an emperor choosing the subject of painting, though the degree of satisfaction Tang Taizong felt with Yan Liben’s rendering of rare birds is not recorded. From the Song dynasty in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the great connoisseur 90

and aesthete emperor Huizong not only defined a court style in his choice of subjects, in artists to paint them, and in the paintings he himself produced; he also was the moving force in the first great listing and ordering of the imperial holdings, the “Painting Catalogue of the Xuanhe Era” (Xuanhe hua pu).12 From the Ming period, we have a number of accounts of emperors expressing their views on what they did and did not like in painting. The Yongle emperor (r. 1403 – 1425) is reported as expressing his distaste for the art of the Southern Song court school, later called the “Ma-­Xia school” after Ma Yuan (active c. 1180 – 1220) and Xia Gui (active c. 1200 – 1250), two of its most distinguished practitioners, since in his view and that of his artistic advisers its favored “one-­ corner” compositional model was an obvious reflection of that enfeebled dynasty’s only partial control over the territory of the empire.13 His iconographic literalism was in one account shared by his grandson the Xuande emperor (r. 1426 – 1435), who is supposed (in a late Ming source, admittedly) to have dismissed the work of the aspirant court painter Dai Jin when it was pointed out to him by one of Dai’s jealous rivals (none other than Xie Huan, artist of the Apricot Garden scroll), that his painting of a fisherman in the red robe of an official could be understood as a political critique, even an act of lèse-­majesté.14 But if literary accounts of emperors as viewers of painting are fairly numerous, images of them are somewhat rarer. Surviving images suggest that Ming emperors preferred to have themselves pictured as participants in or spectators of manly exercises, rather than as connoisseurs of painting.15 It is only in the eighteenth century, and from the reign of the Qianlong emperor, that we get any examples of the latter subject. One of the finest of these is a hanging scroll, now in Beijing (fig. 3.7), executed jointly by the court artists Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766) and Ding Guanpeng (active 1708 – 1771).16 It shows the emperor seated under a pine tree, a large peacock feather fan held over his head as a sign of rank. He is dressed in pre-­Qing scholarly costume, again not necessarily the type of garment he ever actually wore, but an indication that he is engaged in an activity that has a venerable pedigree. The outdoor setting alludes to the numerous Ming paintings of the viewing of painting discussed above. Ten young boys attend him, their hair done in the style that tells us they are still socially if not actually chronologically children, and there are two figures who wear official caps who are certainly eunuchs. One of these holds the bottom of the scroll that is held aloft by a boy — a boy who returns our gaze by staring straight ahead out of the picture plane, and hence is a reminder to us of our position as viewers (the effect is seen in another roughly contemporary picture, that by Yu Zhiding, fig. 2.43). To the left of the emperor a table bears nine carefully delineated treasures of antiquity from the imperial collections, in the form of jades, bronzes, and pieces of porcelain. More items for appreciation — a “many treasures box” (duobaoge), a large vase, and a guqin zither, the musical instrument of choice of the gentleman — are being carried in by three boys in the foreground. To the left of the hanging scroll itself another boy stands waiting with four further hanging scrolls, telling us this is to be an extensive session of connoisseurship. The picture being viewed is unusual, perhaps even unique, in the body of Chinese meta-­painting, in that it is not a generic image but can the emperor

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be identified with a specific and indeed surviving work in the imperial collections. This is a painting (fig. 3.8) dated 1588, depicting the theme of washing the elephant (the subject has esoteric Buddhist religious connotations, turning on the homophony between xiang 象, “elephant,” and xiang 像, “image”), by the late Ming artist Ding Yunpeng (1547 – after 1628), a successful official and pious Buddhist lay believer.17 There is a coincidence of surname between the Ding Yunpeng who painted the original elephant painting and the Ding Guanpeng who painted the image of the Qianlong emperor viewing it over a century later, though as far as we know they were not actually related. But this coincidence was exploited on more than one occasion by the emperor, who perhaps aimed to co-­opt the long-­dead and prestigious figure of Ding Yunpeng to his service by having a court employee, the much lower status Ding Guanpeng, copy a number of the earlier artist’s works.18 This is just part of a very complex process of “possessing the past” that is being imaged in this painting, and it is quite easy to relate this picture to a number of pre-­Qing paintings of gentlemanly connoisseurship, as an activity whose established prestige was part of the emperor’s self-­image and the image he wished to project to the elites of his vast empire. The table full of splendid objects, for example, and the throng of attendant servants, exist in Ming paintings like Qiu Ying’s Evaluating Antiques in the Bamboo Courtyard (see fig. 2.29) and the screen panel showing the enjoyment of antiquities by Du Jin (see fig. 2.30). The same sort of composition was deployed toward the end of the Ming in Gu Bing’s 1603 printed imagining of the emperor

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3.7.  Giuseppe Castiglione/ Lang Shining (1688 – 1766) and Ding Guanpeng (active c. 1738 – 1768), The Qianlong Emperor Looking at a Painting, 1746 – c. 1750. Ink and color on paper, 135.4 × 62 cm. The Palace Museum. 3.8.  Ding Yunpeng (1547 – after 1628), Washing the Elephant, 1588 (detail). Ink and color on paper, 140 × 46.6 cm. National Palace Museum.

what a work by the ninth-­century Gu Deqian might possibly look like, if such a thing existed (see fig. 2.47). There are, indeed, as discussed in the preceding chapter, quite a number of pictures of gentlemen looking at pictures, some attributed also to Du Jin, like the example from the set of the four accomplishments that is now in the Shanghai Museum (see fig. 2.1). The hat and robes of the central viewing figure in the earlier painting, the boy arriving in the foreground, even the compositional device of the overarching pine tree, are strikingly similar to the same features in the eighteenth-­century painting by Castiglione and Ding Guanpeng portraying the Qianlong emperor as connoisseur. But there are differences, and they are crucial. Most significant is the fact that in the Ming dynasty paintings of gentlemen looking at paintings, such viewing is invariably a social and collective activity, with never less than two adult male figures so engaged. In the painting from the Du Jin set, four men turn their attention to the displayed scroll, and they appear to engage in dialogue with each other about it. In the Qing scroll (fig. 3.7), the emperor is crucially by himself. Only boys and eunuchs attend him, and he is therefore the single and solitary viewing subject for which the picture is unrolled; it is displayed for him alone. Emperors had long used a distinctive first person pronoun to refer to themselves, as zhen, meaning literally “the solitary one,” and here this singularity is rendered in pictorial form.19 The solitariness of the emperor becomes an important part of later orientalist descriptions of China and of the European paradigm of “oriental despotism” more broadly, as in the 1743 letter of the court Jesuit Denis Attiret (1702 – 1768), who wrote, “There is but one Man here; and that is the Emperor. All Pleasures are made for him alone.”20 We therefore need to be careful not to believe that it is an accurate account of either the political structure of the Qing empire or of the social life of its imperial court. However, this fantasy does have significant indigenous elements and is perhaps again better understood as a co-­production than as a simple imposition. This makes it a very different kind of image from the one of court ladies viewing a painting together, part of a set dated 1738 by Chen Mei (active 1700 – 1740s) showing Occupations of the Months, in which they retain the social aspect of connoisseurship in dialogue and discussion around the painting they admire (see fig.  2.50).21 Another point of difference between these two paintings lies in the direction of gaze. The Ming gentlemen are shown as fully engaged with the act of looking; their eyes travel toward the pictorial surface, as is the case in the great majority of such paintings, including the Apricot Garden scroll (see fig. 2.21). (In the Bamboo Garden, figure 2.25, the two artists named Lü look out of the picture at us, but their engagement with the pictorial surface is still represented by the pointing fan.) But although the Qing court painting by Castiglione and Ding is now conventionally titled The Qianlong Emperor Looking at a Painting, in fact his gaze is directed more past the picture of Washing the Elephant than at it. They are present in the same space, and both are rendered fully visible to the viewer, but there is no direct line of sight between them. This can be explained by the fact that the artists of this image are faced with two contradictory charges. One is to 94

nest a small-­scale copy of the earlier painting within their work to the degree that it will be legible and recognizable (this is a specific rather than a generic meta-­painting). The other is to paint the face of the emperor full-­on, or at least with a sufficiently high degree of frontality to meet the demands of court protocol. To paint him in profile — or, even worse, with his back to us, as is perfectly acceptable in the case of the generic scholars in the Ming painting —  would be a terrible breach of the canons of Qing imperial image-­making, as we can see from the myriad images of the emperor hunting, inspecting his empire, and relaxing that come down to us. These canons had come to be well understood by the second of the two court artists who was responsible, along with Ding Guanpeng, for this image of imperial solitary viewing of the painting of the past. This was Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766), or rather Lang Shining, the name this Italian artist adopted from his arrival in China in 1715, through the agency of the Jesuit order of which he was a lay member. We now know considerably more about the career of this Milanese painter than we did only ten years ago; we have a much better grasp of how he was trained in Italy, what he did there before he left for China at the age of twenty-­seven, and what sort of visual resources he had with him when he took up his post at the imperial court.22 He most certainly was not a “missionary,” as he has sometimes been described, except in the sense that his presence at court, and his rise through the ranks of the imperial court workshop system, formed part of the larger Jesuit mission strategy for the ultimate conversion of the Qing elite to Christianity. Audiences today have by now, and as the result of many generous loans from the Palace Museum, Beijing, where the majority of his work is still held, a good grasp of the range of images he produced for his imperial patrons, first for the Yongzheng emperor, and then for his son and Castiglione’s principal patron the Qianlong emperor. But many things about Castiglione and his time in China remain unclear to us, one of them being the degree to which he fully grasped the implications of the images that he was ordered by his imperial patron to produce. This issue is made manifest in one of his most often-­reproduced works, which might appear at first sight to take us some way away from the viewing of painting, but which may, in fact, allude to it in some subtle and unexpected ways. Kazakhs Presenting Horses in Tribute (fig. 3.9) is a sizable hand scroll by Castiglione (though it certainly also involved the work of some of the many

the emperor

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3.9.  Father Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766), Kazakhs Presenting Horses in Tribute, 1757. Ink and color on paper, 45 × 257 cm. Musée des Arts Asiatiques –  Guimet, Paris mg 17033.

Chinese and Manchu assistants we know he had), now in the Musée Guimet in Paris. It depicts the emissaries of a Central Asian nomadic people bringing a gift of splendid steeds to the Qianlong emperor in 1757, and hence is a visual record of the extended reach of the Qing dynasty’s sway deep into the vast expanses of Eurasia. Splendid horses had been appropriate gifts to Eurasian rulers since well before the Mongol hegemony of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and images of horses remained a particularly significant theme within the repertoire of court artists like Castiglione.23 We might want to recall at this point that what was perhaps archly named in chapter 1 as the first “Chinese painting” parallels the Kazakhs Presenting Horses scroll in some uncannily neat ways (see fig. 1.8), being an image of a white horse given as a gift from a Chinese emperor rather than to one, as here. In Castiglione’s 1757 scroll, two grooms hold horses while a third Kazakh, presumably the leader of the group, prostrates himself below the neck of a magnificent all-­white beast. The horse almost seems to return the gaze of the emperor, who is dressed in a plain yellow robe and seated on a folding chair before a stone screen, flanked by senior counselors (they are not eunuchs, since all are bearded) who carry his weapons and his teacup. An earlier sketch by Castiglione dated 1748 and with the title Dzungars Offering a Horse in Tribute (fig.  3.10) has the same basic composition, indicating the possibility of another now-­lost rendering of the same subject.24 Paintings of horses had been a staple subject of Ming court paintings too, with white horses particularly favored as a good omen, a sign of heaven’s favor to the ruling dynasty, as well as being the preferred mount of emperors themselves. Paintings showing or implying the evaluating of horses certainly carried a political connotation, in that the skills necessary to judge horseflesh effectively were also those needed to judge the talents of men and select those best able to bear the burdens of office.25 These associations would certainly be present in the Kazakhs scroll, but there may be another set of connotations too. Few theorists of painting in the Qing enjoyed as much prestige as the great Song thinker and writer Su Shi (1037 – 1101), who might legitimately be seen nowadays as the key figure in the set of assumptions, practices, and prejudices we have come to know as “literati painting.” He certainly was the first person to speak explicitly of “scholar’s painting” (shirenhua).26 Among his writings on the subject, one of many points at which he theorized the distinction between a form of painting produced by educated, amateur, and disinterested gentlemen, and one produced by the perhaps technically more skilled but infinitely less penetrative gaze of the socially inferior professional artisan, we find this colophon, an inscription on a work he favored by his contemporary Song Zifang: Looking at scholar’s painting is like judging the best horses of the empire: one sees how the spirit has been brought out; but when it comes to artisan-­ painters, one usually just gets whip and skin, stable and fodder, without one speck of superior achievement. After looking at a few feet or so, one is tired. This work . . . is truly scholar’s painting.27

The simile that makes a comparison between the act of looking at literati painting, particularly at the “spirit and vitality” ( yi qi) visible within it, and 96

the judging of fine horseflesh, is a striking one. But it perhaps cuts both ways in this particular instance, in that the act of viewing the finest horses could be seen as in some way comparable to the viewing of painting, making the Musée Guimet Kazakhs scroll (see fig. 3.9) in a sense also a picture of Qianlong in his connoisseurial role, or at the very least one in which the imperial command of the language of culture is not absent from, but rather is embedded in, the practices of rulership, the acceptance of homage, and the exercise of imperial sway. Did the Italian Castiglione, however long-­acculturated he was in the ways of the Qing court, grasp the possible subtleties in what he was ordered to paint in this instance? We cannot know, but it would be rash to assume that he was totally unaware of them. Castiglione worked at the heart of one of the largest painting establishments operating anywhere on the globe at that time, a complex of court workshops from which we have the names of some sixty-­five professional artists of varying statuses known to have worked at court in the Qianlong reign.28 It is hard to believe that it was not also a major center for the discussion of the theoretical and technical problems around painting, but it is a center whose voice is muted, and we catch no echo of it, drowned out as it is in the voluminous historical record by the imperial voice, whether in the words of the Qianlong emperor himself or of those who spoke for him and at his command from within the higher reaches of the bureaucracy. Just as only one man views the painting or scrutinizes the horse, so the voice of the Qing court is a univocal one, from which it is hard to recapture the range of competing views that might or even must once have existed within it. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the demands of a particular kind of imperial and imperious singular viewing subject that called new forms of painting into being at the Qing court. They perhaps reached their most dramatic the emperor

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3.10.  Father Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766), Dzungar Offering a Horse to Emperor Qianlong as Tribute (detail). Ink drawing on scroll, 41 × 150 cm. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

3.11.  Giuseppe Castiglione/ Lang Shining (1688 – 1766) and assistants, The Qianlong Emperor Viewing a Peacock Spreading Its Tail, 1758. Ink and color on paper, 347 ×  537 cm. The Palace Museum. 3.12.  Giuseppe Castiglione/ Lang Shining (1688 – 1766) and assistants, The Qianlong Emperor Viewing a Peacock Spreading Its Tail (detail). The Palace Museum.

form in the programs of large-­ scale decorative schemes of painting using fixed-­point perspective that have now been perceptively studied by a range of scholars and that Kristina Kleutghen demonstrates conclusively are identified in palace records under the name tongjinghua. She translates this technical term as literally “paintings that connect scenes” or “painted scenes into which the viewer can cross.” The term is one whose usage goes back to the Yuan period, when the idea of tong jing, “connecting scenes,” was used in painting theory in discussions of the connection between the depicted scene and the subjectivity of the viewer.29 Such large-­scale, illusionistic painting produced by artists such as Castiglione were already being made at the imperial court in the Yongzheng reign, although it is only from the coming to the throne of Qianlong in 1736 that we get explicit archival evidence for the manufacture of tongjinghua under that name. They were installed in two sites within the Forbidden City that were of particular personal significance to the new emperor, as well as in at least five locations outside the city-­center palace, some as far away as the summer residence of Bishu shanzhuang at Chengde and the imperial retreat of Mount Pan, an important and as we shall see much-­visited stopping place on the route between Beijing and Chengde. One such painting, depicting the emperor watching a display of peacocks flaunting their magnificent tails (fig. 3.11), can be linked to the Kazakhs scroll, in that peacocks were understood as having their origins in the far west, and hence their acceptance as gifts from foreign rulers cemented the sense, core to Qing imperial ideology, of the emperor as the cynosure of the whole world, the sole viewer who was himself at the same time the point toward which all eyes turned.30 In both the Kazakhs scroll and the peacocks painting the emperor is not literally alone but is accompanied by attendants in both cases; however, he is figuratively alone and the only one for whom the spectacle exists. Note in the Kazakhs scroll how he is painted on a different scale to the figures around him, such that if he stood up he would dwarf them (fig. 3.12). Note also how in the peacocks painting the figure of the eunuch closest to the emperor comes nearest to returning our gaze but does not actually do so (unlike the servant boys in a number of earlier viewing scenes), as a reminder that the principal viewer of this painting is the same person as the viewer of the scene itself, namely the emperor. These are not images of imperial majesty designed to project its aura to a wide audience, but rather are visual consolidations of an imperial subjectivity meant for the sole occupant of that ruling subject position. The placing of the highly illusionistic tongjinghua, of “painted scenes into which the viewer can cross,” within the apartments of the imperial palace often strengthens the sense of them being created for a single viewing subject, and meaningful only from and to that singular position. This concentration on a single viewing subject is perhaps seen most vividly in the Juanqin zhai, “Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service,” designed as an ultimate place of retirement for the Qianlong emperor, built between 1771 and 1773 and painted over a five-­year period, 1774 – 1779.31 At the heart of it is a small theater for intimate performances designed for imperial entertainment (fig. 3.13). Decorated with a stunningly virtuosic di sotto in su composition of hanging wisteria branches, it 98

has — like all such schemes, secular and religious — a specific ideal viewing point, which in this case is not, as might be imagined, the emperor’s throne but a point right in front of it, the point where the emperor in entering the room might pause and turn toward the seat of majesty (fig. 3.14).32 The deployment of perspective in the visual culture of majesty, in fact, took several forms in the high Qing period. At the smallest scale, it might involve optical toys, like a lavishly carved combined mirror and perspective box, some 81 cm high, showing scenes of European life to those who peeped through its apertures (fig. 3.15).33 At the largest, another imperial project, the layout of massive pleasure gardens in the Yuanming yuan, or Garden of Perfect Brightness, just outside Beijing, and their pictorialization in the form of a set of large-­scale copper plate engravings (fig. 3.16), makes material the viewing position of the 100

solitary imperial subject on an unprecedented scale. In the imperial gardens of the Yuanming yuan, the European palaces were laid out according to contemporary Western canons of linear perspective by the Qianlong emperor’s Jesuit architects, principally Castiglione himself, assisted by Fernando Bonaventura Moggi (1684 – 1761), with Michel Benoist (1715 – 1774) taking responsibility for the all-­important fountains. A number of European graphic sources, including Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura (specifically the 1545 Paris version) were available to them in the Jesuit library in Beijing.34 It was this same set of conventions that governed the way these palaces were pictured some decades later in the great set of copper engravings of the palaces, using a novel technology only recently mastered by the imperial workshops (an earlier set of copper engravings of the imperial conquests in Inner Asia had been printed in France [fig. 3.17], in a unique instance of Chinese imperial ordering of artworks from abroad, brokered by the merchants of Canton and the French Compagnie des Indes).35 The set of copper engravings entitled Pictures of the European Palaces and Waterworks (Xiyang lou shuifa tu) were created in the period 1781 – 1787 and executed in Beijing to designs by the court painter Ilantai. Two hundred sets were run off the plates, and the distribution of these was as closely controlled by the emperor as was access to the gardens themselves, a privilege granted to few; they went to favorite members of the imperial clan and to senior imperial counselors, but the majority were sent to a range of sites and palaces the emperor himself might visit, including the retreats at Chengde and Panshan.

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3.13.  View of the theater inside the Juanqin zhai, Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service, with painting by Wang Ruxue and assistants, completed 1779. The Palace Museum. 3.14.  Wang Ruxue and assistants, Trompe l’oeil Ceiling Painting, Juanqin zhai, completed 1779. The Palace Museum. 3.15.  Carved wooden floor screen containing mirror and perspective scenes, 1736 – 1795. Wood, glass, and painted paper, 56 × 25 ×  81 cm. Private collection.

This gives the engravings a striking appearance, one that is only reinforced by the sense that these are views, jing, destined for the gaze of one viewer alone, the emperor. As Kristina Kleutghen has written: Although our perception of perspective and its effects is likely more pronounced in the Pictures than it was at the original site thanks to the obvious architectural orthogonals and a glaring sense of its foreignness in the Chinese context, it is crucial to remember that linear perspective was strongly at work in the original site itself. . . . The privileged position granted to the single possible viewer of each of the real and printed scenes endows him with a power born of his presence as its sole omniscient viewership. In the Pictures, this role is reserved for Qianlong, exemplified by several views reserved specifically for him even within this private imperial space.36

Another commentator has summed up the way in which “The perspective illusions constructed among the European Palaces of the Yuanming yuan were most effective when seen from a central viewpoint that would have been occupied by the Qianlong emperor.”37 This is perhaps most clearly seen in the engraving entitled Perspective Paintings East of the Lake (Hu dong xian fa), number twenty in the series (fig. 3.18), which depicts painted screens — “flats,” as they would be called in theatrical parlance — designed to create the illusion of a European street vanishing off into the distance. Framed by huge arches some fourteen meters in height and drawing on the engravings of stage sets in Serlio, these were, in fact, massive tongjinghua, paintings mounted on stone screens, thirteen in all arranged like the flats on a European stage; they were constructed in 1759 as part of the final phase of construction of the complex of European-­style palaces that were built within the much larger imperial gardens, only to be destroyed by British and French troops who occupied and looted the site in 1860. The perspective scene falls into place when viewed from the other end of a massive pond, in a position that would again have been occupied only by the emperor. This solipsistic sense of a form of visuality whose principle object is itself perhaps reaches an apogee in some of the most complex images of the imperial act of viewing produced at court in the eighteenth century, images designed, above all, for the imperial gaze, in what could be considered an extreme instance of Robert Nelson’s concept of “looking with.” These are the four different versions of the painting known as One or Two? (fig. 3.19).38 As has long been recognized, this composition, in which the emperor is pictured as he sits on a couch in the archaic robes of a scholar, backed by a painted screen over which hangs a portrait of himself in those same robes, depends ultimately on an anonymous earlier painting (fig. 3.20). The emperor had owned this image since his youth, before he assumed the throne, and it clearly held a powerful fascination for him. At one time, James Cahill preferred to see this as a work of the Ming dynasty, although it was certainly believed in the eighteenth century to be a work of the Song dynasty and is still cataloged as such in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, where it resides today.39 A later date of course raises the the emperor

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3.16.  Yi Lantai (fl. c. 1738 –  1786), West Façade of Hall of Calm Seas, from a series of twenty plates depicting the Yuanming yuan European Palaces, 1781 – 1786. Copper plate engraving, 50 × 88 cm. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (86-­b26695). 3.17.  Jacques-­Philippe Le Bas (1707 – 1783), after Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766), The Battle of Oroï-­jalatu, from the series Battles of the Chinese Emperor, c. 1765. Engraving, etching, 57.1 × 92.6 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 3.18.  Yi Lantai (fl. c. 1738 –  1786), Perspective Paintings East of the Lake, from a series of twenty plates depicting the Yuanming yuan European Palaces, 1783 – 1786. Copper plate engraving, 50 × 88 cm. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (86-­b26695).

possibility — an intriguing one for present purposes, if ultimately unlikely — that this painting of looking at (maybe “looking past” would be better, but certainly “looking with”) a painting, might be more or less contemporaneous in its creation with the flourishing, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, of the genre of paintings of gentlemen looking at paintings that was the main burden of chapter 2. Unlike those images, One or Two? is inscribed, in the emperor’s hand, with a short poem that reflects on the issue of illusion and reality, and that in its deployment to the maximum of the classical Chinese virtue of brevity taxes translators considerably:

3.20. Anonymous, Gentleman and His Portrait (detail), Song dynasty. Ink and color on silk, 29 × 27.8 cm. National Palace Museum. 3.21. Anonymous, One or Two?, “Eternal Spring” version, c. 1745 – 1750. Ink and color on paper, c. 75 × 150 cm. The Palace Museum.

[It] is one and/or [it] is two —  Neither contingent nor separate. Maybe Confucian, maybe Mohist, Why get excited? Why think?40

As if to compound the sense of infinite recession (again, it might be helpful to invoke the notion of mise en abyme), the One or Two? composition exists today in four separate versions, all unsigned (though ascribed to various Qing court artists, including Giuseppe Castiglione) and produced over a considerable span of time, the earliest in 1745 – 1750 and the latest bearing the date 1780 (figs. 3.19, 3.21, 3.22, 3.23). This last version (fig. 3.23) is perhaps the least technically accomplished and hence the one that is least often published. Like the others, it multiplies embedded images, not only in the form of the portrait-­within-­the-­ portrait, but in the form of the painted screen panel that provides the backdrop to the main figure. Whereas in the three earlier versions this is an elaborate landscape scene, in the 1780 version we see a large branch of plum blossom, which has been convincingly posited as a piece of painting by the emperor the emperor

3.19. Anonymous, One or Two?, “Mental Cultivation” version, 1745 – 1750. Ink and color on paper, 77 × 147.2 cm. The Palace Museum.

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himself.41 If this were true (and it seems highly plausible), it would be one more image to add to the very large list of paintings produced or at least signed by the Qianlong emperor (fig. 3.24). Roughly two thousand paintings by the Qianlong emperor survive today in the Palace Museum, Beijing, about half of them precisely dated, making this the single largest surviving output of any pre-­modern Chinese painter, and allowing us to trace his production across decades. We know, for example, that every year from 1755 to 1791 the emperor produced a painting on the occasion of the New Year festival.42 One of the most impressive paintings he signed was a large-­scale landscape dated 1745 (fig. 3.25) showing the imperial pleasure precinct at Panshan, the stopping place some eighty kilometers east of the capital, between Beijing and the “Eastern Tombs” of the Qing dynasty ancestors.43 A large villa complex was built for the emperor there between 1744 and 1747, and it appears to have had special significance for him, possibly as it was entirely his construction, unburdened by any associations with his ancestors. He visited the site no less than thirty-­two times, wrote no fewer than 1,366 poems about it, and ordered the production of paintings of the site on many occasions from many artists.44 The whole course of his engagement with this site is mapped out on the surface of the 1745 hanging scroll; not only are individual portions of the landscape identified by captions and inscriptions, but the remainder of the surface is covered by no fewer than thirty-­four inscriptions from 1745 to 1793, all made on the occasions of his visits to Panshan, and in fulfilment of a promise made on the painting’s completion to commemorate each trip in this way. It can be demonstrated how the dates of these inscriptions follow the rhythms of war and peace in the Qianlong reign, with gaps when the emperor was occupied elsewhere, and it has been argued that this quantity of reinscribing of a 106

single image, which is unique in the annals of painting, makes this effectively an image of time as well as space, of the cosmic dimensions whose sustenance through just rule was the prime imperial task.45 It has also been demonstrated, through the meticulous modern connoisseurship of the art historian Fu Shen, that the Qianlong emperor did not paint this image himself, and, in fact, that the finished execution of a composition of this complexity was well beyond his capabilities as a painter. He almost certainly supplied a sketch or a concept of the work, which was executed by one of his favorite court artists, Tangdai (1673 – after 1752), like the emperor himself a Manchu, and a painter who in his time had collaborated with many other court artists, including Castiglione.46 Despite being of different generations, there appears to have been a particularly warm relationship between Tangdai and the Qianlong emperor; the fact that we know the former’s date of birth (unusually for a professional artist) is because the court archives contain the list of gifts he received as imperial bounty on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. He had been a favorite painter of the Qianlong emperor’s grandfather, and had collaborated on paintings with the young prince even before his accession.47 He was the emperor

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3.22. Anonymous, One or Two?, “Narayana” version, mid-­18th century. Ink and color on paper, c. 75 × 150 cm. The Palace Museum. 3.23. Anonymous, One or Two?, “Plum Screen” version, 1780. Ink and color on paper, c. 75 ×  150 cm. The Palace Museum. 3.24.  The Qianlong emperor, Three Orchids, from a set of six scrolls of flowers and plants, 1776. Ink on paper, 30.2 ×  18.5 cm. The Palace Museum.

one of the busiest and most highly regarded of the court professional painters, one of relatively few (Castiglione was another) to receive an official rank within the bureaucratic system as a way of greatly augmenting the salary he received as a member of the Painting Academy Office, part of the Imperial Household Department.48 It was not an unusual practice that the emperor should claim authorship of a painting that he had not actually executed, particularly where, as here, the subject was of particular personal significance to him, and where he had himself supplied the original idea, probably drawing attention to a major and supposedly early work in the imperial collections that may have acted as a partial model for the composition.49 He most likely supplied some sort of preliminary draft, from which Tangdai was expected to work, and he would have approved a preliminary large-­scale sketch by the artist, as was common practice. The archives of the palace workshops demonstrate that the emperor had the ultimate say on authorship in all cases — that is to say, that in a situation where it was standard for several painters to have had input to the finished appearance of a work, he was asked to decide which of a number of possible court painters should sign their name on its surface, even though in some cases this may not have been the person most involved in producing it.50 So it is an imperial decision, for instance, that the Kazakhs scroll is “by” Giuseppe Castiglione, even though he may have worked here, as elsewhere, with unnamed collaborators. If Louis XIV of France (r. 1643 – 1715) could famously claim that “L’état, c’est moi” — I am the state — then Qianlong appears here in the guise of one who could truly claim “La peinture, c’est moi” — I am painting. As its sole viewer, he claimed also the right to be in a sense its sole producer, and the intensity and reach of his agency were such that all paintings produced at court were therefore by him. This agency was not only intense but it was wide-­reaching, broad as well as deep. A number of commentators have drawn attention to the unprecedented scale of the eighteenth-­century court’s role as a site of painting, its production, its viewing, and its collecting.51 The great variety of different practices of painting — with what we would now call Chinese painting, set alongside imported European canons of representation as well as those from elsewhere in Asia, such as Tibet — has also been seen as a particular kind of all-­encompassing visuality, where the ability to deploy many kinds of artists and many kinds of image in the imperial project is a visual expression of the project’s range and universality.52 The ability to draw on imported Western sources such as the Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671 – 1676) of Claude Perrault (1613 – 1688), in order to picture the marvelous cassowary, a newly discovered giant flightless bird native to New Guinea, incorporates the “natural history” gaze of European exploration into Qing imperial narratives as a sign of heaven’s favor to the dynasty.53 Picturing all, and in all styles, was akin to ruling all. The Qianlong court also saw the production of both the largest and the smallest paintings seen up to that date in China, as if the imperial gaze sought to encompass all extremes of scale, as well as all possible styles of painting. A colossal image, Buddha Preaching by Ding Guanpeng (also the artist of the painting showing the emperor as gentlemanly viewer, figure 3.8), is over five meters high and nine meters wide, making it the biggest Chinese free-­hanging painting ever the emperor

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3.25.  The Qianlong emperor and Tangdai (1683 – after 1750), Mount Pan, 1745. Ink on paper, 162 × 93.5 cm. The Palace Museum.

produced.54 A landscape scroll of Colors of the Taihang Mountains by Tangdai made to fit into one of the “many treasures boxes” (fig. 3.26), miniature cabinets of curiosities that were a form of courtly amusement (indeed we see one by the emperor’s side in the Ding Guanpeng/Castiglione painting), is a mere seven centimeters in height (fig. 3.27).55 The court was thus a site where painting — painting of many kinds — was made, as well as one where old painting was viewed. It was a site where “painting” was maintained as an object of discourse — as, for example, in the great 1708 compilation of texts, Compendium of Calligraphy and Painting from the Peiwen Studio, done at the command of the Kangxi emperor.56 Between 1744 and 1745, court scholars produced for his grandson the first of two runs of catalogs of the imperial holdings, separating the two thousand or so works included into religious images (under the title Pearl Forest of the Secret Hall, Bi dian zhu lin) and other works, titled Precious Lists of the Stone Channel [Pavilion] (Shi qu bao ji).57 So important are the Qianlong era cataloging projects in understanding the painting of the pre-­Qing period that we might sometimes lose sight of the fact that most of the pictures these catalogs contain were contemporary works.58 But the point of a catalog is what it leaves out as much as what it includes, and by no means every image painted at court counted as a painting in the terms of the imperial cataloging projects. Even many of the emperor’s own pictures, copies of the masterworks of the past, were omitted.59 Particular kinds of the painting of the past that were not favored by imperial taste were 110

less well represented, and it is widely recognized that the hegemony of one particular school of landscape painting, descending from the late Ming arbiter Dong Qichang, owes much to the prominent position of its exponents in the imperial catalogs.60 But the eighteenth-­century imperial court can be seen as the site both of the setting in stone of the painting canon, through the cataloging projects such as Precious Lists of the Stone Channel [Pavilion], and at the same time of that canon’s deconstruction, through the patronage of works such as the tongjinghua, predicated on a very different sort of visuality to that which the paintings in the canon adumbrated. These images fell outside possible definitions of “painting” in terms of the imperial cataloging projects, from which they were all omitted.61 This exclusion has, in its turn, had a major effect on subsequent narratives of what “Chinese painting” is, and it is manifestly the case that even images (such as many by Castiglione) that were included in the “Precious Lists” are left out of most of the classic modern histories of “Chinese painting” if they are deemed to be in a “Western” style. This exclusion has a double source, or rather there are two positions that have an investment in keeping it outside of the principal narrative, which might not have been operative at the beginning of the eighteenth century but were beginning to come into focus at its end. One position is the West’s need for difference, the need that created “Chinese painting” in the first place. The other is the nationalist search for a pure and essential Chineseness. The power of this combination is such that there has for long been no place in the narrative of “Chinese painting” for an image such as the illusionistic wall paintings that decorated the Qianlong emperor’s Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service (fig. 3.28). How much more is this true of what we have come to know as “export painting” — that is to say, pictures created specifically for European and American customers, which in the late eighteenth century begin to be created in substantial numbers and in new forms (fig.  3.29).62 Painting done in China specifically for viewers living outside the empire, with iconography that had no meaningful purchase in the Chinese context, goes back, as we have seen, at least to the beginning of the sixteenth century and probably before (see fig. 1.20). Paintings created originally for Chinese viewers found their way to the other end of Eurasia from the same period onward, as we have also seen (see fig. 1.15). However, the eighteenth century brought about a new and intensified degree of “interconnectedness” in visual culture, and it is from the Qianlong period that we have a body of more substantial evidence for the existence of workshops dedicated to such production, above all in the southern port city of Guangzhou, the emperor

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3.26.  Double-­layered Many Treasures Box (duobaoge) with maki-­e (shihui) of landscape, turtles and cranes, containing the miniature scroll by Tangdai (1683 – after 1750), Colors of the Taihang Mountains. Lacquered wood and other materials, 26.5 × 20.7 × 19.5 cm. National Palace Museum. 3.27.  Tangdai (1683 – after 1750), Colors of the Taihang Mountains. Ink and color on paper, l 7.1 cm. National Palace Museum.

known as Canton to its foreign visitors. In terms of miles, this great commercial entrepôt of oceanic trade was a long way from the imperial court in Beijing, and this has helped us to keep the painting that happened in these locations in two different compartments. But in many ways Guangzhou was close to Beijing, in that the trade with foreigners was managed not by the regular bureaucracy but by the imperial household department, which had a direct interest in its success. A flow of gifts, including between 1728 and 1735 “foreign oil paintings” and special commissions, reached the imperial court from abroad through this route.63 Thus it is now claimed that “European stylistic elements in China did not add a veneer to the art and visual culture of the High Qing, but shaped the very features that defined them.”64 In pictorial terms, the commercial and the imperial were not opposed as spheres of the “low” and the “high,” but were on the contrary contiguous and coexistent. The imperial court might indeed have been the site of enthusiastic if selective appropriation of foreign manners of picturing, but the commercial realm was too; indeed, it has been recently argued that we need to revise our understanding of the channels of communication by which “Western” modes of picturing were appropriated in China, to take more account of the fact that it was urban professional artists, working to order for a clientele possibly of the middling sort, who were the first and most enthusiastic deployers of imported techniques, particularly with regard to the rendering of space.65 It seems particularly apt, therefore, that the court and the city of Canton are the two locations from which we get images of the production (see fig. 3.5 and fig. 3.29), as opposed to the viewing of painting, as in these examples; as the centers of painting to order, court and Canton were united in their diametrical opposition to the literati ideal of the artist’s untramelled (if unrepresentable) subjectivity. Things were happening contemporaneously with one another that render a single narrative of the development (or indeed the “decline”) of

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“Chinese painting” very hard, possibly even untenable. The concept begins to come apart at the seams under the sheer incompatibility of two images like the 1780 version of the imperial portrait One or Two? (see fig.  3.23) and the 1774 portrait of the Englishman Captain Thomas Fry (fig. 3.30). The first, as we have seen, is anonymous, the second by an artist known to us today only by the name Europeans gave him, Spoilum, and then spelled in a bewildering variety of ways. The Fry portrait carries on the reverse the inscription, “Drawn October the [ ]/at Canton in China/Spillem/in the year 1774.” Whoever he was, Spoilum/Spillem is working here in the technique of reverse painting on glass, one that had been practiced in Canton for European and native customers since at least the 1730s, with significant quantities being exported.66 The first instance of the use of this novel technique in portraiture may be by the English artist Arthur Devis (1712 – 1787), who exhibited a portrait of the bishop of Oxford executed in this technique in 1768. Patrick Conner has speculated that work by Devis may have reached China in the 1760s, to form the model for the Spoilum work of 1774, and indeed it may have, but equally worth stressing is the possibility that we see Devis experimenting with what had come to be seen as a “Chinese” technique, and that we are dealing with what I would call the “co-­production” of the painting. As such, it is functionally close to the tongjinghua of the court, similarly “co-­produced” by the proximity of genres and conventions. Another form of such co-­production might equally be the many scenes of the Canton waterfront, the earliest datable version being an

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3.28.  Details of a wall painting, Juanqin zhai, “Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service.” The Palace Museum. 3.29.  Pu-­Qua workshop, Artist Copying a Painting onto the Reverse of a Sheet of Glass, China, late 18th century. Watercolor on paper, 42 × 35 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum d.107-­1898. 3.30.  Spoilum (active c. 1770 –  1810), Portrait of Captain Thomas Fry, 1774. Reverse painting on glass, 38.7 ×  25.4 cm. Private collection, Courtesy of Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

3.31.  The Hongs of Canton, by Olof Årre after Carl Ekeberg, from Capitaine Carl Gustaf Ekebergs Ostindiska resa, åren 1770 och 1771, Stockholm, 1773. Engraving. 3.32. Anonymous, The Waterfront at Canton (detail), c. 1770. Ink and color on paper, 75.5 × 799.5 cm. The British Library, Map Collection: k.Top.116.23.

engraving by Carl Gustav Ekeberg (1716 – 1784), the Swedish traveler and pupil of the great botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). Published in his Ostindiska resa of 1773, The Hongs of Canton (fig. 3.31) has been described as “the earliest, clearly datable view so far identified, either Chinese or European, of the fully developed foreign factory site in Canton.” This appears almost simultaneously with the earliest of the many versions by Chinese artists on paper or silk (fig.  3.32), and it is impossible to establish a clear flow of “influence” in either direction; again it is possible to think of “co-­production,” this time not simply as a product of an “impure” coming together of Cantonese and European pictorial practices, but as an equally heterogeneous effect of painting both 114

on silk or paper and on porcelain, the format where the motif of the foreign factories first appeared as an independent subject (fig.  3.33).67 Another form of co-­production again might be seen in the case of the (sadly lost) Spoilum portrait of the Hawaiian chief “Tianna” (more properly Ka’ianna), who visited Canton in 1787 – 1788 through the agency of the British adventurer John Meares (?1756 – 1809), author of Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the Northwest Coast of America.68 Here agency, and indeed viewing, is dispersed among the worlds of the Chinese painter, the Hawaiian aristocrat, and the British freebooter in a way that defies simple labeling. Trade was corrosive of fixity of location, and of the idea of pure and essential artistic traditions, in other ways. About the time that the long Qianlong reign was drawing to a close, the English writing master William Butler (1748 – 1822) was acquiring a painting very different from those of the anonymous artists of Canton. Bearing the laconic inscription “W. Butler, 1797,” this was no “export painting” but, in fact, a major masterpiece of fourteenth-­century flower and insect painting (fig. 3.34), a work of considerable value in the Chinese art market and possibly one of the first major Chinese paintings to arrive in Europe.69 It was a commercial gaze, the view of the merchant, that brought this work in front of eyes for which its makers could never have imagined it, and it is to this view that the next chapter will address itself. the emperor

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3.33.  Punch bowl showing the foreign factories of Canton, c. 1780 – 1790. Porcelain painted in colored enamels, h. 15.7, d. 36.6 cm. The British Museum, London, Franks.746.+. 3.34.  Xie Chufang (active mid-­14th century), Fascination of Nature (detail), 1321. Ink and color on silk, 28.1 × 352.9 cm. The British Museum, London, 1998,1112,0.1.ch.

chapter four

the merchant

The commercial prosperity of the great cities — cities like Canton, made visible to us in so-­called export painting — was important to the rulers of the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Qing empire, and their desire to see that prosperity was not only the inspiration for their great Southern Tours of inspection, but for the imaging of that prosperity in pictorial form (figs. 4.1, 4.2).1 In that sense, the court and the marketplace are not utterly divorced as contexts of viewing. Both the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors each made six tours to the urban commercial heart of their realm, events that led directly to the commissioning of a series of scrolls depicting the bustling urban scene and the flourishing of the crafts and arts to be found there. A set of twelve hand scrolls on silk, now attributed to the court artist Xu Yang (active c. 1750 – 1776) and illustrating the Qianlong emperor’s first Southern Tour of 1751, was created for the imperial birthday in 1770 and disseminated in printed form to a wider audience. These are works on an impressively imperial scale, and it is surely of significance that scroll six, Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal, is, at nearly twenty meters, twice as long as others in the set. Not only was Suzhou arguably one of the richest and (in its own eyes at least) certainly the most stylish of the great Yangtze delta cities, it was the birthplace of Xu Yang, who became a court artist after presenting work in the course of the tour in 1751. Memorializing this event may therefore perhaps have been of personal significance to him. But even before he worked on the Southern Tour scrolls, a project that created over 150 meters of painting and took over 117

Detail of figure 4.19

five years — from ordering in 1764, through to their sending to the mounting workshop on November 23, 1769, and presentation to the emperor in May/ June 1770 — he had shown what he could do in the way of picturing the urban scene, by creating in 1759 a panorama of his native city variously entitled Life in a Flourishing Age (Sheng shi zi sheng tu) and Flourishing Suzhou (Gusu fan hua tu) (see figs. 4.3 – 4.6).2 This picture, 1,241 centimeters long and 36.5 centimeters high, may well have been done to solicit the order for a larger commission from the emperor, a role in which it was manifestly successful.3 In contrast to the demands of the Southern Tour scrolls, the painter here is freed from the necessity of structuring the composition around the person of the emperor, and can allow the complexity and diversity of the urban scene full reign. But this complexity and diversity were created for the imperial view, linking that view directly to commerce and trade; one of the things both the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors insisted on during their tours was that trade and business should go on, and that the markets should stay open as normal, so that “an abundance of the people and their products” might serve as a sign of prosperity and good government.4 In Flourishing Suzhou we can see, in its mass of detail, several instances of meta-­painting, of details that comment on the art of painting and its place in society. So we see the activity in a painting mounter’s workshop (fig. 4.4), identified by its signboard and by the skilled craftsman working with his glue brush on the reverse of a scroll, while a large hanging scroll of a landscape subject (it looks like an antique) dries on the wall behind him. We see a line of presumably high-­end shops, selling variously hats and porcelain and jewelry, and next to that one announcing that it sells “Calligraphy and Painting by Famous Artists” (fig. 4.5); inside we can just vaguely make out three or four images hanging on the back wall. And in another place we see rather more clearly a shop with paintings for sale, six scrolls hanging on the outer wall of a building, one even overlapping another to make the most of the space (fig. 4.6). One potential customer (or maybe just a flâneur) browses with his hands behind his back. Another walks by with a purchase under his arm. Two men discuss a painting, or at least one of them raises his hand in the gesture of directing attention. In

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4.1.  Wang Hui (1632 – 1717) and assistants, The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji'nan to Mount Tai (detail), 1698. Handscroll; ink and color on silk, 67.9 × 1393.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1979 (1979.5a – d). 4.2.  Xu Yang (active c. 1750 –  after 1776) and assistants, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (detail), 1770. Handscroll; ink and color on silk, 68.8 × 1994 cm. Metro­ politan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1988 (1988.350a – d) 4.3.  Xu Yang (1712 – c. 1779), Flourishing Suzhou (detail), 1759. Ink and color on silk, 39 × 1241 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum. 4.4.  Xu Yang (1712 – c. 1779), Flourishing Suzhou (detail). Liaoning Provincial Museum. 4.5.  Xu Yang (1712 – c. 1779), Flourishing Suzhou (detail). Liaoning Provincial Museum.

4.6. Xu Yang  (1712 – c. 1779), Flourishing Suzhou (detail). Liaoning Provincial Museum.

front of them, porters swarm and boats on the canal unload; some men sit at a wine shop. What we significantly do not see is the practice of literati painting, with its insistent ethos of painting as an activity unrelated to the pursuit of any form of profit. Rather, “painting” in this rendering of the Suzhou cityscape is not an activity divorced from commerce; it is set right within it. The presence of numerous images displayed together simultaneously is what tells us these are things for sale, images exposed to scrutiny as to their worth in a commercial as well as an aesthetic sense. The fact that by the late eighteenth century a Yuan dynasty painting (see fig. 3.34), a work of the fourteenth century, should reach Britain is therefore not as surprising as it might at first glance seem. A well-­ developed trade in art, and the acceptance of paintings as commodities, had by that time already existed for centuries, so some sort of interconnection between that specialized market and the equally specialized but intersecting world of oceanic trade might have been expected. Images showing paintings-within-paintings in a commercial context had, in fact, existed long before Xu Yang’s rendition of the shops of his native Suzhou, and in order to trace the figure of the merchant as viewer of Chinese painting, it is necessary to reverse the chronological forward movement of this account for a moment and return to the previous couple of centuries. If we go back to a late-­Ming or early-­Qing cityscape, at least one hundred years previously, an example of what was once a flourishing genre of painting, but one that survives in very small quantities, provides evidence of this. Scenes of urban commercial prosperity were being painted, presumably for private customers, long before the Kangxi or Qianlong emperors ever went south (fig.  4.7). The surviving 120

examples show predominantly the twin Ming capitals of Beijing and Nanjing.5 These pictures may depend to a greater or lesser degree on one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese painting of any period, the Song dynasty Going Up the River at the Qingming Festival (Qingming shang he tu), attributed to Zhang Zeduan (1085–1145), much seen and sometimes admired in the Ming period, when it passed through several famous collections.6 This led to a large number of updatings of the composition, and there exist today a considerable number of pictures, of very varying quality, that claim to be copies of this celebrated composition by the most successful Suzhou professional artist of the mid-­Ming, Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552). Modern connoisseurship tends to be skeptical as to Qiu’s authorship of any of these works, though curators at the Liaoning Provincial Museum argue for the authenticity of a version there (fig. 4.8).7 Given the prevalence of optimistic Qiu Ying attributions, caution is the merch a nt

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4.7. Anonymous, Splendor of an Imperial Capital, c. 1600 (detail). Ink and color on silk, 32 × 2182.6 cm. National Museum of China. 4.8.  Traditional attribution to Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552), copy of Zhang Zeduan, Going Up the River at the Qingming Festival (detail). Ink and color on silk, 30.5 × 987.5 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum.

probably advisable, and it may be safer to see this as a work of around 1600 or even a little later, though it is one of great charm and character. The city shown in this painting may be (or at least the Song original shows) Kaifeng, and paintings (which are absent from the original Song dynasty composition) now feature in several of the seemingly innumerable vignettes of daily life that have made this such a well-­loved composition over the centuries. A monk prostrates himself in the street before potential donors, while an assistant holds up a large hanging scroll painting of the monastery for which he solicits alms (fig.  4.9). Pictures (of deities?) hang on the wall of a specialist pediatrician (fig.  4.10) and of a pharmacy (fig.  4.11). A portrait painter is at work (fig. 4.12), and there is a picture-­mounting workshop (fig. 4.13). A storyteller displays a large scroll with portraits of heroes and emperors of the past, as the small crowd around him breaks up at the end of the performance and money changes hands (fig. 4.14). Everywhere there is buying and selling, commerce and exchange. And in this busy street scene we see an antiques shop (fig. 4.15), its goods piled in profusion behind the counter, with many bronzes

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and ceramics, at least eight large scrolls, and a number of albums of painting or calligraphy; the shop assistant turns to fetch something down for a customer’s inspection. To the left, the owner of the shop unrolls a hanging scroll, which we can make out to be a composition of bamboos, to the view of two gentlemen, who appear to discuss its merits animatedly. Above their heads hangs a miscellaneous assortment: a guqin zither and a sword, but also a set of musical clappers, a parrot perch, and two empty birdcages, as if to tell us that even bamboo painting is just a thing, just “stuff,” in this context. This would seem to be exactly what meta-­painting is, in that this picture gives a comment on its own composition, for this work fraudulently (or if we want to be charitable, the merch a nt

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4.9–15.  Traditional attribution to Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552), copy of Zhang Zeduan, Going Up the River at the Qingming Festival (details). Liaoning Provincial Museum.

optimistically) signed with the name of a man who painted for money is very much “stuff” itself, an object created in a commercial context, for sale, and in the knowledge that it would be looked at in exactly the context of the urban shopping it depicts. The “Qiu Ying” painting may well date from around 1600, and so is probably a bit earlier than a particularly intriguing image of a painting in its “commodity context,” a woodblock illustration (fig. 4.16) to the drama Ideal Love Matches (Yi zhong yuan) by the seventeenth-­century dramatist Li Yu (1610/11 – 1680), whose life spanned the transition from Ming to Qing.8 The illustration again shows gentlemen bending over a hanging scroll displayed by the proprietor of an antiques shop; we can make out ink stones and albums and the ends of scrolls, all goods available for sale in the marketplace.9 The scene is set in Hangzhou, lakeside city of culture and luxury, and the central character is Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), in his lifetime the leading scholar painter of the late Ming, and a man whose reputation was already at a towering height in the dramatist’s youth. In the play, he has come to Hangzhou for a low-­profile holiday, exhausted by the many social demands made on him by those who seek an example of his art, and gone to visit the antiques shops for a little recreation. He examines the painting, a scene of poverty and want: a broken-­down cottage, the bridge to it deliberately smashed to keep creditors at bay, an impoverished scholar in a tattered gown, a girl reciting poetry as her breath steams in the wintry air. The painting bears the signature of none other than Dong Qichang himself, one of the innumerable fakes of his work flooding the market at that time. According to a mid-­seventeenth-­century poem entitled “Bogus Antiquities” by Shao Chang­heng (1637 – 1704), “The current trends have been dominated by Dong Qichang/labels boasting his name can be found in every village.”10 As the drama proceeds, the practiced connoisseurial eye of the great literatus discerns at once that the picture must be autobiographical, and that the girl in the picture must herself be the artist. He falls in love with her at once. There are multiple ironies in this scene. The drama will end happily, and after a number of twists and turns Miss Yang, the impoverished professional artist, will live to enjoy the ideal love match of the play’s title with Dong Qichang, just as his friend Chen Jiru (1558 – 1639) will marry the talented female forger of his work, but not before the audience is reminded of a few home truths about painting, its viewers, and its creators. In another woodblock illustration to the play (fig. 4.17), Miss Yang is shown in the act of forging the work of the great master who is fated to become her lover and husband, another image of the female painter to set alongside those shown in chapter 1. The ultimate message is disturbing. If a professional, and a woman professional at that, can fake the work of the greatest scholar painter of the age to the point that the imposture is only recognized when he himself looks closely, what are we being told about the integrity of painting as a scholarly pursuit, a gentlemanly accomplishment of restricted access? Are we not rather being shown something of the promiscuity and uncertainty surrounding painting and its authenticity, in a society where the market seems to reign supreme? At one point in the text, an obscene pun is even made between “that painting” (na hua 那畫) and the vulgar word for the 124

male member (also na hua 那話, literally “that word”), a cheap laugh at painting’s pretensions to an elevated status it can no longer sustain.11 The work that Dong Qichang and Chen Jiru produce is harried out of them by vulgarians eager to have the valued products of their brush, and the widespread availability of fakes stands for the rapacity of the art market. The reason Miss Yang fakes a Dong Qichang (note here that it is possible to picture the female artist at work in a way that is not possible for the elite male) is not that she necessarily thinks he is the best artist, but because it will make the largest contribution to solving her and her father’s desperate financial plight. In choosing Dong Qichang as the central character of this tale of deception and illusory authenticities, which contains such startling turns of events as women marrying other women while cross-­dressed as men, and in which both things and people masquerade as what they are not, Li Yu is telling us that the literati ideal was perhaps subverted at its very inception, and making a trenchant comment on the power of commerce to mix things up, to corrode fixity and certainty. This commercial view, the view of the merchant and the customer, is therefore every bit as much part of what makes painting “painting,” as is the disinterested gaze of the gentleman. Indeed, they cannot fully be told apart. The popular encyclopedias of the late Ming, products of the highly commercial industry of publishing, made not just the materiality of painting but knowledge about painting something one could obtain by buying a book. Thirty-­five such encyclopedias survive today from the publishing center of Jianyang in Fujian

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4.16.  Illustration to the drama Ideal Love Matches by Li Yu (1610 – 1680). Woodblock print, 1659. Peking University Library. 4.17.  Illustration to the drama Ideal Love Matches by Li Yu (1610 – 1680). Woodblock print, 1659. Peking University Library.

4.18.  Example of landscape painting, from the encyclopedia The Ocean of Ten Thousand Books. Woodblock print. Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation.

province, famous for its cheap editions accessible well down the social ladder. Most have a section on calligraphy and painting, the latter focusing, as we might expect, less on doing it than on knowing about it. The miswritten names and misquoted authors tell us something about the educational level of their purchasers. Plant, flower, and landscape images predominate in their crude pictures of how to recognize a picture, as in an example of “rules for landscape” from the 1610 “Ocean of Ten Thousand Books” (fig. 4.18).12 The expressive, “literati” landscape had become the default position of what “painting” generically was, even for consumers such as the purchasers of these books; their acts of viewing (even if only at the level of imagined ones) were also part of what created “painting.” Although we have catalogs of painting from the Ming and Qing periods written by elite collectors, up to and including the imperial collection itself, only occasionally in the Ming and Qing periods can we match less exalted types of viewers to the pictures they may have seen. More often we have the patronizing view of their betters, expressed in images like Zhang Lu’s disorderly village viewing (see fig.  2.36). But occasionally surviving inventories of the division of property can tell us a little more, and can confirm the supposition that merchants, people involved in commerce, had long been among the most avid of collectors. Paintings belonged not just to people like the successful merchant Wang Zhen, whose painting collection, as mentioned already, was buried with him in 1495, nor to the banker and Maecenas Xiang Yuanbian (1525 – 1590), but 126

to more humble traders as well. The rare body of archival documents surviving from Huizhou, in Anhui province, and occasionally including detailed property inventories necessary when household wealth was to be divided among adult sons, gives us a glimpse of the ownership of painting at this comfortable but far from elite level of Ming society.13 The double division of the property of a salt merchant named Wu Dezhen is cursory in its 1507 listing of “antique paintings” (guhua) and “screens” (pingfeng), and in its 1517 allusion to “calligraphy and painting and other things,” suggesting they were of limited financial interest. However, by 1612, in keeping with the growing merchant interest in such things, when the Huizhou merchant Sun Shi divided his comfortable wealth among his sons, calligraphy and paintings were listed with more attention to detail. The otherwise unknown Mr. Sun had nine hand scrolls, including one of the calligraphy of the Suzhou literatus Wen Zhengming (1470 – 1559), outnumbered by his thirty-­two hanging scrolls. (The format associated with display is more prominent here than the format associated with contemplation.) In the case of these hanging scrolls, works of calligraphy again predominate, and the majority of the paintings are by unnamed artists (or by artists whose names were not felt worth recording) and are of congratulatory subjects suitable for weddings or birthdays (they may well have been received as gifts), though there is a set of four animal and bird subjects described as works by the fifteenth-­century court artist Lin Liang (whether genuine or not we cannot know).14 This should serve to remind us that well before the Qing period, and indeed from much earlier eras of Chinese history, old paintings were valuable commodities, and ones that a well-­developed art market of specialist dealers could circulate to customers who socially occupied a different position from those for whom certain kinds of images were originally made. That great icon of restricted and elite viewing by members of the official class, Xie Huan’s Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden of 1437 (see fig. 2.22), was by the eighteenth century in the collection of two major merchant collectors of the city of Yangzhou. These were the brothers Ma Yueguan (1688 – 1755) and Ma Yuelu (1697 – after 1766), men whose vast fortune depended on their role in the government monopoly on salt. The governmental finances of the Qing empire, in turn, depended on them, a role that was recognized when Ma Yueguan was one of the welcoming party for the Qianlong emperor on his Southern Tour, and part of the delegation sent by the salt merchants to offer birthday congratulations to the empress dowager in Beijing in 1751. The presence in their large collection of the Apricot Garden scroll is reflected in part of the composition of a work (fig. 4.19) created for the brothers by Fang Shishu (1692 – 1752) and Ye Zhenchu in 1743, entitled A Literary Gathering at Xing’an on the Double Ninth.15 Fang Shishu is in his own person an example of the complexities of status around the art of painting in the Qing period, as a very successful commercial artist; though he was from a highly educated background, he had failed to establish himself as a salt merchant but had many patrons who were from the merchant elite.16 This work of his shows a gathering (an imagined rather than an actual one) of sixteen core members of an exclusive poetry club, the Hanjiang Poetry Society, of which the merch a nt

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the Ma brothers were the core members and initiators. This is the cultural and commercial elite of the city, and they are shown in relaxed poses dotted about a lavish garden, engaged in cultured pursuits, of which the appreciation of painting is one. Although the “four accomplishments” of zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting had by the middle of the eighteenth century become such a cliché that they would no longer be explicitly referenced in a painting like this, the composition of the earlier masterpiece, which the hosts of the gathering themselves owned, is gracefully alluded to in the group of three gentlemen around a scroll.17 Many differences of style and format separate the pictorializations of the “Elegant Gathering” of 1437 and the “Literary Gathering” of 1743, painted as they were three centuries apart, but two of the most striking center on the scroll-­within-­the-­scroll itself, and mark a disjunction between the latter image and its earlier model. In the first place, it is a hand scroll rather than a hanging scroll that is the focus of attention in the Ma brothers’ garden (fig. 4.20), and note that no servants interpose their presence between the viewer and the surface, which is held by the gentlemen themselves.18 But in the second place is the inescapable visual fact that in the later picture the image at which the gentlemen look is itself unpaintable; there are by this point no more paintings-­ within-paintings, not even the corner of a composition that is visible in Apricot Garden, or at least not in the context of high-­status works like these. The Ma brothers owned a formidable collection, with the Xie Huan Apricot Garden complemented by famous works such as a much-­esteemed Dong Qichang copy of Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains by the Yuan dynasty master Zhao Mengfu (1254 – 1322), while on one notable occasion on a summer festival in 1747 they were able to show simultaneously no fewer than thirteen 128

old master paintings of the exorcistic deity Zhong Kui.19 But yet this richness goes unpictured. Why should this be? It may be that we are seeing here an act of denial of painting’s status as a commodity, through a refusal to do what the scenes of painting as an object in the marketplace were happy to do at exactly the same time (see fig.  4.4) and show us the very act of viewing. Now, for the painting viewed by gentlemen to preserve its status in a world of painting viewed by merchants, it has to literally be invisible. And especially so if the gentlemen are merchants. The merchant princes of Yangzhou were matched in their enthusiasm for painting by the equally prosperous commercial magnates of the foreign trade entrepôt of Guangzhou, even if at a time lag of several decades. From the end of the Qianlong reign to the 1860s, at least five of these Cantonese collections were commemorated in catalogs, one of the richest holdings being that of the “hong merchant” (a merchant licensed to trade with foreigners) Pan Zhengwei (1791 – 1850), whose “Record of Calligraphy and Painting from the Tower of Hearing the Hoofbeats” (Ting fan lou shu hua ji ) of 1843 not only gives descriptions of, but also prices paid for, the masterworks of calligraphy and painting it contains.20 The systematic recording of prices is unusual in a Ming or Qing catalog, but it would be perhaps too easy to mark the author down as a vulgarian who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Pan Zhengwei owned such fabulous treasures as a supposed masterpiece of late-­ seventh-­century Chinese calligraphy by the Buddhist master Fazang (637 – 7 12), a work he rated as the finest thing in his collection (though modern scholarship is skeptical).21 Pan also owned a hanging scroll titled Appraising Horses by the great Ming professional painter Qiu Ying, which is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and which might recall the connection made by the Song dynasty the merch a nt

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4.19.  Fang Shishu (1693 – 1751) and Ye Fanglin (active mid-­ 18th century), The Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden (detail), 1743. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 33.5 × 893 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 1979.72. 4.20.  Fang Shishu (1693 – 1751) and Ye Fanglin (active mid-­ 18th century), The Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden (detail), 1743. Handscroll, ink and color on silk. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 1979.72.

4.21. Anonymous, Prome­ nading Ladies, 14th century. Ink and color on silk, 109.6 ×  50.7 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, f1916.50.

writer Su Shi between the connoisseurship of painting and the assessment of horseflesh.22 A link to the imperial collections comes in the form of a work Pan Zhengwei owned and ascribed to the Tang painter Zhou Fang (c. 730 – c. 800). Now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC (fig. 4.21), it would be recognized today as being of considerably later date, though still a work in early style if in ruined condition. The seals indicate that the provenance of this work has it passing from the collection of the Qianlong emperor to the Manchu prince Yongxing (1752 – 1823), Prince Cheng (presumably as a gift), and then from this aristocrat directly to the Cantonese merchant Pan Zhengwei (presumably by purchase). The biography of this particular painting underscores the very few degrees of separation between courtly and commercial milieus. Perhaps this one scroll made it out of the imperial collections (most traffic was the other way) because of doubts over its authenticity; the colophon attributing it to Zhou Fang that purports to be in the hand of Zhao Mengfu (1254 – 1322) is certainly not genuine.23 Nor was this the only optimistic attribution in Pan’s 130

collection. A long hand scroll (fig. 4.22), Greeting the New Year, which Pan thought of as by another Tang artist, Li Zhaodao (active c. 670 – 730), is today ascribed by the Cleveland Museum of Art to the early Ming court artist Shi Rui (active c. 1426 – c. 1470).24 Pan Zhengwei, in fact, had what would be thought of today as impeccably orthodox, not to say conventional, taste. In addition to the works already mentioned, he owned a joint album by the Ming literati painters Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming (fig. 4.23) that is now in Kansas City (and for which he paid the very substantial price of 120 liang of silver), and the “Eight Views of Autumn Moods” by Dong Qichang (fig. 4.24) now in the Shanghai Museum (which cost him 200 liang).25 In fact, the canon of Chinese painting of the past as it has come down to us even into this century — the “Four Great Masters of the Yuan,” the “Four Great Masters of the Ming,” the “Orthodox Masters” of the Qing, and the monk painter and Ming “remnant subject” Shitao — these are the works that dominate not just Pan Zhengwei’s collection but those of the merch a nt

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4.22.  Shi Rui (active c. 1426 –  c. 1470), Greeting the New Year, 15th century. Handscroll, ink, color, and gold on silk, 25.5 × 170.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1973.72. 4.23.  Shen Zhou (1427 – 1509), Gardeners, from the series Landscape Album: Five Leaves by Shen Zhou, One Leaf by Wen Zhengming, Ming dynasty (1368 –  1644). Album leaf mounted as a handscroll: ink on paper, 38.7 ×  60 cm. The Nelson-­Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 46-­51/1.

4.24. Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), leaf from the album Eight Views of Autumn Moods, 1620. Ink and color on paper, 53.8 × 31.7 cm. Shanghai Museum.

his Cantonese peers and contemporaries. Careful analysis shows that the single most collected artist in these circles was Wen Zhengming, followed by Shen Zhou, then Qiu Ying, then Dong Qichang — all major figures of the Ming, and all still very much major figures of the art historical canon.26 What these merchant collectors viewed and recorded has a remarkable congruence with what standard textbooks of much more recent date would view as the central narrative of “Chinese painting,” and to that extent they can be seen as among its creators. There is, on the contrary, almost no evidence in the catalogs for the collecting of work by artists from Guangdong province itself, and absolutely no evidence for the collecting of what might be called “contemporary” painting, work by living artists. However, if we broaden our horizons to consider what a man like Pan Zhengwei must have seen, or at the very least had the opportunity to see, we can begin to grasp the extent to which this canon has for at least two hundred years been an insufficient definition of what “Chinese painting” (in the crude and literal sense of paintings executed in China by artists who were themselves Chinese) might be. Canton was, as we have seen, the point of entry into the Qing empire for quantities of images executed in Europe and elsewhere (for example, in Japan), images whose traces may be hard to pin down but that must have been viewed in a range of contexts. This was, for example, probably how the printed images that lie behind the Qianlong emperor’s cassowary pictures entered the Qing empire. Occasional quotation is not unknown; the 132

direct use of skeletal images taken from the anatomical prints of Andreas Vesalius (De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543) and Hendrik Hondius (Post funera vita, 1610) by the eighteenth-­century painter Luo Pin (1733 – 1799), in his two uncanny hand scrolls (there are versions of 1766 and 1797), both entitled Fascination of Ghosts or Ghost Amusement (Gui qu tu, fig.  4.25), has been well studied.27 Luo Pin’s friend Weng Fanggang (1733 – 1788) wrote a poem for him implying that the painter hung on his studio walls works with fixed point orthogonal perspective, and his studio’s name itself was Guijing zhai, “Studio of the Triangular View[point],” implying an interest in such illusions of depth as seen in the engravings of the European style palaces (see fig. 3.16).28 Very the merch a nt

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4.25.  Luo Pin (1733 – 1799), Fascination of Ghosts (detail), 1766. Ink and color on paper, 35.5 × 1500 cm. Ressel Fok Family Collection.

few artists of any sort of reputation visited the European settlements of Macao or Canton; rare exceptions were the Catholic convert Wu Li (1632 – 1718), and Tang Yifen (1778 – 1853), who in 1816 visited Macao, but left no paintings of the foreign scene, rather a colophon to a poem recording such curiosities as the fact that the foreigners ate when their clocks struck, and his impression of a Portuguese young lady’s piano recital.29 However, it seems inconceivable that the body of prints that arrived through trade links, principally in order to provide designs for porcelain painting, did not on occasion seep out into the wider visual culture that men like Luo Pin, and certainly like the merchant collector Pan Zhengwei, inhabited. In this latter case, the connection is even more direct, since we do know that one version of Fascination of Ghosts belonged to a cousin of his, the salt merchant Pan Shicheng (1804 – 1873), who inscribed on it in 1851 a colophon that makes explicit the connection between its ghostly scenes and the depredations of the foreign “ghosts” ( gui), the forces of British imperialism that both Pan cousins were active in resisting.30 It does not seem too far-­fetched to postulate that at some point this extraordinary picture was viewed by Pan Zhengwei, whose own collecting preferences appear so much more restricted. Indeed, the restrictedness of those preferences can be seen perhaps not as a placid conservatism, a lack of awareness of other pictorial possibilities, but as the very conscious refusal of those possibilities by someone who inhabited a visual culture marked by the diverse imagery that pervaded the great trading center of Canton. His Cantonese contemporaries, if not Pan himself, were certainly involved in the organization of the production of painting in these locations by artists who had mastered styles of representation that were desired by European and North American customers, artists who were not just copying imported images but were producing images in an imported style. Pan Zhengwei was one of the specialist class of entrepreneurs known in English as hong merchants, licensed to trade with foreigners. Images could form a numerically insignificant but symbolically weighty part of that trade (fig. 4.26), and the Pan family had played a key role in at least one unique instance of transcultural courtly pictorial appropriation. Pan Zhengwei’s grand­father, Pan Zhencheng (1714 – 1788), as chief merchant of the Cohong, or corporate body of long-­distance merchants, had in the 1760s effectively underwritten financially the complex and delicate negotiations surrounding the commissioning by the Qianlong emperor of the set of large copper engravings, designed in a European style by court Jesuits and executed in France (see fig. 3.17), commemorating the victories of his armies in the far west of the Qing empire.31 Pan Zhencheng, a Fujianese who had risen from humble origins to great wealth through oceanic trade, was himself a cosmopolitan figure, with a “working knowledge of Western langauges” and a life experience that included voyages as far as the Spanish colony of Manila.32 His son and successor, known to foreigners as Puan Khe Qua II, supplied garden plants to the London savant Sir Joseph Banks, who in 1806 wrote to thank him, accompanying his letter (still in the archives of the Royal Society) with “a set of views of London.”33 We see therefore the two generations of Pan merchant princes who preceded Pan Zhengwei, his father and grandfather, each involved 134

in some sort of pictorial transaction with foreigners, giving rise to who knows what in the way of family lore. Pan Zhengwei’s lavish mansion was one of the sights of Canton, recollected after his death in the nostalgic literature of the pre-­Opium War “old China trade” by writers like William C. Hunter (1812 – 1891), who remarked, “It was a privilege granted to any of his foreign friends to make picnic excursions to the beautiful residence of Pwan-­Kei-­Qua at Pun-­tong,” and who went into raptures over bronzes and porcelain vases visible in the mansion’s library.34 However, the great painting and calligraphy collection stuffed with Yuan and Ming landscape masterpieces, like those belonging to Pan’s other merchant contemporaries, such as Ye Menglong (1775 – 1832) or Liang Tingnan (1796 – 1861), would have been invisible to the occasional foreign business visitor, and certainly not shown to them. Another kind of engagement with painting — contemporary painting — was exercised by others among the close-­knit confraternity of hong merchants of Canton.35 Europeans and Americans in the early nineteenth century certainly did see and indeed receive as gifts examples of the types of hong merchant portraits produced by Chinese oil painters from the late eighteenth century (fig. 4.27) and through to the end of the Canton system in the 1840s. The most successful workshop in that manner was that operated in the decades on either side of the First Opium War (1839 – 1842) by the painter known to his foreign clients as “Lamqua” (his Chinese name may have been Guan Qiao­ chang), who may possibly have worked in the studio of the roaming Irish artist the merch a nt

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4.26. Anonymous, Artist at Work, c. 1800. Gouache on paper, 37.5 × 29.8 cm. Private collection, Courtesy of Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

4.27.  Spoilum (active c. 1770 –  1810), Portrait of a Hong Merchant. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm. Martyn Gregory Gallery, London. 4.28.  Lamqua (active 1825 –  1860), Self-­Portrait, c. 1850. Oil on canvas, 26.99 × 22.70 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Gift of Robert S. Sturgis, 1983. 4.29.  Attributed to Lamqua (active 1825 – 1860), Portrait of Howqua, 1825 – 1850. Oil on canvas, frame dimensions 74.3 × 59.06 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Gift given by Rebecca B. Chase, Ann B. Mathias, Robert H. Bradford, and Charles E. Bradford given in memory of their mother and father, Rebecca Brown Bradford and Robert Fiske Bradford, 1990.

George Chinnery (1774 – 1852), and then left Chinnery’s tutelage to establish his own successful practice as a painter (fig. 4.28).36 Leading hong merchants like Wu Bingjian (1769 – 1843), men who were closely tied by commercial links to Pan Zhengwei, avid collector of the great Yuan and Ming masters, gave their portraits by Lamqua to foreign contacts (fig. 4.29).37 And the viewers of Lamqua paintings extended geographically well beyond the context in which they were painted, not just because the merchant portraits were carried away by their recipients, but because the work of Lamqua was shown at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London in the years 1835 and 1841, and at the École Turgot in Paris, as well as at exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston between 1841 and 1860.38 Guan Qiaochang’s close collaboration over fifteen years with the American medical missionary Peter Parker (1804 – 1888) brought his striking images of disease and deformation to the notice of a medical world that was developing a global gaze.39 We therefore have the paradox that those forms of picture making that were destined to be “Chinese painting” — that is, the works in the collection of someone like a Pan Zhengwei (see fig. 4.24) — were invisible to a global audience, at precisely the moment when that audience was exposed to a new body of paintings that were executed by a Chinese artist in a Chinese city (fig. 4.29), but were destined to be excluded from the category “Chinese painting” — indeed, to define the very limits of that category by failing to fall within their ambit. We have to accept, therefore, the complex and fundamentally “impure” nature of the world of painting in China at this period. This is what dooms the otherwise heroic attempt of the modern scholar (and himself a distinguished 136

painter) Wan Qingli (b. 1945) to rescue the work of the nineteenth century from the misprision in which it has long been held, in a book published in 2005 that he defiantly titled “Not a Century of Decline: A History of Nineteenth-­ Century Chinese Painting” (Bing fei shuailuo de bainian: Shijiu shiji Zhongguo huihua shi). The aims are laudable, especially in its attempted breadth of coverage (including graphics, export painting, and oil painting), but the project is essentially doomed to fail, or rather to fail to achieve its own aims, stated in the author’s credo with these words: I believe that in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese painting, one must grasp the following two principles: 1  –  one must treat the history of Chinese painting, and evaluate Chinese painters, from Chinese (and not Western), and from internal (and not external) criteria. This principle is to be used not only in the history of Chinese painting prior to the nineteenth century, but is also to be used in the history of twentieth-­century Chinese painting, which has received Western influence to a considerable degree, and used not only in the case of those painters who received no Western influence but independently developed Chinese painting, but also in the case of those who did receive Western influence or completely pursued Western art.40

The issue is that, while a history of Chinese painting in the nineteenth century cannot be seen as something that has entirely autochthonous roots, this is precisely what makes it vital and worthy of as much attention as any other era. The very desire to rescue “the nineteenth century” deploys at the outset a criterion (in the sense of a chronological framework) that is in some sense “external.” But we also need to recognize that this “impurity” is not just a novelty, dependent on the early-­nineteenth-­century age of global trade and incipient imperialism. Trade has always acted to make impossible the purity of painting, in China as much as anywhere else, and this is true even if we go right back to the Song dynasty, almost a thousand years ago, when what we might think of as a quintessentially Chinese format of painting, the folding fan, arrived as an innovation from Korea and Japan, and when “Japanese fans” and “Korean painted fans” are mentioned as fashionable novelties in Song poetry.41 Although not a single example survives today, we know that in the late Ming period, the era of Dong Qichang himself, there was a thriving trade in folding screens (as well as more fans) imported from Japan.42 And so right from the sixteenth century, the period when the notion of “Chinese painting” first formed in the minds of foreign viewers, what they were looking at was not a pure and uncontaminated essence, but a complex form that had long been in contact with other forms of picturing. We might choose to identify some sort of crucial turning or break point in the appearance of certain conventions of picturing we call Western, whether it be in the courtly appropriation of the work of Giuseppe Castiglione (fig. 4.30) or in the hong merchant patronage of a portraitist like Lamqua (fig. 4.31). We might choose to notice the ways in which images based on different formal conventions appear as co-­presences and relate 138

to one another. For example, we might notice how there are images using the conventions of elite high-­status painting embedded inside the perspective tongjinghua (see fig. 3.28), and notice too how the same is also true of the kinds of watercolors that were painted in China and taken from there by foreign customers (fig. 4.32); in the example shown, the bamboo painting to the extreme left is in a totally different mode from the main image that surrounds it.43 Inside Lamqua’s swagger portrait of the hong merchant “Mouqua,” the calligraphic inscription in the background (fig. 4.31) is depicted as properly formed, legible characters of Chinese script (possibly an added confirmation that this was produced for the Chinese sitter), different from the “Chinese”-­seeming squiggles that his predecessor Chinnery would have used in just such a context. However, the reverse is not true — that is to say, it is impossible to imagine a hanging scroll or a hand scroll that has embedded within it an image done in an imported style, although, as we have seen, there had long been no obstacle to at least one or even more nested images in the same style. For example, we could not imagine a group of eighteenth-­century gentlemen shown looking at a meticulously delineated imported European print, given that it was by now impossible any longer to show even the painting done in the same manner as its framing painting (see fig. 4.20). Within China itself, it is as if difference is being recognized and expressed pictorially, and in large quantities, at a time when the concept of “Chinese painting” had a presence as yet only in the discourse of foreign viewers, and when the concept of yang hua — “oceanic” or more the merch a nt

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4.30.  Giuseppe Castiglione/ Lang Shining (1688 – 1766) and assistants, The Qianlong Emperor on Horseback, 1739 or 1758. Ink and color on silk, 322.5 × 232 cm. The Palace Museum.

broadly “foreign” painting — had only a tentative existence, as in the two poems by Luo Pin’s friend, the late-­eighteenth-­century writer and calligrapher Weng Fanggang, which he entitled Yang hua ge, “Songs on Foreign Painting.”44 The pictures Weng Fanggang identified as “foreign” may well have been Japanese, and it remains extremely important to realize that the eventual triumph of “Chinese painting” as a construct designed to limit and contain the range of picture production in China owes much more to the long relationship between Chinese and Japanese visual cultures than it does to some putative “impact of the West.” Here commerce was absolutely central. It was, for example, commerce that took large quantities of Chinese painting to Japan in the eighteenth century, where it found an avid market.45 A market existed there too for expertise on the subject, seen in someone like Sakaki Hyakusen (1697 – 1752), whose family owned a Chinese medicine shop in Nagoya and who certainly traded on being (and may actually have been) of Chinese descent. After working as a professional painter for a number of years, he published in Kyoto in 1751 a book on Chinese painting entitled Study of Painters of the Yuan and Ming (Gen Min gajinkō), expanded in 1777 with an extension to the then-­ruling Qing, as Record of Calligraphers and Painters of the Yuan, Ming and Qing (Gen Min Shin shoga jinmeiroku). We should note the continued use here of dynastic names, Yuan and Ming, rather than any of the modern Japanese terms that come to mean “China”; this is still seen as a shared cultural sphere. The earlier work’s brief notices of 305 Yuan and no fewer than 1,328 Ming artists might have looked like an impressive piece of research, until James Cahill pointed out some twenty years ago that the whole thing is cribbed from one of the Qing imperial texts on the art of painting, the Pei wen zhai shu hua pu, published in 1708, which it abbreviates.46 Sakaki Hyakusen could perhaps be added to the long list of observers outside China who knew what the merch a nt

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4.31. Lamqua (active 1825 –  1860), Mouqua, c. 1845. Oil on canvas, frame dimensions 76.2 × 66.04 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Gift of Mr. Harry T. Peters, Jr., 1975. 4.32. Anonymous, Interior Scene, c. 1820 – 1840. Watercolor on paper, 43.5 × 54.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London d.35-­1903.

“Chinese painting” was all about without having seen very much of it at all, a lack he shared with his contemporaries, for whom familiarity with genuine Chinese painting of the Yuan and Ming was in almost inverse proportion to their passion for it. For example, there is no evidence for a single genuine Dong Qichang in Japan in the entire Edo period (1603 – 1868).47 However, it was, above all, the work of such elite literati artists, the theoretical underpinnings of which were familiar to the world of painting in Japan, which seemed to Japanese as well as to Korean collectors like the defining and central works of the Chinese tradition.48 Some professional Chinese painters, as well as merchants who found that skill in painting was well received by Japanese business associates, were able to make their way to Japan in the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early-­nineteenth centuries.49 And there is evidence that the traffic was not all one way. For example, a history of the painting of the eighteenth and early-­ nineteenth centuries by the father and son team of Jiang Baoling and Jiang Zhisheng, the Critique on the Present Forest of Ink (Mo lin jin hua), published in 1852, already includes biographies of a small number of Japanese artists living and working in that country, still at that point technically “closed” to the outside world, and certainly before the first painters from Japan were able to make their way to Shanghai.50 Another disconcerting synchronism that tends to dissolve the fixity of Chinese painting might be a juxtaposition of the work that the Cantonese oil painter Guan Qiaochang showed at the Royal Academy in 1841 (except that it cannot now be identified) with a scroll of Contemplation Among Pines, dated 1843 (fig. 4.33), painted in Japan by the Chinese merchant Chen Yizhou (c. 1800 – after 1850). Although very different in style, they share the feature that they were destined to be viewed outside China, and in a sense therefore were destined to play a role — positively or negatively — in defining what “Chinese painting” was, even if in the end neither was to find a permanent place within that categorization, and neither “Lamqua” nor “Chin Isshū” were to be remembered as “Chinese painters.” But what was and was not perceived as Chinese was to play a major role in Japan in defining what was and was not indigenous, native, truly Japanese. By the seventeenth century, the new term of kanga (literally “Han painting”) had replaced the earlier kara-­e (“Tang painting”) in Japanese usage, just as the term waga had replaced yamato-­e, and an extensive body of theorizing around the differences had come into being.51 By the end of the eighteenth century at the latest, these differences had taken a visual form, often involving allusion to a story that describes how the great Tang dynasty Chinese poet Bai Juyi (772 – 846) had been sent over the seas by China’s emperor to test the native’s skill at poetry, and had been bested by none other than the god of Sumiyoshi disguised as a fisherman. Based on a Nō play named after its central character, Haku Rakuten, by Zeami (1363 – 1443), it had become part of the “national myth,” painted by artists like Ogata Kōrin (1658 – 1716) and reproduced in the “floating world” print culture of Edo-­period Japan. As Timon Screech has shown, the theme of poetic competition was by the second half of the eighteenth century applied to competition between painting styles, and a print by Suzuki Harunobu (1724 – 1770) 142

shows the encounter, the deity appearing here as a beautiful woman (fig. 4.34). The “Chinese picture” that Bai Juyi holds up is an ink painting of an orchid in nanga (literally “Southern painting” — that is, Chinese literati) manner, while the woman who stands for Japan holds up a pillar print of the famous teahouse waitress Osen, by Harunobu himself. Screech has noted: Nanga and ukiyo-­e have different epistemologies. Each in its own terms can give rise to excellent works of art, just as Haku Rakuten and Sumi­ yoshi Myōjin can both produce exemplary poems. The two are, however, incompatible.52

However, they are not so incompatible that they cannot both be reproduced as here in the same pictorial space, although with the important proviso that while both forms of picture are visible to the Japanese audience, in whose position we as viewers stand, the “Japanese” picture is invisible to the baffled Chinese visitor, being turned away from him and out toward us. This might stand for the bold claim that all forms of picturing are in some degree visible the merch a nt

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4.33.  Chen Yizhou/Chin Isshu (about 1800 – after 1850), Contemplation Among Pines, 1843. Hanging scroll; ink on silk, 69.53 × 29.69 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Ruth and Bruce Dayton 98.18.19.

to themselves — in the Edo Japanese context this would have to mean not just “Chinese” and “Japanese” styles but “Dutch” (ranga — that is, European) painting too. It is a claim which echoes that made in sixteenth-­century Isfahan when Dust Muhammad first set bounds to his own tradition by binding it together with that of “the Chinese” and “the Franks,” and it reminds us that, if it can be asserted that “Chinese painting” has perhaps never been “pure,” this is a quality it shares with every other form of artistic or creative practice. The kinds of trading relationship between China and Japan, or between China and Europe — which find their pictorial analog in the Harunobu print (fig. 4.34), or the image of a Chinese artist at work on a landscape canvas (see fig. 4.26), or the continued vitality of the kinki shoga theme in Japanese painting long after it had ceased to be of such interest in China (fig. 4.35) — were greatly intensified as the nineteenth century progressed, and as new sites for the production of painting within China came to dominate over older centers. Chief among these was Shanghai, where the close connection between artists and the commercial world of publishing also reached a new level of intensity.53 The commercial vitality of a city like Suzhou had been pictured in new forms in the eighteenth century, in the form of a distinctive school of colored woodblock printmaking, in which the bustlingly commercial urban scene was portrayed in the form of images that had the potential to reach a much wider audience than had been able to view the cityscape paintings to which these prints were clearly related (fig. 4.36).54 The nineteenth century in China saw

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4.34.  Suzuki Harunobu (1725 –  1770), Parody of the Nō Play Hakurakuten, Edo period, about 1769 – 1770. Color woodblock print (nishiki-­e), 26.6 ×  20.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Worcester Art Museum exchange, made possible through the Special Korean Pottery Fund, Museum purchase with funds donated by contribution, and Smith­ sonian Institution — Chinese Expedition, 1923 – 24, 54.350. 4.35.  Ikeda Koson (1801 – 1866), Literary Gathering. Ink and color on silk, 169 × 85.5 cm. John C. Weber Collection. Provenance: Helmut Brinker. 4.36. Anonymous, Changmen Gate, Suzhou, 1734. Color woodblock print, 108.6 × 56 cm. Umi-­Mori Art Museum.

4.37.  Wu Changshuo (1844 –  1927), Peonies in a Bronze Vessel, 1903. Ink and color on paper, 133 × 66 cm. Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archae­ ology, University of Oxford, ea2007.103. 4.38.  See-­Tay (Liang Shitai, active 1870s – 1880s), Seventh Prince feeding deer, c. 1888. Photograph. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division lot 9969-­g.

the introduction of a whole range of new technologies of reproduction and multiplication of images, including that of composite rubbing, which rendered the three dimensions of bronze vessels in two dimensions with a veracity that had not been achieved before (fig. 4.37), but also including the imported technique of photography (fig.  4.38).55 It has been argued that one of the most powerful self-­portrait images of the mid-­nineteenth century, that of the painter Ren Xiong (1823 – 1857), demonstrates an exposure to the photographic image (fig. 4.39).56 Certainly as early as 1859, Wang Tao (1828 – 1897) writes about seeing photographs by Luo Yuanyou: Luo Yuanyou, a Cantonese painter, served as an accountant for the previous governor Wu Jianzhang [of Shanghai] before. Now he has learned the Western method of painting from Westerners, and the price of a print is not so expensive. The resulting image is so realistic; even each hair of the eyebrow is clearly shown. His technique is far better than that of the Frenchman Li Gelang [Denis Louis Legrand, b. 1820].57

4.39.  Ren Xiong (1823 – 1857), Self-­Portrait, 1850s. Ink and color on paper, 177 × 79 cm. The Palace Museum.

Note how photography is described here as “the Western method of painting” (xifahua), seen not as something opposite to painting but merely as a local variety of it, just as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877) saw himself as deploying “the pencil of nature,” valuable in the preparation of preparatory drafts for later paintings. The first identified advertisements for photographic studios in China date from 1872, by which time it was firmly established in 146

somewhere like Shanghai, and indeed reaching deeper into the Qing empire. From the 1870s, the collector Chen Jieqi (1813 – 1884) was enthusiastically recommending photography as a way of recording vessels, and at the same time endorsing its possibilities in sustaining the practice of painting, rather than bringing about its death. In a letter dated 1875 to the scholar and collector of bronzes Wu Dacheng (1835 – 1902), he writes: I have a cousin named Tan Yufan, who once worked for Pan Wei, from whom he learned western photography. Because it yields likenesses that are not particularly elegant, I did not initially use this technology. Later, I saw his photographs of mountains and rivers, trees and plants, all with the appearance of the method of painting frontal images. This technique is also good for making drafts of paintings . . . 58

By 1876 the adoption of the cheaper technique of lithography made possible the more accurate reproduction of paintings and what has been described as the incorporation of “illustration into China’s emerging mass culture,” coexist­ ing with the older technology of woodblock printing; this illustration often had Japanese connections.59 This mass culture is the backdrop against which painters operated in Shanghai, where it has been calculated by Jonathan Hay that in the two decades between about 1875 and 1895 over thirty “painting albums” — hua pu — were published, some “thousands of images by more than ninety contemporary artists.”60 Some of these were reprints of earlier work, as, for example, the illustrations to the novel Dream of the Red Chamber, created by Gai Qi in the early nineteenth century but only published in 1879 (see fig. 2.56). But many more were used as ways of disseminating the work of contemporary artists (fig. 4.40), all of whom now worked in a commercial context where, however scrupulously the conventions that a major painter was not a paid artisan were observed, everyone knew that fame, skill, and money were linked in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways. Two pictures of different kinds from the same year of 1884 make some of these issues of expanded mass spectatorship visible to us. The first (fig. 4.41) comes from an 1884 guidebook, Famous Shanghai Sights, with Illustrations and Explanations, an introduction to the splendors of Shanghai, prominent among which are its shopping opportunities. It depicts two Japanese customers in an antiques shop, examining a large hanging scroll that is sketchily depicted but still identifiable as a landscape, and probably one in the “orthodox” manner that, as executed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by artists like the “Four Wang,” had enjoyed great prestige in China and had been avidly consumed in Japan (see fig. 5.18). It is a safe choice, exactly what Japanese customers might be expected to go for. Following the first official Japanese delegation to Shanghai in 1862, a number of artists had made the trip, although the first painters to do so were not, as might be expected, those in the Chinese-­derived nanga manner but those who practiced oil painting after the Western manner. 61 But they were soon followed by nanga painters and indeed tourists of the type we see pictured here; for Chinese visitors, the cosmopolitan crowd was at least as much an attraction of Shanghai as was its 148

increasingly central place in the art market of the empire, while for Japanese visitors the chance to acquire the still-­prestigious cultural products of continental civilization was a powerful draw. The first shop selling Japanese ceramics and lacquer opened in Shanghai in 1868, and by 1885 the Japanese population of the city was around a thousand, rising by 1903 to 3,631 (as against 3,713 British subjects); by 1911, the 5,714 Japanese were the largest single resident group of foreigners.62 This printed image, which might be the first image of non-­Chinese viewing subjects looking at “a Chinese painting,” was created in the same year as a remarkable painting that, it could be argued, is also a meta-­painting in that it has as its principal subject issues of viewing, though it manifests them in very different ways from some of the earlier examples discussed above. This is Three Friends (fig. 4.42) by Ren Yi, also known as Ren Bonian (1840 – 1895), and similarly dated 1884.63 The close interconnection between Ren and artistic circles in Japan has been studied by a number of scholars, and the ways in which he seized the opportunities afforded not only by the presence of Japanese people but of Japanese printed and painted images remain an intriguing subject.64 In the same year of 1884, adverts in the Shanghai newspapers were offering Japanese gafu (“painting albums”) — in fact, printed collections of images for sale — a practice that can be traced back at least to 1881.65 Ren Bonian was certainly prepared to engage with the possibilities of cosmopolitan techniques of visual image production himself, publishing a “painting album,” or hua pu, the merch a nt

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4.40.  Ren Bonian (1840 –  1896), Cat, from Dianshizhai Collected Paintings (Dianshi­ zhai conghua), 1885, juan 6, p. 21. Lithograph. 4.41.  Japanese Customers Inspecting a Painting, from the guidebook Famous Shanghai Sites, with Illus­ trations and Explanations, 1884. Woodblock print.

4.42.  Ren Bonian (1840 –  1895), Three Friends, 1884. Ink and color on paper, 63.5 × 36.1 cm. The Palace Museum.

of his collected works in 1887.66 It has even been suggested that Ren Bonian picked up the habit of carrying a pencil for sketching from a friend named Liu Dezhai (1843 – 1912), who was an instructor at the French Catholic art college of Tushanwan in Shanghai.67 By 1884, he was one of the most successful artists in Shanghai, the first mention of him having appeared in a poem in the newspaper Shenbao in 1873; by 1876, he was mentioned in guidebooks to the city as one of its cultural stars.68 He was closely associated with Dianshizhai, the publishing house founded by the British entrepreneur Ernest Major (1841 – 1908) in 1878 as the first lithographic printer in Shanghai (it was the publisher of the 1884 guidebook illustration shown in figure 4.41), and by the end of the 1870s, Ren Bonian was the major seller among their lithographic reproductions of works by famous living artists. Three Friends shows the artist seated on the left; next to him is a man named Zeng Fengji, about whom we know very little (Roberta Wue suggests he may have been a fellow artist). We know a bit more about the third figure, seated on the right (though not his dates), for he is Zhu Jintang, proprietor of the Jiuhuatang fan shop, one of the leading outlets for contemporary art. He is the artist’s dealer. One wonders if perhaps the shadowy presence of Zeng between them (he turns his head and meets our gaze more obliquely) acts to reduce the starkness of the implications of showing just the two of them, the producer of the goods and the merchant of those same goods, alone. Behind the three figures, and towering over them the way a pine tree in an earlier painting might dominate the scholars gathered under it, is a mass of paintings, at least eleven large hanging scrolls upright in a porcelain tub, two more hanging scrolls on the table, and a bundle of hand scrolls, as well as piles of albums. It is as if we are being shown the profusion, the sheer quantity, of paintings that the city now demands, and that everyone knows are commodities, goods for sale and circulation. In his discussion of this work, Richard Vinograd has argued that the inscription shows “rather fawning pleasure at being invited to join his subjects,” and that both painter and image are now “among the piles of paintings owned by his host . . . an object on display. . . .”69 But in the specific context of the Shanghai art market, it seems possible that this is a painting that can be alternatively read as being about determinedly refusing to look at painting, or at least about not being pictured looking at painting, not in fact looking like a customer (see fig. 4.6). The painting of looking at painting, like the very idea that painting is constituted chiefly by the act of disinterested looking, is by this date no longer sustainable. The painting seems to say that the aura of the disinterested gentlemanly connoisseur can no longer be sustained in the modern world; the magic will not work anymore, it will not hold up. Two years after painting Three Friends, in 1886 Ren Bonian adopted the soubriquet huanu, “painting slave” or “slave painter,” as if to acknowledge the extent to which he was the bond servant of an insatiable master, the marketplace.70 Certainly there are no paintings of looking at paintings in the output of Ren Bonian himself, and they become much rarer in the work of his contemporaries also, as perhaps too liable to that misinterpretation that we are watching people shopping. Instead of the figure of the viewer, we begin to see the rise of images of the 150

artist at work. We see them first not at the core of painting but at its margins, in images like those of export painters at work in Canton (fig. 4.43) or the famous image by the Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837 – 1921) of a Hong Kong oil painter at work (fig. 4.44), in images that are dominated too by issues of sale and of reproduction.71 As Yu-­chih Lai has shown, Ren Bonian, a man whose own political position can be described as proto-­nationalist and strongly anti-­foreign, was through the 1880s producing painting in which a pervasive theme was that of borders and edges (fig. 4.45), the borders between states and between cultures and cultural practices. She shows how they draw on “. . . a collective ambivalence consisting, on the one hand, of the pursuit of pleasure without regard to any boundaries and, on the other, of a contradictory, nationalistic sentiment distinguished by its assertion of boundaries.”72 That ambivalence was bound to be sharpened in Shanghai, a “zone of contact” where new kinds of painting could be viewed in new kinds of contexts by new kinds of subjects, and where the issue of exactly what constituted “Chinese painting” was made more pressing by the presence of alternative voices. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the clamor of those alternative voices would reach a new level, and the debate about how to respond to them would become correspondingly intense.

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4.43.  Tingqua workshop (fl. 1840 – 1870), The Studio of Tingqua. Gouache on paper, 18 × 27 cm. Martyn Gregory Gallery, London. 4.44. John Thomson (1837 –  1921), Chinese Artist, Hong Kong, 1868. Photograph, from Illustrations of China and Its People (London, 1873 –  1874). Library of Congress. 4.45.  Ren Bonian (1840 – 1895), Su Wu Tending Sheep. Ink and color on paper, 31.5 × 36 cm. The Palace Museum.

chapter five

the nation

In June 1885, the Qing empire signed a peace treaty with France, bringing to an end the humiliating Sino-­French War of 1883 – 1885 that had so disturbed the patriot painter Ren Bonian, whose self-­portrait of the previous year (see fig. 4.42) shows little of the patriotic anger he is known to have felt at this latest proof of dynastic failure. In November of the same year, the imperial Grand Council was ordered by the ruling Empress ­Dowager to select subjects for a massive series of battle paintings (fig. 5.1) that would present the triumphs in arms of the dynasty over its internal enemies.1 It is almost impossible not to see these two events as closely connected, an attempt to present visually, if only to itself, the image of a martial prowess that in reality was slipping away under the twin assaults of domestic rebellion and foreign imperialism. Scattered across the Beijing palace archives and a number of collections outside China today, there remain full-­size cartoons for what was, in all, an impressively large commission of sixty-­seven paintings, huge works on a scale that matched those of the eighteenth-­century high Qing, with each painting well over a meter high and three meters across. Twenty of these battle pictures commemorate victories over the messianic pseudo-­Christian rebellion of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, complete by 1864 (fig. 5.1), while almost as many deal with the contemporaneous so-­called Nian Rebellion in north China. Smaller numbers commemorate triumph over the Muslim rebels of the southwest and northwest of the empire.2 The impresario of the project was a court painter by the name of Qingkuan 155

Detail of figure 5.30

(1848 – 1927), a bannerman (or hereditary soldier) of the Plain Yellow Chinese Banner, and a man who from the 1880s played a key role in all the artistic projects of the dynasty. This one was complete by 1890, and the sequence of paintings was hung in the Purple Effulgence Pavilion (Zi guang ge), where Qianlong’s earlier victories had also been shown; indeed the eighteenth-­century battle paintings, together with the images of the loyal Qing generals who had fought in them (which had been executed between 1755 and the early 1760s), were removed in order to display these, only for them to be dispersed some ten years later when foreign forces occupied the Forbidden City during the Boxer Rebellion.3 Imperial victories, commemorated by imperial painters in imperial workshops, producing works viewed in imperial palaces only by the members of imperial courts — this is a pattern that is very familiar from the height of Qing power in the previous two centuries. But it has to be remembered that the restricted audience of court viewing of painting had always existed in a state of interaction with the world of the commercial artist, as when Xu Yang moved from his native Suzhou to pictorialize the Southern Tours of the Qianlong emperor (see fig. 4.2). So in the nineteenth century, the images viewed at court and the images viewed by a wider public, who obtained access to them through a market in pictures, were not as separate as the symbolics of high red imperial palace walls might lead us at first to believe. Although the exact nature of the connection is murky, it is clear that there is a relationship between the imperial set of victory paintings and prints of these same victories, produced through the new technique of photolithography by the Shanghai-­based and foreign-­owned Dianshizhai Printing Company (fig. 5.2). The artist of these images was one of the stars of the commercial Shanghai art world, Wu Youru (c. 1840 – 1893), who was known to have been commissioned by Zeng Guoquan (1824 – 1890), one of the victorious commanders of the Taiping wars.4 In the late nineteenth century, therefore, we can see that, as contexts for the viewing of painting, the world of 156

the imperial court (with its growing hardening of ethnic boundaries between Manchu and Han Chinese) and the cosmopolitan world of the treaty ports such as Shanghai (where boundaries were excitingly and disturbingly fluid) were not separated by some absolute boundary, but rather were linked together in certain ways in a single field of painting. The kinds of viewing to which that painting could be subject were, however, increasingly unstable and contested, and positioned within the traumas that brought the ethnic and dynastic Qing imperial hegemony to an end and the new nation-state of the Chinese Republic into being. That sort of trauma is vividly brought home by a painting that passed through the Beijing art market in 2010 (fig. 5.3).5 Dated 1346, it is signed by the Yuan dynasty artist Wang Meng (c. 1308 – 1385), and carries several collection seals of the Qianlong emperor, who also owned all eleven of the scrolls by this same artist now in museums in Beijing, Taipei, Shanghai, and Shenyang. It is therefore almost certainly a work recorded in the imperial catalogs as Listening to the Spring in a Deep Valley. One of the seals shows that the painting was at some point in the Chunhua xuan, a main palace in the Changchun yuan to the east of the Yuanming yuan complex, built in 1749 in European style. This is one of the buildings whose occupation on October 6, 1860, by French and British troops soon led to its looted treasures being hawked openly on the streets of Beijing. Its burning on October 18 – 19, 1860, was part of the infamous “sack of the Summer Palace,” denounced at the time by European intellectuals such as

the nation

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5.1.  Qingkuan (1848 – 1927) and assistants, Battle Scene from the Taiping Rebellion, 1886 –  1890. Ink and color on silk, 135.9 × 307.3 cm. On loan to the University of Alberta Art Collection, University of Alberta Museums, from the Collection of Sandy and Cécile Mactaggart, l2004-­19-­1. 5.2.  Wu Youru (c. 1840 – 1894), Regaining the Prefectural City Ruizhou, from a set of prints, Victory over the Taiping, 1888 – 1889. Lithograph. SOAS Library, London.

5.3.  Wang Meng (c. 1308 – 1385), Listening to the Spring in a Deep Valley, 1346. Ink on paper, 129 × 51 cm. Private collection.

Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), and still the event that more than any other persists as a lieu de mémoire in the Chinese national archive of humiliations never to be repeated.6 At the top center of Listening to the Spring in a Deep Valley, a work that ironically was painted while the artist was in hiding from the horrors of a much earlier war, is the mark of a boot, while an inscription at the lower left records the repair of the picture — the replacement of a section that had presumably been torn off, by the painter Li Jishou (1815 – 1896) in 1872. At the bottom right, and on the replacement, are two square seals, one of which bears the studio name of Zhuang Yusong, a Qing official who died in 1863. It seems likely therefore that the picture was damaged in the process of the looting but nevertheless found its way onto the Beijing art market, where its value as a work by one of the most highly regarded masters of the Yuan dynasty would have made it of considerable value to connoisseurs.7 To the foreign troops, who concentrated on carrying back to Europe for themselves and their rulers booty in the valued forms of porcelain, jades, and silks, this work on paper must have seemed of little immediate value. We might therefore take this as standing for the fact that in 1860 a masterpiece of Yuan painting like this one remained invisible to European viewers. They could come to see it literally (through military penetration of the imperial precincts in which it was stored), but they could not see it culturally; it could not be present to them as “painting,” even as “Chinese painting.” No significant paintings from the imperial collections found their way to Europe or America as an immediate aftermath of the looting of the Summer Palace. By the time another significant episode of Western viewing of Chinese painting of the highest quality took place, in the foreign occupation of the imperial palace in 1900 – 1901 during the course of the so-­called Boxer Rebellion, this situation had changed considerably. Not only did the image of the Qianlong emperor viewing central Asian tribute horses (see fig. 3.9) come into the possession of Henri Nicolas Frey (1847 – 1932), commander of the French occupying troops (from whom it came to the Musée Guimet in 1925), and hence leave China at that point, but equally dislodged from its imperial context was a work that had been more wholly and firmly within the canon of painting in China for many centuries. This is the celebrated Admo­nitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (fig. 5.4) attributed to Gu Kaizhi, which was taken from the palace collections in 1900, to find its way to the British Museum, who bought it for £25 from Captain C. A. K. Johnson of the First Bengal Lancers in 1903.8 By 1904, when the curator-­poet Laurence Binyon (1869 – 1943) published the work in The Burlington Magazine as “a Chinese painting of the fourth century,” the category of “Chinese painting” had become perfectly visible to an audience outside China, only forty years after some uncomprehending and unseeing boot had come down on the surface of Wang Meng’s hanging scroll.9 If it was the progress of Western imperialism that brought a work like the Admonitions (fig. 5.4) scroll before the eyes of a museum-­going audience in London, it was the parallel progress of Japan toward a modern nation-­ statehood (a status that granted it a place in the “punitive expedition” on which the painting was abducted from the Qing imperial palace) that was crucial to 158

its interpretation there. It is necessary at this point to take the account back to 1886, when the surgeon William Anderson (1842 – 1900) had already melded these two East Asian centers together in publishing the Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum, containing the works (fig.  5.5) he had acquired in Japan (he never visited China itself) during his tenure there as the chair of anatomy and surgery at the Imperial Naval Medical College.10 In the same year, Anderson published The Pictorial Arts of Japan: With a Brief Sketch of the Associated Arts, and Some Remarks upon the Pictorial Arts of the Chinese and Koreans, a work in which the painting of China was presented to an audience in the English-­speaking world as inflected to a considerable degree through Japanese collecting practices, and in which the two East Asian traditions were compared to China’s detriment, in dismissive statements like “With the Ming dynasty commenced the decadence of Chinese pictorial art.”11 Decline is, however, not seen by Anderson as irreversible, he concludes: Such a contrast, however, cannot last. The Chinese, once mighty in intellect and inventive power, still gigantic in numbers and resources, are beginning to awaken, and they will soon discover that they can better employ the edifice erected by their forefathers than by sleeping beneath it.12

Central to the formation of global understandings of “Japanese art,” “Chinese art,” and their crucial underpinning concept of “Asian art” was a contemporary of Anderson’s in the cadre of foreign professional experts hired by the Meiji regime in Japan to kick-­start a transformation in higher education and culture. This was Ernest Fenollosa (1853 – 1908), the charismatic, Harvard-­educated son of a Spanish father and American mother, who taught at Tokyo’s Imperial University from 1878 to 1886 and subsequently advised the Japanese government on

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the creation of museums and the protection of what was now seen as “national heritage.”13 Following Fenollosa’s return in 1890 to the United States, where he became the key figure in the construction of several important institutional and private collections of Chinese and Japanese art, his friend and disciple Okakura Kakuzō (also known as Okakura Tenshin, 1862 – 1913) began to lecture at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (an institution in whose founding Fenollosa himself had been central) on aesthetics and the history of art.14 The modern Japanese scholar Satō Dōshin stresses the dependence of Okakura on the American Fenollosa, whose Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art was published posthumously only in 1912, although the work was essentially complete and the ideas in it fully formed before he left Japan in 1890. Satō therefore sees the American Fenollosa as the real founder of the “history of Japanese art” and the “history of Asian art.”15 But he also points to the historical contingency surrounding the moment of these ideas’ formation: The fact that the history of Asian art came to be constructed at this point in time means that the history of Asian art in Japan was formed exactly when China lost its role as Asia’s cohesive power because of the western powers’ advances.16

One curious effect of this, and a mark of the degree to which Japanese readings were dominant on a much more than local scale, is the general practice of describing Chinese artists by the Japanese readings of their names, as Fenollosa the nation

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5.4.  Traditionally attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344 – c. 406), Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (detail). The British Museum, London, 1903,0408,0.1. 5.5. Anonymous, Boy Riding a Goat, traditional attribution to Han Gan (c. 706 – 783), but Ming dynasty. Ink and color on silk, 65.4 × 42.5 cm. The British Museum, London, 1881,1210,0.8.ch.

did pervasively in his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. So when Bernard Berenson (introduced, it might be remembered, to Chinese and Japanese art through Fenollosa’s agency) opined in a typical obiter dictum that Botticelli’s “real place as a draughtsman” was with “the great Chinese and Japanese, with Ririomin, Harunobu, and Hokusai,” the first figure he names is, in fact, the Chinese Song dynasty painter Li Longmian (or Li Gonglin, 1049 – 1106), a practice rather like referring to Rembrandt as “Lunbulante” (the pinyin rendering of the Chinese characters used for the Dutch artist’s name).17 Japanese interlocutors were as important as the writings of Fenollosa in the British understanding of both the broader (and as yet inchoate) category of “Chinese painting” and the interpretation of individual objects like the Gu Kaizhi Admonitions scroll. It has been accurately pointed out that: From his encounter with Japanese woodblock prints to his contacts with Japanese scholars, Binyon’s conception of Chinese painting was persistently influenced by Japanese expertise and the writings on Oriental art by collectors, scholars and sinologists from Japan and Europe.18

Prior to the purchase of the Admonitions scroll, the Japanese dealer Kohitsu Ryōnin (1875 – 1933), scion of a family of art experts with a pedigree stretching back into the Edo period, came to London in the spring of 1902, and in that year worked together with Laurence Binyon on a revision of Anderson’s 1886 catalog. In the introduction to his 1908 survey Painting of the Far East, Binyon called him an “invaluable helper,” pointing to the ways in which “East” and “West” were mutually involved in the joint production of understandings of their difference at this period.19 Shimomura Kanzan (1873 – 1930), a protégé of Okakura Kakuzō, was in London from February 1903 to April 1905, and there met Binyon, who asked him to repair the very recently acquired Gu Kaizhi Admonitions.20 Various other Japanese luminaries were consulted by Binyon about the Admonitions and the vexed question of its date and authenticity.21 Of particular significance to him was Okakura’s manifesto of 1903 entitled The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Arts of Japan, with its bold opening assertion that “Asia is One.” What Europeans and Americans were coming to call “East Asia” from now on was often rendered in Japanese by the new term Tōyō, literally “Eastern Ocean,” as in the fifteen-­volume Tōyō bijutsu taikan, Survey of East Asian Art, published between 1908 and 1919 — three neologisms in a row to make the point that while this might be old stuff, it was being configured in a new way.22 By the time Laurence Binyon first published the Admonitions scroll in 1904, therefore, the project to “historicize ‘Asian art’ from the viewpoint of Japanese nationalism” had reached a new level of intensity, and that very Japanese nationalism would come to provide one of the most stringent and dangerous of audiences for Chinese painting, and play a crucial role in the co-­production of both “Chinese painting” (Zhongguo hua) and later “national painting” ( guohua).23 In the work of the great Japanese nationalist Sinologue Naitō Konan (1866 – 1934), particularly his lectures delivered at Kyoto Imperial University in 1922 and 1923, earlier Japanese Meiji-­period misprision of “literati painting” 162

was replaced by a valuation of newly imported Yuan and Ming dynasty works. But that valuation was intrinsically linked to a view of China as marked by past cultural achievements, with the center of Eastern culture now having moved decisively to Japan.24 The availability of new terminology like “East Asia” and “art” is central to the building of a world picture by scholars like Naitō Konan in the early twentieth century. But it was not just Asian languages that were in flux in the years separating Fenollosa’s return to the United States from the consolidation of Zhongguo hua/“Chinese painting,” something that was in place by the 1920s at the latest. The term “pictorial art,” rather than simply “painting,” was the preferred one for much Western scholarship at this time; as well as appearing in the title of Anderson’s pioneering 1886 survey, it is used, for example, as the title of the relevant chapter in Stephen Bushell’s Chinese Art of 1904 (the first work in English to carry this title), in Herbert Giles, An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art (London, 1905), and in E. A. Strehlneek, Chinese Pictorial Art (Shanghai, 1914). As late as 1917, it is the preferred form for what is the earliest historiographic survey of Chinese literature on painting, Friedrich Hirth’s Native Sources for the History of Chinese Pictorial Art.25 Slippages between “painting,” “pictorial art,” and simply “art” are significant here. There has been a degree of attention to the development of the idea of “art” in those Asian languages, which did not possess such an all-­embracing term prior to the late-­nineteenth or early-­twentieth century, and to the ways in which the term that ended up in the Chinese lexicon (where it serves as one of the two main modern words with the dictionary definition of “art”) as meishu was a loan from the Japanese neologism bijutsu, in turn taken from the German schöne kunst, after the French beaux arts.26 But as well as these new coinages, older terms like Chinese hua and Japanese ga remained in play, even if they took on new semantic weightings in new contexts. In Japan particularly, the character read as ga came loose from the older pairing of shōga, “calligraphy and painting,” to form part of another neologism, kaiga, first attested in 1882 and meaning something like “painting as an art” or, at the very least, “painting in an expanded field”: If one looks at the actual situation empirically it seems hard to dispute that the usage of the word ga widened beginning in the Meiji period. But just as the semantic and artistic attributes associated with ga had existed long before the Meiji period, the societal attribute — or equivalently, its “public” nature — had also been in place since before the Meiji period.27

It would be possible to say the same thing for the Chinese context. In terms of the titles of Japanese publications, it is an observable fact that those using the term Shina bijutsu, “Chinese art” (using a Japanese term, Shina, seen in China itself from an early date as derogatory and imperialistic) actually precede those that discuss “Chinese painting” (usually in the locution meiga/minghua, or “famous paintings”), such as Comments on China’s Famous Paintings through History (Shina rekidai meiga ronpyō) of 1900 or Masterworks of Chinese Painting (Shina meigashū) of 1907.28 Hua, “painting,” is therefore a term that might the nation

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have been shifting its meaning at this point in history, but was doing so not on the basis of introducing something utterly new, rather of working with accumulated centuries of objects, practices, and statements, all of which had to be negotiated into (or else rejected from) the new semantic range of this venerable term. Certainly by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the term “Chinese painting” had become a perfectly viable one in both scholarly and commercial usage, and in a fully transnational context.29 It is what appears on the cover of the Guide to an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings (Fourth to Nineteenth Centuries AD ) for an exhibit held at the British Museum in 1910, in which the order of priority is significantly reversed, and in which the Admonitions scroll was presented to a viewing public in London for the first time, framed by a learned catalog entry discussing the dating of the work, here assigned to the “eighth century at latest.”30 “Chinese painting,” itself a co-­ production, is now a category fully exposed to the view of an audience outside the Qing empire, beginning just as Master Gu’s Painting Album had done in 1603 with the work of Gu Kaizhi (see fig. 5.4), and ending with the eighteenth century, nothing later than that date being deemed worthy of collection or exhibition by the British Museum; if Chinese painting had a history, it had, as seen from London in 1910, no present and hence no future. It was circumscribed, cataloged, known. But it would be simplistic to think about a “Western view of Chinese painting” and a “Chinese view of Chinese painting” as being objects set on parallel tracks that were destined never to meet. Rather, by the early twentieth century, we need to see “Chinese painting” as an intimately intertwined co-­production of sites (in China itself, in Japan, in Europe, in North America) that might have been geographically distinct and often linguistically impenetrable to one another, but that were nevertheless linked by bonds of trade and empire, made possible by specialist technical skills we are only beginning to understand. The category of “Chinese painting,” and engagement with its practices, was never wholly controlled by museum curators and scholars, and certainly not by those outside China itself. In this regard, it cannot be seen as simply an orientalist imposition, but rather as a term of resistance to imperialism as much as one of complicity with it; Chinese definitions still matter enormously, not because of the way they express some timeless essence but because of their innovative and flexible deployment in an era of stress and anxiety. In order to understand this fully, we need to find some way of expanding our histories to make room for works that, while of limited aesthetic quality, may tell us important things about audiences and viewing practices, and that help us to understand the wider context, including the great works, better. One such work is a painting executed in 1907 (fig. 5.6) in an accomplished if conventional manner by an otherwise utterly unknown painter named Chang Xinyong, depicting the ancient poet and embodiment of heroic integrity Qu Yuan (c. 340 – 278 bce ) in conversation with a fisherman. It was done, the inscription tells us, for the birthday of the recipient, and so fills the kind of role paintings had long played in established patterns of elite civility. Except that here the recipient is from Finland; he is the Lutheran missionary pastor 164

Henrik Erland Sihvonen (1873 – 1967), whose presence in a relatively remote part of Hunan province means that in this case even the most “traditional” kind of painting (as this style was coming to be seen) is linked to new patterns of global movement. The painting is dated twice, with the equivalent anno domini dates of 1907 as well as the “Chinese calendar” date of the “thirty-­third year of the Guangxu reign.” It is therefore not only a painting that reached a global audience, but one that is self-­aware of its own place as a painting destined for a global audience. In its inscription’s discussion of how “Europeans and Americans” have come to see Qu Yuan as a figure representative of “patriotism” (using the neologism ai guo, literally “love of the nation”), it sees itself as the nation

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5.6.  Chang Xinyong, with calligraphy by Hou Fangzhu (both active early 20th century), Qu Yuan and a Fisher­man, 1907. Ink and color on silk, 160 × 80 cm. The National Museum of Finland.

5.7.  After Huang Gongwang (1269 – 1354), Mountain Landscape with Dwellings. Ink on silk, 86 × 41 cm. National Museum of Scotland, on loan from George Watson’s College (a Merchant Company of Edinburgh school). 5.8.  Ren Bonian (1840 – 1896), Bird and Blossom. Ink and color on gold paper, 18 × 51.6 cm. National Museum of Scotland, on loan from George Watson’s College (a Merchant Company of Edinburgh school).

a “Chinese painting,” in a way that works produced even a few decades before are not able to do. It is constituted as a “Chinese painting” by being looked at by (indeed, in this case, it was painted for) those who are not Chinese. It is the viewing that makes it what it is. Three years after the creation of Pastor Sihvonen’s birthday present, in the same year that the Admonitions scroll went on display in London, and still less than a decade after it was removed from the imperial collections, another foreign viewer, the British colonial official Sir James Stewart Lockhart (1858 – 1937) began seriously to build his own collection of “Chinese paintings.” Crucially, he did not do it on his own, but with the active assistance of a Chinese collaborator. Lockhart was civil commissioner of Weihaiwei, a British colonial enclave on the coast of Shandong province, from 1902 to 1920, and in some ways a disappointed man (he failed to be appointed governor of Hong Kong, and failed to be appointed as professor of Chinese at both Edinburgh and London Universities).31 Although he had been given some Chinese paintings as gifts during earlier postings in Hong Kong, he only began to turn his attention to building a collection in 1910, when he reformed a connection with Xie Zuantai (Tse Ts’an Tai, 1872 – 1939), an Australian-­born, Hong Kong – educated, English-­speaking Chinese businessman, cartoonist, and important anti-­Manchu political activist, whom he had known in the 1880s, though they never met again after 1887.32 In April 1910, Xie sent Lockhart some of his political cartoons and inquired of him: Do you collect Chinese works of art? (Paintings). They are the rage now in England and on the Continent and fetch high prices. Some are really worth thousands of pounds each. Their true value will only be appreciated when China possesses her “National Art Gallery.” Many valuable works of art are now being bought up in China dirt cheap! . . . My collection of Chinese paintings is fairly representative, and comprises 5 dynasties (Tang and Ching), and I believe I own some of the oldest and best paintings in China.33

5.9.  Hu Gongshou (1823 –  1886), Mountain Streams and Autumn Rain. Ink on paper, diameter 12.1 cm. National Museum of Scotland, on loan from George Watson’s College (a Merchant Company of Edinburgh school).

The collapse of the novel category “Chinese works of art” into that of “painting” is one seen elsewhere at this time, but is itself a new form of understanding unrelated to older traditions of categorization by Chinese antiquarian scholarship, in which calligraphy occupied a higher place.34 Xie Zuantai (who seems to have had little interest in calligraphy) goes on to envisage a proper home for his magnificent collection: “It is my intention to present my collection of paintings to the Chinese Nation, when the people are ready and prepared to take proper care of them.”35 Lockhart bit, and business between them was brisk throughout 1910, with numerous optimistically attributed scrolls passing north from Hong Kong to Weihaiwei. On June 20, Xie sold eighteen pictures “by famous painters of the Sung, Yuan and Ming dynasties for $450. They are all bargains and you are lucky to be getting them so cheap” (fig. 5.7). The pick of the bunch are “four big pictures on silk” supposedly by Qiu Ying (c. 1494 – c. 1552), possibly the most-­forged painter in Chinese history (alas, Lockhart’s scrolls are no more real than most of the rest). For Xie, only old masters count, as he laments: Art practised by ancient Chinese painters is deteriorating; and even the work of present day painters is far inferior to that of the artists of the 166

nineteenth Century. The greatest of latter day painters are Yak Bak Nin and Wu Kung Shau. Their pictures are prized in Europe and Japan. Four genuine pictures by Yak Bak Nin cost at least 100 taels today in China!36

The name concealed under Xie’s Cantonese pronunciation is none other than Ren Bonian (fig.  5.8), and the other “latter day painter” is Hu Gongshou (1823 – 1886; fig. 5.9); both had been dead for some years at the time of writing. The British Museum collection, far away in London, was now just as visible to Xie as it was to Lockhart, and in October 1910 we find him writing to Lockhart to tell him, “I have gone through the catalogue of Chinese and Japanese paintings of the British Museum,” to comment on the low quality of many pieces (“these are practically worthless and should be excluded from the British Museum Collection”), and to ask for a copy of the 1886 Anderson catalog.37 Here we see clearly the way in which Xie Zuantai constructs his idea of “Chinese painting” as a national subject, one that is selective in its assertion of what does and does not count, yet that does so at least partly on the basis of accounts seen firmly as “Western.” Xie’s blend of business acumen and patriotic zeal is manifest throughout his correspondence with this foreign collector of the nation

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5.10.  Officials with Portrait of King Edward VII, Before the Procession Through Chu Fou, Sept. 1904. Photograph. National Archives, London na09-­19. 5.11.  The Dowager Empress Cixi, hand-­tinted photograph presented to President Theodore Roosevelt, 1904. Blair House, United States State Department. 5.12.  Xunling (1874 – 1943), Photograph of Dowager Empress Cixi with Sarah Pike Conger and Other Ladies of the US Legation, Beijing. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 5.13.  Katharine Augusta Carl (1865 – 1938), The Empress Dowager, Tze Hsi, of China, 1903. Oil on canvas, 297.1 ×  173.3 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Chinese painting, to whom he wrote in December 1910 to announce, “I am now trying to foresee a Society for the presentation of China’s art treasures with Branch Societies in all the Provinces of the Empire. . . . Something must be done to prevent priceless masterpieces from leaving the country, and to raise Chinese art from the low level to which it has fallen.”38 The inauguration of his “China Art Society,” “for the protection and preservation of China’s art treasures,” had, in fact, been announced back in May in the main English-­language Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, in a report probably authored by Xie himself that praises the outstanding quality of his collection and looks forward to the creation of a “National Art Gallery.”39 This institution is closely linked in Xie’s mind with the need for a Parliament, the projects of political and cultural renewal, national liberation, and the end of Manchu rule being for him intimately linked. At the same time as he was selling “Chinese painting” to a foreign client (almost none of it actually being what he said it was, though whether this was through mendacity or over-­confidence remains a moot point), he was envisaging an essentially national audience, in which “Chinese painting” would be visible to a revitalized Chinese nation through public institutions. Indeed, the Chinese nation and Chinese painting might be said here to be each capable of constituting the other.40 The war that led to the sack of the Summer Palace in 1862, the occupation of Beijing by foreign troops in 1901, the looting that took place on both occasions, the flight on both occasions too of the Qing imperial rulers from their capital — these are all often seen today as part of the inexorable and unstoppable process of dynastic collapse that led inevitably to the creation of the Chinese Republic in 1911. This was the Chinese Republic toward which Xie Zuantai had actively worked, even as he sold “Chinese painting” to a prominent official of the British empire occupying Chinese soil. But the Qing dynasty was not willing to go gently into that historical good night to which Xie and his colleagues had wished to condemn it, and less-­deterministic scholarship in recent years has shown us the extent to which serious attempts at reform of the imperial polity were undertaken. We might see the great series of battle paintings (see figs. 5.1, 5.2), as part of the process of imperial reform and as an attempt to brace up elite morale through visual memorializing of triumph over internal foes and victory in prolonged civil wars. We might also see as part of that process a new approach to the imperial image, a making visible of the ruler to the nation (or proto-­nation) that had few precedents in China’s past, but that drew both on what precedents there were, and on the possibilities of new technologies, to show the dynasty to the people. The diplomatically deft manipulation of her own image by the dowager empress Cixi (1835 – 1908), who beginning in 1904 exchanged photographic portraits with foreign rulers (figs. 5.10, 5.11), received them in exchange, and allowed herself to be photographed with members of the foreign embassy community (fig.  5.12), are well known. Her portrait in oils by the American painter Katherine Augusta Carl (1865 – 1938) was one of the hits of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (fig. 5.13) and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.41 The following year, the empress again commissioned the Dutch-­born American society portraitist 168

5.14.  Hubert Vos (1855 – 1935), Portrait of the Dowager Empress Cixi, 1905. Oil on canvas, 92 × 54 cm. Yihe yuan Summer Palace, Beijing.

Hubert Vos (1885 – 1935) to paint her portrait, resulting in a pair of paintings of strikingly different aspect. In one, which she kept in her summer palace (fig.  5.14), the background is palatial and the image relatively youthful. The other, which Vos painted following his return to New York and which is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, plays up to the orientalist stereotype of the “Dragon Empress” (fig.  5.15), with its dark background of swirling dragons meeting the exotic expectations of a foreign audience.42 But in addition to these commissions of images aimed, however variously, at a foreign audience, the images of the empire’s rulers were from the beginning of the twentieth century reaching a mass audience — indeed, were playing a role 170

in the attempt to construct the imagined community of the Qing empire as a distinctive form of modern monarchy in a world where monarchies still dominated the globe. By 1904 the newspaper Shibao was advertising for sale books of photographs of the imperial family, and Hubert Vos noted photos of the Empress Dowager for sale in Beijing the following year, part of a global circulation of images of royalty that had a huge international audience.43 Far from the urban centers, in the depths of Hunan province, images could be purchased, including a 1909 colored lithograph of the newly enthroned boy Xuantong emperor (r. 1908 – 1912; fig. 5.16), destined to be the last of his line, though no one could know that at the time. Captions describing these “Imperial Images the nation

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5.15.  Hubert Vos (1855 – 1935), H. I. M., the Empress Dowager of China, Cixi (1835 – 1908), 1905 –  1906. Oil on canvas, 169.6 ×  123.6 cm. Harvard Art Museums/  Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.162.

of the Ruling House of the Great Qing Empire” identify immediately behind the infant the widow of his predecessor, with his parents flanking him. This print was produced in Japan rather than in Hunan itself, but was collected in China by one of the Finnish Lutheran missionaries who tended a small flock in the heart of this vast southern province, and who took it home with him to rest in Helsinki. It is a testimony — like the portraits of Cixi in oils (see fig. 5.15) and like the presence of the Admonitions scroll in the British Museum (see fig. 5.4) — to the international flow of images that is the inescapable background to any attempt to think about painting in China, and more particularly about the audiences who viewed it, in the twentieth century, when things showed an unwillingness to stay put. The imperial family image is captioned in a way that identifies Da Qing guo, “The Great Qing,” using the word guo, which in the twentieth century would become indelibly associated with the concept of “nation.”44 It would later come to be associated with hua, “painting,” in the neologism guohua, “national painting” (derived from the Japanese equivalent kokuga), in the sense of a form of painting that is distinctive to and unique to the Chinese nation, which embodies some sort of essence of Chinese culture. The term was dominant from the 1920s, replacing a number of earlier alternatives.45 But before it meant “nation,” the Chinese term guo could just as well mean “dynasty,” or “ruling house,” and so in studying the years before the nation will sweep the dynasty from the historical stage it is worth just nodding briefly toward another 172

kind of alternative guohua, as “dynastic painting,” encompassing images of the dynasty’s military triumphs (see fig. 5.1) as well as its key personalities (fig. 5.16). This was not what guohua was going to come to mean in the twentieth century, and none of these images would find a safe place within that category; indeed, they would again form part of that large mass of images that would fit in no category, and hence be unviewable and unstudiable by those confident that the boundaries of “Chinese painting” were clear to them. One of those confident souls was the political reformer Kang Youwei (1858 – 1927), who in 1904 (the very year in which Laurence Binyon published the Admonitions scroll) visited Italy for the first time. Kang’s encounter, in the course of visits to such cultural pilgrimage sites as the Vatican Museums, with the high points of the canon of European painting, crystallized for him a here-­and-­there, them-­and-­us act of comparison between what he was able to see as two total and totally different painting traditions. And it was Raphael’s Transfiguration (fig. 5.17) that led him to say, “The painting of our country is shallow and desultory, far inferior to his, it must be reformed.”46 Kang was by no means the first person to speak about a reform of “the painting of our country,” but his statement of intent was part of the process whereby “Chinese painting” came to be understood in a narrow sense, as being, above all, about the Orthodox School of landscape painting (fig. 5.18), which had enjoyed high levels of elite patronage and hence high levels of prestige since the seventeenth century. For Kang, and for a number of others like him, the source of reform

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5.16.  Portraits of the Qing Imperial Family, 1909. Colored lithograph, 55 × 35 cm. The National Museum of Finland. 5.17.  Raphael (1483 – 1520), The Transfiguration, 1520. Oil on wood, 410 × 279 cm. Pinacoteca Vaticana. 5.18.  Wang Hui (1632 – 1717), leaf from the album Large Emerging from Small, 1672. Ink and color on silk, 55.5 ×  34.5 cm. Shanghai Museum.

lay not externally but internally, in the painting of China’s deep past, before the seventeenth-­century decline, when it had been far superior (above all, in its degree of mimetic realism) to the flat and unconvincing painting of the European Middle Ages. Kang actually believed that this realism had been transmitted from China to Europe, along with the technique of painting in oils, by Marco Polo in the Yuan dynasty, the kind of comforting myth of Chinese primacy (did China not invent paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass?) that nationalist intellectuals of the early twentieth century, including a man like Xie Zuantai, deployed as one of the building blocks of a project of national renewal through the reinvigoration of a native genius supposedly crushed by centuries of alien, Manchu rule. “Realism” (here defined more in the sense of a style of representation than of the engagement with contemporary society that it was for a number of its nineteenth-­century French theorists) was for Kang Youwei scientific, hence universal — neither “foreign” nor “Chinese.” But it was a universal human achievement in the realization of which Chinese painting had chronological priority, in the masterpieces (see fig. 1.11) of the Song dynasty (960 – 1 279) that far outstripped the supposedly flat and feeble work (did not European histories like Vasari’s Lives of the Artists themselves say so?) of Europe at that same early time. The project was to recover past greatness, a greatness that was both “realistic” and “Chinese,” and that was to be found in the painting of the pre-­Yuan dynasty (1279 – 1368) period.47 But the strategy of Kang Youwei was not the only strategy. The manner in which alternative possibilities of achieving a successful recovery, of providing a prehistory of modern, realistic, national painting in China, were available in the ferment of the early twentieth century, can be seen in an enigmatic entry found in the Gazetteer of Nanhai County (Nanhai xian zhi), published in the “third year of Xuantong” — that is, 1911 in the Western calendar, the very year in which a series of uncoordinated revolts would coalesce into the war that overthrew the Qing dynasty. Nanhai is a county of the Pearl River delta, the site of the great port of Canton, which by this date was, like Shanghai, a “zone of contact,” with its distinctive history of cultural interactions, appropriations, and rejections. Like many gazetteers (a form of chorographic writing combining local history and geography), biographies of local notables are prominently featured, categorized into themes. Chapter 8 of the biographies covers the category of Yishu; the word means “art” in a Chinese dictionary today, but in 1911 the meaning was much more fluid, retaining often an older sense of “arts” in the sense of learned skills.48 There are, for instance, a number of medical practitioners gathered here under that heading. One brief biography is of a man named Guan Zuolin, described as poor in his youth, who “travelled to various countries of Europe and America, where he was delighted by their portraits in oils, which he studied until he was accomplished in them, returning to set up a business in Canton, making portraits for people, which were delightful and lively, such that those who saw them sighed in admiration. This was in the middle of the Jiaqing reign [1796 – 1820], when this skill first entered China . . .”49 The identification of “Guan Zuolin” with the “Spoilum” whose signature appears on a number of early oil paintings executed for Western clients in Canton (fig. 5.19) 174

was highly attractive as Chinese export painting became an object of art market and scholarly interest, though it is now increasingly seen as resting on very shaky ground indeed.50 The trip to Europe and America is implausible, and the gazetteer underestimates by many decades the beginnings of painting in oil by Cantonese artists. What seems more interesting in the current context is the coincidence of the attempt (a coincidence not previously noted) to provide a genealogy for a different form of “Chinese painting” with the very moment when “China” as a national subject began the process of achieving visibility for the citizens of a new, republican nation. That process moved rapidly from the realms of the theoretical to the practical with the final collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the creation of a Republic of China. Momentous as this date is in China’s history, it is fundamentally wrong to see it as in some way a moment of total rupture in the history of painting, as if “modern Chinese painting” came into being on that date. What is inescapable is that for China this was a crucial ratcheting up of the stakes around the twin concepts of “tradition” and “modernity,” in a context where “One is not born traditional; one chooses to become traditional by constant innovation. The idea of an identical repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a single conception of time.”51 At the same time as China became (or was thrust into being) “traditional,” it was placed in the position of being “a culture,” part of the rest and not the West, a member of that group of nonmoderns who define modernity (“much more than an illusion and much less than an essence”) itself. 52 The creation of the Chinese Republic thus raised the stakes in the long process of defining what was and was not “Chinese,” a process that is still very much afoot in the early twenty-­first century, and the outcome of which remains as uncertain as ever. Few active players of the game thought about the issue with the subtlety or acuity shown by the painter of one of the great early-­twentieth-­century the nation

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5.19.  Spoilum (active c. 1770 –  1805), Richard Wheatland, c. 1800, and Martha Goodhue Wheatland, wife of Captain Richard Wheatland, 1799 –  1800. Oil on canvas and oil on primed cloth, 69.22 × 54.93 and 59.3 × 45.3 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Gift of Richard Wheatland II, Alice Wellman, Mary Schley, and Sarah Richards, 1991.

meta-­paintings, Chen Shizeng (1876 – 1923), whose hanging scroll entitled Viewing Paintings of 1918 (fig. 5.20) makes visible some of the new tensions that a self-­conscious politics of modernity brought to the visual arts. This is a painting of looking at paintings that addresses the complexities of a given moment with much more awareness than a simple “them-­and-­us” dichotomy would allow. It is not physically a very large painting, less than three feet high, but its crowded composition gives it a kind of monumentality, with every square inch of the paper covered. Beneath the title, Viewing Paintings (Du hua tu), an inscription gives the precise circumstances: On the first of the twelfth month of dingsi [12/1/1918], Ye Yufu, Jin Gongbei and Chen Zhongshu assembled the holdings of the collectors of the capital, and exhibited them in Central Park for seven days, changing every day, in all six or seven hundred. The fees of those who came to examine (guan) them went to the relief of flood disaster in the capital region. I subsequently pictured the scene of that time to record this splendid event.53

5.20.  Chen Shizeng (1876 –  1923), Viewing Paintings, 1918. Ink and color on paper, 87.6 × 46.6 cm. The Palace Museum.

We see then in all twenty figures, engaged in the viewing of the paintings assembled by a group of Beijing cultural luminaries (Ye Gongchuo, 1881 – 1968; Jin Cheng, 1878 – 1926; Chen Handi, 1874 – 1949), a charitable event designed to raise funds for the relief of famine victims. The great gardens of Suzhou were in the early nineteenth century at the Spring Festival opened to visitors for small sums of money, and we are told by one chronicler that these were occasions on which “they hang calligraphy and paintings by famous worthies.”54 However, the public exhibition of painting, and certainly the public exhibition for which tickets were sold to all comers, was still a novel social form in this period, the first proper example perhaps being the painting exhibit that formed part of the imperially sponsored Nanyang Industrial Exhibition of 1910, some eight years before this event, which had attracted some 200,000 visitors.55 (The catering concession at this massively successful event was held by none other than the enterprising Xie Zuantai, the correspondent of Sir James Stewart Lockhart.56) In events like this, the merchant and the nation came together, through key figures like the businessman and painter Wang Yiting (1867 – 1938), the prominent Buddhist and philanthropist who was both a dominant figure in the Shanghai world of painting and a moving spirit behind the 1910 exhibition, and through Jin Cheng, son of a family of raw silk producers, graduate in law from London University, owner of an antiques shop in Beijing’s Liulichang, and entrepreneur of the philanthropic exhibition pictured by Chen Shizeng.57 The crowd in Viewing Paintings looks like a more select one than the 200,000 attendees of the Nanyang Industrial Exhibition, even if the composition does stress that it is a crowd. And it is a mixed crowd. It is the depths of winter in Beijing, and everyone is well muffled up, but we can still make out differences in dress, with some wearing long silk robes and some in woolen overcoats — Chinese dress and Western dress.58 Racial difference is portrayed in the painting too, with a foreign male prominent in the right foreground, distinguishable not just by his dress but also by his florid complexion and upswept “Kaiser Wilhelm” moustache. Off on her own to the bottom left of the 176

composition stands a foreign woman, who is positioned in such a way that she is the only figure in the whole painting not actually able to look closely at any of the paintings on show. Her gloved hand rests on the table, her facial features are left blank. There are a couple of small albums facing us (the viewers of the painting), which are being looked at by three men, including the Western male, and on the same table a long hand scroll, which is upside down to us but the right way up to the group of eight men who jostle and crowd to see it. On the back wall are suspended two fairly large landscape hanging scrolls being viewed by seven men; they have their backs to us, except for the figure on the extreme right of the group, who is shown in profile with a degree of care that suggests this may be an actual portrait, and who balances his hands on the back of the man next to him, whether as a gesture of intimacy or just to steady himself in the crush we cannot say. A direct comparison between this image and a painting of looking at paintings executed some four hundred years previously, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, allows a number of points to be made about the changing ways in which Chinese painting is constituted over time by its audiences (see figs. 5.20, 2.1). Obvious dissimilarities, despite the superficial congruity of subject matter, are very tempting. On the one hand, in the Ming (see fig. 2.1) we have the learned intercourse of elite males, admitted to the gathering by virtue of long-­standing social ties between them; to set against that, in the Republic (see fig. 5.20), we have the promiscuous mingling of men and women, natives and foreigners, who have paid for their tickets to see these things. In the Ming, one image at a time is viewed and discussed thoroughly; in the Republic, a number of simultaneously available pictures stand for the six or seven hundred shown in the course of the exhibition. In the past, there is “painting” pure and simple, defined in relation to the other elegant pursuits of the literati; by the early twentieth century, there are images that can no longer be simply “painting” but are called upon to be “Chinese painting,” embedded within “a specific form of socialized or culturally constructed vision, a nationalistic visuality centered on training the eye to identify visual clues and to distinguish between the foreign and domestic across social life.”59 Hierarchy versus public sphere, tradition versus modernity, Chinese versus Western, and, above all, Chinese tradition versus Western modernity — these are the binary oppositions that gripped the minds of the intellectuals of the early Republican age, and that have continued down to the present to impose themselves on our understanding. But might the actual picture of Viewing Paintings be conveying something different, something subtler, about the type of possibilities present in the early-­ twentieth-­century moment in China? For a start, there is here an alternative reading of “realism,” constituted not as a preference for a style of illusionistic visual mimesis, but as an engagement with the world of the now, complex and impure as it might be. This might not be the realism Kang Youwei wanted, but it is a realism nonetheless. The hand scroll and the albums are too sketchy for us to “read” them, but the two hanging scrolls appear to be in the “orthodox” landscape style of the Four Wang, the work that, above all, was seen by someone 178

like Kang Youwei (but not by Chen Shizeng) as embodying the dead hand of a vapid tradition. They are stylistically very different from the main scene, with its use of wash and modeling to represent the bulk of the viewers’ clothes. We would now perhaps call that style of representation “Western,” though it can be seen more accurately as reflecting an appropriation of a manner of depicting genre scenes flourishing in Japan at this period, under the Sino-­Japanese label of manhua/manga (literally “casual painting,” but soon functionally equivalent to “sketch”).60 Chen Shizeng was one of many who encountered “Western art” for the first time in Japan (where he lived as a student of natural science for seven years from 1903 to 1910), and he was publishing sketches in the newspapers from his move to Beijing in 1916 until his death.61 In the embedded paintings-­within-­a painting in Chen’s exhibition image, we might be reminded of the way in which images of a certain kind could be present within court painting or export paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that made use of similarly imported conventions (see fig. 4.32). Does this picture then imply a possibility for coexistence within the same frame that is not simply the absorption of one by the other, not simply a zero-­sum game, winner takes all, but rather is some sort of co-­presence? Here as well as elsewhere, there is plenty of support for the view that the absolute difference between “Western painting” and “Chinese painting,” which was rapidly to come to structure all practice, all criticism, all scholarship after 1911, may not have seemed so self-­evident to all actors at the time. If we consider for a moment what was happening at the same time to one of the “remnant subjects” of the Manchu dynasty, the court painter Qingkuan, impresario of the late-­nineteenth-­century battle paintings, we get a glimpse of a world where either/or was not the only possibility. A colophon on a work by him dated 1915 (just two years before Viewing Paintings) tells us that he was still in demand after the collapse of court patronage, and that after 1911: . . . friends and acquaintances seeking for his paintings increased day by day. As an example, Tao, the Beile and the son of Prince Chun [Zaitao, 1887– 1970], pleaded with Mr Qing to paint a painting commemorating his balloon-­excursion on his trip to Europe. That painting is remarkably true to life, which indicates that Mr Qing is also an expert in Western technique.62

That is to say, for some at least at this date “Western technique” was still an available possibility that served as an adjunct to “painting” rather than a replacement of it. Something of the same feeling may persist in Chen Shizeng’s work (see fig. 5.20), as he demonstrates his own command both of the brushwork techniques of the Orthodox School, and the modeling capabilities of layered washes, techniques he had acquired through a close study of Japanese painting, in close proximity to one another. Paintings here are less confident of the absolute division of “Eastern” and “Western” than are theorists. The title of the picture is surely significant too. Chen Shizeng entitled it Du hua tu, literally “Picture of Reading Paintings,” using the verb du, “to read,” which has the connotations of concentrated and informed looking most closely associated with the elite tradition of socially endorsed, high-­status looking.63 the nation

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However, within the inscription he uses the verb guan, “to gaze on, to contemplate,” to describe what the visitors to the exhibition are doing; this is the verb that forms the modern Chinese word guanzhong, “audience” — literally, “gazing crowd” or “viewing mass.” Is this therefore an act of viewing that is in tension between reading and gazing, between du and guan? It is perhaps the last real picture of its kind, a comment on the ways in which viewing is to be no longer the preserve of the few, and it seems that it is, like many great works of art, deeply ambivalent, and much richer than the formulations that seek to make it sit still in one and not another category. That same sense of unresolved possibilities is present in Chen Shizeng’s most important piece of writing about painting, created shortly before his premature death in 1923 at the age of forty-­seven. In an essay entitled “The Value of Literati Painting,” which was published in 1921 and again in 1922 in two different versions representing two different registers of a written Chinese language then in a highly productive state of flux, Chen seemed to want to destabilize a simplistic ascription of mimetic realism as the central fact of “Western” painting.64 He knew too much about what was happening at the time: Western painting can be described as extremely faithful to form. Since the nineteenth century, in accordance with the principle of science, [Western painting] has meticulously rendered objects with lights and colours. Lately, however, postimpressionism has run counter to that course; it de-­ emphasizes the objective, and focuses on the subjective, and it is joined in its revolutionary performances by Cubism and Futurism. Such intellectual transformations are significant evidence to show that verisimilitude does not exhaust the good in art, and that alternative criteria must be sought.65

As the work of a number of modern scholars has demonstrated, Chen’s stress on the subjectivity of the artist as the central element within what would not long after his death come to be called “traditional” Chinese painting (fig. 5.21) was a bold attempt to claim for that kind of painting practice the aesthetic high ground of a modernity in which subjectivity was seen as sovereign. In that sense, he parallels Kang Youwei’s claim that Chinese painting “got there first,” although for him the desirable “already present” is not realism but rather its opposite, the expressiveness of artistic subjectivity (fig. 5.22). Only in the Republican era did the venerable term qi yun — an unsatisfactory (indeed misleading) but now firmly established translation of which is “spirit resonance” — become “shorthand for subjective expression and individualism, ideas explicitly associated with modernity in the early twentieth century.”66 Chen’s essay “The Value of Literati Painting” ends with a checklist of its central tenets: “The important elements of literati painting are: first, personality; second, learning; third, talent; fourth, thought; and only with these four can complete success be achieved.”67 The syntax may be classical, but these terms are all neologisms, new attempts to combine the character stock in ways that will make solid that which constantly threatens to melt into air. They are also attempts to characterize not painting, not style, not the way the picture looks; they are rather attempts to characterize how the painter is. Indeed, it would be only 180

leaning on the language a little to translate the title of this crucial essay as “The Value of the Literati Painter.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why in the twentieth century in China it is images of the artist, disseminated as they are through a broad range of media, and not images of the viewer, that come to stand for “painting,” both narrowly and in China’s wider visual culture.68 As discussed above, images of painters at work had been rare in the Ming and Qing periods outside of certain well-­defined contexts. We perhaps see the beginning of a new emphasis on the performative aspects of the painter in the kinds of accounts from the 1880s of the rapidity with which Ren Bonian executed his highly esteemed portraits (see fig. 4.42).69 But it is from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that actual images of the painter at work seem to be everywhere, as the performance of the artistic subjectivity that is seen to be central to “Chinese painting” itself spreads throughout the mass media. Whether it is the art class sketching en plein air in

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5.21.  Chen Shizeng (1876 –  1923), Studio by the Water, 1921. Album leaf; ink and color on paper, 33.7 × 47.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986 (1986.267.104). 5.22.  Yu Li (1862 – 1922), Ink Plum Blossoms, 1915. Ink on paper, 17 × 50 cm. Xubaizhai Collection, Hong Kong Museum of Art.

the Shanghai suburbs (fig. 5.23), or the fashionably dressed “new woman” as painter in oils (fig. 5.24), or the nonchalant dandy, hand in pocket, dashing off a picture in front of a small crowd of Chinese and British admirers (fig. 5.25), one of the key ways that “painting” is now represented as a concept is to show people doing it. This was particularly the case with the performance of the role of the Chinese artist for foreign audiences, as can be seen, for instance, in the case of Zhang Shuqi (1900 – 1957), who traveled to the United States in 1941 as part of a diplomatic offensive to firm up US public support for China in the new conditions of wartime alliance (fig. 5.26). He had studied with Liu Haisu (1896 – 1994), as one of the first students in his private Shanghai Art Academy, before taking a position as a teacher of guohua at the new Central University in Nanjing. Huge crowds in numerous US cities attended his public demonstrations of “Chinese painting,” one of which was captured in a spread for Life magazine, while at least one other such performance was filmed.70 The crowd here watches the process of painting, not the finished painting, as if “Chinese painting” can only be verified in the visible availability of the racially distinct “Chinese painter,” present here to the gaze of the unmarked “audience.” This certain separation of painting and Chinese painting was perhaps inevitable, given the huge social, cultural, and political forces invested in such absolute difference. But twenty years earlier, Chen Shizeng seems to hold out a more ecumenical possibility, one never to be realized. His early death in 1923 came shortly after the devastating Kantō earthquake of that year, still Japan’s most destructive natural calamity. In a funeral eulogy, Liang Qichao (1873 – 1929) compared the death of Chen to that earthquake, in the scale of its impact on China’s cultural scene; his loss was keenly felt.71 By the time he died, and in a shockingly rapid transition from the world of painting into which 182

he had been born in the late Qing, there was now no such thing as painting — hua — pure and simple. There was only painting with qualifications, as yanghua, youhua, wenrenhua, guohua, Zhongguohua — foreign painting, oil painting, literati painting, national painting, Chinese painting. Du hua tu, Viewing Paintings (see fig. 5.20) therefore stands as a threnody for a time when hua alone was enough to mean “painting” for most people.72 In 1926, shortly after Chen’s death, there appeared in print a series of lectures he had given as early as 1922, entitled History of Chinese Painting, Zhongguo huihua shi.73 This title appears here in Chinese for the very first time, and in the same year as it was used for the Chinese translation, by the young Pan Tianshou (1897 – 1971), of a work originally in Japanese, the nationalistic Shina kaiga shi, History of Chinese Painting, by Nakamura Fusetsu and Kojika Seiun, which had appeared originally in 1913.74 The asymmetry between “Chinese painting” and “painting” was now firmly installed, and was present under that same dichotomy between Zhongguo huihua, “Chinese painting,” and xiandai huihua, “modern [but not Chinese] painting,” which would still be used some six decades later as the title of the two works Huang Yong Ping was to deliberately destroy (see fig. 1.1). But more important was the fact that “Chinese painting” was now fully visible under that name to Chinese painters and their audiences alike, and that all prior work of a particular kind was now retrospectively subsumed under that name. It was all “Chinese painting” now. By the 1920s it was firmly accepted that the audience for painting was the nation, and that some painting was necessarily Chinese in its spectatorship as much as in its creation. This view was only reinforced by the creation of new national institutions such as the museums, with their commitment to displaying and publishing what was now seen as the heritage of the Chinese nation. Almost immediately upon the foundation of the Republic, the question of what to do with the imperial collections became a compelling one, addressed by the establishment in Beijing in 1913 of the Antiquities Display Hall (Gu wu chenliesuo) and then in October 1925 of the National Palace Museum (Guoli gugong bowuyuan).75 From 1929,

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5.23.  Students of the Shanghai School of Art Sketching in the Vicinity of the Longhua Pagoda in 1918. Photograph from Meishu 1 (1918). 5.24.  Ding Song, Painting a Self-­Portrait, from Illus­ trations and Poems on One Hundred Fashionable Beauties of Shanghai, 1916. 5.25.  Liu Haisu (1896 – 1994), painting at the New Burlington Galleries, London, 1935. Photograph from The Studio, vol. 109 (1935). 5.26.  Zhang Shuqi (1900 –  1957), painting in Chicago, 1943. Photograph. Zhang Shuqi Papers, Box 22, Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

the Palace Museum published its own journal, Palace Museum Weekly (Gugong zhoukan; fig.  5.27), using mass media to present its collections to a national public larger than that of its actual visitors. The rise of an art market in Shanghai that depended on photographic reproduction to market its wares was just as much of an institutional innovation as the establishment of the museum as a form of viewing space for painting. The career of Star Talbot (c. 1861 – 1935), the Eurasian photographer, medicine salesman, and art dealer, was crucially dependent on illustrated publications such as the bilingual catalog of the collection of his shadowy business partner E. A. Strehlneek (b. 1871), which appeared in 1914 under the titles Zhonghua minghua (literally, “Famous Chinese Paintings”) and Chinese Pictorial Art.76 But it was at this date already a latecomer to the presentation of reproductions of painting to a wider audience. Even prior to the foundation of the Republic, journals such as National Essence (Guocui xuebao) and Collected National Glories of the Divine Land (Shenzhou guoguang ji), often modeled implicitly on Japanese prototypes, were using techniques such as collotype and photolithography to make reproductions of paintings available to wider publics.77 Despite the rhetoric of “the nation” in which these practices were embedded, it is clear that the transnational culture of reproduction and publishing made such boundaries unmanageable in practice. As early as 1908, photographic reproductions of the Admonitions scroll, originally published in London (where the scroll then resided) in the context of Stephen Wootton Bushell’s Chinese Art of 1904 – 1906, were being reappropriated by the journal National Essence some decades before Bushell’s work as a whole received its Chinese translation.78 And it was the photographic reproduction of early masterpieces that made their forgery easier for someone like the talented but unscrupulous young painter Zhang Daqian (1899 – 1983), who in 1934 executed two versions of Sleeping Gibbon (fig.  5.28), which he signed with the name Liang Kai (active early thirteenth century). The composition is modeled on a scroll in a triptych by Muqi (active early thirteenth century – c. 1279), which Zhang saw in Japan, but which was also published in the leading Japanese art journal Kokka in 1926.79 The essentially transnational nature of the concept “Chinese painting” is seen, for example, in the pamphlet the indefatigable self-­publicist Xie Zuantai produced in Hong Kong in 1928, entitled Ancient Chinese Art: A Treatise on Chinese Painting (note the equivalence in the title of what are, in fact, two quite different entities). Produced “in order to hasten the realization of universal peace and brotherhood,” the pamphlet is an uneasy cohabitation of nationalist self-­assertion (the indigenous origins of Chinese art are defended robustly against diffusionist theories) and the citation of eminent foreign authorities such as the museum curator Laurence Binyon and the dealer Ralph M. Chait (d. 1975), and the archaeologists Aurel Stein (1862 – 1943) and Sven Hedin (1865 – 1952). A renewed dismissal of contemporary art (“Modern Chinese artists have lamentably failed to follow in the footsteps of the ancient masters, and this is why the lines and brush work of their pictures are so weak, and wanting in life and vigour”), indeed a refusal to acknowledge any work of quality since the Song dynasty, goes along with a seconding of the desire of Sir Charles Holmes, director of London’s National Gallery, to see “the 184

great painters of the East in juxtaposition of the great painters of Europe.”80 Although Xie (who held distinctive views on the Central Asian origins of the human race and published extensively on the Deluge and the “Chinese Noah”) is a forgotten figure today in the historiography of Chinese painting, we may perhaps see in this enthusiastic amateur something of the tensions that a wider Chinese elite felt as the Republic struggled for the cultural as well as the political respect it felt it deserved in an international context. Alongside museums and publications, the development of the exhibition (fig. 5.29) as a new context of viewing within a new civil society and the organization of artistic societies created the spaces in which the arguments about what sort of art the times demanded took place.81 By November 1927, when one of the most successful of these groupings, the Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui), held its eighth and largest group show, it would have been widely accepted among intellectuals that, as one newspaper wrote: Art is the expression of a nation’s people and is the central focus of culture. The art of our nation peaked in Tang and Song times, and declined in the Qing. Recently our people have become accustomed to strife and no longer know what is art.82

But this sort of “strategic essentialism,” shared by Xie Zuantai and the Heavenly Horse Society both, meant that much of the painting being created in China could not now be “Chinese painting,” or at least not for certain audiences, most the nation

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5.27.  Palace Museum Weekly, issue 1, 1929, p. 2. 5.28.  Zhang Daqian (1899 –  1983), Sleeping Gibbon, signed as Liang Kai (c. 1140 – c. 1210). Ink on paper, 131.1 × 45.7 cm. Honolulu Museum of Art, Wilhelmina Tenney Memorial Collection 1956; 2217.1.

5.29.  Exhibition by the Art Movement Society (Yishu yundong she) of the National Art School, held at the Franco-­Belgian Association, Shanghai, Aug. 1929. Photograph, from Liangyou huabao, 1928, no. 38, p. 34. 5.30.  Liu Haisu (1896 – 1994), Qianmen (The Front Gate), Beijing, 1922. Oil on canvas, 60 × 79 cm. Liu Haisu Art Museum. 5.31.  Fang Junbi (1898 – 1986), After the Bath, c. 1935 – 36.

particularly foreign ones. Liu Haisu’s precocious 1922 oil painting of Beijing (fig.  5.30), with the Ming dynasty gate of the city looming over the railway station and the tramlines of the modern metropolis, could not be visible to European observers as “a Chinese painting,” any more than could the nudes (fig.  5.31) of the Paris-­educated Fang Junbi (1898 – 1986) or any of the other attempts by a range of artists (figs. 5.32, 5.33) to claim a place in the master narrative of “modern art,” a narrative constructed precisely on the premise that they could not be part of it.83 As can be seen from the covers of exhibitions held in Berlin, in Amsterdam, and in Paris in the 1930s (figs. 5.34, 5.35), “modern Chinese art” had to mean guohua, “national painting” in the international context. In Paris, even though the artistic establishment had been willing exceptionally to acquire work in oil by Liu Haisu from a solo show he held there in 1931 (fig. 5.36), at which he was just one more foreigner welcomed into the ecumenical bosom of the école de Paris, the acquisitions made by the French state from the exhibition of “peinture chinoise” held in 1933 (fig. 5.37) were firmly in the guohua style, which indeed was the only possible style on view in that context.84 Writing in 1934 of the Berlin exhibition, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, “Chinese Painting of the Present Day,” the German curator and scholar William Cohn (1880 – 1961) could acknowledge, “Equally popular in China is a school of painting which employs the same techniques and subjects as Western oil painting, but this does not concern us here, since it was not included in the exhibition, and rightly so.”85 In the phrase “rightly so” we see how the Gegen­ wart, the “present” of “Chinese painting,” now had no room for a school of painting whose popularity in China was not enough to make it acceptable to a European critic. The possibilities for “painting” were largely closed off by the dilemma in which work that was “Chinese” was seen as “traditional” (and hence not modern), whereas work that was “modern” was seen as imitative 186

5.32.  Guan Zilan (1903 – 1986), Girl of the Autumn River, 1921. Private collection. 5.33.  Xu Beihong (1895 –  1953), Awaiting the Deliverer, 1930 – 1931. Oil on canvas, 230 × 318 cm. Xu Beihong Memorial Museum.

(and hence not Chinese). A fatal in authenticity beckoned, either way, which the simple assertion of artistic subjectivity could not overcome on its own. But at the same time as images of the artist proliferated within Republican culture, a contrary refusal to accept artistic subjectivity at its own face value, to allow that the painter defines what painting is, can be seen in the popular culture of the era, in things like newspaper cartoons, where pictures of looking at pictures might reappear in surprising ways. The roly-­poly Niubizi, literally “Ox-­nose,” was a wildly popular comic creation of the cartoonist Huang Yao 188

(1917 – 1987) that appeared in the Shanghai Post from 1934.86 He can be pictured both as artist and as audience, as in his close examination of a nude in the modernist manner (fig. 5.38; fig. 5.39 shows the sort of work being lampooned), the quickly scribbled signifier of a fancy frame being as much a pointer to its enticing otherness as is its scandalous subject matter. The caption, in his catchphrase formula beginning “If I was a . . . ,” tells us that “If I was a moralist, this painting would be the very soul of art!”87 The same curlicued frames appear to tell us that we are looking at something weird and a bit risible, in a cartoon by Liang Baibo (?1911 – 1970), a woman who was both a successful commercial artist for the Shanghai newspaper industry and involved with the aggressively polemical and modernist Storm Society (Juelanshe). Her great creation is “Miss Bee” (Mifeng xiaojie), a ditzy blonde who is nobody’s fool, and who specializes in buzzing about, deflating the pomposity of the age. In figure 5.40, she comes upon an exhibition of “foreign painting” (yanghua — that is, oil painting), though the ethnicity of the artist is deliberately indeterminate, as is her own, looking blonde the nation

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5.34.  Cover of catalog, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1934). 5.35.  Cover of catalog, Moderne Chinesische Schilderkunst (Amsterdam, 1934). 5.36.  Liu Haisu (1895 – 1994), Winter Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, 49.6 × 65 cm. Musée des Arts Asiatiques – ­ Guimet, Paris, am 5079p. 5.37.  Zhang Daqian (1899 –  1983), Lotus. Ink on paper, 163 × 77.5 cm. Musée des Arts Asiatiques – ­Guimet, Paris, jp685p.

5.38.  Huang Yao (1917 – 1987), “If I was a moralist, this picture would be the very soul of art!” Niubizi cartoon, Xinwenbao (Shanghai Post), 1930s.

but speaking perfect Chinese.88 The floppy hair and smock mark out the Artist with a capital A, and the sub-­Modigliani nude behind his head, a minimal meta-­ picture if ever there was one, skewers the manner in which he works. He is silent, but Miss Bee speaks in all four panels (reading from top left): Top left: “Aha ! An exhibition of oil painting.” Top right: “I had the opportunity to be a painter.” Bottom left: “But then I gave it up.” Bottom right: “Because those colors often used to dirty my new clothes.”

5.39.  Lin Fengmian (1900 –  1929), Nude, 1934.

This may not be hilarious today, and maybe it only ever raised a wry smile, but the vexing messiness of oil paint, the essential triviality for Miss Bee of the keenly fought arguments over medium and subject matter, remind us that the early-­twentieth-­century art scene in China was probably never more than a minority interest. The term translated here as “oil painting” is yanghua, which literally means “oceanic” (that is, “foreign”) painting. It is the colloquial rather than the learned term (which might be youhua, “oil painting,” or xihua, “Western painting”), and it is probably both what people in the 1930s actually said, and a form of words that had been in use since the seventeenth century for a whole range of practices and media seen as originally imports, even if many of them were now deeply indigenized.89 The duality of yang and guo, “foreign” and “national,” appears at this period in a number of contexts, whether in yanghuo/guohuo, “foreign products/ national products” or yanghua/guohua, “foreign painting/national painting,” or any number of similarly structured oppositions. Karl Gerth has written eloquently of “a specific form of socialized or culturally constructed vision, a nationalistic visuality centered on training the eye to identify visual clues and to distinguish between the foreign and domestic across social life.”90 However, in the case of painting, those visual clues were (and are) so much more ambiguous, the efforts necessary to suppress any awareness of the centuries-­old presence of the “foreign” within the body of Chinese painting that much more 190

burdensome, and the arguments about the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic correspondingly intense and long-­lived. One perhaps key difference (though not one unique to painting, affecting as it did other cultural practices) was that the goods Chinese firms made were unequivocally “national goods,” guohuo (even if they were kinds of goods originally imported, like bicycles or matches), whereas an oil painting by a Chinese artist remained in the popular perception as yanghua, on the basis, above all, of its style; the Chinese ethnicity of the artist was not sufficient to render work unequivocally “Chinese.” This opposition, reinforced though it was by practices of exhibition and publication, and formally structured in the separate departments of art schools, was not immanent and timeless; it was a particular construction of the cultural politics of the (often vexed and harried) Chinese Republic before 1949.91 Enlarged though the audience for painting was through publication of works in the mass media, it remained one probably very much restricted by class and by geography, and is an audience that is still severely under-­researched, by comparison with what we now know about the producers of art in the 1920s and 1930s. This situation was, however, to change dramatically under the impact of war and revolution, as the shape and size of the audience for painting in China underwent unprecedented types of expansion, of reshaping, of coercion and control. the nation

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5.40. Liang Baibo (?1911 –  1970), Miss Bee, 1930s.

chapter six

the people

In some of the most compelling paintings of early-­twentieth-­century China, it is possible to see a disconnect between foreground and background, almost as if they have been dropped in from two different pictures. It can be seen in the 1918 Viewing Paintings by Chen Shizeng (see fig. 5.20), where the background is formed by two meta-­paintings executed in long-­established forms of brushstroke, while the figures in the foreground are modeled in washes Chen had probably first seen in Japanese forms of sketching, themselves understood as appropriations of a foreign manner.1 It can perhaps be seen too in After the Bath by Fang Junbi (see fig. 5.31), where the foreground figure expresses the care the artist had taken to absorb the lessons of her life-­drawing classes at the École Normale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, under the tutelage of Ferdinand Humbert (1842 – 1934), while a background window of bamboo leaves, each leaf a brushstroke in the established manner, creates a geographically specific setting for the otherwise racially indefinite nude body. Although the 1936 portrait of his pupil and lover Sun Duoci (1912 – 1975) by Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953) is more stylistically coherent (fig.  6.1), there is a visible disjunction between the plaster casts of the background — figures of European classical civilization, including death masks of Tolstoy and Lenin — and the highly racially and temporally marked figure of the modern Chinese woman, dressed in her qipao, the new “national” dress of the Republic. And in the same artist’s 1940 portrait of the Indian Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941), the disconnect reaches some sort of apogee in a foreground and background of entirely 193

Detail of figure 6.6

6.1.  Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953), Portrait of Miss Sun Duoci, 1936. Oil on canvas, 132 ×  107 cm. Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. 6.2.  Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953), Portrait of Rabindranath Tagore, 1940. Ink and color on paper, 51 × 50 cm. Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. 6.3.  Ding Cong (1916 – 2009), Images of Today (detail), 1944. Ink and color on paper, 28.6 × 149.9 cm. Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Gift of Dr. William P. Fenn, 1977.0101.b.

different formal lineages, which seem to have nothing to say to one another (fig. 6.2); the face and hands recall the artist’s training in Paris, where he won prizes for his life-­drawing skills, while the background displays all the guohua mannerisms of what was now the only “Chinese painting.”2 It is hard not to see these internal struggles in certain pictures as the visual image of the violently polemical context of debate around painting that marked the cultural life of the less than forty-­year period between the demise of the Qing empire in 1912 and the Communist Party victory in China’s prolonged civil war, leading in the end to the “Liberation” of 1949.3 Another visual image of the disintegration and discontent attendant on the worst of these years is perhaps visible in a painting entitled Images of Today (fig. 6.3) by the cartoonist Ding Cong (1916 – 2009), executed in 1944 during the darkest hours of World War II (for Chinese, the “War of Anti-­Japanese Resistance,” 1937 – 1945), in which China’s struggle against Japanese imperialism had both galvanized and fatally weakened the republican project. Amid scenes of military incompetence, peculation, bribery, and self-­seeking, the figure of the artist (note again the visual shorthand of floppy hair and cravat, seen as the apparel of the target of Miss Bee’s wit in figure 5.40), who is blindfolded and has no idea of what is going on around him, with certainly no ability to depict it, holds toward us an image of a mangy tiger, bedizened with prizes and 194

the appreciative seals and colophons of viewers.4 The barb is directed with minimal subtlety at the fondness in wartime for images of vibrant animal defiance (fig. 6.4), almost by then the official art of the Republic, whether in painted or photographic form. The composition is episodic and atomized; as these people cannot relate to each other, a common purpose, even the crucial common purpose of national salvation, is unachieved. Uncertainty and open polemic — or, to put it another way, free debate and the taking of different positions — were to be largely put aside in the monovocal the people

195

6.4.  Lang Jingshan (1892 –  1995), Roaring Lion, 1941. Photograph on bromide paper, 42 × 19 cm. Royal Photographic Society/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.

discourse of official cultural policy after the final Communist victory of 1949. Painting was to matter more than it ever had under the Republican government, which can scarcely be said to have had an identifiable cultural policy at all, but it was to be a rigorously policed practice, reconfigured to meet the needs of what was invariably referred to as “New China.”5 Part of that reconfiguration involved a reassessment of the cultural heritage of the past, often on the basis of an assessment of the social position of individual artists and writers, and firmly based on the principles expressed in the 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” by the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), with their insistence that only those who stood on the side of “the people” (renmin) could produce work of any value, often most appropriately expressed in graphic, reproducible, easily distributable form (fig. 6.5).6 With “the people” replacing “the nation” as the central enabling discourse of power and culture in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after 1949, even better were those works that could be demonstrated to be generated by “the people” themselves. In a painting of 1954, just five years after New China came into being, Pan Jiezi (1915 – 2002) painted The Creators of the Cave Art (fig. 6.6), a work that shows both painters and the viewers of painting together in the same field, in a manner that is rare in Chinese painting of any date. The painting is executed in what in Chinese is called “heavy color” (zhong cai), a technique with which the artist was particularly associated, and on which he wrote technical treatises. It is classified now by the National Art 196

Museum of China, where it is held (and presumably was so classified at the time of its execution) as Zhongguo hua, “Chinese painting,” and everything about it announces it as a work of the twentieth century, impossible of execution at any earlier period.7 The entire surface is covered with paint — as, for example, in an earlier picture equally insistent on its modernity, Chen Shizeng’s Viewing Paintings (see fig. 5.20) — and no part of the surface is left blank, as would have been common in much pre-twentieth-century work. It uses academically precise fixed-­point perspective, as taught in the art schools of China from the late nineteenth century, even underscoring its deployment of that quintessentially “foreign” technique through a regularly tiled floor, object of a thousand classroom exercises. The foreshortening of the Buddha image on the right-­hand wall similarly depends on mastery of this technical skill. Yet the subject matter (and this is a rarity in the art of New China) is ancient. The scene is set in China’s deep past, in the Tang dynasty (618 – 906) of the seventh to tenth centuries, and in the Buddhist cave temples of Dunhuang (the the people

197

6.5.  Hong Bo (1923 – 1985), Enlisting in the Army, published 1950. Color woodblock print, 29.3 × 20.3 cm. Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archae­ology, University of Oxford ea2006.271.

6.6.  Pan Jiezi (1915 – 2002), The Creators of the Cave Art, 1954. Ink and color on paper, 110 × 80 cm. National Art Museum of China.

“Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,” often now called the Mogao Caves) in the remote northwest of the country.8 A family of aristocrats, in gorgeous robes and accompanied by servants, has come to see the decoration of a Buddhist cave shrine, of which they are presumably the patrons. Seven painters in all are at work, two figures high on scaffolding, others engaged in putting the finishing touches to a decorative border, while a boy apprentice grinds red pigment. One more senior painter stands back to consider what has just been completed, while another man, his white beard marking him out as the most experienced of the group, and presumably its commanding intelligence, turns to acknowledge the interruption (though his gaze goes not to the viewing figures but well over their heads, into the distance, toward History). The tattered dress and bronzed skin of the painters mark them out as The People, as the anonymous creators of this masterpiece of world art that is at the same time the heritage not of “the nation” in some abstract sense, but more specifically of the working class who are the motive force of its history. Here the rich in their gorgeous robes can stand and stare, but they are in a sense superfluous, as the people get on with the task History has allotted to them. The whole work is marked by archaeological precision, not only of period costumes but of the paraphernalia of cartoons and water jugs that crowd the scene. There is a circularity about this, in that we know what Tang aristocrats looked like largely from the portraits of donors preserved at Dunhuang itself. But there is another form of circularity, in that Pan Jiezi was himself part of the team of artists who had worked at Dunhuang to study and to copy its murals. Reproduction of the murals had begun in the difficult wartime conditions of 1941 – 1943, when significantly the project of copying them was entrusted not to the technology of photography, but to guohua, “national painting,” inserting these previously unknown masterpieces into the national consciousness in a way that created “a kind of history painting for a newly realized nation. . . .” 9 Pan Jiezi was throughout the 1950s an assiduous publicist for the art of the Dunhuang caves, their pious purpose as works of Buddhist devotion largely ignored in favor of seeing them as works that demonstrated the artistic genius of The People, a task much aided by the anonymity of their creators. In a much later piece of writing, but one that perhaps helps us to understand the cultural politics in which this painting was originally inserted, Pan argued for an absolute division within “Chinese painting” into the two traditions of gongbihua and xieyihua.10 The former, which could be rendered tendentiously as “craftsmanly brush painting” (or less so as “meticulous brush painting”) — that is, a careful rendering of observed reality — is seen as dominant in early China, while its Other of “sketchy” (literally “writing the idea”) painting only becomes dominant from the Yuan/Ming period, a development Pan reprehends. There is therefore a polemical point thematized by The Creators of the Cave Art — namely, that it is works in a realist tradition that are the real, the authentic Chinese painting, as embodied by artists drawn anonymously from “the people.” This is clearly a variant of the argument first advanced by Kang Youwei, about Chinese painting’s precocity in mimesis, a precocity abandoned (wrongheadedly, it is here argued by Pan Jiezi) in later centuries by a turn to a 198

6.7.  Photograph captioned, “Li-­shu-­ching, a member of the Kuohsiang Commune, Changli County, Hopei, belongs to the Changli County Artists’ Association. Here we see her at work on a painting.” From People’s Communes in Pictures (Beijing, 1960). 6.8.  Emil Shulthess (1913 –  1996), A Young Artist in the Cho-­cheng-­yuan Garden in Soochow, 1964. Photograph from Emil Shulthess, China (London, 1966), fig. 14. 6.9.  Emil Shulthess (1913 –  1996), Art Students in the Wuhan Iron and Steel Works, 1964. Photograph from Emil Shulthess, China (London, 1966), fig. 139. 6.10.  Wu Zuoren (1908 – 1997), Portrait of the Painter Qi Baishi, 1954. Oil on panel, 116 × 90 cm. National Art Museum of China.

painting “beyond representation,” but it is here given a distinct political edge by the association of realism with the impeccably proletarian and anonymous artisan, and of expression with the self-­indulgence of a feudal ruling class.11 The anonymity of the creators of the cave art is an important part of their positioning here; it is their very absence from the written historical record controlled by the feudal ruling classes that makes it possible for them to stand for “the people” as both the real makers and the real viewers of art. By contrast, the great names of the past in painting, like the “feudal emperor” Song Huizong (1082 – 1135) and the despotic Ming “feudal landlord” Dong Qichang, were to be dethroned from their positions as the significant names around whom a history of Chinese painting could be written.12 However, in the early years of the People’s Republic, the image of actual named living artists continued to be as prominent as it had been in the pre-­Liberation era, with representations appearing in the mass media as well as in the photographs of foreign visitors of a whole range of painters, from revered figures of the emerging guohua canon to art students and amateurs (figs. 6.7 – 6.9), now liberated to engage their own creativity under the party’s beneficent tutelage, and the object of more or less admiring recording in the imagery of New China. The pre-­Liberation fame and impeccably working-­class background of the painter Qi Baishi (1864 – 1957) made him an ideal synecdoche for the argument that the People’s Republic had the care of the nation’s heritage at heart, a powerful rebuttal to the claims of the Nationalist regime now established on Taiwan to embody that heritage and preserve it from the peril of “red” suppression and oppression. His titular position as chairman of the Chinese Artists’ Association, available to meet and greet visiting potentially well-­disposed foreign dignitaries like the English painter Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959), only buttressed this claim.13 An oil portrait of the ninety-­year-­old artist (fig. 6.10) by Wu Zuoren (1908 – 1997), who had studied before 1949 in Paris and had at one point cultivated a more polemically modernist style, was painted in 1954, the very same year as Pan Jiezi’s image of the anonymous geniuses of Dunhuang, and the year in which he received Stanley 200

Spencer. Qi’s monumental bulk, his return of the viewer’s gaze, and, above all, his prominent, gnarled worker’s hands all go to create a picture that, though it contains no visual signifiers of Qi’s status as a painter (apart perhaps from the long gown, worn after 1949 by very few), says that the tradition he embodies has a future. This is so because the rendition in an academic oil-­painting style —  the style that was rapidly becoming the official descriptive mode of the party-­ state in China — of a portrait of the most distinguished practitioner of what was by the 1950s “traditional Chinese painting” is also perhaps a way of saying that this tradition is now enfolded within the modernity that the party and the state embody. There is here perhaps a kind of stylistic internal orientalism, in which guohua, “Chinese painting,” can be spoken about, spoken for, but is less able to speak for itself. By painting its most distinguished living painter in an utterly different manner to that which he deployed himself, it is as if an argument is being made, a reminder is being offered, that “Chinese painting” will not be the way in which the party, the state, and its leaders are shown to the people; another mode of painting, of art, will be employed in that task (fig. 6.11). In the early 1950s, forms of private and personal viewing of artworks still existed, and the forms of elite sociability that had prevailed between gentlemen for centuries retained a certain degree of purchase. A fan leaf, dated 1953 and painted with plum blossoms (fig. 6.12), is by the actor Mei Lanfang (1894 – 1961), the leading exponent of “Peking opera” in the twentieth century (and the last great male actor of female roles), admired by Berthold Brecht 202

(1898 – 1956) and Charlie Chaplin (1889 – 1977) alike, and another part of the cultural heritage carefully curated by New China.14 It perhaps looks at first glance like the kind of conventional image that could have been painted any time in the Ming or Qing periods (Mei Lanfang was not particularly renowned as a painter), and the subject of plum blossoms is hardly an unconventional one (though, remember, the folding fan is ultimately in its origins an imported form of material support for the image in this case). However, the image is pointedly dedicated to “Comrade Yuanying” (Yuanying tongzhi), using the appellation of the new egalitarian ethos of the socialist era. Exactly what form of negotiation, between the “public transcript” of New China and a more personal “private transcript,” is involved here we are unlikely to ever know.15 The stylistic fluidity that marked the 1950s, as the various polemical positions held by painters of the pre-­Liberation era struggled to mobilize the power and authority of the state apparatus behind their vision of what painting in New China could and should be, is mirrored in some interestingly awkward images of painters at work, images that have the potential to be to us today now both faintly risible and faintly sinister. The painter, editor, and art historian Huang Binhong (1865 – 1955) was, like Qi Baishi, a venerable figure after 1949; Huang’s engagement with and acceptance of the party’s cultural stance was an important gauge of a certain continuity, and hence needed to be shown to an audience of those professionally concerned with the arts.16 In one propaganda photograph of the Great Man (fig. 6.13), an audience is provided for him as he paints, in the form of his wife, Song Ruoying, who could be thought to look both a bit uncomfortable and slightly superfluous as she stands in front of this performance of “the Chinese artist.” More uneasy still is a staged photograph (fig. 6.14) that purports to show Huang sketching en plein air, as guohua painting attempts to come to terms with the demand for the elements of scientific realism, of engagement with the productive life of society, required by Communist Party cultural policy.17 Huang holds a sketchpad and gazes into the landscape while two younger men, presumably there not least to sustain the very aged painter physically, glance at the results, invisible to us.18 If we wanted a caricatured image of “the artist supervised by the party” in socialist China, this would do well enough (although in reality the two younger men are

the people

203

6.11.  Luo Gongliu (1916 –  2004), Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan’an, 1951. Oil on canvas, 164 ×  236 cm. National Museum of China. 6.12.  Mei Lanfang (1894 –  1961), Ink Plum Blossoms, 1953. Ink on paper, 18.8 × 49.8 cm. Xubaizhai Collection, Hong Kong Museum of Art.

6.13.  Huang Binhong (1865 – 1955) painting in his studio, watched by his wife Song Ruoying, 1953. Zhejiang Provincial Museum. 6.14.  Huang Binhong (1865 – 1955), photographed five months before his death, sketching at Feilaifeng, Lingyin Temple, Hangzhou, flanked by the painters Hong Shiqing (left) and Zhu Lesan (right). 6.15.  Yu Yunjie painting at the Foziling Dam construction site, 1950s. 6.16.  Yu Yunjie (1917 – 1992) and Zhao Yannian (1924 – 2014), Conquer Every Difficulty, Build Socialism, 1955. Poster, 76.5 ×  52.5 cm. The British Museum, London, 2006,0501,0.72.

themselves painters, presumably eager to learn, and the slightly creepy quality of this approved image is surely unintentional, to its promoters at least). The administrative divisions of post-­ 1949 art schools (principally into departments of guohua, “Chinese painting,” of youhua, “oil painting,” and of printmaking) represent both a continuation of Republican-­era debates and an institutionalization of the ambiguity about style found in Mao Zedong’s strategically nebulous but unquestionably normative “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” of 1942. Images of the painter at one with the masses, which abound in the periodicals of the 1950s, fit much more comfortably with the practices of oil painting than they do with the studio-­bound traditions of guohua. This can be seen in a photograph (fig. 6.15) of the painter Yu Yunjie (1917 – 1992) at the Foziling Dam construction site in the 1950s, a type of image designed to show painters where to be and how to behave within the parameters of the subjectivity of new socialist man. It is an ideological image, in that it shows the painter how to “insert himself into the social system that is his historically given potential field of public activity.”19 It is, in turn, meant to enable the painter to generate his own ideological images, which is surely the case in the poster Conquer Every Difficulty, Build Socialism (fig. 6.16), which results from a collaboration between Yu Yunjie and his contemporary Zhao Yannian (1924 – 2014), and which surely draws on the kind of sketch made at the dam site. The representation of the heroic worker, suspended from a rope as he hacks at the mountainside with a sledgehammer, is obviously ideological in that it provides a model for emulation by its audience, but it is also ideological in the sense that it interpellates the viewing subject as the sort of person who views images in this particular style, a style derived from academic oil painting that, though established in China for at least a century, was still a largely unfamiliar one to a mass audience outside the major metropolitan centers. Indeed, the print run for this poster, at 35,000 copies, shows just how narrow its viewing public may have been, especially when set beside the 2,396,000 copies of another poster image of the same year of 1955, entitled Looking at 204

Chrysanthemums (fig. 6.17). This print may be just as ideologically saturated, but it draws on more familiar styles of pre-­Liberation commercial graphics that had already prior to 1949 been available to a mass audience (fig. 6.18), as well as modernizing a long-­established congratulatory and celebratory iconography of happy and prosperous infants and auspicious flowers. The form of hua, of “painting,” that the party arguably cared most about was not, of course, painting at all, but the kinds of mass-­produced graphics, whether woodblock prints or more modern photolithographic posters, which went under the broad and baggy definition of nianhua, literally “New Year paintings” (from the originally apotropaic use of such printed images and the practice of pasting them to doors and walls at the turn of the lunar calendar). The new nianhua directive of the Ministry of Culture, issued on November 26, 1949, mere weeks after the official birth of the People’s Republic, was, in fact, one of the very first documents on cultural policy after Liberation, showing the importance that was attached to this sort of practice at the very highest levels. It had directed that: New nianhua should emphasize labouring people’s new, happy and hard-­ fought lives and their appearance of health and heroism. In art we must fully utilize folk styles, and strive to capture the customs of the masses. . . .

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As to those popular “door god” pictures, yuefenpai pictures, etc., new nianhua should pay attention to them, revise these styles, and make them a tool for popularising new art . . . 20

However, recent research is making clear the extent to which this “new art” met with passive resistance from a mass viewing public in the years after 1949, with consumers simply refusing to buy the new imagery of heroic model workers (fig. 6.19), preferring the familiar imagery of chubby babies, protective warriors, and gods often drawn from genuinely popular forms of theater. As late as 1958, “new” nianhua themes accounted for as little as 2.6 percent of the pictures sold in the major urban centers of Tianjin and Shanghai.21 For the party’s cultural organs, therefore, there was much work to be done in making an audience for correct forms of painting, as well as making the painters to produce them. This had begun immediately in 1949, with exhibitions of art taking place the minute it was feasible to do so (fig. 6.20). We naturally know much less about the former process, the construction of an audience, than about the latter, admirably chronicled by Julia Andrews and other scholars, but we can without too much difficulty read a photograph like one from April 1952 (fig. 6.21) as being involved in the process of showing how paintings are ideally to be looked at in the socialist state. We see a group of identically dressed workers (they are in some sort of factory uniform, not their everyday clothes), and we see them from the back. We stand among them. We look at an oil painting hanging high up on a wall, and even in the fuzzy reproduction available we can see that it shows a scene of socialist construction; a figure holding a plan gestures toward the bright future, flanked by peasants and a boy in the scarf of the Young Pioneers.

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6.17.  Zhang Yuqing (1909 –  1993), Looking at Chrysanthemums, 1st ed. 1955, 27th ed. 1957. Poster, 77.5 × 53 cm. 6.18.  Jack Birns (1919 – 2008), Prints for Sale Hang on a Sidewalk Fence, Shanghai, January 1948. Photograph, from Carolyn Wakeman and Ken Light, eds., Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Berkeley/ LA/ London, 2003), p. 68. 6.19.  Lin Gang (b. 1924), Zhao Guilan at the Conference of Outstanding Workers, 1952. Poster, 53 × 68 cm. Landsberger collection bg e15/555.

The picture is Distant View of the Huai River, and the context is an exhibition devoted to the management of the great waterway, work in which these very workers may well be involved.22 The operation of the process of interpellation, the “hailing” that causes us to recognize ourselves at the moment we are addressed, is blatant and obvious. But we need to remember also a number of things that are so obvious that they are almost hidden in plain sight in a photograph like this. Viewing has here been arranged through the danwei, the “work unit,” which was the basic organ of social life as well as of production in the People’s Republic of the 1950s to 1970s. This is a collective outing of workers from one factory (hence the uniforms), not a spontaneous desire to see art. In 1953 when this picture was taken, the stylistic conventions of the oil painting were familiar to relatively few people, and relatively few people would have ever seen an actual oil painting before. At most, they might have seen the kind of poster art displayed for sale in the streets of many pre-­Liberation cities. Foreign works were particularly rare. The painter Jin Shangyi (b. 1934) has recorded that, despite a keen interest in the visual arts, he never saw an oil painting made outside China until a major exhibition of Soviet work was shown in Beijing in 1954, making “socialist realism” visible through actual works in China for the first time (fig. 6.22).23 The viewing conventions of the museum, its hushed forms of attention, the focus on looking without touching — all of these are learned forms of behavior, as code-­bound as the conventions of the Ming gentleman. Before 1949, they had been restricted to a very small portion of China’s population, but after that date the potential for each individual to function as part of the audience for painting, through their presence as “the people,” was the people

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6.20.  Henri Cartier-­Bresson (1908 – 2004), Communist soldiers at an exposition organized by the cultural service of the People’s Army: the themes, the epic Long March, past misery of the peasants, and the necessity of a union between the peasantry and the army, 1949. 6.21.  Workers Looking at the Oil Painting “Distant View of the Huai River” in the Control the Huai Exhibition, Shanghai, April 1952.

6.22.  Boris Ioganson (1893 –  1973), In an Old Urals Factory, 1937. Oil on canvas, 280 ×  320 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 6.23.  [After] Dong Xiwen (1914 – 1973), The Founding Ceremony of People’s China, 1953. Oil on canvas, 230 ×  405 cm. National Museum of China.

created through massive institutional and ideological labor on the part of the state.24 One could see this as part of a larger process of spectacularization of life that took place in the PRC, whereby “the people,” while theoretically providing the actors of history whose passage across the square was viewed with approval by the leadership, in fact formed the audience that viewed that leadership (fig. 6.23), continuously present to its view.25 However, it would be wrong to see the audience for the painting made in the People’s Republic of China after 1949 to be one that was confined entirely to China itself. It may well be the case that certain forms of international engagement ceased, sometimes abruptly, after 1949, and the flow of students to Paris and Tokyo certainly dried up. But that is not to say that developments in the painting of China were thus utterly invisible to global audiences. Apart from the increased contact with eastern Europe, there was an enhanced degree of exchange with the artistic circles of what was only then beginning to be called the Third World. The 1950s saw exhibitions from India, Indonesia, Chile, Egypt, and Mexico shown in Beijing; David Siqueiros (1896 – 1974) was there in 1956, with reciprocal visits by Chinese artists to at least some of these countries.26 Nor did exchanges with western Europe cease completely. In 1954, the British cultural delegation that included Stanley Spencer visited the Art Institute in Shanghai as part of an extensive tour, and the novelist Rex Warner (1905 – 1986) expressed for the readers of the Sunday Times his relief at being presented with “a typical classical Chinese landscape, with its tufted rocks, cascades and pines,” which had been “rendered ‘modern’ by the insertion of some tiny figures of men, dwarfed further by a waterfall, yet seen to be carrying, if 210

very closely examined, minute red flags” (his appreciation did not extend to a record of the artist’s name).27 A year later Chinese audiences had the opportunity to view an exhibition of British graphic art from 1450 – 1956, and a show of “Sixty Years of British Painting in Oils” was (with some difficulty) shown in both Beijing and Shanghai in 1960; a reciprocal exhibition, “Arts from China,” which included the work of the now-­deceased Qi Baishi, was shown in London in 1964.28 However, after 1949 there was almost no scholarly interest in western Europe or North America in China’s contemporary art, a position that simply continued the relatively low degree of interest in contemporary practice on the part of professional academics that had prevailed since the fall of the empire in 1911 (essentially the same was true with regard to “modern Chinese literature”). The great exception was Michael Sullivan (1916 – 2013), whose Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century (London, 1959) was the first heroic attempt to provide an overview. Equally unusual, though less positive in its evaluation, was a brief article, “Art and the Artist in Communist China,” that appeared in the same year in College Art Journal and that concluded, “Certainly from a Western point of view the contemporary art scene in China looks like a creative desert, and the cultural line has yet to produce a true and original expression.”29 However, for a broader audience the print mass media in the United States (much more than in western Europe) did include coverage of cultural developments in what readers were told about the situation there. So on June 4, 1952, the New York Times carried the story “Peiping in Literary Drive: Chinese Reds Act to Bring Art Closer to the Party Line,” which made explicit reference to the “Rectification” campaign launched on the tenth anniversary of Mao’s Yan’an talks. The death of the painter Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953) was reported

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6.24.  “Red China Revealed in Her Art.” From the New York Times, January 5, 1958.

without editorializing in the same paper in September 1953, but much more coverage was given in 1955 to the arrest of the writer Hu Feng (1902 – 1985), who was accused of being at the heart of an “anti-­party clique” as a result of the fact that “he is reported to have made a speech last fall criticizing the party line on literature and urging fewer political restrictions on writers in Communist China.” The writer says that “The Hu Feng tempest extends beyond the ranks of Communist China’s ‘cultural workers’,” placing within scare quotes the Chinese term now in broad use in the People’s Republic.30 Major developments in “Free China,” Chiang Kai-­shek’s Republic of China, now confined to the islands of Taiwan and its outliers, were covered too. One year later, in 1956, under the headline “Bulk of China’s Great Art Works Held in Taiwan by Nationalists,” the New York Times reported as news that “Most of China’s choice art treasures are not in Communist-­ruled Peiping,” and quoted Dr. Han Lih-wu, identified as “head of a Nationalist commission in charge of the art treasures,” as saying, “About 95 percent of the cream is here.”31 The portion of the old imperial collections that were transferred to the island of Taiwan after 1949, stored initially in caves outside the city of Taizhong (Taichung), and then installed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei after its construction in 1965, played a major role in the cultural politics of the Nationalist (Guomindang, or KMT) regime there, as testimony to the possession of tokens of legitimacy, and as marks of continuity and the promise of eventual “return to the mainland.”32 In 1958, readers of the New York Times were given an extensive interpretation of the state of art in contemporary China, in a piece by Peggy Durdin (1910 – 2002), an American journalist born in China and very much an “old China hand,” titled “Red China Revealed in Her Art.”33 The subtitle lays out the argument: “Mao knows what he wants in painting — and the artists work to order. The classic school (‘hidden hint’) is replaced by the Communist school (‘happy, struggling worker’).”34 Using pairs of paintings (fig. 6.24), the article draws a stark distinction between a timeless “classic” school and the contemporary Communist one, the key difference lying in the status of the artist, and in particular in his personal freedom: In ancient China, the painter, like everyone else, owed loyalty to the emperor. But he was no slave of the state. . . . The artist, in Chinese classic society, was free to think and believe just as he pleased. . . . In the golden days of Chinese painting, the artist was free to live where and as he pleased. . . . The artist could talk and behave as he pleased. . . . A Chinese painter was free not to work, not to paint, not to say or do anything. He could feel as he liked and reflect his moods in his painting. . . . He was free above all to be at peace with himself and his world. . . . Nobody, Emperors included, told classic Chinese painters what and how to paint.

This is the idyllic situation that has been overthrown by the insistence on the artist as “a radio transmitter for carrying the party line to the masses — more trouble than the transmitter, less effective, and more casually discarded.” It was in this context of juxtaposition between past and present, between 212

Red China and Free China, autonomous artist and dragooned “cultural worker,” that the people of the United States were able to form a part of the audience for “Chinese painting,” when a major exhibition of treasures from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, brought across the Pacific in a US navy warship, toured five cities (Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco) in 1961 – 1962.35 With President John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963) and the veteran Chiang Kai-­shek (1887 – 1975) as its honorary patrons, this was an explicitly political event, as the preface makes clear. In a preface, Wang Shijie (1891 – 1981), chairman of the Executive Committee in the Republic of China, first relates the history of the collection, and in particular how it survived Mongols, Manchus, and both the 1860 and 1900 invasions by European, American, and Japanese imperialism.36 He goes on, “When the Communist revolt spread over many parts of the country in 1948 – 1949, the Chinese Government and the Museum decided to move them to safety, this time to Taiwan,” and he describes Chinese art as “one of the finest parts of the Chinese people’s cultural heritage . . . ,” something that is “ultramundane,” bringing “comfort and solace to the modern man who often feels himself entrapped in a materialistic world.” He concludes: Moreover, I also feel strongly that, in these troubled times of ours a fuller understanding of Chinese art and culture by the American people, on whose shoulders rests largely the future of the free world, assumes a new significance. This exhibition may also serve as a reminder that the free Chinese are fighting to save their cultural heritage as much as to recover lost territories.37

The introduction to the catalog is unsigned, although its principal authors were in all probability John Pope (1906 – 1982), director of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and James Cahill (1926 – 2014). It states, in its discussion of what it describes (but still within quote marks) as “literati painters”: The primary aim of these men, who were poets and calligraphers as well as painters, was not to create accurate images of the world outside them, or objects of beauty, or displays of skill; it was rather to embody in their works something of their own nature and feeling.38

And certainly the composition of the exhibition gives this sort of work a prominence that it had not had in previous major exhibitions of Chinese art, most notably in the famous 1935 – 1936 exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London.39 There were 231 items in the 1961 – 1962 “Treasures” show; catalog numbers 1 – 1 22 were paintings, 123 – 132 were calligraphy, and 133 – 231 were objects of various kinds (woven silk tapestry first, then bronzes, jades, ceramics, and other media, in that order). But although paintings made up only just over half of the items, they are cataloged in much greater detail than the bronzes and jades and porcelain, with the paintings occupying pages 34 to 213 of the 286-­page catalog. Of no. 67 (fig. 6.25), Three Friends of Winter by Zhao Mengjian (?1199 – 1 264), we are told, “Both subject and style typify the taste of the late Sung and early Yuan dynasty literati painters . . . ,” and there is a definite 214

emphasis on the “literati” tradition as central to painting. For example, the front cover of the catalog (fig. 6.26) carries an anonymous Song picture entitled Noble Scholar Under a Willow, (catalog no. 26), while the back shows Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall (catalog no. 98) by Wen Zhengming (1470 – 1559), at the acme of the literati tradition. At least one piece of newspaper criticism of the show dutifully got the point. In a rave review in the Washington Post, the journalist Leslie Judd Ahlander noted: By the second half of the 11th century, however, painting in China was to make a drastic change from an objective style to a subjective, expressive viewpoint. A school of gentleman-­scholars known as “literati” arose to oppose the academicians. They claimed, much like our own contemporary artists, that the value of the picture did not depend upon its likeness to anything in nature, but rather its purpose was to reveal the character and the mood of the person painting it.40

It is worth pointing out that the picture that illustrates this article, Guo Xi’s masterpiece Early Spring of 1072 (see fig. 1.11), is a work by an artist very much within the ambit of the imperial court, and one that would, as discussed in an earlier chapter, now be recognized very much as reflecting an ideology of imperial centrality, rather then the “character and mood” of Guo Xi. But the message still stands. The important thing about Chinese painting lies in its figuring of a “subjective, expressive viewpoint.” The painting that does this most successfully, and hence is “most Chinese,” is that by literati amateurs, who paint purely from their own autonomous subjectivity. No one tells the artist what to do. What is interesting is that the newspaper critic does what the scholars the people

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6.25.  Zhao Mengjian (1199 –  c. 1267), Three Friends of Winter, 1260. Ink on paper, 32.2 × 53.4 cm. National Palace Museum. 6.26.  Front cover of Chinese Art Treasures (1962), showing Anonymous (Song Dynasty), Noble Scholar Under a Willow, in the National Palace Museum.

never do, or at least never do in print at this point, which is to make explicit an analogy between the subjective brushwork of the Chinese artist of the past, and the subjectivist expressiveness of “our own contemporary artists.” Two years before the “Chinese Treasures” show opened, in March 1958, the same Leslie Judd Ahlander had made the analogy from the other direction, in reviewing the work of Gene Davis (1920 – 1985), principally known now as a member of the Washington Color School but characterized then by Ahlander as an “action” painter. She writes: It points up again the great affinity this form of painting has for Oriental art and how much it has borrowed of the Oriental technical concepts, though its end result is action and dynamics rather then balance and repose.41

At this point a seductive but ultimately dangerous line of argument begins to appear. It is beginning to look like it would be possible to construct a neat narrative on the following lines: the historiography of Chinese painting, as it develops in the United States in the early decades of the Cold War, favors literati painting as the most valuable and only real “Chinese painting” precisely because it is a useful stick with which to beat the cultural policies of the “red” enemy. State-­supported exhibitions of treasures from the Cold War ally of Taiwan are deployed in support of this conclusion, analogous to the ways in which we would now recognize that the dissemination of abstract expressionism received a degree of covert support behind the scenes from organs of the US state.42 Just as the freedom to be a Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956; fig. 6.27) or a Gene Davis proves the superiority of the free world, so the significant art of China is that which most fully allows for the autonomy and expression of the artist’s subjectivity. But will this really do? Is it not too pat, too obvious? Does it not seem to ignore the extent to which a definition of “Chinese painting” centered on a “subjective, expressive viewpoint,” produced, above all, by a “school of gentleman-­scholars known as ‘literati’” is a co-­production of audiences both outside China and inside the country itself, which equally draw on the powerful rhetoric of a distinctively Chinese tradition of painting as the embodiment of the nation, this tradition being seen as revitalized and re-­energized by socialist transformation after 1949? For if it was the masterpieces of the past that were to act as “Chinese painting” for the US audience, both popular and learned, it was the art of the present that was presented to audiences elsewhere under that selfsame rubric. In considering the increasingly global audiences involved in constructing “Chinese painting” in the twentieth century, we need also to take into account the visibility of that Chinese painting to, for example, a Soviet audience, as in the major Chinese exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in autumn 1950 or the Chinese participation in the “Art of Socialist Countries” exhibition held in Moscow in 1958 – 1959. The official discourse around this very explicitly emphasized the plurality of styles in the “socialist camp,” aiming to refute directly accusations from the West that the creativity of the individual and the specifics of national styles were suffering suppression under socialism.43 216

One of the key twentieth-­century sustainers of the discourse of “Chinese painting,” as painter, educator, and writer, was Pan Tianshou (1897 – 1971), who was photographed in 1964 at work on large-­scale paintings for the Huaqiao Hotel (fig. 6.28). As early as 1926, he had already been the author of one of the first historical surveys of Chinese painting, perhaps, in fact, the first person writing in Chinese to deploy the title Zhongguo huihua shi, “A History of Chinese Painting.”44 This necessarily led him to an attempt to define what “Chinese painting” was, a task he continued to work on after 1949, when he was perhaps the leading defender of the validity of certain kinds of painting practice — to him, “Chinese painting” — in the face of claims of its obsolescence in the modern world. In 1950, Pan alleged, the powerful art-­world figure Jiang Feng (1910 – 1982) had gone as far as to claim that: Chinese painting is unable to reflect reality, is unable to produce large scale pictures, it must be eliminated; in the future painting with a global character will certainly appear. Oil painting is able to reflect reality, able to produce large scale pictures, and has a global character . . . 45

Whether Jiang Feng actually uttered these words is unknown, but in the context of his fall from power in the Anti-­Rightist Campaign of 1957, they provided Pan Tianshou and those who agreed with him with a powerful position from which to defend “Chinese painting” on patriotic and nationalist grounds, as well as purely aesthetic ones. What they indicate is that defenders and opponents of “Chinese painting” in the PRC shared certain presumptions: namely, that something called “Chinese painting” existed, had always existed, had certain characteristics that could be circumscribed and defined, and was essentially different from, even opposite to, something called “Western painting” or “oil painting.” One of Pan Tianshou’s most famous polemical pronouncements is

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6.27.  Martha Holmes (1923 –  2006), Jackson Pollock Working in His Studio, 1949. Photograph by Martha Holmes/Time Life Pictures/Getty images. 6.28. Anonymous, Pan Tianshou (1897 – 1971) at Work in the Huaqiao Hotel, 1964. Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum.

his claim, apparently made in 1965, that “We must draw a major distinction between Chinese and Western painting;”46 the original Chinese sentence uses a vivid image of pulling (lakai) two things apart, as if their difference had to be manufactured by human effort and agency. That agency was deployed equally by writers and audiences and artists in China and in “the West” to the point that the distinction seems a natural one, a part of the much larger distinction between “East” and “West,” traditional and modern, that is reflected not only in such institutional arrangements as which paintings go in which museums, but more subtly and more profoundly in the way we think about the world. It is unlikely (though not absolutely impossible) that Pan had access to the contemporary work of Ernst Gombrich, but the parallels between his views and Gombrich’s insistence on a dichotomy between an illusionistic West and conventionalized East are striking, to say the least. A term like “Chinese traditional painting” is one that Pan Tianshou was happy both to use and to define.47 But it is not something that pre-­exists its usage, in which it means very much not everything that was done in China in the past, but only a certain part of that, the part that — from very different political and intellectual positions —  both Pan Tianshou and his Western contemporaries in the 1950s needed to be kept separate. This act of simultaneous definition and separation might bring us back to the Mellon Lecture podium in 1956, when for Ernst Gombrich the “restricted visual language of Chinese art” was the necessary foil to his narrative of the conquest of visual reality, of the relationship between “Art and Illusion.” It might bring us also to someone with a very different take from Gombrich, to Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994), who would definitely have shared Jiang Feng’s view that “Chinese painting” was an exhausted tradition, reduced some centuries before to “the pat and the pretty.”48 But love it or hate it, these savants of the mid-­twentieth century all knew what it was. I wish it were possible to be so sure. Two photographs of mid-­twentieth-­century painters working on the floor (see figs. 6.27, 6.28) — one of whom (Pan Tianshou) insisted on the total difference

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of Chinese and Western painting, the other of whom (Jackson Pollock) needed just as badly to partake in the repression of the idea that they had any similarity (particularly in the case of his own work) — might promote reflection on the extent to which very different artistic as well as scholarly agendas might have a stake in an insistence on “Chinese painting,” now seen as a major part of “Asian art,” as a known, bounded, and, above all, separate quantity.49 This is not to say that we need to redress the balance through an equally totalizing insistence that Chinese painting and Western painting are “just the same”; that is not the point at all. But it is sometimes necessary to pause and think about what has been lost as well as gained by the construction of “Chinese painting” in a way that excludes a whole range of paintings (figs. 6.29 – 6.31) of various dates, even as we struggle to understand how and why it has come to mean what it does and what, if we are to be realistic about it, it always now will.50 In the days of his celebrity, images of Pan Tianshou as painter of, instructor in, and audience for paintings were part of the vast state apparatus of cultural and propaganda work of the PRC. In a photograph (fig. 6.32) of him teaching at the Academy in Hangzhou in 1961, he has literally rolled up his sleeves to show by doing; his eager young charges look to the master, not to the image on the table. In a photograph of him attending a children’s art exhibition, also in Hangzhou in the same year (fig. 6.33), he beams with approval at the work on the walls, while the group of children registers varying degrees of glee and bafflement. Pan would have beamed with less beneficence on the contemporary the people

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6.29. Anonymous, Portrait of Li Rihua (1565 –  1 635), early 17th century. Ink and color on paper, 41.6 × 26.7 cm. Nanjing Museum. 6.30.  Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766) and others, Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor, detail from Portraits of Emperor Qianlong, the Empress, and Eleven Imperial Consorts, 1736 – c. 1770s. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 53.8 × 1,154.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1969.31. 6.31.  Chen Baoyi (1893 – 1945), Portrait of Guan Zilan, 1930. Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 60.5 cm. National Art Museum of China.

scene at the Shanghai School of Art (fig. 6.34), where in a photograph taken again in 1961 a group of oil-­painting students at their easels copy work brought back by fellow students who have studied in the Soviet Union. It is easy to caricature this as an image utterly horrific to the dedicated viewers of “Chinese painting,” whether someone in China itself, like Pan Tianshou, or someone like Peggy Durdin, for whom this image of “cultural workers” engaged in slavish 220

copying of the Soviet model would have confirmed her most negative views of the position of art in Red China. But, as we know, both Pan Tianshou and the Russian-­schooled oil painters were to be swept aside equally in the cataclysm of the Cultural Revolution, from the mid-­1960s to the mid-­1970s, even if the “Ten Years of Chaos” of the official designation were not equally intense in their brutality and violence.51 A part of what underlay the Cultural Revolution’s ideology was the utopian notion that everyone is potentially an artist, indeed that the very subject position of “artist” should vanish, with its elitist implications of a select group of “experts” and “authorities,” against whom both rhetorical and actual violence was to be deployed. Already prior to this period we see in the People’s Republic the idea of art as a product of “the people,” not only in Pan Jiezi’s 1954 image of The Creators of the Cave Art, but in posed propaganda photographs like one of a female commune member rather genteelly dabbing at a picture (see fig. 6.7), a potentially gruesome image when we remember it dates from the depths of the famine that afflicted China in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Li Shujing might just still be alive today. At least we know her name, something that is not the case with the equally posed Red Guards at Harbin’s University of Industry (fig. 6.35), at work on an image of the Great Helmsman in 1967. This is as it should be, as the image of “the artist” vanished completely from public discourse. A rare photograph (fig. 6.36) of the painter Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938), showing him at work on another colossal Mao portrait, comes from the undoubtedly large but still largely untapped private archive of the period, and would never have been published at the time. Although we do know the name of the painter of an image entitled Occupy the Cultural Battlefield of the Village (fig. 6.37), what is important to record is that Zhang Lin is a “Commune member, Dongfengsheng Production Team, Niudong Commune,” in Huxian County, the center of a much-­publicized movement of amateur artists designed to demonstrate the end of the era of the trained specialist.52 the people

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6.32.  Pan Tianshou (1897 – 1971) with His Students, Hangzhou, 1961. Photograph. Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum. 6.33.  Pan Tianshou (1897 –  1971) Visiting a Children’s Art Exhibition in Hangzhou, 1961. Photograph. Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum. 6.34.  Students of the oil painting class of the Shanghai School of Art copying work by students returned from the Soviet Union in 1961. 6.35.  Li Zhensheng (b. 1940), Red Guards Painting a Poster at Harbin’s University of Industry, Aug. – Dec. 1967. 6.36.  Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938) at Work on a Billboard, Hangzhou, 1967. Zheng Shengtian Collection.

In this image, titled with the typically militarized language of the “battlefield” and its busyness harking back to the street scenes of urban vibrancy done for eighteenth-­century emperors, the cultural life of the rural village is going on at full blast, with storytelling, performance of model operas, and a group of painters (it is significant that they are a group) at work on a large outdoor mural to the upper right. Painters, subject matter, and viewers have here fused into one mass of “the people,” with no differentiation between them. But the defining meta-­picture of the Cultural Revolution is probably a widely circulated photographic image (fig. 6.38) of a family of peasants greeting the arrival of what is one of the most widely reproduced paintings of all time, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (some 900 million copies were printed).53 It was painted by Liu Chunhua (b. 1944), though his agency at this point is as invisible as his name, while the people, their faces wreathed in grins of incredible glee, commune directly with the icon of the godlike leader (though a small child in arms is too young to manufacture the necessary degree of joy). Here the subject is everything; as in a religious icon, this is not about the viewing of an image but the direct access it gives to the divine. The fact that it is a painting, “Chinese” or otherwise, has vanished. That fact returns in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, generating some pathetic attempts to return to what is seen as the normality of the 1950s, in retrospect a golden age of party support for the arts. A somewhat stilted academic painting of 1984 (fig. 6.39) by Ren Mengzhang (b. 1934) nostalgically portrays Zhu De Viewing a Painting Exhibition, in which the great military leader Zhu De (1886 – 1976), Mao’s staunchest partner and most vigorous critic, a figure sidelined in the Cultural Revolution, gives his blessing to a group of monumental oil paintings. The implied presence of “foreign friends” in this scene of the 1950s recalls the age of close collaboration with eastern Europe,

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6.37.  Zhang Lin (active 1970s), Occupy the Cultural Battlefield of the Village, 1974. 76.8 ×  52.7 cm. The Royal Library, Copenhagen. 6.38.  Photograph showing peasants welcoming a poster, Liu Chunhua, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan.

when Ren Mengzhang himself had studied under the Russian teacher Konstantin Maksimov (1913 – 1993), who may also be pictured within the painting, as the seated figure in brown. Edges and fragments of nine oil paintings are visible, the ones we see most clearly being the three small nudes on the back wall, a reference to the ongoing controversy (one going back to the beginning of the twentieth century) about the admissibility of this subject matter in painting in China (if not in “Chinese painting”).54 We cannot see the painting at which the great man, straw hat in hand, gazes so intently. This sort of “grand machine” painting is a tour de force of compositional complexity that stands right at the end of a tradition of paintings about looking at paintings, doomed to give way, like the very academic tradition it celebrates, as other forms of painting became dominant in China from the mid-­1980s.55 Issues of spectatorship may still matter here, as in a humorously unsettling painting from 1991 – 1992 entitled Father in Front of the TV (fig. 6.40) by Liu Wei (b. 1963), with its disjunction between “traditional Chinese opera” and the culture of consumerism and leisure that 224

now sustains it for an audience of the older generation, clad here in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, bastion of the power of the state. Already new forms of art that challenged the centrality of any form of painting were gaining publicity and recognition, and were to be the way in which a new category of “Chinese contemporary art,” with new forms of spectatorship and increasingly global visibility (fig. 6.41) was to come to prominence.56 It would be easy, then, too easy, to end this account with the death of “Chinese painting,” of which Huang Yong Ping’s work (see fig. 1.1) could, if we so wished, be taken as the figure. But to do so would be in the first place empirically wrong, since although guohua is largely excluded from the category of “contemporary Chinese art,” as a glance through exhibition catalogs will confirm, it remains commercially viable as an artistic practice within the Sinophone world, and continues to accrue prestige and recognition to its most successful practitioners.57 At the same time, the “death of painting” seems itself like a moment of a particular past, as the works of a still-­deeper past continue to grip and engage viewers, and as the ongoing fascination with what happens when we look at a painting, which so intrigued Ernst Gombrich in the 1950s, continues to provide an artist of today like Thomas Struth (b. 1954) with some of his most “pensive” images (fig. 6.42).58 It has been a continuous theme of this account to argue that “Chinese painting” has always been a known category, one claimed as known utterly and one defined by its viewers. So it is fitting to at least gesture toward the limits of that knowledge, with a reminder

the people

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6.39.  Ren Mengzhang (b. 1934), Zhu De Viewing a Painting Exhibition, 1984. 160 × 180 cm. Ren Family Collection. 6.40.  Liu Wei (b. 1965), Father in Front of the TV, 1992. Oil on canvas, 80 ×  100 cm. Private collection.

that viewers do not always know what is going on, and, by extension, what has gone on. A small painting of artists sketching on the beach at the north Chinese seaside resort of Beidaihe was created by Zheng Ziyan (b. 1951) in October 1975 (fig. 6.43). Part of what makes this a compelling image for me personally is that I spent part of 1975 myself in Beijing, as one of the first language students from Britain to study Chinese there since the launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. This picture was painted very shortly after my stay. But as a member of the “No ­Name” (Wu ming) group of unofficial painters (though even that name was not coined until a retrospective show in the changed China of 1979), Zheng Ziyan will have kept viewing of this painting very tightly restricted to a small group of her trusted friends; the consequences of any wider viewing might be personally disastrous, given that the group continued to produce paintings that in both subject matter and style were far from acceptable to the party-­state at the time.59 I never knew — indeed as almost everyone else did not know till some years later — that such things were going on. The privacy of the image produced is thematized here in the fact that all three artists, the two on the beach and the one on the distant rock, have their backs to us; we cannot see what they are working on. We the viewers look in the same direction as them, look “with” them,” as if to say that we are the viewers of this particular “Chinese painting” now, however it is configured. There is an audience, however, in this delicate and risky meta-­painting, in the form of two children off to the right of the composition. But being too young and too far away to grasp the subversive aspect of what they are seeing, they might stand for all observers, none of whom know enough to be able to say with certainty, “Chinese painting has to be like this” or “the defining characteristic of Chinese painting is that.” the people

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6.41.  Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. Photograph. 6.42.  Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Museo del Prado 7, Madrid, 2005. Chromogenic print, 177.5 × 218.6 cm. Cat. 9461. 6.43.  Zheng Ziyan (b. 1951), The No Name Group Sketching at Beidaihe, 1975. Oil on paper, 19.7 × 27 cm. Collection of Zheng Ziyan.

conclusion

Anyone who works on art in China, and who is invited to give the Mellon Lectures must necessarily feel a particularly heavy responsibility. For that lecturer could perhaps be seen (if only in his own anxieties) as representing the field, or sub-­field, in a way that is not so absolutely the case for someone who speaks on a topic from within the Western canon, and who can certainly begin to speak at a different point, certainly can begin by assuming what “we all know” in a different way. The opportunity to speak about Chinese art in such a context, coming around as it does so rarely, must perforce seem to the speaker (and perhaps to the audience too) like the opportunity to speak for Chinese art. This, of course, is far from being a situation unique to the study of China. Any speaker from outside the Western canon who stands up in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to address a topic not in “art” but in “Chinese art” (or pre-­Columbian, or Indian, or African art) is almost bound to feel in gloomier moments that they find themselves somewhat in the position of the Earl of Manchester, one of the opponents of King Charles I in the English Civil War; he mournfully, if accurately, remarked, “If we fight [the king] 100 times and beat him 99 he will be King still, but if he beat us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone.”1 A less than incisive series on some topics can be presumed to leave the topic unscathed; the damage is done solely to the reputation of the speaker. In 1954, Sir Herbert Read — whose Concise History of Modern Painting would, some thirty-­five years later, as we have seen, play an unexpected role 229

Detail of figure 6.10

C.1.  Franz Kugler, Handbuch

der Kunstgeschichte, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1872), i, fig. 137, Aus einer chinesischen malerei.

in Huang Yong Ping’s visual argument about the simultaneous impossibility of a self-­contained “Chinese painting” and of a self-­obsessed modernity that excluded it (see figs. 1.1, 1.2) — gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. His theme was “The Art of Sculpture.” Savaged by the American critics of the day, Clement Greenberg chief among them, the series is described in the official history of the Mellon Lectures as “heralding the eclipse” of Read’s reputation as the foremost art critic of his time.2 “Sculpture,” one presumes, suffered little damage. But the same is not quite the case with the speaker on the art of China, for whom the credibility of the topic itself is also at issue — hence the feeling of responsibility. There is no point in lamenting the fact that things are not otherwise. But perhaps any continuing feeling of marginalization is, in fact, both totally unnecessary and more than somewhat unjustified. It embodies that claiming of the underdog and outsider status that is one of the most unattractive features of contemporary academic politics. It is also unwarranted in that, as I have tried to suggest, it is precisely the supposedly marginalized topics that are essential to art history’s construction and sustainability, that make it what it is. At least since what has been called “the first survey of world art,” Franz Kugler’s 1842 Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, included an example of a generic figure seated on a giant fish (quite probably taken from porcelain decoration) and called it “From a Chinese Painting” (Aus einer chinesischen malerei), what has been called “the Chinese example” has always been present within art history (fig.  C.1).3 In discussing the use made of “the Chinese example” by Eric Hayot, the editors of his suggestive study The Hypothetical Mandarin have remarked on his “symptomatic understanding of the example,” and on the fact that “Examples, one might say, always point in two directions: shoring up the writer’s argument, yes, but inevitably unmasking the ideological motivation of that argument at the very same time.”4 And they cite the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, who has claimed that it is “China, more than any other 230

place, that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself, from Smith and Malthus to Marx and Weber . . .”5 Thus while the very first image in Gombrich’s Art and Illusion is a meta-­ picture, a cartoon showing an Egyptian Life Class solemnly sizing up a flat model to produce a flat image (Egyptians being an “other” of “Western” art that goes at least as far back as Johann Joachim Winckelmann [1717 – 1768]), it is China which for Gombrich sums up the difference between the Western and the oriental, and hence makes the former possible. Art and Illusion is structured around Gombrich’s opposition of “illusionistic” images (“a special class of representations grounded in biological, wired-­in mechanisms or perception that are shared by all cultures”) and “conventional” images (“which approach the conventions of language”).6 This dichotomy is then exemplified by the difference between Western and oriental pictures, within which latter category Chinese painting is to stand as the prime example: Would not a Chinese call that orchid “perfect” which corresponds most closely to the rules he had absorbed? . . . No artistic tradition insists with greater force on the need for inspired spontaneity than that of ancient China, but it is precisely there we find a complete reliance on acquired vocabularies.7

Gombrich then cites the “recent translation of a Chinese standard textbook on painting from the seventeenth century” (he is referring to Mai-­mai Sze’s 1956 The Tao of Painting, vol. II, which includes a translation of The Mustard Seed Manual of Painting [Jiezi yuan hua zhuan] of 1679) and notes that, “the Chinese method must have been as admirably adapted to the function of art in this beautifully consistent culture as the formulas evolved by Egyptians were adapted to their purpose.”8 Here, once again, for art history at least, the East is One. How did this come about? This question of “how” is not so easy to answer as the question of when it did. In 1827 the readers of the London newspaper The Times could have read a curious advertisement:

to schools and families  — A young Lady, accustomed to instruct in the various branches of drawing, including velvet, wood and Chinese painting, would be happy to attend a school or family on the most reasonable terms. Address, post-­paid, to P. M., postoffice, Newgate-­street.9 Exactly one hundred years later, in 1927, it was possible to purchase a lavishly produced volume, printed in Paris, entitled Chinese Paintings in English Collections, by the British Museum curator Laurence Binyon.10 Clearly the words “Chinese painting” cannot carry the same meaning in both these contexts, and although we can never know exactly what P. M. was teaching her young pupils (indeed if she had any), it is a pretty safe bet that it would not have been recognized as anything other than lamentably amateurish chinoiserie in the context of the 1920s. By that date, and most particularly in a burst of activity between about 1908, when Binyon had published Painting in the Far East, and about 1935, when paintings from the former Qing imperial collections were exhibited in London, what “Chinese painting” was became more or less a fixed and conclusion

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known quantity. It would be possible to argue that central to this professionalization of the study of the subject were the processes of foreign acquisition of actual examples that were unthinkable in 1827, taken for granted in 1927, and inescapably bound to the progress of imperialism in Asia over that period. It would certainly be possible to see the “invention of Chinese painting” as part of this wider process. It is certainly the case that the first usages of the term “Chinese paintings” in the principal European languages come in the context of collections and exhibitions, where ownership of the things is intimately related to ownership of the term. As we have seen in chapter 5, William Anderson’s 1886 Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum is the earliest use of the term in an English book title, and it is similarly in contexts of collection, ownership, and display that the term become naturalized, whether in the 1908 Berlin Aus­ stellung chinesischer Gemälde aus der Sammlung Olga-­Julia Wegener, held at the Königliche Akademie der Künste, the 1910 British Museum Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings, the 1912 Paris Exposition de peintures chinoises anciennes (Musée Cernuschi), or the 1914 Special Exhibition of Chinese Paintings from the Collection of the Museum, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.11 It was possible to see, certainly possible to possess, Chinese painting in Berlin, London, Paris, and New York (or indeed in Tokyo) some time before the topic existed much outside of the context of public or private collections, and certainly before anyone outside East Asia possessed the credentials of a higher research degree on the subject.12 To follow this line of argument would be to appear broadly in step with the agenda of Edward Said’s now classic, if still contentious, text Orientalism of 1978. Here, the East is defined and constructed in order that it can be dominated and constrained. Such a position has undoubtedly been very influential on earlier work of mine, and has been identified as playing this role by commentators on it.13 However, without repudiating it totally, I would wish to say that further study has led me to the view that we have underestimated one of the perhaps distinctive features of the way in which orientalism engaged with “Chinese painting” as an object of study, and that is the extent to which the construction of the topic is carried out on the basis of indigenous materials, and then reappropriated, in complex ways and at a very early date, within China itself. Neither exogenous imposition nor indigenous essence, Chinese painting, just like its audiences, stands between the native and the foreign. Emblematic of this might be the central role of the “Eurasian” entrepreneur Star Talbot — also known as Shi Dezhi, Shu Yunming, Shi Duzhi, and Sze Tak Chee — in the growth of the market for “Chinese painting,” and the long-­standing confusion between him and the Shanghai-­based Latvian art dealer E. A. Strehlneek, also known as Shi Deni, impresario of the bilingual volume Chinese Pictorial Art/Zhonghua minghua of 1914, mentioned in chapter 5. (For years Talbot and Strehlneek were thought to be the same person.14) We can see this “in-­ betweenness” too if we consider two works on the topic, both published in 1928, just one year after Binyon’s Chinese Paintings in English Collections. One is the first book in English to be entitled simply Chinese Painting, by John C. 232

Ferguson (1866 – 1945). The second is Tse Tsan Tai, Ancient Chinese Art: A Treatise on Chinese Painting, also discussed in chapter 5. Neither of these, if for varying reasons, would be held in very high regard by contemporary scholarship on the history of Chinese painting; indeed, the latter has vanished almost entirely from the scholarly literature, while Ferguson’s survey, though respectfully received in its day, has equally failed to establish itself as a classic. But there are other similarities between these two neglected forays into the field (of greatly differing length and seriousness, it must be said), or, rather, there are interesting similarities between the positioning of their authors. Xie Zuantai, a colonial subject and bilingual Chinese nationalist, can be compared in some ways to J. C. Ferguson, the foreign-­born scholar who more than any other of his contemporaries naturalized himself in a Chinese context, living his entire adult life in the country, working for a succession of Chinese patrons and institutions, acquiring an unparalleled fluency in the language, leaving his collection not to an American museum but to a Chinese university.15 Both men operated in practice in complex transnational contexts, while themselves firmly adhering in theory to the concept of the bounded separateness of cultures. One of the few reviews of Chinese Painting at the time of its publication noted, “During his residence of thirty-­five years in China, the author has had unusual chances of gaining familiarity with the native stance towards the subject of this book,” and remarks, “Thus he can write not as a western critic groping in a world remotely alien to his own, but as an interpreter of the native spirit and tradition permeating an art which has many roots in the long life of Chinese civilization.” What Ferguson does, as the review goes on to point out, and what connects him not just to Xie Zuantai but to much more renowned and authoritative figures in China itself, can be baldly stated thus: “Dr. Ferguson contrasts the sources of painting in the East and the West.”16 We only need to contrast the attention and authority given by foreigners to “the native stance” with regard to Chinese painting, to that which was accorded to what the native producers and viewers of, for example, Persian architecture or, even more, African sculpture might think at the same time, to see some of the ways in which the Chinese context was distinctive. This distinctiveness may well owe its particular force in large part to the existence of a very large and very significant body of Chinese textual knowledge in which “the native stance” was materialized.17 The work on Chinese painting by John C. Ferguson that does remain of enduring value —  indeed is still a crucial research tool not yet wholly superseded by digitization — is his Lidai zhulu hua mu, Catalogue of Recorded Paintings of Successive Dynasties, in which he painstakingly combed through some 108 Chinese texts from the Tang dynasty to the contemporary Republican period, and listed all the painting titles they contain, thus making it possible in theory to trace successive mentions of any given extant painting through time.18 Written entirely in Chinese and published in Beijing in 1934 under Ferguson’s Chinese name, Fu Kaisen, the “Catalogue” addressed an audience situated within China itself, complicating further any notion of separate or discrete “foreign” and “Chinese” traditions of scholarship on Chinese painting, even as rhetorically these two possibilities were being ever more insistently promoted. conclusion

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Ten years on from the insistence of both Ferguson and Xie Zuantai on the importance of the “native stance” — by which time China was engaged in the savagery of the Sino-­Japanese War, and the dreams of “world peace and harmony” with which Xie had invested better cross-­cultural understanding through Art were a sad memory — a refugee from a different savagery contemplated a body of Chinese painting with a historiographical eye. Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) went to see the exhibition of the Chinese painting collection of Jean-­Pierre Dubosc (1904 – 1988) shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in October 1937, and his review of it was published in Europe: Revue Mensuelle in January 1938.19 What else Benjamin had read about Chinese painting we cannot precisely know, but he was clearly aware that this exhibition offered an opportunity in which “connoisseurs took advantage of the occasion to mark a shift in values that is currently taking place in the field.” By this he meant that it was an exhibition (he alludes to one other show held in Oslo in 1936 with a similar agenda) in which the painting of the Ming and Qing periods, or at least the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, was treated with respect. This re-­evaluation of later, post-­Song Chinese painting stood on its head the position of Ernest Fenollosa, for whom it was in the years from the middle of the Ming period that Chinese painting became “childish, confused and merely ornamental”; for him these years marked the end and not the beginning of “Chinese painting.”20 Benjamin might perhaps be criticized for his willingness to indulge in the kind of high-­sounding but rather vacuous ekphrasis that post-­war professional historians of Chinese art strove so hard to excise from their writing: An essential feature of the image is that it incorporates something eternal. This eternal quality expresses itself in the fixity and stability of the stroke, but it is also manifest, more subtly, thanks to the fact that the image embodies something that is fluid and ever-­changing. It is from this blending of the fixed and the mutable that Chinese painting derives its meaning.

He might be criticized too (as I have criticized others) for his confidence that the small number of examples in front of him can stand for “Chinese painting” as a whole, and it is telling in this regard that throughout the review he names no actual specific painting contained within it, since it is not the specific but the category that engages him. He is scrupulous to bolster his position with a gesture to “the native stance,” this time in the shape of Lin Yutang (1895 – 1976), the most successful translator and interpreter in his day of what had become traditional Chinese culture, and who combined a confident command of that culture with a doctorate in philology from Leipzig. What Benjamin may well not have been aware of is that in the very same year in which the Chinese painting collection of Jean-Pierre Dubosc was made visible in Paris through exhibition (fig.  C.2), it was simultaneously being made visible in Beijing through the publication there of high-­quality collotype reproductions of some dozen of its finest items, under the Chinese title Bao hui ji, Collected Treasures of Painting.21 Who then can we say is responsible for “Chinese painting” as an object? Where was it made? Whom does it serve? 234

This last question is perhaps the most difficult, even the most dangerous one. In discussing what he calls “the bad objects of empire,” things which are “objects of ambivalence and anxiety that can be associated with fascination as easily as with aversion,” W. J. T. Mitchell posits a sequence of engagements, “from bad to tolerated to curated and collected,” which he interprets under the figure of three highly charged terms: idol/fetish/totem.22 These are not three different kinds of things, he insists, but the names of three different relations to things, and in particular of relation to images. The first, idolatry, is characterized by a surplus, by an overestimation of the image (“when the calf is seen as a miraculous image of God, it is an idol”), while the second, conclusion

235

C.2.  Liu Jue (1410 – 1472),

Retreat in the Mountains, calligraphy by Shen Zhou (1427 – 1509). Ink on paper, 149 × 55 cm. Musée des Arts Asiatiques – ­Guimet, Paris, aa218.

fetishism, relates to “greed acquisitiveness, perverse desire, materialism, and a magical attitude towards objects.” A thing is a totem when “it is seen as a self-­consciously produced image of the tribe or nation.”23 These are for him a sequence, but that sequence it seems to me is complicated, and the possibilities for simultaneous manifestations of all three cannot be laid lightly aside. It is hard not to see something of the fetish in the ways that audiences outside China over the century from about 1850 to 1950, particularly in Europe and North America, have written about Chinese painting as something that moved over the period from the openly disdained to the enthusiastically curated. It is equally hard not to see “Chinese painting” as a totem of Chineseness, of national and ethnic identity, perhaps most intensively for audiences in the Sinophone world but not exclusively restricted to it. These two responses have surely coexisted and continue to do so. Their continuing tension may even be a healthy one. But it might be good to stop this side of idolatry. It might be good to abandon definition for investigation, rejecting in the case of Chinese painting “the fantasy of purity” and disconnecting it from the necessity of serving, along with “Chinese culture” as a whole, as some sort of salvation balancing out the traumas of China’s recent history, both those that can be spoken of openly and those that, for now, remain part of who knows how many private transcripts.24 If we stop thinking about “Chinese painting” and start thinking about, thinking with, Chinese paintings we may be surprised at the richness and the possibilities we find.

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notes

introduction 1.  James Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong, 2010), p. 134, where the unstated collapse of “Chinese landscape painting” into “Chinese painting” requires noting; the quote is also cited in Jerome Silbergeld, “Reflections on Chinese Art History: An Interview with Wen C. Fong,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), pp. 17 – 51 (p. 18). 2.  W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London, 2005), p. 49.

ch a pter one: beginning a nd ending 1.  Richard Vinograd, “The Ends of Chinese Painting,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 510 – 26; Vinograd cites, among other points of reference, the classic article Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (1981), pp. 69 – 86; see also Yves-­Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Yves-­Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA and London, 1993), pp. 229 – 44 (originally published in 1986). As an aside, but an important one, it is necessary to distinguish the “end of painting” from the broader “end of art,” as adumbrated by a line of thinkers from Theodor Adorno through to Arthur Danto and Hans Belting, on which see Hal Foster, Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (London, 2003), pp. 123 – 26. 2.  Michael Zheng, “Objectivity, Absurdity and Social Critique: A Conversation with Hou Hanru,” Yishu 8.5 (Sept./Oct. 2009), pp. 47 – 61, stresses both the conscious appropriation of Marcel Duchamp’s idea of using chance, and claims that the choice of texts for treatment was totally governed by aleatoric processes. However, the reception of the work by almost all critics, as here, attaches significance in varying degrees to the books used. The photograph of the work’s creation (and the spinning-­disk device used to determine choices of actions) is reproduced in Yin Ji’nan, Du zi kou men: Jinguan Zhongguo dangdai wenhua yu meishu (Beijing, 2000), p. 122. 3.  Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London, 1959). On the translation, see Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-­Garde in Twentieth-­Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011), p. 101. 4.  Wang Bomin, Zhongguo huihua shi (Shanghai, 1982); the preface is dated Jan. 1966, and an afterword explains the long gap between composition and publication. 5.  Shane McCausland and Ling Lizhong, Telling Images of China: Narrative and Figure Paintings 15th – 20th Century from the Shanghai Museum (London, 2010), pp. 94 – 97. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the inspiration for the 2012 Mellon Lectures provided by this outstanding exhibition, and to thank Shane McCausland and Michael Ryan for the opportunity to see it in Dublin in 2010. 6.  Song Lian (1310 – 1381), translated in Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London, 1997), p. 109. 7.  For example, Wen C. Fong, Art as History: Calligraphy and Painting as One (Princeton, NJ, 2014). 8.  Craig Clunas, “Antiquarian Politics and the Politics of Antiquarianism in Ming Regional Courts,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago, 2010), pp. 229 – 54. 9.  Susan Bush and Hsio-­yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA and London, 1985); pp. 24 – 25 translate the famous story from the writing of Han Fei (d. 233 bce ) in which a retainer

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of the Bronze Age King of Qi explains why demons and goblins are easier to paint than dogs and horses, since everyone has actually seen the latter. By at least the turn of the millennium the idea that “painting” (hua) had distinctive regional styles was in place. See Anthony Barbieri-­Low, “Regionalism in Han Dynasty Stone Carving and Lacquer Painting,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), I, pp. 259 – 79 (p. 270), for a lacquer dish dated 9 CE with an inscription identifying its decoration as being Shu hua, “Sichuan painting.” 10.  Craig Clunas, “Images of High Antiquity: The Prehistory of Art in Ming Dynasty China,” in Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Die Gegenwart des Altertums: Formen und Funktionen des Altertumsbezugs in den Hochkulturen der Alten Welt (Heidelberg, 2001), pp. 481 – 91 (p. 487). 11.  Stephen Little, “A ‘Cultural Biography’ of the Admonitions Scroll: The Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Shane McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in China (London, 2003), pp. 219 – 48 (p. 222). 12.  This is the surmise in W. M. Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters, Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture (Leiden 2001), p. 53. See too Ralph Kauz, “Gift Exchange between Iran, Central Asia, and China under the Ming dynasty, 1368 – 1644,” in Linda Komaroff and Sheila Blair, eds., Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (Houston, 2011), pp. 115 – 21. 13.  David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400 – 1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven, CT and London, 2005), pp. 295 – 304. 14.  David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-­Century Iran, Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture (Leiden 2001), pp. 178 – 79. 15.  Thackston, Album Prefaces, pp. 12, 16; for a full translation of the preface, see pp. 4 – 17. For a discussion, and for the comment that “the Picture Gallery of China” (nigarkhānā-­yi chin) is “used frequently in Persian poetry,” see Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, pp. 160 – 208, and p. 176, n. 71. 16.  Xuanhe hua pu, juan 12, pp. 141 – 42, in Yu Anlan, ed., Hua shi congshu, 5 vols. (Shanghai, 1982), II. See also Sakakibara Satoru, Bi no kakehashi: ikoku ni tsukawasareta byōbutachi (Tokyo, 2002), p. 21 (a reference for which I thank Melanie Trede) and, more generally, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle, 2008). 17.  Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-­Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu, 2006), pp. 5 – 6. 18.  Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Gallery: A Short History (London, 2009), p.  117. One could also draw attention to such earlier curatorial arrangements as the inclusion in the collections of the National Museum in Stockholm of the Chinese paintings collected by Osvald Sirén (1879 – 1966), and their subsequent transfer to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in 1963, as showing how conscious decisions were taken in a number of collections to distinguish between “painting” and “Chinese painting”; see Magnus Fiskesjö, “Art and Science as Competing Values in the Formation of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities,” in Guolong Lai and Jason Steuber, eds., Collectors, Collections, and Collecting the Arts of China: Histories and Challenges (Gainesville, FL, 2014), pp. 67 – 98. 19.  Vinograd, “The Ends of Chinese Painting,” p. 511. 20.  For the separate terminology of such images, see Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600 – 1900 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 509; Jan Stuart and Evelyn Rawski, Worshipping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 93 – 95. 21.  Hin-­cheung Lovell, An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Painting Catalogues and Related Texts, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies 16 (Ann Arbor, 1973), pp. 49 – 58. 22.  Andrew M. Watsky, “Locating ‘China’ in the Arts of Sixteenth-­Century Japan,” Art History 29.4 (2006), pp. 600 – 24 (p. 602). However, note that by the seventeenth century the term kara-­e 唐繪 was being replaced in Japan in discussions of painting theory by kanga 漢画, though the use of kara/ Tang for things Chinese remained widespread. See Timon Screech, “A Japanese Construction of Chinese Painting in the Eighteenth Century,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 460 – 72 (pp. 460, 462). For an overview, see Itakura Masaaki, “Chinese Paintings That Crossed the Sea: The Development of Chinese Art Collections in Japan,” in Zhang Hongxing, ed., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 – 1900 (London, 2013), pp. 87 – 95. 23.  The text of Hwagi appears in Sin Sukju, Bohanjae jip, originally printed in 1645 (Seoul, 1988), pp. 107 – 9, and is translated in full in Burglind Jungmann, “Sin Sukju’s Record on the Painting Collection of Prince Anpyeong and Early Joseon Antiquarianism,” Archives of Asian Art 61 (2011), pp. 107 – 26; for the wider context, see Burglind Jungmann, Die koreanische Landschaftsmalerei und die chinesische Che-­ schule: Vom späten 15. bis zum frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1992), and Yi Sŏng-­mi, “Ideals in Conflict: Changing Conceptions of Literati Paintings in Korea,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 288 – 314.

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24.  David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA, 2008), p. xii. 25.  Ain Indianisch tuech, darauf ist gemalt ain grosser vogl gleichwie ain Schwann sambt andern vögelen, sonst von allerlai laubwerch gemalt. Ain Indianisch tuech, darauf Indianische heuser gemalt , in dem haus siezen die Indianer bei einander und einer schreibt in ain roten rockh. Mer ain Indianisch tuech, darauf etliche Indianische heuser gemalt, darinnen weiber, so auf saitenspil schlagen. Document 5556, dated May 30, 1596, Innsbruck, in Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, II. Theil: Urkunden und Regesten aus der k. und k. Hofbibliothek, herausgegeben von Wenedelin Boeheim, 7 (1888), pp. 226 – 313 (p. 307). On “Indian” as a term, see Jessica Keating and Lia Markey, “‘Indian’ objects in Medici and Austrian-­Habsburg inventories,” Journal of the History of Collections 23.2 (2011), pp. 283 – 300. For a recent overview of European acquisition of Chinese painting since the early modern period, see Clarissa von Spee, “Setting Milestones: Collecting Classical Chinese Painting in Europe,” in Zhang Hongxing, ed., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 – 1900 (London, 2013), pp. 65 – 77. 26.  For example, the Chinese paintings in the Munich Kunstkammer, contemporary with Schloss Ambras, and cataloged intriguingly on at least one occasion as “windows” (4 indianische hohe Fenster aus dünnem Pergament, mit Figuren bemalt), are all lost today. Dorothea Diemer, Peter Diemer, Lorenz Seelig, Peter Volk, Brigitte Volk-­Knüttel, et al., Die Münchener Kunstkammer: Band 2, Katalog Teil 2 (Munich, 2008), pp.  600 – 602. The work of Cesare Vecellio, published in 1590, explicitly derives his images of Chinese clothing from paintings he claims to have seen personally; Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Asia, Africa, The Americas: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (London, 2008), pp.  526, 528. A full audit of such early mentions remains desirable. 27.  The translation is from the classic article by Michael Sullivan, “Sandrart on Chinese Painting,” Oriental Art 1.4 (Spring 1949), pp. 159 – 61. For the original text, see Rudolf Arthur Peltzer, ed., Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-­, Bild-­und Mahlerey-­Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister (Munich, 1925), pp.  297 – 98. On Sandrart’s discussion of Chinese painting, and the argument that his major source was Nicolaus Trigaut, De christiana expeditione apud Sinas . . . (1612), see Michèle-­Caroline Heck, Théorie et pratique de la peinture: Sandrart et la Teutsche Academie (Paris, 2006), pp. 64 – 66. 28.  Isaac Vossius, Variarum obervationis liber (London, 1685), pp. 69 – 85 (p. 79). I am grateful to William Poole for this reference. 29.  This fantasy of total knowledge is not, of course, restricted to painting, and in the parallel field of literature there was an equivalent willingness from at least the eighteenth century to make generalizations for which evidence and confidence were in inverse proportions. See David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century England (Cambridge, 2010), p. 167, for a typically acerbic comment on the “littleness and poverty of genius in almost all the works of taste of the Chinese” by Thomas Percy (1729 – 1811). 30.  John Barrow, Travels in China (London, 1804), p. 323. 31.  Quoted (significantly) in Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, sixth ed. (London, 2002), p. 228. 32.  On Berenson’s Chinese longings, see Laurance P. Roberts, The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti (New York, 1991), p. 8; Evaert Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 260; and Craig Clunas, “The Art of Global Comparisons,” in Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global (London, 2013), pp. 165 – 76 (pp. 168 – 7 1). On the oriental links of Sienese painting, see Bernhard Berenson, “A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, Part I,” Burlington Magazine 3.7 (1903), pp.2 – 35; Bernhard Berenson, “A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, Part II,” Burlington Magazine 3.8 (1903), pp. 171 – 84; and the discussion in Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Berenson, Sassetta and Asian Art,” in Machtelt Israëls, ed., Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece (Florence and Leiden, 2009), pp. 37 – 49. 33.  Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago and London, 2005), p. 77. 34.  Clement Greenberg, “The Art of China: Review of The Principles of Chinese Painting by George Rowley” (The Nation, Oct. 28, 1950), in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950 – 1956 (Chicago and London, 1993), pp. 42 – 44 (p. 43). 35.  Jones, Eyesight Alone, p. 483, n. 23, citing Clement Greenberg “Abstract and Representational,” Art Digest (Nov. 1, 1954). 36.  Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 175. The fact that “Chinese painting” was equally deficient for both Clement Greenberg and Ernst Gombrich, the two dominant figures writing on the visual arts in English in the 1950s, is highly suggestive of ways in which they might have been closer in position than is always recognized; see Jones, Eyesight Alone, pp. 97 – 1 26. 37.  See the entry by Philip Conisbee in Judy Metro, ed., The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts:

notes to pages 18 – 22

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Fifty Years (Washington, DC, 2002), pp.  44 – 47. The literature discussing Art and Illusion is itself huge; for a recent reassessment of its theoretical premises, see Jason Gaiger, “Hegel’s Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation between Art History and Philosophy,” Art Bulletin 93.2 (June 2011), pp. 178 – 94. 38.  The Boston painting used as Gombrich’s example in Art and Illusion is, for instance, reproduced on a full page of William Cohn, Chinese Painting (London, 1948), plate 98. 39.  An almost random example: Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London, 1949), p. 53: “Without [Salvator Rosa] Alexander Cosens would have had no style in which to depict the grandeur of wild nature, in those strange drawings which remind us both of Hercules Seghers and Southern Sung.” Clark’s familiarity at that date with the range of Southern Song painting can only have been very sketchy. 40.  Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain (Oxford, 2009), p. 8. The “different and individual” qualities of separate civilizations, which make history possible, is centrally insisted on by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803) as part of the counter-­enlightenment project that is a significant element in orientalism’s composition. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (London, 2000), p. 213, and on Herder as orientalist, see Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Washington, DC and New York, 2009), pp. 43 – 52. 41.  For example, Arthur Danto, “Ming and Qing Paintings,” in Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York, 1994), pp. 32 – 39. From its confident assertions of factual errors — for example, that everyone interested in painting in China were themselves painters, through its ability to derive “traditional Chinese art” from an evidence base of one example, to its inability to spell correctly the names of artists — this is the sort of piece that it would be somewhat harder to get into print about “painting” tout court. 42.  Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge, 2009), p. 56. 43.  Translated in Robert van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome, 1958), pp. 4 – 6. 44.  This term, now widely employed in book titles (for example, Jiang Zhaoshen, Wen Zhengming yu Suzhou huatan, Taibei, 1977) does not appear to predate the twentieth century, and is probably a loanword into Chinese from the Japanese neologism gadan. 45.  Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, ed., Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th – 19th Centuries (London, 2002), pp. 88 – 89. 46.  Michela Bussotti, “The Gushi huapu, a Ming Dinasty Wood-­ Block Printing Masterpiece in the Naples National Library,” in Paolo Santangelo, ed., Ming Qing yanjiu (Naples and Rome, 1995), pp. 11 – 44; Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, pp. 139 – 48; J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle and London, 2012), pp. 68 – 69. 47.  See Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or The Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry, 26 (2000), pp. 414 – 34. 48.  W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London, 2005), p. 198. 49.  On Korea, see Yi Sŏng-­mi, “Ideals in Conflict,” pp. 293 – 94, which notes how a copy of Gu shi hua pu was brought to Korea in 1606 by the Ming envoy Zhu Zhifan (1564 – after 1624); also J. P. Park, “De-­ influencing Late Chosŏn (1700 – 1850): Open and Closed Discourses on Early Modern Korean Art,” Global Korea: Old and New (Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference of KSAA (2009), pp. 27 – 38. On Japan, see Machida Shiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan, Kinsei Nihon kaiga to gafu: etehon ten, 2 vols. (Machida, 1990); Ma Erkai, “Shiqi shiji Zhongguo huapu zai Riben bei jieshou de jingguo,” Gugong xueshu jikan, 305 (Aug. 2008), pp. 86 – 101. 50.  The quotation is from Foster, Design and Crime, p. 68, based on the argument in Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Critical Inquiry 10.3 (March 1984), pp. 510 – 42. 51.  James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2010); pp. 1 – 1 2 contain a trenchant argument for the expansion of the purview of what should count as part of the history of Chinese painting. 52.  Foong Ping, “Multipanel Landscape Screens as Spatial Simulacra at the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), II, pp. 533 – 56 (p. 547). 53.  These were also the first Chinese paintings published by the Finnish art historian Osvald Sirén, who along with Berenson’s Japanese disciple Yashiro Yukio (1890 – 1975) was one of very few scholars in the first half of the twentieth century to do serious work on both Italy and China. On Sirén, see Minna Törmä, Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Sirén’s Journey into Chinese Art (Hong Kong, 2013); on Yashiro, see http:// yashiro.itatti.harvard.edu/ [accessed Sept. 1, 2015]. 54.  Wu Tung, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting (Boston, 1997), pp. 164 – 65. See also Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, pp. 18 – 19.

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55.  Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, Seichi Ninpō: Nihon bukkyō 1300-­nen no genryū (Nara, 2009) catalog no. 104 (35 and 36); the set is discussed in Zhang Hongxing, ed., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 – 1900, catalog nos. 23 and 24, pp. 176 – 79. 56.  These sets form a central part of the argument in the first Mellon Lecture series to address the art of China, published as Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998: Bollingen Series XXXV (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 162 – 85. 57.  For example, the wall painting of the Daoist teacher Wang Chongyang (1113 – 1170) using a painting of a skeleton to instruct disciples on the illusory nature of human existence. See Paul Katz, Images of the Immortal: The Cult of Lü Dongbin at the Palace of Eternal Joy (Honolulu, 1999), p. 154, and Jeehee Hong, “Theatricalizing Death and Society in The Skeletons’ Illusory Performance by Li Song,” Art Bulletin 93.1 (March 2011), pp. 60 – 78 (p. 62). 58.  W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London, 1994), p. 22.

ch a pter two: the gentlem a n 1.  On Du Jin, see James Cahill, Parting at the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368 – 1580 (Tokyo, 1978), pp. 154 – 56. Cahill discusses a number of what he describes as “functional pictures” by Du, and by the use of the marked case implicitly demotes them from the status of “paintings” pure and simple. His more recent work, in particular Pictures for Use and Pleasure, revises this view considerably. 2.  Reproduced in Á l’ombre des pins: Chefs-d’œuvre d’art chinois du Musée de Shanghai (Geneva, 2004), cat. no. 59, pp. 126 – 30. Li He and Michael Knight, eds., Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty (San Francisco, 2008), no. 131, pp. 229 – 30; note that they have spurious seals of Tang Yin (1470 – 1524) and are ascribed to Du Jin on grounds of connoisseurship. 3.  The phrase qin qi shu hua is used to describe the cultural accomplishments of the learned monk Biancai in the early Tang text Lanting ji by He Yanzhi, and then is repeated in the same terms in juan 3 of Zhang Yanyuan, Fa shu yao lu, according to an online search of Siku quanshu (http://skqs.ouls.ox.ac .uk/), accessed Aug. 27, 2012. An online search of the twenty-­five dynastic histories and of Gujin tushu jicheng perhaps surprisingly reveals no instances at all of qin qi shu hua, and there are only ten in Si ku quan shu, including the Zhang Yanyuan reference; the rest are largely from Ming and Qing painting catalogs. It is a very rare phrase in biji texts of the Song to Qing, and does not appear at all in the standard index, Kyōto daigaku tōyōshi kenkyukai, Chūgoku zuihitsu sakuin (Tokyo, 1954), pp. 192 – 93 for headword kin. The earliest use of the term “Four Accomplishments” (si yi) to cover these activities appears in Li Yu (1610 – 1680), Xian qing ou ji, where they are associated not with “scholars” but with young girls, for whose self-­confidence they are said to be “unmissable”; see Li Yu, Xian qing ou ji, Ming Qing xiaopin congkan (Shanghai, 2000), pp. 167 – 7 1. 4.  Craig Clunas, “Human Figures in the Decoration of Ming Lacquer,” Oriental Art, New Series 32.2 (Summer 1986), pp. 177 – 88 (pp. 182 – 85). 5.  Kendall H. Brown, The Politics of Reclusion: Painting and Power in Momoyama Japan (Honolulu, 1997), p. 50. 6.  Brown, The Politics of Reclusion, p. 80, where reference is made to Sōami’s Kundaikan sōchōki, c. 1471, which mentions a painting on the theme in the shogunal collection, and to Zokosui shishū, which records Kōsei Ryūha (1374 – 1446) inscribing a poem on the kinkishoga theme upon a fan painting. See also Timon Screech, Obtaining Pictures: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (London, 2012), p. 146. 7.  Richard Stanley-­Baker, “Josetsu’s Catching a Catfish with a Gourd: Cultural Agendas and the Early Fifteenth-­Century Shogunal Academy,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), I, pp. 421 – 45 (p. 435). 8.  Scarlett Jang, “Representations of Exemplary Scholar-­Officials, Past and Present,” in Cary Y. Liu and Dora C. Y. Ching, eds., Arts of the Sung and Yüan: Ritual, Ethnicity and Style in Painting (Princeton, NJ, 1999), pp. 38 – 67 (p. 64, n. 14), cites the work of Aoki Masaru to assert, “From the Northern Sung onward, the mention of these four arts together to describe a gentleman’s versatility becomes increasingly frequent,” but does not give specific examples. 9.  Jang, “Representations of Exemplary Scholar-­Officials” discusses and dates as “13th century” a hand scroll in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, depicting the Eighteen Scholars of the Tang, which has a traditional attribution to Liu Songnian (fl. c. 1175 – after 1195), as well as a single hanging scroll that repeats part of the composition and that may have formed part of a set of four. James Cahill, incorporating the work of Osvald Sirén and Ellen Johnston Laing, An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, and Yüan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1980), pp. 135 – 36, dates the former work as “Yüan? copy after an old composition,” and the latter as “Southern Sung Academy copy of older (10th century)

notes to pages 32 – 41

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composition.” If indeed they are of the early date Jang proposes, then this composition is a viable prototype for the more numerous qin qi shu hua sets of the Ming, but it does not show all four activities. 10.  See the discussion in Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London, 1996), pp. 239 – 43. 11.  Cahill, Index, p. 286, lists as “Yüan-­Ming works, probably not by Jen.” In Zhang Hongxing, ed., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, cat. no. 53, pp. 238 – 41, the set is cataloged as “early 15th century,” and the different seasonal background of each individual scroll is emphasized, “painting” being the activity of winter. 12.  This set is discussed in Helmut Brinker, “Seeking Delight in the Arts: Literary Gathering by Ikeda Koson,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds. Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), II, pp. 679 – 92, where Brinker gives the set a fifteenth-­century date, and demonstrates that it provided motifs used for a painting by Ikeda Koson (1801 – 1866). 13.  For the works, see Chen Jiejin and Lai Yuzhi, eds., Zhuisuo Zhe pai/Tracing the Che School in Chinese Painting (Taibei, 2008), pp. 268 – 7 1. They are listed as “Good Ming Academy copies of Southern Sung works” in Cahill, Index, p. 217, but there is no incontrovertible evidence known to me that such a subject was ever actually executed in Song times. 14.  David Ake Sensabaugh, The Scholar as Collector: Chinese Art at Yale (New Haven, CT, 2004), pp. 6 – 7. 15.  The Qiu Ying version is discussed in Thomas Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting, Freer Gallery of Art Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition (Washington, DC, 1973), pp. 60 – 61. 16.  This possibility was suggested to me in discussion with Shane McCausland and Timothy Barrett, who pointed out the homophone between jia mao 家貓 “domestic [white] cat” and jia mao 假冒 “false appearance,” “hypocrisy.” 17.  Wu, Double Screen, illus. 77 and p. 239, also gives this a Ming date. Note that this is cataloged as Song in date in Zhongguo gudai shuhua jianding zu, ed., Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu, 24 vols. (Beijing, 1986 – 2001), 6, p. 339. 18.  For an exception that proves the rule, we might consider the woodblock illustration to the seventeenth-­century drama The Lady in the Painting (Hua zhong ren), illustrated in Judith T. Zeitlin, “The Life and Death of the Image: Ghosts and Female Portraits in Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century Literature,” in Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA and London 2005), pp. 229 – 56 (p. 249), where the male lead is shown turning away in contemplation from the portrait of a lady he is supposedly painting. And a seventeenth-­century hanging scroll in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (1971.75, gift of Mrs. Elizabeth Hay Bechtel) depicts an elderly man in the act of putting a brush to a screen and producing a single horizontal line; this may, however, be a specific historical reference (I thank Chen Fongfong for bringing this picture to my attention). 19.  For the former, see James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China, Bampton Lectures in America (New York, 1994), or Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470 – 1559 (London, 2004). For the latter, see Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-­Painting Genre (Cambridge, 1996); also Maggie Bickford, “Visual Evidence Is Evidence: Rehabilitating the Object,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), I, pp. 67 – 92 (p. 72), where it is explicitly stated, “The visual evidence demands that we reject a neat bipolar split between professional and scholar-­amateur painting.” 20.  Clunas, Elegant Debts, p. 158, quoting He Liangjun (1506 – 1573). 21.  The Wang Zhen paintings are reproduced in Jiangsu sheng Huaian xian bowuguan and Zhongguo gudai shuhua jiandingzu, eds., Huaian Ming mu chutu shuhua (Beijing, 1988), and discussed in Kathlyn Liscomb, “A Collection of Painting and Calligraphy Discovered in the Inner Coffin of Wang Zhen (d. 1495 CE),” Archives of Asian Art 47 (1994), pp. 6 – 34. 22.  Wu Hung, Double Screen; Wu Hung, “The Painted Screen,” Critical Inquiry 23.1 (Autumn 1996), pp. 37 – 79 (p. 37). There is also a third iteration of the argument in Wu Hung, “Screen Images: Three Modes of ‘Painting-­within-­Painting’ in Chinese Art,” in Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, eds., Arts of the Sung and Yüan, papers prepared for an international symposium organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition Splendors of Ancient China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (New York, 1996), pp. 319 – 37. On some of the earliest hua zhong hua, see also Wang Yao-­t’ing, “Paintings within Paintings,” in Pearls of the Middle Kingdom: A Selection of Articles from the National Palace Museum Monthly of Chinese Art (Taipei, 1984), pp. 80 – 87, and Michael Sullivan, “Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting,” Artibus Asiae 27 (1966), pp. 239 – 54. 23.  The first of these is accepted as Southern Song dynasty in date in Cahill, Index, p. 218, and is discussed in Jang, “Representations of Exemplary Scholar Officials,” pp. 53 – 54. 24.  McCausland and Ling Lizhong, Telling Images of China, cat. no 1.

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25.  Richard M. Barnhart, “The Ming Academy,” in Richard M. Barnhart, Wen C. Fong, and Maxwell K. Hearn, Mandate of Heaven: Emperors and Artists in China (Zurich, 1996), pp. 95 – 112 (p. 98); Maxwell K. Hearn, “An Early Ming Example of Multiples: Two Versions of Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden,” in Judith G. Smith and Wen C. Fong, eds., Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting (New York, 1999), pp. 221 – 56; Yin Ji’nan, “Mingdai gongting huajia Xie Huan de yeyu shenghuo yu fang Mi shi yunshan huihua,” Yishushi yanjiu 9 (2007), pp. 101 – 26 (where for the first time Xie Huan’s exact dates are established); Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-­Hall, eds., Ming: 50 Years That Changed China (London, 2014), pp. 190 – 91. 26.  Richard Barnhart, ed., Painters of the Great Ming: The Imperial Court and the Zhe School (Dallas, 1993), pp. 1 – 20. 27.  Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, p. 30, downgrades it to “School of Xia Gui” — that is, late thirteenth century. 28.  Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Bollingen Series XXXV:51 (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2010), p. 102, argues for the necessary (though not causal or unilinear) connection between images of absorption and the new conditions of prolonged and intensive looking in European art only made possible by the development of the private picture gallery. This, of course, assumes that the European example is the only extant one. 29.  I am grateful to Dennis Prior for this suggestion. 30.  Shan Guoqiang, ed., Yuanti zhepai huihua, Gugong bowuyuan cang wenwu zhenpin daxi (Shanghai, 2007), no. 38; Li and Knight, Power and Glory, no. 124; discussed in Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London, 1996), p. 64. 31.  Parenthetically, it is worth remembering that Xie Huan, artist of the Apricot Garden scroll, is present in the Zhenjiang Museum version of the composition, and probably once existed too in the Metropolitan Museum version (which has been trimmed); see Hearn, “An Early Ming Example of Multiples,” p. 228. 32.  Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 100. 33.  A. H. Pasco and Wilfrid J. Rollman, “The Artistry of Gide’s Onomastics,” MLN 86.4 (May 1971), pp. 523 – 31. 34.  Robert S. Nelson, “Empathetic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature,” Art History 30.4 (2007), pp. 489 – 502 (p. 500). 35.  Victor I. Stoichita, L’Instauration du tableau: Metapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris, 1993), translated as Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-­Aware Image: An Insight into Early-­Modern Meta-­Painting (Cambridge, 1997), p. 3. For an objection to the term “meta-­picture,” see Paisley Livingston, “Nested Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61.3 (2003), pp. 233 – 45. 36.  Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 35. 37.  Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 48; also p. 82, “The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such: it is the place where pictures reveal and ‘know’ themselves, where they reflect on the intersections of visuality, language, and similitude, where they engage in speculation and theorizing on their own nature and history.” 38.  See n. 20. 39.  Wu, “The Painted Screen,” p. 45. 40.  Wu, “The Painted Screen,” pp. 52 – 56. 41.  Wu, “The Painted Screen,” p. 73. 42.  Stoichita, Self-­Aware Image, p. 16. There is more recent work in response to Stoichita on the meta-­ image in Europe that does take account of the Chinese case, and that is commendably uninterested in trying to push “modernity” back to the earlier period that it studies, even as it expounds “meta-­painting in the age of the fresco”; see Péter Bokody, Images-­Within-­Images in Italian Painting (1250 – 1350): Reality and Reflexivity (Farnham, 2015), pp. 89 – 112. 43.  Stoichita, Self-­Aware Image, p. 224. 44.  Stoichita, Self-­Aware Image, p. xiv. 45.  Stoichita, Self-­Aware Image, p. 113. 46.  Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, pp. 150 – 53. 47.  Carrier, A World Art History, p. 112. 48.  Wen C. Fong, “Tung Ch’i-­ch’ang and Artistic Renewal,” in Wai-­kam Ho and Judith C. Smith, eds., The Century of Tung Ch’i-­ch’ang 1555 – 1636, 2 vols. (Kansas City, MO, Seattle, and London, 1992), I, 43 – 54 (p. 49). 49.  Guoli gugong bowuyuan, Ying xi tu/Painting of Children at Play (Taibei, 1990), pp.  68 – 7 1, Cahill, Index, p. 174, catalogs as “Good Ming painting.” 50.  Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, p. 120. 51.  Barnhart, “The Ming Academy,” p. 108; Park, Art by the Book, pp. 24 – 25. 52.  Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge, 1991); Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China

notes to pages 52 – 66

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(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2008); Wu Renshu, Pinwei Shehua: Wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu (Taibei, 2008). 53.  Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (London, 2007), pp. 39 – 41. 54.  Jennifer Purtle, “Scopic Frames: Devices for Seeing China in 1640,” Art History 33.1 (2010), pp.  54 – 73. Xiao Li-­ling, The Eternal Present of the Past: Performance, Illustration, and Reading in the Wanli Period (1573 – 1619) (Leiden, 2007), pp. 9, 219, takes art historians to task for their description of these images as “meta-­pictures,” but she asserts rather than proves that they originally existed as illustrations to a text of the play. 55.  Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 58 – 64. 56.  This work is discussed, and its inscriptions translated, in Chu-­tsing Li and James C. Y. Watt, eds., The Chinese Scholar’s Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period (New York and London, 1987), pp. 37, 144. For a stimulating revision of our understanding of the artistic theory of the period, see Katharine P.  Burnett, Dimensions of Originality: Essays on Seventeenth-­Century Chinese Art Theory and Criticism (Hong Kong, 2013). 57.  This line of thought was first suggested to me by Jessica Ruse; the Gai Qi work was included as catalog no. 1052 in the exhibition discussed in Turmoil, Representation and Trends: Modern Chinese Painting, 1796 – 1949, International Conference Papers (Taipei, 2008). 58.  Clunas, “Images of High Antiquity,” p. 490. 59.  Reproduced in Yang Han, ed., Zhongguo meishu quanji, Huihua bian 8 – Mingdai huihua (shang) (Shanghai, 1988), pl. 65, p. 70. Li Shida, and this painting in particular, are discussed in James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570 – 1644 (Tokyo, 1982), pp. 33 – 36, pl. 5, color pl. 2. 60.  The painting is illustrated in full in McCausland, Telling Images of China, pp. 128 – 31, and discussed in the context of Shitao’s work in Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 193 – 94. 61.  I owe Maggie Bickford thanks for pointing out this example, and for her convincing reading of it. For a discussion of the work, see James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-­ Century Chinese Painting, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1979 (Cambridge, MA and London, 1982), pp.  134 – 41. On Chen, see Anne Burkus-­Chasson, “Elegant or Common? Chen Hongshou’s Birthday Presentation Pictures and His Professional Status,” Art Bulletin 26.2 (June 1994), pp. 279 – 300, and on his patron Zhou Lianggong, see Hongnam Kim, The Life of a Patron: Zhou Lianggong (1612 – 1672) and the Painters of Seventeenth-­Century China (New York, 1996). Chen’s works overall are rich in “paintings-­ within-­the-­painting,” often in the form of screens whose subjects offer an ironic comment on the main picture — for example, the folding screen of various subjects, including bananas in the snow (a poetic topos of the Tang dynasty writer and painter Wang Wei, 701 – 761), which forms the backdrop to the heroine’s reading of a love letter in Chen’s woodblock illustrations to the drama Xi xiang ji, The West Chamber; see Cai Meifen, ed., Splendid Treasures: A Hundred Masterpieces of the National Palace Museum on Parade (Taipei, 2011), pp. 350 – 51. 62.  Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 135. 63.  Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, pp. 48 – 55. 64.  Reproduced in Glanz der Kaiser von China: Kunst und Leben in der verbotenen Stadt (Cologne, 2012), pp. 160 – 61. Other examples are legion; for example, a mid-­Ming work by Du Jin showing the same calligrapher, sold as lot 3775 in Royal Lights of the Landscape Collection, 2012 Beijing Poly Spring Auction, June 3, 2012. My thanks to John Cayley for a stimulating discussion of why “meta-­calligraphy” does not exist. 65.  Nanjing bowuyuan, Ming Qing renwu xiaoxianghua xuan (Shanghai, 1979), nos. 31 – 33. 66.  Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, p. 53. 67.  See Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 162. 68.  On this text, see Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th – 17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA and London, 2002), pp. 218, 237; the work is discussed in Wang Zhenghua, “Shenghuo, zhishi yu wenhua shangpin: Wan Ming Fujian ban riyong leishu yu qi shuhuamen,” in Wang Zhenghua, Yishu, quanli yu xiaofei: Zhongguo yishushi yanjiu de yige mianxiang (Hangzhou, 2011), pp. 322 – 96 (pp. 332 – 33). 69.  Van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art, pp. 4 – 6. 70.  Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, p. 228. 71.  A point made in Brinker, “Seeking Delight in the Arts,” p. 680. 72.  Cahill, Parting at the Shore, pp. 201 – 10; Ellen Johnston Laing, “Ch’iu Ying’s Three Patrons,” Ming Studies 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 49 – 56; Ellen Johnston Laing, “Sixteenth-Century Patterns of Patronage: Qiu Ying and the Xiang Family,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111 (1991), pp. 1 – 7; Ellen Johnston Laing, “Qiu Ying’s Other Patrons,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117 (1997), pp. 686 – 92; Ellen

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Johnston Laing, “Problems in Reconstructing the Life of Qiu Ying,” Ars Orientalis 29 (1999), pp. 70 – 89; Ellen Johnston Laing, “Suzhou Pian and Other Dubious Paintings in the Received Oeuvre of Qiu Ying,” Artibus Asiae 59 (2000), pp. 265 – 94. 73.  Jennifer Purtle, “The Icon of the Woman Artist: Guan Daosheng (1262 – 1319) and the Power of Painting at the Ming Court circa 1500,” in Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Asian Art (London, 2011), pp. 290 – 317. 74.  Martin J. Powers, “Artistic Status and Social Agency,” in Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Chinese Art (Oxford, 2015), pp. 351 – 70 (p. 366), fig. 17.4. 75.  Stella Lee, “Figure Painters of Late Ming,” in James Cahill, ed., The Restless Landscape: Chinese Paintings of the Late Ming Period (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 145 – 60 (pp. 145 – 46, cat. no. 73). 76.  Clunas and Harrison-­Hall, Ming, p. 193; Porter, Chinese Taste, p. 61. 77.  Wu, Tales from the Land of Dragons, no. 25, p. 154. 78.  Shane McCausland, First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll (London, 2003), pp. 63 – 67. 79.  The “first specular representation to include the painter in the act of working on his painting” in the European tradition is (probably) the little figure reflected in the polished shield of Saint George in Jan van Eyck, Madonna with Canon Van der Paele (1436). We know Van Eyck read Pliny, so he may well have been aware that classical authors tell how Phidias pictured himself “in Minerva’s shield.” Stoichita, Self-­ Aware Image, pp. 220 – 21. 80.  The play in which it is embedded, and this image in particular, has generated a sophisticated literature: Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-­Century China (Stanford, CA, 1994), pp. 72 – 75; Tina Lu, Persons, Roles and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 28 – 62; on portraits in particular, see Zeitlin, “The Life and Death of the Image.” 81.  Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (London, 1956). 82.  McCausland, Telling Images of China, cat. no. 34. 83.  Marsha Weidner, Ellen Johnston Laing, Irving Yucheng Lo, Christina Chu, and James Robinson, Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300 – 1912 (Indianapolis, 1988), pp. 141 – 44, p. 212. 84.  Paisley Livingston, “Nested Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61.3 (2003), pp. 233 – 45. 85.  This is taken from a set of images of the characters of Hong lou meng, entitled Hong lou meng renwu tu, ascribed to Gai Qi (1774 – 1829), but not printed until 1879; see Hong lou meng renwu tu (Shanghai, 1980). A possible other candidate for this short list of images of Qing women painters is the chalk sketch by the French Jesuit Denis Attiret (1702 – 1768), now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and reproduced in Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 52, as Woman Seated at a Table Writing. Her brush is poised, certainly, but must we assume she is about to write rather than paint? 86.  Weidner, Views from Jade Terrace, p. 17; Ma Yazhen, “Cong ‘Yu tai shu shi’ dao ‘Yu tai hua shi’: Nüxing yishujia chuanji de duli chengshu yu Zhexi de yiwen chuancheng,” Qinghua xuebao/Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, New Series, 40.3 (Sept. 2010), pp. 411 – 51. 87.  Anne Gerritsen, “The Many Guises of Xiaoluan: The Legacy of a Girl Poet in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Women’s History 17.2 (2005), pp. 38 – 61 (p. 49).

ch a pter thr ee: the emperor 1.  Paintings that record the ceremonial of imperial courts prior to the Qing survive in very much smaller numbers than their importance at the time would warrant; this has to do with reasons of canon formation that are partly discussed later in this chapter. For one rare early Song survival, see Patricia Ebrey, “Taking Out the Grand Carriage: Imperial Spectacle and the Visual Culture of Northern Song Kaifeng,” Asia Major (Third Series) 12.1 (1999), pp. 33 – 66. The two Ming processional scrolls often reproduced (for example, Craig Clunas, Art in China, second ed. (Oxford, 2009), pp. 70 – 73) as showing the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522 – 1566) are now more properly recognized as dating from the reign of the Wanli emperor (r. 1573 – 1620); see Lin Li’na, “Mingren ‘Chu jing ru bi tu’ zhi zonghe yanjiu (shang),” Gugong wenwu yuekan 127 (Oct. 1993), pp. 58 – 77, and Lin Li’na, “Mingren ‘Chu jing ru bi tu’ zhi zonghe yanjiu (xia),” Gugong wenwu yuekan 128 (Nov. 1993), pp. 34 – 41. 2.  Scarlett Jang, “Realm of the Immortals: Painting Decorating the Jade Hall of the Northern Song,” Ars Orientalis 22 (1992), pp. 81 – 96 (p. 91). 3.  Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, pp. 86 – 87. 4.  Wen C. Fong and James C. Y. Watt, Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (New York, 1996), pp. 399 – 400. Elements of this composition, and in particular the meta-­pictorial scene of a portrait painter at work, depend on a now-­divided work ascribed to Zhou Wenju (active c. 961 – 975), but

notes to pages 76 – 86

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probably late Northern Song (early twelfth century) in date, the “portrait painter” section of which belonged to no less a connoisseur than Bernard Berenson himself; see Roberts, The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art, pp. 27 – 31. Another Ming painter to replicate this composition was Du Jin, whose “Palace Ladies” scroll is, like the “Eighteen Scholars” set discussed in chapter 2, now in the Shanghai Museum. One of the scrolls is reproduced in Zhang, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, cat. no. 54, pp. 242 – 45, but for the portrait-­ painter passage, see Zhongguo gudai shuhua jianding zu, ed., Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu, 2, p. 246. 5.  The courtly origins of “literary newness” are a central theme of Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2006), pp. 283 – 98. 6.  Reproduced in Wang Yao-­t’ing, ed, Chuanyi moxie/The Tradition of Re-­Presenting Art: Originality and Reproduction in Chinese Painting and Calligraphy (Taibei, 2007), fig. 1-­1. On Leng Mei’s career, see Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, pp. 60 – 61. 7.  Feng Mingzhu, ed., Yongzheng: Qing Shizu wenwu dazhan/Harmony and Integrity: The Yongzheng Emperor and His Times (Taibei, 2009), pp. 1 – 56, 114 – 15; Chen Yunru, “Shijian de xingzhuang — ‘Qing yuanhua shier yueling tu’ yanjiu,” Gugong xueshu jikan 22.4 (2005), pp. 103 – 39. 8.  It remains unclear to what extent Han (as opposed to Manchu) dress styles were actually worn at the Qing imperial court; Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 47, has an explicit statement by the Qianlong emperor that this was not done, though the same emperor’s prohibition on the wearing of Han clothing by court ladies (ibid., p. 222, n. 38) suggests that sometimes it was. 9.  Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 44. 10.  There are particular complexities around the Yongzheng emperor’s manipulation of self-­ portraiture, studied in Wu Hung, “Emperor’s Masquerade: ‘Costume Portraits’ of Yongzheng and Qianlong,” Orientations 26.7 (1995), pp. 25 – 41; see also Hui-­chi Lo, “Political Advancement and Religious Transcendence: The Yongzheng Emperor’s (1678 – 1735) Deployment of Portraiture,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2009. 11. The album is discussed in Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, pp. 121 – 23. 12.  On which see Ebrey, Accumulating Culture. 13.  Kathlyn Liscomb, “The Role of Leading Court Officials as Patrons of Painting in the Fifteenth Century,” Ming Studies 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 34 – 63 (p. 35). 14.  Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, p. 139. 15.  David Robinson, “Wu: The Arts of War,” in Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-­Hall, eds., Ming: 50 Years That Changed China (London, 2014), pp. 112 – 55 (pp. 135 – 47). 16.  Discussed in Harold Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch’ien-­lung Reign (Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 83; Lothar Ledderose, ed., Palastmuseum Peking: Schätze aus der Verbot­ enen Stadt (Berlin, 1985), pp. 164 – 65; Zhang Hongxing, The Qianlong Emperor: Treasures from the Forbidden City (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 109; Jessica Rawson, ed., China: The Three Emperors 1662 – 1795 (London, 2005), p. 438; Jason Steuber, “Qing Dynasty Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong: Rule through Replication in Architecture and the Arts,” in Nick Pearce and Jason Steuber, eds., Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China (Gainesville, FL, 2012), pp. 138 – 211 (pp. 186 – 94). 17.  On the Buddhist context of Ding Yunpeng’s work, see Richard R. Kent, Worldly Guardians of the Buddhist Law: Ding Yunpeng’s Baimiao Lohans: A Reflection of Late Ming Lay Buddhism (Princeton, NJ, 2005). 18.  Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu, 2003), pp. 138 – 41. 19.  For another example of solitary looking, described by James Cahill as “the apogee of the proprietary gaze,” see the large-­scale painting The Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Himself, depicting the ruler looking out from a raised building over a lake and bridge crossed by palace beauties and servants, reproduced in Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 51. 20.  Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 51. 21.  Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, pp. 84 – 85. 22.  Marco Musillo, “Bridging Europe and China: The Professional Life of Giuseppe Castiglione (1688 – 1766),” PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2006; Michèle Pirrrazzoli-­t’Serstevens, avec deux encadrés de Marco Musillo, Giuseppe Castiglione, 1688 – 1766: Peintre et architecte à la cour de Chine (Paris, 2007); Marco Musillo, “Reconciling Two Careers: The Jesuit Memoir of Giuseppe Castiglione, Lay Brother and Qing Imperial Painter,” Eighteenth Century Studies 42.1 (2008), pp. 45 – 59; Susan Naquin, “Giuseppe Castiglione/Lang Shining: A Review Essay,” T’oung Pao 95 (2009), pp.  393 – 412; National Palace Museum, Portrayals from a Brush Divine: A Special Exhibition on the Tricentennial of Giuseppe Castiglione’s Arrival in China (Taipei, 2015), which reproduces for the first time images of what may well be work executed by Castiglione before he left Italy for China. 23.  Ma Yazhen, “Qingdai gongting huama yuhui zhuanhuan yu yiyi — Cong Lang Shining de ‘Bai jun tu’ tanqi,” Gugong xueshu jikan 27.3 (2010), pp. 103 – 38.

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24.  Pirrrazzoli-­t’Serstevens, Giuseppe Castiglione, pp.  176 – 85; Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness, p. 54; Kristina Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (Seattle and London, 2015), pp. 160 – 65. 25.  Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, pp. 119 – 23. 26.  Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037 – 1101) to Tung Ch’i-­ch’ang (1555 – 1636), Harvard-­Yenching Institute Studies 27 (Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 29. 27.  Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, p. 196; the Chinese text is given in Bush, Chinese Literati on Painting, no. 38, p. 188, translation p. 29. See also Ronald Egan, “The Emperor and the Ink Plum: Tracing a Lost Connection between Literati and Huizong’s Court,” in David R. Knechtges and Eugence Vance, eds., Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe and Japan (Seattle and London, 2005), pp. 117 – 48 (p. 130). 28.  Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-­lung Painting Academy,” in Alfreda A. Murck and Wen C. Fong, eds., Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 333 – 56 (pp. 355 – 56). 29.  Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions, pp. 5 – 6. 30.  Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions, pp. 142 – 65. 31.  Nancy Zeng Berliner and Mark C. Elliott, The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City (New Haven, CT, 2010), p. 210, for the context of the Juanqin zhai in the private areas of the palace; also Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions, pp. 220 – 41. 32.  Kristina Renée Kleutghen, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Perspective: Illusionistic Painting in Eighteenth-­Century China,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010, p. 153. 33.  This extraordinary (and apparently unique) object was sold as lot 6051 in Magnificent Imperial Works of Art of the Qianlong Reign, 2012 Beijing Poly Spring Auction, June 5, 2012, Beijing. 34.  John R. Finlay, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Western Vistas: Linear Perspective and Trompe l’Oeil Illusion in the European Palaces of the Yuanming yuan,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extrême orient 94 (2007), pp. 159 – 94 (pp. 162, 168); Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions, pp. 178 – 218. 35.  Richard E. Strassberg, “War and Peace: Four Intercultural Landscapes,” in Marcia Reed and Paola Demattè, eds., China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles, 2007), pp.  104 – 20; Steuber, “Qing Dynasty Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong,” pp. 138 – 211; Laura Newby, “Copper Plates for the Qianlong Emperor: From Paris to Peking via Canton,” Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012), pp. 161 – 99. 36.  Kleutghen, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Perspective,” pp. 207 – 8. 37.  Finlay, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Western Vistas,” p. 187. 38.  Jason Steuber, “Qing Dynasty Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong,” pp.  162 – 63, illustrates all four versions, which are also discussed in Kleutghen, “Qianlong Emperor’s Perspective,” pp. 72 – 1 20. Berger, Empire of Emptiness, pp. 51 – 54, discusses and illustrates the Yangxindian version, as does Rawson, Three Emperors, no. 196, pp. 439 – 40. 39.  The piece is reproduced and discussed as Song in Chen Yunru, “Wenren de shenfen rentong: tan Songren renwu ce,” Gugong wenwu yuekan 276 (March 2006), pp. 74 – 82, and it is no. 34 in Lin Boting, ed., Da guan: Bei Song shuhua tezhan (Taibei, 2006), but is cataloged as “not earlier than Ming” in Cahill, Index, p. 221. 40.  This translation is in Berger, Empire of Emptiness, p. 51; for an alternative rendering (by Gerald Holzwarth), see Rawson, Three Emperors, p. 439. 41.  Kleutghen, “Qianlong Emperor’s Perspective,” p. 115. 42.  Fu Shen, “Qianlong huangdi ‘Yu bi Panshan tu’ yu Tang Dai,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 28 (2010), pp. 83 – 1 22 (pp. 86 – 87). 43.  Reproduced in Rawson, Three Emperors, no. 191. 44.  Shao Yan, “Shikong zhuanhuanzhong de xinggong tuxiang – dui jijian ‘Panshan tu’ de yanjiu,” Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 135.1 (2008), pp. 24 – 49 (pp. 24 – 25). four inscrip45.  Shao Yan, “Shikong zhuanhuanzhong de xinggong tuxiang,” p.  30. The thirty-­ tions on the Mount Pan painting can be compared with the Qianlong emperor’s fifty-­ five inscriptions on the Ziming copy of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by Huang Gongwang (1269 – 1354), or the nineteen inscriptions done between 1754 and 1797 on The Wanluan Thatched Hall (1597) by Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), a painting that the emperor frequently took to Mount Pan with him; see Gerald Holzwarth, “The Qianlong Emperor as Art Patron and the Formation of the Collections of the Palace Museum, Beijing,” in Jessica Rawson, ed., China: The Three Emperors 1662 – 1795 (London, 2005), pp.  41 – 53 (p.  46). On the importance of timing and pictorial production, see Jan Stuart, “Timely Images: Chinese Art and Festival Display,” Proceedings of the British Academy 167 (2009), pp. 295 – 348. 46.  On Tangdai, see Susan Lam Yick Ying, “Kangxi’s Champion Painter — Tandai’ [sic],” Besides: A Journal of Art History and Criticism 1 (1997), pp. 40 – 58, and for a chronology of his works, see Susan

notes to pages 96 – 107

247

Lam Yick Ying, “A Chronological Table of Dated Works by Tangdai,” Besides: A Journal of Art History and Criticism 2 (1999), pp. 65 – 78. 47.  Fu Shen, “Qianlong huangdi ‘Yu bi Panshan tu’ yu Tang Dai,” pp. 92 – 98 ; also Lam, “Kangxi’s Champion Painter,” pp. 40 – 58. 48.  Yang Boda, “The Development of the Ch’ien-­lung Painting Academy,” p. 344. 49.  The work is Asking the Way in the Autumn Mountains, attributed to Juran (active c. 960 – 980). See Fu Shen, “Qianlong huangdi ‘Yu bi Panshan tu’ yu Tang Dai,” p. 84. 50.  Fu Shen, “Qianlong huangdi ‘Yu bi Panshan tu’ yu Tang Dai,” p. 100. 51.  Gerald Holzwarth, “The Qianlong Emperor as Art Patron.” 52.  This is the central argument of Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness. It is fully in keeping with this aesthetic of incorporation that both the bow case of the Qianlong emperor and one of the most valuable surviving Song dynasty calligraphic rubbings should have been covered in imported European silks. See Rawson, Three Emperors, p. 167, and An Siyuan zang shanben beitie xuan (Beijing, 1996), p. 40. 53.  Lai Yu-­chih, “Images, Knowledge and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court,” Transcultural Studies 2013.1, pp. 7 – 100. 54.  Berliner Festspiele/Insel Verlag, Europa und die Kaiser von China (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), pp. 334 – 35, reproduces only a detail of this massive work. 55.  Yu Peijin, “Pinwei yu yitu: Qing Qianlong ‘Ji qiong zao’ duobaoge chutan,” Gugong wenwu yuekan 294 (2007), pp. 16 – 27 (pp. 20 – 21). 56.  Lovell, Annotated Bibliography, pp. 41 – 42; Holzwarth, “The Qianlong Emperor as Art Patron,” p. 43. 57.  Lovell, Annotated Bibliography, pp. 49 – 57; Holzwarth, “The Qianlong Emperor as Art Patron,” pp. 48 – 50. The original catalog was augmented by Er bian in 1793 and San bian in 1815 – 1816, under the Jiaqing emperor. 58.  Claudia Brown, “Painting and the Qing Court: Scholar Artists, 1736 – 1850,” in Judith G. Smith, ed., Tradition and Transformation: Studies in Chinese Art in Honor of Chu-­tsing Li (Lawrence, KS, 2005), pp. 305 – 21 (p. 306), calculates that two-­thirds of the pictures in Shiqu baoji and Midian zhulin are Qing works, not earlier. About 1 percent are by academy professionals, and 50 percent are by scholar-­bureaucrats and aristocrats. 59.  Fu Shen, “Qianlong huangdi ‘Yu bi Panshan tu’ yu Tang Dai,” p. 86. 60.  Lothar Ledderose, “Some Observations on the Imperial Art Collection in China,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 43 (1978 – 1979), pp. 33 – 46; Holzwarth, “The Qianlong Emperor as Art Patron,” pp. 41 – 53; Willow Hai Chang, Yang Renkai, and David Ake Sensabaugh, The Last Emperor’s Collection: Masterpieces of Painting and Calligraphy from the Liaoning Provincial Museum (New York, 2008), pp. 67 – 69. 61.  Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions, pp. 274 – 76. 62.  For surveys of watercolor painting, see Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours (London, 1984); see also Andrew Lo, Song Jiayu, Wang Zi-­cheng, and Wu Fangsi, Daying tushuguan tezang Zhongguo Qingdai waixiaohua jinghua, 8 vols. (Guangzhou, 2011). 63.  Patrick Conner, “The Enigma of Spoilum and the Origins of China Trade Portraiture,” Antiques (March 1998), pp. 419 – 25 (p. 420), citing Yang Boda, Tributes from Guangdong to the Qing Court (Beijing and Hong Kong, 1987), p. 45. 64.  Wang Cheng-­hua, “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth-­Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 96.4 (2014), pp. 379 – 94 (p. 391). 65.  Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 70. A related point, about the regional specificity of what we have been too willing to see as “Western” styles, is made in Ma Yazhen, “Shangren shehui yu difang shehui de jiaorong — cong Qingdai Suzhou banhua kan difang shangye wenhua,” Hanxue yanjiu 28.2 (2010), pp. 87 – 1 26. 66.  Conner, “The Enigma of Spoilum,” p. 420. 67.  Kee Il Choi Jr., “Carl Gustav Ekeberg and the Invention of Chinese Export Painting,” The Magazine Antiques (March 1998), pp. 426 – 37. 68.  Conner, “The Enigma of Spoilum,” p.  425. On Meares, see J. K. Laughton, “Meares, John (1756? – 1809),” rev. H. V. Bowen, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., May 2007, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18487 [accessed Aug. 7, 2012.] 69.  Roderick Whitfield, Fascination of Nature: Plants and Insects in Chinese Painting and Ceramics of the Yuan Dynasty (1279 – 1368), 2 vols. (Seoul, 1993). See also the review of this by Maggie Bickford, in Artibus Asiae 58.3/4 (1999), pp. 343 – 52.

248

ch a pter four: the merch a nt 1.  On the tours, see Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680 – 1785 (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007). 2.  Published in full in Yan Lijuan, ed., Qing Xu Yang “Gusu fan hua tu”’ (Xianggang, 1988), and discussed in Ma Yazhen, “Zhongjie yu difang yu zhongyang zhijian: “‘Sheng shi zi sheng tu’” de shuangchong xingge,” Guoli Taiwan daxue meishushiyanjiu jikan, 24 (2008), pp.  259 – 327; see also Wang Zhenghua, “Qianlong chao Suzhou chengshi tuxiang: Zhengzhi quanli, wenhua xiaofei yu dijing suzao,” in Wang Zhenghua, Yishu, quanli yu xiaofei: Zhongguo yishushi yanjiu de yige mianxiang (Taibei, 2011), pp. 127 – 95. See also Zhang, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting , cat. no. 76, pp. 310 – 11. 3.  Barnhart, Mandate of Heaven, pp. 182 – 93. 4.  Chang, A Court on Horseback, p. 309. 5.  On cityscapes of the Ming, see Wang Zhenghua, “Guoyan fanhua; wan Ming chengshi tu, chengshi guan yu wenhua xiaofei de yanjiu,” in Wang Zhenghua, Yishu, quanli yu xiaofei: Zhongguo yishushi yanjiu de yige mianxiang (Hangzhou, 2011), pp. 397 – 446. On the development of cityscapes in general as a genre within professional painting, see Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, pp. 138 – 48. 6.  Almost everything about this now popularly loved masterpiece is controversial, including the correct rendering of its title. See Julia K. Murray, “Water Under a Bridge: Further Thoughts on the Qingming Scroll,” Journal of Sung-­Yuan Studies 27 (1997), pp. 99 – 107; also Heping Liu, “Painting and Commerce in Northern Song Dynasty China, 960 – 1126,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1997, pp.  147 – 90. The best reproductions are in Shanghai Bowuguan, ed., Jin Tang Song Yuan shuhua guobao teji (Shanghai, 2002), pp. 397 – 421. 7.  Published in full in Qiu Ying fang Zhang Zeduan Qingming shang he tu, Han Mo Series B2 (Xianggang, 2007), and in Chang, The Last Emperor’s Collection, pp. 177 – 86. On problems of authenticity, see Laing, “Suzhou Pian and other Dubious Paintings.” The work is accepted as partially from the hand of Qiu Ying in Zhongguo gudai shuhua jianding zu, ed., Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu, 15, p. 328. Another Ming version in the Metropolitan Museum is published in Alan Priest, Ch’ing ming shang ho: Spring Festival on the River (New York, 1948), while the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains an unfinished and particularly shoddy version of the subject that was part of the bequest of the sinologist and notorious fraudster Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873 – 1944). 8.  On the drama Yi zhong yuan, see Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), pp. 169 – 75. Ibid., p. 16, records the interesting fact that the preface of about 1655 is by Huang Yuanjie (active 1639 – 1656), a well-­known woman artist of the late Ming – early Qing, on whom see Weidner, ed., Views from Jade Terrace, p. 180. On the concept of “commodity context,” see Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3 – 63 (p. 15). 9.  This image of the antiques shop was redrawn by Robert van Gulik for his Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome, 1958), p. 465, the retouching noticed as such in James Cahill’s review of this work, published in Journal of the American Oriental Society 81.4 (1961), pp. 448 – 51. It is also reproduced in Clunas, Superfluous Things, and was used as the dust jacket illustration of the 1991 first edition. 10.  Wai-­kam Ho, “Late Ming Literati: Their Social and Cultural Ambience,” in Chu-­tsing Li and James C. Y. Watt, eds., The Chinese Scholar’s Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period (New York and London, 1987), pp. 23 – 36 (p. 31). 11.  Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, p. 155. 12.  Wang Zhenghua, “Shenghuo, zhishi yu wenhua shangpin.” On “publicized pictorial knowledge,” see Richard Vinograd, “Private Art and Public Knowledge in Later Chinese Painting,” in Susanne Kuech­ l­er and Walter Melion, eds., Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation (Washington, DC and London, 1991), pp. 176 – 202 (pp. 191 – 202). 13.  Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA and London, 2010), pp. 188 – 89, citing Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua, pp. 225 – 32. 14.  Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo, ed., Huizhou qiannian qiwaixiaohyue wenshu: Song Yuan Ming Bian, Qing Minguo bian, 40 vols. (Shijiazhuang, 1991), 5, pp. 431 – 32. 15.  Ginger Cheng-­chi Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-­Century Yangzhou (Stanford, CA, 2001), p. 21 (greeting the emperor), pp. 38 – 39 (ownership of the Xie Huan, Apricot Garden), pp. 40 – 59 (the Hanjiang Poetry Society). 16.  Hsü, Bushel of Pearls, pp. 64 – 93; Xu Chengqi, “Xin’an Fang Shishu: Yangzhou huihua de quyu secai,” in Chen Baozhen, ed., Quyu yu wangluo: Jin qiannianlai Zhongguo meishushi yanjiu guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji (Taibei, 2001), pp.  403 – 27; Ju-­hsi Chou, “Chain of Causation: Fang Shishu’s The Autumn Colors on the Que and Hua Mountains after Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang,” in Judith G. Smith, ed., Tradition and Transformation: Studies in Chinese Art in Honor of Chu-­tsing Li (Lawrence, KS, 2005), pp. 281 – 303.

notes to pages 117 – 27

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17.  Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls, p. 39. 18.  On the “collaboration and tension” between the physical formats of Chinese painting and their role as images and, in particular, on the hand scroll as a private, even voyeuristic, medium (somewhat undercut by the example here), see Wu Hung, “The Painted Screen,” p. 65. 19.  Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls, pp. 55 – 56, 59 – 60. 20.  Zhuang Shen, Cong bai zhi dao bai yin: Qingmo Guangdong shuhua chuangzuo yu shoucang shi, 2 vols. (Taibei, 1997); Lovell, Annotated Bibliography, p. 114. 21.  T. H. Barrett, “Review of Antonino Forte, A Jewel in Indra’s Net,” in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64.1 (2001), pp. 145 – 46. 22.  Stephen Little, “The Demon Queller and the Art of Qiu Ying,” Artibus Asiae 46.1/2 (1985), pp. 5 – 1 28 (p. 63, n. 289). 23.  Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting, pp. 208 – 11. 24.  Sally W. Goodfellow, ed., Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson-­Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 1980), pp. 159 – 60. 25.  Goodfellow, ed., Eight Dynasties, pp. 185 – 87, and Wai-­kam Ho and Judith G. Smith, eds., The Century of Tung Ch’i-­ch’ang, 155 – 1636 (Kansas City, Seattle, and London, 1992), I, pl. 38. Prices from chart on Zhuang Shen, Cong bai zhi dao bai yin, I, pp. 479 – 80. 26.  Zhuang Shen, Cong bai zhi dao bai yin, I, pp. 528 – 29. The contrast with Jiangnan collections is subtle but noticeable; see ibid., pp. 542 – 43. 27.  Jonathan Hay, “Culture, Ethnicity, and Empire in the Work of Two Eighteenth-­Century ‘Eccentric’ Artists,” Res 35 (Spring 1999), pp. 201 – 23. For the 1797 version, see Zhang Hongxing, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, cat. no. 78, pp. 316 – 17. 28.  Qianshen Bai, “Composite Rubbings in Nineteenth-­Century China: The Case of Wu Dacheng (1835 – 1902) and His Friends,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago, 2010), pp. 291 – 319 (p. 301). 29.  Zhuang Sue, “Shijiu shiji Guangdong waixiao hua de zanzhuzhe — Guangdong shisanhang hangshang,” in Chen Baozhen, ed., Quyu yu wangluo: Jin qiannianlai Zhongguo meishushi yanjiu guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji (Taibei, 2001), pp. 533 – 78 (p. 542), the Chinese text quoted in Zhuang Shen, Cong bai zhi dao bai yin, I, p. 291, n. 52. 30.  Yeewan Koon, “Lives and Afterlives: Luo Ping’s ‘Guiqu tu’,” Orientations 40 (Sept. 2009), pp. 66 – 72. 31.  Newby, “Copper Plates for the Qianlong Emperor,” p. 190. On the Cohong, and the organization of the Canton trade, see Paul Arthur Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700 – 1845 (Hong Kong, 2005). 32.  Arthur W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1943 – 1944), II, pp. 605 – 6. Pan Zhencheng was known to the Western merchant community by the name Puan Khequa (and various variant spellings), making his grandson Pan Zhengwei “Puan Khequa III” in Western sources. 33.  “China and the Royal Society,” http://royalsociety.org/China-­and-­the-­Royal-­Society-­Give-­and-­ take/ [accessed Aug. 29, 2012]. 34.  Pan Zhengwei is one of the chief characters in William C. Hunter, Bits of Old China (London, 1855), pp. 78, 80, and clearly Hunter interacted with him to a considerable degree. 35.  Zhuang Sue, “Shijiu shiji Guangdong waixiao hua de zanzhuzhe.” 36.  On Lamqua, see Li Shizhuang, “Guanyu wan Qing waixiaohua huajia Lingua shenfen de yixie wenti,” Besides: A Journal of Art History and Criticism 2 (1999), pp. 127 – 49; also Larissa N. Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Durham, NC and London, 2008), pp. 39 – 72. On Chinnery, see Patrick Conner, George Chinnery, 1774 – 1852: Artist of India and the China Coast (Woodbridge, 1993); also Patrick Conner, “Chinnery, George (1774 – 1852),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., May 2007, http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/article/5311 [accessed July 25, 2013]. 37.  His successor Howqua II gave a portrait by Lamqua to Robert B. Forbes in 1840; Zhuang Sue, “Shijiu shiji Guangdong waixiao hua de zanzhuzhe,” pp. 562 – 63. 38.  Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours, p. 54. 39.  Heinrich, The After Life of Images, pp. 39 – 72. 40.  Wan Qingli, Bing fei shuailuo de bainian: Shijiu shiji Zhongguo huihua shi (Taibei, 2005) [English title: The Century Was Not Declining in Art: A History of Nineteenth-­Century Chinese Painting], p. 111, under the heading “Looking at the History of Chinese Painting from the Starting Point of China.” The term shuailuo, “decline,” is a significant one, since it formed the final stage in the four-­stage model of tides of thought (sichao) developed by Liang Qichao. It was subsequently appropriated by the “Naitō school” of Japanese historiography as a model of world history, within which there was the strong implication that China was essentially exhausted as both a cultural and a political force. See Cary Y. Liu, “Between the Titans: Constructions of Modernity and Tradition at the Dawn of Chinese Architectural History,”

250

in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), II, pp. 185 – 210 (p.188). 41.  Li Junjie, “Zheshan jiqi shanmian yishu,” Shanghai bowuguan jikan 4 (1987), pp.  101 – 10; Shi Shouqian, “Shanshui sui shen: Shi shiji Riben zheshan de chuanru Zhongguo yu shanshui huashan zai shiwu zhi shiqi shiji de liuxing,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 29 (Sept. 2010), pp. 1 – 66. 42.  Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua, p. 234. 43.  An early-­nineteenth-­century example attributed to Wang Chengpei (d. c. 1805), where the contrast between the illusionistic main picture and the embedded image is particularly striking, is illustrated in Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 96. 44.  Qianshen Bai, “Composite Rubbings in Nineteenth-­Century China,” p. 317, n. 22. 45.  Burglind Jungmann, “Confusing Traditions: Elements of the Korean An Kyŏn School in Early Japanese Nanga Landscape Painting,” Artibus Asiae 55.3/4 (1995), pp. 303 – 18; Joan Stanley-­Baker, The Transmission of Chinese Idealist Painting to Japan: Notes on the Early Phase (1661 – 1799), Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies 21 (Ann Arbor, 1992). 46.  James Cahill, Sakaki Hyakusen and Early Nanga Painting (Berkeley, 1983), pp.  62 – 65. Jungmann, “Confusing Traditions,” pp. 309 – 11, makes the important point that Korean diplomatic missions were seen by Japanese intellectuals as an even better source of access to Chinese elite painting traditions, untainted by commerce. On Hyakusen, see also Screech, Obtaining Pictures, pp. 245 – 46. 47.  Cahill, Sakaki Hyakusen and Early Nanga Painting, p. 53. 48.  For Korean elite taste in Chinese painting, see J. P. Park, “The Anxiety of Influence: (Mis)reading Chinese Art in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700 – 1850),” Art Bulletin 97 (Sept. 2015), pp. 301 – 22. 49.  Stephen Addiss, Mathew Welch, and Julian Wolfgram, with Janet Carpenter, Japanese Quest for a New Vision: The Impact of Visiting Chinese Painters, 1600 – 1900 (Lawrence, KS, c. 1986). 50.  Lai Yuzhi, “Cong ‘Molin jinhua’ de bianji kan Mingzhi chunian Zhong Ri shuhuaquan de wanglai,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 27 (2009), pp. 197 – 234.  On the background to this text, see Chi-­Kwong Lee, “Jiang Baoling and His ‘Molin Jinhua’: A Study of the Commercialization of Painting in Jiangnan Region During the Jiaqing-­Daoguang Era of Qing,” PhD diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. 51.  Screech, “A Japanese Construction of Chinese Painting,” p. 460. 52.  Screech, “A Japanese Construction of Chinese Painting,” p. 462. 53.  Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-­century Shanghai,” in Ju-­hsi Chou, ed., Art at the Close of China’s Empire, Phøebus Occasional Papers in Art History, Vol. 8 (Phoenix, 1998), pp. 134 – 88. This volume was completed too late to take advantage of the major survey in Roberta Wue, Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-­Century Shanghai (Honolulu, 2015). 54.  Ma Yazhen, “Shangren shehui yu difang shehui de jiaorong.” 55.  Roberta Wue, “Essentially Chinese: The Chinese Portrait Subject in Nineteenth-­Century Photography,” in Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA and London, 2005), pp. 257 – 82; Chia-­Ling Yang, “The Crisis of the Real: Portraiture and Photography in Late Nineteenth-­Century Shanghai,” in Jennifer Purtle and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from Treaty Ports to World War II (Chicago, 2009), pp. 20 – 37; Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, eds., Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles, 2011); Yi Gu, “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840 – 1911,” Art Bulletin 95 (2013), pp. 120 – 38. 56.  James Cahill, “Ren Xiong and His Self-­Portrait,” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995), pp. 119 – 32; Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, pp. 128 – 30. 57.  Chia-­Ling Yang, “The Crisis of the Real,” pp. 21 – 22. 58.  Bai, “Composite Rubbings.” 59.  Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-­ century Shanghai,” pp.  134  –  88 (p. 135); Lai Yuzhi, “Qingmo shiyin de xingqi yu Shanghai Riben huapu leishuji de liutong: Yi ‘Dianshizhai conghua’ wei zhongxin,” Zongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 85 (2014), pp. 57 – 1 27. 60.  Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-­century Shanghai,” p. 143. 61.  Joshua A. Fogel, “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Elizabeth Lillehoj, ed., Acquisition, Art and Ownership in Edo-­period Japan (Warren, CT, 2007), pp. 149 – 67 (p. 152). 62.  Kuiyi Shen, “The Shanghai-­Japan Connection in the Late Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Shibian xingbian liufeng: Zhongguo jindai huihua 1796 – 1949 xueshu taolunhui lunwenji/ Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Painting 1796 – 1949, International Conference Papers (Gaoxiong, 2007), pp. 233 – 58 (p. 234). 63.  Roberta Wue, “Selling the Artist: Advertising, Art and Audience in Nineteenth-­Century Shanghai,” Art Bulletin 91.4 (2009), pp. 463 – 80. On Ren Bonian, see Chialing Yang, New Wine in Old Bottles: The Art of Ren Bonian in Nineteenth-­Century Shanghai (London, 2007); also Hans van der Meyden,

notes to pages 138 – 49

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“The Life and Works of Ren Bonian (1840 – 1896): An Attempt to Strip the Artist’s Biography of Some Apocryphal Fabrications,” Oriental Art 38.1 (Spring 1992), pp. 27 – 40, who rightly notes (p. 27) that “his standard biography has become an almost inextricable fabric of facts and whimsical inventions.” 64.  Lai Yuzhi, “Fuliu qianjie: 1870 niandai Shanghai de Riben wangluo yu Ren Bonian zuopin zhong de Riben yangfen,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 14 (2003), pp. 159 – 242. 65.  Lai Yuzhi, “Qingmo shiyin de xingqi yu Shanghai Riben huapu leishuji de liutong.” 66.  Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-­century Shanghai,” p. 153. 67.  Shen Zhiyu, “Guanyu Ren Bonian de xin shiliao,” in Gong Chanxing, ed., Ren Bonian yanjiu (Tianjin, 1982), pp. 16 – 17; Hans van der Meyden, “The Life and Works of Ren Bonian,” pp. 27 – 40. 68.  Wue, “Selling the Artist,” p. 466. 69.  Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, p. 131. 70.  Wue, “Selling the Artist,” p. 477. 71.  Richard Vinograd, “Satire and Situation: Images of the Artist in Late Nineteenth-­Century China,” in Ju-­hsi Chou, ed., Art at the Close of China’s Empire, Phøebus Occasional Papers in Art History, vol. 8 (Phoenix, 1998), pp. 110 – 33. 72.  Yu-­chih Lai, “Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian’s Frontier Paintings and Urban Life in 1880s Shanghai,” Art Bulletin 86.3 (Sept. 2004), pp. 550 – 72 (p. 550).

ch a pter fiv e: the nation 1.  Zhang Hongxing, “Studies in Late Qing Battle Paintings,” Artibus Asiae 60.2 (2000), pp. 265 – 96 (p. 268). 2.  Zhang Hongxing, “Studies in Late Qing Battle Paintings,” p. 267. 3.  Zhang Hongxing, “Studies in Late Qing Battle Paintings,” p. 269. On the original paintings, see Newby, “Copper Plates for the Qianlong Emperor,” pp. 164 – 65, and Herbert Butz, Bilder für die “Halle des Purpurglanzes”: Chinesische Offiziersporträts und Schlachtenkupfer der Ära Qianlong (1736 – 1795) (Berlin, 2003). 4.  Zhang Hongxing, “Studies in Late Qing Battle Paintings,” p. 289. There is a growing literature on Wu Youru; see, for instance, Rudolf G. Wagner, “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai huabao,” in Rudolf G. Wagner, ed., Joining the Global: Word, Image and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870 – 1910 (Albany, NY, 2007), pp. 105 – 73 (pp. 126 – 31, 149 – 54). 5.  Liu Jinku, “Ying Fa lianjun pixue xia de ‘guo bao’: Wang Meng ‘You he ting quan tu zhou’ kaozheng,” Ju ying cheng hua — Qingdai gongting dianzang Zhongguo gudai shuhua yechang/Fine and Rare Classical Court Paintings and Calligraphies Evening Sale, Poly Auction, Beijing, Dec. 4, 2010 (unpaginated). 6.  James L. Hevia, “Loot’s Fate, the Economy of Plunder, and the Moral Life of Objects from the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China,” History and Anthropology 6.4 (1994), pp. 319 – 45; Maya Jasanoff, “Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests and Imperial Self-­Fashioning,” Past and Present 184.1 (2004), pp. 109 – 35; Nora Wang, Ye Xin, and Wang Lou, Victor Hugo et le sac du Palais d’été (Paris, 2003). 7.  I therefore interpret the picture’s biography differently from Liu Jinku, “Ying Fa lianjun pixue xia de ‘guo bao’,” who sees the repair as part of the Tongzhi emperor’s project of cultural restoration. But this strikes me as a necessarily patriotic contemporary reading of events, when there is no evidence of imperial agency in the repairing, nor evidence that it re-­entered the imperial collections (there is, in fact, evidence of the opposite, in the form of the Zhuang family seals). See Zhang Hongxing, “The Nineteenth-­Century Provenance of the Admonitions Scroll: A Hypothesis,” in Shane McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll (London, 2003), pp. 277 – 87 (p. 284), for evidence of other works looted from the Summer Palace appearing on the Beijing art market in the 1860s. 8.  Zhang, “The Nineteenth-­Century Provenance of the Admonitions Scroll.” 9.  Michelle Ying-­Ling Huang, “Laurence Binyon and the Admonitions Scroll,” Orientations 41.5 (June 2010), pp. 53 – 57. 10.  On Anderson, see Thomas Seccombe, “Anderson, William (1842  –  1900),” rev. Mark Pottle, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., Oct. 2009, http://www.oxforddnb .com/view/article/508 [accessed Jan. 1, 2013]; on the British Museum’s acquisition of his collection, see Michelle Ying-­Ling Huang, “British Interest in Chinese painting, 1881 – 1910: The Anderson and Wegener Collections of Chinese Painting in the British Museum,” Journal of the History of Collections 22.2 (2010), pp. 279 – 87, and Michelle Ying Ling Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise on the British Reception of Chinese Painting,” in Michelle Ying Ling Huang, ed., Beyond Boundaries: East and West Cross-­ Cultural Exchanges (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011), pp. 88 – 112 (pp. 90 – 92). 11.  William Anderson, The Pictorial Arts of Japan: With a Brief Sketch of the Associated Arts, and Some Remarks upon the Pictorial Arts of the Chinese and Koreans, 4 vols. (London, 1886), IV, pp. 253 – 65, covers

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“Chinese art,” through the means of woodblock prints from a number of Japanese gafu; the quote is p. 259. 12.  Anderson, Pictorial Arts of Japan, IV, p. 265. 13.  Bethany Neubauer, “Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco,” American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17 – 00277.html [accessed Aug. 10, 2015]. 14.  Christopher Benfey, “Okakura Kakuzo,” American National Biography Online, April 2001 update, http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17 – 01634.html [accessed Aug. 10, 2015]. On Fenollosa’s lasting legacy, see David Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, NC, 2006), pp. 126 – 45, “Ernest Fenollosa’s History of Asian Art”; for his crucial influence on the formation of one key American collection, see Ingrid Larsen, “‘Don’t Send Ming or Later Pictures’: Charles Lang Freer and the First Major Collection of Chinese Painting in an American Museum,” Ars Orientalis 40 (2011), pp. 7 – 38, especially pp. 11 – 16. 15.  Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty, translated by Hiroshi Nara (Los Angeles, 2011), p. 174. For the ways in which the writings of Okakura Kakuzo and his younger contemporary Kōjirō Tomita (1890 – 1976) came to represent an “authentic” Asian voice for US audiences, despite their crucial appropriation of ideas from (for instance) Fenollosa, see Constance J. S. Chen, “Transnational Orientals: Scholars of Art, Nationalist Discourses, and the Question of Intellectual Authority,” Journal of Asian American Studies 9.3 (2006), pp. 215 – 42. 16.  Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, p. 169. 17.  Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, p. 260. The index of the second edition of Laurence Binyon, Painting in the Far East (London, 1913), still includes Japanese spellings, with entries like “Bunchomei. See Wen Chengming.” When the author joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1979, Far Eastern Department catalogs still listed Wen Zhengming (1470 – 1559) as “Bunchōmei.” 18.  Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise,” p. 89. 19.  Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise,” pp. 93 – 94.  20.  Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise,” p. 96. 21.  Shane McCausland, “Nihonga Meets Gu Kaizhi: A Japanese Copy of a Chinese Painting in the British Museum,” Art Bulletin 87 (2005), pp. 688 – 7 13 (p. 698). 22.  Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise,” p. 101; Satō Dōshin, “‘History of Art’: The Determinants of Historicization,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 474 – 86 (p. 479). 23.  Wong, Parting the Mists, p. 12. A re-­evaluation of guohua, and its retrieval from the simplistic category “traditional Chinese painting” has been one of the most productive strands of recent research on twentieth-­century Chinese art. In addition to the work of Aida Yuen Wong and Pedith Chan already cited, see also Han-­yun Chang, “He Tianjian and the Defense of Guohua,” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007. On the importance of exchange with Japan, see Walter B. Davis, Culture in Common: Wang Yiting’s Art of Exchange with Japan (Leiden, forthcoming). 24.  Aida Yuen Wong, “The East, Nationalism, and Taishō Democracy: Naitō Konan’s History of Chinese Painting,” Sino-­Japanese Studies 11.2 (1999), pp. 3 – 23. 25.  Friedrich Hirth, Native Sources for the History of Chinese Pictorial Art (New York, 1917). Note that this derives from Hirth’s German original, which employs the more straightforward “chinesische Malerei.” 26.  Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, pp. 192 – 93, for the Japanese adoption of the term bijutsu; for the complexities of the Chinese appropriation of these characters as meishu, see Yu-­jen Liu, “Publishing Chinese Art: Issues of Cultural Reproduction in China, 1905 – 1918,” DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2010, pp. 105 – 42. 27.  Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, p. 198. 28.  See the chart on Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, p. 172. 29.  The first advertisement of an auction sale devoted to “Antique Chinese Paintings” to be carried by The Times of London, where it appears in the newspaper for Feb. 19, 1914. They are described as being “of the Sung, Ming, Kang Shi, and Tao Kwang periods.” 30.  British Museum: Guide to an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings (Fourth to Nineteenth Century A.D.), in the Print and Drawing Gallery (London, 1910), pp. 14 – 15. A piece headed “Chinese Painting at the British Museum” in The Times of March 7, 1910 (which may have been written by Laurence Binyon himself), announces the acquisition of the Chinese painting collection of the German resident of Beijing Olga-Julia Wegener and previews the exhibition, stressing that these works were acquired in China itself and so are untainted by the taste of Japan. The point is driven home in the same newspaper the following day, March 8, 1910, where an article entitled “Chinese Painting” announces, “It is only lately that we have begun to understand that in painting the Chinese are the Italians of the east, and that Japanese art, which was discovered with so much enthusiasm in the nineteenth century, is inferior in nearly all the highest qualities to its great original.”

notes to pages 160 – 64

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31.  Shiona M. Airlie, “Lockhart, Sir James Haldane Stewart (1858  –  1937),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /63594 [accessed Dec. 30, 2012]. 32.  On Xie Zuantai’s political and cartooning activities, and a reproduction of his most successful political image, see Rudolf G. Wagner, “China ‘Asleep’ and ‘Awakening’: A Study in Conceptualizing Asymmetry and Coping with It,” http://archiv.ub.uni-­ heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/transcultural/article /view/7315/2916 [accessed Sept. 5, 2012]. 33.  Sonia Lightfoot, The Chinese Painting Collection and Correspondence of Sir James Stewart Lockhart (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter, 2008), p. 50. 34.  Liu, “Publishing Chinese Art: Issues of Cultural Reproduction in China, 1905 – 1918,” pp. 84 – 90; Yu-­jen Liu, “Second Only to the Original: Rhetoric and Practice in the Photographic Reproduction of Art in Early Twentieth-­Century China,” Art History 37.1 (2014), pp. 68 – 95. 35.  Lightfoot, The Chinese Painting Collection and Correspondence of Sir James Stewart Lockhart, p. 117. Xie’s claim that Chinese paintings were “the rage” may draw on his awareness of the British Museum’s purchase, in February 1910, of 145 Chinese paintings from the German collector Olga-­Julia Wegener (d. 1938), for the considerable sum of £7,500; see Huang, “British Interest in Chinese Painting, 1881 – 1910,” p. 283. 36.  Lightfoot, The Chinese Painting Collection and Correspondence of Sir James Stewart Lockhart, p. 121. 37.  Ibid., p. 130. 38.  Ibid., p. 131. 39.  Ibid., pp. 177 – 79. 40.  The point is well made in Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, Harvard East Asian Monographs 224 (Cambridge, MA and London, 2003), p.  17: “I argue here that a Chinese nation did not precede the notion of ‘Chinese products.’ The two constructs evolved together.” 41.  David Hogge, “The Empress Dowager and the Camera: Photographing Cixi 1903 – 1904”, Massa­ chussetts Institute of Technology, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/empress_dowager/cx _essay_03.pdf; Grant Hayter-­Menzies, The Empress and Mrs Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds (Hong Kong, 2011), deals with the Carl commission; the painter’s own account is in Katherine Augusta Carl, With the Empress Dowager of China (London, 1906). For a recent overview, see Wang Zhenghua, “Zouxiang ‘gongkaihua’: Cixi xiaoxiang de fengge xingshi, zhengzhi yundong yu xing­ xiang su zao,” Guoli Taiwan daxue meishushi yanjiu jikan 32 (2012), pp. 239 – 316, and in Wang Cheng-­ hua, “‘Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, circa 1904,” Nan Nü 14 (2012), pp. 119 – 76. 42.  Virginia Anderson, “‘A Semi-­Chinese Picture’: Hubert Vos and the Empress Dowager of China,” in Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz, eds., East-­West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship (Washington, DC, 2012), pp. 96 – 109. 43.  Yang, “The Crisis of the Real,” p. 21; Anderson, “‘A Semi-­Chinese Picture,’” p. 108, n. 20; Wang “‘Going Public,’” pp. 149 – 61. 44.  The key account of this process remains Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995). 45.  See Wong, Parting the Mists, p. xxiii, for a definition of guohua as Hobsbawmian “invented tradition”; see pp. 12 – 13 for its dominance from the 1920s. 46.  Cao Yiqiang, “Unintended Consequences of Tourism: Kang Youwei’s Italian Journey (1904) and Sterling Clark’s Chinese Expedition (1908),” in Lauren Golden, ed., Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies (London, 2006), pp. 341 – 51 (p. 345); more extensive translations from Kang’s writings are in Lawrence Wu, “Kang Youwei and the Westernisation of Modern Chinese Art,” Orientations 21.3 (1990), pp. 46 – 53. 47.  Jerome Silbergeld, “Changing Views of Change: The Song-­Yuan Transition in Chinese Painting Histories,” in Vishakha N. Desai, ed., Asian Art History in the Twenty-­First Century (Williamstown, MA, 2007), pp. 40 – 63; Cheng-­hua Wang, “Rediscovering Song Painting for the Nation: Artistic Discursive Practices in Early Twentieth-­Century China,” Artibus Asiae 72.2 (2011), pp. 221 – 46. 48.  Liu, “Publishing Chinese Art: Issues of Cultural Reproduction in China, 1905 – 1918,” pp. 143 – 45. 49.  Zhang Fengjie, ed., Nanhai xian zhi, Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng edn (Shanghai, 2003), juan 21, p. 8a [p. 434]. 50.  Patrick Conner, The China Trade, 1600 – 1860 (Brighton, 1986), pp. 50 – 52. 51.  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 76. 52.  Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 76, 40. 53.  Nie Hui, “Chen Shizeng he tade ‘Du hua tu’,” Zijincheng 125 (2004.4), pp. 100 – 101 (p. 100). 54.  The quote is from Gu Lu, Qing Jia Lu (Shanghai, 1986), p. 56; this text, by an author of uncertain date, was first published in 1830.

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55.  Gerth, China Made, p. 224; Susan R. Fernsebner, “Objects, Spectacle, and a Nation on Display at the Nanyang Exposition of 1910,” Late Imperial China 27.2 (2006), pp. 99 – 1 24. On the history of exhibitions, see Liu Ruikuan, Zhongguo meishu de xiandaihua: Meishu qikan yu meizhan huodong de fenxi (1911 – 1937) (Beijing, 2008); Kris Imants Ercums, “Exhibiting Modernity: National Art Exhibitions in China During the Early Republican Period, 1911 – 1937,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014. 56.  On April 1, 1910, Xie wrote, “Will you be able to visit the Nanking Exhibition in May next?” Lightfoot, The Chinese Painting Collection and Correspondence of Sir James Stewart Lockhart, p. 118. 57.  Wan Qingli, “Chinese Merchants as Influential Artists: 1700 – 1948,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 528 – 54. 58.  Both clothing and racial typologies were fraught issues at this period. See Robert E. Harrist Jr., “Clothes Make the Man: Dress, Modernity and Masculinity in China ca. 1912 – 1937,” in Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, Harvard East Asian Monographs 239 (Cambridge, MA and London, 2005), pp. 171 – 93; Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London, 1992). 59.  Gerth, China Made, p. 10. 60.  For Chen’s appropriation of a Japanese manner of painting, itself appropriating European watercolor technique, and for its appearance in Viewing Paintings, see Lu Xuanfei, “Chen Shizeng ‘Beijing fengsu tu’ zhong de Riben qishi,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 28 (2010), pp. 185 – 266 (pp. 214 – 15). The point is made there that the (Chinese) figures depicted are actual portraits, if caricatured ones, and the participants in the scene would be recognizable to those “in the know,” an interesting point of comparison with a much earlier viewing scene such as Xie Huan’s Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (see fig. 2.20). Also stressed is the existence of a number of earlier Japanese scenes of exhibition viewing that might have acted as models for Chen in this case. 61.  On Chen Shizeng as manhua artist, see Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1895 – 1975) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2002), pp. 61 – 67. 62.  Zhang Hongxing, “Studies in Late Qing Battle Paintings,” pp. 274 – 76. 63.  Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, pp. 119 – 20. 64.  Li Yunheng, Zhang Shengjie, and Yan Lijun eds., Chen Shizeng hua lun (Beijing, 2008), pp. 161 – 66; Wenrenhua de jiazhi (baihua), published in Huixue zazhi 2 (Spring 1921), pp. 1 – 6, 167 – 72; Wen ren hua zhi jia zhi (wenyan), published in May 1922 in the book Zhongguo wenrenhua zhi yanjiu, which also includes Omura Seigai’s “Renaissance” essay. For discussions, see Gao Xindan, “Shixi Chen Shizeng ‘Wenrenhua zhi jiazhi’ de chengwen qingjing,” Besides: A Journal of Art History and Criticism 3 (2001), pp. 181 – 92; for a situation of this essay in the context of Chen’s other writings, in particular his insistence on the “progressive” nature of “Chinese painting” (Zhongguo hua, a term Chen first used in 1921), see Chen Chiyu, “Chen Shizeng Zhongguo hua jinbulun zhi yiyi,” Dongnan daxue xuebao (Zhexue shekexueban) 8.5 (2006), pp. 94 – 99. 65.  Translation in Wong, Parting the Mists, p. 65. 66.  Wong, Parting the Mists, p. xxvii; see also p. 67 for the derivation of jiazhi, “value,” from the Japanese kachi, a term explicitly derived from Adam Smith: “the idea of assigning values to cultural products was a trope that enabled different nations to join the world marketplace. The greatest challenge facing literati painting was whether it could measure up to international artistic standards.” On qiyun and its origins in the venerable “Six Laws of Xie He,” see Susan Bush and Hsio-­yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, pp. 10 – 13; also James Cahill, “The Six Laws and How to Read Them,” Ars Orientalis 4 (1961), pp. 372 – 81. “Spirit resonance” is the controversial if widely used translation of William Acker. For the argument, based on a thorough investigation of the terms in the context of Six Dynasties literary theory, that a better translation would be something like “liveliness of individual style,” see Chen Chaoxiu, Wen xin diao long shuyu tanxi (Taibei, 1986), pp. 120 – 24. 67.  Li Yunheng, Zhang Shengjie, Yan Lijun, eds., Chen Shizeng hua lun, p. 171. See also Barmé, Artistic Exile, pp. 118 – 19, for a discussion of Chen’s awareness of the theories of “modern aestheticians,” and in particular of the idea of Einfühlungstheorie (in Chinese ganqing yiru), which Chen derived from Kant via the key figure of Cai Yuanpei (1868 – 1940). 68.  It is a significant reflection on the bifurcation in the secondary literature on Chinese painting in the twentieth century that while images of oil painters at work will be found in books like Li Zhao, Shanghai youhua shi (Shanghai, 1995), and Li Zhao, Zhongguo xiandai youhua shi (Shanghai, 2007), images of guohua painters at work appear in works like Xiaoneng Yang, Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth Century China (Stanford, CA, 2010). 69.  Roberta Wue, “Deliberate Looks: Ren Bonian’s 1888 Album of Women,” in Jason C. Kuo, ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s – 1930s (Washington, DC, 2007), pp. 55 – 77 (p. 56). 70.  Gordon H. Chang, “Chinese Painting Comes to America: Zhang Shuqi and the Diplomacy of Art,” in Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz, eds, East-­West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship (Washington, DC, 2012), pp. 126 – 41.

notes to pages 176 – 82

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71.  Nie Hui, “Chen Shizeng he tade ‘Du hua tu’,” p. 101. 72.  This should, I believe, affect how we read a text like the collection Hua lun congkan (Collected Texts on the Theory of Painting) published in 1937 by Zhonghua shuju, which collects theoretical texts on what it calls simply “painting” (hua) from Liang Yuandi (r. 552 – 555) to Chen Shizeng in the early twentieth century, and is hence more polemical and less “traditional” than it might first appear. 73.  Text in Li Yunheng, Zhang Shengjie, and Yan Lijun, eds, Chen Shizeng lun hua, pp. 2 – 136. The lectures were edited in separate editions by Chen’s students Yu Jianhua (1895 – 1979) and Su Jiheng (active 1920s – 1930s), and appeared under their name. The text cited is a modern punctuated version of that by Yu Jianhua, published in Ji’nan in 1926. 74.  On the development of art-­historical writing in general in China, see Wong, Parting the Mists, pp. 35 – 53 (pp. 42 – 48 on Pan Tianshou); also Guo Hui, “Writing Chinese Art History in Late Qing and Republican China,” PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2009. 75.  Song Zhaolin, Gu wu chenliesuo: Zhongguo gongting bowuyuan zhi quanyu (Taibei, 2010); Tamara Hamlish, “Global Culture, Modern Heritage: Re-­ membering the Chinese Imperial Collections,” in Susan A. Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford, CA, 2000), pp.  137 – 60; Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott with David Shambaugh, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures (Seattle and London, 2005), pp. 56 – 73. 76.  Zaixin Hong, “An Entrepreneur in an ‘Adventurer’s Paradise’: Star Talbot and His Innovative Contributions to the Art Business of Modern Shanghai,” in Jennifer Purtle and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from Treaty Ports to World War II (Chicago, 2009), pp. 85 – 105 (p. 91). 77.  Lisa Claypool, “Ways of Seeing the Nation: Chinese Painting in the National Essence Journal (1905 – 1911) and Exhibition Culture,” positions: east asia cultures critique 19.1 (2011), pp.  55 – 82; Wang Cheng-­hua, “New Printing Technology and Heritage Preservation: Collotype Reproduction of Antiquities in Modern China circa 1908 – 1917,” in Joshua Vogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2012), pp. 273 – 308, 363 – 72; Liu, “Second Only to the Original.” 78.  Liu, “Publishing Chinese Art,” pp.  208 – 51; Cheng-­hua Wang, “The Qing Imperial Collection Circa 1905 – 25: National Humiliation, Heritage Preservation, and Exhibition Culture,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago, 2010), pp. 320 – 41 (pp. 324 – 25). 79.  Clarissa von Spee, “Zhang Daqian, Wu Hufan and the Story of Sleeping Gibbon,” in Shibian xingbian liufeng: Zhongguo jindai huihua 1796 – 1949 xueshu taolunhui lunwenji/Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Painting 1796 – 1949, International Conference Papers (Gaoxiong, 2007), pp. 271 – 84 (p. 272). 80.  Tse Tsan Tai, Ancient Chinese Art: A Treatise on Chinese Painting (Hong Kong, 1928), p. 127, p. 18. The Bodleian Library copy is dedicated in the author’s hand, “To the Chancellor and Congregation, Oxford University, With the Author’s Best Compliments.” 81. Julia F. Andrews, “Exhibition to Exhibition: Painting Practice in the Early Twentieth Century as a Modern Response to ‘Tradition’,” in Shibian xingbian liufeng: Zhongguo jindai huihua 1796 – 1949 xueshu taolunhui lunwenji/Turmoil, Representation, and Trends: Modern Chinese Painting 1796 – 1949, International Conference Papers (Gaoxiong, 2007), pp. 23 – 58. 82.  Andrews, “Exhibition to Exhibition,” pp. 27 – 30.  See also Richard K. Kent, “Fine Art Photography in Republican Period Shanghai: From Pictorialism to Modernism,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), pp. 849 – 74 (p. 857), for the claims of photography as art in the context of this exhibition. 83.  On Fang Junbi, see Frank Dunand, ed., The Pavilion of Marital Harmony: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy between Tradition and Modernity (Geneva, 2002), and on the artistic community abroad more generally, see Jo-­Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern 1919 – 1945 (Munich, 2004), and Éric Lefebvre, Artistes chinois à Paris (Paris, 2011). 84.  Lefebvre, Artistes chinois à Paris, cat. 2 and cat. 7. 85.  Cohn’s essay is translated in full in Danzker, ed., Shanghai Modern, pp. 112 – 17. 86.  Huang Yao: Cartoonist, Scholar, Painter 1917 – 1987 (Singapore, 2011). 87.  Wu He, ed., Zhishang jingling: 20 shiji 30 niandai de manhua mingxing (Beijing 2003), p. 33, also pp. 42, 43, 45 for other encounters between Niubizi and the perplexing figure of the nude model. For another cartoon from 1935 satirizing the less-­than-­pure motives for an interest in the female nude on the part of (entirely male) audiences, and for a discussion of the issues it raises, see David Clarke, “Iconicity and Indexicality: The Body in Chinese Art,” Semiotica 155 – 1/4 (2005), pp. 229 – 48 (p. 240). The nude image in Republican popular culture is the subject of Sun Liying, “Body Un/Dis-­Covered: Luoti, Editorial Agency and Transcultural Production in Chinese Pictorials (1925 – 1933),” PhD diss., Ruprecht-­Karls-­ Universität Heidelberg, 2014.

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88.  Wu He, ed., Zhishang jingling, p. 140. Liang Baibo is the sole woman in the company of eighteen men in a group caricature of the leading cartoonists of the 1930s; see Mary Ginsberg, The Art of Influence: Asian Propaganda (London, 2013), fig. 14. 89.  Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London, 2007), p. 27, cites Qu Dajun (1630 – 1696) using the term yanghuo, “ocean goods,” for imports. On the opposition between guo and yang, see Gerth, China Made, p. 4. On the terms youhua and xihua, see Li Zhao, Shanghai youhua shi; Éric Janicot, “Les matières de la modernité: la diffusion de la peinture à l’huile en Chine republicaine,” Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 49.3 (2002), pp. 168 – 75. 90.  Gerth, China Made, p. 10. 91.  On art schools, see Jane Zheng, “The Shanghai Fine Arts College and Modern Artists in the Public Sphere (1913 – 1937),” East Asian History 32/33 (2006 – 2007), pp. 217 – 30; on art societies and art publishing, see also Pedith Pui Chan, “The Making of a Modern Art World: The Institutionalisation of Guohua in Shanghai, 1929 – 1937,” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2009, and Pedith Pui Chan, “The Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua 國畫: Art Societies in Republican Shanghai,” Modern China 20 (2013), pp. 1 – 30.

ch a pter six: the people 1.  Lu Xuanfei, “Chen Shizeng ‘Beijing fengsu tu’ zhong de Riben qishi,” Meishushi yanjiu jikan 28 (2010), pp. 185 – 266 (pp. 214 – 15). 2.  On Xu Beihong, see most recently Ronald Otsuka, Xu Fangfang, and Chen Hao, Xu Beihong, Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: Selections from the Beihong Memorial Museum (Denver, 2011). 3.  The literature on Republican artistic debates is large and growing; key works in English include Ralph Croizier, Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School of Painting, 1906 – 1951 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1988); Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-­ Century China (Berkeley, 1996); Kuiyi Shen, “On the Reform of Chinese Painting in Early Republican China,” in Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, eds., Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition (Hangzhou, 1997), pp. 602 – 22; John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu, 1998); Julia Andrews, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in 20th-­Century Chinese Art (New York, 1998); Danzker, Shanghai Modern (2004); Wong, Parting the Mists (2006); Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-­Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2008); John Clark, Modernities of Chinese Art (Leiden, 2010); Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th-­Century China (Milan, 2010). 4.  Jonathan Chaves, The Chinese Painter as Poet (New York, 2000), pp.  109 – 12, 143; Marcia R. Ristaino, China’s Intrepid Muse: The Cartoons and Art of Ding Cong (Warren, CT, 2009), pp. 50 – 53. 5.  The fullest account of the making of New China’s art world remains Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China 1949 – 1979 (Berkeley, 1994). 6.  On the Yan’an Forum and its wartime context, see B. S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” (Ann Arbor, 1980); also David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford, 1991), and Chang-­tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937 – 1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994). 7.  The work is cataloged as Zhiben gongbi zhongcai Zhongguo hua, “Fine brushwork Chinese painting in heavy colours on paper,” in Yang Lidan, ed., Bainian meishu: Guan zang jingpin. Jinian Zhongguo meishuguan jianguan 40 zhounian (Beijing, 2003), p.  81. The website of the National Art Museum of China until very recently used “Traditional Chinese Painting” (more recently just “Chinese painting”) as its translation of what in the Chinese-­language version is guohua, and this is the category into which Pan Jiezi’s 1954 work falls there, see: http://www.namoc.org/en/Collection/200902/t20090205_66584 .html [accessed Jan, 2, 2013], where the English title is given as “The Founder of Grotto Art.” It was a well-­received work at the time of its execution, since it is included in the portfolio of reproductions entitled Contemporary Chinese Painting, produced by Foreign Languages Press (Beijing, 1955) under the English title, “How Our Old Cave Murals Were Created.” 8.  Sarah E. Fraser, Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618 – 960 (Stanford, CA, 2004). I am grateful to Sarah Fraser for the opinion that the painting “doesn’t seem to be a particular cave, but rather an idealized amalgam” (personal e-­mail communication, March 2, 2013). 9.  Sarah E. Fraser, “Antiquarianism or Primitivism? The Edge of History in the Modern Chinese Imagination,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago, 2010), pp. 342 – 67 (p. 357). 10.  Zhou Daguang, ed., Gongbihua yishu (Beijing, 2002), p. 10. 11.  Based on an entirely different politics, but with something of the same indebtedness to Kang

not es to pages 190 – 200

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Youwei (not to say to Chen Shizeng), is the project of Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th – 14th Century, Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 48 (New York, 1992), where the transcendence of mimesis is seen in positive terms. 12.  Chang-­tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, NY and London, 2011), p. 180. 13.  Andrews, Painters and Politics, p. 125; Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China (Oxford, 2010), p. 456. 14.  Published in Fan: Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Collection Catalogue (Hong Kong, 1994), pp.  154 – 55; see also Suk-­young Kim, “From Imperial Concubine to Model Maoist: The Photographic Metamorphosis of Mei Lanfang,” Theatre Research International 31.1 (2006), pp. 37 – 53. 15.  The idea of public and private transcripts originates in the work of James C. Scott, but I owe an awareness of it to Alfreda Murck, “Public and Private Truths in Chinese Painting: Zhu Da and Fu Baoshi,” in Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honour of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), I, pp. 141 – 64. 16.  Claire Roberts, Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (Hong Kong, 2010). 17.  One of the painters who made the most consistent effort at topographically realist guohua, especially in relation to his visit to Eastern Europe in 1957, was Fu Baoshi (1904 – 1965); see Anita Chung, ed., Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904 – 1965) (Cleveland, 2011). 18.  Both photographs are published in Zhao Zhijun, ed., Huajia Huang Binhong nianpu (Beijing, 1990), pp. 236 – 37. 19.  Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore MD and London, 1987), p. 86. More pictures of guohua artists sketching from nature are reproduced in Li Zhao, Shanghai youhua shi (Shanghai, 1995), p. 173. 20.  James A. Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art and History in Rural North China (Vancouver and Seattle, 2004), p. 146. 21.  Hung, Mao’s New World, pp. 200 – 206. 22.  Li Zhao, Shanghai youhua shi, p. 172. 23.  Hung, Mao’s New World, p. 131. 24.  For the scale of this — for example, the tenfold doubling in the number of museums in China, from 21 in 1949 to 230 in 1962 — see Richard Kurt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, MD, 2004), p. 40. 25.  Hung, Mao’s New World, p. 49, quotes Vladimir Paperny, “Moscow in the 1930s and the Emergence of a New City,” in Hans Günther, ed., The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York, 1990), pp. 229 – 39 (p. 232): “Who were the spectators of the pompous parades and demonstrations of the 1930s? In the pre-­ television age, who could see them but a few party leaders standing on top of Lenin’s tomb? . . . the leaders were not the audience, they were the actors, while the demonstrators acted as [the] audience . . .” 26.  The point is made by Zheng Shengtian in his contribution to “Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Meeting Roundtable 3: The 1955 Bandung Conference — Alternative Postwar Histories,” Yishu 14.3 (2015), pp. 48 – 7 1 (pp. 62 – 67). 27.  Wright, Passport to Peking, p. 333. 28.  Wright, Passport to Peking, pp. 497, 503. 29.  Arnold L. Herstand, “Art and the Artist in Communist China,” College Art Journal 19.1 (1959), pp. 23 – 29. Herstand (1925 – 1989), who studied as a painter with Fernand Léger, went on to be president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and was active as an art dealer in New York, but he appears not to have written further on China, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/23/obituaries/arnold-­herstand­ -­art-­gallery-­owner-­and-­educator-­64.html [accessed Jan. 3, 2013]. 30.  “Writer Is Target in Peiping Press,” New York Times, June 15, 1955. For the broader context, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945 – 1961 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2003). A search of British newspapers of the same period fails to produce stories of this kind, supporting the sense that events in China were more compelling to an American audience. 31.  “Bulk of China’s Great Art Works Held in Taiwan by Nationalists,” New York Times, July 22, 1956. 32.  Jane C. Ju, “Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics,” in Anna Brzyski, ed., Partisan Canons (Durham, NC and London, 2007), pp. 115 – 34. 33.  For a biography, see Enid Nemy, “Peggy Durdin, 92, Reporter on Asia, Dies,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 2002. Durdin wrote little about China, relative to her large output on Southeast Asia, but what she did write has a pervasive tone that “Chinese culture” has been effectively destroyed under Communist rule. 34.  Peggy Durdin, “Red China Revealed in Her Art,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1958. 35.  Ju, “Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics,” pp.  123 – 26. For an overview of the history of the reception of Chinese painting in the United States, see Charles Mason,

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“Collecting Chinese Paintings in the United States,” in Zhang Hongxing, ed., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 – 1900 (London, 2013), pp. 79 – 85. 36.  This claim, of course, ignores the fact that the collection was created by Manchus. On the way in which this fact became increasingly visible, see Susan Naquin, “The Forbidden City Goes Abroad: Qing History and the Foreign Exhibitions of the Palace Museum, 1974 – 2000,” T’oung Pao 90 (2004), pp. 341 – 97. 37.  Chinese Art Treasures: A Selected Group of Objects from the Chinese National Palace Museum and the Chinese National Central Museum Taichung, Taiwan (Geneva, 1961), “Preface.” 38.  Chinese Art Treasures, p. 20. 39.  On which see Basil Gray, “The Royal Academy Exhibition of Chinese Art, 1935 – 1936 in Retrospect,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 50 (1985 – 1986), pp. 11 – 36. 40.  Leslie Judd Ahlander, “Incomparable Rarities from China,” Washington Post, May 28, 1961. 41.  Leslie Judd Ahlander, “Work of ‘Action’ Painter Shown,” Washington Post, March 8, 1959. 42.  Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999). 43.  On 1950, see Hung, Mao’s New World, p. 114; on 1958, see Susan E. Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958 – 59, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-­War Eastern Europe (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 101 – 32 (p. 107). The cultural relations between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR are an important but under-­researched area in English (since few command the necessary language skills); for a glimpse of what sources might be available, see Mark Gamsa, “The Cultural and the Social in Chinese-­Russian Relations,” Cultural and Social History 9.3 (2012), pp. 391 – 406. 44.  On this history, see Wong, Parting the Mists, pp. 45 – 49. Chen Shizeng’s lectures were published under this same title, but that may have been applied to them posthumously. 45.  Pan Tianshou, “Shei shuo ‘Zhongguo hua biran taotai’?” in Shui Tianzhong and Lang Shaojun, eds., Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan, 2 vols. (Shanghai, 1999), I, pp. 116 – 21 (p. 116). For the context of this dispute, see Andrews, Painters and Politics, p. 193, and Xiaoping Lin, “Challenging the Canon: Socialist Realism in Traditional Chinese Painting Revisited,” Third Text 21.1 (2007), pp. 41 – 53. 46.  Pan Gongkai, ed., Pan Tianshou tan yi lu (Hangzhou, 2002), p. 18, where this obiter dictum, endlessly cited and recycled in modern discussions, is attributed simply as “1965. Statement to a reporter”; its exact provenance remains somewhat unclear. 47.  Pan Tianshou, “Tantan Zhongguo chuantong huihua de fengge,” in Shui Tianzhong and Lang Shaojun, eds., Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan, 2 vols. (Shanghai, 1999), I, pp. 122 – 39 (the lecture dates from 1957). 48.  Clement Greenberg, “The Art of China: Review of The Principles of Chinese Painting by George Rowley” (The Nation, Oct. 28, 1950), in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950 – 1956 (Chicago and London, 1993), pp. 42 – 44. 49.  For a powerful argument about the extent to which post-­war abstract art needed to repress any hint of the “oriental” mode in its practices or discourses, see Stanley K. Abe, “To Avoid the Inscrutable: Abstract Expressionism and the ‘Oriental Mode’,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction, Annotating Art’s Histories (Cambridge, MA and London, 2006), pp.  53 – 73; also Bert Winter-­Tamaki, “The Asian Dimensions of Post-­war Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics,” in Alexandra Munroe, ed., The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860 – 1989 (New York, 2009), pp. 144 – 97, who quotes on p.  152 Clement Greenberg insisting “Not one of the original ‘abstract expressionists’ — least of all Kline — has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West.” 50.  Craig Clunas, “The Art of Global Comparisons,” in Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global (London, 2013), pp. 165 – 76. 51.  On the art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, see the exhibition catalog Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Art and China’s Revolution (New Haven, CT and London, 2008), and the essays collected in Richard King, ed., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 – 1976 (Vancouver, 2010). 52.  Reproduced in Huxian nongminhua xuanji (Xi’an, 1974), no. 69. On the Huxian phenomenon, see Ralph Croizier, “Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity,” in King, ed., Art in Turmoil, pp. 136 – 63. 53.  Zheng Shengtian, “Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan: A Conversation with the Artist Liu Chunhua,” in Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Art and China’s Revolution (New York, 2009), pp. 118 – 32. 54.  On the history of the controversy surrounding the nude in art after 1949, see Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, pp. 73 – 106. For François Jullien, the Chinese “lack” of the nude forms one of the major points of a difference he sees as absolute and essential; François Jullien, translated by Maev de la Guardia, The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics (Chicago and London, 2007).

notes to pages 214 – 24

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55.  The English-­language literature alone is now large, with key works including Joan Lebold Cohen, The New Chinese Painting 1949 – 1986 (New York, 1987); Gao Minglu, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley, 1998); Wu Hung, ed., Chinese Art at the Crossroad: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (Hong Kong, 2001); Martina Köppel-­Yang, Semiotic Warfare : The Chinese Avant-­Garde, 1979 – 1989 (Hong Kong, 2003); Gao Minglu, Total Modernity. 56.  This literature is even larger; of that restricted to English, see, in addition to Köppel-­Yang, Semiotic Warfare, and Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, most recently Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong, 2008); Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York and Durham, NC, 2010); Christopher Crouch, ed., Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization (Amherst, NY, 2010); Richard Vine, New China, New Art (Munich, New York, and London, 2011); Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Jeong-­hee Lee Kalisch, and Juliane Noth, eds., Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context (Weimar, 2012). 57.  Ivan Gaskell, “Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalisation and Contemporary Chinese Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52.1 (2012), pp. 1 – 16. 58.  I owe the idea of the “thinking” image to my colleague Hanneke Grootenboer. 59.  Zheng Ziyan and Wang Aihe, eds., Zheng Ziyan: Wu ming huaji 13 (Xianggang, 2009), pl. 6; ibid., p. 8, for an account of the “four-­day utopian commune” on the beach around the public holiday of Oct. 1, 1975, during which the work was painted. On the “No Name” group see the collected volumes of Wu ming huaji, as well as Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974 – 1985 (New York, 2011), pp. 15 – 58, and Juliane Noth, “Landscapes of Exclusion: The No Name Group and the Multiple Modernities of Chinese Art around 1979,” in Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Jeong-­ hee Lee Kalisch, and Juliane Noth, eds., Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context (Weimar, 2012), pp. 49 – 62.

conclusion 1.  Ian J. Gentles, “Montagu, Edward, Second Earl of Manchester (1602 – 1671),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /19009 [accessed Aug. 21, 2013]. 2.  Metro, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, p. 35. 3.  Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, originally 1842; I consulted the fifth ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1872). China is treated in vol. 1, pp. 332 – 36; pp. 332 – 35 — that is, three-­quarters of the total — is taken up with bauliche Denkmäler, while pp. 335 – 36 treat bildende Kunst der Chinesen. Fig. 137 is the unspecified Aus einer chinesischen Malerei figure seated on a carp. On Kugler (1800 – 1858) and his history, see http:// www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kuglerf.htm [accessed Aug. 20, 2013]. 4.  Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, p. xii. 5.  Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, p. 9, citing Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2000), p. 25. 6.  Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 341. 7.  The quotes are taken from Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 128 – 29, 134. 8.  Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p.129. Mai-­mai Sze, The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting, 2 vols., Bollingen Series XLIX (Princeton, NJ, 1956) was the subject of a famously trenchant review by James Cahill in Ars Orientalis 2 (1959), pp. 232 – 41, which concludes, “. . . we might, until we can demonstrate more convincingly the actual relevance of Yin and Yang, Ch’an Buddhism, etc., to painting, leave them to the realm of philosophy, religion, and the dabbling of the pseudomystics among our contemporary poets and painters. Less Tao, please, more painting.” 9.  The Times, July 18, 1827. 10.  Laurence Binyon, Chinese Paintings in English Collections (Paris and Brussels, 1927). 11.  Ausstellung chinesischer Gemälde aus der Sammlung Olga-­Julia Wegener (Berlin, 1908); Guide to an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings (Fourth to Nineteenth Century a.d.) (London, 1910); Musée Cernuschi, Exposition de peintures chinoises anciennes (Paris, 1912); Metropolitan Museum of Art, Special Exhibition of Chinese Paintings from the Collection of the Museum (New York, 1914). 12.  The first English-­language PhD awarded appears to be to Donovan M. Sullivan [Michael Sullivan], “Evidence and Sources for the Study of Early Chinese Landscape Painting,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1952. The sad fact that Michael Sullivan (1916 – 2013) passed away only during the time of writing of this book demonstrates the brevity of the field’s existence outside China. 13.  Thus David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects, p. 37, draws attention to the claim in Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford, 1997), p. 9, that “it was in nineteenth-­century Europe and North America that ‘Chinese art’ was created.” While stressing that I believe “painting” and “art” have quite different statuses, I would still want now to draw back somewhat from the starkness of this formulation.

260

14.  The confusion is resolved in Zaixin Hong, “An Entrepreneur in an ‘Adventurer’s Paradise’,” pp. 86 – 91. 15.  On Ferguson, see Lara Jaishree Netting, “Acquiring Chinese Art and Culture: The Collections and Scholarship of John C. Ferguson (1866 – 1945),” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2009. 16.  W. Perceval Yetts, “Painting in Chinese Civilization” [review of John C. Ferguson, Chinese Painting], The Burlington Magazine 53.305 (Aug. 1928), pp. 96 – 97. 17.  This textual record was systematized during the Republican and early People’s Republic eras in works like Yu Shaosong, Shuhua shulu jieti (Beiping, 1932), Yu Anlan, ed., Hua lun cong kan (Beijing, 1937), and Yu Jianhua, ed., Zhongguo hualun leibian (Beijing,1957), which, as the preface makes clear, was also begun in the 1930s. These compilations have been and continue to be mined largely uncritically (and I am equally culpable) as if they were an uncomplicated record of what “the aesthetics of painting” in China are — for example, Zhongguo hualun leibian supplies almost all the examples used in François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China, translated by Janet Lloyd (New York, 1995). A re-­examination of these texts as presentations of a polemical position, rather than neutral “sources,” might well be productive. 18.  Fu Kaisen, Lidai zhulu huamu, 2 vols. (Beiping, 1934). 19.  Walter Benjamin, “Chinese Paintings at the Bibliothèque Nationale,” translated by Timothy J. Attanucci, in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA and London, 2009), pp. 257 – 61. 20.  Pointed out by John Rosenfield, “Concluding Remarks,” in Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix, eds., The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays in Scholarly Method (Taipei, 2008), pp. 632 – 42 (p. 635). More or less contemporary with Benjamin’s review is one of the first articles to consider the development of the study of Chinese painting in Europe and America historiographically; see Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl, “Chinese Painting,” Parnassus 10.1 (Jan. 1938), pp. 16 – 22, 48. 21.  Pao hui chi, Paintings by Chinese Masters: Twelve Paintings Reproduced in Collotype from the Collection of J. P. Dubosc (Beijing, 1937). 22.  Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, pp. 158, 164. 23.  Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, pp. 189, 98. 24.  Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 132.

notes to pages 232– 36

261

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index

Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (Nü shi zhen tu 女史箴圖), 8 –­ ­9, 80, 158, 160, 162, 164, 172, 184 After the Bath (Yu hou 浴後), 186  –­ ­87, 193 Ahlander, Leslie Judd, 215 –­ ­16 ai guo 愛國, 165 Ai Weiwei 艾未未, 226 Album of Paintings by Famous Masters of Successive Dynasties (Li dai ming gong hua pu 歷代名公 畫譜). See Master Gu’s Painting Album Album of Various Subjects (Ren wu tu ce 人物圖冊), 7 Amusing Oneself with Calligraphy and Painting (Shu hua wu qing tu 書畫娛情圖), 72  –­ ­73, 91 An Zhengwen 安正文, 50  –­ ­51 Anderson, William, 160, 162, 167, 232 Andrews, Julia, 207 anecdotal portraiture, 72 Anhui province, 127 Antique Model Calligraphy Assembled in the Hall for Treasuring Worthies (Bao xian tang ji gu fa tie 寶賢堂集古法帖), 8  –­ ­9 Antiquities Display Hall (Gu wu chenliesuo 古物 陳列所), 183 Apelles Painting Campaspe, 63 Appraising Horses (Xiang ma tu 相馬圖), 129 Art Movement Society (Yishu yundong she 藝術 運動社), 186 Artist at Work, 134  –­ ­35, 145 Asking the Way in the Autumn Mountains (Qiu shan wen dao tu 秋山問道圖), 109, 248n49 Attiret, Denis, 94, 245n85 Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains (Qiao Hua qiu se 鵲華秋色), 128 Awaiting the Deliverer (Xi wo hou 徯我後), 188 Bahram Mirza album, 10 –­ ­12, 25 Bai Juyi 白居易, 142  –­ ­44 Barnhart, Richard, 65 Barrow, John, 20  –­ ­21 Battle Scene from the Taiping Rebellion, 155  –­ ­56, 168 Beijing, 52, 87, 91, 98, 100 –­ ­1, 112, 121, 127, 157 –­ ­58, 171, 176, 179, 183, 186, 209 –­ ­11, 227, 233 –­ ­34 Benjamin, Walter, 234 Benoist, Michel, 101

Berenson, Bernard, 21, 32, 162, 246n4 Beverage Peddler and Fan Seller, 49 Biancai 辯才, 37, 241n3 Bickford, Maggie, 48, 242n19, 244n61 bijutsu 美術, 163 Binyon, Laurence, 158, 162, 173, 184, 231, 253n30 Bird and Blossom, 167 Bird and Flowers, 25 Birns, Jack, 206 Birthday Gathering in the Bamboo Garden (Zhu lin shou ji tu 竹園壽集圖), 56  –­ ­58, 94 Bishu shanzhuang 避暑山莊, 98, 101 Bohanjae jip 保閑斎集 Boxer Rebellion, 156, 158 boxes, 40, 100 –­ ­1; “many treasures box” (see duobaoge) Boy Riding a Goat, 161 Brecht, Berthold, 202  –­ ­3 Brinker, Helmut, 242n12 British Museum, 9, 14, 80, 158, 160, 164, 167, 253n30, 254n35 Buddha Preaching, 109  –­ ­10 Buddhism, 17, 32 –­ ­33, 93, 197 –­ ­98, 260n8 Bushel, Stephen Wootton, 163, 184 Butler, William, 115 cabinets of curiosities, 19, 63, 110 Cahill, James, 59, 71, 89, 103, 141, 214, 241n1, 241n9, 260n8 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, 255n67 calligraphy and painting. See shu hua Canton (Guangzhou), 101, 111 –­ ­15, 117, 132, 134  –­ ­35, 153, 174  –­ ­75 Carl, Katherine Augusta, 168 –­ ­69 Carrier, David, 19, 260n13 Cartier-­Bresson, Henri, 208 Castiglione, Giuseppe, 91  –­ ­92, 94  –­ ­99, 101, 105, 107, 109, 111, 138 –­ ­39, 218 Cat, 149 Catalogue of Paintings in the Shogunal Collection (Gyomotsu on’e mokuroku 御物御絵目録), 39 Catalogue of Recorded Paintings of Successive Dynasties (Lidai zhulu hua mu 歷代著錄畫目), 233

277

Categorised Tripartite Orthodox Knowledge for Myriad Occasions (Lei ju san tai wan yong zheng zong 類聚三台萬用正宗), 74 Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (毛主席去安源), 223 Chait, Ralph M., 184 Chang Xinyong 昌新鏞, 164  –­ ­65 Changchun yuan長春園, 157 Changmen Gate, Suzhou, 145 Chaplin, Charlie, 203 Characters from “Dream of the Red Chamber” (Hong lou meng ren wu tu 紅樓夢人物圖), 83 Chen Baoyi 陳抱一, 219 Chen Handi 陳漢弟, 176 Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬, 71  –­ ­72, 74, 78  –­ ­79, 244n61 Chen Jieqi 陳介祺, 148 Chen Jiru 陳繼儒, 124  –­ ­25 Chen Mei 陳枚, 79, 94 Chen Shizeng 陳師曾, 175  –­ ­81, 182  –­ ­83, 193, 197, 255n67, 256n72 Chen Yizhou (aka Chin Isshū) 陳逸舟, 142 Cheng, Prince 成親王, 130 Chengde, 98, 101 Chiang Kai-­shek 蔣介石, 212, 214 Chinese Artist, Hong Kong, 152  –­ ­53 Chinese Artists’ Association, 200 Chinese Deities, 21 Chinese Pictorial Art. See Famous Chinese Paintings Chinnery, George, 136, 139 Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 62  –­ ­63 Chunhua xuan 淳化軒, 157 Cixi 慈禧太后, 168  –­ ­7 1 Clark, Kenneth, 240n39 Cohn, William, 186 Collected National Glories of the Divine Land (Shenzhou guoguang ji 神州國光集), 184 Collected Texts on the Theory of Painting (Hua lun congkan 畫論叢刊), 256n72 Collected Treasures of Painting (Bao hui ji 寳繪集), 234 Colors of the Taihang Mountains (Taihang shan se 太行山色), 110  –­ ­11 Comments on China’s Famous Paintings through History (Shina rekidai meiga ronpyō 支那歴代 名画論評), 163 “Commune member, Dongfengsheng Production Team, Niudong Commune” (Niudong gongshe Dongfengsheng dadui sheyuan 牛东公社东丰 盛大队社员), 221 Communist Party and art, 196, 200, 202 –­ ­14, 221  –­ ­23, 225, 227 Compendium of Calligraphy and Painting from the Peiwen Studio (Pei wen zhai shu hua pu 佩文齋 書畫譜), 110, 141 Conner, Patrick, 113 Conquer Every Difficulty, Build Socialism (Zhansheng yiqie kunnan, jianshe shehuizhuyi 戰勝一切困難建設社會主義), 204  –­ ­5 Contemplation among Pines, 142  –­ ­43

278

Copy of Qiu Ying’s “Spring Morning in the Han Palace” (Fang Qiu Ying Han gong chun xiao tu 仿仇英漢宮春曉圖), 88 Creators of the Cave Art, The (Shiku yishu de chuangzaozhe 石窟藝術的創造者), 192, 196  –­ ­200, 221, 257n7 Critique on the Present Forest of Ink (Mo lin jin hua 墨林今話), 142 Da Qing guo 大清國, 172 Dai Jin 戴進, 55, 91 Danto, Arthur, 240n41 danwei 單位, 209 Dapper, Olfert, 20 Davis, Gene, 216 “death of painting” thesis, 5 –­ ­6, 225, 237n1 Devis, Arthur, 113 Dianshizhai Collected Paintings (Dianshizhai cong hua 點石齋叢畫), 149 Dianshizhai Printing Company 點石齋, 150, 156 Ding Cong 丁聰, 194  –­ ­95 Ding Guanpeng 丁觀鵬, 91  –­ ­95, 109 Ding Song 丁悚, 182 Ding Yunpeng丁雲鵬, 93 Distant View of the Huai River (Huai he de yuan jing 淮河的遠景), 209 Dong Qichang 董其昌, 9, 29  –­ ­30, 64, 68  –­ ­69, 70, 74, 76, 111, 128, 131 –­ ­32, 247n45; Communist Party view of, 200; in Japan, 142; in Li Yu’s play, 124 –­ ­25 Dong Xiwen 董希文, 210  –­ ­11 Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng 紅樓夢), 73, 83, 148, 245n85 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 226 Du Jin 杜堇, 37, 39, 48, 57 –­ ­58, 75, 93 –­ ­94, 241nn1  –­ ­2, 244n64, 246n4 Du Liniang 杜麗娘. See Peony Pavilion, The Dubosc, Jean-­Pierre, 234 Dunhuang murals, 198 duobaoge 多寳格, 91, 110 Durdin, Peggy, 212  –­ ­14, 220  –­ ­21, 258n33 Dust Muhammad, 11 –­ ­12, 17, 18 –­ ­19, 22, 26 –­ ­27, 145 Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Fuchun shan ju tu 富春山居圖), 247n45 Dzungars Offering a Horse in Tribute (准噶尔貢 馬圖), 96  –­ ­97 Early Spring (Zao chun tu 早春圖), 13, 85, 215 Early Summer (Xiao xia tu 消夏圖), 46, 48 Eight Views of Autumn Moods (Qiu xing ba jing tu 秋興八景圖), 131  –­ ­32 Eighteen Scholars of the Tang Dynasty (Tang shi ba xue shi tu 唐十八學士圖), 36  –­ ­37, 39, 41  –­ ­46, 57 –­ ­61, 62, 94, 178, 241n9, 242nn11 –­ ­12 Ekeberg, Carl Gustav, 114 Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden (Xing yuan ya ji tu 杏園雅集圖), 4, 33, 52 –­ ­56, 64, 66, 74, 85, 94, 127 –­ ­28, 255n60 Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (Xi yuan ya ji tu 西園雅集圖), 70  –­ ­7 1 Empress Dowager, Tze Hsi, of China, The, 168  –­ ­69

Enjoying Antiquities (Wan gu tu 玩古圖), 61  –­ ­62, 93 Enlisting in the Army, 197 Evaluating Antiques in the Bamboo Courtyard (Zhu yuan pin gu tu 竹園品古圖), 61, 93 exhibitions, establishment of, 185 –­ ­86; catalogs, 186, 189, 214 –­ ­15; Communist Party and, 207 –­ ­9, 211 Expelling Demons from the House, 65  –­ ­66 “export painting,” 111 –­ ­15, 134, 179 Famous Chinese Paintings (Zhonghua minghua 中華名畫), 184, 232 Famous Shanghai Sights, with Illustrations and Explanations (Shen jiang ming sheng tu shuo 申江名勝圖說), 148  –­ ­49, 150 Fang Junbi 方君璧, 186  –­ ­87, 193 Fang Meiya 方梅崖, 27 Fang Shishu 方士庶, 127  –­ ­28 fans and fan painters, 47, 72, 74, 90, 138, 202 –­ ­3 Fascination of Ghosts (aka Ghost Amusement) (Gui qu tu 鬼趣圖), 133  –­ ­34 Fascination of Nature (Qian kun sheng yi tu 乾坤生意圖), 115, 120 Father in Front of the TV (Baba zai dianshiji qian 爸爸在电视机前), 224  –­ ­25 Fazang 法藏, 129 Female Disciples of Master Suiyuan (Suiyuan nü dizi tu 隨園女弟子圖), 80, 82 Fenollosa, Ernest, 32, 160 –­ ­62, 234 Ferdinand II, 19, 27 Ferguson, John C., 232 –­ ­34 Fisherman’s Abode after Rain, A, 3, 23 –­ ­24, 55, 85 –­ ­86 Flourishing Suzhou (Gusu fan hua tu 姑蘇繁華圖), 118  –­ ­20 Fong, Wen C., 258n11 foreground vs. background, 193 –­ ­94 Founding Ceremony of People’s China, The (Kai guo da dian 开国大典), 210  –­ ­11 Four Accomplishments (si yi). See qin qi shu hua Four Accomplishments, 46, 48 Four Luminaries of Mount Shang (Shangshan si hao tu 商山四皓圖), 70  –­ ­7 1 Fraser, Sarah E., 257n8 Frey, Henri Nicolas, 158 Fried, Michael, 55 Fu Baoshi 傅抱石, 258n17 Fu Kaisen 福開森. See Ferguson, John C. Fu Shen 傅申, 107 Fujian province, 125, 134 Funerary Portrait of Lady Li, 16  –­ ­17 Fuxi 伏羲, 6  –­ ­7 ga 画, 163 gadan 画壇, 240n44 gafu 画譜, 149 Gai Qi 改琦, 70, 148, 244n57, 245n85 Gazetteer of Nanhai County (Nanhai xian zhi 南海縣志), 174  –­ ­75 gender and spectatorship, 65, 76 –­ ­80, 94, 178 Gentleman and his Portrait (Ren wu ce 人物冊), 103  –­ ­4

index

Gerth, Karl, 190, 254n40 Gide, André, 60 Giles, Herbert, 163 Girl of the Autumn River 秋水伊人, 188 Going Up the River at the Qingming Festival (Qingming shang he tu 清明上河圖), 121  –­ ­24, 249nn6  –­ ­7 Gombrich, Ernst, 22 –­ ­25, 26, 55, 86, 218, 225, 231, 239n36; “beholder’s share” concept, 22, 25, 53 gongbihua 工筆畫, 198 Greenberg, Clement, 21 –­ ­22, 218, 230, 239n36, 259n49 Greeting the New Year, 131 Gu Bing 顧炳, 29, 75, 93 –­ ­94 Gu Deqian 顧德謙, 74  –­ ­75, 94 Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之, 8 –­ ­9, 12, 29, 158, 162, 164 Gu Songchao 顧松巢, 72 guan 觀, 180 Guan Daosheng 管道昇, 76, 79 Guan Qiaochang 關喬昌. See Lamqua Guan Zilan 關紫蘭, 188, 219 Guan Zuolin 關作林, 174 Guangdong province, 132 Guangzhou. See Canton guanzhong 觀衆, 180 guhua 古畫, 127 guo 國, 172 Guo Xi 郭熙, 12, 13, 18, 85, 215 Guo Xu 郭詡, 6  –­ ­7 guohua 國畫, 162, 172 –­ ­73, 182, 183, 186, 194, 198, 200, 202, 204, 225, 253n23, 257n7 guohuo 國貨, 191 guqin 古琴, 41, 91, 123 Haecht, Willem van, 63 Haku Rakuten 白楽天, 142 Han Fei 韓非, 237n9 Han Gan 韓幹, 161 Han Lih-­wu 杭立武, 212 hand (or horizontal) scrolls. See juan hanging (or vertical) scrolls. See zhou Hangzhou, 55, 124, 204, 219, 221 Hanjiang Poetry Society 韓江詩社, 127  –­ ­28 Hay, Jonathan, 148 Hayot, Eric, 23, 230 He Liangjun 何良俊, 9, 242n20 He Yanzhi 何延之, 241n3 Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui 天馬會), 185 Hedin, Sven, 184 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 240n40 Herstand, Arnold L., 258n29 H.I.M., the Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, 170  –­ ­7 1 Hirth, Friedrich, 163 History of Chinese Painting (Shina kaiga shi 支那 絵画史), 183 History of Chinese Painting (Zhongguo huihua shi 中國繪畫史), 5 –­ ­6, 12, 13, 25, 183, 217 “History of Chinese Painting” and “A Concise History of Modern Painting” After Two Minutes

279

in the Washing Machine (“Zhongguo huihua shi” he “Xiandai huihua jianshi” zai xiyijili jiaobanle liangfenzhong 中国绘画史和现代绘 画简史在洗衣机里搅拌了两分种), 5  –­ ­16, 13, 183, 225, 230, 237n2 Holmes, Charles, 14, 184 –­ ­85 Holmes, Martha, 217 “Homecoming” Ode of Tao Yuanming, The (Tao Yuanming Gui qu lai xi ci tu 陶淵明歸 去來兮辭圖), 71  –­ ­72 Hondius, Hendrik, 133 Hong Bo 洪波, 197 Hong lou meng. See Dream of the Red Chamber hong merchants, 129, 134 –­ ­36 Hong Shiqing 洪世清, 204 Hongs of Canton, The, 114 Horse with Chinese Grooms, 10 –­ ­11, 12, 22, 28, 96 horse topos in paintings, 96 –­ ­97 Hu Feng 胡風, 212 Hu Gongshou 胡公壽, 167 hua 畫, 12 –­ ­13, 14, 17, 26, 29, 31, 50, 86 –­ ­87; canon formation of, 111, 132, 245n1; na hua pun, 124 –­ ­25; regionalism and, 238n9; termi­no­ logical expansion of, 163 –­ ­64, 166, 172, 174, 183, 190, 198 hua pu畫譜, 29 –­ ­30, 148, 149 hua zhong hua 畫中畫, 32 –­ ­33, 42, 46, 50, 59, 70, 74, 88 –­ ­89, 120; disappearance of, 128 –­ ­29, 139. See also meta-­pictures huajiang 畫匠, 49 Huang Binhong 黃賓虹, 203  –­ ­4 Huang Gongwang 黃公望, 166, 247n45 Huang Yao 黄尧, 188  –­ ­90 Huang Yong Ping 黄永砯, 5 –­ ­6, 13, 183, 225, 230 Huang Yuanjie 黃媛介, 249n8 huanu 畫奴, 150 huatan 畫壇, 27, 240n44 Hugo, Victor, 158 Huizong, 12, 90  –­ ­91 Humbert, Ferdinand, 193 Hunan province, 165, 171 –­ ­72 Hunter, William C., 135, 250n34 Ideal Love Matches (Yi zhong yuan 意中緣), 124  –­ ­25 Ikeda Koson 池田邨孤邨, 145, 242 Illustrations and Poems on One Hundred Fashionable Beauties of Shanghai (Shanghai shizhuang bai mei tu yong 上海時裝百美圖詠), 183 Images of Today (Xian xiang tu 現象圖), 194  –­ ­95 Ink Plum Blossoms (Mo mei tu 墨梅圖), 181, 202  –­ ­3 Interior Scene, 139, 141 Ioganson, Boris, 210 Jade Terrace History of Painting (Yu tai hua shi 玉臺畫史), 83 Jang, Scarlett, 241nn8  –­ ­9 Japan, 13, 17 –­ ­18, 27, 29, 33, 38 –­ ­39, 132, 138, 141 –­ ­45, 148  –­ ­49; modernization period, 158, 160  –­ ­63, 179; war against, 194, 234 jars, 40, 64 Jesuits, 94 –­ ­95, 101, 134, 245n85

280

Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉, 73 Jia Xichun 賈惜春, 83 Jiajing emperor 嘉靖帝, 245n1 Jiang Baoling 蔣寳齡, 142 Jiang Feng 江豐, 217  –­ ­18 Jiang Zhisheng 蔣茝生, 142 jiazhi 價值, 255n66 Jin Cheng 金城, 176 Jin Shangyi 靳尚谊, 209 jing 景, 103 Jiuhuatang 九華堂, 150 Johnson, C. A. K., 158 juan 卷, 32, 42, 55, 128 –­ ­29 Juanqin zhai 倦勤齋, 98 Jullien, François, 259n54 Jungmann, Burglind, 251n46 Juran 巨然, 248n49 kachi 価値, 255n66 kaiga 絵画, 163 Kang Youwei 康有為, 173 –­ ­74, 179, 180, 198, 257n11 kanga 漢画, 142, 238n22 Kangxi emperor 康熙帝, 88 –­ ­89, 110, 117, 119 Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, The, 117  –­ ­18 kara-­e 唐絵, 142, 238n22 karamono 唐物, 17  –­ ­18 Kazakhs Presenting Horses in Tribute (Hasake gong ma tu 哈薩克貢馬圖), 95 –­ ­97, 98, 109, 158 Kennedy, John F., 214 Kill, The, 8  –­ ­9 kinki shoga 琴棋書画, 38, 145, 241n6 Kircher, Athanasius, 20 Kleutghen, Kristina, 98, 103 Kohitsu Ryōnin 古筆了任, 162 Kojika Seiun 小鹿青雲, 183 Kōjirō Tomita 富田幸次郎, 253n15 Kokka 囯華, 184 kokuga 囯画, 172 Korea, 17, 29, 138, 142, 240n49 Kōsei Ryūha 江西竜派, 241n6 Kugler, Franz, 230 Kundaikan sōchōki 君台観左右帳記, 241n6 Lady at Her Dressing Table in a Garden, 80 Lady in the Painting, The (Hua zhong ren 畫中人), 242n18 Lai, Yu-­chih, 153 Laing, Ellen Johnston, 241n9 lakai 拉開, 218 Lamqua, 135  –­ ­37, 138, 139  –­ ­40, 142 Landscape Album, 131 Lanting ji 蘭亭集, 241n3 Lang Jingshan, 196 Lang Shining 郎世寧. See Castiglione, Giuseppe Large Emerging from Small (Xiao zhong xian da 小中現大), 173 Le Bas, Jacques-­Philippe, 102 Legrand, Denis Louis (aka Li Gelang 李閣郎), 146 Leng Mei 冷枚, 88

Li Gonglin 李公麟, 70  –­ ­7 1, 162 Li Jishou 李吉壽, 158 Li Shida 李士達, 70  –­ ­7 1 Li Shujing, 200, 221 Li Yu 李漁, 37  –­ ­38, 124 Li Zhaodao 李昭道, 131 Liang Baibo 梁白波, 189, 257n88 Liang Kai 梁楷, 39, 49, 184 Liang Qichao 梁啟超, 182, 250n40 Liang Shitai (aka See-­Tay 梁時泰), 146 Liang Tingnan 梁廷榼, 135 Liang Yuandi 梁元帝, 256n72 Liao Yunjin 廖雲錦, 82, 83 Life in a Flourishing Age (Sheng shi zi sheng tu 盛世滋生圖). See Flourishing Suzhou Lin Fengmian 林風眠, 189  –­ ­90 Lin Gang 林岗, 207 Lin Liang 林良, 127 Lin Yutang 林語堂, 234 Listening to the Spring in a Deep Valley (You he ting quan tu 幽壑聼泉圖), 157  –­ ­59 Literary Gathering, 145, 242n12 Literary Gathering at Xing’an on the Double Ninth, A (Jiu ri Xing’an wen yan tu 九日行庵文讌圖), 127  –­ ­29 literati painting, 96 –­ ­97, 120, 142, 162, 183, 214 –­ ­16, 255n66; Chen Shizeng on, 180 –­ ­81 Liu Chunhua 刘春华, 223 Liu Dezhai 劉德齋, 150 Liu Haisu 劉海粟, 182, 183, 186 –­ ­87, 189 Liu Jinku 劉金庫, 252n7 Liu Jue 劉玨, 235 Liu Songnian 劉松年, 241n9 Liu Wei 刘炜, 224  –­ ­25 Livingston, Paisley, 82 Lockhart, James Stewart, 166 –­ ­68, 176 Lofty Mount Lu (Lushan gao 廬山高), 29, 31 Looking at Chrysanthemums (Kan juhua 看菊花), 204, 206 Lotus, 189 Louis XIV, 109 Lu Tanwei 陸探微, 9 Lu Xinzhong 陸信忠, 35 Lü Ji 呂紀, 18, 56 –­ ­57, 94 Lü Wenying 呂文英, 56  –­ ­57, 94 luo bi 落筆, 70 Luo Gongliu 罗工柳, 202 Luo Pin 羅聘, 133  –­ ­34, 141 Luo Yuanyou 羅元佑, 146 luohan 羅漢, 32 Ma Yuan 馬遠, 91 Ma Yueguan 馬曰琯, 127  –­ ­28 Ma Yuelu 馬曰璐, 127  –­ ­28 Major, Ernest, 150 Maksimov, Konstantin, 224 manhua/manga 漫畫/漫画, 179 Mani, 11  –­ ­1 2 Mao Zedong 毛澤東, 196, 202, 204, 207, 211, 212, 221, 223 Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification

index

in Yan’an (Yan’an zheng feng yanshuo 延安整风演说), 202 Martha Goodhue Wheatland, 175 Master Gu’s Painting Album (Gu shi hua pu 顧氏畫譜), 9, 28 –­ ­30, 74 –­ ­75, 164, 240n49 Masterworks of Chinese Painting (Shina meigashū 支那名画集), 163 Meares, John, 115 Mei Lanfang (1894  –­ ­1961) 梅蘭芳, 202  –­ ­3 meishu 美術, 163 Mellon Lectures (A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), 22, 53, 218, 229 –­ ­30, 237n5, 241n56 meta-­pictures (metapeinture), 32, 35, 60 –­ ­64, 67 –­ ­68, 71, 80 –­ ­82, 91, 95, 149, 176, 179, 190, 193, 223 –­ ­24, 227, 243n37, 243n42, 244n54, 245n4 minghua/meiga 名畫 / 名画, 163 mise en abyme, 33, 60, 68, 105 Miss Bee (Mifeng xiaojie 蜜蜂小姐), 189  –­ ­90, 191, 194 Mitchell, W. J. T., 2, 35, 60, 235 –­ ­36, 243n37, 243n42 modernity, 23, 63 –­ ­64, 197, 202, 230, 243n42; vs. tradition, 175 –­ ­76, 178 –­ ­80, 184, 186, 188, 218 Moggi, Fernando Bonaventura, 101 Mount Pan (Panshan tu 盤山圖). 106  –­ ­8 Mountain Landscape with Dwellings, 166  –­ ­67 Mountain Streams and Autumn Rain, 167 Mouqua, 139  –­ ­40 Muqi 牧谿, 184 museums: establishment of, 183 –­ ­84; viewing conventions of, 209 Mustard Seed Manual of Painting, The ( Jiezi yuan hua zhuan 芥子園畫傳), 231  

Naitō Konan 内藤湖南, 162  –­ ­63 Nakamura Fusetsu 中村不折, 183 nanga 南画, 143, 148 Nanyang Industrial Exhibition, 176 National Art Museum, 196 –­ ­97 National Essence (Guocui xuebao 國粹學報), 184 National Palace Museum (Guoli gugong bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院), 39, 103, 183 –­ ­84, 212, 214 nationalism and art, 111, 153, 161, 162, 167 –­ ­68, 172  –­ ­75, 178, 184  –­ ­85, 190  –­ ­91, 217 Nelson, Robert, 60, 103 Ni Zan (1301  –­ ­1374) 倪瓚, 59 nianhua 年畫, 206  –­ ­7 Nine Elders of the Huichang Era (Huichang jiu lao tu 會昌九老圖), 50 Niubizi 牛鼻子, 188  –­ ­90 Nizami Ganjava, Ilyas ibn Yusuf, 11 –­ ­12 No Name Group Sketching at Beidaihe, The (Wuming huahui zai Beidaihe xiesheng 无名画会在北戴河写生), 227 Noble Scholar Under a Willow (Liu yin gao shi tu 柳陰高士圖), 214  –­ ­15 Nude, 189  –­ ­90 nude in art, 186, 189 –­ ­90, 193, 224, 256n87, 259n54 Occupy the Cultural Battlefield of the Village (Zhanling nongcun wenhua zhendi 占领农村 文化阵地), 221  –­ ­23

281

Ocean of Ten Thousand Books (Wan shu yuan hai 萬書淵海), 126 Ogata Kōrin 尾形光琳, 142 Okakura Kakuzō/Okakura Tenshin 岡倉覚三 /  岡倉天心, 161  –­ ­62, 253n15 Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall (Gu mu han quan tu 古木寒泉圖), 215 One Hundred Boys (Chang chun bai zi 長春百子), 64  –­ ­65 One or Two? (Shi yi shi er 是一是二), 84, 103 –­ ­7, 113 orientalism, 232, 240n40 Orthodox School of landscape painting, 173, 178 –­ ­79 Osen お仙, 143  –­ ­44 Ōsen Keisan 橫川景三, 38 Painting (Du Jin). See Eighteen Scholars of the Tang Dynasty Painting Academy Office (Hua yuan chu 畫院處), 109 Painting a Self-­Portrait, 182 Painting Catalogue of the Xuanhe Era (Xuanhe hua pu 宣和畫譜), 12  –­ ­13, 91 painting ownership, 9, 49 –­ ­50, 55, 126 –­ ­29, 135 painting performance depictions, 134 –­ ­35, 145, 181  –­ ­83, 198, 200, 203  –­ ­4, 217, 219  –­ ­23, 227, 242n18, 245n79 painting prices, 129, 131, 158, 166 painting status, 49, 57  –­ ­58, 66  –­ ­67, 86, 124  –­ ­25, 127, 212 paintings-­within-­paintings. See hua zhong hua; meta-­pictures Palace Museum Weekly (Gugong zhoukan 故宮周刊), 184, 185 Palace Scenes with Figures, 90 Pan Gongshou 潘恭壽, 82  –­ ­83 Pan Jiezi 潘絜玆, 196 –­ ­99, 200, 221 Pan Shicheng 潘仕成, 134 Pan Tianshou 潘天壽, 183, 217  –­ ­21 Pan Wei 潘霨, 148 Pan Zhencheng 潘振成, 134, 250n32 Pan Zhengwei 潘正煒, 129  –­ ­32, 134  –­ ­36, 250n32, 250n34 Paperny, Vladimir, 258n25 Parker, Peter, 136 Parody of the Nō Play “Haku Rakuten,” 143  –­ ­45 Pastimes of the Imperial Concubines: Lost in Antiquity by a Charcoal Brazier (Yue man qing you tu: Wei lü bo gu 月曼清遊圖: 圍爐博古), 79, 94 Pearl Forest of the Secret Hall (Bi dian zhu lin 秘殿珠林), 17, 110 Peonies in a Bronze Vessel, 146 Peony Pavilion, The (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), 80  –­ ­81 Perrault, Claude, 109 Perspective Paintings East of the Lake (Hu dong xian fa 湖東綫法), 102  –­ ­3 photography, 146, 148, 153, 168 –­ ­69, 171, 184, 195 –­ ­ 96, 198, 200, 203, 204, 207, 209, 218 –­ ­21, 223 Pictures of the European Palaces and Waterworks (Xiyang lou shuifa tu 西洋樓水發圖), 101  –­ ­3, 134

282

pingfeng 屏風, 127 Pollock, Jackson, 216  –­ ­17 Polo, Marco, 174 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 230  –­ ­31 Pope, John, 214 porcelain works, 38 –­ ­39, 64, 75, 79 –­ ­80, 91, 115, 134, 135 Portrait of a Hong Merchant, 136 Portrait of a Young Man, 11 Portrait of Captain Thomas Fry, 113 Portrait of Guan Zilan (Guan Zilan xiang 關紫蘭像), 219 Portrait of Howqua, 137 Portrait of Li Rihua (Li Rihua xiang 李日華像), 218 Portrait of Miss Sun Duoci (Sun Duoci nüshi xiang 孫多慈女士像), 193  –­ ­94 Portrait of Rabindranath Tagore (Taigeer xiang 泰戈爾像), 193  –­ ­94, 195 Portrait of the Dowager Empress Cixi, 170 Portrait of the Painter Qi Baishi (Huajia Qi Baishi xiang 画家齐白石像), 200  –­ ­2, 228 Portraits of Emperor Qianlong, the Empress, and Eleven Imperial Consorts, 218 Portraits of the Qing Imperial Family, 172  –­ ­73 Precious Lists of the Stone Channel [Pavilion] (Shi qu bao ji 石渠寳笈), 17, 110  –­ ­11 prints, 9, 20, 28 –­ ­30, 67 –­ ­68, 74, 75, 81, 83, 93, 101 –­ ­2, 117, 125, 126, 132, 133, 134, 139, 142 –­ ­45, 148, 149, 150, 156 –­ ­57, 162, 172, 197, 204 –­ ­7 Promenading Ladies, 130 Pu Qua workshop, 112 –­ ­13 Purple Effulgence Pavilion (Zi guang ge 紫光閣), 156 Purple Mushroom Mountain Dwelling (Zi zhi shan fang 紫芝山房圖), 59 Purtle, Jennifer, 76, 244n54 Qi Baishi 齊白石, 14, 200 –­ ­202, 203, 211, 228 qi yun 氣韻, 180 Qian Xili 錢習禮, 52  –­ ­53, 55 Qianlong emperor 乾隆帝, 90, 91  –­ ­100, 103  –­ ­9, 130, 132, 134, 157, 218, 247n45; clothing prohibition, 246n8; paintings by, 106 –­ ­9; Southern Tours, 117, 119, 127, 156 Qianlong Emperor Enjoying Himself, The (Qianlong xing le tu 乾隆行樂圖), 246n19 Qianlong Emperor Looking at a Painting, The (Qianlong guan hua tu 乾隆觀畫圖), 91  –­ ­95, 110 Qianlong Emperor on Horseback, The (Qianlong da yue tu 乾隆大閱圖), 139 Qianlong Emperor Viewing a Peacock Spreading Its Tail, The (Qianlong guan kong que kai ping tu 乾隆觀孔雀開屏圖), 98  –­ ­99 Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, The, 117  –­ ­19 Qianmen (The Front Gate), Beijing (Beijing Qianmen 北京前門), 186  –­ ­87 Qiao Lai 喬萊, 72 qin qi shu hua 琴棋書畫, 37  –­ ­39, 41  –­ ­46, 49  –­ ­50,

52, 56, 64, 74 –­ ­75, 128, 241n3, 241nn8 –­ ­9; women and, 79, 241n3 Qingkuan 慶寬, 155  –­ ­56, 179 qipao 旗袍, 193 Qiu Ying 仇英, 48, 61, 76, 86 –­ ­89, 93, 121 –­ ­24, 132, 166, 249n7 Qu Yuan 屈原, 164  –­ ­65 Qu Yuan and a Fisherman, 164  –­ ­65 ranga 蘭画, 145 Raphael, 173 Read, Herbert, 5  –­ ­6, 13  –­ ­14, 229  –­ ­30 realism, 174, 178, 180, 198, 200; socialist, 209 –­ ­10 Record of Calligraphers and Painters of the Yuan, Ming and Qing (Gen Min Shin shoga jinmeiroku 元明清書画人名録), 141 Record of Calligraphy and Painting from the Tower of Hearing the Hoofbeats (Ting fan lou shu hua ji 聼颿樓書畫記), 129 Record of Paintings (Hwagi 畫集), 18 Records of the Painting of Successive Dynasties (Li dai ming hua ji 歷代名畫記), 86 Regaining the Prefectural City Ruizhou, 156  –­ ­57, 168 religious icons, 17 Ren Bonian/Ren Yi 任伯年 / 任頤, 149  –­ ­51, 153, 167, 181, 251n63 Ren Mengzhang 任夢璋, 223  –­ ­24 Ren Renfa 任仁發, 42  –­ ­44 Ren Xiong 任熊, 146  –­ ­47 renmin 人民, 196, 198 Retreat in the Mountains, 235 Return of the Soul, The (Huan hun ji 還魂記). See Peony Pavilion, The Richard Wheatland, 175 Riefstahl, Rudolf Meyer, 261n20 Roaring Lion, 196 Romance of the West Chamber, The (Xi xiang ji 西廂記), 67  –­ ­68, 244n61 Ruskin, John, 21 Said, Edward, 232 Sakaki Hyakusen 彭城百川, 141  –­ ­42 Sandrart, Joachim von, 19 –­ ­20 Satō Dōshin 佐藤道信, 161 Scene in a Palace Garden, 20 Scholar Instructing Girl Pupils in the Arts, 78  –­ ­79 Screech, Timon, 142  –­ ­43 screens, 32, 33, 38, 42, 50, 58, 59 –­ ­61, 93, 101, 103, 105, 127, 138 Self-­Portrait [Lamqua], 136 Self-­Portrait [Ren Xiong] (Zi hua xiang 自畫像), 146 Sensabaugh, David, 45 Serlio, Sebastiano, 101, 103 Seven Kings of Hell, 35 Seventh Prince Feeding Deer, 146 shan shui 山水, 64 Shandong province, 166 Shanghai, 142, 145 –­ ­46, 148 –­ ­50, 153, 157, 182, 184, 189

index

Shao Changheng 邵長衡, 124 Shen Zhou 沈周, 29  –­ ­31, 47, 131  –­ ­32, 235 Shenbao 申報, 150 Shi Deni 史德匿. See Strehlneek, E. A. Shi Dezhi (Sze Tak Chee) 施德之 . See Talbot, Star Shi Duzhi 施督之. See Talbot, Star Shi Rui 石銳, 131 shi tang 詩堂, 73 Shibao 時報, 171 Shimomura Kanzan 下村観山, 162 Shina bijutsu 支那美術, 163 Shina kaiga shi 支那絵画史, 183 shirenhua 士人畫, 96. See also literati painting Shitao 石濤, 71, 131 shoga 書画, 163 shu 書, 41, 70 Shu hua 蜀畫, 238n9 shu hua 書畫, 49  –­ ­50 shuailuo 衰落, 250n40 Shulthess, Emil, 200 si yi 四藝. See qin qi shu hua sichao 思潮, 250n40 Sihvonen, Henrik Erland, 164 –­ ­66 Sin Sukju 申叔舟, 18 Sino-­French War, 155 Sino-­Japanese War, 234 Siqueiros, David, 210 Sirén, Osvald, 238n18, 240n53, 241n9 Sleeping Gibbon, 184  –­ ­85 Sōami 相阿弥, 241n6 Song Huizong 宋徽宗, 200 Song Lian 宋濂, 7, 49 Song Ruoying 宋若嬰, 203  –­ ­4 Song Shenzong 宋神宗, 85 Song Zifang 宋子房, 96 Spencer, Stanley, 200, 202, 210 “spirit resonance,” 180, 255n66 Splendour of an Imperial Capital (Huang du ji sheng tu 皇都積勝圖), 120  –­ ­21 Spoilum, 113, 115, 136, 174 –­ ­75 Spring, 18 Spring Morning in the Han Palace (Han gong chun xiao 漢宮春曉), 48, 86 –­ ­89, 245n4 Spring Trees after Rain (Yu yu chun shu 雨餘春樹), 12, 15 Stanley-­Baker, Richard, 39 Stein, Aurel, 184 Stoichita, Victor, 60, 62 –­ ­63 Storm Society (Juelan she 決瀾社), 189 Story of the Stone (Shitou ji 石頭記). See Dream of the Red Chamber Strehlneek, E. A., 163, 184, 232 Struth, Thomas, 225  –­ ­26 Students of the Shanghai School of Art, 182 Studio by the Water, 181 Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service (Juanqin zhai 齋), 98, 100, 111 –­ ­12 Studio of Tingqua, 152  –­ ­53 Studio of the Triangular View[point] (Guijing zhai 圭景齋), 133

283

Study of Painters of the Yuan and Ming (Gen Min gajinkō 元明画人考), 141 Studying a Painting, 65, 67, 126 Su Hanchen 蘇漢臣, 64  –­ ­65, 80 Su Jiheng 蘇吉亨, 256n73 Su Shi 蘇軾, 70, 96 –­ ­97, 130 Su Wu Tending Sheep (Su Wu mu yang tu 蘇武牧羊圖), 153 Sugawara no Michizane 菅原道真, 27  –­ ­28 Sullivan, Michael, 211, 260n12 Summer Palace sack, 157 –­ ­58, 168 Sun Duoci 孫多慈, 193  –­ ­94 Sun Shi 孫時, 127 Survey of East Asian Art (Tōyō bijutsu taikan 東洋美術大觀), 162 Suzhou, 76, 86, 117 –­ ­20, 127, 145, 156, 176 Suzuki Harunobu 鈴木春信, 142  –­ ­44 Sze, Mai-­Mai, 231 Tagore, Rabindranath, 193, 195 Taizong 唐太宗, 41, 46, 86, 90 Talbot, Star, 184, 232 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 146 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” (Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhuishang de jianghua 在延安文藝座談會上的講話), 196, 204 Tan Yufan 譚雨帆, 148 Tang Souyu 湯漱玉, 83 Tang Yifen 湯貽芬, 134 Tang Yin 唐寅, 73, 241n2 Tangdai 唐岱, 107  –­ ­9, 110  –­ ­11 Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, 71  –­ ­72 Tarhan, Sayyed-­Ahmad, 10 technological advances, 146, 148, 168, 184 Tenjin Crossing to China (Totō Tenjin 渡唐天神), 27  –­ ­28 Tenjin-­sama 天神. See Sugawara no Michizane Thomson, John, 152  –­ ­53 Three Friends (San you tu 三友圖), 116, 149 –­ ­51, 155 Three Friends of Winter (Sui han san you tu 嵗寒三友圖), 214  –­ ­15 Three Orchids (San zhu tu 三珠圖), 106  –­ ­7 tongjinghua 通景畫, 98, 103, 111, 113, 139 Tongzhi emperor 同治帝, 252n7 Tōyō 東洋, 162 Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhang wu zhi 長物志), 26 Tse Tsan Tai. See Xie Zuantai Two Women Looking at Painting, 76  –­ ­77 ukiyo-­e 浮世絵, 142  –­ ­43 “Value of Literati Painting, The” (Wenrenhua de jiazhi 文人畫的價值), 180  –­ ­81 van Eyck, Jan, 245n79 van Gulik, Robert, 249n9 Vasari, Giorgio, 29, 174 Vecellio, Cesare, 239n26 Velázquez, Diego, 62 –­ ­63, 68 Venerable Friends (Shang you tu 尚友圖), ii, 68  –­ ­70, 73  –­ ­74

284

Vermeer, Johannes, 62 Vesalius, Andreas, 133 Viewing a Painting, 50 Viewing Paintings (Du hua tu 讀畫圖), 154, 176 –­ ­80, 183, 193, 197, 255n60 Vinograd, Richard, 14, 72, 150 Vos, Hubert, 168, 170 –­ ­71 Vossius, Isaac, 20 waga 和画, 142 Wan Qingli 萬青力, 136, 138 Wang, the Four (Wang Hui 王翬, ~ Jian 王鑒, ~ Shimin 王時敏, ~ Yuanqi 王原祁), 148, 178 Wang Bomin 王伯敏, 5 –­ ­6, 12, 13, 25 Wang Chengpei 汪承霈, 251n43 Wang Chongyang 王重陽, 241n57 Wang Gong 汪恭, 82  –­ ­83 Wang Hui 王翬, 173 Wang Meng 王蒙, 157  –­ ­59 Wang Ruxue 王儒學, 100  –­ ­101 Wang Shijie 王世杰, 214 Wang Tao 王韬, 146 Wang Wei 王維, 244n61 Wang Xizhi 王羲之, 72  –­ ­73 Wang Xizhi Inscribing a Fan (Wang Xizhi ti shan tu 王羲之題扇圖), 39 Wang Yiting 王一亭, 176 Wang Yuyan Sketching Orchids (Wang Yuyan xie lan tu 王玉燕寫蘭圖), 82  –­ ­83 Wang Zhen 王鎮, 49, 126 Wanli emperor 萬曆帝, 245n1 Wanluan Thatched Hall, The (Wanluan cao tang tu 婉孌草堂), 247n45 Warner, Rex, 210  –­ ­11 Washing the Elephant (Xi xiang tu 洗象圖), 93, 94  –­ ­95 Waterfront at Canton, The, 114 Wegener, Olga-­Julia, 253n30, 254n35 weiqi 圍棋, 41 Wen Zhengming 文徵明, 12, 15, 47, 49, 127, 131  –­ ­32, 215 Wen Zhenheng 文震亨, 26 Weng Fanggang 翁方綱, 133, 141 wenrenhua 文人畫, 183 Western painting techniques, 173 –­ ­74, 179 –­ ­80, 186, 190, 193 –­ ­94; Pan Tianshou on, 217 –­ ­18 Western views of Chinese art, 19 –­ ­23, 158, 160 –­ ­67, 172, 186, 214  –­ ­16, 230  –­ ­36, 253n30; New York Times reportage, 211  –­ ­13 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 231 Winter Landscape, 186, 189 Woman Holding a Balance, 62  –­ ­63 women artists, 79 –­ ­83, 124 –­ ­25, 182, 189, 245n85 Wu Bingjian 伍秉鑑, 136 Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩, 146 Wu Dacheng 吳大瀓, 148 Wu Daozi 吳道子, 9 Wu Dezhen 吳德振, 127 Wu Hung, 50, 60 –­ ­61 Wu Jianzhang 吳建彰, 146

Wu Li 吳歷, 134 Wu Youru 吴友如, 156  –­ ­57 Wu Zuoren 吴作人, 200  –­ ­201 Wue, Roberta, 150 Xi xiang ji. See Romance of the West Chamber, The Xia Gui 夏珪, 24, 91 xiandai huihua 現代繪畫, 183 xiang (elephant) 象, 93 xiang (image) 像, 93 Xiang Shengmo 項聖謨, 68  –­ ­69 Xiang Yuanbian 項元汴, 9, 126 Xie Chufang 謝楚芳, 115 Xie Huan 謝環, 33, 52 –­ ­53, 53, 85, 91, 127, 243n31 Xie Zuantai [Tse Ts’an Tai] (1872 –­ ­1939) 謝纘泰, 166  –­ ­68, 174, 176; Ancient Chinese Art, 184  –­ ­85, 233  –­ ­34 xieyihua 寫意畫, 198 xifahua 西法畫, 146 xihua 西畫, 190 xingle tu 行樂圖, 89 xingsi 形似, 64 Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻, 14, 193  –­ ­94, 211  –­ ­1 2 Xu Yang 徐揚, 117  –­ ­20, 156 Xuande emperor 宣德帝, 91 Xuantong emperor 宣統帝, 171  –­ ­72 yamato-­e 大和絵, 142 Yan Liben 閻立本, 86, 90 Yang hua ge 洋畫歌, 141 Yang Pu 楊溥, 52 –­ ­53, 55, 74 Yang Rong 楊榮, 52 Yang Yunyou 楊雲友, 124  –­ ­25 yanghua 洋畫, 139, 141, 183, 189 –­ ­91 yanghuo 洋貨, 190, 257n89 Yangzhou, 127  –­ ­29 Yashiro Yukio 矢代幸雄, 240n53 Ye Gongchuo 葉恭綽, 176 Ye Menglong 葉夢龍, 135 Ye Xiaoluan 葉小鸞, 83 Ye Zhenchu 葉震初, 127 Yellow Crane Tower (Huang he lou tu 黃鶴樓圖), 50  –­ ­51 Yi Lantai 伊蘭太, 102 yi qi 意氣, 96 Yi Yong 李瑢, Prince Anpyeong 安平大君, 18 yishu 藝術, 174 Yongle emperor 永樂帝, 91 Yongxing 永瑆, 130 Yongzheng emperor 雍正帝, 89, 95 Yongzheng Emperor’s Amusements of the Twelve Months: Painting a Portrait in the Tenth Month, The (Yongzheng shi er yue xing le tu:

index

shi yue hua xiang 雍正十二月行樂圖: 十月畫像), 89 You Shao 尤詔, 82  –­ ­83 youhua 油畫, 183, 190, 204 Yu Jianhua 俞劍華, 256n73 Yu Li 俞禮, 181 Yu Yunjie 俞云阶, 204  –­ ­5 Yu Zhiding 禹之鼎, 72  –­ ­73, 91 Yuan Mei 袁枚, 82, 83 Yuanming yuan complex, 100 –­ ­2, 157 Yuanying tongzhi 源英同志, 203 Zaitao 醇親王載濤, 179 Zeami Motokiyo 世阿弥元清, 142 Zeng Fengji 曾鳳寄, 150 Zeng Guoquan 曾國荃, 156 Zhang Daqian 張大千, 184, 189 Zhang Lin 张林, 221  –­ ­23 Zhang Lu 張路, 65, 67, 126 Zhang Qi 張琦, 68 Zhang Ruitu 張瑞圖, 70  –­ ­7 1 Zhang Sengyou 張僧繇, 9 Zhang Shuqi 張書旂, 182, 183 Zhang Yanyuan 張彥遠, 37, 86, 241n3 Zhang Yuqing 章育青, 206 Zhang Zeduan 張擇端, 121 Zhao Guilan at the Conference of Outstanding Workers (Qunyinghui shang de Zhao Guilan 群英会上的赵桂兰), 207 Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫, 128, 130 Zhao Mengjian 趙孟堅, 214 Zhao Yannian 赵延年, 204 Zhe school, 55 Zhejiang province, 55 zhen 朕, 94 Zheng, Michael, 237n2 Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天, 221 Zheng Ziyan 鄭子燕, 227 zhong cai 重彩, 196 Zhong Kui 鍾馗, 129 Zhongguo hua 中國畫, 12, 25, 162 –­ ­63, 183, 197 zhou (hanging scroll) 軸, 32, 41 –­ ­42, 55, 127 Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤, 70 Zhou Fang 周昉, 130 Zhou Jichang 周季常, 32  –­ ­34 Zhou Lianggong 周亮工, 70, 71 Zhou Wenju 周文矩, 245n4 Zhu De 朱德, 223  –­ ­24 Zhu De Viewing a Painting Exhibition (Zhu laozong kan huazhan 朱老总看画展), 223  –­ ­24 Zhu Jintang 朱錦堂, 150 Zhu Lesan 諸樂三, 204 Zhu Zhifan 朱之藩, 240n49 Zhuang Yusong 莊裕菘, 158

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photogr aphy and copyright cr edits

Permission to reproduce illustrations is provided by the owners and sources as listed in the captions. Additional copyright notices and photography credits are as follows. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris (fig. 1.1); Shanghai Museum (fig. 1.3); Jinci Museum (fig. 1.4); © The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 1.5); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 1.6); National Palace Museum (fig. 1.11); National Palace Museum (fig. 1.12); TNM Image Archives (fig. 1.14); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1.15); Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program (fig. 1.16); Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 1.18); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 1.21); Peking University Library (fig. 1.22); National Palace Museum (fig. 1.24); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1.25); Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 1.26); bpk, Berlin/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Juergen Liepe (fig. 1.27); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.1); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.2); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 2.3); © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fig. 2.4); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.5); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.6); TNM Image Archives (fig. 2.7); TNM Image Archives (fig. 2.8); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.9); Yale University Art Gallery (fig. 2.10); Yale University Art Gallery (fig. 2.11); Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 2.12); Suzhou Museum (fig. 2.13); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.14); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.16); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.18); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.19); Zhen­jiang Municipal Museum (fig. 2.21); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 2.22); Image ©  The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 2.23); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.24); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.25); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.26); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.27); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.28); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.29); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.30); © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY (fig. 2.32); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.34); Image ©  The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 2.36); Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_d012779_01 (fig. 2.37); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.38); ©  Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fig. 2.39); Suzhou Museum (fig. 2.40); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.41); Nanjing Museum (fig. 2.43); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.44); Peking University Library (fig. 2.47); Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Bruce M. White (fig. 2.48); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.50); Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 2.51); Photograph ©  2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 2.52); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.53); Shanghai Museum (fig. 2.54); The Palace Museum (fig. 2.55); National Palace Museum (fig. 2.56); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.1); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.2); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.3); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.4); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.5); Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 3.6); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.7); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.8); ©  RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 3.9); ©  RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Thierry Olivier (fig. 3.10); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.11); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.12); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.13); Beijing Poly International Auction (fig. 3.15); Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program (fig. 3.16); © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Martine Beck-Coppola/Art Resource, NY (fig. 3.17); Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program (fig. 3.18); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.19); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.20); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.21); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.22); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.23); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.24); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.25); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.26); National Palace Museum (fig. 3.27); The Palace Museum (fig. 3.28); © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fig. 3.29); Courtesy of Martyn Gregory Gallery, London (fig. 3.30); The Research Archives, Umeå University Library (fig. 3.31); © The British Library Board, Maps.K.Top.116.23, centre (fig. 3.32); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 3.33); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 3.34); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 4.1); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 4.2); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.3); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.4); Liaoning

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Provincial Museum (fig. 4.5); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.6); National Museum of China (fig. 4.7); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.8); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.9); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.10); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.11); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.12); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.13); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.14); Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 4.15); Peking University Library (fig. 4.16); Peking University Library (fig. 4.17); Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation (fig. 4.18); © The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 4.19); © The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 4.20); © The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 4.22); Shanghai Museum (fig. 4.24); Rainer Wolfsberger (fig. 4.25); Courtesy of Martyn Gregory Gallery, London (fig. 4.26); © 2010 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (fig. 4.28); © Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA/Photographer: Mark Sexton (fig. 4.29); The Palace Museum (fig. 4.30); © 2007 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA/Photographer: Mark Sexton (fig. 4.31); © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fig. 4.32); Minneapolis Institute of Art (fig. 4.33); Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 4.34); John Bigelow Taylor (fig. 4.35); UmiMori Art Museum (fig. 4.36); © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (fig. 4.37); Courtesy of the Library of Congress (fig. 4.38); The Palace Museum (fig. 4.39); National Library of Australia, nla.obj56642620 (fig. 4.41); The Palace Museum (fig. 4.42); Courtesy of the Library of Congress (fig. 4.44); The Palace Museum (fig. 4.45); Beijing Poly International Auction (fig. 5.3); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 5.4); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 5.5); © National Museums Scotland (fig. 5.7); ©  National Museums Scotland (fig. 5.8); ©  National Museums Scotland (fig. 5.9); Micaela van Rijckevorsel (www.art-etcetera.nl) (fig. 5.14); Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College (fig. 5.15); Scala/Art Resource, NY (fig. 5.17); Shanghai Museum (fig. 5.18); © 2007 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (Richard)/© 2006 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (Martha)/Photographer: Jeffrey R. Dykes (fig. 5.19); The Palace Museum (fig. 5.20); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 5.21); Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection (fig. 5.22); Shanghai Library (fig. 5.23); Shanghai Library (fig. 5.24); The University of Hong Kong Libraries (fig. 5.27); Leiden University Libraries, East Asian Library, KUNST. 535 v. 1 (fig. 5.29); Liu Haisu Art Museum (fig. 5.30); Chinese Art Books, Co. (fig. 5.32); Xu Beihong Memorial Museum (fig. 5.33); Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 5.34); © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Benjamin Soligny/Raphaël Chipault (fig. 5.36); © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Benjamin Soligny/Raphaël Chipault (fig. 5.37); Xu Beihong Memorial Museum (fig. 6.1); Xu Beihong Memorial Museum (fig. 6.2); Work © the Artist’s Estate/Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (fig. 6.5); National Art Museum of China (fig. 6.6); © Emil Schulthess/Fotostiftung Schweiz (fig. 6.8); © Emil Schulthess/Fotostiftung Schweiz (fig. 6.9); National Art Museum of China (fig. 6.10); Courtesy of the Luo Family (fig. 6.11); Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection (fig. 6.12); Zhejiang Provincial Museum/Photographer: Hu Yichuan (fig. 6.13); Zhejiang Provincial Museum (fig. 6.14); © The Trustees of the British Museum (fig. 6.16); Michael Wolf/laif/Redux (fig. 6.17); International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) (fig. 6.19); Courtesy of Magnum Photos (fig. 6.20); National Museum of China (fig. 6.23); David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University/2016 ©  1958 The New York Times (fig. 6.24); National Palace Museum (fig. 6.25); National Palace Museum (fig. 6.26); Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum (fig. 6.28); Nanjing Museum (fig. 6.29); © The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 6.30); National Art Museum of China (fig. 6.31); Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum (fig. 6.32); Pan Tian Shou Memorial Museum (fig. 6.33); © Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images (fig. 6.35); The Royal Library, Copenhagen (fig. 6.37); Sotheby’s Inc. (fig. 6.40); © Ai Weiwei, Courtesy Lisson Gallery (fig. 6.41); © Thomas Struth (fig. 6.42); © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Photographer: Ghislain Vanneste (fig. 7.2)

288

the a. w. mellon lectur es in the fine arts 1952 – 2016

1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (published as The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, 1956) Sir Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (published 1956) Etienne Gilson, Art and Reality (published as Painting and Reality, 1957) E. H. Gombrich, The Visible World and the Language of Art (published as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960) Sigfried Giedion, Constancy and Change in Art and Architecture (published as The Eternal Present: A Contribution on Constancy and Change, 1962 – 1964) Sir Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin and French Classicism (published as Nicolas Poussin, 1967) Naum Gabo, A Sculptor’s View of the Fine Arts (published as Of Divers Arts, 1962) Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Horace Walpole (published 1960) André Grabar, Christian Iconography and the Christian Religion in Antiquity (published as Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, 1968) Kathleen Raine, William Blake and Traditional Mythology (published as Blake and Tradition, 1968) Sir John Pope Hennessy, Artist and Individual: Some Aspects of the Renaissance Portrait (published as The Portrait in the Renaissance, 1966) Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present (published 1967) Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sources of Romantic Thought (published as The Roots of Romanticism, 1999) Lord David Cecil, Dreamer or Visionary: A Study of English Romantic Painting (published as Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-­Jones, 1969) Mario Praz, On the Parallel of Literature and the Visual Arts (published as Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, 1970) Stephen Spender, Imaginative Literature and Painting Jacob Bronowski, Art as a Mode of Knowledge (published as The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science, 1978) Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Aspects of NineteenthCentury Architecture (published as A History of Building Types, 1976) T. S. R. Boase, Vasari: The Man and the Book (published as Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book, 1979) Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (published 1974) H. W. Janson, NineteenthCentury Sculpture Reconsidered (published as The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument) H. C. Robbins Landon, Music in Europe in the Year 1776 Peter von Blanckenhagen, Aspects of Classical Art André Chastel, The Sack of Rome: 1527 (published 1982) Joseph W. Alsop, The History of Art Collecting (published as The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared, 1982) John Rewald, Cézanne and America (published as Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists, and Critics, 1891 – 1921, 1989) Peter Kidson, Principles of Design in Ancient and Medieval Architecture John Harris, Palladian Architecture in England, 1615 – 1760 Leo Steinberg, The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting Vincent Scully, The Shape of France (published as Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade) Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (published 1987) James S. Ackerman, The Villa in History (published as The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, 1990)

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

Lukas Foss, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Composer Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (published 1990) John Shearman, Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (published as Only Connect . . . : Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, 1992) Oleg Grabar, Intermediary Demons: Toward a Theory of Ornament (published as The Mediation of Ornament, 1992) Jennifer Montagu, Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque (published 1996) Willibald Sauerländer, Changing Faces: Art and Physiognomy through the Ages Anthony Hecht, The Laws of the Poetic Art (published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art, 1995) John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity (published 1994) Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-­Century Europe (published 1995) Arthur C. Danto, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (published as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, 1997) Pierre M. Rosenberg, From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, Ingres (published as From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, and Ingres, 2000) John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (published as Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still, 2000) Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (published 2000) Carlo Bertelli, Transitions Marc Fumaroli, The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in the Arts, 1600 – ­1715 Salvatore Settis, Giorgione and Caravaggio: Art as Revolution Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (published 2010) Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (published 2006) Irving Lavin, More than Meets the Eye Irene J. Winter, “Great Work”: Terms of Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Mesopotamia Simon Schama, Really Old Masters: Age, Infirmity, and Reinvention Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books: The Binocular Poetry of Death (published as Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, 2010) Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: Parallel Worlds (published as Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, 2016) T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (published as Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, 2013) Mary Miller, Art and Representation in the Ancient New World Mary Beard, The Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from Ancient Rome to Salvador Dalí Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (published 2017) Barry Bergdoll, Out of Site in Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750 Anthony Grafton, Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe Thomas Crow, Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814 – ­1820 Vidya Dehejia, The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes in South India, c. 855 – ­1280 Alexander Nemerov, The Forest: America in the 1830s