The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll 9781789147964

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
1. On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium
2. Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period
3. Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces
4. Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll
5. Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll
6. Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll
7. The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World
References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

The first extended history of the Chinese picture-scroll. The Chinese picture-scroll, a long, horizontal painting or calligraphic work, has been China's pre-eminent aesthetic form throughout the last two millennia. This first history of the picturescroll explores its extraordinary longevity and adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China's artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge.

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL Shane McCausland

reaktion books

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2023 Copyright © Shane McCausland 2023 All rights reserved The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book from The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 796 4

Contents

Introduction 7 1 On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium 23 2 Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period 53 3 Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces 89 4 Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll 125 5 Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll 155 6 Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll 191 7 The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World 223 References 251 Further Reading 274 Acknowledgements 276 List of Illustrations 277 Index 285

Frontispiece: Chen Shizeng (Chen Hengke, 1876–1923), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition (Duhua tu), 1917, hanging scroll, detail of illus. 147, ink and colours on paper, 87.7 × 46.6 cm.

Introduction

T

his is a study of the Chinese picture-scroll (tujuan) or handscroll (shoujuan) – the two terms for a painted artwork mounted in a horizontal roll are used more or less interchangeably. The most iconic example in China is a brilliant scroll called Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, painted in the late Northern Song (960–1127) capital, Bianliang (modern Kaifeng), around 1100, by the court artist Zhang Zeduan (c. 1085–1145). Such is its fame that long queues form whenever and wherever it is on public display. This painting is even a leitmotif in Liu Cixin’s celebrated 2006 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem (San ti), where it is cited as an example of something ancient and superficially complex, ‘full of fine, rich details’, but in reality quite simple, at least in comparison with the microscopic information content or entropy of a photograph, which is not visible to the naked eye.1 It is perhaps ironic that most people nowadays only ever see the picture-scroll in the form of a

photograph reproduced in a book or on a screen. Although that means of visual dissemination is a great enabler of the work of traditional art history, that is, the semiotic analysis of ‘fine, rich details’, it is also problematic in that it serves to reduce the scroll painting to a reproduced image of its pictorial content, undervaluing its physical nature and its character as a material work of art. Addressing this legacy of Modernism, the tendency to accentuate the visual and pictorial, is one of the impulses for writing this book, although readers may well have other motivations for being interested in the subject. As we shape to reckon with the painting as a scroll object, there is yet another powerful legacy to contend with, this time from late imperial history, namely the philological urge to see the painting through the body of texts that surrounds it. A great number of the finest picture-scrolls passed through the collecting hands of the last imperium, the Manchu Qing (1644–1911), and a 7

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

great number of them, the Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival scroll (see illus. 30) included, are literally covered with a multiplicity of connoisseurly inscriptions and seal impressions. Not just marginalia but marks on the artworks themselves and extending into a related web of primary text sources (such as catalogues and records), these philological traces are the product of centuries of mainstream connoisseurship, which has largely worked to put off other points of entry such as forensic observation and critical interpretation.2 For many a modern viewer it has become natural to regard viewing a scroll-painting as equivalent to reading these texts, but we should be wary of only approaching the Qingming scroll and others like it through this empire of texts. As the field’s focus turns towards the painted art object as a haptic material thing, we begin to envisage the work of interdisciplinary research on the material body of scrolls. Further into the future we could anticipate using scientific analysis to identify deposits of dna from those who handled picture-scrolls over the last millennium and a half: not just the usual cast of characters, namely male Chinese connoisseurs and mounters, but potentially also Japanese Zen monks, Mongolian princesses, Italian Jesuits, Manchu bannermen or Eurasian art dealers. More immediately, we can also highlight an interest in the embodied, and so often unspoken, knowledge associated with such artworks. This material turn in art history, a means also to redress some historical imbalances, highlights not just the materiality but the material culture and the intermediality of artworks, notably their apparent awareness of their effects as artworks upon us as their beholders. The field now reckons with how both images and the objects that bear them work as agents of stasis and change in their moment of being made and over their subsequent lives, through such variables as the degree and nature of their difference from the status quo.3

The questions that broadly animate this study concern those relationships between visual, haptic and material elements in the world of the picturescroll, and how this particular rolling form of artwork has served to make and shape its own reception in the world. Within this, a line of questioning addresses the problems of how images and texts function within the moveable, pliable frame of the picture-scroll, exploring, for example, what is diegetic or integral to a picture and what is marginal or in-between these and what is the beholder’s role in this web of relationships. This introduction offers a series of vignettes on the handscroll which may be woven together by way of a general orientation.

Material history and integrity vs changing glosses and roles of the picture-scroll To get our bearings, we begin by asking what constitutes a handscroll within the culture, and what does it do? It is perhaps the very ubiquity of the handscroll in Chinese dynastic culture, as well as Modernism’s focus on the pictorial, that has shielded it from sustained attention as a medium for pictures in Chinese art history. If we begin with etymology, when we refer to a handscroll as a translation of the Chinese term juan, we are alighting on an enduring technology captured in a word with multiple glosses. One of those glosses is the sense of a roll for the storage of writing, which pre-dates the appearance of the scroll as a bearer of a painted picture. An early gloss on juan as a physical roll for clerical purposes generally refers to the initial use of slips of bamboo strung together and inscribed vertically to enable longer text records (or tax registers, 簡 jian) to be collated. Examples have been dated to around the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), but the sense is probably earlier, as can be gleaned etymologically from the pictograph 卷 juan in its earliest, 8

Introduction

手卷 [shoujuan] scroll pictures. 書卷 [shujuan] books. 開卷 [kaijuan] to open the book; to commence studies. 黄卷 [huangjuan] yellow rolls – the classics. (a) Read juan3 To roll up . . . (b) Read quan2 To curl . . . (c) u.f. 券 [quan] No. 1654. To grasp firmly . . .6

seal-script form , in use prior to the outset of the dynastic period in 221 bce, which resembles what a reader, in the person of a scribe, sees of their hands holding a proto-scroll, in the form of a set of strips, over a seal.4 The common usage of juan in the dynastic period and today to mean a chapter of a book, including a chapter in a codex book with turning pages, is a vestigial trace of that early meaning. Slightly confusingly, depending on context, a juan can refer to a volume in a set or a singleton or to a chapter within a volume or book, but this is properly the concern of bibliography and bibliology and not ours in these pages. Late imperial philology captures the learned and bookish connotations in the various binomes in use containing juan. The Australian missionary R. H. Mathews’s (1841–1918) Chinese-English dictionary entries, which remain relevant in contemporary digital research initiatives,5 primarily tie its related meanings to the Confucian classics and thereby to normative Confucian education and statecraft in the philological tradition. The two entries for tu (picture) and juan (scroll) read as follows:

Note the morally pejorative secondary glosses on the character tu (scheme, plan, desire . . .), which echo with an innate Confucian mistrust of the art of deception. Meantime, of the two commonly used terms for a handscroll today, the more literal shoujuan (handscroll) is listed (as ‘scroll pictures’) but the absence of tujuan (literally, picture-scroll) points to its being a modern neologism or at least a term not in common use in Mathews’s intellectual circle. Historically, the sense of juan as a seamless scroll rather than a bundled roll will have followed a shift towards the use of silk and subsequently paper, invented in China two thousand years ago, as preferred bases for writing and painting. Once these arts were elevated above scribal status, the first great artists recognized as such became specialists usually in one or the other art. As to the early currency of the scroll medium for these arts, in the early critical texts on art and aesthetics, an artist specializing in a different pictorial format, for instance the screen, was something worth recording.7 The social milieu of the picture-scroll in early medieval culture was evidently very select, as is evoked in a phrase used to describe contemporary music performed by and for the educated elite, namely ‘a song for one or two’, an image in which the artist emotes in lyric voice for just himself or for himself and an audience of one.8 The handscroll or picture-scroll in early culture can be seen as the visual counterpart, being a small object that one or two at a desk could comfortably view. Here in the formative Wei–Jin period (220–589), between

圖 [character no.] 6531 [Read tú] A map; a picture; a diagram; a portrait. 圖像 [tuxiang] a picture; a likeness . . . 圖書 [tushu] a private or personal seal; 圖書 an illustrated book . . . 圖畫 [tuhua] to draw pictures; pictures, plans etc. . . . 圖繪 [tuhui] to draw a map, plan, design, etc. . . . 地圖 [ditu] a map . . . (a) To scheme. To plan. To desire . . . 卷 [character no.] 1640 [Read juàn] A roll of paper; a book; an essay or document. 卷一 [juan yi] Vol. 1. 卷子 [juanzi] examination papers when handed in. 卷宗 [juanzong] or 案 卷 [anjuan] archives; the records of cases . . . 卷軸 [juanzhou] roller for a map or scrolls . . . 在卷 [zaijuan] in the archives. 9

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

the first two great centralized empires, the Han (206 bce–220 ce) and the Tang (618–907),9 began a coextensive relationship between the picturescroll and the brush arts, which, as we will explore, has weathered epochal changes in situational social and intellectual cultures. With the arrival of this new aesthetic horizon, some of these scrolls were accorded talismanic status, a kind of supernatural quality accruing to certain scrolls of writing and painting in historical cultures.10 The magical properties of ancient Chinese paintings and diagrams were systematically parsed by the writer and poet Yan Yanzhi (384–456), who recognized the gamut of pictures as showing ‘nature’s principles’ in the hexagrams from the Book of Change (tuli), conceptual ideographs in the form of written characters (tushi) and images of natural forms in painting and pictures (tuxing).11 This emerging aesthetics would later inspire the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s (1899–1986) story ‘The Fauna of the Mirror’, based on the Tang-dynasty tale of a beauty in a painted scroll called Zhenzhen (True-True) who becomes real, or becomes true, when her lover calls her name for a hundred days and nights without stopping. This concern with the magical powers of the image is a characteristic of the historical conception of painting but leaves us wondering what it was about the nature of the picture as a scroll, as a technology or machina, that enabled this rather divine transformation to happen. The endurance and diversity of glosses on the word juan offer a model to understand the history of the scroll object in relation to the everchanging technologies about it. In this history, emerging reprographic technologies such as printing, which appeared in the late Tang period, were generally the upstart, skeuomorphic media in this network of relationships, and implicitly drew upon or alluded to the more ancient and venerable scroll heritage. In the mid-dynastic period

(tenth to fourteenth century), between the Tang and the Ming empire (1368–1644), the scholars who acted as guardians of scroll culture cherished what they regarded as the monumentality of this seemingly ephemeral scroll medium and contrasted it as a living tradition, revivified by each generation in transmission, with the eventual crumbling of stone sculptures symbolic of cosmopolitan empires such as the Tang.12 There was also a lingering idealization of the purity of the medium, so that in the early modern world connoisseurs did not shy away from noting the vulgarity of putting a monetary value on scrolls, while advancing a scholarly regime of value.13 A high regard for painting scrolls as having a particular ‘scroll vitality’ (juanzhou qi) distinguished them as the prime aesthetic medium employed by the greatest maestri. The Qing-dynasty scholar Fang Xun (1736–1799) opined: Scholar paintings are often said to have ‘scroll vitality’ [juanzhou qi], but people always point to the vitality in the brushwork to explain this [term], which one cannot help laughing at. Surely what the ancients meant by ‘scroll vitality’ was not a question of the formal expression in brushwork or exquisite draftsmanship [in a painting] but one of elegant or vulgar taste [in their choice of format]. Otherwise, scholar [–painter]s like Mojie (Wang Wei, 699–759) and Longmian (Li Gonglin, 1049–1106) would not have [bothered with] scrolls and rollers.14

Not a common term, ‘scroll vitality’ or the ‘aura of scrolls’, is nevertheless instructive as it contains a carefully chosen binome for a picture-scroll composed of the words for a scroll (juan) around a roller (zhou), which Mathews had glossed as ‘roller for a map or scrolls’, underscoring the specific role and active participation of the proper audience. This medium was being claimed for scholar artists 10

Introduction

to qiwu (‘objets d’art’ or applied arts), a term in modern museum parlance referring to bronzes, jades, ceramics and other plastic art forms. There simply has not been space to include more than a few calligraphy handscrolls in this study. There is precedent from early within the tradition for focusing on picture-scrolls alone, given the tenable position that calligraphy and painting follow ‘different ways (dao) which should not be studied indiscriminately’.18 Whether or not this sharp modal distinction stands up to close scrutiny, we nevertheless can see the general bifurcation this writer had in mind: standards of judgement in calligraphy could be grounded in binary questions (‘A text is a precondition but is it complete or not?’, ‘Is the calligraphy fine or not?’, ‘Is it by the signatory or not?’), whereas in painting, the forms of which had no such defined source material, the permutations of such questions could be endlessly complex and intertwined. Considering the picture-scroll as an integral object, this study will examine its uses, although abuses might in fact be the mot juste, given the treatment of these objects historically. In particular, suffering wear and tear or other perceived obsolescence, the handscroll is necessarily subject to renewal through remounting, perhaps on average every several hundred years, supporting the notion of a living tradition. The lives or incarnations of these objects were nevertheless often random in length, and where scrolls have survived history’s high attrition rate through transmission, they may have passed from collector to collector as a result of personal or network encounters, or through coercive appropriation by the state or an individual. More romantically, they may have ended up in dealers’ shops or bookshops with old books and records, where they were picked up by connoisseurs.19 These patterns of survival and attrition have sometimes uneasily matched the prevalent lyric voice of comity espoused by

by contrast with other, ‘vulgar’, formats such as, presumably, walls, wall-mounted pictures and screens. Fang Xun’s complaint is that fellow connoisseurs have not appreciated the aesthestic value inherent in the horizontal, personally handled picture-scroll format preferred by the progenitors of the scholar-painting tradition.15 A remarkable reflection on what a Chinese handscroll had become by the eighteenth century is Cheng-hua Wang’s assessment of a reprise of the Qingming scroll made at court the year after the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) acceded to the Qing throne, in 1737. ‘For [the emperor] Qianlong’, she writes, ‘the Qingming painting of 1737 was not only a [handscroll] painting per se, but also a manifestation of sagacious cultural appropriation, an instrument for dynastic cultural competition, and a beacon of what was glorious about his court painting.’16 This mode of engagement with the Chinese past, itself conceived as co-extensive with scroll materiality and culture and serving as an instrument of the political present, extended to containing the inherently unruly character of the picture-scroll as a medium for dissent and the voicing of difference. Despite this being an extraordinary weight for the handscroll to bear, it has been a recurring feature in China’s modernity, continuing into the present, as we will explore in some examples in the last chapter.17

Positivism, the canon and its discontents The archive of picture-scrolls is vast, and necessarily there are many lacunae in this book. There is one particular distinction that this book does not do justice to. In material terms, the juan handscroll as a work of art could refer to picture-scrolls and to handscrolls of calligraphy made as artworks. In traditional Chinese typology, they are often lumped together in the term shuhua (‘calligraphy and painting’), as opposed 11

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

China’s scholar class, to emote the nostalgia, sentiment and yearning embodied in scroll art. The look and quality of a well-designed and well-mounted picture-scroll invite the scroller not to doubt it and to see it as an object with aesthetic integrity.20 However, the more one knows about a given example, in light of historical remounting practices, the harder it is to see it in positivist terms as a complete or discrete object.21 That tradition of mounting and remounting has typically been regarded with a naive benignity by many connoisseurs, to the cynical advantage of others, with handscrolls being seen in an overwhelmingly positivist light, at least until the intellectual scepticism of the ‘evidentiary scholarship’ movement (kaozhengxue) of late imperial China. As the Tang art historian Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815– c. 877) noted in the quotation above, the picturescroll can take so many forms, and work in various modes and functions, and it does this from an early date. Zhang meticulously recorded what he knew of nefarious practices of forgery and the like, generally by figures deemed morally dubious, including by female and usurping members of the royal family and their entourages.22 While disentangling these matters in the archive of old-master paintings today is not the primary intention here, still, issues of connoisseurship and reprises and puzzle pieces are not avoided, and there are any number to choose from. Although controversies are not necessarily relevant to the status of handscrolls as such, a history of the picturescroll does afford an opportunity to rethink this as an angle for connoisseurship. As far as paying attention to scroll production goes, we will take note of obvious patterns to the dark arts of copying to deceive, falsification and fakery.23 Among picture-scrolls, these traits are not so straightforward to identify when, in the nature of the format, myriad opportunities and possibilities for change, obfuscation and deceit

exist and have been fully exploited. Unlike other mounting formats for Chinese paintings, handscrolls have an almost unlimited potential to be framed and reframed through the mounting process, to send out or welcome in folia fugitiva. Some examples from the infinite range of good- and bad-faith combinations and overlapping possibilities comprise: scrolls with just a painting, or with this and extensive seals and colophons accrued over time; scrolls whose artistic authorship has been obscured, usually by removing the artist’s, patron’s or recipient’s signature, and reassigned; and scrolls where the painting is fake (having been substituted) and the colophons are genuine (or vice versa).24 There are also scrolls where part of the painting is original and another part made up and so on.25 In collections ‘the beautiful and the ugly [may be] all jumbled together,’ Zhang Yanyuan warned at the outset of the history of art in the medieval period.26 Picture-scrolls are, then, multi-form and multi-layered pieces of history which have been chopped and changed as they have passed through time to the extent that Richard Vinograd has seen Chinese paintings as ‘extended events’ because of their accretions in the form of inscriptions and colophons.27 The broader purpose here is to be able to step back and take stock of these patterns of accretion of seals and inscriptions on scrolls which have long been postively used by critics and connoisseurs to trace an object’s provenance, ideally along a unique pathway through some of the great historical collections; and to be able to understand and critically evaluate the centrality in historical thinking of a smooth diachronic timeline snaking back from the present to the moment of the artwork’s creation, becoming aware of the ways and means by which knowledge produced in this fashion functions to sustain core culture and displace or efface other aspects.

12

Introduction

scroll was largely a singular creative module, a one-off, one-act or one-album format, and its pictorial space within generally seen to be devoted, as Fang Xun lamented, to the performance of the brushstroke as some kind of hyper-trope, with brushed ink traces in dot and outline as its idiomatic language.29 Within the tradition, a co-extensive transmission of unspoken but embodied knowledge about scrolls and their handling and reading means that neither material matters nor handling practices were much commented upon explicitly by artists, mounters, collectors or connoisseurs. Still, the object has been visually recursive throughout its history, in that painters have enjoyed inserting images of scrolls being viewed and handled into images within their picture-scrolls. As such, artists using the medium have been able in certain cases to convey embedded or encoded messages about their image or scroll and its reading.30 Depictions of scrolls being handled feature within picture-scrolls, sometimes also within pictures within these scrolls. These images necessarily have to be taken as iconographic or rhetorical depictions and interpreted as such, especially when the scroll object is by its nature most unwieldly to view, except on a well-lit, clean, flat surface with scroll weights to hand to pin down the curling ends, despite the jaunty or light-hearted manner of handling or inscribing scrolls conjured up by artists in some pictures featuring handscrolls. This embodied form of knowedge of artists and mounters, although occasionally glimpsed in such images, resulted in few ‘how to’ manuals being produced until very recently. It was not until 1958 that a study from a connoisseurly angle on the history and practice of scroll mounting appeared – published by the Dutch sinologist Robert van Gulik (1910–1967), in a book that included samples of materials in a folder at the back, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur.

The materiality of objects: haptic qualities, embodiment and recursion – and historiography Picture-scrolls represent a category within the corpus of extant artworks from mainly the latter half of China’s dynastic period over the last two millennia, with a relatively tiny minority of earlier survivors from the Tang and pre-Tang period. Within this corpus, there are small ones (a few centimetres long) and outsize ones (dozens of metres long), ordinary and extraordinary ones, cheap and expensive ones.28 The basic practicalities of handling a scroll on a desk or table, however, determined a median length of between about 50 centimetres and perhaps 6 or 8 metres, with an average height around 30 centimetres. What was deemed a manageable size and proportion changed over time, getting longer and larger. This dynamic shaped the pictorial size and scale of the rolling pictorial frame and to a degree also the internal choreography of scrolling pictures, which often echoed the structure of pieces of music and drama. As to the potential for scrolls to grow in scale both physically and in terms of their internal structural logic, Lothar Ledderose has argued how a distinctive pattern of ‘modular’ artistic creativity in China functioned through the gathering together of interchangeable components into one complete thing. He has traced this practice across multiple media, from figural sculpture, ceramics and architecture to writing and painting. Although scrolls could be made longer by inserting more sheets of silk or paper base in the mounting, a chief advantage over the vertical hanging scroll format which was limited by ceiling height, perhaps surprisingly, Chinese artists and mounters never really took to the custom widely used in Japan of splitting extra-long scroll compositions into modular sets of two or three or more. The horizontal 13

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

In the digital age, further didactic studies have appeared in new formats, many by the museums which care for important collections, moving on from just how to read a Chinese painting towards explanation of the scroll medium.31 Today, these art objects are dispersed across the globe, and the specialists who conserve and handle them are part of a global network, as is our discourse. In 2010, wanting to open up this knowledge to audiences of worldly cultures, a major Western museum posted online a video demonstration entitled ‘Safe Handling Practice for Chinese Handscrolls’.32 The basic way of thinking with things proposed here is related to Jonathan Hay’s history not of art but of the artwork.33 Or, as Bill Brown writes, ‘The whole point of thinking about things – or, say, of thinking with them – is a matter of posing and responding to questions that a given master narrative cannot pose in an empirically or conceptually satisfying way.’34 This material approach also encourages looking into research in cognate media. Despite its relative youth as an art, photography, or rather its materiality, also provides a lesson here: research on the haptic qualities of photography and its mountings offers to be applicable both by analogy and within a broader materiality-of-art studies.35 The current situation is that, unlike in photography studies, the haptic and tactile part of a viewer’s encounter with a handscroll – despite the name – has rarely been reflected upon or theorized, except where occasionally noted as a breach of integrity or the handiwork of the ill-intentioned mounter, remaining typically part of that unspoken but embodied knowledge of scroll culture.36 To step back and see the study of the Chinese picture-scroll from a broader disciplinary position, some frictions appear unavoidable, given a rather unfavourable master narrative for a material history of the scroll as an art form in some regional framings. This is seen in the

European tradition in commentary on the primitive character and limited flexibility of the scroll as a literary format in the long story of scientific progress. In medieval Europe of the thirteenth century, scrolls seem to have been revived as an archaic book form, for example, to illustrate the Compendium of History through the Genealogy of Christ, even though ‘[t]he more practical codex had replaced the scroll, or roll, centuries before’. Among the roughly contemporary versions of the same Compendium in codex form (that is, sixty of the ninety surviving), ‘some display ingenious arrangements [for example, foldouts and shifting the orientation of text and diagrams] to compensate for the limitations of bound folios.’37 As a form of knowledge and knowledge production, and with its own localized agency, this study of the Chinese scroll as a literary and pictorial medium could be expected to challenge and disrupt such culturally bounded meta-narratives of progress.

The forms of historicism and time While this study is not in itself a search for the origins of the picture-scroll, these are relevant and included. Tracing a linear development in time is a handy pedagogical convention and has been applied for that purpose at moments in history such as our own.38 To narrate the story so far, the architecture of a scrolling-image medium was the product of the aesthetic genesis of the Han-to-Tang transition, coinciding with the birth of both classical calligraphy and painting, both facilitated by technological advances in art materials, including paper and more flexible brushes. An epistolary mode of brush calligraphy, retrospectively the ‘classical tradition’, flowed from lettered exchanges among the scholarly elite on the newly invented base of paper. Meantime, in gossamerlike ink outlines of extraordinary delicacy on silk, painters charged with illustrating didactic 14

Introduction

exemplary figures were animated by the body language of, and eye contact between, courtly figures of both genders. Gradually, an elaborate framework of texts and paratexts, in the form of seal impressions and inscriptions by creators, owners and viewers, began to accumulate over the centuries in and on old scrolls. Spurred by late imperial philology with its respect for the written word, a pattern of object analysis emerged in which seeing or rather reading the artwork through this textual framework paralleled and even overshadowed observation of the painting core. The pictures within scrolls have embodied ideas or sensibilities or are seen to have taken on some purport or significance, in this sense, not just through their innate iconologies and origination with this artist or that patron but because of their having passed as handscrolls through the hands of collectors X, Y and Z. One could argue that the rolling linear picture-scroll is the ultimate physical form of this mode of knowledge production. Yet the medium itself and artists’ reflections on its uses were hardly plain or uniform. Creators’ awareness of the reflexive and also recursive qualities of the medium and its relationships with other media or intermediality call for special attention.39 Though the chapters that follow develop in a linear logic, primarily for pedagogical reasons as noted, there is an explicit challenge to the reader, namely, how to hold in mind an image of the entanglements and recursions that complicate the sense of normative linear time passing, a task that critics and historians of art of any given moment in history have faced for their moment, akin to what Keith Moxey has explored as ‘visual time’. A given picture-scroll can, for example, only present itself to us in its most recent mounting, typically rendering its previous incarnations (if any) partially invisible. Further, any ancient picturescroll that has survived for several centuries, let

alone one that has travelled through millennia into the twenty-first century, is by now an extraordinarily complex collage of images and pieces of history. The multiple temporalities and visualities traversed may well be entirely hidden by the apparently unruffled skin of the scroll surface. When it comes to how a spatial–temporal world is articulated virtually within the Chinese horizontal scrolling image, there is no well-theorized or fundamental pattern to it, other than perhaps in embodied or practical knowledge. Instructive here is an ancient tale in China about a half-witted son who, using his father’s book on fine horses, took a toad (which, after all, has four legs) for a thoroughbred, much to his father’s bemusement.40 It is an argument of this book that some of that practical and untheorized knowledge in the scroll-painting tradition, of a common-sense kind that would have saved the dull boy from ridicule down the ages, is embedded in visual manipulations or iconology, particularly artists’ manipulation of forms in pictures to serve both intrinsically, to represent something in a given scene, and instrumentally, to speak to other forms dispersed across other parts or sections of the scroll, usually to guide the viewing process. We will explore the degree to which that contextual creative judgement of artists was typically based on a more or less expansive visual knowledge base of the painting tradition. These diegetic or quasi-diegetic uses of form within pictures to pace and structure reading and scrolling will offer an investigative thread in what follows. To set out the problem at a macro level, the semiological principles of the pictographic writing system provide a useful steer in that characters in the evolving written language provide a structured repository of iconographic and narrative possibilities. Take the character for bad or ill-omened, 噩 (pinyin: e, pronounced ‘urgh’), a very ancient character which takes the same form 15

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

in seal script and is a component of modern words like e-ye (nightmare). If we take a synaesthetic approach to the etymology, the sound, e, is appropriately onomatopaeic for the semantic connotations, but the form is also ominous in visually depicting the ruler, configured in the character 王 wang (prince, king) as the uniter of the three realms of the cosmos (that is, the vertical line linking the three horizontal tiers of heaven, earth and human­kind), being challenged by a chorus of open mouths, sounding ‘urgh’ from all four corners of the realm. When sound, image and concept conjoin in a harmony of dissent within but against the established political hierarchy, we can sense not just how pictographs influentially spatialize socio-political culture but also how writing and history frame rulership, giving insight into the willingness to hear or silence co-ordinated voices in the context of legitimacy and kingship.

of material evidence,’ the International Dunhuang Project, based at the British Library, has authoritatively stated on its website.42 So this book is offered by way of a framework, a detached cultural history with an iconological approach to material objects and their inherent visuality. In the regional scope of its content, the book does deal with China and the East Asia region from medieval to contemporary times, but in a generally China-focused fashion. Frustratingly, despite the shared origins in Chinese culture of what is today called East Asian culture, or even East Asian scroll culture, there is too little in this book from Korea, Japan or pre-colonial Vietnam. There would certainly be more to learn from Korean art, in particular through connections with Buddhism and printed scroll culture, as well as surrounding the rarity and heritage issues of a masterpiece like Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Land (1447), by An Kyŏn (1350–1447), a Chosŏn visual telling of the ‘Peach-Blossom Spring’ tale of the land of eternal youth by the Chinese poet Tao Qian (365–427).43 In Japanese art, meantime, classical picturescrolls as singletons or in small sets of two or three known as emaki (picture-scrolls) are a major art form in their own right and synonymous with the formative development of a distinctively Japanese culture from around 1000 ce.44 There is also a later, popular early modern genre known as Nara e-hon (Nara picture-books), which comprise multi-volume books but also sets of picturescrolls, two or three in each. A small-number case study will have to stand to defend the position that the picture-scroll in Japan enjoyed just one short but significant classical moment of production around the Kamakura period (1185–1333). Of the 151 exhibits in a major 2016 exhibition held in Taiwan comprising loans from major Japanese collections, entitled ‘Japanese Art at Its Finest’, only five were picture-scrolls, or just 3.3 per cent, albeit two were designated a national treasure and

Audience, regionalism and positioning As a study of the Chinese handscroll, this book makes no claim to instruct the technical specialists and professionals upon whom all art historians, curators and collectors rely – that is, the mounters, conservators and art handlers whose job it is to maintain the working order of these artworks in storage and on display. Their work is part of the research framework and, as noted, institutionally these individuals have lately contributed to the opening up of once embodied and often secret knowledge in modern media such as film. Meanwhile, investigation into the materiality of art has benefited from a devotion to design itself as a museological concept, led by major institutions with this mandate.41 While this book does not deal much with scrolls from outside the Sinosphere, it is intended to speak to historians of art and of the book and bookbinding. ‘The history of Chinese bookbinding has always suffered owing to a lack 16

Introduction

an important cultural property.45 A future broadsweep history of the East Asian picture-scroll probably depends on digital technology along with decanonization and de-territorialization of the discipline, as seen by a cosmopolitan but culturally informed ‘worldly eye’.46 On this thread, there are continuing calls in the discipline to move beyond ekphrasis or the ‘interpretative description’ of artworks,47 with its theoretical and methodological connection with the province of European art, and the centring of the white self, but also beyond the imagined exceptionalism of the contemporary and the analogue–digital divide. In Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext, which is, appropriately, an online book that scrolls down on screen, Jack Hartnell wonders how ‘the continuous page stirs [European, Mediterranean and Asian] distant pasts in our imagination’ and sets out ‘to build conceptual bridges across a typology of object’.48 Although the analysis of Chinese picture-scrolls in this book has not depended on their juxtaposition with analagous examples from other cultures, still these can be instructive and a number of them surface in what follows, including the Byzantine Josua-Rolle (see illus. 17), the 70metre-long Bayeux tapestry, the English king Henry viii’s (r. 1509–47) procession scroll of 1511 (see illus. 98) and nineteenth-century European panoramas (see illus. 131).

also see these artworks with the naked eye in the storage room of a museum or collector’s lock-up. Other than professional art handlers and specialist curators, few of us today handle museum-quality handscrolls. When we see them already unrolled or watch the professionals at work, we are left to apply to the situation by cross-reference the knowledge gained by our own first-hand share of the experience of handling scrolls (or lack thereof). That composite kind of personal experience is picked up as an artist, collector, researcher, student, aficionado or curator through looking at artworks in an artist’s or conservation studio, in museum storage or by seeing and handling them at art dealers’ and auction houses or in personal collections of original works and replicas. Where practice and aesthetic material in the form of handscrolls meet is fascinating. Chinese scrolls are normative objects in East Asia, belonging comfortably in the category of shuhua (‘calligraphy and painting’), as opposed to works of applied art, qiwu (‘objets d’art’), a distinction noted above. Outside East Asia, particularly where Western colonial practices still obtain, these objects have been separated out as the ‘other’ and often defined by their regionalism as Chinese, East Asian or Asian, in a subaltern state that is not straightforward to disentangle.50 It is not surprising that there are significant variations in viewing practice, even among professional art handlers in museums and collectors in China and the rest of East and Southeast Asia, Europe and the Anglophone West. In these intercultural contexts, different regimes and agendas, from ethno-nationalist to multicultural to inclusive, operate and the ‘right to look’ varies.51 For researchers, the professional event of viewing handscrolls in a museum study room, usually calling for the support of multiple curatorial and handling staff, may be a busy, even hurried, stressful, competitive and status-conscious occasion with reputations at stake.

Research methodology This interest in the handscroll’s dynamic and mutable relationships to its viewers has some context.49 The reality of viewing a Chinese old-master scroll-painting for most people today, however, is not through touch and spontaneous control of the object but by seeing it laid out in a display case through, at best, non-reflective glass, in a darkened and often crowded public gallery. A few may 17

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The advent of the digital age has to a degree been a leveller, bringing even wider digital access to handscrolls in hi-res reproduction, following a historical peak in printed reproduction quality at the turn of the millennium.52 Since around 2010, digitally scrolling picture-scrolls have become widely available to view online, many provided by museums and research centres.53 Animation, vr and ar are also making scrolls accessible to new audiences.54 Parallel developments in digital art history, such as searchable databases of terms and images, support semiotic analysis of paintings’ content, deepening our aesthetic understanding of artistic symbolism and to some degree its use in historical contexts.55 These contemporary questions are further explored in Chapter Seven. The investigative approach and analytical method applied here in this book necessarily speak to my own research experience and positionality in the current context outlined above. One implication of the widening visual (if not physical) accessibility of picture-scrolls is the call this makes upon researchers and curators to speak to new audiences. Handscrolls are survivors, the material counterpart to the immaterial portion of heritage that does not survive, but we can acknowledge that both these parts played roles (as one increased and the other diminished) in creating cultural consciousness and scroll culture.56 To take an example, we have little notion of what kinds of formats or media women painters employed before the Ming period since so little survives. A tiny proportion of the painting heritage is by women: the Palace Museum in Beijing, for instance, lists just 250 works.57 Texts do not help much either as, where female painters are mentioned by critics, usually briefly and usually at the end after religious masters and foreigners of regional states such as Japan, it is often to show their failings.58 From the late Ming, some of the most outstanding artistic talents also

became famous as courtesans, such as Xue Susu (c. 1564–c. 1650) (see illus. 103), historically critiqued in these terms: ‘her brush dashes rapidly and all her paintings are full of spirit [or pluck]. They are even [superior] to those of most professional painters.’59 Some contemporary critique, in this case of the courtesan-painter Li Yin (c. 1610–1685), continues this riff: ‘she avoided the drawbacks of the works by women painters like narrow composition and weak strokes.’60 This is changing, however. In modern literary scholarship, Xue Susu’s writings are seen now to evince the emergence of a female editorial voice which highlights themes of women as commodities and agents.61 For art history, now general surveys of Ming and Qing art offer a balanced model in incorporating a judicious and critical range of artworks,62 and in this spirit of restorative justice we will feature and intersperse across the study, where possible, picture-scrolls from outside the late imperial mainstream, including art by non-Chinese and by women. This book makes no claim to be representative, only to inductively make examples of works from a canon in transition, and it is this crossed history approach that affords us the opportunity to reconsider, even if we are not in a position to actually redress, such historical inequities and gaps. My intellectual base has included generally poststructuralist research, such as studies on embodied knowledge, on the temporality and agency of imitation, on how narrative doubles as meta-narrative and on recursive forms and modalities.63 At the core, I draw inspiration from the finest examples of Sinologically engaged iconological critiques of visuality.64 Against this, echoing the linear material form of the scroll itself, the chapters that follow will unfold in chronological sequence, serving to critically trace the evolutionary timeline and mainstream development of the picture-scroll from its emergence 18

Introduction

in the early medieval period (Chapter One) to its maturation in the ‘middle period’, the Song-Jin era (960–1279) in Chapter Two and the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) in Chapter Three. We proceed from there to track patterns and changes over the late imperial dynastic formations, the Ming (1368– 1644) in Chapter Four and the Qing (1644–1911) in Chapter Five – and into Modernism (Chapter Six) and the contemporary moment (Chapter Seven). A modern book is necessarily in codex format, whether the reader encounters it in printed or digital version. This cannot be said to replicate the material feel and haptic experience of viewing or reading a picture-scroll, but it is not unrelated. Seeing the whole content of a scroll reproduced in much reduced scale on a page feels artificial and is not a substitute either. But this is not new. Since at least the time of the printing boom in late Ming China, reproducing part or all of a picture-scroll in codex book format has posed just such a problem (if that it is, since it seems so to us) to authors and designers. In selecting what to illustrate of a given picturescroll, sometimes I have been able to feature a full handscroll opened out, as it were, from start to finish, with details where possible. Because many scrolls are so long, it has made sense also

to borrow from film studies the convention of reproducing ‘stills’ – that is, sections or even just details – as available images and resources allow. In film studies, it is not the custom to relate the whole narrative in a long feature picture, a practice adapted in this volume. A similar but slightly different design challenge faced Bernard Comment, author of The Panorama from this press (2002), a study on the massive circular pictures in vogue in exhibition installation form in early modern Europe and the related diorama and cineorama. In addition to in-page figure illustrations, Comment’s Panorama featured some foldouts that to a degree replicated the experience of viewing a panorama; in a good number of cases here we have similarly run illustrations of some longer scrolls across two pages. What Comment did not have in 2002, but is now available following the world’s digital turn, is the vast Internet archive of visual materials accessible through the click of a hyperlink as the digital counterpart to galleries in public museums and other display spaces full of old-master scrolls and new works in the picture-scroll tradition. I hope that my readers, with these object archives there to hand, will come to see this body of scrolling art in a new, raking light.

19

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Anatomy of the handscroll Despite the compelling interest of the handscroll (手卷 shoujuan or just 卷 juan) or picture-scroll (圖 卷 tujuan) as a mounting format (illus. 1), it is often an invisible frame which sets off the artwork contained within it, known as the 畫心 huaxin or ‘painting heart’.65 The Chinese character xin is literally a heart, the beating heart of a human or animal, but in intellectual culture this is also the place where thinking is done, so xin as the ‘mind’ of an educated person is another gloss. Occasionally, a rarer homophone of xin is used: the word 芯 xin with a ‘grass’ radical over the ‘heart’, meaning the pith of a rush or, through its usage as such, the wick of a lamp or candle.66 The image of the painting itself (or work of calligraphy) within the scroll as an anthropomorphic heart/ mind is fair enough, as this connotes the concept, purport or intent embodied therein by its artistic creator, referred to as yuyi, or lodged or embedded meaning. The alternative notion of the painting as a wick is also arresting. The base for painting was organic stuff, either silk (strands of gossamer extracted from silkworms, wound into threads and then woven into fabric) or, following its invention in early medieval China, paper made from pith and other organic stuff. In a lamp or candle, the lit wick appears not to burn but to hold the flame which then illuminates the space further around it. The flame disperses light as if through a halo or aureole, burning dull or incandescent according to the quality of the art. The painting heart is held in place within the scroll mounting between brocade or silk end-panels known as geshui 隔水 or water dividers, like the paths between flooded paddy fields, providing the viewer with a means to navigate on foot by looking down into the scroll. The immediate interior of the scroll, on unrolling, is the ‘heaven’ (or sometimes ‘hall of heaven’), in the sense of occupying the space above or before the artwork, while the backing or colophon paper (often extensive) after the painted heart, known as the ‘extended tail’, is inserted

both to buffer the ‘painting heart’ from the inner wooden roller and widen the curl when rolled up, reducing stress on the materials and, from the middle dynastic period on, to serve as a space for written commentaries in colophons to be added by viewing connoisseurs. The whole interior and the immediate exterior, which is visible when the scroll is rolled up and strapped in by a length of cord, certainly act like a grand historical stage where any person leaving a mark, be it a seal impression or an inscription, is much exposed. Such interventions may seem commonplace because they are so plentiful, especially in later dynastic times, but are not for the faint-hearted. By implication, until about the twentieth century, this was the almost exclusive preserve of educated Chinese or royal men, with some notable exceptions. (Only at the hands of modern non-Chinese-speaking collectors do you find upside-down seal impressions.) Just as the wick in a lamp can be replaced, so a painting can be remounted in a new scroll mounting once the old one wears out through handling, abuse or perceived obsolescence. The mounting style employed by Zhao Ji (1082–1135), the Northern Song artist–emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), is considered an acme of elegance and finery, as we will explore in Chapter Two. In contrast, the practice of the Manchu Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) is lamented as having enabled a certain incontinence with imperial inscriptions and seals, including all over the ‘painting heart’, which had previously been largely preserved from collectors’ paratexts through taboo. Typically, the highly skilled work of remounting happens at least every few hundred years for old-master works, often with the aim of preserving in or excising from the new format any more or less valued portions of the old mounting, such as the tapestry outer wrapper (see illus. 16), silk end-panels or sections bearing seal impressions and inscriptions. In practice, it is hard to fully reconstruct these processes or their underpinning motivations for renewal, 20

Introduction

1 Diagrams of the basic handscroll format.

when multiple pieces of history become attached or are removed over time.67 The mounter’s art, like the empirical knowledge of the potter, was little studied in any language before the Dutch sinologist Robert van Gulik’s 537-page tome Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (1958). The earliest text in Chinese did not appear until the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644), although before this time piecemeal references are to be found scattered among writings by connoisseurs, often expressing their alarm or satisfaction at the skill of mounters. It was precisely the practices associated

with the manuscript tradition, copying and remounting, that troubled sceptics of the late imperial ‘evidentiary scholarship’ (kaozhengxue) movement. They pitted this manner of transmitting the received tradition against the material cultural heritage in hard, fixed forms (for example, inscribed stone sculptures and bronze vessels), which they regarded as ipso facto less subject to manipulation by historical actors and so more authentic as immutable pieces which could rectify the historical imagining of the past.

21

2, 3 After Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–c. 406), Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Nüshi zhen tu), late 5th or 6th century, former handscroll mounted on panel, ink and colours on silk, 24.37 × 343.75 cm. Details: the rejection scene; a court lady meditates; the court instructress.

1 On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

T

his chapter is not a search for that holy grail, the origin, but it has nevertheless to deal with origination, which has been an important part of the tradition right up to today. Of the plethora of potted histories to be found online, for example, some attest to the emergence of the picture-scroll from stringed slips of bamboo or wood in the late pre-imperial period (before 221 ce), others to the influence of Buddhist sutramaking in the ancient and early medieval periods.1 Throughout history, the lack of relevant early evidence, whether material or textual, has not hampered the philological mind’s aetiological rehearsals of origination myths for pictures and picture-making. There were perennial arguments, without any specific reference to base or medium, about which of the legendary sages in antiquity, Shihuang or the Yellow Emperor’s minister Cang Jie, was the first to ‘make pictures’ containing secret knowledge of the cosmos and its workings. It may indeed be that these ancient charts and maps and

pictures, as sources call them, had no established mounting format or picture-framing device as such, other than presumably being folded or rolled-up lengths of silk inscribed with ink from lampblack and organic and mineral pigment colours. Such is the form of probably the earliest example of a manuscript containing words and images, namely the Chu (c. 11th century bce–223 bce) silk manuscript of a zodiac calendar measuring 38 by 47 centimetres, interred with a tomb occupant in perhaps 300 bce.2 Early writings about painting (primarily portraiture at this date) from the era of the first enduring unified empire, the Han (206 bce–220 ce), pay almost no attention to format but privilege technique, at a time when a calligraphic inkoutline mode of representation was emerging in tandem with technical improvements in the brush, as well as the function of pictures, referencing a mainstream cultural disquiet about the value of representational realism or virtuality as 23

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necessarily the work of deceiving the eye. The Former Han (206 bce–9 ce) scholar Liu An (c. 179– 122 bce), for instance, wrote that ‘in painting, do not venerate the brush to the detriment of the portrait likeness.’3 In his ‘Preface to Landscape Painting’, Zong Bing (375–443) recognized in painting the opportunity to make a ‘dream journey’ (woyou) by, at leisure or in old age, ‘unrolling a scroll, facing it alone, and seated [there] investigating the four boundaries’.4 Here is textual evidence that the aesthetic medium, materials and format of the picture-scroll, and a corresponding discourse about its value and purpose, were now established. Material and visual evidence in the form of scrolls and pictures of scrolls is harder to come by. Indeed, on the rare occasions when origination tales for ancient pictures and writing were illustrated, as we will see later in the Yuan-dynasty (1271–1368) woodcut-printed encyclopaedia Forest of Affairs (see illus. 59), these visualizations are, as is to be expected, more revealing about aesthetic hierarchies of their own moment. The figure in Forest of Affairs tries to make illustrational sense of the legend whereby a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing – in this case – a perfectly formed pile of scrolls on its back, scrolls which are signifiers of the pictures contained within them. By dint of its cultural status at this date, the scroll was evidently the only conceivable format for imaging ancient pictures. Their sudden appearance out of the water fully formed as scrolls, looking just as they would have appeared in contemporary reality, only served to collapse the

passage of time between the always belated present and that magical moment of origination in antiquity.5 Any search for origins, even as it is fixed in time, is also a function of such powerful inclusions, exclusions and recursions at play within the canon as it was constantly framed and reframed in the passage of time. In this chapter we will first explore some of the characteristic themes pertaining to the picture-scroll as a powerful emerging aesthetic form, all the while keeping its historical development and inner logic in mind.

Mediating visual worlds in and out of the picture-scroll For the earliest fully formed example of a ‘long scroll’ (changjuan) in the handscroll format, read from right to left, created by an artist painter (but not typically signed, until the tenth century), widely circulated and critiqued among the elite and easily recognizable as such, then we need look no further than the foundational Wei–Jin period (220–589), between the Han and Tang (618–907) empires. The archetypal, miraculous survivor from around this time is the celebrated Admonitions of the Court Instructress picture-scroll attributed to, and plausibly a close copy after, the art of the early figural master Gu Kaizhi (c. 344– c. 406), known simply as ‘the Admonitions scroll’ or the Admonitions (illus. 2–6; also see illus. 20 and 21). It is probably a fifth- or sixth-century painting and has probably been remounted various or even multiple times. Although there have been arguments that the scroll, or another like iteration 24

4–6 After Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–c. 406), Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Nüshi zhen tu), late 5th or 6th century, former handscroll mounted on panel, ink and colours on silk, 24.37 × 343.75 cm. Details: Lady Ban; the toilette scene.

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

7 ‘Story of Wu Zixu’, 3rd century, rubbing of a bronze mirror, d. 20.7 cm.

of it, was at some point screen-mounted, it has generally been assumed, because of its intimate historical linkage to Gu Kaizhi, that it began life as a picture-scroll.6 The patterns of damage, some detectable with the naked eye and others through the use of infrared and ultraviolet photography, support this, in that they include multiple vertical strips of wear brought about by rolling and unrolling the silk base, which has become increasingly brittle with age.7 In modern studies of the origins of the picturescroll in China, what has mattered is positing a timeline conceived on the footprint of the nationstate, which has led to some arresting claims for the medium’s preconditions and emergence. In one case, we are invited to consider the indebtedness of scroll art to rock art, a pictorial mode pre- and post-dating the invention of the Chinese script from around 1500 bce. Evidence shows that the makers of rock art figures and scenes

in Neolithic times in East Asia worked their way along flat cliff ledges or along the level surfaces perpendicular to markable rock faces.8 Whether this can be taken as evidence of a cultural predilection for this lateral way of seeing or for making or linking pictures is a matter of debate. Rock art is widespread wherever on geohistorical dry land early human society reached, and the survival and discovery of evidence are accordingly random. What is well known, however, is how Neolithic rock art from the Yinshan mountains in the region of north China and Inner Mongolia was observed and documented as early as the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534). Notes by the courtier Li Daoyuan (466 or 472–527) in his Commentary on the Water Classic (Shuijing zhu) confirm an instance of its entry into elite consciousness at exactly the time that the picture-scroll was emerging as an art medium in this era of individualist and yet cosmopolitan intellectual enquiry.9 26

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

While absence of material evidence of handscrolls is not evidence of absence, we can analogize about related early visual practices and thinking from narrative scenography of the Han period. These evince some patterns, if no obvious or formal kind of codification. A celebrated story known as ‘Two Peaches Kill Three Warriors’, in which a diminutive politician exploits the chivalric code to outwit three knights, was commonly painted on tiles as part of the scenic decor of architecture, where it typically could be read chronologically from left to right: in other words, the reverse of the soon-to-be standard right-to-left direction to narration and reading in handscrolls. This is seen in the horizontal illustration in the painted terracotta gable end panel from tomb no. 1 at Luoyang, of the late first century bce.10 Bronze mirrors were another category of luxus object able to bear images in vogue. A story from 485 bce of the physically strong courtier Wu Zixu (526–484 bce) appears on the back of bronze mirrors, arranged in four linked scenes in a circle around the boss or nose (illus. 7). The story selected is a witty choice for this object, given its reflective function. Knowing the weakness of the King of Wu (seated before a screen) for beautiful women, the vengeful King of Yue and his adviser selected, trained and presented two such beauties, Xi Shi and Zheng Dan (standing beside bronze cauldrons). The King of Wu’s adviser, Wu Zixu (seated with sword drawn), warned his ruler, in vain as it turned out, not to accept them, knowing the king’s reputation for becoming blind and deaf to the world when his passions were aroused.11 A year later Wu Zixu was discredited and ordered to commit suicide, and by 473 bce Yue’s army had invaded and destroyed Wu, an outcome portended by the bridge depicted between the two kings. The four scenes in this exemplary tale of loyal remonstrance are craftily linked through a set of visual plotting devices including text captions

and connecting images, which together evince an already rich technique and practice in visual narration using multiple linked scenes. Despite the circular format, Wu Zixu’s beard and words flow out towards his ruler, and his outstretched hand assumes the classic gesture of remonstrance. The king’s own hand gestures towards the two beauties or immortal ‘jade women’ (signalled by the hare pounding the elixir of immortality in the halfmoon beside them), while they eye Wu Zixu, his topknot loose, eyes bulging and teeth bared in a gurning expression. Simple text captions identify the protagonists by name, but it is the words uttered by Wu Zixu to his king that offer a more complex visual experience. Alongside the flowing beard, this inscription is read upwards, away from him towards the king just as Wu Zixu’s sword and hand gesture also point that way, while his wide-eyed gaze is fixed back in the other direction, along with another tassel of beard and his topknot, towards the ‘beauties who topple kingdoms’. The modular scenography with captions does not determine a start or end point but allows the narrative to be read openly – indeed, the scenes appear in different orders on different sets of castings of the mirror – offering wider accessibility to different readers as users of the mirror. There is a continuous ground plane which borders the inscription around the outside, but the latter does not clarify the temporality as it includes standard phrases, such as wishes for peace and prosperity of the dynasty and its people, which are read clockwise but not necessarily with any specific start or end point. The mental process of reflection thus triggered is in keeping with the implied and special functions of the mirror, including as a tool of literal and figurative self-reflection on one’s appearance and conduct, whoever one may be. Such is the ingenuity of the designer, who plays not with the iconography but with the sequencing and audience appeal, that one could 27

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not, using digital technology, try to impose order by opening this out into a single linear narrative. If one did so, one would lose the simultaneity of the links and portents emplotted on the round mirror back. In China it is the art of painting, with its power to reflect images back to the beholder and in the process stimulate inner reflections, that inherits this mantle and comes to be figuratively known in the tradition as the ‘precious mirror’.12 We should be wary, however, of making a totally culturally bounded link between the birth of the painting tradition in China and the medium of the picture-scroll in that parallel histories of the transition from three- to two-dimensional art image-making across Eurasia hold promise for future research.13

If we look across early China at larger-scale ensembles of this figural mode of art imagery, the go-to example is the large suite of stoneengraved scenes from the Wu Family Shrine precinct in Shandong, dating to the later second century ce, conceived as a mosaic of figural morality tales adding up to a clan’s civic identity.14 The approach to visual narration found here follows the use of standardized stone slabs as walls, providing a naturally ‘landscape’-oriented picture frame. The rectangular wall frame is divided, by and large, into tiered rows and within each of these horizontally stretched rectangles, figures typically appear arrayed standing in rows. This compositional format featuring the horizontal presentation of figures in regimented ranks or ‘like

8 Middle register: ‘Loyal Assassin Jing Ke Attempts to Slay the Prince of Qin’（Jing Ke ci Qinwang), ink rubbing from a stone engraving at the Wu Family Shrine, Shandong Province, c. 168 ce. 28

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

[written] characters aligned in a row like a long snake’, as the Chinese idiom has it, combined with an attitude to filling the picture plane in horror vacui.15 In some significant cases this pattern is disrupted in interesting ways. One mono-scenic, composite image illustrates the ‘loyal assassin’ Jing Ke’s (d. 227 bce) attempt to slay the tyrannical Prince of Qin (r. 247–221 bce) (illus. 8). As in the story of Wu Zixu, plotlines and timelines are overlaid or interwoven in what, at first glance, looks like the single most dramatic moment within the rectangular frame of the scene: the failed assassination. In fact, when each detail is gazed upon and explored, we find time past and time future embedded here. Forms allow us to trace prior plotlines leading up to the

pivotal moment: the head of the Qin turncoat general, Fan Wuqi (d. 227 bce), seen lying in the open box, was willingly given up as part of the ruse to smuggle the murder weapon into the audience chamber. We can also anticipate the dire consequences of Jing Ke’s failure when we see the would-be assassin, ‘angry hair bursting off his cap’ (nufa chongguan), being arrested by a powerful bodyguard. All the while, heightening the tension and the pathos, the silken tassel on the dagger impaled in the wooden pillar still hangs in the air as the thud and twang of the blade’s impact reverberate around the room, the weapon having disastrously missed its target. Elsewhere in the Wu Family Shrine there are elaborate long scenes and scenes that wantonly

9 Scene of ‘Raising the Cauldron’ (Sheng ding tu), ink rubbing from a stone engraving at the Wu Family Shrine, Shandong Province, c. 168 ce.

29

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breach the fixed registers for expressive purposes. In ‘Raising the Cauldron’ (illus. 9), the same tyrant, by now the First Emperor of Qin (r. 221–210 bce), gets his moral comeuppance by pointedly failing to recover from the water a precious bronze ding tripod vessel, the repossession of which would confer legitimacy. The figures in rows are readable laterally in both directions. The rows are stacked up in a notional grid in the picture plane so that a row at the top, though in the same scale, sits above and/or on the far side of figures below. In ‘Raising the Cauldron’, the figures in the top row are also of higher status, dry-shod, overseeing the struggling workers on the river below, and they stand in a row along a space readable as either a platform above them or else the far riverbank. The composition echoes the simple arrangement of horizontal broken and unbroken lines in the trigrams from the Confucian classic Book of Change – that is, the left and right vertical ends of the picture frame are fixed edges, but there are flexible narrative and spatial relationships between the forms contained within three or six horizontal registers. Airy and watery spaces are filled and signified respectively as such via abductive logic, by flying birds in the sky and interested fish in the river. The fishes’ attention to the outcome, in particular, is an implied sign of heaven’s stake in the result of this political archaeology. Technically, their forms are turned on the horizontal axis into the picture plane, so they are seen in close to axial or side-on view, dispelling visual ambiguity for the readership, but also in keeping with the treatment of human figures.16 This cultural approach to the spatialization of pictorial imagery in two dimensions has parallels in the sophisticated pictography of Chinese writing. Some written characters (admittedly not many, but an example is an example) function in bird’s-eye view, such as 車 che (car, carriage), which represents a two-wheeled cart seen from

above: the axle is the vertical line. Other examples of such pictographs are frontal and lateral, such as 女 nü (woman), in which the female subject is pictured cross-legged facing the viewer/reader. When nü is combined with a child, 子 zi, to create the character 好 hao (woman holding child = ‘good’), the aspect does not change: the seated woman is as if holding the child to her breast. However, when the ‘woman’ graph is combined to form the picto-conceptual character 姦 jian (three women together = ‘vice’), the three ‘woman’ elements are similarly stacked up in the picture plane in two registers or else could be read as seated in a triangle, one behind, facing the viewer, if the scale of the larger upper figure is relegated as a signifying factor. Han pictorial composition, in generating knowledge through pictures, contains both this variable conceptual and spatial approach to combining forms as well as their containment within a rectangular pictorial frame. One of the earliest convincing exemplars of the art of the picture-scroll, as noted, is the Admonitions scroll (see illus. 2–6, 20 and 21), with its monoscenic but also iterative elaboration in an original twelve scenes of a poetic memorial, ‘The Admonitions of the Court Instructress’, on the conduct and virtue expected of female members of the imperial household.17 The memorial itself was presented in 290 ce to the Western Jin (266–316) throne by the statesman Zhang Hua (232–300), who was motivated to rectify the conduct of the notoriously self-interested and ruthless Empress Jia (257–300). Appropriating the voice of the high-ranking ‘court instructress’ (nüshi, literally, ‘female historian’) of old, Zhang Hua marshalled his argument using a set of exemplary figures, such as we have encountered already, and some abstract ideals about duty and ethics, tailored to life in the inner court. Related picture-scrolls from this period, in­cluding Biographies of Exemplary Women, 30

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

illustrating a textual anthology, and the Goddess of the Luo River, based on a rhapsody, show the basis of an emerging aesthetic tradition of horizontal scroll-painting, still tied at this nascent stage to illustration of, if not full-blown narratives (with spatial and temporal development), then anecdotal or annalistic ‘ancient affairs’ (gushi) recorded in texts. This durable ancient mode of picturemaking bridged the Han–Tang transition from antiquity to the medieval, despite discoveries such as paper-making and technological advances such as the manufacture of more responsive brushes, and the gradual institution of the scroll format for the art of painting. The extraordinary complexity and depth of the Admonitions scroll seem to make it ever fresh for each generation that encounters it. My own recent reflections concern the compelling use of visual recursions within the additive sequencing of scenes within the scroll as a means to link, interlace and layer the admonitory tales and truisms in ways the text itself could not.18

examples may underpin the later development of collections of diverse pictorial contents quite divorced from any collated textual logic, from flowers to landscapes, in album and handscroll formats. The second kind is narrative illustration of a story which develops in time and place, often associated with biography as in Han stone engravings, in Jātaka tales of the lives of the Buddha and in the illustrated romance Goddess of the Luo River, which is extant in several versions probably of the Song period (960–1279), which have historically been attributed to Gu Kaizhi.21 Extended illustrations of Jātaka tales appeared in murals, as in one in the Northern Zhou (557–81) Buddhist cavetemple no. 428 at Dunhuang in Gansu Province, interestingly remediated into a ‘horizontal roll’ (hengpi) in a life-size transcription by the twentiethcentury master Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien, 1899–1983).22 This particular horizontal format has its posterity in paintings that have clearly demarcated scenes describing events unfolding in time. Early examples are the three-scened Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, attributed to Song emperor Huizong and presumed to be a copy after a Tang original by Zhang Xuan (c. 713–c. 755; see illus. 22), and the celebrated multi-scenic drama, Night Revels of Han Xizai, a Song painting after an original by Gu Hongzhong (937–975) mentioned above.23 Third is the documentary-style snapshot image of an ‘ancient affair’ (gushi) or political event, such as Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (or The Sedan Chair, a probable Song copy of an original by Yan Liben) (illus. 13). This is a court genre scene which shows Tang emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) receiving a Tibetan envoy (left, middle) come to escort Taizong’s daughter back to form a marriage alliance with the king of Tibet, Songtsen Gampo (d. 649). Other examples of this type are Lady Guoguo on a Spring Outing, also

Typologies of content The early picture-scroll format, according to Gao Jinlong, served to contain at least three kinds of painted figural imagery, each of which had its own posterity.19 The first was thematic assemblies of largely unrelated figures or events collated first in texts, as in Biographies of Exemplary Women and the Admonitions of the Court Instructress. The Biographies’ anthology-like format for figures in a row is seen in later medieval works such as The Thirteen Emperors, a probable early Tang painting attributed to Yan Liben (c. 600–673; illus. 10), in Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, attributed to Zhou Fang (c. 730–800) and in Sun Wei’s (active late 9th century) Lofty Scholars (illus. 12), a fragment from a longer original probably depicting a subject entitled the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.20 Taxonomically, these early 31

10, 11 Attributed to Yan Liben (c. 600–c. 673), The Thirteen Emperors (Lidai diwang tu juan), c. 650, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 51.3 × 531 cm.

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copied by Huizong after Zhang Xuan,24 and later works in which the size of figures shrinks in proportion to the setting, but with the painting transposed into a longer, continuous narrative-style setting, blurring the distinction with the second category. Examples are Zhao Gan’s (active mid-10th century) Early Snow along the River (see illus. 27), discussed later, and two late Northern Song (960– 1127) masterworks, Zhang Zeduan’s Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival (see illus. 30) and Wang Ximeng’s (1096–1119) Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, which we return to in the next chapter. As useful as grouping and categorizing scrolls by pictorial content may be, even at the early stage of the handscroll’s development in its first

millennium these categorical divisions tend to be ambiguous and fluid, particularly the second and third. By the mid-Tang period, compositions played around with the convention of lining up figures in a sequence, as more complex depth and spatialization by division and diegetic instrumentalization of forms emerged in tandem with a shift towards genre-type images of courtly life. This is seen in a Song copy after Zhou Fang, Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute.25 By the Song period, a broader socio-cultural shift was under way as figural subjects no longer predominated but shared space with or else gave way to landscape and flower-and-plant genres. It sounds reasonable to suppose that the longevity

34

12 Sun Wei (active late 9th century), Lofty Scholars (Gaoyi tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 45.2 × 168.7 cm.

13 Attributed to Yan Liben (c. 600–c. 673), Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (Bunian tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 38.5 × 129 cm.

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of the handscroll format could owe in part to the successive substitution or displacement of obsolescent genres and modes by topical new ones, thereby keeping form and content fresh and relevant. Still, the process whereby each of these genres and modes endured or became outdated and got surpassed by new subjects, with old and new somehow co-operating visually and formally in related inherited ways, calls for scrutiny in what follows.

triangulation and figuration of poetry, calligraphy and painting (in that order): lyric poetry linked textual and sound worlds, calligraphy linked text and visual worlds, while the visuality of paintings could incorporate both. The handscroll was the typical material format bringing them together – but not consistently until much later in scroll history, well into the second millennium ce. To consider manuscript sutras in handscroll form, these had a decidedly bookish quality by the seventh century, as is seen in the colophon of 675 to a Lotus Sutra by one Yuan Yuanzhe (active late seventh century), scribe of the imperial chancellery in the Tang capital.28 Illustrated Sutra of Past and Present Karma, an eighth-century scroll long preserved in Kōfuku-ji, a temple in Nara, Japan, features a short-lived formula with biographical illustrations in the upper half running over the transcription of the text below (illus. 14). More rarely, the text could appear on the back of a painted scroll, as is seen in The Subjugation of Demons, a late-Tang scroll discovered at Dunhuang.29 An interesting feature in the make-up of much later handscrolls in China is the occasional use of paper sheets inscribed with sutras, reversed, for the titlepiece sections in the mounting of handscrolls, seemingly alluding to this ancient practice of using both sides of a scroll, which otherwise died out.30 Also among the Dunhuang collections is a printed Diamond Sutra, in the form of a kind of unmounted handscroll, which has been called ‘the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book’.31 In its print colophon at the end it is dated to 11 May 868 and described as having been ‘Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents’. Although the short backing paper, on which appear three lines of manuscript calligraphy, is crudely cropped, nonetheless this evidently was an accomplished format for a horizontal Buddhist scroll comprised of woodcut prints stuck together

The picture-scroll format as choice The extensive material evidence dating to the first millennium ce uncovered in Dunhuang in the far west of China, a place closely tied to metropolitan Tang culture and learning, is primarily Buddhist. It shows how the ascendancy of the scroll format was never guaranteed insofar as there were at this historical stage multiple contending literary formats in use, including butterfly bindings, stitched bindings, pothī (a pile of wide sheets sandwiched between end cards, strung together through two holes in the middle at either end), concertina bindings, whirlwind and wrapped-back bindings in addition to horizontal scrolls.26 Not all of these media were equally well adapted to containing words and images, but the breadth and range of this object field point to the exploratory and provisional character of the media and to the diverse and constant range of sources of learning arriving in Dunhuang from across Asia’s geography. It could be, as Gao Jinlong has supposed, that the possibilities afforded by the extended illustrative function of the picture-scroll, in the way it successfully catered to a socio-political demand for visual exemplification, also represented something of singular cultural value, and that this drove the subsequent development of the horizontally scrolling format.27 The aesthetic ideal of the ‘three perfections’ (san jue), for example, was a complex 36

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

14 Unknown painter and calligrapher, Illustrated Sutra of Past and Present Karma (E inga kyō), c. 750–c. 800, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 26.5 × 1,100.5 cm.

in order, following a fine frontispiece illustration showing the Buddha teaching. In a late ninthcentury painting of an itinerant entertainer, also recovered from Cave 17 of the Mogao grottoes at Dunhuang, the harlequin-like figure carries a backpack of scrolls, indicating that Buddhist folkloric storytelling using scrolls, presumably still in a variety of presentational formats, was part of his ‘schtick’ (illus. 15).32 The evidence from Dunhuang indicates that many, if not most, of the larger-scale paintings were hung by hooks and were stored as folded objects rather than rolled, which underscores the relative bookishness and rarity of the Diamond Sutra despite its formal maturity as an object.33 The codification of the handscroll as the superlative material framework for the fine art of painting is widely regarded as having had its foundational moment, subsequently fetishized through preservation and transmission practices, at the late Northern Song court under the emperor Huizong. The celebrated ‘Xuanhe seven-seals’ (Xuanhe qixi) mounting style (see illus. 37), so called after Huizong’s regnal period of that name

(1119–25), is explored further in the next chapter. For now, we note the fact that many early scrolls, although perhaps not the Admonitions, passed through Huizong’s court and bear traces of this treatment, contributing to their reputations. Our regard for the Admonitions as a miraculous survivor significantly owes to the fact that it was first recorded in text in around 1100, in the maverick artist and connoisseur Mi Fu’s (1051–1107) History of Painting, where it is linked with Gu Kaizhi,34 but also to the fact that in its probable remounting around then at the Song court (although not in the ‘Xuanhe seven-seals’ format) it was wrapped in the most exquisite silk kesi-tapestry depicting a peony, itself a superlative artwork (illus. 16) of a kind then used to clothe the most treasured handscrolls, which inspires further confidence in the painting’s antiquity. By around this early eleventh-century date, the three primary formats for the art of Chinese painting were in existence, namely, handscrolls, hanging scrolls and albums (screens are usually excluded from this grouping), which have come to comprise what is today referred to as ‘ancient paintings’ 37

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genaeologia Christi (The Compendium of History through the Genealogy of Christ), is made up of seven joined parchment folios. It is thought to have been a somewhat archaic, even eccentric, choice of format at that date, given that ‘the more practical codex had replaced the scroll, or roll, centuries before Peter of Poitiers was active.’36 This provides an interesting disciplinary context for understanding the link between archaism and the picture-scroll format in China. Let us consider the contemporary hagiography of the early history of the Chinese picturescroll based on display of the transmitted archive. A full-blown big-data approach to analysis, which might also employ textual references and archaeological finds as checks and balances, awaits co-ordinated deployment of the relevant computer technology, so for now I will illustrate this with a small-number case study based on an international exhibition in Shanghai in 2012 of early Chinese paintings. The handscroll seemingly suddenly appears on the scene in the Wei–Jin period (220–589) and is immovable as the prime format for great artworks throughout the first half of the dynastic period, to the end of the first millennium ce. This is despite the fact that handscrolls were probably a minority, niche format in the first millennium ce, by contrast with other formats such as screens and hanging pictures, up until the time of an apparent dramatic growth in the number of picture-scrolls being created around the Northern Song period, when a parallel codification of aesthetic formats took place. Following the timeline from the Wei–Jin, how many picture-scrolls do we encounter before reaching a format other than a handscroll? No. 23, the hanging scroll entitled Snowy Bamboo and attributed to Xu Xi (first half tenth century) is the first, while no. 24, though technically a small vertical hanging scroll, is mounted as a handscroll, as we will explore in the next chapter.37 Of the 72 works

15 Unknown painter (Tang dynasty, 618–907), ‘Itinerant Story-teller’ (or ‘Travelling Monk’), c. 851–900, painting for hanging, ink and colours on paper, 41 × 29.8 cm.

(guhua).35 Meanwhile, horizontal scrolling, in particular for storytelling, was clearly settling in as a mode across later medieval East Asia. How far this may relate to parallel developments in other coeval cultural spheres remains to be seen. Two examples suggests that synchronicity may be the key to comparison. The Josua-Rolle (illus. 17) is a probable tenth-century Byzantine scroll, or illuminated manuscript, showing the Old Testament Book of Joshua, created in the imperial workshops in Constantinople. Its format of figural images over text hints at viable grounds for comparison with Buddhist narrative scrolls. From a few centuries later, an English thirteenth-century vertical scroll in parchment by the French theologian Peter of Poitiers (c. 1130–1205), Compendium historiae in 38

16 Silk tapestry (kesi) outer wrapper formerly attached to the Admonitions scroll (illus. 4), late Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), early 12th century, now mounted as part of a panel.

17 Unknown painter and calligrapher (c. 10th century), Josua-Rolle (Joshua Roll) (now dismantled), 10th century, detail, ink and colours on sheepskin, 31 × 1,063.8 cm.

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in vol. i of the Shanghai catalogue, covering the earliest examples up to the end of the Sino–Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368, the non-handscroll formats and percentage of handscrolls as a proportion of the exhibits may be enumerated as follows:

If today, with the benefits of science and archaeology, we are puzzled by a scenario in which the handscroll maintains this foundational status even though so little survives from its early history in the Wei–Jin period and nothing from before this, consider how even early historical sources also seem unsure about its emergence. By 639, an early inventory of collections of extant paintings in ‘the palace storeroom, Buddhist temples and private family’ collections numbered 298 juan and 47 wall-paintings from antiquity to the present.38 The word juan has multiple related contextual meanings, from volume to chapter to book or scroll, but is here used in binary opposition to refer to any form of rolling or scroll-mounted painting as opposed to vertical paintings on walls.

Wei–Jin to Tang Dynasties: 0 of 17 [= 100% handscrolls] Five Dynasties: 1 of 7 [= 86% handscrolls] Northern Song Dynasty: 5 of 16 [= 69% handscrolls] Jin–Southern Song Dynasties: 6 of 14 [= 57% handscrolls] Yuan Dynasty: 13 of 18 [= 28% handscrolls]

18 Attributed to Wu Zongyuan (d. 1035), Procession of Taoist Immortals (also known as Procession of Immortals Paying Homage to the Primordial) (Chaoyuan xianzhang tu), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 58 × 777 cm. 40

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

19 Attributed to Liang Lingzan (active c. 721; possibly a copy of a Liang dynasty work by Zhang Sengyou, active c. 490–540), Five Planets and Twenty-Eight Mansions (Wuxing ershiba su shenxing tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 27.5 × 489.7 cm.

Although that early Tang inventory distinguished between rolled (juan) and wall-paintings, later on, as we have noted, the term juan starts to be used in combination with the word zhou (a roller, commonly used in the word lizhou, ‘vertical [or wall or hanging] scroll’), but where juanzhou was generally taken to refer to handscroll paintings by old masters. In the early Tang, the majority of juan picture scrolls were likely to be handscrolls containing pictures of figural subjects, such as Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (see illus. 13) attributed to Yan Liben, a court genre scene. At this date, most of these handscrolls would still have been painted on silk bases, rather than on the medium of paper, which seems to have remained the preserve of scholars writing letters or epistolary-style manuscripts in the developing classical or ‘Two Wangs’ tradition, after Wang Xizhi (303–365) and his son Xianzhi (344–386) (see illus. 86). The mid-Tang courtier–painter Han Huang (723–787) is recorded as having painted as many as thirty long scrolls illustrating exemplary subjects,39 confirming what we can surmise from the material evidence about how the ‘long scroll’ was

becoming increasingly ‘establishment’. Writers generally did not feel the need to specify the format, evidently considering it more interesting to highlight the qualities of the base material, using just the word su (the plain whiteness of silk, or else paper) to highlight the contrast of this ground or support with the light or dark tonality of painted ink.40 Perhaps it was this growing stability to the scroll as a frame which afforded artists the critical space to test the boundaries of creative practice. Writing in around 750, Zhang Zao (active 713–55) remarks with astonishment on a painting by Bi Hong, who, he says, ‘was different in that he only used bald [that is, worn out] brushes or else used his hands to rub [ink] on the silk surface (juansu)’.41 We know that early painters from the Wei–Jin to the Tang also painted murals, although we have only an outline sense of the relationship between scroll- and mural-painting practices, from comparisons of forms in paintings with wall-paintings. The attribution to the Sui-dynasty (581–618) artist Zhan Ziqian (c. 545–618), Spring Excursion, recalls Tang imperial murals (see illus. 24). The great Tang artists certainly painted a great many murals in the capital’s temples, and some early 41

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picture-scrolls celebrating literary topics such as Northern Qi Scholars Collating Texts, a probable eleventh-century painting after a Tang original possibly by Yan Liben, even seem to echo compositionally sixth- to seventh-century tomb murals of the early Tang.42 Handscrolls undoubtedly also served lowlier functions as placeholders or as a storage format for images in other media, including murals and, from around the tenth century on, prints. Early scroll-paintings illustrate how imagery moved with ease across media, for example, in the way they capture the mise en scène of figures preserved in stone engravings. We referred above to Sun Wei’s Lofty Scholars (see illus. 12) and its related lateral arrangement of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, possibly after a composition by the great Lu Tanwei (active 450–90), in an image stamped on bricks preserved in a tomb in Nanjing, datable to the later fifth century.43 More commonly the role of iconographic inventory was vested in so-called fenben (literally, ‘powder versions’), so named after pounces (actual-size pricked models used to lay out design elements of murals), or portable small-scale models which were usually mounted in albums. The secular bent of the Chinese picture-scroll tradition may account for the preservation of just one outsize early painting which stands out as a referent to mural painting in medieval religious buildings. The attribution to Wu Zongyuan (d. 1035) entitled Procession of Taoist Immortals (illus. 18) measures 58 by 777 centimetres and is a probable draft for a mural. The large size of the Procession scroll, however, is not related to an observable increase in the size of other extant scrolls. For a host of reasons, partly to do with an appetite for more detail, more elucidation of things, as the modern scholar Yu Hui has observed in his study on Zhang Zeduan’s Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, horizontal scrolls were getting longer from the tenth century.

In part, this must also have been driven by the popularity of new genres such as architectural or ‘boundary painting’ (jiehua) (see illus. 28), the forte of one of the great names of this period, the Southern Tang (937–76) scholar–official Guo Zhongshu (c. 929–977).44 This general date for handscroll culture beginning to prosper and increase appears to make sense. The great Tang artist and critic Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815–c. 877), writing in the mid-ninth century, states towards the end of his Record of Famous Painters throughout the Ages (Lidai minghua ji; c. 845), before the section on art in contemporary temples, that only in the Wei–Jin period – coinciding with the beginning of art criticism and collecting – did the mounting and backing of scrolls become competent, making it possible to name some mounters working chiefly in court contexts. There is an obvious correlation here between the nascent canonical history of painting he was attempting to shape in his Record, on one hand, and, on the other, the corresponding material archive or corpus of painting as a whole, and within this, the acclaimed quartet of founding figural artists, ‘Gu, Lu, Zhang and Wu’, referring to Gu Kaizhi, Lu Tanwei, Zhang Sengyou (active c. 490– 540) (see illus. 19) and Wu Daozi (active 710–40).

Mediality in objects of instruction: meta-pictures A distinctive and remarkable quality of some early picture-scrolls, especially the Admonitions, is their condition of self-awareness, that is, how in their function as didactic objects of instruction illustrating texts they seem to be able to comment on their own reception as images within objects that are beheld by viewers – what we might call meta-pictures. The higher level of psychological drama in the Admonitions scroll, in obvious contrast with workaday contemporary iconographic 42

20 ‘The family scene’, detail from Admonitions of the Court Instructress (illus. 4).

21 ‘Lady Feng Confronting the Bear’, detail from Admonitions of the Court Instructress (illus. 4).

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imagery for the same subjects seen in other media,45 becomes more intense in the later, abstract scenes. The family scene of the Admonitions scroll, for example, illustrates the royal family in the back palace living in harmony by learning and observing rites and protocol, in observance of the admonition inscribed to the right (illus. 20). At the back of the scene a girl and a boy are being taught by an elderly tutor who holds a scroll, which may be read as the very scroll we are beholding. This line of sight into the painting is directly crossed by the visual intercourse between the emperor and an astoundingly beautiful consort opposite him. These geometric axes vie for attention with the contrived triangulation of the figural arrangement, a visual recursion in which triangles nestle within larger triangles until the pyramid-shaped family group is formed – with triangulation occurring in both the picture and ground planes. The recursions in visual, spatial and temporal dimensions open up various narrative readings, including allegory.46 As a product of its time, the Admonitions was necessarily structured by a text, no different from a stone engraved image, but the painter was barely constrained by text or textuality. Indeed, there are delicious moments which would undermine the assumption of a superiority of text over image. Consider the witty role of the text caption placed at the end of the scene of ‘Lady Feng Confronting the Bear’ in the Admonitions scroll (illus. 21), where it acts as a single dividing line

between this and the following scene. At the pivotal heart of the Lady Feng scene is the selfless Lady Feng (who threw herself in the beast’s path to protect the emperor). Meanwhile Lady Fu (who ran away to save herself) has moved so far away and so fast that she is about to step through the caption into the next scene. Lady Fu already appears to be walking behind the virtuous Lady Ban (see illus. 5), who has declined to ride in the imperial palanquin (out of concern for what it would say historically about her husband’s kingship). This rather humorous and unexpected juxtaposition of the self-serving and the virtuous was a brilliant, maverick ploy on the painter’s part at the expense of the written word, which implicated the viewer in a connivance. In Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (illus. 22), which transmits an eighth-century composition, the viewer will notice the again recursive implication of her involvement, in that the silk shown being prepared in the painting may be the silk base of the painting itself. This idea could be a trigger for further reflection on, say, the exemplification of duty and responsibility in a figurative way broadly as well as specifically by women of the court as the seri-culturalists of imperial tradition. This artist took up the mantle of freely inventive visual expression in the best tradition of the Admonitions scroll but, crucially, in a palace genre scene without any textual preconditions. What we do discern over the Tang–Song 44

22, 23 Attributed to Zhao Ji (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), after Zhang Xuan (c. 713–c. 755), Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (Daolian tu), early 12th century, handscroll, ink, colours and gold on silk, 37.7 × 466 cm.

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24 Attributed to Zhan Ziqian (c. 545–618), Spring Excursion (Youchun tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 43 × 80.5 cm.

transition, however, is a general pattern whereby the relationship of text to image is reversed. In early painting a text was a precondition; within genre painting there was no such prerequesite. That fledgling independence of the image from the text was not set to last, as the role of what Wu Hung has termed ‘textual enclosures’, the paratextual inscriptions of collectors and connoisseurs in and on the mounting, emerged into prominence to such a degree that they would eventually come to contain and condition our access to the painting heart.47

past models, incorporating standard instructive, auspicious and allegorical content but, in doing so, marking also a transformation in the degree to which it could enchant its viewers by virtue of its sumptuous physical and material form as a silken picture-scroll and of the exquisite traces of its purported authorship by the legendary Gu Kaizhi. By the mid-Tang period, elements of court genre painting seen in the Admonitions were being magnified, as the expression of ‘who we are’ became less didactically introspective and focused on internal court conduct and more overtly descriptive of the space of the court and the elite, with a growing awareness of the regional projection of imperial power, triggering also genre diversification and increasing scene length. In the case of the attribution to Zhan Ziqian, Spring Excursion (illus. 24), this is conceived as a picture of courtly leisure and visually free of text or any apparent controlling textual narrative.

Having devoted some attention to the origins, materiality, typology and mediality of the early medieval handscroll, we turn now to the chronology of the picture-scroll in the latter part of the first millennium ce. We saw the Admonitions as an artwork which announced a new and highly aestheticized visual practice of exemplification of 46

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

Compositionally, the painting itself is quite sophisticated when viewed in toto, displaying unified space and a clear ground plane, scaling of trees and hills from near-ground to distance and lateral perspectival recession along the opposite banks, all set within the rectangular picture frame. Yet it also exhibits ‘primitive’ qualities, such as the frontal treatment of trees and shrubs and the repetitive patterning of forms: overlapping mound-shaped or triangular hills, trees silhouetted on contours, ink outlines with graduated wash pattern, and dedicated mapping of colours to forms. Indeed, Zhan Ziqian’s precursiveness (as far as it can be seen through the copy), as it were, with regard to the rise of an art of landscape painting, stands in contrast to the continuing use of handscrolls for the mundane yet auspicious purpose of identifying a good spot for a grave in the mountains. That is indeed the function of an annotated ‘landscape’ scroll in use around 900, recovered from the Library Cave (Cave 17) at Dunhuang.48

After centuries of a visual culture of virtuesignalling through representations of suites of ancient exemplars, this new pictorial mode must have animated the elite, who now glimpsed not rows of ancients but figures recognizable as themselves enjoying the leisure that came with rank and status, as in Spring Excursion. Attributed to Yan Liben, Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (see illus. 13) marks another step in the emergence of this new kind of courtly genre scene. Here Tang emperor Taizong is individualized in the somewhat hieratic iconography of historical exemplars, yet the scroll format enables a layering of references and allusions to play out. The bookish qualities of the format are freshened up, as the classical purport of painting for recording ‘ancient affairs’ (gushi) was boldly repurposed and edged with topicality in the depiction of a noted contemporary event in the centralized Tang empire – all of this generating a new power to capture memory and focus discourse. 47

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Attention to pictorial form and content and awareness of materiality look to have been bound up with the maturing of anatomical form depiction. A small portrait of Tang Taizong’s favourite mount, Night-Shining White, which is unsigned but attributed to the court painter Han Gan (active 742–56) (illus. 25),49 exemplifies the emergence of the picture-scroll into a material form for the ages. There are inscriptions and marks on it left by an almost unbelievable string of canonical collectors and connoisseurs, attesting to its distinguished provenance. This begins with an extraordinarily rare signature by Zhang Yanyuan. There is a title and attribution by the Southern Tang ‘last ruler’, Li Yu (937–978, r. 961–75), the first well-known aesthete emperor, which is remarked upon by the Southern Song connoisseur Wu Yue (active 1115–56). There is a signature and seal of Mi Fu. There are colophons and seals of the most famous collector–connoisseurs and royals of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and seals of modern East Asians from the Manchu royal Pu Ru (1896–1963) to the Japanese antiquarian Kawai Senro (1871–1945). Its owner for much of the twentieth century was the Jewish Anglo-Indian collector Sir Percival David (1892–1964), from whose widow, Sheila Riddell (1914–1995), Wen C. Fong (1930–2018) acquired it for the Metropolitan Museum in 1977.50 We will end this chapter back in the tenth century, at the end of this initial phase of the handscroll’s historical journey. This is the point where Li Yu, as he had done on Night-Shining White, was establishing the practice of an emperor asserting his right to entitle and attribute paintings in his calligraphic inscriptions. A superb handscroll from his Southern Tang state is Early Snow along the River (illus. 27), which Li Yu, in his prominent inscription down the leading edge of the painting, records was ‘painted by student of the Painting Academy, Zhao Gan [active 961–75]’.

Unrolling today across almost 4 metres, it is an important early example of a painting presented in a distinctly made-for-handscroll conception.51 A consistently middle-distance visual frame, set between the top and bottom edges of the scroll (25.9 centimetres), equates to the visual experience of the painter–observer as he moves along the banks at the painting’s lower edge, capturing vignettish groups of fisherfolk going about their business, despite the first snow of the season. Passing through these marshy hinterland byways, like the painter–observer (and viewer), is the knot of travellers on the near shore one-third of the way along, a group that is itself remarked upon with delight by the locals. Genre scenery, visual narrative and landscape painting are merging here with a new interest in depicting technology, all on the visual stage afforded by the rolling picture-scroll. Regarding the technological interest, the painting’s length allows the artist to show multiple iterations of the netting and trapping equipment, and its customary usage and economy, while alluding to the far more strategic, governmental responsibility of waterways management, without which these people live at the mercy of nature. By this point, the height but even more the length of Early Snow (25.9 × 376.5 centimetres) owes little to the earlier, additive format of successive individual scenes in the handscroll format. Here the horizontal traversal is matched to the active verb of the title, ‘going along’ (xing), with this journey in time being unified through the occasional affective screening of the scenery by flurries of ‘early snow’, represented by flecks of white paint on the picture surface. Zhao Gan’s deliberate horizontal conception gains in independence through the contrast with prior uses of the horizontal scroll and chimes with the new intensity of function in contemporary scrolls. This was also the era of the new kind of architectural painting pioneered by Guo Zhongshu, from whose hand 48

25, 26 Attributed to Han Gan (active 742–56), Night-Shining White (Zhaoyebai tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 30.8 × 34 cm.

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27 Zhao Gan (active 961–75), Early Snow along the River (Jiangxing chuxue tu), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 25.9 × 376.5 cm.

little survives. Take the roughly contemporary A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel Built over a Canal Lock (see illus. 29), by Wei Xian (c. tenth century), to which we return later, which is an example of a notably tall scroll-painting, measuring 53.2 by 119.3 centimetres, where the proportions and scale are tailored to the subject, enabling the gaze to roam from a fixed viewpoint over a large canvas and prompting the beholder to marvel at the fine technical detail and what it represents. In Early Snow, a poorly repainted vertical join in the silk support towards the end suggests that a portion of the painting has been removed, which makes it difficult to ascertain the full logic of its horizontal composition as a visual narrative. It is possible that it was conceived in perhaps five fairly distinct but continuous scenes, each one divided from and yet linked to the next by carefully placed

formal features such as trees in the foreground or a wider expanse of water. The positioning of and relationships between these more structural diegetic forms within the composition, which contrast with the vignettish sketches of figural groups, contrive therefore to offer multiple alternative readings of the same visual narrative record, depending on the scroller’s preference for where to pause and frame a view. If we can scroll back and forth in picture-scroll history, this now appears as a highly naturalistic development on the furrow opened up by the artist of the Admonitions, who found ways to link scenes into a compelling visual narrative, rivalling the text as a driver, through thematic geometries like the repetition of the pyramid form – overcoming the clunkiness of the scene-by-scene convention. Visual plotting techniques involving the 50

On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium

obvious subdivision of space within a single scene (and single-scroll opening) frame had appeared in mid-Tang scrolls, as preserved in Song copies after them, such as Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute, attributed to Zhou Fang, with its tripartite internal subdivision.52 There in a single scroll opening, three seated court ladies are very obviously divided by two standing servants at each end and two trees in the middle.53 In Early Snow, the artist finds a way to further integrate these structural mainstays into a longer, perhaps five-part, narration of the pictorial space, already alive with activity in both pictorial detail and descriptive mark, injecting a new sense of naturalism into painting and heralding this new direction in which Song painting was heading.

Against that spearhead of originality, other core local structural techniques remained evergreen, or perhaps simply unavoidable, such as the manipulation of pictorial forms into repoussoirs and buffers at each end of a picture to signal the start or necessary reverse of direction of reading. In the case of the closure, in the Admonitions, it was the classic left-to-right movement of two figural forms, a pair of gossiping court ladies moving against the right-to-left flow of our reading, that gave the ‘bounce’ at the end (see illus. 3). In Early Snow, a similar effect is produced by the disruption of the right-to-left momentum, again with diegetically embedded forms: dispersed islands and reeds in the final third of the composition, rounded off by the rightward-leaning trees.

51

28 Wei Xian (active 10th century), A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel Built over a Canal Lock (Zhakou panche tu), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 53.2 × 119.3 cm.

2 Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period

T

he scroll format is seemingly an historical leveller of scroll-paintings in that they all have core features in common, such as their shared rolling form and handling method. Yet a set of differentiating factors was emerging among handscrolls in the Song (960–1279) period. Markers of difference included the quality of the mounting and materials, as well as the presence of marginalia and paratexts, the result of a growing habit of commentary on scrolls about their authorship, reception, classification and provenance. Looking at Chinese old-master picture-scrolls today, many are saturated with the impressions of seals and inscriptions placed on and beside the actual artwork, or ʻpainting heartʼ (huaxin), by collectors and connoisseurs – an organic, if also often shady, process of accretion over the centuries that, as we have noted, reached a high tide around the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries before largely vanishing over the course of the twentieth. From the Tang–Song transition in the tenth century,

over time, these interventions by connoisseurs reshaped the look of the object but also the viewerʼs engagement with a picture-scroll. The experience of mainly looking at a picture, as implied by the Chinese term picture-scroll (tujuan), was altered in and by active transmission to become one of decoding a multi-temporal patchwork or collage of texts and images. Ever-advancing visual and art-historical literacy, capability in classical and literary language as well as paleographic and epigraphic skills were needed to access and mediate the traces deposited in scrolls, as well as critical judgement to distinguish wheat from chaff. We can only imagine how confusing the Song or later form of an early medieval, Wei–Jin or Tang scroll would look to its maker. In this chapter we take on the challenge of reimagining the context of this philological turn in the mid-dynastic moment. We investigate the drivers and agency of these first artistic inscriptions, how they differed from prior narrative or 53

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29 Wei Xian (active 10th century), A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel Built over a Canal Lock (Zhakou panche tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 53.2 × 119.3 cm.

content-related ones in a new aesthetics. We ask how the emergence of an expanding culture of paratexts came to transform the ways people read or visually engaged with the picture-scroll. We consider the first coy appearance of the makerʼs signature in early Song paintings and explore how the embedding of names altered ideas of the artistʼs presence and the representation of reality in the scrolling artwork. Broadly, we trace the development of handscroll art and culture up to the end of the Song dynasty in 1279. This includes the degree to which a fledgling tradition of scholar-painting, from the eleventh century on, closely linked with the handscroll medium through its horizontal format and literary expandability, came to inform artistic notions of creativity and authority and the practice of connoisseurship in the old-master tradition of calligraphy and painting.

From the early Song, there are outstanding artworks, such as the late tenth-century painting attributed to Wei Xian (c. tenth century), A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel Built over a Canal Lock (or The Water Mill, illus. 29), which highlight the technical or technological prowess of the new dynasty, in both form and content.1 Various such paintings have been made to pass through history as expedient cheerleaders for Song culture’s efflorescence, most notably Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, painted by the court artist Zhang Zeduan in the early 1100s (illus. 30). This propensity to derive a feelgood factor from great artworks, particularly strong in court circles, has to a degree protected them from serious critique, which has made all the more stunning the recent revisionist appraisal of Zhang Zeduan’s masterpiece by the modern scholar Yu Hui. Through forensic iconographic visual analysis and correlated philological research, he has reinterpreted Zhang Zeduan’s painting against the grain, not as a flower of Song culture – think of the exquisite floral kesi tapestries used as outer scroll wrappers (illus. 31; see illus. 16)2 – but rather as this concerned

Song and its others We begin with a problem: the close association of fine artworks of this period with the cohesion, enterprise and prosperity of the Song empire. 54

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court artist’s grave, encoded warning to power about the danger to the state from endemic corruption, economic mismanagement, political factionalism and the debauched lifestyle of courtiers. The last of these Yu Hui tracks via abductive logic, for example, in a vignette in the final scene: here, the anxious wife of a court official visits a doctor specializing in alcoholism, a consultation that takes place, with elaborate irony, between the royal palace and a well (see illus. 30).3 The stakes are high for these paintings. Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, as a superlative

example of a Song court handscroll, can stand for Song painting or even Chinese painting. The queues that form to file past this masterpiece when it comes out on rare displays probably exceed those for the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or the crown jewels in the Tower of London. Yu Hui begins his study by noting how the scroll was ‘discovered’ in what is now Liaoning Provincial Museum and made known to the public only in 1950, the year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (prc). The implication that it was among the Qing (1644–1911) imperial treasures

30 Zhang Zeduan (c. 1085–1145), Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival (Qingming shanghe tu), c. 1100–1105, handscroll, detail of the final passage, ink and colours on silk, 24.8 × 528 cm. 55

31 Unknown weaver (Song dynasty, 960–1279), Riches in an Everlasting Spring (Song kesi fugui changchun zhou), hanging scroll, silk tapestry, 87.5 × 39 cm.

Inscribing the Artist and the Collector

notoriously squirrelled out of the Forbidden City in 1923 by the teenage ‘last emperor’ Pu Yi (1906– 1967) and his brother was clear enough to need no mention.4 This is a complex silence about the pre-revolutionary moment, allowing a contrast to emerge between the scroll’s recent tainted association with Pu Yi and its embodiment, now reconstituted, of state order and demotic prosperity from an idealized age. A second problem here is that by default we tend to ascribe fine artworks of the tenth to thirteenth century to China’s Song dynasty, so conniving in mainstream practices of exclusion. These habits in scroll culture included the defacement or removal of seals and ciphers on handscrolls, seen as undesirable, accrued during the various contemporary non-Han regimes in the north China region (‘Cathay’): the Tangut Western Xia (Xixia, 1038–1227); the Khitan Liao (907–1125); the Jurchen Jin (1115–1234), to which the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) paid annual tribute until Jin’s defeat by the Mongols in 1234; and even the pre-dynastic hiatus period between 1206 and the foundation in 1271 of the Mongol Great Yuan ulus or khanate (1271–1368), which as the Yuan dynasty in Chinese historiography officially attained the ‘mandate of heaven’ from Song only in 1279. The material record from these ethnolinguistically ‘other’ cultures, already thin and then tampered with in transmission, has long sat in the background while the native Song’s enjoyed the limelight in Chinese art discourse. By way of reparative justice, a counternarrative to accompany the narrative, we will pay more mind to Jurchen Jin scroll art in what follows by simply including more Jin examples, with commentary on their distinctiveness. To begin that now, the Admonitions scroll (see illus. 2–6, 16, 20 and 21) is once again a nice case. Historically, many inscriptions in ‘slender gold’ script by the Jurchen Jin emperor Zhangzong

(r. 1189–1208) were ascribed to his Chinese grandfather, the Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126).5 In the Admonitions colophon set is one such cuckoo, a partial transcription of the ‘Admonitions’ memorial on silk, which was sliced up (to reduce its height and make it fit) and remounted into the Admonitions scroll probably in the twelfth or thirteenth century (and at the latest by the sixteenth century). This Sinocentric curating of the archive has long barred the curious from thinking laterally, even at the geographic and cultural fringes of China. The current ‘worlding’ of art history prompts a provocation: what could come from juxtaposing Song scroll art with, for example, contemporary textual illustration practices elsewhere in Eurasia, such as the Byzantine Josua-Rolle (see illus. 17)? Meantime, Jurchen Jin scroll art deserves attention in its own right. Scholars as far back as Tang Hou (active c. 1328) in the early Yuan rated these Jin artists highly, especially their equestrian painting art. Recently Yu Hui has made this and the art of other non-Chinese cultures a particular research focus, even taking an exquisitely executed colophon of 1205 by the Jin connoisseur Zhang Zhu (active 1161–1208) as his portal into the world of Zhang Zeduan’s Qingming scroll.6 Another study has noted the hefty size (47 centimetres high) and evaluated the robust brush qualities of the first, Jin-dynasty half of a reconstructed picture-scroll entitled Six Horses. Traditionally this painting has been attributed to the Southern Song master Zhao Boju (c. 1120–c. 1162). In fact, the latter half is a Yuan or later confection. The preserved Jin portion bears comparison with contemporary Song examples, having a common cultural basis in the art of the quintessential Northern Song scholar– painter Li Gonglin (1049–1106) (see illus. 40).7 Further prising this issue open is the interpretation of these Jin paintings as having ‘[served] to suggest the decline of simple moral values at the 57

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32 Zhang Yu (active 13th century), Lady Wenji Returning to China (Wenji guihan tu) (alternatively identified as Bright Consort Leaving China), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 29 × 128.8 cm.

late Jurchen court and the corresponding rise of the influence of the Northern Song literati’, which may have had its basis in Jin popular culture.8 In an obvious pitfall, the narrative subjects and iconological content of both Jin and Song paintings can play into a China-centric logic. Their

topics often highlight the cultural, social and pol­ itical cost of dynastic contestation in this ‘middle period’ of Chinese history.9 Lyrical portrayals of this divided era from both sides (Song and Jin) often illustrate tales of elite Chinese women who were married into northern and steppe 58

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royalty, as depicted in emotive painting subjects such as Bright Consort Leaving China (see illus. 74) about the beautiful Wang Zhaojun (1st c. bce) and Lady Wenji Returning to China about the musician and poet Cai Yan (177–250) (illus. 32), both Jin paintings. Compositionally, these paintings show travelling nomads escorting the Chinese women, typically depicted moving left to right against the

normal direction of viewing. That brief friction works as an iconographic contraflow, the sign of the artist’s increasing awareness and exploitation of viewing as a passing encounter between the beholder of the image, who is also the handler of the picture-scroll, and the subject traversing the picture space within. Doing justice to marginalized others is one thing, but Song scroll art also 59

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deserves a richer treatment, to be seen through the lens of this regional culture, in which border and culture crossings were a major theme of art both on the periphery of Song and within it.

or landscape features. The classic example is Fan Kuan’s (c. 960–c. 1030) signature secreted among the branches of his chef-d’oeuvre of about 1000, Travellers among Streams and Mountains.11 In subsequent practice, within a century or two, signatures could appear almost anywhere around the inside edge of a hanging scroll-painting, but on a handscroll they appeared occasionally at the beginning but mostly at the end, echoing literary convention. A couple of examples: in the late Northern Song, Huizong’s younger cousin and aesthetic mentor Zhao Lingrang (active 1070–1100) left an outstandingly fine signature inscription at the end of his poetic, languid Whiling Away the Summer by a Lakeside Retreat, dated 1100.12 As to the Jin, the signature of Li Shan (mid- to late Jin dynasty, 1115–1234) appears on his masterly handscroll Wind and Snow in the Fir-Pines (illus. 34), at the beginning, on the right, but plausibly this is visually positioned as if engraved on the rockface placed there as

Text in image: the positioning of artists as signatories We saw in the last chapter how rulers of the tenth and subsequent centuries, principally ‘Last Ruler’ Li Yu of the Southern Tang and the Northern Song emperor Huizong, began to inscribe attributions and titles both on and beside (in title slips) paintings in their collections, spurring new paratextual practices in and around paintings.10 By way of example, see Huizong’s placement of his inscribed attribution on Yi Yuanji’s (c. 1000–c. 1064) Gibbon and Kittens (see illus. 41). However, remarkably, it was only in the early Song that artists began covertly to insert their signatures in their paintings, in the first instance lodged among foliage 60

33, 34 Li Shan (active mid- to late Jin dynasty, 1115–1234), Wind and Snow in the Fir-pines (Fengxue shansong tu), late 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 29.7 × 79.3 cm.

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35 Yang Wei (active c. 1180), Two Fine Horses (Erjun tu), 1184, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 25.2 × 81 cm.

a compositional repoussoir, rather than in def­ iance of literary and now emerging handscroll convention.13 For a more elaborate example, consider a painting by the otherwise unknown Jin artist Yang Wei (active twelfth century), Two Fine Horses, of 1184 (illus. 35), which features a nomad equestrian lassooing a horse running loose on the steppe, and exemplifies the growing use of an official-looking form of early artist signature, self-consciously placed in its own space at the end.14 While horse painting, so well suited to the horizontal scroll format, is an obvious northern or steppe subject, there are other unusual artistic clusters to be found among these Jin handscrolls. A distinctive

Jin aesthetic in this format is the liking for contrasting figural pairings, in the form of short handscrolls with binary or oppositional content shaping their compositions. Here, in the picture space, a realistic pace and agility are conveyed in the depiction of these stocky steppe horses shown galloping along – that is, to visualize the peak of excitement during the chase, since the gallop is a gait that horses typically switch into for a few paces during a high-speed canter. The bilateral framing is enhanced by the formal pictorial activation of the scroll ends: the brow of hill shown at the top right and the spindly holm oak sticking into the frame at the left, below the official-looking signature in small script in the top left. 62

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Yang Wei’s elegant emblematic rendering of his signature in the upper left corner consists of a short line of formal calligraphy comprising a reign name (Dading, 1161–89) – partially lost due to mounters having trimmed the horizontal edges of the painting – and cyclical date (jiachen, 1184). This is followed by the artist’s name and place of origin, formalized by a seal impression placed over the name, and followed at a slight distance by the final character hua (‘painted’) executed in a cursive flourish, a mark that refers semantically to and visually exemplifies the nature of the picture to the right. With its powerful calligraphic presence this inscription sits existentially in the picture plane, mediating between the external and internal environments and between pictorial and textual knowledge systems. Creating and

occupying a liminal visual space, the signature is part of the picture yet also apart from it. Its provisional reading as a nearground form tallies with the spatial determination of the ruddy-leafed oak branch and rock clump below, which sits in the nearground and close to the picture plane. Together these closing near-surface forms work to draw the eye laterally down and across the tableau from a distance, at the picture-scroll’s opening edge, towards the enclosure at the front, affording a classic iconographic stage on the steppe for the drama to unfold. By no means all paintings were now being inscribed, however – not even all works with a strong literary flavour. A tall handscroll illustration of the polymath Su Shi’s (or Su Dongpo, 1037–1101) Red Cliff Ode, unsigned but attributed 63

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36 Unknown Song court painter, after Xiao Zhao (active 12th century), Auspicious Omens of Dynastic Revival (Zhongxing ruiying tu), handscroll originally comprising twelve scenes, detail, ink and colours on silk, 26.7 × 397.3 cm.

to the Jin artist Wu Yuanzhi (active c. 1190–96), is a pictorial passage excerpted from the whole ode and shaped so as to be viewed as a single picture. The current mounting makes it appear like a painted frontispiece to the 1228 inscription which follows, by Zhao Bingwen (1159–1232), which Zhao intended ‘to resonate in harmony with the immortal [Su Dong]po’s Red Cliff prose-poem’.15 Meantime, Southern Song courtly works of dynastic legitimation, probably produced in multiples to accompany proleptic works of official historiography, were often unsigned compilations by unknown artists of the painting academy working with official scribes or imperial amanuenses, such as Auspicious Omens of Dynastic Revival (illus. 36).16 Despite lacking signatures, even these scrolls, sometimes only loosely connected to big names, elicited early commentaries inscribed by viewers

in colophons, at this stage usually in the form of poetry. As scrolls got longer and signatures became more common as marks of authorship, a curious outcome was the way some of these pictures were cut down and divided up by unscrupulous owners: hence the various part-original, part-substituted scrolls we encounter.17

The late Northern Song moment Let us consider the implications for our subject of Huizong’s twinned artistic and political leadership of the Song dynasty, which cannot be separated from his economic mismanagement and loss of half the Song empire. Huizong’s artistic legacy was quickly framed after the Jurchen Jin’s invasion of the north in 1126–7 and his own capture by the Jurchens, through his appropriation of 64

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Mountains of 1113, almost 12 metres in length.19 Long and lapidary, Wang Ximeng’s epic painterly approach to this handscroll belies his youth and exemplifies the extraordinary aesthetic quality of this historical moment. It also exemplifies a growing trend for longer handscrolls, known as ‘long scrolls’ (changjuan). Yu Hui has observed that this lengthening of picture-scrolls over the course of the Song period was driven by intellectual and philosophical trends for investigative depth and precision. He cites the Northern Song scholar–official Han Qi (1008–1075), who wrote of his technique of viewing paintings: ‘to grasp the truth completely is the ultimate; to grasp it largely is superior’, understood to refer to the degree of understanding or insight that could be garnered through the quality of the painting.20 Longer-form studies provided more space for sustained analysis of things but also called for more elaborate techniques of visual narration of subjects, to which we return below.

the canal network to transport ornamental rocks from the south to the palace gardens of his capital at Bianliang. Huizong had celebrated named rocks, such as the Gen Marchmount, recorded in his albums of auspicious signs. Surviving album leaves, subsequently all mounted as precious individual handscrolls, include Auspicious Dragon Rock (see illus. 175), with its eponymous central inscription on the rock in gold ink there as a paleographic record of an epigram engraved on the rock itself in Huizong’s distinctive ‘slender gold’ calligraphy.18 The cult of the artist–emperor also had a basis in his painting academy, which produced two of the most famous picture-scrolls in the whole of Chinese painting. One is Zhang Zeduan’s Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival (see illus. 30). The academy had also nurtured the prodigy Wang Ximeng (1096–1119), the teenage pioneer of an extended mode of blue-and-green landscape scroll-painting, seen in A Thousand Li of Rivers and 65

37, 38 Wei Xian (active 10th century), Lofty Scholar (Gaoshi tu), small hanging scroll mounted as a handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 134.5 × 52.5 cm.

Inscribing the Artist and the Collector

him. Like Auspicious Dragon Rock (see illus. 175), his Five-Coloured Parakeet and Cranes above Kaifeng are today handscrolls, but were album leaves initially, while Finches and Bamboo, although apparently made as a small handscroll, worked with the same rectangular proportions.24 In the painting oeuvre attributed to him, there is one credible long handscroll, Willow and Crows, Reeds and Geese (illus. 39). This picture toys with the extended horizontal format, but frustratingly so in that only the first half is a plausible attribution to Huizong. The latter half, including the central imperial cipher (tianxia yi ren: ‘[to make] the whole world [like one family, the whole nation] like one person’), is a later interpolation. The aesthetics of the youthful Zhao Ji were shaped by his cousin Zhao Lingrang, who had a fine collection of Tang paintings and whose own paintings in various genres, including narrative scenes, were seen as ‘in no way inferior to those marvellous paintings from the Tang court’.25 It is not surprising then that part of Huizong’s court enterprise involved the meticulous copying of Tang paintings, inevitably in the handscroll format. The emperor deliberately named the reprised paintings in his inscriptions on or beside them in the mounting. To this antiquarian practice we owe our view of palace genre scenes, from Lady Guoguo on a Spring Outing to Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (see illus. 22), both apparently by Huizong’s own hand after the Tang painter Zhang Xuan (active eighth century), and other Tang equestrian scenes, through works such as the scholar–painter Li Gonglin’s undated tour-de-force reprise of Pasturing Horses, by Wei Yan (active c. 700), done to an imperial command and signed in seal script in the top right corner.26 The archaism of Li Gonglin’s inscription on Pasturing Horses, serving to narrow or collapse differences in time and place between the copy and its source, played upon visual knowledge of like

The picture-scroll must have risen significantly in aesthetic status with the introduction under Huizong of a new livery for scrolls in the royal collection. The finest ones were covered in exquisite kesi tapestry wrappers (see illus. 31 and 16), artworks in their own right. Also, Huizong launched a new treatment, the Xuanhe qixi (‘Xuanhe seven imperial seals’) mounting format. Both of these scrolls by Zhang Zeduan and Wang Ximeng were given the ‘Xuanhe seven seals’ imprimatur, a system which gave order and distinction to the finest artworks through the emperor’s act of naming and inscribing them, right down to details such as use of a square double-dragon seal for paintings like these, in contrast with a circular double-dragon seal for fine calligraphies.21 Incidentally, this system was later adopted by the Jurchen Jin court after the capture of Huizong and much of the Northern Song royal family in the capital.22 In addition, the monarch Huizong appears to have been unique in collecting history in the way he mounted some small hanging scrolls – as handscrolls. Blue Magpie and Thorny Shrubs, attributed to the early Song court artist Huang Jucai (b. 933), is a small vertical hanging scroll which is catalogued as such today but was previously mounted by Huizong as a handscroll.23 Another similar case, mentioned above, is Wei Xian’s Lofty Scholar (illus. 37), which has further recursive layers of mediality: in the eye of the painting, the eponymous recluse sits in his waterside pavilion, ignoring the refreshment proffered by his kneeling wife, absorbed in reading a small horizontal scroll like the object iself in its handscroll mounting. Although Zhao Ji was a major collector of old-master paintings, which would have been primarily handscrolls, and as emperor Huizong pioneered this new mounting aesthetics, it is not immediately obvious that he favoured the picture-scroll format over any other for his own works of painting, or at least those attributed to 67

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39 Attributed to Zhao Ji (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), Willow and Crows, Reeds and Geese (Liuya luyan tu juan), early 12th century (the first half) with a later addition,  handscroll, detail (the first half), ink and light colours on paper, 34 × 223.2 cm.

subject of Tree and Rock (see illus. 177), the most plausible extant attribution to the most famous scholar and political exile of this period, Su Shi.28 A specialist in horse painting, Li Gonglin executed Five Tribute Horses in around 1090 (illus. 40), a scroll long known to modern scholarship only in black-and-white photographic reproductions but recently rediscovered. Despite its parade-like formality and classical Tang format with five square frames lined up in a row and captioned, Five Tribute Horses also exemplifies the naturalism of late Northern-Song scholar-painting. The horses are each seen from side on as if by a seated observer sketching, and with the artifice of the exquisitely modulated ink-outline traces disappearing into the forms they create as they become readable by the beholder as representational qualities of the equine forms.29 Itakura Masaaki, who has studied the rediscovered painting, argues that it will necessitate a rewriting of the history of Northern Song painting, since we can now confirm it is painted not only on special Chengxintang paper but also, most unexpectedly, in colour.30 Having not, after all, been lost in the firebombing of Tokyo in the Second World War, this scroll takes its place as one of those ‘supreme

forms of text–image relationship in ancient arts. Short identifier texts had appeared in captions floating beside the figures they referred to in narrative scenes in antique engravings (see illus. 8) but the specific combination of seal-script inscriptions with figures in scroll-painting was somewhat later. We see it in the attribution to Zhang Sengyou (active c. 490–540), Five Planets and Twenty-Eight Mansions (see illus. 19), and in the Yan Liben attribution, Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (see illus. 13).27 Such connotations must have finessed how the artist’s inscription stating the context and authorship of the painting was appreciated as a novelty, but in ways we are largely guessing at, due to our limited understanding of that early corpus. Li Gonglin’s oeuvre does comes across as decidedly classical. An exemplary scholar–painter despite his lowly official rank, Li Gonglin certainly embraced the received wisdom of the handscroll format in both his copies and new works to royal command and in his creative practice amid private or personal networks. This intellectual affinity among scholar-official artists for the picturescroll as a painting medium had previously extended into contentious, even polemical, themes such as ‘withered trees, bamboo and rocks’, the 68

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Letter about a Coral Tree, Mi Fu crows about his latest art acquisitions.31 Besides boldly sketching his coral brush-rest in the middle of the letter, he also refers to an inscription by the early Tang courtier–calligrapher–connoisseur Xue Ji (647–713) on an ancient (Six Dynasties) painting by Zhang Sengyou (perhaps a handscroll like Five Planets; see illus. 19) that had been owned by Xue Ji’s painting model, the Tang painter Yan Liben (see illus. 11, 13 and 57). Here, in Peter Sturman’s words, ‘Mi Fu now affixes his name to this impressive pedigree.’32 The aspirations of this well-connected and fiercely ambitious artist are insightful in that they also show how scholar–artists were conceptualizing the old-master tradition and connoisseurly lineages through the artworks they saw and competitively acquired.

treasures’ (zhibao), artworks fetishized as divine artefacts, legendary survivors or works of destiny. The corpus of expanding and rich commentary around famous artworks in this middle Song period, which could be recorded and transmitted separately in text, is not matched by the numbers of scrolls that have actually survived, particularly those by scholar–artists like Su Shi and his circle, which was purged by Huizong. Zhang Zeduan’s Qingming scroll, in a politically sensitive vignette illustrating this change, shows large-scale calligraphic works by these former scholar–officials being used as covers on the rubbish carts. However, in that he was influential on Huizong, we do have a range of works by the calligrapher and connoisseur Mi Fu (1051–1107), a restlessly inventive and arrogant art impresario. In an eye-catching letter remounted as an album leaf,

40 Li Gonglin (1049–1106), Five Tribute Horses (Wuma tu), c. 1090, handscroll, detail, ink and light colours on paper, 28 × 257.2 cm. 69

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41 Yi Yuanji (c. 1000–c. 1064), Gibbon and Kittens (Hou mao tu), c. mid-late 11th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31.9 × 57.2 cm.

Signalled by the way they activated the picture surface plane, often by causing figures within the image to engage the viewer directly by gazing through this artificial screen, the first scroll painters were also aware of this. We see it early in the tradition in the scene ‘Lady Ban Declines to Ride in the Imperial Palanquin’ in the Admonitions scroll (see illus. 5), where a palanquin-bearer whose toe is being trodden on by his neighbour suppresses a roar of pain while looking at us. We see it again in the copy of a Tang original, Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (see illus. 22), where a plump lady in the first group, taking a rest from her labours, gazes directly at us through the surface plane. The device reappears in a new guise, however, in a court genre scene, in Yi Yuanji’s (c. 1000–c. 1064) Gibbon and Kittens (illus. 41). This is a short and highly suggestive handscroll-painting in which a collared gibbon with an arch expression teases a kitten. The primate is looking askance straight at us, the beholders, through the picture surface, as if acknowledging he has been caught red-handed being naughty by his owner. This

The handscroll medium in the Song context: intermediary features To what extent were Song artists aware of and interested in the picture-scroll as a visual medium and aware of its specific character? What were the drivers of their ventures to innovate using the aesthetic potential of its material form? Wu Hung has studied the relationship between medium and representation in the case of screens, noting recursive examples where a painted screen appears within a painted screen. Sometimes such a scene appears within a painted scroll – Zhou Wenju’s (active 942–61) Double Screen handscroll is an example.33 There, the pictorial frame of the painting as a whole echoes the shape and proportion of the inner pictures, or ‘paintings within paintings’ (huazhonghua), but also snaps out of this pattern to fit into the handscroll as a rolling medium.34 Early Song scroll painters were not the first to show a heightened awareness of the beholder – doubly, the viewer and handler of a horizontal scroll – and that person’s relationship to the content. 70

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witty yet charged composition involving palace pets triggers a curious reflection on positionality on the part of the beholder, but it can hardly be dismissed as a gimmicky or inappropriate effect, as Yi Yuanji was no mountebank: his gibbon paintings garnered him an imperial commission from Song emperor Yingzong (r. 1063–7) for the Palace of Filial Respect. This and his arresting painting skills would account for his having been poisoned, having barely begun, by jealous rivals in the court painting academy.35 From here, I want to trace some of these intermediary features further and map them to changing idioms by which space and time within pictures, so often standing for the whole index of pictorial content, were imagined, poetically or otherwise. If we take landscape scenery as an

example, a macro-level change seen over the Tang–Song transition is in the modelling of spatial distance types. The basic conventions inherited from the Tang were ‘high distance’, ‘deep distance’ and ‘level distance’. Song distance types were articulated by Han Zhuo (active c. 1095–1123) as ‘broad distance’, ‘bewildering distance’ and ‘remote distance’.36 What were the broader implications of this transition in the visual order for the handscroll as a painting format? The appearance at court of what is known as monumental landscape painting over the course of the long eleventh century is usually mapped across paintings in a format of growing importance, the hanging or wall scroll format (lizhou). This makes sense in that monumental landscape painting was a courtly display – positing how the

42 Zhang of Handan family kiln (Jin dynasty, 1115–1234), Cizhou-ware pillow, with a scene of three horsemen in a steppe landscape, Henan Province, China, stoneware, slip-painted and glazed, h. 14.9 × l. 40.6 × w. 18.1 cm. 71

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dynastic status quo was seen to resonate in and be legitimated by nature’s order. The vertically attenuated formal qualities of monumental landscape, high peaks and deep valleys, were suited to upright rectangular formats such as wall panels, screens and hanging scrolls, epitomized by the court painter Guo Xi’s masterpiece, Early Spring, of 1072 – an art described in Foong Ping’s words as ‘the efficacious landscape’.37 The horizontal scroll format co-existed somewhat awkwardly with this development, not being a natural habitat for this high-peak iconography. This political investment in display formats can also be read as a countermove by the Northern Song imperium to curb the cultural framing of the handscroll at the hands of the new social class of scholar–gentry or literati. The picture-scroll, with its intimate and so potentially subaltern or dissenting character, was becoming associated in scholarly landscape art with the ‘flat vista’ or ‘level distance’ (pingyuan) composition format, itself

increasingly seen as part of an oppositional iconography of exile (political alienation from court as a judicial sanction) and reclusion (implicit critique of rulership by unsummonable scholars).38 We may wonder how these spatial tropes were compositionally and spatially adapted when they moved between the two formats. Pictorial content developed inside a vertically attenuated frame (the Western ‘portrait’ format) was not simply translated into the extended horizontal format of a picture-scroll when that format was employed, or vice versa, although there are examples where something like this may have occurred. The attribution to Qu Ding (active c. 1023–c. 1056), Summer Mountains, of around 1050, if it is not in fact the cut-down final section of a longer scroll, is such a case.39 Another contemporary example to consider is the art of the mid-eleventh-century painter Xu Daoning (c. 970–1052), creator of the hauntingly beautiful Fishermen’s Evening Song, of around 1050

43 Xu Daoning (c. 970–1052), Fishermen’s Evening Song (Qiujiang yuting tu / Yuzhou changwan tu), c. 1050, handscroll, ink and light colours on silk, 48.26 × 225.4 cm. 72

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(illus. 43). A landscapist in the ‘forested hills’ tradition of Li Cheng (919–967), Xu Daoning was seen to have ‘completely transformed’ the genre, ‘excelling in three aspects: forested [hills], level distance and wild water’. In particular, critics noticed how, even as his hills had bodily form and his water had a sense of flow, there was this extraordinary sense of scale from outsized foreground forms to diminutive things in the distance.40 The picture-scroll’s longitudinal format suited Xu Daoning’s forte and vice versa. The early Song development of scrolling landscapes brought out, in the process, some core structural conventions, notably around the use of three-part phrasing, inherited from Tang divisions of space in handscrolls, and formal repoussoirs situated close to the picture frame and picture plane at the beginning and end. In this specific sense of how to adapt an image or picture to the object that bears it, two-dimensional pictures in scrolls hardly differed, in the way they

adapted to the host material form, from decor on three-dimensional plastic artworks such as painted ceramics. This was not simply theoretical. Landscape and figural imagery of the same subjects as in painting and book illustration does indeed appear for the first time widely on ceramics, such as Jin-dynasty Cizhou wares (illus. 42), from the mid-Song period onwards.41 By its nature, the handscroll format was ill suited to articulating the magnanimity of nature which the court would associate with the state in large standing formats. Guo Xi’s one extant handscroll, Old Trees, Level Distance, of about 1080, makes little obvious sense as a monumental landscape like Early Spring, and despite in-depth study it is still puzzling as an intimate work.42 The Guo Xi conundrum is one issue. Then there are cases where an artist was recognized at the time as being multi-talented across painting media. The great Jin scholar–artist Wang Tingyun’s (1151–1202) son Wang Wanqing (early to mid-thirteenth century),

73

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44 Southern Song (1127–1279) court artists (13th century), Odes of the State of Bin (Binfeng qiyue tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink, colours, gold and silver on paper, 29.2 × 1,398.9 cm.

for example, related Li Shan’s ‘skill and finesse’ in the handscroll Wind and Snow in the Fir-Pines (see illus. 34) to the artist’s long-honed proficiency as a landscape muralist.43 However, the reality is that few Song-period oeuvres comprise extant artworks across diverse formats, pointing up how little we know of these masters’ range of practices in other media, such as murals. Occasionally we have glimpses of how the horizontal scroll format for landscape could be adapted for a display space: for instance, in the panelling of furniture, in the long horizontal side panels of a throne, seat or bed. Consider the continuous landscape scene specifically adapted to the space in the back-panelling of a day-bed depicted behind a slumbering man within a narrative scroll, Odes of the State of Bin (illus. 44), which I take to date from the late Song painting academy. This passage illustrates insects crawling into the house from outdoors to escape winter’s chill, in duty to the textual account in the ode. At the corners of the day-bed, while the picture base for the landscape turned in space as in the panels of a folding screen, the landscape composition

itself could continue uninterrupted as a flowing landscape. Indeed, the compositional transition of this embedded landscape across the rightangled turn at the rear left corner of the bed is considerably more successful than the transition between the two awkwardly intersecting buildings in this portion of the picture-scroll, despite the narrative logic and the formal scaling of the trail of hibernating bugs. So, were Song-period handscrolls being treated significantly differently from before, and if so, how? Critics did occasionally note some of the differences generated by different observation and viewing practices, but it is questionable how novel these were. Mi Fu, for instance, writes: ‘In a Dong Yuan cloudy scene [landscape] in my family’s collection, when you horizontally unroll the whole scroll, the structure of the mountains is now hidden now revealed, the trees in the forests are now clear and now indistinct, [creating an] impression that is lofty and antique.’ In one gloss on these remarks, the painting was evidently hard to read visually close-up but became legible when observed from a distance.44 This may strike 74

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us as unusual in a handscroll – something more common in a vertical or wall scroll – but it indicates that at this early stage in the development of landscape painting there was no expectation that the language of landscape content should be confined to any one format or medium to the exclusion of others.

image of a solitary scholar gazing at a waterfall or the individual traveller serially experiencing such scenes. The direction of Southern Song landscape scroll art was powerfully shaped by members of the cultural elite such as Mi Fu’s son Mi Youren (1086–1165 or 1074–1153), the artist of Revelling in Cloudy Mountains (illus. 45). Mi Youren’s colophon to another of his own paintings, Wondrous Views of Xiao and Xiang, states: ‘Creating a long [landscape] handscroll for the purpose of delighting the eye cannot be compared to actually going travelling for this purpose, yet is not such a scroll something that delights other people too?’45 The embodied act of scrolling was a way at least theoretically to share the sights, through visual poetics and to a degree, in a stylized trope, the sensation of the physical movement of travelling over terrain and across water, through observers’ shared haptic experience of rolling and unrolling. Despite his paintings being notoriously difficult to attain, especially later in life, when his proximity to the emperor brought out the snob in him, through handscrolls, Mi Youren fashioned the Mi-style misty-level landscapes into a family lineage.46 For the older, self-important Mi

The picture-scroll in the later Song period The scientifically enquiring mind has been cited as the motive behind more extensive, probing examinations of painting subjects in ‘long scrolls’. This form of curiosity might equally account for visual experimentation as part of the ‘inward turn’ in Song art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that is, in the south in a new and at first unfamiliar world reshaped by the crushing loss of the north to the Jurchen Jin and ongoing fractious diplomacy, seen in the miniaturization, poeticization and individualization of the pictorial frame and content. Jurchen Jin handscrolls were generally short. In the Southern Song, newly popular formats were the intimate ones – handheld fans and album leaves – while lone figures were pictured in a narrowly framed nature, epitomized by the 75

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45 Mi Youren, Revelling in Cloudy Mountains (Yunshan deyi tu), c. 12th century, handscroll, ink on paper, 27.2 × 212.6 cm.

Youren, cloudy mountains became the Mi visual signature to the extent that he was teased for painting ‘primordial clouds, thick as pea soup’ only for the crown.47 The effects of this ripple out in canon formation, in the ways he confirmed the identification of type-forms (‘cold forest’, ‘cloudy mountains’) with lineages (Li-Guo, Mi family). Importantly, for such an aspirational family as the Mis, this was evidently only possible in the handscroll format. For scholar–artists the combined acts of scrollhandling and reminiscence would indeed become a function of the scroll within the cultural imaginary. Take the (probably) Yuan scroll Buddhist Temples amid Autumn Mountains, which bears a spurious signature of Yan Wengui (970–1030). The picture weaves narrative into the rolling landscape: reappearing three times is the group comprising a figure in a broad-brimmed hat travelling on a mule accompanied by two servants on foot, one carrying his zither, the other two cases hanging from each end of a shoulder pole. The colophon by Tu Wen (fourteenth century) speaks of this link when he writes, ‘One who loves temples of past dynasties, I unroll this picture to reminisce about my old travels.’48 The scroll is conceived as a sight world or place for contemplative retreat and

the act of viewing it conducive to mental reclusion and temporary escape from daily cares, much as Zong Bing had outlined. The experience is allconsuming and synaesthetic. The handling of the scroll is a bodily act, with haptic senses activated in the hands. This combines with visual absorption through the eyes and perhaps also aural engagement in humming or chanting remembered poetry. By now, the physical act of rolling mirrors the mental process and emotions of going back in time (unrolling) and returning to the present (re-rolling). A growing Song-era sense of mediality, or the object’s awareness of itself as an aesthetic object and as a bearer or container for a representational image, may be traced in the more emboldened artistic self-awareness of the thirteenth century. Southern-Song Chan (or Zen) antinomian monk– painters were never part of the art-historical canon, but nevertheless their practices offered profound challenges to the epistemological basis of visual order.49 Pressing expressionistic inky form to the very edges of recoverable meaning across both the visual and textual components, works like Yujian’s Mount Lu (illus. 46) had little following in China outside Chan Buddhism, but were revered in Japan. There, what were 76

46 Yujian (active Southern Song, 1127–1279), Mount Lu (Lushan tu), mounted as a hanging scroll, ink on silk, 35.5 × 62.7 cm.

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47 Xu Yugong (active mid-12th century), Plum Blossoms and Bamboo in Snow (Xuezhong meizhu tu juan), handscroll, ink on silk, 30 × 122 cm.

presumably small handscrolls, sometimes containing sets of short paintings, were repurposed by conversion into a format suited to display as individual paintings, namely the small hanging scroll in the tokonoma alcove. In contrast with practice in China, in Japan the hanging scroll format had little trouble accommodating picture shapes that were square or slightly wider than they were high.50 Back in the Southern-Song aesthetic mainstream, artists were animated by the boundaries not so much of representational marks or traces as of compositional orchestration involving the geometric fringes of the image, the rectangular frame-to-pictorial content relationship. Sustained virtuosic renditions like Narcissus, by the late Song scholar–painter Zhao Mengjian (1199–before 1267), with what looks to us like a close-up panning effect in film, appears to extend over a long picturescroll (it is ‘only’ 374 centimetres long).51 One of the most interesting and striking disruptions of the pictorial order in this period happened in the Jin. Until now, the picture frame supported the illusion of form within a painting in being a largely unobtrusive window on and container for a centred and holistic subject in a composition. Now, suddenly, the handscrollpainting could alternatively be conceived as presenting a subjectively cropped horizontal vista,

like seeing through a wide-framed window, calling attention to the standing eye height of the artist and observer. In the northern statesman Wang Tingyun’s hoary picture-scroll, Secluded Bamboo and Withered Branches, the harsh cropping of the nature scene by the positioning of the picture frame affords us only an arresting view of the midsection of an ancient tree trunk and a lone bamboo stalk, in a nascent conceptual discontinuity from nature.52 A related Song iteration of this emerging compositional type, the cross-section of nature beheld by the solitary observer, is the otherwise unknown artist Xu Yugong’s (active mid-twelfth century) Plum Blossoms and Bamboo in Snow (illus. 47). Here the handscroll format governs how a detail of human visual experience is pictured: this is standing looking side-on at a section of frozen shrubbery seen at head height as if through a wide but narrow window. While the artist relinquishes control over what must be imagined to exist in nature above or below the horizontal edges (in the picture we see the mid-sections of bamboo stalks traversing the image vertically), he is at liberty to play freely with the lateral movement across the horizontal axis, and does so liberally with the branch of prunus. This extends to the right, its branch tips formed into points that consistently reach almost to the edges of the horizontally 78

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extending picture, against what will be confirmed, when the eye has scanned to both ends, as a relatively narrow depth of field in the recession axis of the picture plane. This was no gratuitous experiment. The resulting awkward dialogue between the plane and the frame accords poetically with the curious tropic mix of perennial hope and beauty in adversity embodied by the painting subject.53

the iconography. A probable late Southern Song scroll illustrating ancient poetry is Nine Songs (illus. 48).54 Illustrations of scenes in ancient collections like this comprised iconic ancient type-form compositions. Each scene could vary in size just as the length of the accompanying inscriptions did, so that inherited iconologies held sway. A lyrically powerful scene showing the Ladies of the Xiang before their suicide by drowning stands out as one of the longer ones in this collection. Compositionally, it pivots and rotates at the centre line, pointing to future events, while a dead tree points to a body of water, all generating an intense mood of melancholic introspection. Let us look at some other examples. Painters also elaborated on inherited sequential scene modes to create more visually narrative-driven treatments of old genres (figures) and new (landscape). A fascinating remediation of horse images is Six Warhorses from the Zhaoling by the Jin

Visual narrative and consciousness of the medium Surveying the archive of Song-period scrolls, the adaptability, flexibility and indeed multiplicity and diversity of the Song-era scroll format are all remarkable. Song narrative scroll art itself encompassed and incorporated diverse modes of visual storytelling and illustration. In a sense, the more ancient the narrative content, the more atavistic

48 Formerly attributed to Zhang Dunli (late 12th century), Nine Songs (Jiu ge tu shuhua juan), c. 1225–c. 1250, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 24.7 × 608.5 cm. 79

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49 Xia Gui (active c. 1180–1224), Twelve Views of Landscape (Shanshui shier jing), handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 27.3 × 253.7 cm. 

painter Zhao Lin (active 1161–89), which illustrated Tang emperor Taizong’s (r. 626–49) famous warhorses. The renowned original images were large ‘landscape’-shaped shallow-relief stone carvings from Taizong’s tomb complex, the Zhaoling. A transposition into the handscroll format afforded the artist a chance to release the animals from their rectangular frames into its somewhat less bounded space. It shows the first three moving leftwards into the scroll at increasing speeds, followed by the last three facing right, generating a crescendo and diminuendo and a neat symmetry around the fulcrum or central turning point.55 Around the same date landscape scrolls could appropriate the form of an album-like set of evenly sized images, as is seen in the Southern Song scholar–painter Wang Hong’s (active c. 1131–c. 1161) Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, of about 1150,56 and the mid- to late Southern Song court painter Xia Gui’s (active c. 1180–1224) Twelve Views of Landscape (illus. 49). Both show the developing choreography or performative staging of landscape in named movements or tableaux. Short-form handscrolls also served a purpose. Sometimes a short horizontal frame, two or three times wider than it is tall, was the most appropriate shape for an image with inherent horizontal movement, such as the scene of Watching the Tidal Bore on the Qiantang River, a festival view from the

northern, Hangzhou bank (illus. 50) or a Taoist frontispiece scene reminiscent of a printed frontispiece, like Liang Kai’s Liberating the Soul from the Netherworld.57 The short format also allowed for a story to be reduced to a single vignette, often successfully making the horizontal frame serve to represent the crossing of a border or a conflicted position between rivals, alternatives or binaries.58 The expressive potential of this was well scoped out: for example, in Jin paintings of Lady Wenji Returning to China (see illus. 32). Long-form narrative art arguably reached its acme across East Asia in this era. Narrative illustration in scroll form (many in sets) was in full bloom in Japan, all the while, in superlatively affective scroll-paintings such as The Tale of Genji (illus. 51), after the novel by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978–c. 1014), and in dozens of scrolls attesting to the power of temple deities. Although the concept of fully narrative scroll art offers us moderns a neat and satisfying distinction, such a notion is not sustained by the body of evidence, where a gamut of narratological approaches proudly speaks to a crowded and diverse field of examplars and models. In China, we find overt visual narration in time and space of a story or text in narratively episodic yet visually continuous works like Odes of the State of Bin (see illus. 44),59 or in an overtly dramatic sequence of divided scenes, 80

50 Li Song (1190–1230), Watching the Tidal Bore on the Qiantang River (Qiantang guanchao tu), 1127–1279, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 17.4 × 83 cm.

51 Takekawa (‘Bamboo River’) scene detail from The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari emaki), early 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 21.8 × 48.3 cm.

52, 53 Xia Gui (active c. 1180–1224), A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains (Xishan qingyuan tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 46.5 × 889.1 cm.

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as in the Song copy of Gu Hongzhong’s (937–975) Night Revels of Han Xizai. The fascination of Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival is its lightly worn integration of extended landscape and genre painting and episodic visual continuity, unencumbered by a text yet serving as loyal commentary. Another intriguing path is beaten by Qiao Zhongchang’s (active twelfth century) Latter Red Cliff Ode, a proper narrative painting based on the eponymous prose-poem by Su Shi done in an engaging monochrome scholar–painting mode that variously integrates text inscriptions into the picture around, in and on the landscape forms. In Southern Song, we see ever more sophisticated use of varied formal stages and tableaux and transitional passages making use of visually arresting (unexpected, rich and never fully resolving) combinations of contrasting and complementary features. Within the oeuvre of the court artist Xia Gui are examples of different approaches. In addition to his Twelve Views of Landscape (see illus. 49), he leaves a long and aptly named handscroll, A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains (illus. 52).60 Here the 8 metres of the painting are finely structured by a sequence of three evenly spaced foreground ‘events’ or features that rise to or close to the top edge, divided by spatial recessions in the landscape. There are two sheets of paper, and where they join exactly in the middle is another kind of fulcrum, pointing at ways in which the artist was governed by the extent (or limitations) of his materials. Working with a composition longer than two lengths of this paper would seem to have become unmanageable. The later triumph of landscape as a genre cannot be taken as evidence that it was the

compositional patterns seen in landscapes, which were visually geared towards recreating the experience of roaming abroad, which also governed the visual narrative structuring of forms in other scroll-painting subjects, including intimately scaled and microcosmic forms of observation. An implication of scenes on the contemplation of fish, a respectable Song-period genre, is that ideas play out of roaming in the mind while standing still. The subject of fish is usually interpreted through an allusion to a conversation between two ancient Daoist philosophers that starts with an innocent observation by one of them about the happiness of fish and ends with an epistemological argument about the human basis for knowledge about the happiness of fish, humans not being fish. Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers (illus. 54) is a beautiful unsigned probable Song scroll attributed to the little-known Liu Cai (active c. 1080–1120). The choreography of design and movement is keyed to the reading-while-scrolling experience. There are four movements corresponding to clusters of fish, divided by reed beds and also flowers fallen on the water surface, with pictorial forms doing double duty as locally descriptive and collectively as a sequence of groups: i) thin long fish at the surface; ii) several larger fish moving to the left (into the scroll) and down into the deep water; iii) various sizes and colours of fish below lily pads on the surface (offering contrast of surface and depth); and iv) a triangle of several large fish heading one another off. In the last group first two large fish, one dark and one gold, split the momentum of the reading direction, and then the last big fish, turning back into the scroll, reverses it, 83

54–6 Attributed to Liu Cai (active c. 1080–1120), Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers (Luohua youyu tu), c. 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 26.4 × 255.3 cm.

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57 Attributed to Yan Liben (c. 600–c. 673), Admonishing in Chains (Suojian tu), 15th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 36.9 × 207.9 cm. 

creating a visual eddy in the water which signals the end. All through this, between the weedy bed and petal-strewn surface, the artist has contrived an entirely naturalistic variation of types and sizes of fish in shoals, of their movement and direction, and of the density of shoals. The naturalistic pace of viewing deeply informs the experience of such contemplation. A painting like Fish Swimming demonstrates again how some of these pictorial modalities we have been tracing could overlap: in this case, the necessity for visual narrative plotting of forms within the horizontal scroll and the artist’s consciousness of that delicate yet intense relationship between medium and representation. We explored earlier that activation of visual communication between spaces either side of the picture surface, first noted with figures looking through the screen between the worlds of the image and its beholder. In Fish Swimming, the monochromatic fingerlings are curious about the bright pink petals floating (like little cups) on the water’s surface, and they swirl about in a shoal directly below. The fallen petals from an overhanging pear tree, partially seen at the leading edge of the painting, and the floating lilypads are a fine painterly conceit, calling attention to the surface of the water, represented without form per se but by implication of these watertop forms. Figuratively and literally, they also call attention to the surface and depth of the

water column and its echo, the painting. This invisibility of the water surface is shared – almost iconically – with the invisibility of the image surface, while the dark buff silk medium serves to represent and embody the mysterious interior of the body of water. This dual surface marks a plane of division which doubles as the meeting point of air and water in the image and as divider between the inner and outer worlds of the rolling picture. Stepping back to look at art-historical development over the course of the Song–Yuan transition, this kind of reflexive treatment of surface seen here in this exemplary picture-scroll must be viewed as one of the conditions for the so-called late thirteenth-century ‘discovery of surface’, to which we return in the next chapter.61

Coda: the politics of scroll iconology Traditionally attributed to Yan Liben, Admonishing in Chains (illus. 57) is an early Ming (fifteenthcentury) copy of a Southern Song picture-scroll. It illustrates an anecdote about a Xiongnu (Turkic) ruler, Liu Yuan (r. c. 249–310), who resented the remonstrance of his fearless Chinese adviser, Chen Yuanda (d. 316), and sentenced Chen and his wife to death in the marketplace.62 It has a structural iconology matched to its content, ‘visually underscoring the dichotomy between civilized persuasion and barbaric force’.63 Seated on a throne in 86

Inscribing the Artist and the Collector

the dead centre of the painting, the ruler looks towards the undignified scene, on our right, of agitated hounds and armed guards attempting to take Chen Yuanda away, while the ruler’s body is angled the other way, to our left, from which direction his Chinese wife and her handmaidens serenely approach. The situation is only resolved, here, by the appearance of the queen. The corpus of early, Wei–Jin to Tang old-master paintings in reality comprises only a small pool of early works, largely picture-scrolls known to us through random survivals of originals. Alongside this is a larger number of reprises of those scrolls by Song-period artists (or reprises of reprises, such as Admonishing in Chains). This culture of copying and transmission exemplifies a new and disctinctive feature of the creativity around the corpus of art in this middle period. At the same time, running in parallel, there is a related complex process of how artists of the Song–Liao–Jin period, in creating new works in different regimes across the region, found purchase against the inherited legacy of visuality and visual cultures of the picture-scroll. The appropriation of past pictorial modes certainly enabled and supported painters’ creative practices. Taking a macro-historical view, however, there was also a role, which emerged in earnest in this time, for critical commentary by connoisseurs on actual artworks to play a part in shaping how artworks were received – and

continue to be received. Zhang Zhu’s important colophon to Zhang Zeduan’s Qingming scroll showed that. In the next chapters we attend to how this scholarly practice expanded under Mongol rule in the succeeding Yuan period and to the end of dynastic history, including revealing changing motives for transmission, ranging across cultural pride or duty to political expediency. In the early Yuan, Tang Hou would interpret Admonishing in Chains as a signal of a painter’s loyalty and righteousness coming out of the silk ground.64 By the early Ming, the reprise version of that date seemingly ‘reverts’ to highlighting a less nuanced choice between Chinese civilization and barbarian chaos. By late Ming, the extant copy circulated among retired or failed government officials whose engagement with it amounted to a form of indirect loyal remonstrance.65 Such twists and turns in the narrative of reception find echoes in other scrolls with ethnic and regional political dimensions, and illustrate how a philological framework, taking physical form in the heavily inscribed appearance of the archive as material culture, came to dominate the study of handscrolls in general, and Song-period scrolls in particular, in late imperial times. We have tried in this chapter to reimagine Song-era scroll art as a nascent practice of the creative imagination, while attending carefully to historically overlooked and subtle relationships between pictures and their material form in the medium of the picture-scroll.

87

58 Wang Zhenpeng (active early 14th century), Boya Playing the Qin (Boya guqin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 31.4 × 92 cm.

3 Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces

I

t is the conundrum of any ‘middle period’ that it must necessarily bridge and pivot between early and later periods, in this case in the diachronic modelling of China’s dynasticism.1 The notion of how swathes of the learning of Mediterranean antiquity were transmitted, by a still poorly understood process, into modern Europe via the Arab world would be a sort of analogy for China’s art history as channelled through the Mongol period. The deep-rooted persistence of ingrained cultural patterns and tropes within agonistic Chinese history, however, has worked to displace understanding of topicality and art’s agency within the Sino–Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) legacy. Yet, as Marsha Haufler (Weidner) has highlighted, the Mongol royal family’s role in China was core:

Sengge Ragi [c. 1283–1331], [and the Yuan khans] Tugh Temür [r. 1328–9, 1329–32] and Toghon Temür [r. 1333–68] in the elite succession of connoisseur-collectors responsible for the preservation and transmission of China’s artistic heritage over the centuries.2

The puzzle of Yuan-period art is not why the Mongols should have preserved and transmitted the gems of China’s artistic heritage (see illus. 27) so much as how, and by what means, in the context of the visualities of their late medieval world empire. The problem under the Sino– Mongol Yuan dynasty is to refigure how Chinese culture – here, in the rarefied form of the picturescroll – was incorporated into the largest and most powerful khanate of the federated Great Mongol State (1206–1368), the Mongols’ culturally diverse but ethnically hierarchical imperial polity across Eurasia.

Even if there were no corroborating textual evidence, such stories [as are] told by seals [on old-master picture-scrolls] would be enough to place [the Mongol princess royal] 89

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Forest of Affairs, we find illustrations of the origination legends of pictures and writing comprising figures of a kind of scaly, winged ‘dragon horse’ bearing charts and pictures tied onto a modern saddle (they look long enough to be hanging scrolls with end-knobs, but scrolls nonetheless) and a ‘divine tortoise’ bearing several book-like tablets of writing on its back (illus. 59).3 The picture-scroll patently transited the Yuan in the elite and common mainstream, but the questions of what it bore historical witness to and how this altered both its conception as an

The picture-scroll format in macro-history Our starting point is that scrolls already had a significant place in Yuan visual culture, attested to by the manner in which they served in the popular imagination to illustrate and visualize the earliest writing and pictures. In legend, the sages Fuxi and Cangjie were able to create the trigrams and hexagrams (in the Book of Change) and writing that were the basis of the classics and histories. We have noted how, in mid-Yuan editions of the widely circulated southern Chinese encyclopaedia

59 ‘Pictures from the [Meng] River’ and ‘Writing from the Luo [River]’, ‘Wenji lei’ section from Chen Yuanjing, Forest of Affairs (Shilin guangji), woodblock printed book, Yuan Zhishun (1330–33) edition. 90

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aesthetic medium and its agency in this context are complex. Post-Yuan Chinese views tended to paint Yuan as an historical dystopia or anomie, whereas contemporary sources (at least the early Yuan ones) such as Marco Polo (1254–1324) and Rusticello of Pisa’s (active late thirteenth century) Description of the World weave a rosier picture from the angle of the ruling class. This may be why Polo never mentions some of the cultural things we regard as quintessentially Chinese, such as leaf tea, woodblock printing, brush calligraphy, female footbinding or indeed scrolls, suggesting that separate Sino and Mongol cultural spheres co-existed, with limited interaction.4 From our vantage point, though, we can see how the scale and prestige of late medieval Sinophone culture gave it momentum through the compressed cycle of this flawed dynasty, but also that the Sino–Mongol mainstream guardianship of China’s culture expanded to include artʼs traditional outsiders: women, clerics and non-Chinese. To rephrase the questions, to what degree were the status and function of the handscroll altered over the course of the Yuan in this remarkable covenant, and through what kinds of business-as-unusual intervention? The basic precondition, inspiring the chapter title, ‘Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces’, is Yuan’s incorporation of much of northeast and east Asia, including the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) in the north China region known as Cathay and the Chinese Southern Song (1127–1279) dynasty in the south, known as Manzi, into the Sino– Mongol Yuan dynasty, which itself was the hegemonic khanate of the Mongols’ pan-continental Eurasian polity, the Yeke Monggol Ulus (Great Mongol State or United Mongol Empire). At its greatest extent that great state reached from Mongolia to Java and from the Korean peninsula along the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe. In 1276, the pick of the Song royal collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting in the fallen

Southern Song capital Lin’an, renamed Khinsai (modern Hangzhou), was transported along with the Song royal family to Khubilai’s (r. 1260–94) palace in Daidu (or Khanbalik; modern Beijing), there to be hurriedly inventoried by the courtier Wang Yun (1227–1304). Wang could hardly have signalled more strongly the inestimable value of China’s art heritage as a basis to understand history and the world.5 This is how we know that old-master scrolls of Chinese calligraphy and painting, such as Yan Liben’s attributed scroll of The Thirteen Emperors (see illus. 10), in addition to ancient, early horse paintings from the Tang dynasty and architectural ruled-line paintings (jiehua), were immediately valued by China’s unifiers (and not simply after they were supposedly sinicized) – but to a measured degree, since the remainder of the Song collection was sold off from warehouses in Khinsai. These spoils and other artworks acquired and kept in Daidu’s palaces were preserved as a prime resource for artists and impresarios not just in the Yuan khanate but from across the Great Mongol State. In the Mongol Il-khanate (1256–1335) in Persia, the vizier Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), for instance, compiled a pioneering illustrated universal history in 1300–1310, the Compendium of Chronicles (Jami’ al-tawarikh). For the sections on China, it drew liberally on Chinese sources, presumably ones provided by the great libraries and collections of Daidu, which held paintings like the scroll of The Thirteen Emperors. In Rashid’s portraits of Chinese emperors, his draftsmen adapted whatever format the source material came in to fit it to the codex manuscript page layout, but preserving the iconography of royal or venerable figures seated on low platforms, which was so well suited to the horizontal rolling scroll format.6 The collections Khubilai started probably had far more impact within Yuan, however. The art of the southern Chinese painter Wang Zhenpeng (active 91

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early fourteenth century), a picture-scroll specialist among the most prominent of court artists, was said to have been much enriched as a result of his access to and study of the court painting collection, of which more below. Also relevant, as we take our bearings, is a wider sense of cosmopolitan China as a region in Eurasia. The northern Chinese scholar–official and painter Li Kan (1245–1320), a bamboo specialist, participated in atelier production at the Yuan court in the knowledge that his audience there comprised a royal and official viewership from across the Great State and indeed envoys, tribute bearers and women from every part of the known world.7 From the other end of the continent, in European cartography, the marginalia of the Catalan Atlas of 1375, a mappamundi by Abraham Cresques (1325–1387), show Marco Polo’s entourage travelling out to Cathay.8 Critical art publications in Yuan China also speak to this sense of cultural geography. Writing in around the 1330s, the painter and critic Rao Ziran (active c. 1340) incorporates candid comments on Japanese painters, even if this was to note that they ‘frequently commit errors’.9 His tone is one of confidence, command and authority, and he is blatantly practical, showing the breezy

insouciance of the educated professional Yuan artist with regard to technical matters. Where did the handscroll fit into this pot­ pourri of culture, we may wonder? The place of the picture-scroll in, for instance, Rao Ziran’s treatise, of which only one chapter survives, is not straightforward. If we consider the terms Rao Ziran uses to refer to picture formats, it is clear that at least in this chapter he was not precious about the special status of picture-scrolls but was, rather, concerned with much larger formats for vertical display. The terms he uses are bihua (wall-painting) or fu (a measure word for pictures) or ping (a screen). To speculate, Rao Ziran may have addressed picture-scrolls in another chapter of his treatise, or perhaps, for him, the compositional design and construction principles he spoke of applied equally to this bookish format, with no implied binary. He may have regarded wallpainting as so much more technically demanding than mere scrolls or albums, which were portable media fit to transport as copybooks (fenben) of the design repertoire. We can still learn from Rao Ziran in that his advice coalesces around achieving a satisfactory affect on the observer in the viewing context. He 92

60, 61 Shang Qi (active early 14th century), Spring Mountains (Chunshan tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 39.6 × 214.5 cm.

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counsels the painter to stand back to take in the whole and to shape a naturalistic look in which the composition, dynamic balance and density of forms and their relation to content, whether mountains or people, are complete and finished. What mattered to him was avoiding pernicious extremes while cultivating the centre or mean, seeing beauty in the harmony of opposites and a perfectly balanced equivalent moment. The kind of composition he refers to is found in the exquisitely balanced and precise landscape picture-scroll Spring Mountains (illus. 60, 61) by his Chinese contemporary, the mid-Yuan court artist Shang Qi (active early fourteenth century). Spring Mountains is an emblem-like jewel of a painting that selectively synthesizes the Chinese landscape painting tradition, with its allusions to and coopting of Chinese royal blue-and-green landscape. It is also enchantingly attractive, as if extracting and crystallizing beauty from the picture-scroll tradition – consider Wang Ximeng’s (1096–1119) One Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, which was in circulation around Daidu – and putting the artist’s consummate technical skills on display.10 Produced for the very highest echelons of Mongol society, Spring Mountains can be imagined as a masterly adaptation of a large-scale mural into the rolling format, which is to presuppose that Shang Qi’s practice extended to murals and screens. The composition ranges from the foreground in the bottom right to the far distance just before the end to a deep distance at the very end. The lynchpin is a pair of pines at the middle, preceded by a ‘foil’ vista and followed by a flat vista. Structurally, it rotates around this central vertical pivot line, being a large painting but just short enough to display fully open, giving a sense of how the Mongol court valued the Chinese tradition through patronage of painting and how that heritage was remodelled and adapted to Yuan court taste.

Female painters and patrons in Yuan art In the historiography of much of China’s past there is little evidence of the participation in art discourse of women and other marginalized groups, including royalty, clerics and foreigners. Not so in the Yuan. Female painters and patrons evidently enjoyed significant roles as aesthetes and taste-makers and found ways to advance their interests through scroll art, as attested to by a clutch of extant artworks. Perhaps the circulation of artworks among elite women was widespread, a possibility given how what survives of Yuan Chinese painting in Japan speaks of far more varied and disparate tastes than is indicated by the material record transmitted (and highly curated) in China alone. As to the cultural power of prominent women in Yuan society, we know that elite intermarriage and aesthetic interactions among the ethnicities of Yuan were not uncommon. But we are not generally led to expect that wives and concubines acted as especially civilizing influencers either in northern arts under the Khitan Liao (916–1125) and Jurchen Jin (1115–1234) or in the Sino–Mongol Yuan. There are intriguing glimpses of the position of education in women’s lives in Yuan art. Reflecting a northern polyethnic value system and exemplary of early Yuan court practice is the art of the long-lived court artist He Cheng (1223–after 1314), whose period of activity spanned Jin to early Yuan. In his handscroll illustrating the poet Tao Qian’s (365–427) famous ode Returning Home, dated 1314 (illus. 62), the elderly artist offers a moving portrayal of Tao Qian’s personal role in educating his daughters. The oeuvre of the best-known woman painter of the Yuan and indeed of later dynastic China, the southern Chinese Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), wife of the courtier and polymath Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) (see illus. 81), is uneven and problematic from an authenticity angle. Among attributed 94

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62 He Cheng (1223–after 1314), Returning Home (Guiqulai tu), 1314, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 41 × 723.8 cm.

picture-scrolls, A Bamboo Grove in Mist (illus. 63) is plausible for its intimate proportions and scale (it measures 15 centimetres high by 112.4 centimetres long), classical tripartite composition, relatively narrow range of depth in the middle distance and soft, controlled brushwork.11 We return below to the context of Guan Daosheng’s practice when we consider the art world of Zhao Mengfu and his circle, but it is worth noting here how her art was incorporated into a genre of scroll, popular in the later dynastic period, known as a ‘collected highlights’ (jijin). Her attributed painting Bamboo Clumps in Mist and Rain (bearing a date of 1308 and dedicated to an unknown female recipient), features second in the Collected Highlights of Yuan

Artists (Yuanren jijin) scroll assembled by the Ming collector Xiang Yuanbian (1525–1590), following her husband Zhao Mengfu’s painting but before works by canonical later Yuan masters Ni Zan (1301–1374) (see illus. 84) and Wu Zhen (1280–1354) and four others.12 A Mongol royal, the Grand Elder Princess of the State of Lu, Sengge Ragi, great-granddaughter of Khubilai khan and elder sister of the khan Ayurbarwada (Renzong, r. 1311–20), was one of the most influential yet historically underrated collectors of the Yuan period, as noted at the head of this chapter.13 She was the principal patron of one of the most technically gifted artists of the era, Wang Zhenpeng. Wang’s Boya Playing the Qin 95

63, 64 Attributed to Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), A Bamboo Grove in Mist (Ludi tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 14.9 × 112.4 cm.

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

65 Wang Zhenpeng (active early 14th century), Boya Playing the Qin (Boya guqin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 31.4 × 92 cm.

(illus. 65), exemplifies the prominence of scroll art as the platform for his superlative draftsmanship and her patronage.14 Through analogy, the topic of Boya directly confronted Chinese anxieties around Yuan’s transmission of China’s cultural tradition: in antiquity, the accomplished qin zither-player Yu Boya broke the strings of his instrument after his intimate friend and audience of one, the woodcutter Zhong Ziqi, died. Through her patronage of perhaps Yuan China’s most virtuosic painter and in this painting specifically, the princess pointedly addresses the conundrum facing much of China’s artist community under Mongol rule: will you trust the Mongol overlords, and what will you do to enrich and transmit culture in the Sino–Mongol world economy? Wang Zhenpeng’s Boya uses the immediacy of synaesthesis to blend an eidetic, olfactory and aural sensory world, but it also has intellectual referents. The half-closure of soul-mate Zhong Ziqi’s

eyes in this picture is quite provocative within the visual discourse of old-master paintings. It seemingly rises to the challenge set by Gu Kaizhi (c. 344– c. 406), who had written, ‘To paint the hands playing the five-stringed zither is easy, To paint the eyes tracking the flight of geese is hard.’15 As such, the painting exemplifies Wai-kam Ho’s evocation of the notion of a ‘picture-idea’ (huayi), which may be multi-sensory, entwined with cultural memory and associated with the academic painting tradition since the Song.16 In numerous interweaving ways, Boya also exemplifies a distinctively Mongol imperial curating of art conventions. It plays out a subject purportedly painted by Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) himself in Listening to the Qin,17 but in a monochrome Yuan scholarly horizontal picture-scroll, mounted in the princess’s personal mounting livery (of which, more below). The picture itself incorporates a visual allusion to probable Tang paintings of this subject, known 98

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in works such as Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute, to which Wang Zhenpeng had access in royal and capital collections. The consummate draftsmanship, in the quality and character of ink-outline painting, also channels that scholarly mirepoix, the art of Li Gonglin (1049–1106) (see illus. 40). The oeuvre of Wang Zhenpeng speaks to how the princess instrumentalized Wang’s superlative skill and unique access to old-master collections in the capital. A jiehua master and well-connected and influential artist, Wang Zhenpeng was originally from Shaoxing, Zhejiang and later shaped in Yongjia (Wenzhou, Zhejiang), a major centre of painting in late Southern Song and into the early Yuan. He was bestowed with court honours, including the name Guyun chushi, ‘Virgin Scholar of the Solitary Cloud’, which evinces his interface with multiple senior members of the Mongol royal family and infers his interactions with leading Mongol officials like Jigüntei (1281–1323), who served the princess, and Chinese scholar–officials from Yu Ji (1272–1348), who wrote his tomb inscription, to the princess’s court calligrapher Feng Zizhen (1251–1348) to Deng Wenyuan (1259–1328), a director of the Hanlin Academy. It is no surprise he was present at court festivals and famous gatherings and, as we will explore further below, that on such occasions his art was showcased alongside seminal works by the old masters. Wang Zhenpeng’s oeuvre begins with the 1308 scroll Vimalakirti and the Doctrine of Non-Duality (illus. 66), an altered transcription of a Jurchen Jin-dynasty work on a Buddhist theme. Wang Zhenpeng’s presence at court and his experience there of interpersonal relations surface in the specific naturalism of subjects like Vimalakirti, in that the court promoted inter-religious debates and contests of the kind depicted. Confrontations between those who wield holy power is a major theme of Inner Asian royal conversion narratives, and an example of the immanentist belief

system of the Mongols, with their economy of ritual efficacy and custom of grading the effectiveness and power of religion.18 Besides the male dynamics in Vimalakirti and Boya Playing the Qin, Wang Zhenpeng also executed paintings with female themes, including the one known as Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha (see illus. 72) as well as panoramic ‘ruled-line’ paintings (jiehua) of the court-sponsored annual dragonboat regattas. He had a string of close followers, including Li Rongjin, Xia Yong, Zhu Yu and Wei Jiuding (all fourteenth century). His Mongolsponsored interest in framing his scenes using architectural structures to conjure a stage-like threshold, breaking down the barrier between the virtual and material worlds (see Nursing the Infant Buddha), is echoed widely across regional vernacular practices: for example, in the manner in which ateliers of mural painters decorated tomb chambers, providing one illustration of how Mongol patronage influenced popular visual culture. It is not surprising that post-Yuan historiographic purists would exclude court artists such as Wang Zhenpeng and Shang Qi (see illus. 60) from official histories, despite their flair and virtuosity and indeed their influence, but what of the princess’s connoisseurly audience at and beyond the court at the time? It is hardly likely that she ever intended to win over the elderly Song loyalists, including Zheng Sixiao (1241–1318) and Gong Kai (1222–1307) (see illus. 83 and 73), especially since the evidence suggests her activities were more driven by her personal instincts and education rather than any kind of official policy. Her collecting and display habits show how she simply liked the art of the Song loyalist Qian Xuan (1239–1301) (see illus. 82, 85). Still, as Yuan court art, Wang Zhenpeng’s painting is in tune politically with the more programmatic and civic works by his fellow Chinese contemporaries, men in the senior ranks of officialdom, including Zhao 99

66 Wang Zhenpeng (active early 14th century), Vimalakirti and the Doctrine of Non-Duality (Weimo buer tu juan), 1308, handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 39.2 × 218.3 cm. .

67 Attributed to Lu Sheng (active early 14th century), spurious signature of Cao Zhibai (1272–1355), The Eighteen Gentlemen (Shiba gong), handscroll frontispiece, ink and light colours on silk, 35 × 128.1 (?) cm.

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Mengfu, Ren Renfa (1254–1327) and Li Kan, who all worked extensively in the handscroll medium. Sharing a common interest with these Chineseeducated taste-makers, the princess was also a patron of calligraphy, and one of the fifteen or so extant scrolls bearing her seals is an intriguing painting of the ‘painted preface’ type, The Eighteen Gentlemen (illus. 67), an intertextual mode that brought a calligraphic inscription of a set text (usually some values-laden or iconic subject) into dialogue with an emblematic picture within the horizontal scroll medium. The painting features a mass of branches growing from a single pine tree trunk, originally done at the princess’s command by a painter called Lu Sheng (active c. 1320s) to a now lost calligraphic transcription of a long prose-poem composed and executed

by Feng Zizhen in his capacity as calligrapher– connoisseur to the princess.19 The painting exemplifies the classical proportions and dynamic balance alluded to by Rao Ziran. The ‘painting heart’, at least at the time of creation in the Yuan, was marked with the princess’s seal (top right) but no other text (what is written in the ‘painting heart’ now is by the Qianlong emperor in 1747), underscoring its crisp complementary relationship with the transcription it once prefaced. That calligraphic rendition we can only imagine from Feng Zizhen’s colophons in the mode of powerful Northern Song scholar calligraphy (see illus. 69) to works in the princess’s collection – see illus. 24 (left end); and Picture of Insects and Butterflies from Life (illus. 68), carrying a traditional attribution to Zhao Chang (d. c. 1016).

68 Traditional attribution to Zhao Chang (d. c. 1016), Picture of Insects and Butterflies from Life (Xiesheng jiadie tu), handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 27.7 × 91 cm. 103

69, 70 Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind (Songfeng ge shi), handscroll, ink on paper, 32.8 × 219.2 cm.

Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces

The semantic nature of the Eighteen Gentlemen painting also gives an insight into the role of educated women in Sino–Mongol society. It is a kind of Chinese visual word game, appropriate in a gift to wish a young man good fortune in his official career. In the ‘auspicious dream’ story alluded to here, Ding Gu of the Three Kingdoms period (220–80) dreamt of a pine tree growing out of his belly. He later rose, in the 260s, to become a chief minister of the Wu kingdom (222–80), ranked as one of the sangong (‘three excellencies’ of state). People said this was portended by the character for pine, song 松, in his dream. The graph comprises two elements, a mu 木 (tree) radical on the left and a phonetic (gong 公, meaning a superior gentleman or excellency) on the right. The radical mu itself is composed in writing of two elements which are also characters, first ‘ten’ (shi 十) and then, superimposed over that, ‘eight’ (ba 八). These two steps make the word shiba 十 八, ‘eighteen’, so that the whole song 松 character could be unravelled as a portent, signifying that ‘after eighteen years’ Ding Gu, and hence surely also the recipient, ‘would be a gong’.20 In the medieval visual–semantic knowledge system, all of this could be encapsulated in and conveyed by the image of the pine tree. Here, the exquisitely proportioned relationship between the tree and its pictorial frame must have provided, in complement to the original calligraphic inscription, almost total aesthetic saturation.

Temple in Daidu by the Grand Elder Princess, Sengge Ragi, in 1323. She already had a thriving art circle and, like Huizong, a standard mounting practice for commissions and works in her collection, typically involving the placement of her seals and the addition of two colophons by her court calligrapher–connoisseurs, Feng Zizhen and Zhao Yan (active early fourteenth century). An example just noted is the scroll of Pictures of Insects and Butterflies from Life, albeit the painting lacks secure dating (see illus. 68).21 The princess’s largest seal, ‘The emperor’s elder sister’s calligraphy and painting [seal]’, was placed in the upper right corner of the ‘painting heart’ of scrolls she collected. Some of these seal impressions have been tampered with by later collectors, typically by the excision of the right half, which would have identified her as the owner (‘the emperor’s elder sister’), as on Boya Playing the Qin (see illus. 65), an act usually ascribed to Ming nativist chauvinism, on a par with the omission of painters like Wang Zhenpeng from the official Yuan history, Yuan shi.22 Such practices have made art-historical reconstruction of the princess’s celebrated 1323 banquet, or in Chinese ‘elegant gathering’, at which she brought out several dozen works from her collection, all the more significant and the worthy subject of a recent exhibition.23 What happened after the Buddhist purification ceremony and then the feasting is of intense interest. A prominent Chinese scholar–official and guest, Yuan Jue (1267–1327), records:

The princess’s elegant gathering

When all was cleared away, they brought out some picture scrolls. [The princess] commanded those of her suite who were

Picture-scrolls were the centrepiece of a celebrated festival gathering hosted at the Tianqing 105

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Harder to gauge is how the scrolls were handled and displayed by the army of art handlers in the princess’s retinue. Where colophon-writers refer to ‘rolling the scroll’, this was surely a general reference to the unrolling and re-rolling of the scrolls for them by the attendants, as when Zhang Gui of the Central Secretariat wrote, ‘Rolling the scroll to look again, my eyes are doubly brightened.’ We have to assume that the writers were furnished with a suitable writing environment, at least a chair at a table, as well as the materials, for the extemporary performance of writing in front of an audience full of wine.26 This Mongol princess’s role as an art impresario at court is extraordinary, given her Mongol ethnicity and the rarity of such examples at courts in China’s history. For Yuan Jue, her intervention could be rationalized and most positively presented in the guise of the ‘court instructress’ from Chinese antiquity, the figure shown in the final scene of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress scroll (see illus. 3), whose authority and jurisdiction extended to using artworks to guide and shape court and dynastic culture. So what works did the princess select for her guests, and how were they received? Her collection evidently had the range and depth to allow her to make judicious choices. Beyond works of high aesthetic quality by royalty (Huizong) and examples of the classical Chinese tradition of calligraphy linked with upstanding male character (Orchid Pavilion Preface), already noted, she brought out paintings illustrating Mongolian culture and its relation with Chinese culture, such as figural paintings of sheep and horses and of certain established narrative themes on loyalty such as: the parting on the steppe of two Han generals, Li Ling and Su Wu; paintings on themes of nature, domesticity and beauty, including cut flowers; classical Chinese landscape paintings; paintings with religious themes, mainly Buddhist and Daoist; and works

capable to add inscriptions in the backing [paper]. When this ritual was complete she then again commanded those who were competent in literary composition to record the year and month to illuminate [the occasion] for future generations.24

Not all the works inscribed by some fourteen of her guests, including the scholar–officials Deng Wenyuan and also Yuan Jue, who left a fulsome record having quit office months later after the Nanpo coup d’état, would have been handscrolls, but most of the important ones were. Second on Yuan Jue’s list was a canonical example of Chinese calligraphy, the Dingwu ink-rubbing version of the Orchid Pavilion Preface (previously endorsed by the late Zhao Mengfu and his circle); there were also works of calligraphy and painting by Huizong, who was certainly not regarded here, as at other moments in history, as the epitome of a hunjun or ‘fatuous ruler’. It is too bad that only one of the dozens of calligraphy and painting scrolls viewed is extant, a work of calligraphy by Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind, dated 1102 (illus. 70).25 The colophon of Bozhulu Chong (1279–1338), a Jurchen or ethnic Khitan courtier, gives a flavour of the critical responses. His poem, inspired by Huang’s calligraphy, emphasizes the aural and sensory imagination, using onomatopoeic words (like xiaoxiao) to help contrast the humdrum world with the loftiness of ‘the man of the Way in his upper storey’, as the poem puts it, ‘with the soughing sound about his ears, listening to the wind in the pines’. It appears that some of the inscriptions were written in pairs or trios or however many would fit onto a single sheet of paper, and that these may have been inserted into the scroll during later remounting, although other (perhaps most) commentaries would have been written directly into the backing paper where there was space. 106

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by recent and contemporary masters, including Qian Xuan and her own Wang Zhenpeng. She constructed an exhibition argument, as it were, through this selection from a canonical corpus of picture-scrolls, one with which the audience was familiar and whose contextual cultural power it understood. References in the written commentaries assume familiarity with collecting and taxonomic and interpretation practices in antiquity. They also highlight the materiality of accumulated treasures of what are called ‘yellow silk’ scrolls (materially recalling the yellow silk ‘water dividers’ or geshui in handscrolls, used most classically in the Xuanhe mounting format by Song Huizong), likening the princess’s painting collection to the Confucian classics. The possession of these treasures, with their magical aura, afforded the prospect of seeing cultural patterns and hence divining the direction of societal change, all for the better conduct of ruling and government. In a common currency, knowledge was produced in this context through visual tropes. A stellar figure at the Mongol court, the princess clearly was seen to be instrumentalizing the Chinese aesthetic notion of yuyi (implied, figural or allegorical meaning 喩意 or embodied meaning 寓意) in these artworks. Yuan Jue’s record of the event states:

And this is tempered by scorn for its opposite, when he continues: Hence the reason why the [Grand Princess of] the Principality of Lu has inherited and acquired [these paintings] and takes her delight in them, is that she has truly attained the profound intent of the Five [Confucian] Classics. How could this be likened to the scheme of the scholar consumed by curiosity who listens open-mouthed, merely to indulge the ear and eye [with novelty]?

It is no surprise that some of the colophons by the princess’s guests are fawning, but the manner of this is of interest. Hanlin Academy readerin-waiting Li Yuandao, for instance, in his commentary to Huang Tingjian’s calligraphy, wrote: ‘It is fitting that this should be a curio of the Imperial family.’27 The princess’s initiative had a legacy, reverberating through the lethal court politics of the 1320s and beyond, as is well known. Just a few months after her ‘elegant gathering’, for example, another group scholar–official viewing occurred, on the third day of the sixth month (of Zhizhi 3, in other words, 1323), as is recorded in an anonymous one-line colophon to the painting of Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy (see illus. 13), ‘colleagues of the Assembled Worthies [Academy] together viewed [the painting] in the western part of the Dengying Hall.’28 By 1329, such gatherings had evidently paved the way for the establishment of the Academy of the Pavilion of the Star of Literature (Kuizhangge xueshiyuan) by the new khan Tugh Temür (Jayaatu khan, Wenzong), another aesthete and patron of the arts. Some 113 officials, including distinguished Mongolian, Inner Asian and Chinese scholars and statesmen, would serve in the academy, which existed to transmit Chinese Confucian high culture to the Mongol

In the past, kings collected the folksongs that spread throughout [society] high and low [to show how they listened to their subjects]; and in the same way, had grasses, trees, insects and fish minutely grasped [in paintings to be able to identify and distinguish them]. According to the nature of each of these things, they understood its figurative meaning. By observing culture’s patterns [in these ways], they were able to mirror antiquity [in shaping the polity].

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court establishment,29 including ‘the appraisal and classification of the paintings and calligraphic works in the imperial collection’.30 A celebrated example of a meeting is recorded in the collective viewing colophon to Zhao Gan’s Early Snow along the River (see illus. 27). This is traditionally seen as a key moment illustrating how the Mongol rulers and their polyethnic advisors had become sinicized but how Tugh Temür came to value all these activities associated with Confucian high culture is a moot point. Who his role models were, including and beyond his kinswoman the princess herself, given her spectacular role as a royal actor in Chinese scroll culture, demands further nuanced modelling and critique.

This is, again, a shortish, single-view scene limited to what the eye can immediately absorb through gazes from a single vantage point, that is, not requiring either the beholder to move much or the object to be moved: in other words, selfpresenting as a picture. Wang Zhenpeng’s interest in liminality and geometry has some intriguing points of overlap with related visual concerns seen in art from as far away as Europe.33 Wang was geometrically disciplined in his application of planes and parallelism to generate an affine or parallel linear mode of perspective in his Nursing the Infant Buddha and we can sense this as a new contextual iconology of naturalism, in tandem with deliberate cropping of the scene’s edges (note the cut-off carpet at the bottom edge) to frame the picture.34 The virtuality of the world of the picture is conjured here through this trimming, which serves to blur or even dissolve barriers between the pictorial space and the beholder’s. The parallel perspective system generated with the carpet and the throne appears quite ‘Western’ to the modern eye, but a ‘source’ in European art at that date is not obvious, calling into question any one regional or cultural origin – or indeed any hierarchy of influence for the appearance of this perspectivalism in painting across Eurasia in the age of the Mongols. The structure of the scene, using canopies supported by pillars or staffs, was common to royal reception scenes, however, as is seen in paintings such as Simone Martini’s (c. 1284–1344) fresco of the Maestà (1315–21) in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, in which the Virgin Mary holds the child Jesus on her knee.35 This fascination with geometry at the mid-Yuan end of the Eurasian continent has later ripples. There is a remarkable cosmographic circle made with a compass in Zhu Derun’s (1294–1365) 1349 scroll Primordial Chaos (Hunlun tu) (see illus. 198), where the circle – the hunlun itself or a full moon or its reflection – hangs low, seemingly suspended

Real and other spaces Yuan painting shows a dramatic new interest in liminal framings within pictures, often for interior settings. In his study on screens and the recursive space worlds of ‘paintings within paintings’ (huazhonghua) in Chinese art history, Wu Hung illustrated the absorbing Whiling Away the Summer by the early Yuan painter Liu Guandao (1258–1336) and explored the embedded screen imagery.31 In the Yuan, architectural framings, making use of pillars and entrance-way steps to conjure the picture frame and surface as a threshold between virtual and real worlds, are also a feature of north China’s tomb murals by travelling ateliers and indeed of print illustrations such as the scene of entertaining a guest in the Forest of Affairs.32 At court, we see this trend, presumably emanating out of this quarter of influence, in Wang Zhenpeng’s paintings such as Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha or, to give it its long title, Mahaprajapati or Helidimu Guizimushen (Hariti, Goddess of Easy Delivery, Giver and Protector of Children) Nursing the Infant Buddha (illus. 71). 108

71, 72 Wang Zhenpeng (active early 14th century), Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha (Yimu yufo tu juan), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31.9 × 93.8 cm.

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below the wind-tossed tangle of tendrils and between the artist’s inscription and the cliff-edge rock and pine clump.36 However, the Yuan moment was short-lived, and Ming painting would quickly lead in other directions. So where does the handscroll fit in all this? A prior generation of scholarship conceived the notion of mid-dynastic scholar paintings as ‘images [or impressions] of the mind’ (xinyin), which related the virtual space and artistic traces in a painting to its creator, and understood the self-conscious and art-historical qualities of Yuan painting as marking a discontinuity from nature, by contrast with the naturalism of Song, a way of thinking generated by looking at Song and Yuan art through

Chinese painting history.37 Thinking through scroll materiality and Mongol-era synchrony, Wang Zhenpeng’s ‘real space’ techniques present as well fitted to the Mongol court, but he was also clearly au fait with wider developments in painting in China, including the escalating importance of landscape as a genre. By late Yuan, landscape would be the prime genre of all the leading scholar–painters, and the hanging scroll would be noticeably displacing the handscroll as a format. The patent topicality of picture-scroll art at the early to mid-Yuan court, however, is clear from a witty conceit that further played with interior space, where Wang Zhenpeng even alluded to landscape painting in Boya Playing

73 Gong Kai (1222–1307), Zhongshan Going on Excursion (Zhongshan chuyou tu), handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 32.8 × 169.5 cm. 110

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the Qin. In the arms of a servant on the right is a bundle of scrolls wrapped up in a case. On that scroll case is a misty landscape painting featuring two tiers of mountains (see illus. 58 and 65), possibly even a reference to the scroll-painting art of one of his colleagues, such as Shang Qi (see illus. 60). It is tempting to ask whether the Yuan arthistorical turn could have had the effect of reducing the size and scale of paintings in general and handscrolls in particular, encouraged by small-scale art at court and by the mesmerizing interiority of the art of a late Yuan master such as Ni Zan. However, we do not see the demise of the ‘long scroll’, even as the late Yuan polity began to fray and social norms were challenged. The diversity and flexibility of the medium continue unabated. Standing back to look at changes over the long fourteenth century, late Song scrolls by the likes of Zhao Mengjian (1199–before 1267), such as his tour-de-force Narcissi scroll at 374 centimetres long,38 were typically longer than could be viewed in a single scroll opening but still mid-size. Early Yuan handscrolls by the elderly Song loyalists, such as Zheng Sixiao (see illus. 83), Gong Kai and Qian Xuan (see illus. 82 and 85), were either of short or medium length, such as Gong Kai’s Zhongshan Going on Excursion (illus. 73), which is 169.5 centimetres long.39 Many other early and mid-Yuan handscrolls are also of short or medium length, but very long ones also appear all through the period: there are Zhao Cangyun’s (active c. 1300) inscribed narrative work Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains (22.5 × 564 centimetres) and Isles of the Blessed (31.5 × 970 centimetres) attributed to Puguang (active 1286–1309);40 Li Kan’s serial portraits of bamboo species in his Ink Bamboo of 1308 (now divided into two scrolls) and Chen Jizhi’s (active early fourteenth century) Treaty at Bian Bridge of 1320 (36 × 774 centimetres); as well as Huang Gongwang’s (1269–1354) Dwelling the

Fuchun Mountains of 1350 (over 6 metres long) and, by an unknown artist, Episodes from the Career of a Yuan Official (cropped in half and missing the signature).41

Intermediality Related to this diversity in the form of scrolls, we find in the Yuan an accelerated transfer of pictorial images across media, including ceramics and prints. Despite its literary pedigree, the picture-scroll was not immune to this. Images in mid-Yuan pinghua (‘plain text’) printed books typically fit across the top quarter of the page in horizontal frames, sometimes bleeding across two pages, very like and perhaps influenced by the frame and proportion of the handscroll in their presentation. As has been well studied in the celebrated example of ‘Guigu Descending the Mountain’, these pinghua illustrations quickly found their way into the decorative repertoire of the middle Yuan on some of the finest examples of the new blue-and-white porcelains being made at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi from the 1330s, an eye-catching and high-status brand or product which quickly gained pan-Eurasian recognition, as well as onto de luxe examples of Longquan celadon ware from Zhejiang.42 Some extant handscroll-paintings have not dissimilar proportions and literary qualities, showing how the circulation of repertory images drew at least some handscroll production into this diffusion with its wider regional ramifications. It is not a surprise that one example survives in Japan: Bright Consort Leaving China, by the Jurchen Jin artist Gong Suran (active c. 1127–62) (illus. 74), which with its four figural groups is compositionally the kind of scene that could have shifted to print or to a large painted vessel surface.43 Cultural vision in bringing figural imagery into the pictorial decorative repertoire of plastic 111

74, 75 Gong Suran (active c. 1127–62), Bright Consort Leaving China (Mingfei chu sai tu), 12th–13th century, handscroll, ink on paper, 30.2 × 160.2 cm.

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arts pre-dated Yuan literary examples and has a still poorly understood relationship with north China or Cathay in the period of Khitan, Jurchen and early Mongol rule. A new freedom to coarsely and brazenly appropriate the horizontal scrollpainting mode onto the flattish circular body of painted ceramics is evident from the Jurchen Jin period. It would seem an obvious transfer, yet it only happened relatively ‘late’, that is, in the Jin and the Yuan before Jingdezhen blue-and-white (which appeared from around the 1330s), on relatively ‘popular’ ware, Cizhou stonewares made around Cixian, Hebei Province, and elsewhere across the north. This buff to grey stoneware body could be covered with white slip to create a ‘paper’ ground over which light and dark brown slips were used like ink as outline and wash. The designers could be disarmingly obvious in their intention to link the status aspirations of their users with pictorial content. Around the flattish belly of one fairly straight-sided jar (illus. 76), seemingly fashioned to carry a horizonally scrolling picture design ringing its form, we find a gentleman of sartorial elegance emerging from a pavilion under a tree to admire forested mountains.44 One can imagine this jar, from the fourteenth century, as a potter’s transposition of a Ni Zan-style ‘scholar-in-landscape’ motif onto a wine

jar, but this was also a process whereby a nuanced set of scholarly tropes (in Ni Zan’s case, austerity, desolation, embedded texts) were displaced by a more anxious need to depict and colour rather than loftily imply the scholar’s presence. The image on the jar comprises four distinct but logically connected and slightly overlapping scenes (pavilion, tree, scholar, mountains), which, echoing the scholar’s gaze, are also read from right to left like a picture-scroll. The designer’s approach to this scrolling picture indicates how he was less concerned with the authenticity of his decorative sources than with the challenge of laying a four-scene, two-dimensional design down onto a gently curving three-dimensional surface. The elaboration of the scholar-in-landscape scenery fits in a taut design framework: that is, a positioning of the picture between the thick brown circle above and a loose cloud-like band below, which brilliantly mark off the shoulder and foot as external. These bands accentuate the scrolllike qualities of the picture, in harmony with the picture content. These decorative effects are cannily conceived to map the main scenery to the jar’s function as a wine container. The dark-painted lip of the jar calls to mind the liquidity of its contents but also links up visually with the thick band above the scholar-in-landscape image. This is a 113

76–9 Stoneware jar, covered with buff white slip and decorated in brown with a scholar-in-landscape design, Cizhou ware (Cizhouyao hecai shanshui gaoshi tu guan), Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), 21.7 × 17.6 cm. 80 Wine jar painted with fish and aquatic plants, Yuan dynasty, mid-14th century, porcelain with underglaze cobalt blue decoration, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, 30.3 × 34.9 cm.

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fascinating psychological play on the designer’s part, which connects the status, quality and mood connoted by the scholar-in-landscape scenery with anyone who would consume the jar’s liquid contents. The marriage of a decorative four-scene approach to this plastic shape of a jar to consciously evoke the picturesque qualities of an East Asian picture-scroll is superbly achieved in some highend examples of mid-fourteenth-century blue-andwhite. One stunning ‘fish jar’ for wine (illus. 80), which triggers auspicious connotations (the word ‘fish’ puns on ‘plenty’ while blue puns on ‘purity’), features four distinct scenes of individual fish gliding about at their ease among reeds and lotuses. In a pictorial aesthetic obvious by association with handscroll-painting, but intelligently applied to porcelain, the designer makes a virtue of the jar’s well-rounded shape and shiny-surfaced white body to evoke the visual refractions we perceive when looking into crystal-clear water.45 Flattened, fan-shaped reeds sway in the current from their roots at the vessel’s foot, which doubles as the bed of the pond. Lotus stalks emerge from the lake bed below to open out as flowers in lateral views and as leaves tipped towards the picture plane, below the neck. The cover of this wine jar, now lost, would have been a lotus leaf. In their approach to building ceramic design around the decorative potential of blue-and-white, Jingdezhen designers easily assumed the contemplative and affective aesthetics of the elite picture-scroll in this distinctively late Yuan shared visual economy around the implied meaning of content and form. That empirical depth of knowledge in Chinese painting, including the range and depth of the decorative repertoire, the tradition of attaching symbolic value to form and a pragmatic adaptability around the horizontal picture frame, will have played its part in the process of turning blue-and-white into a Mongol global brand.

Zhao Mengfu and his circle Any study on Yuan art must reckon with the figure and circle of Zhao Mengfu, who was himself a brilliant but controversial statesman and had the fortune to have married Guan Daosheng, encountered above (see illus. 63). A southern Chinese courtier and scholar–official shown favour by Khubilai khan and his successors, Zhao Mengfu had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the corpus of old-master paintings and calligraphy, overwhelmingly handscrolls, and was a taste-maker and critic of renown who left dozens of highly influential colophons on artworks. The scale and scope of his influence can hardly be imagined without the handscroll. This art medium enabled his mode of critical intervention in colophons and provided his own forte in his painting practice, serving also as a most exclusive medium and platform to disseminate his ideas among influential peers. Some of his own paintings in this medium were programmatic, even propagandistic, works openly in praise of the Mongol government, such as Watering Horses in Autumn Fields in 1312, which presaged the restitution of the civil service examination system, beloved of the Chinese-educated scholar class, for official recruitment after 1313. Other, more nuanced paintings circulated among peers, such as Sheep and Goat (illus. 81), painted around 1305–10, which pushed new canonical norms in the text–image relationship following an earlier phase in the Song–Yuan transition when scholar–artists had become acutely aware of the picture surface. We see Zhao Mengfu’s mentor and fellow townsman Qian Xuan as having begun this in scrolls like Living in the Hills, an archaistic landscape on the theme of reclusion. Here Qian Xuan divided off the last short portion of the picture’s paper ground, about a seventh of the paper’s length, with a faint vertical line to create a zone to 116

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the left for his inscription following the painting.46 Another example is White Lotus (illus. 82), excavated from the tomb of the early Ming prince Zhu Tan (d. 1389) in 1970, which measures 32 by 90.3 centimetres and features an inscription in which the two lines of poetry hang above the discursive commentary and signature.47 Seemingly inspired by Qian Xuan, Zhao Mengfu often appeared to be consciously experimenting with the positioning of his inscriptions and colophons as part of a visual discourse involving his detractors as well as his nearest and dearest. By the 1300s, Zhao Mengfu and other scholar– painters had begun placing their artist inscriptions more obviously within the picture frame, without any qualifying line or distance separating the pictorial and textual spaces, so that the text floated beside, over or within the image. Writing into the surface of a picture may have

interrupted the illusion of virtual reality within the frame, but must be understood to have remade the act of viewing as something more akin to reading a picture-scroll. Besides appearing in Zhao Mengfu’s painting, inscriptions are found variously employed in the Song loyalist practice of one of Zhao Mengfu’s erstwhile friends. Chief among Zhao’s detractors, Zheng Sixiao formulated a small, intimate frame for his Ink Orchid of 1306 (illus. 83), the inky plant appearing on the paper without any ground, the lyric voicing of lament over the invasion of the Southern Song by Khubilai. In this portrait of the flower with ‘regal fragrance’ (wangzhe xiang) and resonant of the era of the sages in antiquity, the long leaves are literally intertwined with text. To the right, two fanning leaves appear to support or sound out the artist’s poem inscription. To the left, a large horizontal leaf literally supports the vertical trio of forms

81 Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), Sheep and Goat (Eryang tu), c. 1305–10, handscroll, ink on paper, 25.2 × 48.7 cm. 117

82 Qian Xuan (1239–1301), White Lotus (Bai lian), handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 32 × 90.3 cm. Excavated in 1970 from the tomb of the Ming prince, Zhu Tan (d. 1389), Shandong Province.

83 Zheng Sixiao (1241–1318), Ink Orchid (Molan tu), 1306, handscroll, ink on paper, 25.7 × 42.4 cm.

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comprising the artist’s date and signature above two seals which sit either side of it. All of this is delicately choreographed within the rectangular picture frame. In the innovative interplay of text and image in Sheep and Goat we find three bodies, with the equivalent-sized calligraphic inscription assuming a similar formal presence to and interaction with the two animals, as well as a textual point of departure for the artist to reflect on the image’s place in and relationship to art history going back to Tang masters. The manner in which Zhao and his critics reflect on this purely formalistic arrangement is never explicit but vicariously posited through the claim to be embedded in art-historical tradition. We can sample the variety of this change through the art of another Song loyalist, Gong Kai. Under the Yuan, Gong Kai’s painting instrumentalized the same traditional Chinese subjects that ‘turncoats’ like Zhao Mengfu were using, such as horses, but in Gong Kai’s case to lament the eclipse of Song culture. The symbolism of his Emaciated Horse,48 which stood for heroes of anti-Yuan resistance such as Wen Tianxiang (1236–1283), has been well studied but less remarked is his further manipulation of the paratexts. An unmissable, powerful large-character artist’s inscription follows the painting in the backing paper, describing the crumpled horse as ‘[casting] a shadow like a mountain on the sandy bank in the setting sun’.49 In addition, in the image frame, he also inserts two small three-character inscriptions: the title in the upper right and a signature in the lower left, either side of and patently framing the image of the ill-treated horse as ‘thoroughbred bones’. Conversely, Gong Kai’s Zhongshan Going on Excursion (see illus. 73), illustrating a popular narrative episode about the legendary demon-queller Zhong Kui and his sister, is neither signed nor dated on the painting but bears two artist’s seals on the centre paper join, so-called ‘bridging seals’

(qifeng), an occasional feature unique to multi-sheet picture-scrolls. The painting is again accompanied by a long artist’s inscription in the backing paper following the rear border panel. Not without humour or irony, as a Song loyalist, his concern in the inscription is to justify his painting as an effort to clean up a painting subject that in the Song had become ‘near to obscene, going so far as to show Lord Whiskers [Zhong Kui] in a field privy with a porcupine going for him, and his sister with an open blouse wielding a stick to drive it away’.50 The absence of writing on the painting becomes an instrument to cleanse the subject of thoughts of scatology or nudity. These deliberate choices about the formal incorporation of calligraphic text or impressed seal legends into the ‘painting heart’ exemplify how even selfmarginalizing loyalists participated in the broader visual culture, playing a role in introducing the presence of text into the picture frame. Another group of Zhao Mengfu’s scrollpaintings were more reflective and personal, such as his last dated work (1321), for a Chan Buddhist monk, Elegantly Emerging from a Bamboo Clump (Xiu chu cong lin), depicting a single bamboo branch. Just the leafy head of the branch is seen to arc horizontally across the picture frame, echoing a composition by his late wife, which is in fact found mounted together with his painting in the composite handscroll known as Ink Bamboos by Members of the Zhao Family (Zhaoshi yimen mozhu tu).51 The normal art-historical model that we could invoke to map the fate of the Chinese picturescroll in the Yuan is one whereby influential aesthetic ideas and practices in the form of a vibrant, refreshing classicism were disseminated from a loose elite of taste-makers, a social circle of scholar– artists and connoisseurs around Zhao Mengfu, mostly with some official standing in the early and mid-Yuan. Subsequently, this core Sino-culture is seen to persevere even as it was disrupted by 119

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84 Attributed to Ni Zan (1301–1374), Bamboo Branch (Zhuzhi tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 34 × 76.4 cm.

picture-scrolls, an attribution entitled Bamboo Branch (illus. 84). So, the handscroll format was from time to time called upon when required by late Yuan painters, whether for compositional or referential reasons, as here perhaps, or else to provide an extended space for ‘empty-white’ (kongbai) cloudy abstraction, or to provide space for an accompanying text.52 But if the lifespan of the medium across the Yuan shows us anything, it is that the handscroll format was not in itself a fundamental prerequisite for the transmission of the scholarly tradition as it had been for much of that tradition previously. In addition to his painting practice, Zhao Mengfu’s legacy is profoundly felt in connoisseurship of the canon of old masters. The material record shows that he was the connoisseur who dramatically expanded the role of the colophon, transforming it from its previous default as an annalistic group viewing record into something potentially virtuosic, the performance of an individual scholar’s discursive commentary. To step back and take a broader historical view of the impact of the early Yuan moment, we can identify

late Yuan fraying of the social order, something visible in the displaced lives of exemplars like Ni Zan (see illus. 84). In that Ni Zan’s painting art mirrored his life journey and was symbolic of south China’s landed gentry in the late Yuan, it was a contingent and mobile practice keyed to his social entanglements and expectations of social reciprocity. We tend to see his creative urge for self-expression through a deliberate iconological choice to employ spare and rustic modes. His constrained aesthetics stands in contrast with Zhao Mengfu’s art in praise of government, an overt strategic visual exploration or historical research for wider societal ends. All the same, both these practices depended on a shared visual memory of the painting tradition and its associated interpretive mindset. A landscapist in the ‘hills beyond a river’ mode, Ni Zan rarely painted in the handscroll format, preferring instead small hanging scrolls, perhaps simply because he usually had only small sheets of paper to work with. However, it is notable that the Zhao Mengfu Bamboo Branch composition looks to have inspired Ni Zan to do one of his few surviving horizontal 120

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a visible step-change in collector–connoisseurs’ approach to their paratexts through the example of Night-Shining White attributed to Han Gan (see illus. 25), which has an unusually long provenance track stretching back to Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815– c. 877), as noted previously. The earliest marks are just names of viewers or owners: Zhang Yanyuan’s ‘Yanyuan’ and Mi Fu’s (1051–1107) ‘Fu’ with a seal. The early emperor–collectors, Li Houzhu (Li Yu, 937–978, r. 961–75) and Song emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–62), provided title and attribution, while the Southern Song connoisseurs started to record the viewing of the scroll as an event (Xiang Ziyin, 1138) and remark on the past rulers’ attributions (Wu Yue). There are no early Yuan traces, so it is very noticeable how the later Yuan connoisseurs, Wei Su (1303–1372) and Jie Hong (1304–1373), were the first to add longer, six- to eight-column poetic colophons, now in the backing paper following the rear ‘water divider’ or brocade end-panel.53

Writing in troubled times, Wei Su describes how this scroll, with its associated cautionary tale about women who topple kingdoms – from Xi Shi to Yang Guifei – should be preserved by the side of an emperor, Mongol or otherwise. Looking through the corpus, time and again Zhao Mengfu’s is the first colophon to appear in the backing paper of many pre-Yuan old-master works,54 but he also inscribed personalized remarks on contemporary works. A candid example from 1289 is his inscription on Qian Xuan’s Eight Flowers handscroll (illus. 85), which appears at the end of the ‘painting heart’, seemingly in place of Qian’s own signature, but adopting Qian’s own practice of post-positioning artistic inscriptions after the painting, exploring the diegetic edges of painting in a manner also echoing the transfiguration of nature in the manner of its representation. Notably, Zhao’s rectangular text on Eight Flowers is ‘indented’ per socio-literary protocol: that is,

85 Qian Xuan (1239–1301), Eight Flowers (Bahua tu), before 1289, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 29.4 × 333.9 cm. Inscription by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). 121

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lowered a short distance from the upper edge of the paper, to no higher than Qian Xuan’s narcissi blooms to the right, out of respect for the older man, his fellow townsman and purported teacher. Beyond protocol, these effects come across as affectionate and conceived to be sympathetic to and respectful of the personal tragedy within Zhao’s real message: ‘Recently, this gentleman has been inebriated every day and his hands shake due to delirium tremens: he would be hard pressed to paint like this again. There are now so many followers and students in our district imitating his work, knocking out travesties of true beauty [like Dong

Shi copying Xi Shi’s frown], that this scroll should be truly treasured.’ We may pick up on another point exemplified here, namely Zhao Mengfu’s reference to the material form of the painting as a scroll or to the act of scrolling through the artwork, implying bodily motor function, haptic sensation and lyric experience through materiality.55 This personal voice of a knowing and practising authority becomes a hallmark of Zhao Mengfu’s critical colophons to not just paintings and calligraphy but also rare ink rubbings. Carrying on pre-Yuan practices (see illus. 70), a related subset of handscrolls, both transmitted

86 Attributed to Wang Xianzhi (344–386), Epitaph for My Nursemaid (Baomu zhi), early 13th century, handscroll, detail, ink rubbing and ink inscriptions on paper, 31 × 29 cm (the rubbing). 122

Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces

and new, was made-for-scroll manuscript transcriptions of calligraphy, such as we see in the oeuvres of Zhao Mengfu, his Inner Asian friend the calligrapher Xianyu Shu (1246–1302) and later calligraphers like the Inner Asian Kangli Naonao (1295–1345).56 Ever adaptable to the interests of the calligraphy brethren, however, the handscroll format continued to absorb high-end calligraphic specimens from or destined for other media, such as stone engravings or ink-rubbing copies patted off them. Occasionally, a calligraphic transcription might be sliced and diced so it could be fitted into a different-sized scroll, as in the case noted above of the transcription of part of the ‘Admonitions of the Court Instructress’ text by the Jin emperor Zhangzong (r. 1189–1208) (historically taken for Huizong’s calligraphy) in the Admonitions scroll.57 Celebrated examples of transmitted ink rubbings, underscoring the continuing centrality of the classical epistolary tradition of Chinese calligraphy, were Tang-dynasty Dingwu rubbing versions of the Orchid Pavilion Preface, an example of which princess Sengge Ragi showed at her 1323 banquet. Real or confected discoveries of ancient calligraphy could also cause a stir, as in the case of Epitaph for My Nursemaid ascribed to Wang Xianzhi (344–386) (illus. 86). Widely celebrated as a masterwork of calligraphy in the Southern Song and Yuan, this ink rubbing from a carved clay brick was in fact fabricated and then ‘unearthed’ in 1202. It circulated in the late Song and Yuan in at least two versions in handscroll format, attracting extensive commentary from connoisseurs.58 Writing in 1309 on what is today the only extant version, Zhao Mengfu commented that ‘Although the Epitaph . . . was discovered quite late, nevertheless . . . it is worth a million of those [other works] passed down in the world that were copied onto stone.’59 Once a consensus view had formed among connoisseurs around the authenticity of the crumbled epitaph tablet, the

highly visible imperfections in the rubbing only served to underscore the value of this form of reproduction for preservation and the suitability of the handscroll, as opposed to the concertinaed ‘model-book’ album format for calligraphic specimens (dantie or congtie), which had become popular from the tenth century, as the material format in which to transmit it.

In summary Mongol appropriation of the aesthetic sign system is in fact apparent in scroll culture from the early to mid-Yuan onwards. Even the former Song royal Zhao Cangyun’s narrative picture-scroll Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains underscores the expressive latitude afforded to Song loyalists and remnants by Khubilai, following the khan’s coup de main in 1287 whereby he successfully wooed and then summoned the former Song princeling Zhao Mengfu to court. After the restoration of the civil service exam system in the mid-1310s, albeit in a distinctively Sino–Mongol form, leading scholars openly praised their government, led by Zhao Mengfu and his Watering Horses in Autumn Suburbs. Recent discoveries or reattributions of Yuan paintings (for example, Episodes from the Career of a Yuan Official) have tended to show the patronage system and inner workings of the Yuan state functioning relatively normally, undermining the meta-narrative constructed around late Yuan dystopia, austerity and deprivation, while institutional innovations such as the Kuizhangge star chamber show the state grappling with rites, propriety, diplomacy and governance – in short, late medieval statecraft – around the viewing table. What effect overall on the Chinese old-master scroll-painting tradition do we find in the Yuan moment? Despite its brevity and in hindsight precarity, the Mongol visual economy was generally 123

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of a Yuan work like Episodes from the Career of a Yuan Official, which actually shows the roofs of Khubilai’s imperial palace; on the other, there was the creation of a new image for Beijing, for instance through an admittedly problematic scroll, Eight Views of Beijing, which redefined the city, effacing the Yuan metropolis through its representation as a blank slate, in a series of unblemished and unpopulated pastoral beauty spots, a bucolic vision with its posterity in southern Chinese scholarpainting tradition.

supportive as well as appropriative of Chinese collecting, connoisseurship and scholar-painting modes and this created the conditions for the foundation of the nascent scholar-painting tradition, as text and image combined in a new alchemy in the picture-scroll medium. Flashpoints would emerge in the Yuan–Ming transition over propaganda. Looking ahead to the next chapter, in a bracing dose of Ming revisionism, we can glimpse the process of rebranding Khubilai’s ‘metropolis’ (Daidu, Khanbalik) as the Ming ‘northern capital’ (Beijing). On one hand, there was the suppression

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4 Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll

T

he Ming dynasty (1368–1644) is sometimes held up as the moment when the native Chinese scholar-art tradition flowered in China, with picture-scrolls of figures, landscapes, flowers and narratives at its heart. Yet even this scholar-painting mainstream, closely associated with the southern city of Suzhou (hence, the Wu School) and critically bound, over the course of the period, into opposition with academic and professional painting (the Zhe School), had its own exogenous material, such as literary erotica.1 The period has been a candidate for the kind of worlding of the discipline under way, for example, in the reframing of the Italian Renaissance as a global phenomenon, spurred by Claire Farago and others.2 Indeed, this is the first period of China’s art history from which we have quantities of a wider range, socially and materially, of ephemera and pictorial material culture in non-elite media (including scrolls and print material), particularly from the late Ming, enabling us to look at categories of the overlooked, such as the first small

body of reliably attributed artworks by educated female artists. As the title of the chapter suggests, the Ming saw a profound rethinking of the painted ink trace as a form of knowledge, with implications for our subject, the picture-scroll. As the mid- to late Ming master Xu Wei (1521–1593) reflected, to be explored further below, the artist’s ink trace was an image-shadow to be mused upon and mulled over by the viewer, over and above its duty to represent form naturalistically. His own painting is characterized by a fluidity between improvisation and pre-composition, underpinned by technical mastery, and exemplifies an accelerated spectralism in expressionistic inky brushwork, that is, in the range and depth of properties of deictic marks, generated with the media as the basis for reading a painting as a retracing of the act through its execution, somewhat to the detriment of extended scrolling composition. What did this mean for the scroll medium as the basic platform for a mounted and framed surface 125

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87 Digitally generated reproduction of a blue-and-white jar with scrolling design, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Tianshun period (1457–64), Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province.

on which that shadow falls and is momentarily captured? This chapter investigates the picture-scroll at this moment, in the raking light of wider early modern effects of the urbanization of societies and the marketization of the economy. It focuses in particular on the picture-scroll as a form of embodied knowledge, and it develops themes around the impact on the materiality of the picturescroll from socio-economic but also intellectual changes. Positioning the handscroll in relation to regional cultures, it reconsiders the movement of scrolls across East Asia and reviews local productions of scroll-paintings, to allow for a more fine-grained characterization of the particular chemistry of text–image–media relations in the Chinese picture-scroll at the onset of modern globalization.

China’ while, domestically, he conveyed mixed messages around Mongol self-interest and laxity.3 Under the first five Ming reigns, from 1368 to 1435, and the Interregnum (1436–64), we recognize a radical reform of culture, in which neoConfucianism and Han ethnogenesis infused pictorial arts with the establishment revival of Southern Song (1127–1279) academic and court culture. It is notable how during the Interregnum in the mid-fifteenth century, blue-and-white manufacturers at Jingdezhen, no longer bound by court production values as under the preceding succession of reigns, once again fashioned large jars bearing scrolling imagery, as if these pictures were migrating from painting across media to another aesthetic surface and object, as had begun to happen in Yuan production (illus. 87, see illus. 76 and 80). The continuation of late Yuan scholar-painting modes under the early Ming revival was but brief. Some of the individuals concerned were seemingly willing participants, yet others died, or were exiled or executed.4 A legendary figure in the late dynastic popular imagination, the Daoist master Leng Qian (active 1343–after 1368) was already a great age when summoned to the early Ming court. Although he is noted primarily as a musician, candidates for paintings attributed to him

The early dynastic construction and aesthetic tensions, 1368–1464 Historically, the Ming dynasty was immediately framed in contrast with the defeated Mongol Yuan by the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (Taizu, r. 1368–98), according to his needs and purposes as dynastic founder. In his foreign policy, he portrayed Yuan as illegitimate and ‘a shame to 126

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do survive, including a 4-metre-long handscroll, Gathering of Immortals, in soft hemp-fibre brush and ink outline. In an unusually placed inscription before the end, in a manner integrated into the composition, he claimed to recreate from memory an eponymous scroll by Li Gonglin (1049–1106) that he had seen in Huangzhou.5 Scholarly application to painting in these attenuated horizontal compositions alone gives credence to the argument that this medium was being revived and centred within elite culture for its nativist connotations, but we could go further insofar as the rhetoric of formal allusions to the monochromatic ink-outline idioms of artists like Li Gonglin, the hackneyed scholar-painting subjects and nostalgic compositional narrative tropes, looping back to the Confucian classics, support this. Yuan art’s conditional preservation and transmission in this context could come at the price of a complicit displacement, as, for example, in the case of the Yuan court handscroll Episodes from the Career of a Yuan Official, introduced at the end of the last chapter, which features a laudatory royal inscription on Yuan palace stationery, done apparently by the crown prince Ayushiridara (1340– 1378) in the ‘slender gold’ calligraphic style of Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126). Early Ming connoisseurs adjudged the painting to be the product of a more distant context and simply ascribed the calligraphy to Huizong.6 Effacing the Yuan while valorizing the link to Song royal artistry was no doubt politically attuned, but evidence unearthed from an early Ming royal tomb in Shandong, that of Zhu Tan (1370–1389), Prince Huang of Lu, containing the Qian Xuan (1239–1301) White Lotus (see illus. 82) scroll as well as scrolls once in the collection of the Mongol princess Sengge Ragi (c. 1283–1331), demonstrates that the early Ming establishment and early Ming royal taste were hardly monolithic in their revisionism towards the Yuan.7

In conceiving of Ming art historically, it may be justified to assert a ‘continuity and change’ model, but one drawback is that it gives continuity the whip hand and disrupts or qualifies analysis from the starting point that China’s heritage, in the early Ming court agenda, was an instrument of cultural control, asserting a set of links and reference points through visual identification and similarity and thereby displacing others. Scholars have observed how the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopaedia (1403–8), for example, which collated the extant corpus of China’s literary heritage, was an inspired and prolonged means to quiet potentially fractious scholars at an awkward moment of politicial legitimacy for the usurping Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24). The printing of illustrated Buddhist sutras may also have played a like role. The growing universalism of the early fifteenthcentury Asian continent and its archipelagos, visual­ized in the Korean world map of 1402, based on one commissioned by Jamal al-Din for Khubilai khan (r. 1260–94) (that is, Bolanxi’s Da Yuan da yi tongzhi of 1303), was inherited from the Mongols but retempered through Ming foreign policy in the form of the extensive maritime expeditions of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (1371–1433/5) between 1405 and 1433. A scheme of propagandistic, nativist works makes sense in this context. In the oeuvre of celebrated and highly versatile court artists such as Dai Jin (1388–1462), founder of the Zhe School, we find various extraordinarily innovative uses for the picture-scroll. The young Dai Jin painted an album-leaf-sized painting mounted as part of a birthday scroll for the calligrapher Duan Muzhi in 1407.8 This intriguing little painting has a crease down the middle, indicating that it was once in a folding format, and its composition echoes that of a Song album leaf but with a more washy airiness and structural use of light across the surfaces of the forms in the picture. Dai Jin’s scroll-painting of a radiant sun situates a huge orb 127

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88 Dai Jin (1388–1462), The Six Patriarchs (from Damo to Huineng) (Damo zhi Huineng liudai xiang), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 33.8 × 219.5 cm.

rising from a misty horizon, amid a 156-centimetrelong single-view composition, across a sea of highly stylized crashing waves, such as we find in ceramic decoration.9 Meanwhile, his The Six Patriarchs (from Damo to Huineng) depicts each of the Chan figures in turn in his own compositional space and identified with a discretely located caption nearby, but loosely connected via adjoining transitional landscape forms, in a format that is both continuous and episodic, making the hagiographic mode seem lively and fresh (illus. 88). Finally, his Ink Pine handscroll is an outrageously bold sliced-out horizontal vista in which the laterally scrolling picture traces, first, a messy thicket of pine branches and leaves which neatly segues into, second, a view of the base of two pine trunks emerging from a grassy slope. A combination-type composition of stark originality, the expressive inky painting mode also presages the xieyi or ‘sketched concept’ mode of the middle Ming.10 Plotting in early Ming picture-scrolls in the scholar-painting ink-on-paper mode pioneered by late Yuan artists, among them Ni Zan (1301–1374), depended heavily on the formalistic manipulation of visual forms, which tied in neatly with a new nativist, neo-Confucian penchant for return (to origins) tinged with nostalgia. One of the leading

scholar–officials who purveyed this mode was Wang Fu (1362–1416), a follower of Ni Zan who returned to court as a court calligrapher following his banishment under the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–98), and was later seen as the ancestor of Ming scholar-painting.11 A well-known picture-scroll attributed to Wang Fu, Eight Views of Beijing, dated 1414 and patently linked with the Yongle emperor’s controversial decision to relocate the capital to Beijing from Nanjing (which remained the spiritual home of Ming academic court and professional painting circles, the so-called Zhe School), ties selected bucolic views to strategic elements of the new city planning, such as water sources.12 Wang Fu specialized in a new kind of ‘bamboo along the banks of a remote brook’ handscroll, full of nostalgic allusions to the poetic purity of the epoch of the Chinese sage–kings.13 In 1410 he painted A Myriad Bamboo in Autumn (illus. 89), which is only 26 centimetres high but reaches to a length of almost 8.5 metres. The inscription reads: I had been weary of painting for a long time, when one day Master Yu Xingjian brought this scroll to me and asked for an ink painting of the ‘gentleman’ [that is, bamboo]. At the 128

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antiquity and back to a nostalgic, belated present. The monochromy of ink on paper is intensified by the calligraphic microtonalism and the use of atmospheric perspective. One early developer of this Ming academic or courtly mode was Lin Liang (c. 1430–c. 1490). Lin Liang’s vigorously brushed Birds in Bushes marks a new kind of tour-de-force handscroll, which over the course of its 12-metre length tracks the active life of birds through dense thickets in a fairly close-up panning view with a narrow depth of field.16 The extended monochrome format, setting the inky medium into contest with representational outcome, consciously but loosely borrows from a composition like Willow and Crows, Reeds and Geese attributed to Song Huizong (see illus. 39).17 However, with Lin Liang, the scaling up of the picturescroll format to this horizontal length, a material pairing with the powerful descriptive mode of execution, arguably owes more to an early Ming courtly taste for bravura showmanship than to Song aesthetics. Artists seem to have competed not to be outdone by the virtuosic performances of other huge personalities in the ranks of the early Ming court and academy artists, making the once short and bookish scale of the handscroll a distant memory. The establishment’s Southern Song revival highlighted positive links between the Ming and

time, I was a bit tipsy from drinking some wine, and just as I happily started to wield my brush, without noticing it, I had come to the end of the paper. Although its manner does not fully conform to the rules of the old masters, still it captures a mood of easy country living that comes from my own ideas, so perhaps it is something worth having. Since Master Yu by nature has a very lofty disposition and is an expert connoisseur of the arts, he will certainly ignore its external appearance [and perceive the true inner qualities of the work].14

Rhetorical rather than candid, Wang Fu here defined the late imperial scholar–painter’s humble boast, twinning his comfortable lifestyle and nonconformity to rules with that virtuosic length. This was one of a number of such showpieces, a production pattern taken up by Xia Chang (1399–1470), whose similar works in this vein reach to over 12 metres, with titles on the theme of Spring Rain on the Xiang River.15 Viewing the picture-scroll equates to an emotive journey in time and place: literally, in scrolling inked images, to the source of the iconic Xiang river of the Confucian classics (unrolling) and then back down again along the flow (rerolling); figuratively, to the sources of Chinese culture in classical 129

89 Wang Fu (1362–1416), A Myriad Bamboo in Autumn（Wanzhu qiu shen tu), 1410, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 26.1 × 847 cm.

90 Zhu Zhanji (1399–1435, r. 1425–35), Marquis of Wu at His Lofty Ease  (Wuhou gaowo tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 27.7 × 40.5 cm.

Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll

Southern Song court cultures, as is seen in the revival of interest in Southern Song court modes such as the Ma-Xia style. Xia Gui (active c. 1180–1224), painter of Twelve Views of Landscape (see illus. 49), had been disparaged in early Yuan connoisseurship.18 The earliest colophon on his almost 9-metre-long scroll A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains (see illus. 52), which is missing the final section that presumably bore the signature, is the one of 1378 ascribing it to Xia Gui.19 Under the Yongle emperor, the revival of Song court art extended to the crude legitimation practice of making pictorial records of ‘auspicious responses’ (ruiying) from heaven to the conduct of government.20 The Xuande reign (1425–35) is rightly renowned for its superlative imperial blue-and-white and technically innovative enamelled ceramics as well as more bland court scroll-painting,21 which tallies with the blanched quality of paintings reputed to be by the Xuande emperor himself, Zhu Zhanji (r. 1425–35). One neat, competent such work is entitled The Marquis of Wu at His Lofty Ease (illus. 90). Embedded in a scroll featuring formalized complementary inscriptions on slightly taller paper, this is a flattering little album leaf of a painting created to be presented to the sexuagenarian Chen Xuan by the emperor and based on a depiction of the strategist Zhuge Liang (181–243) before he came out of reclusion to assist the Eastern Han warlord, Liu Bei (161–223).22 The horizontal scroll is the material platform for an inscribed picture of a figure prostrated among a shady clump of bamboos, the square pile of books he uses as a pillow visually playing off his large soft exposed belly in the centre of the composition, while the figure’s relaxed gaze towards the imperial inscription in the upper left, conventionally occupying a corner space within the picture frame, sets the trans-historical allusions into motion.

The mid-Ming century (1465–1566) The imaginary world of the picture-scroll, if the diversity of the surviving material record allows such a term, was moving every which way in the mid-Ming, a period here comprising the four reigns of Chenghua (1464–87), Hongzhi (1487–1505), Zhengde (1505–21) and Jiajing (1522–66). Some of the salient contextual issues are the intersection of scroll-painting with court pageantry, the growth of collections and the heavy hand of officialdom, seen in factionalism, corruption and confiscations.23 We attend here also to the changing role of professionalism and the artist’s agency in the visual economy of scroll-painting. Regarding an ongoing negotiation of the relationship between the duty to represent form and the expressive content of the mode, we explore the autonomy of expression in the creation of art and transmission of visual culture, and the artist’s assertion of iconological readings, as well as female artistic voices. Finally, there is the continuing question of continental connections. If we begin with collecting patterns, while quantitative evidence is hard to collate, an anecdotal impression from reviewing what is extant today is that the handscroll was starting to become the minority format for painting, at least in comparison with the vertical hanging scroll for display. Consider one of the largest oeuvres, that of the Suzhou professional Qiu Ying (c. 1494– 1552). His handscroll-paintings, which are more celebrated than his works in any other media, are generally either quality transcriptions of oldmaster paintings, such as his doppelgänger of the famous Night Revels of Han Xizai, or reiterations of old painting subjects such as his masterpiece, Spring Morning in the Han Palace of about 1552, long believed to have been done for the salt tycoon-cum-collector Xiang Yuanbian (1525–1590), or pictures intended to be mounted alongside 131

91–4 Sections from Romance of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji), 1498 (Hongzhi 11th year), printed book imitating the format of a handscroll.

95 Wu Wei (1459–1508), Zilu Asking for the Ferry (Wenjin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on gold painted and flecked paper, 46.3 × 110.2 cm.

Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll

a calligraphic transcription by such towering scholar–artist figures as Wen Zhengming (1470– 1559).24 Qiu Ying’s professional painting practice signals the commodification and marketization of luxury and scholar culture, as the old medieval structures and allegiances became eroded and social mobility increased as official rank and status were accessible to wealth through purchase and patronage. The agglomeration of vast private collections in the mid- to late Ming was driven and fed by obsessive and compulsive behaviours,25 an art economy into which the state was bound through the cashiering of political casualities and confiscation of property. This necessitated new inventorying practices along with colophon-writing, but it also spurred an exponential proliferation of seal impressions on the ‘painting heart’, notably at the hands of Xiang Yuanbian. Xiang’s collector’s traces on the Admonitions, for example, comprise multiple seal impressions on the painting and a colophon in seal script as well as the use of a character from the rote-learned sequence in the Thousand Character Classic (Qianziwen) used for inventory purposes. Random and serendipitous, the inventory mark in this case is the character juan (‘handscroll’). In his colophons and records, Xiang also invariably recorded the price he paid, widely

considered to be a vulgar practice (see Chapter Five). He often recorded when he had a scroll remounted. The term was zhuangchi 裝池, literally, ‘to shore up the pond’, referring to the brocade or silk end-panels either side of the ‘painting heart’, which acted as ‘water dividers’ between paddies, geshui 隔水, separating the feature section from its mounting, although both were by now customarily overlaid with paratexts.26 The continental connections of Ming culture and their contemporary framing are also fascinating. A long lost and partially cropped, though still over 30 metres long, Silk Road Landscape Map handscroll, in antique Chinese blue-and-green landscape style with captions, maps the geography from Jiayuguan in Gansu travelling west to Mecca (the subsequent part is missing).27 Probably dating to the middle or late Ming, it confuses the binary option of whether, on one hand, Ming was essentially nativist and introspective, developing a neo-Confucian philological core culture around the Lower Yangtse delta region (Jiangnan), well represented by a body of canonical works, or, on the other hand, whether it was in fact more regionally circumspect. Donated in 2017 to the Palace Museum, Beijing, it has been officially said to ‘[serve] as proof that China already had a clear understanding of the world geography, 133

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especially along the Silk Road, before Western maps were introduced to China’.28 The Silk Road which the scroll or map is said to track is itself a convenient late nineteenth-century neologism in the era of the Belt and Road Initiative, but as historical evidence this scroll does stand to add to our understanding of the Ming state’s coercive bilateralism in foreign and trade policy, along the lines traced by Pang Huiping for official transfer protocols for art.29 As Craig Clunas has shown, the provincial Ming ‘appanage kings’ (fanwang) of the empire’s hinterlands were significant actors in provincial art worlds and took to their graves objects from across the Asian continent, such as gold ingots, which spoke to their status within Ming’s geopolitical situation. These provincial royals may even have been the pioneers of artistic activities such as print publication of art collections, complicating the historical model of a scholar–painting mainstream with the voices of aristocrats, women and foreigners. De luxe print culture would now pose a particular set of problems for the picture-scroll, as we will explore further below, signalled by the appearance of horizontal narrative scenes running over multiple pages above text in printed books illustrating such evergreen tales as Xixiang ji or Romance of the Western Wing and related spin-offs like ‘The Qiantang Dream’ (Qiantang meng), which appeared in a woodcut-printed book format in 1498 (illus. 91).30 This was essentially the innovation of a printed long-form handscroll. China’s regional situation in the mid-Ming surfaces dramatically in an extraordinary picturescroll by the prominent Zhe School master Wu Wei (1459–1508), who is well known for imaginative, delicate and provocative monochrome works such as the Portrait of the Courtesan Known as Wuling in Spring,31 which recursively shows the stylish beauty, whose real name was Qi Huizhen (fifteenth century). In a love-sick pose of female chastity seen by men as

even more enticing in courtesans, she is seated by a stone table pondering (but not actually opening) a small scroll not dissimilar to the picture-scroll itself, amid accoutrements signalling her artistic talents. A new puzzle in his oeuvre is Zilu Asking for the Ferry (illus. 95), where the virtuosity of Wu Wei literally overlays continuing high-level diplomatic exchanges between Ming and the Middle East: he painted on a large (46.3 × 110.2 cm) sheet of China-made gold-painted and -flecked paper, perhaps part of a gift from the Yuan court to the Ilkhanate or Jalayirids rulers in Persia for use in fine book production.32 The gold decoration comprises Qian Xuan-style distant triangular hills crabbing across the middle of the page, seen across a washboard effect of waves. Wu Wei did not overpaint this in black ink so much as create a formal dialogue with it, to produce an engrossing scene illustrating the ancient tale of Confucius’ disciple Zilu asking the way to a ferry. A massive pine trunk serves as an opening repoussoir, while Confucius’ ox-drawn carriage stands halted on a newly hoed field – the gold waves repurposed as furrows – of the recluse–farmer at the left end, who gazes back towards the distant gold hills in answer to Zilu’s enquiry. The unusual form of the signature with no seals and its placement in the lower right loop the eye’s attention back around into the foreground. If the ploughman feels any irritation at the sage’s carriage ploughing up his neatly tilled rows, he does not show it. Wu Wei seems to have relished the dialogical or circular formal and narrative relationships afforded by the opportunity to work with ‘foreign’ gold elements (ripples, distant hills) and Chinese Confucian subjects (tree, narrative). Among the collections of the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul are multiple examples of how pieces of Chinese painting migrated in seemingly hapazard fashion across the Eurasian continent 134

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has been identified in the oeuvre of the Chinese scholar–painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509).33 Staying with the continental question, still very little explored is the basis for a coincidental appearance of painting scrolls depicting court pageantry in the early sixteenth century at either end of Eurasia. Across Europe, royals sponsored records of major political shows such as the English king Henry viii’s (r. 1509–47) Westminster Tournament roll of 1511, known for its commemorative depiction of chivalric spectacle and for featuring the earliest image of a named Black Briton, the trumpeter John Blanke, seen riding a well-shod horse in formation while reading and playing music.34 In Henry’s case, this scroll on vellum thought to have been created by Thomas Wriothesley’s workshop, celebrated the birth of his son by Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) on new year’s day of 1511. In one scene, Henry jousts in front of Catherine (illus. 98). In central Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor and Hapsburg monarch Maximilian i (r. 1508–19) in the 1510s sponsored various triumphal processions in scroll-like images featuring his life events and military victories, such as the 54-metre Triumphal Procession by Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) and his workshop, from around 1512–15, in the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian i (The Great Triumphal Car), published by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in 1522.35 In mid-Ming China, Departure Herald (illus. 97) and Return Clearing are two truly monumental court procession scrolls of the Jiajing reign, from about 1536–8, both measuring around 30 metres in length. Unmatched as picture-scrolls in scale and ambition, they are as lavish, colourful and extravagant as their contents and provide a kind of hieratic documentary of the imperial progress to and back from the Ming imperial tombs about 50 km north of Beijing. The particolour palette is in tune with a newly popular colourful form

96 Unknown painter (c. 15th century), Three Chan Eccentrics, format unknown, ink and colours on paper, 37.2 × 28 cm.

and, in so doing, changed. On the evidence of a probable fifteenth-century folio leaf depicting Three Chan Eccentrics (illus. 96), clearly inspired by and modelled after an uncertain Chinese ‘original’, what Central and Western Asian artists seem to have found intriguing about Chinese art was its plays between geometric schemas and formal content. Within the roughly rectangular painted picture frame of the book, and in front of fanning background trees divided into two green strips either side of a larger white band, the three patriarchs, mouths wide open, are composed into a circular group. They view an open picture-scroll, which is tipped forward so that we can see its contents, including another embedded circular shape – of a curled-up black-and-white cat, an image that 135

97 Unknown Ming Jiajing (1522–66) court artists, Departure Herald (Chujing tu), c. 1536–8, one of a pair of handscrolls, detail, ink and colours on silk, 92.1 × 2,601.3 cm.

98 Workshop of Thomas Wriothesley, ‘Henry viii tilting in front of Katherine of Aragon’, from the Westminster Tournament roll, 1511, colours on vellum, 37.5 × 1,828.8 cm.

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of Jiajing enamelled ceramic production known by the Japanese name kinrande, which features similarly strong reds, blues and gold.36 Following the Rites Controversy of his early reign, the Jiajing emperor made significant use of spectacle and pageant to command the official agenda as well as to bolster his authority and the scale of these pictorial documents points to his use of records of such parades, in suitably elaborate exhibitions or viewings, to extend the investment in the original event. We are beginning to see how the Chinese picture-scroll as a medium was not only adapting to change in Ming socio-political culture but also in relation to Ming’s geopolitical standing.

mode that by comparison with the album takes advantage of the wider lateral expansion of the image possible with the scrolling painting surface. In a similar vein, one of the most celebrated Ming scrolls today is the eccentric late Ming artist Wu Bin’s (active c. 1583–1626) Ten Views of Lingbi Rock, which comprises multiple views of the same subject in a scroll. Meanwhile, the related practice of mounting together different works of different dates in one handscroll in ‘assembled highlights’ (jijin) appears to have been a sixteenth-century innovation.38 This kind of visual mapping of the laterally scrolling surface, populated and paced with formally choreographic imagery, was also taken up by Chen Chun (1483–1544), who is often paired with Xu Wei as a founder of the xieyi mode of self-expression. Chen Chun’s Life Cycle of the Lotus exemplifies this kind of scroll pictorialism.39 Almost 6 metres in length, the artist obviously frames the budding, flowering and wilting of the flower as if tracking a single pond surface, only one that overlays the passage of the summer months onto the scrolling process. Situating the visual action along the centre line of viewing, with little variation of depth, Chen employs overlapping lotus leaf forms in stylized and silhouetted shapes, partially cropped at top and bottom.40 However, it was Chen Chun’s daring use of light and shadowing in his application of ink wash that later Ming artists picked up on, including late Ming women painters such as courtesan–painter Li Yin (c. 1610–1685).41 His immediate ‘follower’ was Xu Wei, who could treat the handscroll no differently from a twelve-leaf album, with minimal variation of the frame size for each subject, or as a slightly more integrated format incorporating different sizes of script and shapes of inscription interspersed among the forms.42 Xu Wei’s celebrated 10-metre-long handscroll Various Flowers (Zahua tujuan) is a tour-de-force of monochromatic inky

The diversification of painting formats spurring a dialogue between form and content A group of picture-scrolls by mid-Ming artists demonstrates that one emerging kind of treatment of the medium was more akin to the album format. Known for his figural albums in ink, Guo Xu (1456–1529 or later) treated the handscroll format as a versatile medium for his forte, that is, as a platform for a pictorial miscellany with a visual quality and character distinct from the bookishness of the codex. The presence of two paintings on equally long sheets of paper within a single picture-scroll, Landscape and Fisherman with Poem, may be by or after Guo Xu.37 The landscape comes first, measuring 22.9 by 156.8 centimetres; the second sheet continues with the fisherman in the first half followed by the inscription at the end, measuring 22.9 by 150.2 centimetres. The artist’s inscription calls this choreography ‘both penned and painted’ (bi bing tu). Here we see an applied formalistic approach, never tending to be abstract yet conceptualist in the approach to form. The scroll is worked with as a small format, providing a flexible ground for a linked series of frames, a 138

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formalism. Phrased across five movements which alternate between close-up views of smaller-sized plants and blooms (pomegranate, lotus) and starkly cropped views of the trunks and branch tips of much taller tree forms, it is punctuated by just a simple line of inscription at the very end. Xu Wei’s Flowers of the Four Seasons extends across nine sheets of paper (it measures 29.9 by 1081.7 centimetres) and is emplotted with an interweaving theatricality.43 Each one of the first four floral subjects, beginning with spring and moving into summer, across peony, grapevine, banana and perhaps osmanthus (gui),44 is painted over a single sheet. Xu Wei then devotes two sheets to a doublewidth cross-section of pine, presumably for autumn, and then suddenly and daringly he switches out of the relief mode of dark ink on light paper into an intaglio mode for the dark-aired winter scene in the final three sheets: one sheet for snowy bamboo and two for a double-width flourish with the closing subject, a prunus and rock. Seen as one of the first moderns, Xu Wei trained himself to see and think imaginatively against the grain. Although he was aware of the visual etymology of the character yong 用 (meaning ‘use’), going back to its ancient seal-script form , his visual glosses were highly flexible and individual. He saw it variously as an arrangement of either: two columns of three kou 口 (mouth) characters; a field 田 (tian) over a river 川 (chuan); or two moons (yue yue): 月 + 月.45 Xu Wei’s expressive approach to pictures and visuality demonstrates the early modern form of a mode of scholarly aesthetics forged in the Han–Tang transition. How far it retained this character in later history is a matter for investigation in what follows. Xu Wei’s mantra, ‘eschewing [the delineation of] form to delight in [ink-wash] shading’ 舍形悅影 (shexing yueying),46 shows that he was a sedulous student of ink wash, but the affinage of his painting practice clearly extended into his

manipulation of the materials that suited the medium, whether it was matching subjects to paper sizes or switching from relief to intaglio brushwork. His awareness of the plasticity of painting was acute, in the way he recorded the phenomenal experience of subjects encountered in nature through these pictorial images – images that doubled as representations and as personal traces left by the media of the process of pictorial representation.

The society of the picture-scroll Access to collections and the patronage of artists in mid-Ming China seem to have been largely male preserves. We have noted the slightly racy subjects painted by Qiu Ying, and to this we can add works by his apprentice (perhaps also his son-in-law) You Qiu (c. 1525–1580), who, along with Qiu Ying’s amanuensis daughter Zhu (d. 1585), inherited the master’s fenben sketchbooks and studio practice. You Qiu’s name is attached to faintly erotic exogenous narratives such as Spring Morning in the Han Palace, dated 1568, which is paired in the scroll mounting with calligraphy by Wen Zhengming, illustrating the lives of the infamous Zhao sisters at the Han court.47 What we might see as conservative modes of painting, based in references to and knowledge of past styles, do continue on in male society in the handscroll format, and this would include Song-style landscape works on silk. A delightful and classical example is a long picture-scroll by a retired scholar–official, Wang Wen (1497–1576), View from the Keyin Pavilion on Paradise Mountain (illus. 99), dated 1562, a quasi-panoramic landscape handscroll almost 6 metres in length.48 As a Nanjing scholar–official, Wang Wen did it in that Song court mode popular among professional and court painters. A very elegant, aestheticized painting, in its brushwork it consciously 139

99, 100 Wang Wen (1497–1576), View from the Keyin Pavilion on Paradise Mountain (Baojieshan Keyinting tu), 1562, handscroll, ink on silk, 39.4 cm × 5,089.3 cm.

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evokes early Song painting and makes fine use of ink-wash background to highlight the whiteness of, for example, shipping on the river. It is traditionally plotted compositionally in three vignette-populated landscape movements, from the foreground opening passage to a rocky, islandlike middle section nestling a water village on stilts to the commercial shipping heading into the far distance at the end. Regarding the scale, some features of interest are sometimes tipped up (a skiff, a building) or brought closer towards the foreground (a sightseeing party) so they can be better articulated. What makes the painting stand out, however, as a work of the Jiajing reign (1522–66) is the handling of light, which emanates from inside valleys and shines off the upper surfaces of rocks. Many of the social aspects of painting associated with men in this period were probably becoming current also among women, such as collaborative, rhyming or commemorative works by social equals, particularly among the scholar class of Suzhou, including Shen Zhou and his followers Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin (1470–1524) and the later Li Shida (1550–1620). Wen Zhengming’s Seven Junipers, of 1532 (illus. 101), is of a subject celebrated in poetry and probably in painting by his teacher Shen Zhou.49 However, unlike in the case of Qiu Ying’s professional studio setup, none of these scholar-artists is particularly known to have had protégées.50 More research is needed to know the extent to which women in the Ming were able to gather and travel socially for the kinds of events that men

celebrated in paintings, often picture-scrolls which afforded the chance to add inscriptions, in group portraits in landscapes and roaming scenic ‘long scrolls’ based on tourism.51 What is notable is how figures of elite women become a far more common painting subject in male painting oeuvres, including in collaborative works. A fine example of a scroll containing a painting by Zhang Ling (active early sixteenth century), once paired with a qu-poem transcribed by his friend Tang Yin, is Beckoning the Immortal (illus. 102).52 This expressive moonlight scene, painted in pale ink, presents a strikingly bold composition. In a moment of intertextual dialogue, the artist decisively used the word tu (picture) in his signature, ‘Pictured by Zhang Ling’, in place of the more common ‘painted by’ (hua), as if to summon into the world the immortal beauty depicted. Patently we have a single-view (29.8 × 111.5 centimetres) picture, rather than a scrolling image, arrayed with few features: the moon, the female immortal figure, the bridge and some beautifully painted plants, all in bright moonlight, originally complementing the qu-poem by Tang Yin.

The late Ming and Transitional periods Cultural changes in the late Ming period had profound consequences for the picture-scroll. While the handscroll provided artists with a highly versatile means to handle time and space pictorially, still, its embedded values were hardly immune to the effects of early modern social and economic change. For a start, collaborations 141

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101 Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), after Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), Seven Junipers (Qi xing hui tu), 1532, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 28.3 × 361.6 cm.

102 Zhang Ling (active early 16th century), Beckoning the Immortal (Zhaoxian tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 29.8 × 111.5 cm.

artist Ma Quan (active c. 1706–62) as one who ‘pursued an effect of sensuality drained of eroticism’, thereby nudging these figures into the study of late imperial visual culture.53 Collectors also began to mount works by late Ming women artists together, as is seen in the scroll Ink Orchids, comprising paintings by Ma Shouzhen and another famous courtesan, Xue Susu. The poet and painter Xue Susu’s Wild Orchids (illus. 103) depicts one of the subjects most commonly (if not always accurately) associated with female painters. The immaturity of critical language about women’s art, including generalizations such as ‘women [were] not good at landscape’,54 means that artworks like these

like the one between Zhang Ling and Tang Yin could have been largely the preserve of male artists, if the extant archive is an accurate picture, but evidence of this kind of collaboration among elite female painters also starts to appear in extant works from towards the end of the Ming period, perhaps in the sixteenth century. This is the period of activity of a famous Nanjing courtesan and celebrity, Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604). Jonathan Hay’s surveys of Ming and Qing art have modelled the re-incorporation of works by such artists into a critical stratigraphy of late imperial Chinese art. He highlighted ‘a particular fragility, the orchid as self-image’ in Ma Shouzhen’s art and spoke of the mid-Qing 142

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still struggle to receive the kind of connoisseurly attention they merit. In a time of profound cultural change, scrolls continued to provide a handy medium for some more traditional subjects like gardens.55 However, by the end of the dynasty, as we will see below in exquisite polychrome prints, the handscroll could in certain newly arising circumstances also be seemingly demeaned to the status of any other decorative object in the way it is insouciantly incorporated into the overall design in another, traditionally inferior, art medium. A litmus test for the late Ming handscroll, revealing of the ‘period eye’ and the extent to which artists were willing and able to transmogrify convention, is the manner of reprise in a 1583 work by Ding Yunpeng (c. 1547–1628) on a very ancient subject, Lady Feng Confronting the Bear, one of the scenes in the Admonitions scroll (see illus. 21).56 Measuring 33 by 185 centimetres, Ding’s scroll picture makes full compositional use of its potential to be viewed – just – in one extended horizontal scene, with a mini-narrative woven through a flattened triangular composition. Guards race in at the opening in a seeminly vain attempt to protect the royal party from the escaped bear, as the valiant Lady Feng stands between it and the emperor. The small signature nestled among rocks in the bottom left corner adds to the antique feel, matching subject and simple ink-outline depiction and lightish colour washes, loosely echoing the mode associated with Gu Kaizhi in the Admonitions. As with the Admonitions, in the context of the late Ming the illustration is faintly parodic, deniably posing the question of whether the effort of the guards to reach the emperor and save him from the bear is worthwhile. There is some value in considering how luxury applied arts of this period are often broadly dated to ‘the late Ming’, here taken to begin with the long Wanli reign (1572–1620), or even more broadly to

the late Ming or the Transitional period across the Ming–Qing divide, with the Transitional period dated to around 1620 to 1673. An object for export overseas like a Swatow dish (illus. 106), datable as such to the late sixteenth or seventeeth century, calls attention to the circulation of Chinese visuality in the wider world in this general period, in art of a somewhat garbled quality being made for the fast-growing middlebrow and international markets of early modernity. Seemingly without too much regard for any cultural difference in its destination, perhaps Southeast Asia, the dish bears an uplifting (for Chinese audiences) image, the isles of the immortals, a place brought home into the present through the Ming spatiality and narrative quality. Compared with extended painting formats, with its circular central picture panel, the dish demands of the potter–decorator an extreme adaptation of the pictorial contents to the available space. Most of the forms and figures are seen in profile or else face towards the distant mountains; in fact, only the ‘split pagoda’ serves a double function in representing both a pagoda standing on the circular dais and a narrow causeway affording access across the sea to the far isles. In terms of the knowledge system of visuality and how this was deployed in scroll culture, the late Ming period provides us with what may be the earliest surviving complete treatise text on scroll mounting. Its author, Zhou Jiazhou (1582–1658), righteously justifies his tome by lamenting the loss of the old ways, for example, the Song-dynasty practices of mounting handscrolls. He lists the bad habits of mounters (for example, cropping the ‘painting heart’, as noted in the case of illus. 35) and examples of good practice among Ming collectors, such as one Xu Gongxuan, who acquired a Ni Zan painting entitled Remote Brook, Cold Pines.57 After outsourcing the task of remounting the scroll to one Zhuang Xishu, Xu marvelled at the quality of the mounter’s skill, which he contrasted, 143

103–5 Xue Susu (c. 1564–c. 1650), Wild Orchids, 1601, handscroll, ink on paper, 32 × 598 cm.

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Japan in around 1613; in Europe, one appears in a Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Jan Breughel the Elder (1568–1625) painting, The Sense of Sight, of 1617–18.60 The format of Chinese painter Ye Cheng’s (active c. 1522–66) painting, Mount Yandang, measuring 35 by 290.3 centimetres (illus. 107) points to an already growing culture of vicarious sightseeing through images. The inscription at the beginning is very small, while the picture adopted an almost documentary style of painting made from prints, as if the artist had never visited the place in person. Yet, in an underwhelming start to cross-cultural comparison, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (Macerata, Italy, 1552–Beijing, 1610) arrived in China and presented engravings of the Escorial and of St Mark’s Square to the emperor in 1601 as ‘promotional gifts’ while denigrating Chinese painting for not using oils or Italian projective perspective.61 Across East Asia, print and art reproduction cultures were thriving. Over the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a new genre of paintings known as ‘Suzhou fakes’ (Suzhou pian), most of which were complete pastiches of old masters in picturescroll form, catered to the undiscerning new entrants among both elite and new urban mercantile classes (and foreigners, such as Japanese), which craved ownership of this expanding scholar culture: this was readily provided to them in this counterfeit format, enabling shadow collections to be amassed. Some of these ‘fineries of forgery’ scrolls, complete with bogus colophon sets by the most famous scholars in history, were well over 10 metres in length.62 Suzhou pian makers and other forgers favoured some artists more than others: forgeries of works by the masterly Qiu Ying, for example, are well known, but Leng Qian was also a popular name to attach to pastiches (illus. 108).63 Suzhou was also the home of a specialist woodcut print production, known as ‘Suzhou prints’, which are mainly preserved in Japan and

106 Swatow-type Zhangzhou export ware ‘split pagoda’ design dish, south China, late 16th–early 17th century, porcelain painted in overglaze enamels, depicting the Daoist isles of the blessed, d. 38.3 cm.

through a witty allusion, to the discernment of the sage Sun Yang (7th century bce). Better known as Bole, Sun Yang was the author of the Classic of Judging Horses and an exemplar, by inference, of the human talent spotter.58 Connoisseurs typically only referred to the business of mounting by professionals when this went particularly well, as in this case, or badly, just as they generally only referred to the qualities of materials when there was something unusual to note, such as superior paper – or their anxiety about the process, given the timelessness of stories about collectors being duped when fakes were substituted by shady mounters for their originals.59 The late Ming is also significant in that the world seemed to be getting smaller, with distant places brought nearer through lenses and through increased domestic and intercontinental travel and travel as imagined through images. The first telescope in East Asia was sent from Europe to 146

107 Ye Cheng (active c. 1522–66), Mount Yandang (Yandangshan tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 35 × 290.3 cm.

108 Ascribed to Leng Qian (14th century), Immortals Playing Weiqi in Penglai (Penglai xianyi tu), 18th-century forgery, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 29.6 × 100.2 cm.

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109 Circle of Kano Takanobu (1571–1618), Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori monogatari), detail from scroll two of a pair of handscrolls, early 17th century, ink, colours, gold and silver leaf on paper, 27.8 × 1,419 cm.

in Europe (see illus. 127). Meanwhile, in Japan, the genre known as Nara e-hon (‘Nara picture books’) comprised multi-set popular illustrated books but also handscroll sets, reprising the great early days of Japanese narrative scrolls (emaki). Nara e-hon were not just pastiches, however, and some remarkable inventive touches are found. A striking example of this is in a scroll set entitled The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (illus. 109), a visual narrative that unfolds across 30 metres of paintings and inscriptions in a pair of scrolls by an early Edo-period artist in the circle of Kano Takanobu (1571–1618).64 In the final sequence of images, the painting deviates from the rather fantastical narrative text in that it unexpectedly reorders the events, as it were offering the reader a variety of possible denouments. Such variety and flexibility may have had a logic within localized cultures, but at the same time transfer across East Asian

cultures was not uncommon in the seventeenth century, certainly generating confusion in the new media worlds of the region.65 Not unrelated, one significant aesthetic innovation of this period was de luxe printing. Top painters continued to confuse idealized scholar/ professional distinctions by getting involved in the print economy. Exemplifying the messy complicity of the learned elite in this expanding culture market, Gu Bing was the author of a Grand Compilation of Famous Paintings through the Ages (Lidai minghua dacheng) of 1603, which is one of the earliest examples of the reproduction of old-master paintings in woodcut printing.66 He also produced one of the finer de luxe woodcut painting manuals, Master Gu’s Painting Manual (Gushi huapu, 1603). Now if Suzhou pian had provided the means by which aspirants to scholar culture could own an old-master scroll, the enterprising Gu Bing modelled a role 148

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which expanded and fuelled this market: his illustrated ‘painting manual’ (huapu, the same term Song emperor Huizong had used for his Xuanhe Painting Manual) published a virtual ‘greatest hits’ collection of old masters in reproduction, to illustrate the canon of old masters in fine print reproductions, to which he added the voice of curatorial authority. Gushi huapu includes compositions ‘giving the impression of a section of a handscroll’.67 These are linked with Zhao Mengjian (1199–before 1267) and with Ni Zan (illus. 110), who by 1600 was perhaps the archetypal scholar–landscapist, advancing a literati connection with the horizontal medium. This is sustainable in Zhao’s case, but Ni Zan did not care for it and rarely used it, as noted in the previous chapter. In today’s material record (and probably the late Ming one too), his specialism was in small hanging scrolls. When he did use it, the handscroll was a formal choice matched to the subject or occasion, as in the case of the attributed Bamboo Branch, with its referencial character to

other similar compositions (see illus. 84). So the unveiling in Gushi huapu of a Ni Zan landscape – in the Ni Zan type-form: a monochrome ‘level distance’ (pingyuan) across water, beyond a sparse stand of bare trees – in the handscroll format speaks to a conflation of this horizontal format and the spare landscape art of Ni Zan in the late Ming popular imaginary. Gu Bing’s sense of popular culture called for the insertion of the late Ming Ni Zan landscape type into the epitome of the ancient scholarly format, a short horizontal picture-scroll. The printed codex frame facilitated also the emergent concept of the ‘detail’ or section. Gu Bing evidently did have access to some original old works in the handscroll format, or to reasonably close copies, as in the case of the horses and grooms painting after the Yuan master Ren Renfa (1254–1327), which has been well studied. Gu Bing’s visual quote from a Ren Renfa painting in another of his illustrations in the Painting Manual is somewhat garbled: in the caption it is said to represent Zhao Yong (1289– 149

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110 Page reproducing a painting by Ni Zan (1301–1374), from Gu Bing (active 1594–1603), Master Gu’s Painting Manual (Gushi huapu, 1603). Japanese reprint of 1798, woodblock print, 26.9 × 41.9 cm.

c. 1360), the son of Ren Renfa’s contemporary Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), but it is actually a reversed quote of the stable section from Ren Renfa’s handscroll-painting of Nine Horses.68 The manner of this mistranslation of an old-master typology into the print format is revealing about the changing status of the picture-scroll in this time of transition and about the growing desire for knowledge about scholar culture among the urban mercantile class. In a similarly puzzling example, a small hanging scroll with a Japanese mounting also quotes from an excerpt from the Ren Renfa handscroll, in reverse (illus. 111). There is speculation that this painting is the source for the Gu Bing print,69 but it is also possible that the painting is a knock-

off shipped to Japan from the Suzhou pian world of circulation. Sometimes, what these objects bear material witness to is so garbled as to be anybody’s guess. Among educated artists active in this commercial world of art, two of the finest late Ming figural artists, paired as ‘Chen of the South, Cui of the North’ (Nan Chen Bei Cui), were Chen Hongshou (1598–1652) and Cui Zizhong (1574–1644). The producer of a vast oeuvre, Chen Hongshou created bespoke paintings for high-end clients, including some superb handscrolls made with his amanuenses. He also ran a studio where these ‘disciples’ (menren) turned out series of paintings of generic subjects on his own templates (mostly birthday paintings) as well as by sampling his designs of 150

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of directly observed, embedded, reflected and shadow images. Each of the narrative scenes is intertwined with a material object or artwork in some other form, from jade to bronze to lantern to screen, which provides its visual framework on the album page. As such, the visual tale unfolds, leaf by leaf, in the cultured domestic space connoted by the animated presence of these luxury objects. The album’s preface is already slightly provocative in presenting a somewhat sexualized frontispiece portrait of the heroine, Oriole (Yingying).72 Appropriately for the opening of the narrative, in scene one (shown in the illustration), the

woodblock illustrations for popular drama books. His print practice, evidently an adjunct means to popularize and sell his painting practice, has been well studied, including in comparison with his contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). Cui Zizhong had little involvement in the print world, but his art is intriguing in treating the hanging scroll very similarly to the handscroll. In his oeuvre, which is very small by comparison to Chen Hongshou’s, the two are composi­tionally almost interchangeable. His idiosyncracy in both vertical and horizontal formats was to place the main figural group obviously to one side of the central point in the composition as is seen in the handscroll of 1634, Immortal Traces of Changbai (Changbai xianji tu), and in the hanging scroll Dogs and Chickens amid the Clouds (Xu Xun Going into Reclusion; illus. 112). This did not prevent him from declaring in his inscription to the latter, however, that ‘all the other painters have fenben [iconographic models] [of this painting subject] but I have gone back and taken the ancients as my teachers without being constrained by them.’ 70 By way of a conclusion, let us take stock of the cultural standing of the picture-scroll as the late Ming merged into the so-called Transitional period. We find here a pattern of pragmatic adaptation and conscious reappropriation of the picturescroll format according to need and situation, as lyrical expression of high aesthetic quality retained a cachet in this taut visual economy. In the world of de luxe xylography, the quality of production and innovation in the design in the finest polychrome woodcuts if anything increased, as is seen in a unique and remarkable surviving album of 1640, illustrating the popular scholar-meets-beauty drama The Story of Oriole, also known as the Romance of the Western Wing (illus. 113).71 The album abounds in puns, double meanings, recursions and ruses conjured up by a confusion

111 Unknown painter (signature of Ren Renfa, 1254–1327), Feeding Horses, 1400–1600 (?), hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, 50 × 75 cm. 151

113 Unknown painter, ‘Scene 1: Scholar Zhang Junrui rides to the Pujiu Monastery (Tou chan)’, from Min Qiji (1580–after 1661), Romance of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji), also known as The Story of Oriole (Yingying zhuan), 1640, album of woodblock print illustrations (multi-block polychrome xylography).

112 Cui Zizhong (1574–1644), Dogs and Chickens amid the Clouds (Xu Xun Going into Reclusion) (Yunzhong jiquan tu), hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, 191.4 × 84 cm.

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figures-in-landscape picture is depicted as embedded within the opening section of a handscroll. Dropping this scene into a picture of a handscroll opening (the whole rendered in de luxe xylography) highlights the cultural value of the horizontal scroll format as the medium for visual narration, availing of its connotations as a resource for narrative plotting and signalling to the reader that a scroll-like drama begins here, but in print. The artist delights in this inside-/outside-the-tale confusion, for example, in the placement of marginal texts. The inscription on the scroll’s exterior titleslip at the right edge gives the scene’s title, ‘Picture no. 1: Like an illusion’ (‘Ru huan di yi tu’), on a background of cranes, symbolizing transcendence and longevity, flying among clouds. The illusions are multiple and breezily conflated, referring to the alchemy within the visual presentation scheme but also to the content, since here the hero, Scholar Zhang, arrives at a Chan Buddhist monastery, the scene of most of the tale, while leaving behind the ‘real’ world symbolized

by the city wall with its skewed watchtower and bannerless flagpole. To the left, the artist positions his signature (‘instructed by the brush of Yuwu [that is, Min Qiji]’, with two seals) neither in the story itself nor outside it on the blank page (the only feature ‘outside’ the scroll is the red-haloed celestial body). Somewhat unnervingly, this inscription sits in the liminal space on the reverse of the scroll mounting (revealing the creative identity behind it all), which becomes both flattened as a calligraphic space and rounded as a rendering of a springy scroll backing. This is an insightful allusion to early Buddhist narrative scroll-painting, where the text was sometimes inscribed on the reverse of a painting, as was noted in Chapter One. Here is our introduction to the creative mastermind, the otherwise unknown Min Qiji, who sets this de luxe reprography in direct aesthetic competition with the picture-scroll, which must take its place among the sequence of aesthetic objects, from bronzes to lanterns to scrolls, that he instrumentalized within this new pictorial order.

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5 Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll

T

he embrace of traditional Chinese philology to the near exclusion of other approaches is a risk to which a linear study of the Chinese handscroll in its late imperial stages is rather susceptible. This is due in part to the exponential growth of the textual and paratextual content in scrolls over China’s last dynastic formation, the Manchu Qing (1644–1911), and the eager reception of this by the market and many researchers. Apart from visual, pictorial and to some degree the inter­textual issues, what risks getting overlooked is often the embodied knowledge within scroll culture, the things that may have seemed too obvious or trite for mention by those, whether expert or dilettante, who enjoyed close physical familiarity with these objects and who participated often unselfconsciously in reshaping this corpus of works in its transmission to posterity. Meantime, in the kind of modern Western colonialist thinking which has powerfully shaped the discipline of art history, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of Baroque

influence on the arts of the Orient, as faster, wider and deeper global connections were forged through trade with religious missions to empires such as the Qing.1 The nineteenth century, in a politically driven narrative, is but a cautionary tale.2 As a result, attention has been somewhat skewed towards the study of virtuality and the geometric articulation of pictorial space, in particular the extent to which landscape painting in China was influenced by characteristics of Baroque art of the Italian variety. This includes its rigid formulation of projective spatial depth, with ground-plane recession towards high horizons in panoptic views, effects that made virtual three-dimensional spaces in two dimensions, akin to what Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) dubbed ‘symbolic form’ in European Renaissance art.3 David Hockney (b. 1937) lamented this perceived influence in a pioneering video, A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (1988; see illus. 199), a study on two Qing imperial Southern Inspection 155

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Tour scroll sets, one from the Kangxi (1662–1722) reign and another from the Qianlong (1736–95) reign, triangulated with a cityscape by Canaletto (1697–1768). The contemporary artist debunked the notion that the Italian Baroque iconology had any inherent claim to superiority in his challenging subtitle, ‘Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth’.4 There is always the risk of implying some kind of lingering asymmetrical model of cross-cultural influence, however, particularly when we look at the ways that a variety of European art formats and modes, such as the ‘landscape’ picture shape, may have distorted the patterns of Chinese framing effects and handling and viewing practices encoded into the scroll and other painting formats. But it is fair to ask, how did the Chinese art tradition, embodied in the scroll-painting movement which we trace here, handle this new level of artistic interaction and appropriate (or succumb to) effects from Italian Baroque and other European art, and to what ends? Equally as important, to bring historical balance to any model of cultural exchange, this chapter will investigate what other significant forces were at work which could collectively or severally have shaped the culture of handscroll art across the more than three and a half centuries of Qing autocracy. In common with changes across East Asia, seen in Edo (1603–1868) Japan and elsewhere, this would include the growth of urban mercantile classes as readers and art consumers, which merits a social historical approach, the enterprise of the publishing industry as an art disseminator, with intermediary implications, complications surrounding the person of the artist as creator, and the task

of disentangling the imperialist enterprise of art patrons at the Manchu court, especially during the ‘Kang-to-Qian prosperity era’ (Kang-Qian shengshi), also referred to as the High Qing, over the reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng (r. 1723–35) and Qianlong emperors.

The transition from Ming to Qing There are reasons to see how in the Ming–Qing transition or Transitional period (1620–83) the picture-scroll, while ever mutable and adaptable, was facing unprecedented challenges to its status and raison d’être, as all the way through visual culture, old and new ways of seeing were being adapted and transposed across art forms and media. An era of cultural transition around a prolonged moment of weak politics rather than pivotal dynastic change in 1644, the seventeenth century is notable for these diverse artistic enterprises and shifting identities. We see these in ventures in the production of de luxe artistic commodities in literary taste and in ceramics, in ‘scholar’s objects’ such as brush pots, with both narrative and scrolling landscape imagery. Woodcut pictures and studio-produced paintings for display on special occasions (especially birthdays) provided for a voracious new southern urban mercantile class. This enterprise is found in Japan too, with the production of Nara e-hon picture-scrolls and picture books and of prints, including some of the most inventive visual narrativization seen anywhere in East Asian picture-scrolls: take the ludic reversal of the order of events in the final scenes of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (see illus. 109), explored in the 156

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114, 115 Huang Xiangjian (1609–1673), Searching for My Parents (Wanli xunqin tu juan), 1656, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 36.5 × 553.7 cm.

previous chapter. In China, it seems that only the highbrow expressive painting modes of so-called individualists and eccentrics, which certainly took ownership of the handscroll tradition, outlasted the political hiatus of this ‘Transitional’ period. Few picture-scrolls deal overtly with the politically sensitive Ming–Qing transition,5 but one example does throw unexpected light on life in the early post-conquest years after the overthrow of the Ming in 1644 and the consolidation of the Qing up to 1683. Searching for My Parents, painted in 1656 by the otherwise little-known Huang Xiangjian (1609–1673), is a ‘long scroll’ (changjuan) over 5 metres long, which is overtly plotted with divisions like in a book, play or musical score, in two obvious halves of three scenes each (illus. 114, 115). With this visual documentary, the painter plotted

his extensive travels up hill and down dale across the country during the unsettled later 1640s in search of his lost parents, the topographical variety reflected in shifting horizons and ground planes in the successively receding valleys. Travel and tourism to scenic sites were an increasingly popular Qing painting subject, both at court in the form of the multi-scroll sets documenting the Kangxi and Qianlong imperial southern inspection tours and in provincial civic contexts by professional artists.6 By the later eighteenth century, as artists moved between the court and southern cities, the dividing lines between these contexts blurred. In Searching for My Parents, though, as a record of the artist’s ultimately successful act of filial piety and a triumph of personal resilience over chaotic politics, the 157

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116, 117 Two ‘Chinese noblewomen’ from Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata . . . (Amsterdam, 1667).

painting depicts the most hazardous stretches of this arduous and frequently dangerous journey through the Qin Pass (in modern southwestern Hunan and eastern Guizhou Provinces), a strategic point commanding north–south traffic, under the surveillance of military communications posts. The individual human narrative of a desperate search along remote byways, figuratively rendered as meandering and sometimes precipitous paths and lanes, intertwines with the dynastic story, related through the watching eyes tracking this journey from far-off walled cities and multiple security installations. An innovative feature, in

the dead centre, is the disappearance of the path out of the top of the scroll, signalling the rarefied height and remoteness of the Qin Pass, a strategic choke point at this historic moment. This is a fascinating lyric appropriation of the medium in the scholar tradition, intertwining a classic yet personal Chinese tale of filial piety with commentary on dynastic change, securitization and surveillance in continental history. The expansion of literati culture in the long seventeenth century coincided with the arrival of European Jesuits in China, most famously Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who in 1602 created a world 158

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map in a set of woodblock-printed panels for the late Ming’s Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620), which contributed to an emerging global consciousness and intellectual networks, the general context of otherwise unrelated projects like the Silk Road handscroll, discussed in the previous chapter. Actual examples of Chinese picture-scrolls crossing to cultures out of China are rare at this date, even within East Asia, but we can also refer to significant representations of scrolls. By the early Qing, it was fellow Jesuit fathers in China who provided visual source material for the influential, orientalist treatise on China published in Amsterdam in 1667 by the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), known as China Illustrata. The sixth and final part of the treatise is about Chinese literature and writing, which he grouped with writing of the Brahmins and of the Maya in Mexico.7 The two illustrations of ‘A Chinese Lady’ sent from China illustrate Chinese polygamy, exotic female dress and bound feet, but also how the ladies while away their hours ‘playing with puppies, birds and other such diversions’ (illus. 116, 117).8 The ‘other diversions’ include a lute in its case and some paintings to view. Visually, these two illustrations comprise a mix of sense and nonsense. They contain shadows cast in various directions from different light sources, illogical to the Western mind but not remarkable in early Qing China’s composite approach to scenic visualization, as seen in Suzhou prints (see illus. 127). Though separately framed in the book, the two images of ‘A Chinese Lady’ are paired in Chinese culture, signalling polygamy and referencing antiquity, by the two characters of the classical word yaotiao (the two beautiful, ideal mates of the ruler in antiquity; see, for example, illus. 48) in the frames on the wall, which were evidently penned by a European engraver working with Chinese originals that were illegible to him. In this pictorial translation, the consorts come to

resemble Rapunzel or Maiden-in-the-Tower figures. Finally, there are the angular proportions of the small hanging-scroll dangling off the table, laid down on top of some other scrolls, strange and disproportionate to a Western eye but comparable to similar but evidently untroubled images in Qing China (especially in print), which allow for composite or conflated shifting viewpoints in time and space. The scroll-painting features a small landscape picture. Plenty is lost in the proverbial translation here: this is a travesty of a work by Ni Zan (1301– 1374), who had recently been popularized in Master Gu’s Painting Manual (see illus. 110), depicting a clump of lifeless trees, redrawn for the engraving by someone both puzzled and unimpressed by the idea of this painting subject and technique. The awkward lie and angles of this scroll’s edges suggest the perceived erroneousness of the picture’s original symbolic spatial language, which is in keeping with the tenor of the text, which is exoticizing and critical at once. Kircher’s Jesuit informants in China must have picked the popular favourite in Ni Zan – who until now had been the epitome of male Chinese aesthetics, as one of the so-called Four Masters of the Yuan Dynasty – to highlight the art of painting, but they also strangely upended the patriarchy by showing women looking at such an artist. To attend to the task of charting the sequential development of scroll-painting culture in Qing China itself, let us turn to the scholary tradition of art criticism, which was so enabling of the lyric voice and dissent and in this period, the fashioning of male identities and make-believe. An instructive starting point is a set of intemperate musings on the treatment by past collectors of a famous handscroll of calligraphy by Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), the Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind handscroll (see illus. 69).9 This is found in Record of Whiling Away the Summer in the Gengzi 159

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Year (1660) by the retired statesman and collector Sun Chengze (1593–1676). Sun’s remarks on the reception of his favourite scroll enable us to visualize what he, as an arbiter, saw as wrong with scroll culture, but also, by critically weighing up his rhetoric, the ways that artistic individualism was intensifying.10 In his commentary, Sun Chengze waspishly enumerates four lapses on the part of previous collectors of the calligraphy scroll. First, referring to the author of the first colophon in the backing paper, the Southern Song (1127–1279) connoisseur Xiang Bing, Sun regrets that ‘the one surnamed Xiang inscribed something so inappropriate’. Sun, who was 67 in 1660, rated the calligraphy highly, whereas Xiang Bing’s appraisal in 1212 described it as the diminished art of an old man (it was written in 1102, when Huang was 57, three years before his death) who failed ‘to match brush and ink’. Thin-skinned, Sun reacted to Xiang Bing’s assessment as if he were judging the debility of the elderly. Then Sun laments the presence of several seal impressions placed by the disgraced Southern Song statesman Jia Sidao (1213–1275), the individual historically blamed for the eventual fall of the Southern Song to Khubilai khan’s Mongol armies in 1276–9, which meant that, for him, the scroll ‘had been defiled by the hands of a traitor corrupted by power’. For Sun, these seal impressions were the immediate traces of Jia’s treachery and corruption and, in a post-conquest world of Manchu Qing China, possibly a jab at the Jia Sidaos of his day. Third, Sun savages the Mongol-Yuan Grand Elder Princess, Sengge Ragi (c. 1283–1331), for her lack of discernment over the men she instructed to inscribe colophons, which was ‘guaranteed to make one spew up one’s dinner from laughter’. Although Sun does not elaborate, it is likely he deplored the manner in which she had exhibited this scroll at the end of a banquet at which the wine had flowed, and commanded certain guests to

inscribe it, rather than this being about the ethnicity of the writers. This was certainly a fling at her judgement as a collector–connoisseur and at the cultural quality of her entourage, some members of which turned out lame performances on this grand stage of history. Finally, he lampoons the late Ming tycoon– collector Xiang Yuanbian (1525–1590) for being ‘grossly vulgar’ by having incontinently impressed ‘far too many’ of his collector’s seals and for having recorded the buying price.11 It is true that Xiang Yuanbian had set a new paradigm with the sheer number of his seals, something adjudged by Sun to be tasteless and crass. In this respect, Xiang would only be surpassed in the history of collecting Chinese art by the Qianlong emperor. Despite his invective, Sun accepted the presence of these accretions as a natural part of the artwork’s journey through Chinese history. The title he gave to his remarks on the scroll, which appears in the opening chapter of his Record, is ‘The ink traces of Huang [Tianjian’s] Pine Wind Pavilion Poem’ (my italics), so for him the physical format of the scroll mounting was still so normative as to be scarcely visible or worthy of comment. Sun rather presented himself as one communing directly, through the kinaesthetic record of ink traces, with the great eleventh-century calligrapher, a channel into the past made possible by the nature of the scroll medium.

The Kangxi reign, 1662–1722 So what evidence is there for the reception of the format in the Kangxi period, insofar as a singlemedium study like this can show up tensions and patterns in a broader stratigraphy of art’s development? In one sense, handscroll culture was never healthier, in its capacity for intellectual creativity among individualists and eccentrics, even while it was also being commoditized in 160

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popular culture and facing stiff competition from print enterprise. Wang Gai (1645–1710) is best known for his paintings created for the pioneering woodcut series The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. Launched in 1679 by the playwright, author and garden designer Li Yu (1611–c. 1680), this was the first popular ‘how to’ collection of old-master styles and painting techniques, which has been profoundly influential on modern painting in China, especially

on self-taught men and women. When pictorially citing canonical picture-scrolls in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual, Wang Gai took an historically interwoven approach. In addition to a familiarity with the roll call of past maestri, he could count on the reader’s embodied knowledge of the medium, which allowed him to excerpt a section and reproduce it as a double-page spread, standing for the whole object in a manner loosely prefiguring our own modern use of illustration details.

118 Wang Gai (1645–1710), after Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Fuchun shan ju tu), as interpreted by Xiao Yuncong (1596–1673). From Li Yu (c. 1611–80),  Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting  (Jieziyuan huazhuan), first edition 1679, woodblock printed book, ink and colours on paper, 24.4 × 30 cm. 161

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119 Wang Kui (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911), after Hua Yan (1682–1756), Peach-Blossom Spring (Taoyuan tu juan), embroidery, detail, 33 × 185 cm.

In the reproduction of the Yuan master Huang Gongwang’s (1269–1354) famous Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains scroll, he channelled the image through the state of the scholar-painting tradition in his own contemporary moment: that is, by rendering it as the pictorial interpretation (fang 倣) of a modern artist, in this case the recently deceased master Xiao Yuncong (1596–1673) (illus. 118). There is, as yet, no synoptic sense of the fully unrolled handscroll here – the matter of the format or medium becomes less relevant next to the iconicity of the individual brush idiom and its lineage – but Wang does fit image to frame by shifting the dynamic of the landscape from a frontal, horizontal mode into a receding lateral one with a fairly steeply rising ground plane. This is a roughly to-scale compression and pivoting that enabled iconic features to be included: trees (near and far), a country retreat, a lone fisherman, hills (near and

far). The image is authoritatively brought to life for its 1679 audience, however, through the iteration of Xiao Yuncong’s distinctive brushwork (see the right-handed thin tapering line-work), a sign of Wang Gai’s mastery of the core role of referencing through visual representation of the brushwork of individual maestri. This practice of presenting one’s own work through the brush interpretation of another is also seen in an unusual related case, which also crosses media. An embroidered picture-scroll entitled Peach-Blossom Spring (illus. 119) bears the signature of Wang Kui, whose period of activity in Nanjing somewhat pre-dates that of the artist whose ‘brush mode’ is cited, namely Hua Yan (1682–1756), one of the Yangzhou eccentrics. The cross-media, skeumorphic inventiveness of Qing artists here is cause for curatorial confusion today since the embroidered handscroll is both a picture-scroll 162

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and a tapestry, which intriguingly confuses the male and female gender stereotypes respectively connected with these media.12 As an embroidery, the artwork masquerades as scroll-painting: it presents a long horizontal format, compositionally read from right to left, hinged at the bridge in the middle; with a deliberately framed inscription in the top left, which alludes to the ‘brush mode of Xinluo Shanren’ (Hua Yan), and with seal ‘impressions’, the legend of one of which refers to the ‘scent of the inkstone’ (Yanxiang). The embroidery also has the look of some of the fine polychrome woodcut prints that Wang Gai produced in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual, in which the forms, while colourful, have a flat, still character: neither print nor embroidery was able to capture the kinetic qualities in the residue or trace of an actual brushstroke.13 Yet, arguably, the professionalization of painting for urban markets had since the early seventeenth century increasingly involved appropriating

decorative form: for example, by avoiding the representational difficulties of overlapping threedimensional forms and interactions, as was seen in the oeuvre of the scholar-turned-professional Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), for production and marketing reasons. As a painting subject, ‘Peach-Blossom Spring’ worked as a catalyst for invention in early Qing art, affording artists the opportunity to be innovative with media (tapestry handscrolls do not appear to have been made before this, only tapestry hanging scrolls and album leaves) and techniques of spatial depiction, such as novel horizon effects and unified ground planes scaled with an eye to southern European-style projective perspective, all in order to conjure up the mystery of the paradise world hidden within the real world. In the case of the embroidery, the artistic spark is the remediation by a painter, through vicarious creative copying, of a horizontal landscape composition into embroidery. 163

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120 Luo Pin  (1733–1799), Narcissus, Bamboo and Rocks (Shuixian zhushi tu), handscroll, ink and light colours on paper, 14.8 × 113.3 cm.

Before we think this composition is standard, consider its awareness of normative civic identity: the distant real world which the fisherman is leaving (left half) is depicted as a city, with tiered buildings on the horizon, of a form widely used to symbolize state surveillance of the populace by a highly militarized conquest regime. Beyond the bridge, to the right, is the simple rustic idyll of the paradise world, its back to the city. In contrast

with other renderings of this subject, this small Elysium is merely screened off from the surveilling view of the distant watchtower, rather than being hidden amid impenetrable mountainous terrain. Spatially, however, these separate earthbound places are linked by the birds in the sky, which serve to unify the liberated aerial space and perhaps advance a middlebrow pun: the characters in the sky to the left echo the birds to the right

121 Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng, 1702–1768), The Qianlong Emperor Practising Archery (Qianlong shejian tu ping), framed ‘screen’ (ping) painting, oil on paper, 95 × 213.7 cm. 164

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– an allusion to the mythical origin of Chinese calligraphy as ‘bird-script’, which thus invokes an aura of timelessness in the mise en scène. The claim, here, is that the ideal of painting embodied by the picture-scroll no longer has a monopoly: that embroidery can rival it in relevance, both as a luxury commodity for the urban elite and intellectually and sensuously, with a jaded nostalgia, by highlighting the inaccessibility of the past and of the simple life. While not wholly scientific, a review of the online digital archive of paintings in the Beijing Palace Museum shows how relatively few artists and patrons overall favoured the picture-scroll format after around 1700, as novel, rival forms of ‘horizontal picture’ (hengfu) appeared both at court and in more commercial urban settings. Framed pictures were displayed on walls in the large, open halls of entertainment and leisure businesses, as is widely seen in illustrations in late Qing pictorial magazines. The shift was under way in early Qing, however. Court paintings in (Western) ‘landscape’ proportions started to be mounted in frames and hung on walls, the change sometimes underscored by a reversal of the traditional direction of reading/looking, so the action within moved from left to right. A framed screen depiction (tu ping) in oils on paper by the French Jesuit artist Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng;

1702–1768) of the Qianlong emperor practising archery (illus. 121),14 is a compositional reversal, shortening and reformatting of a comparable late Ming image such as Ding Yunpeng’s (c. 1547–1628) Lady Feng Confronting the Bear. This court practice of refitting handscroll-proportioned compositions into ever larger wall-mounted formats retained currency well into the nineteenth century, as is seen in a wall scroll (tieluo) from 1820–50, measuring 111 by 294.5 centimetres, depicting The Daoguang Emperor at Leisure.15 If we look at the work of another of the Yangzhou eccentrics, Zheng Xie (1693–1765), we find various large, almost screen-sized, horizontal pictures in his oeuvre.16 Across the long eighteenth century, however, Yangzhou painters rarely painted handscrolls – their urban mercantile patrons demanded largescale attenuated hanging scrolls for halls – but the format was employed on occasion by Luo Pin (1733–1799). On an intimate scale (14.9 × 112.9 cm), his Narcissus, Bamboo and Rocks (illus. 120) has a contrastive lateral compositional balance, suggesting it was designed to be viewed fully open, and vaguely echoes compositions by Yuan scholarofficials. Beyond this, Luo Pin takes an innovative and surprisingly modern approach through his stark and tightly framed surface-depth and reliefintaglio contrasts, achieved by the use of the silk 165

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122 Yu Zhiding (1647–1709), Copy of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colours on the Que and Hua Mountains  (Lin Zhao Mengfu Que Hua qiuse tu juan), 1693, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 28 × 152.5 cm.

ground and a tonal variety of washes and dark ink accents to set up striking foil, silhouette and reserve effects. This rough characterization of a major historical change highlights the distinctiveness of the handscroll practice of a court-connected artist such as Yu Zhiding (1647–1709), a portrait specialist who unusually preferred to work in this format and managed to preserve its freshness.17 In the Beijing Palace Museum’s online database, the majority of his works are picture-scrolls, by contrast with the dearth of such works by any artist after this date.18 An example of his picturescroll practice is his cool and serene copy of Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Autumn Colours on the Que and Hua Mountains (illus. 122), which revels in the task of reprising this painting from the old-master tradition, for the prominent collector, Gao Shiqi (1645–1703), who was unable to acquire the original.19 Yu Zhiding even shifted the position of Zhao Mengfu’s original inscription, which unusually occupied the sky in the middle of the painting, to a more conventional position at the end, to

declutter the picture space. In the Kangxi context, Yu Zhiding’s modernizing painting is also an iconological provocation, making a cultural argument for the existence of perspectival sophistication within Chinese culture long before the advent of the newfangled (Italian Baroque-style) form of spatial recession.

Kangxi scrolling virtual space Original new works of the Kangxi period show a variety of reformulations of spatial depth in developing court and urban visual discourses and of individual scroll-painting practices among the provincial intellectual elites. In his film cited above, David Hockney particularly delighted in the life and energy of the figures in Wang Hui’s (1632–1717) Southern Inspection Tour scrolls of 1698,20 which he recognized as pre-dating the widespread appropriation by court artists of Italian Baroque spatial virtuality. By the early Kangxi reign, European high horizon effects in landscape imagery were making their way into 166

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elite Chinese landscape painting. This is exemplified by Fan Qi’s (1616–after 1694) panoramic Yangzi Riverscape (illus. 123), perhaps from the 1660s, in which ships appear to be on the far watery horizon, although not ‘hull down’ beyond it (that is, where only their masts appear visible at their position beyond the horizon due to the curvature of the earth). Fan Qi was a professional painter in Nanjing, along with the better-known Gong Xian (c. 1618–1689), to whom we return shortly. Lothar Ledderose has speculated that Fan Qi saw such horizon effects in images shown to literati by Jesuits in Nanjing, where Matteo Ricci had resided from 1595 to 1600, such as in Braun and Hogenberg’s famous city views in Civitates Orbis Terrarum (published in Cologne, 1572–1616).21 In the city view of Aden (illus. 125), ships in scale sailing both before and hull down beyond the horizon are observed from high signalling towers. In the Fan Qi, the fixing of the position of the viewer on both the lateral axis of the scroll and the recessional axis towards the horizon is never fully resolved, as if the necessity for this fixing was itself a problem. One might think that the handscroll format is ideally suited here to the

faithful rendering of this horizon effect and the implied scientific knowledge underpinning it. But this panorama works independently of the panoptic southern European sense, in which the panoptical viewing point is external to the image and the space within is wholly fixed in relation to that point. The novel visual drama of the horizon is perfectly centred within the picture-scroll, but conventional Chinese landscape elements with variant perspectives and horizons are placed as buffering, as implied viewpoints either side, forming parts of the framing apparatus, which serves to contain or stage the central river horizon section. So the phenomenal experience of the horizon’s distance is carefully accultured and embodied: strategically placed square huts, signals of individual presence in Chinese scholar art since the time of Ni Zan, act as allusive vantage points worthy of educated occupation and use within the image. These high horizons were not uncommon in, for example, more ephemeral kinds of image like Suzhou prints (illus. 127), while those prints in turn likely derived their agency from elite art forms like Fan Qi’s painting. Despite this circularity of 167

123, 124 Fan Qi (1616–after 1694), Yangzi Riverscape (Changjiang tu), 1660s, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31 × 207 cm.

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horizon imagery in seventeenth-century visual culture, it never became wholly commonplace in the Qing, and although promoted at the Qianlong court it only occasionally retained the interest of leading late Qing painters, including Dai Xi (1801–1860; see illus. 134, 135), Fei Danxu (1802– 1850) and Ren Xiong (1823–1857).22

(changjuan), occurred in the decades around 1700 among the ‘individualists’ and those working in the expressive xieyi (or ‘sketch conceptualist’) lineage that could be traced back to Chen Chun (1483–1544) and Xu Wei (1521–1593) in the midMing. Of the two most famous monk–painters and displaced Ming royals, Shitao (1642–1707) and Bada Shanren (c. 1626–1705), Shitao preferred the album format, although he appreciated his contemporaries’ use of the handscroll as a space for intellectual and artistic play afforded by a visual combination and entanglement, within the unrolling composition, of poetry transcribed in cursive

Dissent, eccentricity and elite self-fashioning: the ‘long handscroll’ The reprise of a particular intellectual-painter mode of handscroll-painting, the ‘long handscroll’

125 View of Aden, from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cologne, 1572). 169

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126 Bada Shanren (Zhu Da, c. 1626–1705), Flowers on the River (Heshang hua tu juan), 1697, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 47 × 1,292.5 cm. Title-piece by Xu Shichang (1855–1939).

calligraphy intertwined with pictorial forms. In the Nanjing painter Gong Xian’s Louxia Temple on Mount She, the composition develops conventionally from the right up to the point where we see the temple on the hilltop.23 Then interest shifts onto the vista from the temple towards the inscription ‘Poem on the Louxia Temple on Mount She’ in the cloud, in which the characters look like falling bands of rain in a heavy cloud that hangs down from the top left corner of the painting, brightening and flattening but also intensifying the lateral band of white space between. In Bada’s Fish and Birds picture-scroll of 1693, three inscriptions combine with three images, with the blocks of text acting as forms and framing devices like his rocks, calling our attention to the remarkable use of the scroll by this individualist who is well known for his cryptic contumacy.24 A Ming princeling turned Chan monk, Bada Shanren had been a child prodigy, but it was only in his late career (from about age 65) that he came to revel in the expressive potential of ‘long scrolls’. His Fish and Shags of 1689 is 572 centimetres long and compositionally combines text and image

127 Painter unknown, Calendar Print (4th–6th months), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China, early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 17th century, polychrome woodblock print, 33.4 × 25.7 cm. 170

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within the rolling image,25 a formalistic idiom that remained popular in this xieyi lineage right up to modern painters such as Pan Tianshou (1897–1971). Bada would go on to double the size of this scroll – in height and length – in later works which, perhaps militantly, called either for huge display spaces such as monasteries or official halls, or for extended individual viewing experiences consonant with a particularly lofty kind of aesthetic taste and sensibility. His well-known Flowers on the River (illus. 126) of 1697, featuring a kind of scrolling diorama of a painting followed by a long inscription, is close to 13 metres in length and 47 centimetres high, while Pine and Cypress of Longevity (Songbo tongchun) of 1702, exceeding 13 metres long and 41 centimetres high, is presented as a copy of a late Shen Zhou (1427–1509) painting, perhaps a cultured way of mitigating against charges of abrasive newness, soaring ambition and meretricious virtuosity.26 Both ‘long scrolls’ are orchestrated and performed on an epic or symphonic scale, the compositional score and virtuoso rendering as one. There is a magisterial command of scenic emplotment and dramatic interchange, and of mapping out ranges of contrast, light, tone and texture in the

service of virtual spatial distinctions and formal definition. As far as this idiosyncratic scrolling format goes, Bada shows a magnificent awareness of and ability to capitalize on the potential inherent in the moving spatial frame, which drifts constantly leftward, even as the pictorial content is cropped top and bottom. Speaking quietly to these boundaries, a visual narrative is embodied in and plotted through the pictorial content. That content takes its virtual form through a pictorial fusion. There is his control of the border frame and the lateral internal momentum. There is also the combined scaling and mapping of atmospheric perspective (that is, mapping focus and tonality to distance) and scale (diminishing sizes of forms to realize distance along a ground or spatial plane, perpendicular to the picture plane). Bada thus highlights contrasts between the painting surface (or picture plane) and our visual proximity to forms with recession into spatial depth. Using effects of juxtaposition, contrast, framing, light, tonality and focus within this long-scroll format, Bada elaborates the painting in time like a form of visual poetry, enabling a powerful lyric voice to emerge concurrently though the synaesthetic qualities of the ink-on-paper media and their 171

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potential both to record and reveal, in the retelling, the creative process as an extended action in time. Bada’s long scrolls might even be seen to anticipate moody lingering views in the cinematic idiom: consider self-consciously intellectual artworks such as Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, by the contemporary video artist Yang Fudong (b. 1971).27

history. Many artworks and an early collecting practice were both things he inherited from his father, the Yongzheng emperor, whose court artists had in around 1728 begun to document thousands of ‘antique trinkets’ (guwan) visually in a large quasi-documentary scroll-painting series, Scroll of Antique Trinkets (Guwan tu; illus. 128).29 Each of these scrolls, executed by a team of unnamed court artists, recorded about 200 to 250 artworks in unnamed royal palaces. While there is some European-style shading effect in evidence in the renderings of the objects, defining their surfaces, perhaps more signficant is the combination of this with a Sino-centric attention to line pattern and outline effects. The linear crackle patterns on ceramic glazes and subtly warped profiles of rims are depicted with such accuracy that extant art objects can be convincingly identified. Among the probable thousands of artworks recorded in these scrolls and passed down, a Song-dynasty Ru-ware bowl – later incised with the Qianlong emperor’s poem colophon in 1786 – is one such, clearly identifiable by its crackle pattern in the 1728 painting (bottom left in illus. 128). The overall purpose of the Yongzheng handscroll series as a kind of Manchu palace inventory of Chinese art collections continues to puzzle. The Qianlong emperor’s approach was more plainspoken. He vastly expanded the documenting of the imperial collection with a series of comprehensive (but unillustrated) cataloguing projects. Scroll arts were covered by the Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley (Shiqu baoji: first edition, 1745; expanded edition, 1793; third edition, 1816). Although these titles disseminated information about the court’s collection, they also chart how many great works dropped out of circulation, with implications for creativity and the continuity of culture. In the mid-Qing period itself, with the Qianlong reign at its core, the court picture-scroll took on a reactionary character, a mode that grated against

The mid-Qing pabulum One of the stand-out features of mid-Qing scroll culture is the imperial extension, over the course of the long Qianlong reign, of the handscroll’s colophon culture to all manner of artworks in the vast palace collection. After becoming the Qianlong emperor in 1736, this art-loving Manchu ruler devoted huge energy to his calligraphy and painting collection. He enshrined his most precious works of scroll art in groupings like the ‘three rarities’ of calligraphy and the ‘four beauties’ of painting and inscribed hundreds of scrolls, typically positioning hokey texts, in a new departure, within the pictorial frame on the ‘painting heart’. From around the 1770s, applied artworks such as ceramics, jades and bronzes began to get the same handscroll treatment, being also instrumentalized as morals and warnings. While it is not completely unexpected that a rare book might receive an imperial colophon, like the one from 1773 on a volume of the manuscript Yongle Encyclopaedia (Yongle dadian), there appears to be no precedent, other than the emperor’s prior treatment of handscrolls, for the practice of imperial or any other kind of colophon being incised into hard objects, as we see on jades, bronzes and ancient ceramics such as a rare Ru-ware bowl, dated 1786.28 How did it come to this? The Qianlong emperor amassed the largest collection of Chinese art ever seen or heard of, perhaps also the largest collection in world 172

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128 Unknown Yongzheng (1723–35) court artists, Scroll of Antique Trinkets (Guwan tu), 1728, handscroll (from of a series of 16 or more), detail, ink and colours on paper, c. 62.5 cm × 20 m.

social changes in, for instance, gender roles within urban society. Examples show some fundamental changes evincing the centralization of power by the imperium and its consolidation at court, even as distinctive southern urban cultures responsive to court taste took shape, sometimes via individuals moving from court service back home. Two such artists of Yangzhou were Yu Zhiding (see illus. 122) and Xu Yang (1712–after 1777; see illus. 132), of the Kangxi and Qianlong periods, respectively. Looking at court practice, we may observe a conglomeration of aesthetic features and practices keyed to the visual articulation

of Manchu kingship and the impulse to assert authoritarian control. A first demonstration of imperial assurance is sheer size. Probably the longest pair of handscrolls ever made were Hongli, the Qianlong emperor’s, eightieth birthday scrolls, depicting the populace celebrating up and down the streets of Beijing in 1790, published in printed form two years later in 1792.30 The Qianlong emperor’s intent to signal his filial piety to his Qing subjects in this project was evident from its conception as an echo of the production by Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715) and Leng Mei (active 1677–1742) of 173

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painted scrolls, and woodblock-printed ones for wider distribution, to celebrate his grandfather the Kangxi emperor’s sixtieth birthday.31 The second Qianlong eightieth birthday scroll measures some 6,389.3 centimetres in length and depicts the western side of the city from the Xizhimen gate on the northwest city wall to the Xihuamen gate into the Forbidden City (illus. 129). The banal documentary quality of this gargantuan artwork demonstrates how, for the ageing Qianlong emperor, as with the actual size of his art collection and also his writings and seal impressions on its contents, more was indeed more. Second, consider how the Qianlong emperor remade the picture-scroll to his will in a virtuous ‘doubling down’ on the position of early Qing scholars like Sun Chengze. Sun had policed connoisseurly conduct in the treatment of scrolls, including the quality of colophons and the number and placement of seals, having the Ming salt tycoon Xiang Yuanbian in his sights. Within picturescrolls, even Xiang Yuanbian had largely confined his inscriptions and colophons to the backing paper, the title-piece or, occasionally, the silk or brocade border panels. With some exceptions, commentators prior to the Qianlong had largely avoided writing directly onto the ‘painting heart’ itself, although seals cluttered the edges. For the Qianlong emperor, no such etiquette or taboo applied. For an obvious example, see his 1757 inscription on one of Zhao Mengfu’s great figural works, Red-Robed Western Monk, a painting the emperor faithfully (but, if we are honest, hopelessly) copied in 1762.32 In the original 1304 scroll, the artist intentionally left blank the space to the right, the one gestured to and looked at by the holy man, as an image of Buddhist emptiness. The Qianlong emperor, who was also a living Buddha, used this area to place his own inscription. The emperor’s mawkish labour of self-improvement, facilitated by an extended court apparatus, is to the

post-imperial eye, no less than it would have been to Sun Chengze, something of a folie de grandeur. The Qianlong emperor’s colophon of 1784 to Zhao Mengfu’s Sheep and Goat (see illus. 81) further exemplifies his approach to redefining and repurposing the artworks in the palace collection. The Yuan artist’s own inscription had positioned his painting in the history of scholarly equine painting, explaining his rendition of a sheep and goat ‘from life’ as a playful variation on the theme. In a typical non sequitur, the Qianlong emperor asserted that Zhao’s real meaning lay in the Confucian virtue connoted by his choice of subject: ‘Alone among domestic animals, the lamb and kid kneel to suckle [indicating filial piety] / So the meaning he has vested in this painting is eternal.’33 Monitored and surveiled by such a sovereign, the court atelier system was a prime mechanism whereby the emperor could extend himself and redefine the agency of court artworks. The court’s dominion over art objects and their agency was exercised through a concerted enterprise of acquisitions, ranking and reinstallation in bespoke, liveried mountings and cases, marking of imperial judgements on their surfaces (on hard and soft objects alike) and publication of corresponding catalogue records. Within this system, handscrolls served the self-cultivation of virtuous kingship, something Hongli valued supremely in the art collection, as seen in his title-piece to an ink outline transcription of the Admonitions, which reads ‘the beginning of princely transformation’ (wanghua zhi shi).34 Inevitably, the handscroll was the format of all of the most select groupings of pictorial artworks: in calligraphy, the Three Rarities (housed in the eponymous study hall, Sanxitang); and in paintings, the royal companions known as the Reunion of Four Beauties (simeiju), which included the Admonitions scroll (see illus. 4) and three landscapes ascribed to Li Gonglin. With the 174

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129 Anonymous Qianlong (1736–95) court artists, Qianlong Emperor’s 80th Birthday Celebration (Gaozong chun Huangdi (Qianlong) baxun wanshou tu juan (xia juan)), 1790, second of two handscrolls, detail, ink and colours on silk, 45 × 6,389.3 cm.

emperor at the centre of it, this was a wholesale enterprise of collating, grouping, remounting and inscribing. It extended to amanuenses or daibi (substitute brushes) trained in such reprographic methods as double-outline and infill technique (shuanggou) to scale the large title-piece characters up from originals in standard block script by (or in) the imperial hand, as in the case of the ‘fragrance of a red reed’ (tongguanfang) titlepiece to the Admonitions. The creation of new objects by court artists gave further play to the elaboration of an imperial programme for art in the service of politics, through choices of subjects, the incorporation of literary association and interpretations, and crucially through the commingling of global iconologies, including those associated with kinaesthetic Chinese ink-outline and colour-wash modes and formats and Baroque Italian perspectival modes for the depiction of space and time. One of the various Jesuits in the Qianlong emperor’s service gained particular favour

and enabled Qing domestication of the Italian Baroque in the Manchu palace. This was the Italian painter Giuseppe Castiglione (Milan, 1688–Beijing, 1766) or Lang Shining, who had arrived in China in 1715 and later became purveyor of what Patricia Berger has called a ‘bland but pristine’ quality of painting.35 His paintings were typically large for display, or else albums, but his acknowledged masterpiece, One Hundred Horses, is in the handscroll format and exists both in a full-draft handscroll version submitted for approval, done in charcoal underdrawing and ink on paper (illus. 130), as well as in the final painting scroll version in colour on silk finished in 1728.36 A draft of a handscroll was not unusual in the atelier production system of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan, evinced by the preparatory version of Kano Sansetsu’s (1589–1651) masterpiece, Song of Everlasting Sorrow (see illus. 164),37 but it is almost unique in Chinese art and most revealing of the process of manufacture in the High Qing imperial workshops. In this unusually 175

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130 Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688–1766), One Hundred Horses, 1723–5, draft handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 94 × 789.3 cm.

tall scroll-painting (94.5 × 776 centimetres), the Baroque formally meets the Qing Chinese handscroll landscape: there are three clear vanishing points at intervals, creating a staged, tripartite horizontal composition quite at home in the Chinese old-master tradition. Although done for the Yongzheng emperor, this scroll was not presented to court until early in the Qianlong reign, at which point it secured for the artist a lifetime of favour. Without scope to proselytize, and evidently deeply involved in forging the image of Qing colonial enterprise, Castiglione collaborated wholeheartedly with his Chinese peers at court, including the porcelain impresario Nian Xiyao

(1679–1726). They produced an illustrated translation of Baroque art theory, showcasing Castiglione’s teacher Andrea Pozzo’s (1642–1709) Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum. Mainstream critics and painters were generally dismissive of European painting, being unimpressed by its virtuosity in the rendering of spatial depth and handling of light on three-dimensional surfaces, even if they were not immune to its local influence in their work. Visually, that ambivalence can be seen in the techniques used in Yongzheng court works such as the Scroll of Antique Trinkets series (see illus. 128).

176

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output. In addition to masterminding the Qianlong emperor’s southern inspection tour series, he created Prosperous Suzhou (illus. 132), which is seen to celebrate his southern city’s civic enterprise and averral of court favour. It shows the iconology of the Manchu system, whereby the Italian Baroquestyle perspective technique was further incorporated into the extended Chinese handscroll format, with multiple vanishing points evident from converging lines of streets and houses and the use of well-placed wedge shapes to fill in gaps between the larger triangular forms generating the vanishing points on the horizon.42 With the ageing of the Qianlong emperor and following his death in 1799, the Qing court’s power to shape the cultural agenda through patronage sensibly diminished, with the court becoming an increasingly closed system that through collecting had removed the bulk of the canon from elite circulation and was seemingly only capable of stamping some imperial seals on inherited artworks out of filial piety and in honour of the Qianlong legacy. The odd scroll did escape the Qing palace in and after the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820), such as The Pleasures of Fishes, by Zhou Dongqing (active late thirteenth century), which has Qianlong seals but subsequently passed through the hands of Wu Rongguang (1773–1843), Wu Yuanhui (active mid-nineteenth century), Gu Linshi (1865–1930) and A. W. Bahr (1877–1959), who was born in China to a Scottish father and Chinese mother and moved to the uk in 1910.43 Although often characterized as an era of political weakness and colonial pre­dation by global powers, symbolized by the Opium Wars and large-scale rebellions, the nineteenth century beyond the court also presents as a liberal, creative if unstable cultural environment. Consider the development of photography and tourism and Western proselytizing – the leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) believed he was Jesus’ brother – particularly in the fast-growing

The challenge of spectacle in later Qing: Suzhou, Yangzhou and Shanghai Understanding of this incorporation of the Baroque and the visual science underpinning it into mid-Qing art has been complicated. The difficulty of unpacking George Kubler’s precise characterization of the Baroque architecture of Rome as ‘curved planes approaching a system of undulant membranes’ underscores the complexity of visual literacy in one context, even before any kind of cross-cultural modelling is imagined.38 It is useful to consider how the European city as a spectacle was visualized in pictorial imagery, however, in part because of the coincidence of aesthetic interests in Europe and China in panoramic views. In eighteenth-century Europe, the city was an increasingly spectacular subject of panoptic surveillance. The enterprising Irish painter Robert Barker (1736–1806) invented the term ‘panorama’ and patented the concept in 1787: for his Invention of an entire new Contrivance or Apparatus, called by him La Nature à Coup D’Œil [Nature at a glance] (*This invention has been fince called the Panorama), for the Purpofe of difplaying Views of Nature at large, by Oil-Painting, Frefco, Water-colours, Crayons, or any other Mode of painting or drawing . . .39

An eager public was treated to urban visual spectacles in long, touristic panoramas made up and installed in rotundas accessible via viewing galleries.40 A few drawings survive in preparatory form, like an unfinished view of Ratisbon (modern-day Regensburg) in Bavaria, by the German artist George Scharf senior (1788–1860) (illus. 106).41 Meanwhile, in China, the Baroque legacy of Giuseppe Castiglione is seen in, for instance, the one-time court painter Xu Yang’s scroll-painting 177

131 George Scharf (1788–1860), Panoramic View of that Part of Ratisbon West of the Cathedral (view of modern-day Regensburg, Bavaria), 1845, folding panorama in sections, watercolours, gouache and pencil drawing on paper, 30.48 × 184.15 cm.

132 Xu Yang (1712–after 1777), Prosperous Suzhou (Shengshi zisheng tu/Gusu fanhua tu), 1757, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 35.9 × 1,243.4 cm.

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city of Shanghai, where a figure recognizable as the modern artist is found. In a probable first, late in the Qianlong reign, a Chinese old-master work arrived in England. The context was the start of modern diplomatic relations. A member of the Irish earl George McCartney’s (1737–1806) inaugural British mission to China in 1792–4 returned with a fine Yuan scroll-painting of 1321 by the otherwise unknown Xie Chufang (active fourteenth century). Vitality of Heaven and Earth (Qiankun shengyi), also known as Fascination of Nature, was subsequently passed down in private collections in England.44 After its arrival, it may even have been appreciated more for its calligraphy, and the Chinese practice of adding paratexts, than for the painting, prompting its first new owner, one William Butler, to inscribe his name in the way he might have inscribed a new book. ‘W: Butler 1799’, written using a quill and ink and with a certain flourish, appears on the mounting just inside the outer stave, but turned 90 degrees clockwise to the horizontal, an English proprietary practice that began and ended here.45 Although an exceptionally rare example of its kind in the West, it hardly circulated far and would have made little if any contribution to the development of knowledge about East Asian art media. The precise value placed on East Asian pictorial or literary artworks by European soldiers in the heyday of nineteenth-century imperialism may be surmised from a spectacular account of the looting of Qing palaces by Anglo-French troops in 1860: ‘The soldiers broke into the [Wenyuange] library, tore up scrolls and used old manuscripts as torches or to light their pipes.’46 A modern connection between the handscroll and demonic imagery had, intriguingly, been established earlier in the Qing by Luo Pin, for whom the medium was a vehicle for studied eccentricity. In his Ghost Amusement paintings, topical in light of literary interest in spectres

and demons, the ghost figures are not chthonic or otherworldly presences but inhabit daily life, although their eery playful presence is captured in hours of darkness, amid swirling clouds, an environment as fluid as the ephemeral scrolling format itself. These topical and domestic qualities are, surprisingly, in tune with conventional or traditional subjects to which the scroll medium also contrived to lend itself. Portrait-like pictures of extended cultured domesticity, typically of elite men surrounded by antiquities or at leisure in their gardens, sometimes with friends, were a kind of image still painted into the Republican period, as seen in a picture-scroll recording a late 1920s tea party, Tasting Tea (see illus. 148), by the Shanghai Modernist Zheng Wuchang (Zheng Chang, 1894–1952).47 These late imperial urban contexts for viewing art and images co-developed with the new intellectual trends, media and reprographic technologies, and catered to more diverse audiences as mercantile classes expanded and women’s education became more established. The growth over the late eighteenth and nineteenth century of the ‘evidentiary scholarship’ movement (kaozhengxue), with its emphasis on objectivity and primary evidence, may be one factor behind a not so subtle shift in the perception of picture-scrolls and the value placed upon them by intellectuals. In a climate of scepticism and nuance, scrolls were increasingly associated by scholars with the paleographic study of manuscript calligraphy and its emphasis on copying and transmission of the mainstream ‘Two Wangs’ epistolary tradition (see illus. 86), rather than on the now more valued epigraphy: direct and (supposedly) unmediated study of ancient engraved or incised calligraphy and images, known as jinshixue, ‘metal and stone studies’. The 1836 colophon by Wu Rongguang to Zhou Dongqing’s The Pleasures of Fishes, for example, performs this philological concern with correcting 180

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133 Liuzhou (1791–1858), Old Bricks and Flower Display (Guzhuan huagong tu), 1835, handscroll, detail, ink rubbings, ink and colours on paper.

the historical record – something also captured visually by the writer’s own corrections of his errors in transcription.48 For epigraphers the study of inscriptions on ancient bronzes, medieval stone stele, sculptures and cliff art necessitated the use of recording through ‘ink rubbing’ copying (taben) techniques whereby a true and direct image of an inscription or object could be obtained whether it was a flat stone or a three-dimensional object (quanxing ta). From around 1800, the epigraphy movement with its sceptical attitude to transmitted manuscript evidence was tied to elite masculinity and scholarly expression, as examples of illustrations of antiquities show. In the late Qianlong period in 1791, the antiquarian Weng Fanggang (1733–1818) used ink rubbings within a picture-scroll to create an authentic record of a celebrated ink grinding stone connected to Mi Fu (1051–1107).49 Another, perhaps more prosaic and didactic early artistic intervention into epigraphic artistry is the handscroll of Pictures of Assembled Antiquities, produced by the Yangzhou-born scholar–official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849) in 1803, a long handscroll of ink rubbings of his antiquities and their inscriptions,

and transcriptions of those inscriptions.50 In the following decades, the antiquarian artist Liuzhou (Dashou; 1791–1858), nicknamed the ‘Metal and Stone Monk’ by Ruan Yuan, was a notable and effective but by now somewhat eccentric user of the scroll form for a brand-new painting genre, seen in his Old Bricks and Flower Display of 1835 (illus. 133), which combined ink rubbings of antique objects with flower paintings to create scenes of the ‘pure display’ type or else incorporating miniature male figures cavorting among antiquities to create fantasias.51 The use of handscrolls by these prominent scholars in the post-Qianlong era after 1800 illustrates a transitional moment where the picturescroll format retained sufficient intellectual value and integrity, as well as its vaunted flexibility to adapt by incorporating ink-rubbing technology, to be used as the format for an extensive visual record. Painting as a practice was turning more recognizably modern in the nineteenth century with the growth of cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai, spurred also by travel and tourism fuelling a market for illustrated printed guidebooks. Among the lettered elite, the handscroll 181

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have noticed how unwieldy and démodé it appeared by contrast with modern photography and mass printing, even if still practical as portable wealth. In a later publication of his photographs taken in China during 1868–72, Through China with a Camera (1898, 1899), Thomson included two reproductions in letterpress halftone captioned ‘Section of an old scroll painted on silk’ (illus. 136).52 The original glass-plate negative must therefore be one of the earliest remediations of scroll art into photography. But despite the entropy of the photograph, as a technology, photography was at the time and to Thomson’s regret only able to capture details or more brutally ‘sections’ of the larger whole. The scroll itself, pace Thomson, appears to be neither old nor highbrow, but nonetheless interesting as a modern old-looking production for a middlebrow audience of a popular topic like the demon-queller Zhong Kui marrying off his sister (see illus. 73). The photographs recorded an unknown and unqualified encounter by Thomson with an object of curiosity, and the captioned prints elegantly disseminated this as part of a story he had to tell about his travels through China. Thomson’s images tell us less about scroll-painting than about his photography’s claim to truth-telling and its moments of encounter at a time of British colonial power.53 Although Thomson had taken one of the earliest photographs of a picture-scroll, it was more likely

continued to provide a format for and a discursive forum around visual records of scenic spots known as ‘famous sites’ (mingsheng): Dai Xi’s 1848 scroll-painting of Rain-Coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mount Tiantai bears a title-piece by Ruan Yuan (illus. 134, 135). The ‘original’ pavilion at this site in an important Buddhist area of Zhejiang was built by Jia Sidao and had been reconstructed and renamed the Rain-Coming Pavilion in 1838. The last third of the painting was left blank, possibly for an inscription that never materialized. The paper sheet of the ‘painting heart’ matches the size of the sheet for the title-piece, creating a complementarity based upon a distinctively modern and formalistic adaptation of the scroll’s interior picture space and its edges. Having been framed by a colonialist narrative of nostalgic decline into timelessness, the historical nineteenth century is now beginning to be celebrated for its intercultural creativity and innovation amid social diversity and political disintegration. Photography overtly overlaps with Chinese scroll art in the work of two British photographers in China, Felice Beato (Venice, 1832–Luxor, 1909) and John Thomson (Edinburgh, 1837–London, 1921). To Thomson, later appointed photographer to Queen Victoria in 1881, we owe one of the earliest photographs of a picture-scroll. He may only have been vaguely aware of how the medium’s popularity was waning but would surely 182

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134, 135 Dai Xi (1801–1860), Rain-Coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt Tiantai, 1848, handscroll, ink on paper, 34.5 × 142.6 cm. Title-piece by Ruan Yuan (1764–1849).

his, Beato’s and their audience’s collective familiarity with landscape panoramas that underlay the two photographers’ presentations of various scrolllike panoramas. Beato was also a pioneer of war photography: his 1860 panorama in the form of a fold-out in a book, Rear of the Taku North Fort after Its Capture Showing the Retreat of the Chinese Army, grimly surveys the aftermath of a decisive battle during the second Opium War, a rich pictorialist elaboration of photographic content facilitated by the natural choice of the scrolling format.54 An altogether more picturesque form of landscape

panorama which both photographers essayed were city views, specifically of Beijing and of Britain’s new colony Hong Kong, comprising ‘landscape’-shaped photographs stitched together, such as Beato’s Panorama of Pekin (illus. 137). The detail illustrated from Beato’s panorama is, in terms of its content, conveniently devoid of people, which highlights the picturesque, but in terms of its materiality it shows how the photographic prints join as well as their material imperfections.55 By the late Qing, as public social space partially opened up for women as courtesans, religious 183

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136 ‘Section of an old scroll painted on silk’, from John Thomson (1837–1921), Through China with a Camera, 2nd edn (London and New York, 1899).

leaders and public figures, they too appropriated the medium ideally suited to intimate viewing as it was being eschewed by men increasingly concerned with public image. The long silence about women in the historical and material record is, however, problematic in that we have inherited no real language to articulate gendered aesthetics, beyond women’s failure to be male. By way of analogy, giving us an indication of what to expect, we find that the ‘middle people’ in late imperial Choson Korea, prevented by the official hierarchy from ever entering the ranks of the Yangban scholar class, nevertheless aspired to Yangban cultural values. This is seen in a scroll-painting of 1853, entitled Literati Gathering of the Middle People, by

Yu Suk (1827–1873), himself a middle-class artist. Here, at a literary gathering, middle-class men imitate the Yangban, for example where they are seen, in the very centre of the painting, recursively looking at and writing on handscrolls such as the viewer is concurrently looking at.56 For China, consider an 1824 handscroll entitled Orchids, comprising four sections or ‘painting hearts’, by Yun Xiang (d. 1827), abbess of a Daoist convent and probably an accomplished courtesan (illus. 138–41).57 The scroll variously embodies the subaltern status of women in Qing society but shows the development of a distinctive, if by cultural convention not assertive aesthetics in the work of women painters. Described as 184

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‘a tantalising memento of shared intimacies’, the series of paintings for a male recipient is executed in xieyi mode but adapted and tailored to connote modesty and self-control.58 While the painting first appears conservative in its approach to representation, the artwork lacks neither confidence nor clarity of voice and expression, including in its generalized appropriation of an aesthetics ascribed to women through referencing to works connected with famous women painters of the past such as Zhao Mengfu’s wife, Guan Daosheng (1262–1319) (see illus. 63). The choreography of a series of five separate sheets, each with a composition of its own, could be seen as shying away from a grand, sweeping ‘long handscroll’ composition, but the sequential and serial figuration of bodily intimacy

in these scenes is risqué, being formally reminiscent of the erotic album. As to the brushwork, Yun Xiang’s idiom works by softening the linear forms and silhouettes, seen in the even, long and rounded orchid leaf strokes; in the relatively measured tonal, tip-effect (rounded centre-tip to sharper edgy technique), in the relatively narrow wet/dry range of ink employed; in the gentle dynamics and relatively static movement of forms; and in the consistent pairing and matching of forms in compositions, as if defining the self through contrastive (rock/orchid) relations and partnership, rather than an insistent singularity or originality. The placement and size of the inscription in the last scene are modest, while its reference to the artist’s flower-loving patron, once an official who served in Guangdong, is respectful, as

137 Buildings at the entrance to the Chinese quarter of the city, Beijing, section two, detail of a panorama of photographs by Felice Beato (1832–1909), Panorama of Pekin, 1860, 21.5 × 29.2 cm. 185

138–41 Yun Xiang (Wang Jinglian, d. 1827), Orchids, 1824, handscroll, four painting panels and a colophon panel, ink on silk, 33.7 × 95.7 cm.

Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll

indicated by her starting a new line for his name, and the statement that she ‘dutifully painted this scroll’. There is even scholarly modesty, sometimes jarringly false in the male voice, in the cautious assertion that the glistening beauty of the ‘fields of flowers’ famous in Guangdong might be ‘to some extent lodged in this [painting]’. The artwork is a fascinating object, in its Song-style cross-referencing of the serial format of the painted album with the horizontal sequencing of the handscroll, and in being delicately expressive, discreet and nuanced in ways largely unseen in the masculine painting tradition. Still, in China, the old scholarly picture-scroll tradition carried on right up to the demise of the imperial system in 1911 and beyond, a continuity won at the cost of the format’s responsiveness to social and intellectual change.59 To understand ‘continuity’ in late imperial scroll culture is also to reckon with the changing sense of the word and of the identity of its enablers. By way of a summing up, take the ordinary example of a scroll containing a 1650 landscape entitled Spring Rain, Thatched Hut, by Wang Jianzhang (active 1621–62), which exemplifies the changing times and lends itself to an iconology of the picture-scroll as a Qing art object (illus. 138).60 The painting itself is from 1650, with a long early colophon set from the same time; the current mounting format is from 1872, and the title-piece from 1910. The obscurity of the artist in China’s art canon – an artist unremarked in China but fêted in Japan for his fan paintings – safeguarded the object from imperial appropriation (the fate of much of the core canon, as we have seen) enabling its parallel transmission within one provincial gentry family, from the man who commissioned it, Gong Weiliu (1611–1680), to the one who last remounted it, Gong Ben’ang (1821–1874), to the pioneering woman Wu Zhiying (1868–1934), who by 1910 felt empowered to inscribe and sign the title-piece in a self-consciously

feminine yet obviously cosmopolitan hand. In terms of its size and scale, the inscription once again prefigures and sets up a dialogue with the ‘painting heart’.61 The note of a Japanese taste for the work of this artist serves as a reminder of the increasing significance of Japan in the development of China’s modern art world, including the iconological foundation of Modernism in the xieyi lineage traced back through Bada and Shitao to Xu Wei and Chen Chun, especially following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Republic of China was founded in 1912, soon after Wu Zhiying’s inscription, but there were no subsequent paratextual accretions in the post-imperial era. The artwork passed out of private circulation into a major museum collection, going behind what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called the ‘vitrine’, that glass divider between audience and object in the context of the museum and the exhibition. This was the world of display of ‘representative specimens’ in the new exhibition culture augurated in late Qing China by A. W. Bahr, organizer of China’s first art exhibition and author of a subsequent catalogue featuring photographs of the installation published in 1911, after his move to London.62 The aesthetic theatrics and visual recursion of this moment, when Chinese art was about to be launched into the international Modernist art world, are wonderfully captured in Bahr’s catalogue, Old Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art in China: Being Description and Illustrations of Articles Selected from an Exhibition Held in Shanghai, November, 1908. A colour plate illustrating one of the exhibits showcases a Qing ceramic vase of fashionable (in the West) famille noire ware, possibly of the Kangxi period (illus. 144). It is fascinating how this is done, through multiple levels and forms of framing. In the book, the colour reproduction is identifiable as one of the paintings of the exhibits commissioned by Bahr 187

142, 143 Title-piece by Wu Zhiying (1868–1934), dated 1910, for Wang Jianzhang (active 1621–62), Spring Rain, Thatched Hut  (Chunyu caotang tu), 1650, handscroll, ink on paper, 31 × 81.5 cm (overall: 34.2 × 1,164 cm).

144 Famille noire vase lent to the Shanghai 1908 exhibition by Ma Chang-kee, painting by Wang Zhenhai (active c. 1908).

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from the local artist Wang Zhenhai (Wong Chun Hai). Working presumably from a photograph, Wang illustrated the pot as if it was an image in a picture-scroll. The scroll is seen to lie open for the viewer, its curled edges revealing a brown brocaded decorative floral pattern on the back. The multiple embedded layerings – of the enamelpainted porcelain pot (on its stand) within the

painted (and signed) picture-scroll, which comprises the Shanghai artist’s painting, captured by a photograph, reproduced in a plate within the catalogue – speak to the multiple interactions, facilitated by new technologies, of new audiences: here was the emerging international Modernist art world, to which we turn in the next chapter.

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6 Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll

T

he toppling of the Qing dynasty in the xinhai revolution of 1911 sharply put into question the traditional, late imperial culture of the handscroll and the scroll’s reception practices within the framework of this art’s long dynastic history. The Bitter Bamboo Shoots scroll (illus. 145, 146) of calligraphy ascribed to the eccentric Tang-dynasty (618–907) monk Huaisu (737–799), for instance, bears a joint viewing colophon dated to 1910, an intervention that rounded off a millennium of exemplary provenance documented in its inscriptions. That path began with the Northern Song (960–1127) court’s label in gold calligraphy beside the artwork. Next came an authentication for the Southern Song (1127–1279) court as ‘genuine traces’ by Mi Youren (1086–1165 or 1074–1153), followed by a long colophon by the Ming (1368–1644) tycoon Xiang Yuanbian (1525–1590), and then a title-piece reading ‘From the brush of Huaisu’ in the Qianlong emperor’s (r. 1736–95) hand.1 However, the remarkable placement of the 1910 colophon, curiously positioned

‘outside’ (that is, to the left of, in the backing paper) the last of the pre-modern seals, hints at the existence of a different, modern kind of social– political context, which was already a profound reality outside the elite art world and would lay the ground for a much contested reformulation of the cultural agenda in the fledgling Republic. Mapping out this new, often cosmopolitan, often chaotic, environment for the handscroll in this chapter has called for a rather different contextual approach. By contrast with what is seen in other chapters, the selection and order of the case studies may appear somewhat disparate and random, by way of a deliberate reshuffle of the archive and an eclectic juxtaposition of sources. Such a culturally specific practice as colophonwriting has persisted since 1911 but in curtailed fashion, in times when its translatability into other modern cultures, including Japan’s, was limited by the high cultural entry point and continuing conventions around gender as well as new paradigms of display. In about 1900, Qing China’s late 191

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imperial art practice and its cultural hierarchy were suffering a poor image internationally. Fine works of art, which had flowed in small numbers to Korea and Japan since medieval times, and to an extent into the Persianate and Arab worlds in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,2 now started also arriving in Japan and other, EuroAmerican ‘great power’ countries and their colonies in greater numbers as spoils and collectibles. Japan’s powerful emergence onto the geopolitical stage in the decades following the 1868 Meiji Restoration meant that Japanese connoisseurs and artists, despite being on China’s periphery, played a major role as international brokers for ‘Chinese art’, as it was soon to be called, in the West. This was epitomized by the impact of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress scroll (see illus. 2–6), acquired through purchase by the British Museum in 1903 from a British Indian Army officer present in Beijing in 1900–1901 for the relief of the Boxer Rebellion. Under surgent Japanese influence, this Chinese art was regarded as part of Asiatic or Eastern art, as when the Admonitions scroll first went on public display at the British Museum alongside the trove of medieval Buddhist materials from Dunhuang acquired by European explorers, to coincide with a joint imperialist project, the ‘Japan–British Exhibition’ held in London’s White City in 1910. This chapter investigates the massive impact on the living tradition of making, handling, reading and viewing handscrolls visited by modern industrial technologies, ideologies and national

identities, including in artistic modernism under the Republic of China from 1912, in socialist realism in the People’s Republic from 1949 and in late modern diasporic contexts. Our subject competed for interest like never before against other, modern, literary and cultural media and formats, especially in the wake of the 1919 New Culture (or May Fourth) movement, which ushered in sweeping modernizations to everything from writing instruments (doing away with brushes) to the use of the vernacular for literature in place of literary or classical language. No one has really probed into whether, in this new cosmopolitan era of jazz, fashion, glossy magazines and sport, the picture-scroll was regarded as any more than an anachronism to be tolerated, a throwback to China’s dynastic or even feudal society and culture retarding the modernization of ʻEastern artʼ. This chapter provocatively opens up such questions. It explores intermedial links between scroll art and art in modern media: for example, anticipating the ways that photographers, active in China by the 1840s, appropriated and refashioned the expressive text–image mode from scholar painting and, for another example, examining the ways that narrative painting, a genre that owed its cultural prominence to the picture-scroll medium, was transformed through book and poster publishing. Did those photographic and print technologies, in a convenience culture, render consumers less responsive to the charms of the picture-scroll format, turning it into a preserve of connoisseurs and collectors and of the new art 192

145, 146 Attributed to Huaisu (737–99), Bitter Bamboo Shoots (Kusun tie), handscroll, ink on silk, 25.1 × 12 cm (the calligraphy: detail, right). Colophon of 1910 at the end of the backing paper.

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professionals, curators and art historians? What were the consequences for scroll and brush arts of Modernist critical reforms to the art canon from the 1920s on, including the introduction of Western neoclassical oil painting, medical anatomy and art practices in art academies? The fashioning of the Modernist artist, exemplified by the peasant-born master Qi Baishi (1864–1957) (see illus. 155), correlated with a realignment of scholar– painter lineages, with the reanimation of a path retraced to the fancied beginning of modern art in mid-Ming China. Where did the picture-scroll sit within the resulting ‘sketch-conceptualist’ (xieyi) lineage traced proleptically back from the early twentieth century through the Qing individualists to those Ming pioneers of modernity, Chen Chun (1483–1544) and Xu Wei (1521–1593)? If the effects of global Modernism in Republican China helped to turn ‘painting’ into a prime category in its own right, this gained purchase on incipient domestic creative and display practices.3 Paintings, often in a Western ‘landscape’ format, were by the mid- to late Qing increasingly mounted and framed to hang on walls in public and private spaces. Such modern ways of showing art posed a profound challenge. The picture-scroll’s long-developed internal symbiosis of text and image, and the integrity of the scroll as an aesthetic medium, would come under further threat in the wake of technological and scientific developments and the advent of a modern media and public. The whole of East Asia was increasingly drawn into this modern global visual economy. Mass media and, with it, public opinion followed the success of newspress impresarios like the Major brothers in late Qing Shanghai, and by the 1920s illustrated journals, magazines and pictorials enjoyed global distribution to Chinese diasporas. While the modern ‘iconic circuit’ comprised both canonical works and the art of critically acclaimed contemporaries,

the continued mainstream reception of scroll culture was hardly assured. China’s best young artists were now routinely training abroad, typically in Japan or Europe, alongside their Japanese peers, bringing home new subjects and techniques, and shaping new types of artists, such as celebrity women painters like Pan Yuliang (Pan Yulin, Yangzhou, 1895–Paris, 1977) and the Fauvist Guan Zilan (Violet Kwan, 1903–1986). After the exoticism of eighteenthcentury Chinoiserie – consider Boucher’s salon painting The Chinese Garden (1742)4 – by the early twentieth century, Western Modernist artists started to incorporate Chinese artworks into their paintings, typically as significant backgrounds. The American painter Leopold Gould Seyffert’s (1887–1956) dally with Modernism, Nude with Chinese Background (1919), reproduces a mural featuring luohans like a screen behind the model in her repose, echoing the display of the Admonitions beside Buddhist paintings and manuscripts. The backdrop of the arresting Self-Portrait as Tahitian (1934) painted in Paris by the then 21-year-old Amrita Sher-Gil (Budapest, 1913–Lahore, 1941), features an ancient Chinese figural scene onto which is cast the looming shadow of a man.5 This new urban and cosmopolitan world of art was on show in a well-known painting by Chen Shizeng (or Chen Hengke, 1876–1923), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition, of 1917 (illus. 147), made to record a week-long exhibition, refreshed daily, that he and others put on in Beijing to raise money for flooding relief outside the capital. A largenosed Westerner – who could be someone like Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875–1968), the Americanborn mining magnate and book collector, who was in Beijing around this time – and two women, one tottering on her bound feet, are among the viewership, but it is still largely a domestic, older man’s world. Twelve years later, in 1929, China’s first National Fine Arts Exhibition was eventually 194

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Modern was then subdivided into oil painting, ‘national [ink] painting’ or guohua and foreign painting. Yet even within guohua there were very few handscrolls: they were mostly hanging scrolls or framed pictures. When edgy works in oil were on display like He Sanfeng’s In the Studio, which showed young male artists fraternizing with the nude female model, picture-scrolls must have seemed dated and limited to the well-travelled younger generation.6 Two tests for the post-imperial continuity of scroll culture were the implications of its global spread and the fate of its attendant practice of colophon writing. So far we have seen how members of the late Qing elite of colophon writers, rather than adding seamlessly to the thread of post-scripted colophons,7 had already broken with history, either with a spatial gap, as we saw with the 1910 viewing colophon to Bitter Bamboo Shoots (see illus. 145), or else by penning more extended title-piece inscriptions, as we saw with the female calligrapher and activist Wu Zhiying (1868–1934) (see illus. 142). We remain vigilant to such patterns of change below, while noting here that the practice of textual accretions carried on, albeit in a more limited way, with both the start of ‘museum-ification’ worldwide inhibiting the practice and fewer new handscrolls being created as a default mounting, even for horizontal pictures. 147 Chen Shizeng (Chen Hengke, 1876–1923), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition (Duhua tu), 1917, hanging scroll, ink and colours on paper, 87.7 × 46.6 cm.

Art and the anachronism of the ‘Last Emperor’

mounted in Shanghai on a similar rolling model, enabling an eclectic and wide-ranging display involving a far greater diversity of actors. The new categories of modern Chinese art were also on show and are preserved in the subsequent catalogue. The first division was necessarily into ancient (a minority) and modern works (a majority).

Complicit victim of China’s revolutionary century, the person of Pu Yi (1906–1967), the so-called Last Emperor, is intricately bound up in the modern heritage questions surrounding China’s handscroll patrimony. Picture-scrolls were the overwhelmingly preferred format of the cache of artworks surreptitiously removed by the teenager and his younger brother from the Forbidden City 195

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in 1922–3 and later carted around his Japanese puppet-state of Manchuria as his treasure chest. In this retrospectively hiatus period, old-master works such as Zheng Sixiao’s (1241–1318) Ink Orchid (see illus. 83) were highly marketable, especially in the confidential sales networks Pu Yi and his retainers developed through their promotion of imperialist Japan’s Asian ‘co-prosperity sphere’. A general taste among Japanese collectors for simple, monochrome images, often in relatively small sizes, exerted an influence in attracting such works to Japan. Revolution and globalization have highlighted the portability of these artworks in the hands of much-displaced collecting elites, with real significance for art history. Pu Yi was certainly not alone in faciliating a rare interdynastic dispersal of scrolls across East Asia and the West, since other prominent citizens also played their part, such as Wanyan Jingxian (c. 1848–c. 1927), who helped to develop major museum collections in North America (see illus. 71) through links to the Japanese scholar and curator Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), buyer for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and to the Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer (1854– 1919), whose collection now forms part of the u.s. National Museum of Asian Art.8 Yet it is scrolls scattered by Pu Yi that belong in a near-legendary category and follow a pattern of resurfacing randomly and spectacularly in today’s mass media. This book began with the most famous extant handscroll in China, Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival (see illus. 30), which resurfaced after the end of the Civil War in 1950, when the connoisseur Yang Renkai (1915–2008) was assigned to review the collections of what was then the Northeast Museum (now Liaoning Provincial Museum).9 A more recent and slightly more low-key apparition is the scroll of Ten Poems by Zhang Xian (990–1078), which was acquired at auction in 1995 by the Palace Museum, Beijing.

It is scarcely possible that Pu Yi could have made the impact he did on East Asian political history without the recourse he had, as the deposed Qing monarch, to these objects as his ready sources of cash and as brokers of social and political connections, had they not been so easily portable, aesthetically desirable per se and readily monetizable as well-provenanced ex-imperial artworks in both Japan and China. The convention of imperial seal stamping, which Pu Yi’s courtiers perpetuated, had once conferred legitimacy on the palace; and it would later (that is, today) come to signal national heritage in museum collections. Pu Yi’s role in the present disposition of handscrolls in collections worldwide may be traced to his earliest survival instincts as a de facto teenage prisoner. In the summer of 1922 he announced his wish to study in England, and over the next half a year he and his brother Pu Jie began smuggling works from the royal collection out of the Forbidden City to fund their escape. ‘We must have removed over a thousand handscrolls, more than two hundred hanging scrolls and pages from albums, and about two hundred rare Sung Dynasty printed books,’ he later confessed, out of choice or otherwise.10 This proportion, of five handscrolls to two of all other formats combined, reflected his anticipated needs but also palace values. Handscrolls were always listed first in the inventories in use – ironically, these were official lists made to try to staunch the rampant flow of losses taking place primarily at the hands of pilfering eunuchs. Pu Yi’s tutors naturally also relied on the Qing court inventories, such as Shiqu baoji, but their modernist rather than strictly orthodox taste did have a small yet noticeable impact on their evaluations and hence on Pu Yi’s choices.11 We have seen that the Chinese handscroll or old-master painting tradition was already going global, and Pu Yi’s adolescent antics and diminished responsibility symbolized the acceleration 196

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148 Zheng Wuchang (Zheng Chang, 1894–1952), Tasting Tea (Pinming tu), 1930, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 34 × 150 cm.

of that. At an early stage of his career, in China in the 1920s and ’30s, the Jewish Anglo-Indian baronet and collector Sir Percival David (Mumbai, 1892–London, 1964), acquired two fairly important picture-scrolls – Night-Shining White, attributed to Han Gan (active 742–56) (see illus. 25), and Pear-Blossoms, with an attribution to Qian Xuan (1239–1301) – which had left the Qing palace, though not, it seems, through Pu Yi’s hands. David soon gave up on Chinese paintings as being too tricky to acquire and switched to ceramics and the odd relevant painting such as the Yongzheng (r. 1723–35) Scroll of Antique Trinkets (see illus. 128). However, other Western and Japanese collectors, including Freer, persevered with great success. The notion that what images do, in being created or remade, to change their world by making a difference is useful here for an understanding of how the conservatism or anachronism of the imperium – that is, Pu Yi and his court – operated in an otherwise generally progressive and certainly republican and modern age.12 For Pu Yi and his leading courtiers, members of the disparate yilao (‘old guard’, mainly former Qing scholar–officials),

Zheng Xiaoxu (1860–1938) and Chen Baochen (1848– 1935), the picture-scroll was a creative practice that anachronistically continued to afford the chance to commemorate and emote through creative conversations in poetry, calligraphy and painting, providing a kind of nostalgic solace or compensation in the old-fashioned way, but with a modern twist. Elsewhere, I have explored the discreet collaboration between these courtiers and a progressive young ink-painter, Zheng Wuchang (or Zheng Chang, 1894–1952, but no relation to Zheng Xiaoxu), in the making of a picture-scroll entitled Flight of the Dragon, which commemorated Pu Yi’s dramatic expulsion from the Forbidden City during a coup on 23 October 1924 and survives only in a grainy image.13 Not long afterwards, in 1930, Zheng Wuchang had been commissioned to create a visual record in painting of an ‘elegant gathering’ (yaji), at which the courtier Zheng Xiaoxu was present. The resulting work, Tasting Tea (illus. 148), was one of Zheng Wuchang’s rare forays into the handscroll medium, but it also highlights the function of the format in modernist 197

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small handscroll of Ten Gibbons (illus. 149, 150) is, again, a formalistic play with East Asian connotations, recalling Chan or Zen Buddhist paintings and historical links between China and Japan. Pu Yi never got to study at Oxford, but the life he had fancied as a teen is glimpsed through the careers and world views of his contemporaries. Take the art of Wu Zuoren (1908–1997), who had trained in Europe and returned to China in 1935 with his Belgian wife, Lina (d. 1939). Wu’s History of Tea (illus. 151) picture-scroll of 1945 features episodic illustrations of various stages of tea’s production, transport in caravans and consumption in the highlands of Tibet, loosely recalling nineteenth-century China School albums on such topics made for the Western market.15 Here the seven stages of the ‘history’ are accompanied by an explanatory text in Wu’s colophon. Wu employs a striking composition to focus attention on the sequence of figures, of the Tibetans and nomads and their livestock and lifestyles. Within the pictorial design and choreography, these linked scenes pink or shear back and forth four times in a formalistic zigzag pattern, both in the picture plane and in the ground plane, from the foreground to increasingly distant and carefully scaled background points, as the scroll unfolds. This example of an innovative adaptation of the

China, as still the right convenience for figural depictions where the addition of dedicatory and commemorative inscriptions by participants was subsequently called for. Pu Yi was no artist, but his older cousin Pu Ru (or Pu Xinyu, 1896–1963) was. Once an outside contender for the Qing throne and opposed to Pu Yi’s pro-Japan policies, Pu Ru fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist camp ahead of the Communist victory in the mainland in 1949 and later became a professor of fine arts at National Taiwan Normal University. He exemplifies the upholding of the tradition of scroll-painting with, for example, a work dedicated to his wife, Lee Moyun, entitled Butterflies (1953).14 Gently recalling small-format Chinese court paintings of this topic, this is nevertheless an intimate and refreshingly modern work that somehow incorporates Japanese sensibilities towards formalism in the fluttering layout and patterning in flattish planes, and the technical neo-traditionalism of doing subjects in old world media but with a crisp modern eye, as seen in Japan’s neo-traditional painting school, Nihonga. Despite the turmoil of the Second World War, a calmly formal innovation combined with a certain cosmopolitanism is evident in handscrolls of the mid-twientieth century before the Communist revolution of 1949. In Pu Ru’s case, a 198

149, 150 Pu Ru (1896–1963), Ten Gibbons (Shiyuan tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 17.5 × 110.4 cm.

151, 152 Wu Zuoren (1908–1997), History of Tea, 1945, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 39.4 × 299.7 cm. Calligraphy by Shen Yinmo (1883–1971) and Fu Baoshi (1904–1965).

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scroll to such a modern purpose would indicate that the picture-scroll’s agency was not entirely reduced, by the mid-twentieth century, to academic and commemorative functions. Pu Yi’s life choices and their impact certainly played a part in disrupting the canon while in the work of a new generation of artists the medium was at the same time being transformed, as Modernist and cosmopolitan contexts opened up in spite of ongoing global and regional conflicts in which Pu Yi remained mired.

world as buyers for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they formed one of the world’s finest collections of Japanese and Chinese oldmaster paintings. In 1908 they were in London, where Fenollosa died, leaving unfinished the manuscript of one of the first English-language histories of East Asian art, framed as Asiatic art, posthumously published in 1912 as Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. Okakura visited the major London museums and made ‘interesting finds in [the] way of Oriental things’, presumably including the as yet unexhibited Admonitions scroll in the British Museum.17 This duo was hugely influential on Western museum and collecting practices, and this is reflected in the way British curators in national museums then investigated, grouped and catalogued their growing Asian art collections.18 Part of the legacy of the 1910 ‘Japan–British Exhibition’ was that one of the Japanese printmakers in residence, Urushibara Yoshijiro (1888–1953), stayed on in England in the employ of the British Museum, befriending establishment artists such as Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956) and turning his hand to supporting two aspects of the modern museum’s mission, publication and conservation. He produced a woodcut facsimile of the Admonitions and in 1916 was charged with remounting the scroll for conservation reasons, owing to the extreme fragility of the silk support. Utterly without precedent, but entirely in keeping with a modern vision of ‘painting’, the handscroll was disassembled from its most recent mounting (at the hands of the Qianlong emperor), covered with a transparent sealant and fixed onto two stretchers, one for the painting alone and the other for ‘all that Chinese writing’, as Craig Clunas archly put it.19 The impact of this form of knowledge production was immediate. When a party of Japanese artists on a study tour to Europe came by in 1923, two of them, Kobayashi Kokei (1883–1957) and Maeda

Modern museums, collectors and a discipline of art history Elite Chinese art emerged, then, into an international art world shaped by geopolitics. The First World War provided the opportunity and context, for instance, for the copper magnate and bibliophile Chester Beatty to travel to China and Japan around 1917. In East Asia, ‘books’ translated into picture-scrolls so that, in the Japanese book arts, Beatty began to amass what would become an important and rare collection of popular early Edo (1603–1868) narrative picture-scrolls, Nara e-hon (see illus. 109).16 In Beijing, he reputedly bought a job-lot of Chinese handscrolls in exchange for an automobile and the resulting Chinese painting collection consists, not surprisingly, mostly of late Qing pastiches made in Beijing for the burgeoning middlebrow and international markets, of a kind dubbed Liulichang (‘Glazed Tile Factory’) or houmen (‘back gate’ of the Forbidden City) pastiches. An example is a cheerfully gulling scroll-painting in twenty scenes, decoratively enriched by gilding to the top and bottom rims, purporting to be by the Qing court painter Yu Zhiding (1647–1709), Story of Oriole, or Romance of the Western Wing (illus. 153). The American aesthete Ernest Fenollosa (1853– 1908) and his Japanese confrère Okakura Kakuzō, author of The Book of Tea (1903), travelled the 202

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153 Unknown late Qing (1644–1911) artist (signature of Yu Zhiding, 1647–1709), scenes from Romance of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji), also known as The Story of Oriole (Yingying zhuan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, h. 29.6 cm.

Seison (1885–1977), jointly made a close copy of the painting for the library of one of Japan’s imperial universities in Sendai (illus. 154). They worked side-by-side on alternate scenes in the gloom of the museum’s study space, an experience that echoed through their twin developments into two twentieth-century masters of Nihonga, even if they rarely again worked with the handscroll as a painting medium.20 Following Pu Yi’s removal from the Forbidden City in 1924, the site complex was soon converted into a national Palace Museum. Further inventories and, in time, display of the former imperial

collections in public galleries followed, with many of the precincts previously dedicated to the arts continuing as such. Calligraphy and paintings are to this day displayed in the Hall of Martial Valour (Wuyingdian), and curators, conservators and archivists are housed in offices in the former Zaobanchu (Palace Works Department) along the west wall. However, the institutionalization of a new regime of museum display utterly redefined the experience of the public viewer: handling the picture-scroll (or album) in museums was no longer possible, turning these objects into passively beheld pictures like those in vertical, 203

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154 Kobayashi Kokei (1883–1957) and Maeda Seison (1885–1977), Copy of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Joshi shin zukan no mosha), 1923, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 26.8 × 469.5 cm.

wall-mounted formats. Chen Shizeng’s Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition (illus. 147) recorded a kind of ticketed public event that echoes through the ages, a kind of charity fundraiser that might have happened at any time in the last two millennia. It shows handscrolls held fully open for viewing – they were changed daily to bring repeat viewers – with weights at each end, but this kind of practice dwindled, although it is still seen at auction viewings. The next step in ‘museum-ification’ was the introduction of the hardware of gallery display in the form of protective glass cases, a new physical vitrine framework placed around the object-image,

sealing it off from audience touch and indeed from the experience of sight by the naked eye, creating the modern spectacle of viewership. Today these audiences are larger and more socially diverse than ever before, while the quality of photographic images in books or other hi-res reproductions can be very good, affording some kind of compensation for the losses incurred by the vitrine experience. Meanwhile, the photograph itself has been seen to conspire in skewing the experience of what is displayed by customarily drawing our attention towards pictorial content, yet without critique of this form of gazing upon representational form. 204

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This comes about when the apparent ‘realism’ of photographic content tends to render the frame and the materiality of the photograph–object less visible, playing down or even denying its haptic qualities, while promoting visual content, in what John Tagg has called the burden of representation.21 All paintings undergo a related process when placed inside the vitrine, but the effect is more significantly distorting in the case of handscrolls and albums, owing to their inherent haptic qualities as viewable art objects. In an ironic twist, photographers of museum artworks belong in the reduced list of those who today get to see famous scrolls with the naked eye in behind-thescenes storage and study spaces, alongside vips, donors, curators, conservators (who double as couriers), researchers and the more fortunate and well-heeled students.

particular circumstances, such as in 1938, to repay a ‘painting debt’ he had owed since he attended a party in 1911. Festival Gathering at the Overlook Tower (illus. 155) is in the only format that could sensibly incorporate his dedication and various poems by the patron and his friends. Modernist and formalist as he was, and subject to commercial demands, Qi typically reworked his own topical compositions, and was here repurposing one of a kind seen in several leaves of a fine album from 1910.22 The translation into a wide horizontal picture frame, however, resulted in the awkward cropping of the mountaintop – perhaps the price paid for its secondary importance next to the cherry flowering by the storied viewing tower packed with guests. In the next generation, ink-painters also generally preferred hanging scrolls and albums. A scholar and painter who patriotically worked up ancient figural subjects, Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) was stylistically an admirer of Shitao and in 1933, at an awkward moment politically, he went to train in Japan. The odd short handscroll features in his oeuvre, but in the horizontal format he favoured the unmounted ‘horizontal picture’ (hengfu) or else a horizontal frame small enough to fit in a hanging scroll, in the manner of small Japanese hanging scrolls.23

Modernizing visions A quick survey of the oeuvres of China’s leading modern artists of the twentieth century shows that they were not especially interested in the picture-scroll format, preferring the ‘portrait’ shape for works to hang vertically or else album leaves. Qi Baishi availed of its potential only in

155 Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Festival Gathering at the Overlook Tower (Chaolanlou qiji tu), 1938, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 36.1 × 132.4 cm. 205

156–9 Ling Shuhua (1904–1990) et al., Spring Trees, Evening Clouds, 1925–58, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, scroll: 9.4 × 397 cm.

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despite his penchant for large-scale works for display.25 Large-scale horizontal formats, though not necessarily in the handscroll medium, seem to have translated effectively into the mid-twentiethcentury bridging of cultures, as is also seen in the work of Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), whose work has been so well received in the cultural entrepôt of Singapore. Zhang Daqian is surely the first Chinese artist to have depicted the Alps in a picture-scroll, Swiss Landscape, measuring 30.6 by 129.2 centimetres (1960), a painting based on memories of a visit with friends to the Walensee in northeast Switzerland.26 International Modernism and the handscroll did conjoin in a somewhat unusual collective artwork, in which Zhang Daqian played a significant role, namely a remarkable picture-scroll assembled by the writer Ling Shuhua, also known by her married name Su-hua Ling Chen (1904–1990), entitled Spring Trees, Evening Clouds (illus. 156–9). Zhang Daqian’s prominent contributions comprised the opening painted scene of a scholar under a pine tree and the inscription of the title-piece, done on completion of the scroll in 1958. Compiled between 1925 and 1958 and featuring almost two dozen contributions, the scroll is a veritable who’s who of the world’s leading Chinese, Japanese and British Modernist artists, and as such it loosely documents some of their interactions.27 The meeting in 1956 between two titans of twentieth-century painting, Zhang Daqian and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), at Picasso’s house in southern France, is often remarked upon. Curiously, it has led to Zhang being marketed in the West as ‘the Chinese Picasso’, despite his works selling for more than Picasso’s.28 Such are the workings of the early twenty-first-century art market. This basically colonial model of a directional push of artistic ‘influence’ from a modern West towards a subaltern China, and the framing

160 Unknown artist, The Triumph of the Kaleidoscope; or, The Demise of the Chinese Game (Le triomphe du kaleidoscope, ou Le Tombeau du Jeu chinois), 1818, lithograph collected by Robert Delaunay and Aaron Martinet.

Consider also Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), a towering figure among artists and collector– connoisseurs, who left China before the Communist takeover in 1949 and through his travels built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the extant old-master canon as well as creating a vast oeuvre. Zhang Daqian was a restless, protean and gregarious wheeler-dealer and some of his best handscrolls are likely to be still undetected forgeries rather than any works he signed in his own name.24 An exceptionally well-travelled artist, he also spent time living in California, Brazil, Argentina and finally Taiwan. Among Zhang’s signed works, the picture-scroll format was relatively little used by such an expansive and widely exhibited artist, 208

161–3 Li Yishi (1886–1942), Pictorial Impressions of the Song of Lasting Sorrow (Changhenge huayi), 1929. Three from a set of 30 illustrations in monochrome gouache on paper, landscape and portrait orientations, 22.5 × 17 cm (or 17 × 22.5 cm). Reproductions with paired calligraphic inscriptions from the eponymous ballad, after Li Yishi, Changhenge huayi (Shanghai, 1935). Right to left: scenes 8, 3 and 9.

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164 Kano Sansetsu (1589–1651) and studio, Song of Lasting Sorrow (Chōgonka gakan), detail from scroll 1 of a pair of handscrolls, ink and colours on silk, 31.5 × 1,048.5 cm.

Jeu chinois (The Triumph of the Kaleidoscope; or, The Demise of the Chinese Game, illus. 160). In it, a haughty European woman of fashion, Europa, holding a kaleidoscope and a scroll bearing kaleidoscopic images, stands, with her foot on his shoulder, over a man with a sort of Qing Manchu queue (a symbol in the nineteenth-century West of China’s backwardness) lying on the ground working on a geometric puzzle. The kaleidoscope patterns on the scroll continue seamlessly onto the hem of Europa’s dress, wedding science and beauty, as it were. Europa’s lenses and reprography (photography was only a few decades away) are seen to lord it over China’s cerebral paper puzzles. Benjamin wondered whether these Chinese tangrams, a kind of puzzle that in fact became popular in nineteenth-century France, might not show

of China as the exotic ‘other’ or a victim, has not always been seen as a simple binary. Arguably, the formation of a Chinese discipline of art history in the early twentieth century, based around the notion of ‘period style’, was fundamentally aligned with Western art’s history.29 Further, at that time, the direction and force of mutual influence between nascent Western European Modernism and late imperial China’s scholar culture came under the memorable and nuanced scrutiny of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in his Arcades Project (1927–40). In a passage questioning the originality of Picasso and his fellow Cubists in relation to Chinese art, Benjamin illustrated a French lithograph, an ‘allegorical caricature’ from 1818, entitled Le Triomphe du Kaleïdoscope ou le tombeau du 210

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1886–1942), entitled Pictorial Impressions of the Song of Lasting Sorrow (illus. 161–3). Born into a scholar– official Suzhou family, Li Yishi was the first Chinese student to graduate in the uk in fine arts, having trained at Glasgow School of Art (1907–12). He subequently read Science and Engineering, graduating from Glasgow University in 1915. His Pictorial Impressions elaborated the topical creative concept of ideas or impressions from poetry (shiyi) and painting (huayi).32 His subject was the famous ballad Song of Lasting Sorrow, by the Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846), which narrated the tragic love story of the late emperor Minghuang (r. 712–56) and his beloved consort Yang Guifei (719–756), one of China’s historical ‘beauties who topple kingdoms’. Perennially popular in East Asia since its composition in 806, the romance was also a cautionary tale, but surprisingly it seems never to have been

‘a first presentiment of the cubist principle in the plastic arts’ developed by Picasso and others in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and hence, ‘whether, in [the lithograph], the brainteaser undoes the kaleidoscope or vice versa’.30 Benjamin’s delightfully cross-grained thinking, further exemplified by his ideas on the aura of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction, continues to confound binary modelling and to inspire thinking about the nature of the artwork and its representation in the digital age.31 In the context of China’s Modernism amid the warlordism of the 1920s, China’s inaugural National Fine Arts Exhibition, finally realized in 1929, was a hugely significant event, and an extended case study is justified to illuminate how it effected an eclipse of the picture-scroll as a Chinese cultural form. We focus on a work of poetry illustration by Li Yishi (Tsoo Hong Lee, 211

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a subject of full-blown narrative illustration in the handscroll format in China, although it had been illustrated in woodblock print scenes and also in a masterpiece of handscroll-painting in Japan by the sinophile Kyoto master of early Edo period, Kano Sansetsu (1589–1651), Song of Lasting Sorrow (illus. 164). Li Yishi would hardly have known of the existence of Sansetsu’s pair of handscrolls on silk, which narrated the tale pictorially in 36 scenes, with three scenes per act, over two scrolls without any inscriptions. This mise en scène had been worked out in and adapted further from a draft version in three scrolls, executed on paper and including inscriptions to each scene.33 Li’s approach in any case eschewed the pre-modern penchant for historical referencing as he opted to devise thirty individual manga-like illustrations, called in Chinese ‘frames’ (幀 zhen), in either ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ orientation, executed in gouache. Scenes 1–10 show Yang Guifei’s elevation and sudden execution; scenes 11–20 show the bereft emperor’s infamous flight to Shu and his later return to the palace as retired emperor; and scenes 21–30 depict the fairytale postscript to the historical part of the story, concerning the Daoist magician who visits the immortal soul of Yang Guifei and brings back tokens. The manner in which Li Yishi’s set, which had been fêted at the National Exhibition, was then turned into a work of book illustration in 1931, is moot. The artist was encouraged by powerful backers to publish it with the mainstream Zhonghua publishing house and the format of the subsequent publication vaguely echoes the production of a traditional picture-scroll. Li Yishi was supported by leading figures in the art world, such as Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), president of Peking University and chief instigator of the 1929 exhibition, and Zhang Naiyan (1894–1958), who both wrote calligraphic prefaces for the book – what would have been the colophons in a handscroll

production. Then the influential entrepreneur and art dealer Zhang Renjie (1877–1950), the father of the Singaporean painter Georgette Chen (Zhang Liying, 1906–1993), provided a full calligraphic transcription of Bai Juyi’s ballad because he ‘absolutely adored’ the illustrations. This transcription is reproduced in the book before the illustrations, as it might have been in a handscroll mounting. Cai Yuanpei acclaimed the artist’s scientific vision in his naturalistic portrayal of events using Western pictorial techniques, essentially neoclassical realism. Such is the illustrational naturalism that we could imagine this set as preparatory sketches for a new cinematic film located partly in the Forbidden City in Beijing, using the furnishings, fittings, costumes and manners of the late Qing. The novelty of Li’s dramatic pictorialist approach is exemplified by the depiction of a palace fire, a most unusual subject in Chinese painting (but not in Japanese; see Sansetsu’s treatment), and by the use of neoclassical Western figural technique to depict Yang Guifei emerging nude from the hot springs. Li Yishi could exercise here his training in drawing in the life room and perhaps anatomy, even as he conveniently obscured her naked midriff by placing a pillar in front of her, in a nod to the pre-modern Chinese convention of decorum whereby high-status individuals are depicted fully clothed. But while the mode of these ‘pictorial impressions’ (huayi), as the artist calls them, is consistently illustrational, what is a most unusual innovation for painting and derives from contemporary mass media is a set of features including the constant design-conscious variation of text-and-image arrangements for the images, the accompanying inscriptions on each page and also the startling variety of script types used (see illus. 161–3). All the illustrations are either portrait or landscape orientation, but they vary in reproduced size and placement on the page, according to their 212

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pairing with the inscription, usually a quatrain from the ballad (but it can be more or less). The canonically minded might see this as a significant appropriation from narrative-style painting in early scrolls of scholar painting like the Qiao Zhongchang’s (active twelfth century) Latter Red Cliff Ode picture-scroll of before 1123 (a format reprised in the early Yuan-dynasty painting Zhao Cangyun’s (active c. 1300) Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains), where excerpts of the texts illustrated were embedded flexibly into the scrolls, whether free-floating in the air or incorporated into the landscape scenery. While the written characters are mostly legible variations on Chinese ‘standard script’, they nonetheless range eclectically across the history of the world in their fashioning and look. Mostly the formal allusions lie within the historical sequence of Chinese script types and modes, from ancient seal and clerical scripts to woodblock print right up to modern post-calligraphic handwriting, as if done with a quill, stylus, fountain pen, ballpoint or pencil. Some of the inscriptions, however, are made to look like Central and South Asian regional scripts such as Tibetan, Devanagari and Tangut. One or two venture even further afield, taking on the form of slanted Roman writing, italics, or else fanciful Art Nouveau and Art Deco designs, which were popular in pictorials and art magazines at the time, enabling strokes of the calligraphy to echo the trailing sleeves of dancers (scene 8) or flames over the city wall (scene 9). The handscroll format in itself evidently held little charm for a young progressive like Li Yishi, yet its legacy as a vehicle for visual drama and naturalism lived on in, for example, the text–image pairings and the choreographed dramatic sequences. We see it also in the manipulation of assumptions about the gender of the viewer of these scenes. As the mood and tempo of the illustrated ballad shift, the artist manipulates our position as

beholders so that sometimes we are overtly the audience not in our time but in the ballad, being implicated in the composition as a main character, and at other times we are made to play the unseen observer or voyeur. In the scene of the royal bodyguard demanding Yang Guifei’s execution as a condition for the emperor’s continued protection (scene 10), the person the guards face off against should be the emperor (he is shown behind in his carriage, unable to act or to watch) but is actually us. Sometimes we are made to take up a conflated role, as emperor and watcher of Yang Guifei emerging from the hot spring (scene 3) and as would-be parents in Tang China who, because of her glamour, ‘wished not for a son but for a daughter’. Exemplary of the emerging figure of the professional Chinese studio artist, with his suite of ‘pictorial impressions’ Li Yishi created a selfconsciously refreshing and modern reprise of the well-known ballad. He eschewed the traditional Chinese practice of formal pictorial allusions to famous old-master Chinese paintings and at the same time foregrounded contemporary realist techniques, as with the palace fire, a feature in Japanese Nihonga or China’s related Syncretist School (Zhezhongpai, or ‘Lingnan School’) images. He introduced Western art’s drawing discipline, honed in the life room. The scenes were discrete and individually framed, for public exhibition and then neatly adapted for publication on the codex page. To set this work in its worldly situation, here was a traditional Chinese subject getting a properly internationalist treatment, of a piece with the recursive Modernist synaesthesia of, say, Maurice Ravel’s (1875–1937) 1922 orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s (1839–1881) Pictures at an Exhibition or with the Zeitgeist for combinations of text and image, noted by Michel Foucault in his study of Raymond Roussel’s (1877–1933) illustrated novel of 1932, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New 213

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165 Ding Cong (1916–2009), Images of Today (Xianxiang tu), Chengdu, 1944, handscroll in three sections, ink and colours on paper, 28.6 × 149.9 cm.

Impressions of Africa), comprising a poem of four cantos and 59 drawings commissioned from Henri-Achille Zo (1873–1933).

is Jiang Zhaohe’s (1904–1986) Refugees, painted clandestinely in Beiping (now Beijing) in 1941–3 and documenting the plight of civilians during the war of resistance against Japan. Originally 2 metres high by 27 metres long, it was confiscated by Japanese military police after it was exhibited in Shanghai and was thought lost until the first 12 metres of it was rediscovered in 1953.35 In the category of self-censorship, there is no shortage of examples, explaining why there are so few picturescrolls from the Communist Revolutionary period in China after 1949. The Japan-trained Guan Liang (1900–1986), for instance, despite a lifelong focus on folk subjects like opera figures, despite largely avoiding old-world media such as the picturescroll and despite having burned all his work from the previous decade before his house was raided by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), still got ‘reform through labour’.36 Another unusual but insightful example is a set of horizontal-format nude figural works on the theme of human suffering by the great Modernist and educator Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), originally created around 1929. Lin’s destruction of his entire oeuvre in the Cultural Revolution, which did little to protect him from persecution and jail in that time, means these works are known only in grainy reproductions. Lin had already become separated from his French wife and their daughter, who emigrated to Brazil in 1956, and was largely excluded from the art world in Communist China,

Still a form of dissent Historically, the ‘Song of Lasting Sorrow’ ballad occupied a position as both a romance and a morality tale, and in those terms the narrative illustration of Li Yishi, as a mildly patriotic cosmopolitan working at the height of Modernism, tended towards romance. The work of some of his peers in this mode of figural narrative-type illustration ranged from humanistic advocacy to political polemics, emboldened by the leadership of Leftist cultural titans like Lu Xun (1881–1936), author of a set of satirical short stories, A Call to Arms (1922). The individual most associated with narrative illustration in the picture-scroll form is the Frenchtrained artist-educator Xu Beihong (Ju Péon, 1895–1953). After his return to China from Europe in 1927, a perennial theme in his work was national strengthening and regeneration, seen in academic blandishments like the handscroll Foolish Old Man Moves the Mountain, painted in India in 1940, depicting an ancient Chinese tale later alluded to in a famous speech by Mao Zedong in 1945.34 By contrast, harrowing artworks of protest or social critique have suffered at the hands of censors or self-censors over the course of the twentieth century. One such in the picture-scroll mode 214

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166 Ding Cong (1916–2009), A Picture of Reality (Xianshi tu), Hong Kong, 1947, dimensions unknown.

but the year after Mao’s death in 1976, Lin was finally allowed to leave to join his family in Rio de Janeiro but resettled in Hong Kong. There he created a series entitled Nightmare including versions of lost originals such as Suffering i (original 1929), done in 1989 after the Tian’anmen Square massacre in June of that year.37 The sensitivities of authoritarian power would explain why images of these works are rarely encountered, either in exhibitions or on the web. To explore further the link between the handscroll and the modern dissenting voice, we will look closely at the art of Ding Cong (1916–2009). Primarily remembered as a cartoon artist, Ding Cong twice in the mid-1940s turned to an extended horizontal format to shape searing socio-political critiques of China’s wartime leadership. The first of these horizontal compositions is Images of Today (illus. 165), painted in 1944 in the Republican wartime stronghold of Chengdu.38 Ding Cong adopted a cartoon-like mode, long popular for visual lampoons in the West, where the extended format means the multiple figural images can easily be viewed not synoptically but rather in a ludic additive sequence – as in a visual game of cat-and-mouse in which the artist embeds humorous and grave elements, juxtapositions, repetitions and visual transformations. In their satirical tone and aesthetic conception, these cartoon plays might be compared to Bela Bartók’s (1881–1945) The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–24), a one-act pantomime ballet with a darkly humorous tale of the sexual exploitation

of a woman by modern urban ne’er-do-wells in which no one comes to any good. One can imagine the two artworks being addressed to a similar cosmopolitan audience. In Ding Cong’s case the humour as such is all the more dark for the gravity of the subject matter and in that the composition calls for attention to detail and for proximity of the eye to the actual image observed, which are also actions exhibited, in a sometimes grotesque parallel, by the various figures in the cartoons themselves. Images of Today is all about what is observed and obscured, about people paying attention to minute details of questionable significance as the social fabric frays amid world war. Everywhere there are images and reading materials being closely examined or proudly displayed for inspection. The banner hanging in the air to the right gives the title, the artist’s name, ‘Little Ding’, and the date. A flourish at each end cannot disguise the sag in the middle. A fashionable artist is displaying his hanging scroll-painting of a mangy big cat, its bottom roller bearing tags of prizes and there is a salesman with his filthy bolt of material. Everyone seems to be myopic, to wear glasses, to be blindfolded or to have their eyes covered, sometimes menacingly, like the final figure, who naturally faces to the right in a borrowing from handscroll convention, the signal to reverse the direction of viewing at the end. His eyes are covered from behind by two grey hands reaching in from beyond the end of the image, perhaps 215

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those of the government censors Ding Cong was scorning or of an Orwellian Big Brother. In an accompanying ‘Song on My Picture of Images of Today’ by the artist, Ding Cong pondered the lives of each of his characters and drew an ominous, prophetic conclusion: ‘Images of today, such as these, cannot go on forever: the people will rise up in revolution and without hesitation!’39 The second picture is A Picture of Reality, done in 1947 in the British colony of Hong Kong, outside the jurisdiction of the Republican Chinese government censorship. Here, Ding Cong shifted from a national to an international perspective, and changed to a darker, more brooding register matched to the unleashing of pent-up anger at the failing Republican regime under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975). The generalissimo is depicted twice, Ding Cong records, to make up for the proscription on cartoon images of him within China, first as a brutal but clueless martinet and then in a bareheaded bow, begging before a complacent top-hatted arms dealer, over the claims of an ashen-faced Uncle Sam.40 From right to left, Ding traces ‘reality’ from the headline news of the war effort directed by the whip-handed Chiang Kai-shek, who commands the cannon firing high-calibre shells labelled ‘Made in usa’. Behind him, his rope drags along an emaciated peasant farmer whose conscription will immediately destitute his despairing wife. The rib bones of the couple’s farm animal and the overturned empty broken rice bowl show that she faces starvation: when she loses her grip on her man’s arm, she will literally fall to the ground with nothing, prey to any kind of evil intent in a gut-wrenching image of powerlessness and poverty. The peasant’s eyeing of bank bills behind her head leads to the topic of the hoarding of food supplies and cynical profiteering. At the pivotal centre of the composition, such a fat merchant sits on his equally round rice baskets, smiling,

brandishing cash, having his leg fondled by a willow-shaped woman and shaking hands on a deal with an even larger businessman. The left side explores international markets for staple foods and arms. Here is Chiang, again, this time begging with what little dignity remains for ordnance from the Fat Cat representing the Western military–industrial complex. This tophatted figure is the only one in the entire image who actually eyes us, the viewers, through the image surface, as if in brazen acknowledgement of the implications of his business and of his top spot in this obscene hierarchy. Below him, Uncle Sam tries to wrest a big dollar coin. Finally, a backward-looking Fascist marshal – perhaps Chiang’s one time ally Adolf Hitler himself – gives a Nazi salute as he sits, unawares, on a cartoon bomb, the fuse of which is about to be lit by a workerturned-terrorist. Reviving the geometry, symmetry and rotation embedded within rolling episodic paintings – the ‘toilette’ scene in the Admonitions scroll is a classic example (see illus. 6) – the composition of A Picture of Reality comprises two halves that we can visualize pivoting and revolving around its central vertical axis: a lethal cocktail, which is literally a vicious circle, of patriarchal systemic inequality and human needs and desires embodied in money, rice, weaponry and sex. The geometric transformations that we are invited to perform mentally around this core serve to configure a global interconnected reality perceived by the artist and to define the relationships between the caricatures of the actual figures. Arguably, this iconology is more significant since it works to conjugate the whole scene, to churn its referents and meanings, by producing the endlessly revolving dystopian cycle that is the present. Oddly, the picture is bookended by two physically strong, healthy men in the prime of youth, namely, the cannoneer to the right who 216

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167, 168 Liu Zigu (1901–1986) and Man Jian (active 1950s), Painting Scroll of the War Against America in Aid of Korea (Kang Mei yuan Chao zhanzheng huajuan), 1958, handscroll, details, ink and colours on paper, 47 × 2,700 cm.

follows Chiang’s orders and the terrorist to the left, while the only two women depicted, either side of the central column of rice baskets, are the peasant wife facing total and hopeless loss and the desperate urbanite who grimly steels herself to fellate the rice merchant. In its way, this image is as brutal an admonition to Chiang Kai-shek as the Admonitions was to its audience. Both avail of the iconological power of this particular compositional formula, but for opposite ends. If the Admonitions worked to stabilize the royal household and thereby the dynasty by picturing an auspicious reality, then the swirling world crisis in Picture of Reality is only resolved, as the artist put it, by a popular uprising.

aspects of life, and the art of the picture-scroll is no exception. The government commanded a subordination of content and form, in the jargon a hypotaxis, away from modern individual expression towards a communal, politically driven agenda. Approved subjects were closely bound up with political campaigns of the moment and with the struggle for legitimacy. In this context, China’s art academies have provided a nurturing technical home for the handscroll format, especially among artist–educators in the ink-painting or guohua mode, which, after 1949, quickly absorbed the bleached cartoon-like qualities and political values of socialist realism. In 1956, Li Xiongcai (1910–2001) used the horizontal format to trace Flood Prevention in Wuhan in a scroll measuring almost 28 metres long. Guan Shanyue (1912–2000), famous as one of the artists of the enormous painting in the Great Hall of the People, This Land So Rich in Beauty, eulogized the

In the age of iconoclasm In the Revolutionary period, notably the politically turbulent Mao years, socialist politics touched all 217

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169 Julian Jusim (b. 1946), frontispiece and title page design for Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902, Poland–1991, usa), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996).

Great Leap Forward in 1958 with a folksy handscroll entitled The Great Leap Forward in Mountain Villages.41 From the same year, a very long collaborative work by Liu Zigu (1901–1986) and Man Jian (active 1950s) surveyed the harsh conditions of the Korean war in a work entitled Painting Scroll of the War Against America in Aid of Korea (illus. 168). As socialist realism in the name of political propaganda was instituted in the mainstream, artists found a way to adapt this anodyne descriptive mode to the picture-scroll format in ambitious state-sponsored scroll projects, somewhat ironically reviving the kind of collaborative production technique last seen at the Qing court. An example is the massive Spring in the Capital (Shoudu zhichun), a kind of socialist customs-and-manners painting measuring 67.9 centimetres high by 4,560.6 centimetres long, painted in 1958–9 by a group of Beijing Art Academy artists, namely Gu Yizhou (1923–1987), Hui Xiaotong (1902–1979), Zhou Yuanliang (1904–1995), Tao Yiqing (1914– 1986), He Jinghan (1923–2008) and Song Quansen (b. 1925).42 A kind of revolutionary appropriation of Zhang Zeduan’s Going Upriver on the Qingming

170 Julian Jusim (b. 1946), illustration for Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902, Poland–1991, usa), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996), first illustrated in Der Kaiser von China, der alles auf den Kopf stellte (Munich, 1993).

Festival (see illus. 30), it is refitted, with no change to the prevailing auspicious interpretation, from a celebration of dynastic culture into a paean to Maoist communism. Prominent artists from proletarian backgrounds were generally lionized, like Qi Baishi. Many others suffered, died or were driven to suicide. As Ding Cong’s case showed, individualist or satirical visual representations of politics were subject to censorship in Republican China and have been even more severely curtailed in the 218

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People’s Republic in a pattern set under Mao’s revolutionary utopianism, particularly in the febrile politics of the Cultural Revolution. Pan Tianshou (1897–1971) was mentored by two pioneering Western-style painters of the twentieth century, Li Shutong (1880–1942) and Lin Fengmian, but also by the scholar–artist Wu Changshuo (1844–1927). He spent his whole career as a professor of guohua at the Hangzhou Art Academy, recruited in 1928 by Lin Fengmian. Pan Tianshou’s handscroll Various Subjects dates to 1959, the year he was appointed director, a post he held until his death, from persecution, in the Cultural Revolution.43 This xieyi-style handscroll stands as a last gasp of individualism and lyric expression through calligraphic and extemporary or spontaneous (if technically disciplined) brushwork and handling of light. It clearly belongs in the scholarly conceptualist lineage of Chinese painting shaped by Wu Changshuo in the Modernist 1920s, the so-called daxieyi tradition. In its repertoire of subjects (rocks, bamboos, lilies, small birds, chrysanthemums) and text–image interplay, it readily contributes to the visual discourse carried on in picture-scrolls by artists in this historical line, from Xu Wei to Bada Shanren and Wu Changshuo himself. Pan paid the ultimate price for his scholarly and reflexive ink-painting practice, in an era when individualism and traditionalism had become politically suspect, regarded as flouting the dogma of art as a public endeavour in the service of the people.

Royal Academy of Arts at Burlington House in London. Heavily supported as a propaganda exercise by the Republican government, it also included loans from the newly formed and credibilityseeking museum collections in the usa. Xia Gui’s (active c. 1180–1224) Twelve Views of Landscape (see illus. 49) was one of almost thirty loans from the Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which had only opened in 1933, that filled a gap.44 After the war and in the run-up to the 1949 Communist takeover, emigration to Taiwan, Europe and the Americas by many of China’s elite families, and by military families who fled in 1949, spurred further growth worldwide of important museum collections of Chinese paintings, notably in the usa. By the 1970s, museum galleries that had once been devoted to Greek and Roman plaster casts were being turned over to the burgeoning field of Asian art. The quantity and quality of colour-printed publications disseminating this art improved over the latter half of the twentieth century, reaching its acme with Wen C. Fong’s (1930, Shanghai–2018, Princeton) Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (1992),45 based on the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which included many works that Fong had acquired for the museum from his fellow émigré from Shanghai, the collector and painter C. C. Wang (Wang Jiqian; 1907, Suzhou–2003, New York). The growth and deepening of Western public consciousness of these images may be gauged by the increasingly specific references to Chinese old-master paintings appearing in reproductions in books and magazines. In the uk, images of China were common in children’s cartoons of the 1970s and, in the case of this writer, presaged encounters with Song-dynasty mountainous landscapes such as Xu Daoning’s (c. 970–1052) Fishermen’s Evening Song of around 1050 (see

China’s diasporas and diasporic images The political insecurity of the Republican period hampered the growing profile of Chinese art as a field within international Modernism. We have noted that the delayed first National Fine Arts Exhibition was only realized in 1929, but then in 1935–6 a landmark major international exhibition of Chinese art was held for the first time, in the 219

171, 172 Chang Ch’ung-ho Frankel (1931–2015), Painting after Zha Shibiao (Zha Shibiao, 1615–98), 1970–80s, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 34.9 × 962.7 cm.

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illus. 49).46 The Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) also authored a children’s book, The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China, published in 1971, about a tyrant and his benighted politics, loosely based on Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. The first edition was illustrated by William Pène du Bois (1916–1993).47 A later, German edition of 1993 featured an illustration schema by the Russian-born illustrator Julian Jusim (b. 1946).48 As the opening page illustrates, Jusim conceived of the whole book as a scroll, in a neat conflation between the Chinese picture-scroll and Jewish scriptural scrolls (illus. 169). ‘As the story is set in the past,’ Jusim has written, ‘I thought it was a good idea to enhance the effect of the illustration to let hands open a scroll at the very beginning of the book and [close by] ripping off paper at the end.’ Jusim has further stated that

although familiar with Chinese paintings and the use of scrolls, . . . the only source of inspiration for my illustrations was Singer’s story which deals . . . with a world in which everything is the other way round. When thinking how to express this visually, the mirror seemed to me a perfect means, because in it everything is reflected the wrong way round.49

Other scenes seem to riff, perhaps coincidentally, on famous artworks that play on reflection, such as the ‘toilette’ scene from the Admonitions scroll (image 4) (illus. 170; see illus. 6) and a scene from Min Qiji’s (1580–after 1661) Romance of the Western Wing (image 7).50 Since the early twenty-first century, China’s rapid economic development has enabled the middle class to travel and study abroad, and we

173 Li Yuan-chia  (1929–1994), Folding Scrolls, one of a series, Bologna, 1963–6, 10.5 × 69.3 cm. 221

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have seen an exponential growth of national and international markets for Chinese art. With that new exposure, mainland Chinese started to encounter stories of modern Chinese art that had unfolded outside the Communist repertoire. The early twentieth century also saw renewed attention being paid to works by Chinese diaspora artists in North America, including those by female artists like Chang Ch’ung-ho Frankel (1913–2015), creator of Painting after Zha Shibiao (1615–1698) (illus. 171, 172), from the 1970s or 1980s. Focus on art by Chinese-born women artists as a valid category has prompted changes in museum collecting policies since the millennium, driven by now global interest in the age of social media.51 Li Yuan-chia (1929–1994) is an example of a peripatetic Chinese-born artist from one of the military families that left for Taiwan in 1949 who is now being promoted in the twenty-first-century market. Born in Guangdong and educated in Taiwan, he later lived in Bologna, London and Cumbria, in England’s northwest. While living

in Bologna between 1963 and 1966, he created a series of Folding Scrolls (illus. 173). As pleasingly unfamiliar, even experimental iterations of a known format, these were not really scrolls at all but concertina albums which opened out like scrolls but were presumably easier to acquire and more convenient to handle, display and store.52 These folding scrolls are broken into pages and yet still linked. On each of the faces or folds is an abstract composition, featuring three or four forms made up of dots and circles in a few colours, positioned along an imaginary ground plane but with the forms tipped up into the picture plane. These play out in sequence against a bold monochrome background over the four to six folds of the ‘scroll’. The colours of these abstract forms circulate or, as it were, scroll through the shapes (dots and circles), or vice versa, in a mingling process of visual and conceptual rearrangement, one not obviously progressing or evolving but seemingly stimulated by its own inner life force.

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his last chapter explores the place of the Chinese picture-scroll in the late modern art world mainly since the death of Mao in 1976, with emphasis on the contemporary global economy of art. As beholders, we now interact with these picture-scrolls in fundamentally different ways from the people that produced them over most of their historical existence, so how altered is the nature of our making, reading, viewing and even naming them as artworks? What is the status and function of the corpus of old-master paintings in this format, the material form of a great part of Chinaʼs transmitted heritage of painting, traditionally dubbed ʻsilent poetryʼ (wushengshi), as well as new works being added to this body?1 There are four linked areas of enquiry which we take broadly in turn, beginning with how statism instrumentalizes and reframes the picture-scroll, largely to fashion and project an ethno-national identity. We then attend to the changing ways that museums worldwide handle handscrolls and how these are presented institutionally and intellectually today.

Third, we investigate what artists now make of the medium. Finally, we look at the digital future in prospect.

The statist picture-scroll The idea of China is now powerfully conflated with the Central People’s Government of the Partystate, even as Chinese art at the same time goes global. This China played out on the world stage at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which had its fair share of arts controversies – from Ai Weiwei’s (b. 1957) on-off involvement in the design of the Bird’s Nest stadium to the integrity of the opening ceremony, directed overall by the film director Zhang Yimou (b. 1951), including Cai Guo-qiang’s (b. 1957) part pre-recorded Giant’s Footsteps firework display leading to the stadium and the lip-syncing of the young singer. The centrepiece of the stadium event was a stunning mixed-arts passage, entitled Scroll (illus. 174), a name that forcefully pitched the purity of technique and form as subject and 223

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174 Shen Wei  (b. 1968), Scroll, performance, section of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.

content per se. It featured dancers performing on top of a giant led screen that showed the unrolling of an enormous handscroll, a sequence conceived, choreographed and visually designed by the dance choreographer and painter Shen Wei (b. 1968), a Chinese-born New Yorker.2 The unfolding picture zone or ‘painting heart’ within the notional handscroll was a stage on which dancers, like brushes, moved kinaesthetically, enacting creative movements as brushes leaving traces in calligraphy and painting on paper. Demonstrating the skill set of the contemporary Chinese artist, Shen Wei’s achievement lay not just in the creativity of his performance, the marrying of contemporary dance with music and visual arts brush movement, but in his handling of the censors, whom he convinced to let him remove other intermediary elements, namely proletarian arts from the Socialist repertoire such as shadow puppetry and folk opera. Highlighting paper and the handscroll as ancient Chinese inventions laid a foundation. On that, he showcased a distinctive kinaesthetic approach to art-making, giving form to a late modern vision of China’s mainstream elite brush-arts tradition of the last two millennia, as seen through its highly technical practice in the art academies, what has been called a ‘conservativenativist’ mode.3 At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the

Central government was in full political mythmaking mode, reaching out with a kind of strategic essentialism to the domestic audience and diasporas while demonstrating the handscroll format and kinaesthetic brush movement as core elements of Chinese culture before the world. The intense political regulation of art within China is a hallmark of Party-state governmentality and the largely command economy. Loyalty and Party membership often seem to precede merit as criteria for success in terms of access to resources, networks and political, if not critical acclaim. Meanwhile, the imposition on art of dogma and Party revisionism, which may be politically nuanced, is rarely critically attuned and occasionally a case of the emperor’s new clothes.4 It is scarcely conceivable that any artist within China could have done what Shen Wei did, when power so freely asserts its right to manage the relationship with the past in its own interest.

The mission of museums What are the roles of leading museums holding major collections of handscroll-paintings, including their initiatives in acquiring, cataloguing, exhibiting and publishing their holdings? What are the stories they tell through these activities? 224

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Following the maxim ‘the past serves the present’ (gu yi jin yong), art in China now follows a calendar of strategic political anniversaries and amnesias, within which art and in particular ‘tier 1 artworks’ (yijipin), as their aesthetic designation implies, play a special role. An insightful case is the loan in 2007 from the Palace Museum, Beijing, of an outstanding group of handscrolls to represent The Pride of China in an exhibition in Hong Kong. Intended to ‘evince the loving support rendered to us [i.e., the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (sar)] by the Central People’s Government’ on the tenth anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China, the exhibition ‘The Pride of China: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy of the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties from the Palace Museum’ even featured a handscroll-shaped codex catalogue.5 Only a few of the 32 artworks were not canoncial handscrolls, and only one dated to later than the core culture millennium of the fourth to fourteenth century. The inclusion of a local loan, a Ming-dynasty copy (no. 32) of Zhang Zeduan’s Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival scroll of around 1100 (cover, no. 17; see illus. 30) rang out, in this exalted company, like a patriotic peripheral echo of that core and central culture. Moreover, that Ming copy was the only painting ‘attributed to’ any artist, breaking the pattern of otherwise unguarded attributions to individual masters which fulfilled the promise to visitors of a ‘once-in-a-lifetime rendezvous with the 32 masterpieces’.6 This highly strategic loan exhibition also paved the way for the landmark development of a southern branch of the Palace Museum in Hong Kong, begun in 2017 without public consultation but with attendant securitization and sovereignty implications. While the artist attributions given to these same paintings on the Palace Museum website in the 2020s are more nuanced, nevertheless the

process of instrumentalization continues.7 No. 31 in the 2007 Hong Kong show was a rare handscroll attributed to the Yuan master Ni Zan (1301–1374), Bamboo Branch (see illus. 84). Neither this subject nor the format was his forte, as noted (hence, in part, the equivocal attribution in these pages), but his stature and the fact that this painting was a handscroll both fitted the exhibition brief. On the Palace Museum website, however, another particular kind of reading of this scroll is advanced, placing little value on the painting and most on the later provenance. The scroll is described as having ‘twice entered the palace’, having been acquired by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95), then ‘stolen out of the palace’ by the last emperor Pu Yi (1906–1967) and then reacquired from the Hong Kong collector Wong Nanping (d. 1985).8 Already in 2005, a market trend of ‘art flowing back to China’ was perceived.9 While archaeologists were beginning to ask ‘What do objects want?’,10 in this case, through digital framing, it is as if the Ni Zan has finally come home to the palace as a museum with the implication that other homeless or peripatetic scrolls out there in the wind not only want to revert to their natural home, the Palace Museum, but sense it as their destiny. Visually, if the eye is attuned to surveiling the philological saturation of such works from the canon, the pattern of accretions of inscriptions and seals in a scroll’s painting zone and its marginalia can prompt the object to speak, as it were, of its origins and provenance almost exclusively. This particular scroll bears the obvious marks of having passed through the hands of the Ming tycoon-collector Xiang Yuanbian (1525–1590) – his are the first seals to encroach inside the artist’s inscription – and of having then entered the Qing palace collection of the Qianlong emperor, who added the small-character inscription and multiple seals to the left and right and above. Obvious too are the single seals of his imperial successors, 225

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Huizong’s (r. 1100–1126) Auspicious Dragon Rock bears his inscription dated to 1951 (illus. 175, 176). Keeping with the old ways, there is little variation here from the traditional, late imperial purport of the colophon. He took a direct approach: that is, appraisal of the artist and this work in Chinese art history and evaluation in terms of mainstream scholarly aesthetic ideals. The scroll is said to exemplify the union of the ‘three perfections’ of poetry, calligraphy and painting, making it a ‘truly rare treasure of the ages’. The recent provenance of this painting also made it a suitable exhibit (no. 15) or instrument in the 2007 Hong Kong exhibition, illustrating the currency of the narrative of return.

the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820; oval, to the right of his inscription) and Pu Yi as Xuantong emperor (r. 1908–11; the bright red square below the last). What stand out as post-dating these are the two redder seal impressions at the bottom on the right: the seals of Wong Nanping, signalling that the scroll was sold into private hands by Pu Yi. Just as with the commandeering of the elite mainstream art tradition, this subsequent ‘rightful’ return to the Palace Museum sets up an awkward conflation of the late imperial Qing with the contemporary post-Socialist regime, as if the nation was reliant on demonstration of repossession of the Qing collections for its own legitimacy.11 There are futher layers. In the early days of nation-building, before the tumult of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), expatriate Chinese worked to return scattered scrolls for safe keeping and transmission. The Hong Kong collector–dealer J. D. Chen (Chen Rentao, 1906–1968) tracked down paintings that had been lost from the Forbidden City, particularly at the hands of Pu Yi.12 Various examples of these which he either sold or gave to the Chinese authorities ended up in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and bear his marks.13 As donor, he tagged these scrolls with what he was probably aware would be the last colophon they might ever have. The scroll of Zhao Ji, the Song emperor

Acquisition, conservation, preservation and the practice of connoisseurship Charged with developing national cultures through acquisitions and other means, the world’s leading museums have long been in the marketplace as custodians of old-master painting traditions, and this now includes China, with highly visible effects. From around the 1970s, with the waning of classical ethnographic distinctions, Western museums began packing away the Greek and Roman plaster casts and opening up 226

175, 176 Zhao Ji (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), Auspicious Dragon Rock (Xianglongshi tu), handscroll, ink and light colours on silk, 53.9 × 127.8 cm. Colophon by J. D. Chen (Chen Rentao , 1906–1968), dated 1951.

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177 Attributed to Su Shi (1037–1101), Tree and Rock (Mushi tu), handscroll, ink on paper, painting: 26.3 × 50 cm; overall with mounting: 27.2 × 543 cm.

the spaces vacated to a broader, more ‘universal’ interpretation of human creativity. Recent acquisitions were called up and a succession of new acquisitions needed to rotate through these spaces in specially designed new gallery furniture including glass-covered desk or scroll cases (pingtai), which substituted for the long tables upon which scrolls had previously been unrolled for viewing. Museums angled to acquire some of the major Chinese collections that left China, mainly with well-heeled emigrants to the usa, prior to the Communist takeover in 1949. One of the last of those émigré collections to find a permanent home was that of Wan-go H. C. Weng (1918–2020), great-great-grandson of the late Qing statesman Weng Tonghe (1830–1904), acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2018.14 Exemplifying the resurgence of the international art auction as a global marketplace, the same year, the Palace Museum, Beijing, acquired one of the most high profile picture-scrolls to appear on the market in recent years, the Tree and Rock handscroll (illus. 177), a painting long kept in Japan with a plausible attribution to the Northern Song polymath Su Shi (1037–1101), which

the museum purchased at auction for a record price in Asia of u.s.$59 million in 2018. It went on view for the first time in the autumn of 2020, but it is not clear at the time of writing whether or not it has been remounted. Private museums now also vie to repatriate these works, like the handscroll of Five Drunken Princes ascribable to Ren Renfa (1254–1327), bought at auction by the private Long Museum in Shanghai for u.s.$42 million in the autumn of 2020.15 Another handscroll slipped out of the palace by Pu Yi, this one now takes its place in the Long collections of Chinese classical and contemporary arts and Communist revolutionary art. What is the effect on picture-scrolls of the conservation agenda of today’s museums? Calling this body of art by the traditional moniker ‘silent poetry’ (wushengshi) prompts the reflection that these scrolls have now fallen silent. No further seals or colophons are added; fewer and fewer connoisseur–calligraphers are qualified or able to inscribe colophons, even if this were permitted. A sense of the scroll object as a working part of the living classical tradition gives way to a new role. This is not entirely passive, though, as the 228

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object is subject to active preservation and display policies and interventions. If in poor condition, this could involve remounting or at least restoration in an in-house or professional conservation or mounting studio. In some national policy frameworks, the existential question is whether to keep a scroll as a handscroll or not. The Admonitions scroll, for example, having been conserved on two panels in the First World War, can scarcely be touched, as its twentieth-century conservation regimen is otherwise untested and without comparators. Scroll-mounting and conservation practices vary somewhat or even considerably across East Asian and Euro-American museums. In China, the policy is effectively to nationalize through remounting. In Japan, the logic of preservation has led to the widespread adoption of the futomaki (literally, ‘large roll’), a removable split wooden or synthetic roller, the two halves of which clap gently onto the inner stave of a scroll before rolling up, widening the diameter of the curl and thereby significantly reducing stress on the support and extending the object’s longevity (illus. 178).16 Except for the conservators and professional art handlers who perforce hold them, these are no longer multisensory image-holding objects, whose haptic qualities contribute to the sum of knowledge about them through touch and manipulation.17 Meanwhile, the modern gallery viewing practice calls for the display of scrolls unrolled, often fully, in long, sealed display cases behind glass. Here, ‘the vitrine is a representational device just as much as drawing, filming or performing a tableau vivant.’18 The mission of modern museums to conserve and preserve their holdings is plainly at odds with the traditional practice of connoisseurship, specifically the business of adding inscriptions and impressing seals. Yet this does carry on at the fringes of official oversight, and its practice demonstrates a curious distancing of history at

play. In China, artworks from the mainstream scholar-art canon in circulation do still get inscribed by top connoisseurs, typically as private citizens acting in a personal capacity. As noted in the last chapter, as the canon enters ever wider circulation through reproduction in books and online, a certain weariness attaches to the business of colophon writing. As the Qianlong emperor’s legacy becomes more distant, the presence of his inscriptions in the ‘painting heart’ appear more intrusive, the self-interest of his graffiti more obvious and mawkish, the logic of his assertions more tendentious, and generally the quality of his poetry and calligraphy appears more ordinary. Nowadays, cognoscenti are understandably wary of grandstanding on this particular stage. So when colophons do occasionally get written into the backing paper of old-master picture-scrolls by connoisseur–calligraphers, even in the prc, we pay attention. The émigré art collector and dealer Jung Ying Tsao (Cao Zhongying, 1923–2011) solicited marques of authentication from the leading mainlanders Xie Zhiliu (1910–1997), Xu Bangda (1911–2012) and Yang Renkai, all revered connoisseurs, as well as fellow émigré C. C. Wang. One

178 Futomaki, Japanese wooden supports for handscrolls. 229

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179 Tseng Yu-ho (Betty Ecke, 1925–2017), The Settlement, 1957 or before, folding screen, ink on paper, (each panel) 56.5 × 86.4 cm; photograph taken on 12 November 1957.

colophon from 1995 by Xu Bangda is to a picturescroll from 1612 by Song Maojin (c. 1559–after 1612), Mist and Rain on the Imperial City. ‘A friend [that is, Tsao] brought and showed me this painting that I might inscribe a few words at the end of the backing paper like this,’ Xu wrote, having acknowledged the previous colophon in the backing paper by the towering figure of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), but very obviously and by the late twentienth century conventionally, leaving a long blank space after it as if he or the patron, or both, did not wish the colophon to be too close.19 Yet

Xu did not use post-1960s ‘simplified characters’ (jiantizi) here, but rather the standard historical forms (zhengtizi or fantizi) in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and older diasporas (and in China up to the Communist reform of the mid-1960s), as if speaking both in the language of history and across the diaspora. The end of the colophon era is remarkable for another effect. There are some limited late modern examples of the opening up of this connoisseurly space to female calligraphers, such as Wu Zhiying (see illus. 142), but there 230

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180 Tseng Yu-ho (Betty Ecke, 1925–2017), Prospect, 1959, dsui paper collage with watercolour and ink calligraphy, watercolour and ink, 26.7 × 119.4 × 2.5 cm.

were suprisingly few twentieth-century female connoisseurs. The Honolulu-based Tseng Yu-ho (1925–2017), also known as Betty Ecke (she married Gustav Ecke after the war), was one: a painter in multiple genres, a calligrapher and a pioneering scholar of Chinese women artists like herself, including the late Ming-dynasty painter Xue Susu, painter of the handscroll Wild Orchids, of 1601 (see illus. 103–5), which had been acquired by the Honolulu Museum of Art in 1952.20 Tseng’s own early paintings, which were figurative, included Tang-style paintings of women,21 or they could adopt a horizontal scroll-like format when the subject justified it, as in the case of The Settlement (1957) (illus. 179), a smallish two-panel screen depicting the spreading urbanization in O’ahu, the composition sharply cut off at each vertical end as if to suggest it was a section of a longer scrolling composition. She also developed both an abstract practice and a multimedia mode, such as in Prospect (1959) (illus. 180), a long, horizontal scroll-like composition which showcased her own dsui paper collage technique, depicting a row of spindly trees in watercolour and so-called ink calligraphy.22 Tseng’s singularity as a modern painter and connoisseur–calligrapher has spurred contemporary female scholars to research examples of these female actors in pre-modern connoisseurship.23 However, in a wide-angled view of history, the shift to conservation effectively now

means that in handscroll culture women will very visibly have been almost entirely excluded from the physical record in China’s long tradition of connoisseurship.

Uses by artists: manipulations of the format to modern and contemporary contexts What does the handscroll, so often a cultural bellwether, tell us about the internationalization of the Chinese art field since the mid-twentieth century? Does that formal dialogue seen within the old-master tradition in the picture-scroll format continue to be relevant when we turn the topic around to see it from modern artists’ point of view? We could expect it to be a staple of ink painting and calligraphy departments in China’s art academies, but how often has it been used with any degree of social or political agency by artists? Engagements with contemporary artists are a growing part of the mission of Western museums, as can be seen in patterns of museum acquisition, particularly of new works. The recent role of museums in the co-production of contemporary scroll-paintings reprises that old-world relationship painters had with patrons, whereby the artwork had to fit the patron’s display needs and space. Single long scrolls are generally impractical; pairs and even trios are more convenient for the modern museum, with its regime of rotations. 231

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Based on China’s North–South Water Transfer Project, the painting entitled Last Days of Village Wen, dated 2011, by arrangement with the artist Ji Yunfei (Yun-Fei Ji, b. 1963), was divided into two scrolls each over 6 metres long (illus. 181–3).24 Depicting the abandonment of a fictive hamlet, this is a patently modern descriptive work in ink and colours on paper, which finds a poetic voice in its acute observation of social anxiety, highlighting the plight of the rural poor displaced by grand state engineering projects. The disordered randomness of planes and relationships between forms, the scenic discontinuity and incongruous colouring scheme, combine to create a sense of impending doom. The figures in their half-packed-up domestic settings have a ghost-like quality. The tragedy played out in each household is nowhere more wrenching than in the detail where a wife glances, her expression somewhat neutral, back over her shoulder at the nearly empty baijiu bottles as she cooly gauges when her husband, slumped cross-legged on a chair beside her, might next be responsive. The artistic language also comprises references to the pre-modern imagery of street figures and the destitute, endearing itself to the modern Western

museum with its connoisseurly guardianship role and its social mission to educate and develop new audiences. This social documentary role of picture-scrolls, which works with the inherent narrative or documentary potential in the horizontal format, is now widespread. The panoramic approach, for instance, retains its documentary appeal across media. The oil painter Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963) has also documented with abundant empathy the lives of ordinary people displaced by engineering projects like the Three Gorges dam, in long horizontal scrolls like River, which is almost 10 metres long and was created for an exhibition project at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 2006.25 In other works, he has employed a wide panoramic landscape format to paint slightly surreal pictures like New Settlers of the Three Gorges (2004), a painting that resembles a sequence of photographs, but with arresting details such as the apparent death of a flying bird in mid-air.26 In North America, there has been a drive to link collections with contemporary practice through museum curator-led co-operative projects. A notable intervention was the 2010 Boston Museum of Fine Arts show ‘Fresh Ink: Ten Takes 232

181–3 Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963), Last Days of Village Wen (Wen cun jishi), dated 2011,  pair of handscrolls, scroll one, ink and colours on paper, 34.6 × 657.8/34.6 × 610.8 cm. 

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on Chinese Tradition’, in which ten Chinese mainland and disapora artists were invited, through a residency programme, to create a new work in dialogue with one in the Museum.27 Most of the artists chose to engage with picture-scrolls, and two were inspired by Chen Rong’s (active thirteenth century) Nine Dragons handscroll of 1244. One of them was the San Francisco- and Shanghai-based landscapist Li Huayi (b. 1948), who identified the central vortex as the significant locus of energy (qi) in the handscroll. Setting himself the challenge of respectfully translating this into a contemporary format, one that could capture the fulcrum of multiple opposites without having to be fully unrolled like a handscroll, he devised an installation painting entitled Dragon amidst Mountain Ranges in the form of a suite of six vertical panels fronted by a hanging scroll.28 The mainland ink-painters Qiu Ting (b. 1971), Li Jin (b. 1958) and Zeng Xiaojun (b. 1954), and even Liu Xiaodong, all

viewed old-master Chinese handscrolls and then painted handscrolls. The sole female artist of the ten in the exhibition, Yu Hong (b. 1966), reworked a handscroll, Song emperor Huizong’s Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (see illus. 22, 23), into a suite of eight vertical panels on gold satin which she entitled Spring Romance (illus. 184), a painting that itself, in repeated recursions, shadowed the original composition, both in its format and by depicting at the left end her female friends holding the original Huizong work in the manner of the court ladies preparing a length of silk within it.29 Only the American-born Chinese painter Arnold Chang (b. 1954), a protégé of C. C. Wang, bucked the trend and chose a formalistic engagement with abstract expressionism through an encounter with Jackson Pollock’s (1912–1956) Number 10, of 1949.30 Describing the project as ‘a vehicle through which I may further integrate my American psyche with my Chinese psyche’,

184 Yu Hong (b. 1966), Spring Romance, 2008, fabric dye on satin, 600 × 912 cm. 234

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185 Arnold Chang (Zhang Hong, b. 1954), Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains, 2008, handscroll, ink on paper, 61 × 349.6 cm.

186 Liu Dan (b. 1953), Ink Handscroll, 1990, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 95.6 × 1,780 cm. 

in 2008 Chang produced a landscape handscroll of the same proportion, Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains (illus. 185).31 Pollock’s selection of a horizontal scroll-like frame for his action painting was suited to his expressionist performance practice, as his body moved right and left dripping paint, such that the resulting forms take shape in a sequence of movements and in response to the edges of the rectangular frame, as we find with longer handscrolls. Over the top of the other layers, the large black forms perform a kind of dance, variously legible in three movements, five shapes or seven calligraphic forms. Chang seems to have internalized the manic energy, the

controlled abandonment, of Pollock and repacked it into the formal tension of his landscape and its brush energy, both in the doodling line quality (the modern vernacular of Chinese ink landscape) and in the tectonic shapes of the rock forms and their affective connotations. Two leading contemporary mainland-born artists who have also been critically acclaimed in the West were both part of ‘Fresh Ink’, namely Xu Bing (b. 1955), ‘in whose work we find no grinning images of Mao Zedong, no plastic’, as Wen C. Fong put it,32 and Liu Dan (b. 1953). Both are artists of China’s ‘lost generation’, whose education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, who gained 235

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187 Xu Bing  (b. 1955), Landscript (A ‘play on Qian Xuan’), 2008, scroll, mounted and framed, ink on paper, 58 × 343 cm.

international reputations forged in the usa and whose art has innovated with the picture-scroll medium. Of all contemporary artists, Liu Dan, whose international experience underpins his creativity and sets him apart from mainland-based peers whom he regards as ideologically dominated, stands out as a champion of the handscroll format.33 His extremely self-demanding practice involves the production of very long and large scrolls painted with meticulous layering and complex skeining of forms and playing with scale and embedded figural imagery. He engaged early on with the horizontal scroll format at monumental scale, for example in his 1990 Ink Handscroll (illus. 186), which measures 95.6 centimetres by 17.8 metres and was so developed to be used in an art installation, mounted around a gallery so as to enfold the viewer. The artwork was conceived in response to the tragedy in Tian’anmen Square in June of the previous year.34 A small Study for Ink Handscroll, measuring 9 by 167 centimetres and drawn using grey and red pencils on paper, records the early conception including the use of blood-red flowing cloud forms.35 The monumentality of the final scroll installation is regarded by Liu Dan’s peers as having been almost suicidal in its technical demands on the artist, in that he employed the centred-tip (zhongfeng)

brush method typically only used at small scale. This pattern of large-scale installation continued in ‘Fresh Ink’, where the long handscroll, one component of his Ten Differentiated Views of the Honourable Old Man, was mounted horizontally to scroll around his portraits of the seventeenthcentury rock known as the Honourable Old Man.36 Xu Bing has gone from being the enfant terrible creator of the iconic Book from the Sky (1987–91), who was driven away from China to the usa after 1989, to becoming an internationally celebrated artist engaging with the world’s aesthetic traditions, to creating a specially designed cigarette made to burn along the entire length of a reproduction of the Qingming scroll (see illus. 30) in 2004,37 to taking an official position in 2008 as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. A woodcut printmaker by training, his artwork for ‘Fresh Ink’ resulted from an examination of that moment of convergence between the old-master tradition of painting and its popularization through printing in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (see illus. 118). He produced a set of long woodcut-printed handscrolls under the title Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll (2010).38 Around this time he also began his ‘landscript’ series, or in Chinese ‘wenzi xiesheng’ (painting life with written characters), a set of 236

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(1239–1301) most mysterious handscroll composition, Dwelling in the Floating Jade Mountains.42 Qian Xuan, as we saw in Chapter Three, was an historical innovator of the text–image relationship in the picture-scroll and as such a handscroll specialist. Xu Bing’s chief interest lay elsewhere, in that he produced a framed horizontal work. In reimagining and reconfiguring Qian Xuan’s Floating Jade Mountains handscroll in his Landscript, Xu Bing makes some obvious interventions such as horizontally attenuating the original rectangular proportion and flattening the sheer cliffs, and also decluttering the picture zone by excising the mass of accrued inscriptions and seals, arguably no great loss. He keeps the artist’s inscription at the head of the painting, shifting it from the position of Qian Xuan’s above the first island to a kind of adjunct place in the picture plane seemingly before the landscape space begins. This is an intelligible dialogue with Qian Xuan’s oeuvre: if not typically in this particular composition, Qian Xuan ventured into this kind of semiotic and spatial ambiguity in the ways he similarly juxtaposed text and image within the rectangular scroll frame, delightfully confusing the previously neat spatial and other distinctions between picture and text zones. Xu’s dialogue with Qian carries on in his formalistic play with the stylized form elements (trees and rocks as ink traces, water as negative space) but does not extend to reprising the dramatic cliff at the end and its cut-off hinterland, a feature that serves to divide Qian’s composition into three sections with troubling spatial and narrative interrelationships. For Xu, this end portion is tamed and flattened along a notably modern-looking receding ground plane, where the water curves back around behind the dwellings, which serves to bring the opening inscription, in the picture plane, back into play as a conceptual and visual entry point. If Qian Xuan

works in which he developed the Chinese cultural concept of calligraphy and painting having a common root. He graphically composed pictorial landscape forms comprised of the Chinese character for that form, typically a more or less pictographic form repeatedly written.39 This was a route Tseng Yu-ho had also shaped to go down (see illus. 179 and 180); Xu Bing has developed this into an art installation practice using multi-channel digital animations.40 To keep with physical scrolls, an example is Xu Bing’s mounted and framed horizontal scroll of 2008 with the title Landscript (illus. 187), described as follows by the artist in his inscription:41 Mu shi shui tu [that is, ‘Tree rock water picture’] Xu Bing play on Qian Xuan Two thousand and eight

The characters mu shi shui were inscribed in ancient Chinese seal script, while tu was written in simplified Chinese; the remainder of the inscription was written in Xu Bing’s invented ‘square word’ calligraphy: in other words, using English orthography but with the strokes rendered in their closest Chinese calligraphic equivalents, with each whole word then reorganized and transcribed in the shape of a square in the manner of a Chinese character. Landscript is an homage, in Xu Bing’s landscript idiom, to perhaps Qian Xuan’s 237

188, 189 Ding Yi (b. 1962), 70 Circles  (Qishi ge yuan), Shanghai, 2013, concertina album, pencil and acrylic on rice paper, 35.5 × 25.3 (folded), 648 cm (unfolded).

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advanced the proposition that he was pictorializing lyrically the reclusive act of dwelling in the mountains, among so many schematic facets of ink rock, then Xu Bing’s dialogic work acts like a retrospective plan view in cultural time and space. Within his inscription, the temporal fulcrum and window on this vista is that character tu (picture), patently and glaringly rendered in modern simplified form, which stands contrapuntally between opposites: the ancient seal script of the first three characters – pictographs of trees, rocks and water syntactically, and further elaborated aesthetically in the picture – and his own postmodern transcultural ‘square word’ calligraphy, which renders English words in the conceptual form of Chinese characters and situates the artwork historically and contextually. The exponential market growth since 1989 has afforded new space for practices as artists in China, long systematically assigned to (or, in exceptional cases, excluded from) communal ‘work units’, usually in art academies, have attained critical acclaim and commercial independence as contemporary artists. The Shanghainese Ding Yi (b. 1962) is one of China’s leading abstract painters. Almost exclusively entitled ‘appearance of crosses’ with a year and number, his works are strict grid paintings which yet move as forms, as in the work of Bridget Riley (b. 1931), and his practice has been paired with that of Sean Scully (b. 1945).43 Ding Yi’s abstract grid canvases are not entirely paratactic or insubordinate, in that through the cross motif and colour, as abstractions, the artist finds and elaborates a formal affective logic. Some of his paintings do echo Chinese formats of

hanging scrolls and handscrolls, in being tall and attenuated or else wide horizontal compositions. Ding Yi’s rich preparatory works, grouped as ‘works on paper’, include some in the Chinese folding scroll format, which have been adapted to record experiments with how his grid forms develop, when experienced visually, producing a visual– somatic engagement, according to an internal logic of growth and decay experienced in time. In the accordion book-scroll 70 Circles of 2013 (illus. 188, 189), the ‘handscroll’ here is akin to a sketchbook, a space in which Ding Yi could visualize the development of form in stages snapshotted in time and from which he could transpose ideas into finished acrylic works. It can be viewed page by album-like page, but is equally well seen opened out fully to its 648 centimetres length, still bound by the convention of right-to-left reading. The geometric page form of the folding scroll adds a material and temporal dimension to the formal geometry of Ding Yi’s painted grid idiom and unfolds in conversation with it. The scroll could be a decoding tool that lets us see the artist’s visual notation of his own work: how he visually documents the changing patterns experienced in the observation of the grids over time. The values attached to the media and materials of the album-scrolls are those of sketchbooks in which ideas play out, preparatory to square canvases, yet, in practice, many of Ding’s long horizontal individual canvases, and works grouped in sequence, reach similar proportions and unfold in related ways as visual experiences in time. With such hard-won critical independence, a small but disparate set of mainland practices are 239

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afforded a space, albeit limited, provisional and extemporary, to disrupt official narratives on the fringes. The artist Lu Qing (b. 1964), the estranged wife of Ai Weiwei, creates annual untitled scrolls painted with grids on long bolts of silk as a means ‘to forget what art is’ (illus. 190).44 By painting on silk, with its deep gender associations (see, for example, Yu Hong and Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, illus. 184 and 23), by turning the scroll sideways to reorient it vertically, which conveys more the idea of domestic weaving than painting in a

studio space, by repetitively painting geometric grids that displace representation and narrative, and by sometimes leaving the annual scroll unfinished – in all these ways, she frays at the edges of what handscroll art is officially meant to be without needing to overtly challenge the patriarchal hold on the medium. Her ‘non-art’ stance, which may be likened to the daily practice of weaving, embroidery or Books of Hours, exists and operates domestically, on its own terms. Such an interstitial space for art features also in transnational collaborative practices, as between the Chinese Chen Shaoxiong (1962–2016) and the Japanese Ozawa Tzuyoshi (b. 1965). Their installation Canton-Tokyo I (2005) is made of ink on papers, chromogenic colour prints, benches, brushes, plastic bottles, plastic ink trays, ink stones, sponge, ceramic dish, bowl and a scroll and demonstrates how the politically imagined and enforced boundaries between modern nation-states do not necessarily map regional or interpersonal artistic ties.45

Photography scrolls Artists in China were never totally cut off from the world after 1949 and the subsequent split with the ussr, and they enjoyed links to other leftist countries. Yet the turmoil and isolation of the Cultural Revolution did further constrain artists’ world views and spaces to practise as well as limiting the availability of basic art resources. A raw poverty is evident in some of the fledgling independent art of the end of the Mao era, if placed in a global late modern context.46 The ‘April Fifth Movement’ in

190 Lu Qing (b. 1964), Untitled  (Wuti),  2000, acrylic on silk, 4,670 × 82 cm.  240

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191, 192 ‘Tian’anmen photographic panorama (4 April 1976)’, from Bao Naiyong (1938–2016), Painting-Scroll of the Times (Shidai de huajuan – Tian’anmen de sheying ji), home-made book in landscape format with single stitch binding.

1976, which followed the death of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) in January, and the state’s underwhelming tribute in Tian’anmen Square, was ‘a result of a conscious choice by [several] photographers, [and] marks both the rise of citizen photojournalism and a renewal of the social documentary tradition in China’.47 The Mongolian metallurgist and photographer Bao Naiyong (1938–2016) was in Beijing on business and participated in the mass gatherings of that spring, where he shot and later stitched together thirteen overlapping black-and-white photographs into a panorama and called it Painting-Scroll of the Times (Shidai de huajuan) (illus.

191), his own Qingming Festival scroll which circulated privately among the photographer’s circle. The vista is a true panorama which circles around the photographer, who was positioned to the north of the centre of the square, turning anti-clockwise around it, starting and ending looking south towards the Memorial to the People’s Martyrs, which was the focal point of the memorializationcum-protest taking place. The ranks of mourner– protesters take up two-thirds or more of the height of the photographs, displacing the state buildings and public monuments to the edges of the frame. At the horizontal centre of the scroll are the photographers who stand above the crowd, 241

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193 Lang Jingshan (1892–1995), A Panoramic Embrace of Landscape (Hushan lansheng), 1981, composite photography mounted in a handscroll, 40 × 296 cm. 

figuratively pushing into the distance the portrait of Mao over the entrance to the Palace Museum. The ‘April Fifth Movement’ was first dubbed counter-revolutionary, hence the initial private circulation of Bao’s photographic Painting-Scroll, and then shortly later redubbed revolutionary, becoming the topic of official revisionist publications, but has since largely been buried in official propaganda, along with like mementos of other so-called incidents.48 It is fascinating to juxtapose Bao Naiyong’s urgent home-made lo-tech handiwork with the technically accomplished and self-consciously erudite photography of the centenarian Lang Jingshan (Long Chin-san; 1892–1995), an émigré to Taiwan. Lang’s composite photography scroll A Panoramic Embrace of Landscape (illus. 193) was created in 1981 in the studio from ten negatives taken throughout his career. This combination printing technique, called in Chinese jijin zhaoxiang (composite photography), originally pioneered by Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–1875), was one that Lang had used from as early as the 1930s and it had made his name internationally.49 The spatial plotting and presentation consciously embody the scholar-painting tradition, from its handscroll format and monochrome treatment of landsape to the self-imaging figural tropes

within – the scholar admiring the vista from his Ni Zan-esque square kiosk to the lone fisherman returning at dusk.50 Though Lang’s scroll does fetishize scholar-painting and landscape, its sociopolitical context is not the bourgeois idyll it may seem but the end of the era of ‘white terror’ under the Nationalist dictatorship (1949–87) that preceded Taiwan’s democratic turn in 1987. In that Lang’s scroll is categorized as an ‘important antiquity’ in Taiwan and Bao’s is at best unremarked in mainland China, the reception of the two scrolls by their respective art establishments either side of the Taiwan Strait is diametrically opposite. Yet an unspoken creative sympathy exists between the two photographic scrolls, despite the artists having little connection beyond their shared Chinese cultural heritage, which exposes the expanding and changing range of artistic operating environments for Chinese artistic practices. Since around the 1980s, non-Chinese artists, albeit in small numbers, have also started adopting the Chinese picture-scroll for their transnational practices and oeuvres. The Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) reformulated her ‘modern miniature’ The Scroll (1989–90) as a 162-centimetres-long roll based on her examination of ‘the tradition of Chinese scroll painting and the structure of narrative in a wide array of 242

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films’ (illus. 194).51 At the end of the twentieth century, the handscroll was being aesthetically and technically adapted, but on the basis of its ability to retain a certain facility as an aesthetic mode conducive to registering and tracing both social and geopolitical change. In this vein, in the Internet age, more recent digital manipulations of the scroll art form have appeared with artists such as Miao Xiaochun (b. 1964), whose digital ink painting, Beijing Hand Scroll 08.024.25B (2009) (illus. 195, 196), is a distorted fish-eye-lens panorama at street level which pans through 180 degrees.52 This vista is captured at an ordinary crossroads in an ordinary low-rise neighbourhood, in a manner inspired by Zhang Zeduan’s Qingming scroll. This scrolling digital ink painting remorselessly documents the quotidian and its differential from the rosy political narrative in the ubiquitous visual propaganda, all executed in a manner somewhere between photography, drawing and painting.53 The oeuvre of the American-born artist Michael Cherney (Qiu Mai, b. 1969) comprises monochrome photographic prints of the much-degraded state of the natural environment mounted in handscrolls, a marriage of art photography with the scholarly tradition of handscroll art. His New Primordial Chaos (illus. 197) depicts what appears to be a charming full moon captured through what seem to be clouds but is in fact the sun shrouded

by a Beijing smog composed of tiny carcinogenic particulates from coal-burning power stations, the new primordial chaos of the title. Around Christmas 2016, the authorities had tried to recategorize the smog emergency as a climate or weather event, a case exemplifying that unsettling exchange of places between what should be first and second nature observed by Bruno Latour. The full moon would normally mark the middle of each lunar month in the traditional agrarian calendar, with connotations of prosperity and order. A similar benignity also attaches to the uncritiqued heritage of old-master painting, allowing Cherney to subvert expectations through his referencing. The primary heritage referent in his New Primordial Chaos is, in fact, to a late Yuandynasty painting, Primordial Chaos by Zhu Derun (1294–1365) (illus. 198), encountered in Chapter Three. This cosmological image featuring the single stroke circle, which to the modern eye equates with the circle or ensō of Chan/Zen painting, has been taken to symbolize enlightenment and the cosmos. As for Zhu Derun, he is commonly seen in official Marxist historiography as having opposed the feudal exploitation of the masses, based on interpretation of such lines of his poetry, often quoted in his biographies, as ‘People become bandits and thieves but how could they aspire to be such; Heaven produces clothing and food but officials exploit this.’54 These contemporary 243

194 Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969), The Scroll, 1989–90, vegetable colour, dry pigment, watercolour and tea on hand-prepared wasli paper, 34.29 × 162.24 cm.

195, 196 Miao Xiaochun  (b. 1964), Beijing Hand Scroll 08.04.25B   (Beijing shoujuan), 2009, digital ink painting, handscroll, 35 × 374 cm.

197 Michael Cherney (Qiu Mai, b. 1969), New Primordial Chaos (Xin hunlun tu), 2014, photograph in handscroll format, ink on mitsumata washi paper, 29.7 × 86.2 cm; scroll: 31.6 × 337.2 cm. Seal: Qiu (autumn).

198 Zhu Derun (1294–1365), Primordial Chaos (Hunlun tu), 1349, handscroll,  ink on paper, 29.7 × 86.2 cm. Colophon by Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), 1548.

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199 David Hockney (b. 1937, writer) and Philip Haas (b. 1954, director and producer), film still from A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (1988).

artworks drawing sympathetically from the well of the Chinese scroll tradition by Sikander and Cherney demonstrate the degree to which this medium has been adapted in global contemporary practices to highlight planetary challenges, from gender equality to the environment.

Looping back to the early days, a cultural value placed on the horizontal reading of visual forms is latent in early pictorial type-forms and this affordance for presenting successions of figures in scenes, rows or tiers has mediated changing historical circumstances as a mode, by enabling other genres to be incorporated or formally substituted into its presentation schema along the way and adapting to technology’s advances, assuring its own continuing relevance and longevity. In medieval Tang scrolling manuscripts, we saw parallel pictures and text, above and below. By the tenth century, a strong pictorialism brought out the visual storytelling potential in the scroll. By around the fourteenth century, the illustrated printing of Yuan drama collections, for example, evinced the adjunct role and size of pictures on

Reprise: the scroll in the Internet age In summary, throughout this study we have identified how highly mutable and truly recursive the medium of the picture-scroll is. It has been instrumentalized by power to drive, direct or stymie change. And to recognize its own socio-political agency, it has also long become used to managing change and adapting itself to new technological environments for its survival. And it continues to be extremely influential. 248

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the page, as the printed codex book grew in popularity. Here was the advance of a logocentric, philological grip on the knowledge production context of the scroll format. In a cohesive handscroll culture or tradition, juxtaposition and integration of text and image carried on according to an evolving set of conventions and historical happenstance, as we have explored. Artists and collectors contrived to preserve this mounting medium, even as it aged technologically but retained its positive antiquarian connotations and handling practices, its adaptability, practicability and reframability. Meanwhile, in the West, the scroll came to be seen as technically deficient, at least by comparison with the codex book. At the outset of the digital age, many of the new imperatives of leading museums holding major collections of handscrolls are by now standard, including such initiatives and partnerhips, often with tech giants, as online cataloguing, virtual exhibitions, e-books, films and online publishing. Many such have been referenced in links throughout this volume.55 One of the first artists to recognize and articulate the parallels between the display screen and the moving image, on one hand, and the rich heritage of Chinese horizontal scrolls on the other, was David Hockney (b. 1937) with his 1988 film A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (illus. 199), a project scarcely imaginable without the support of a major museum. Delighting in the recursion of speaking to camera within a rectangular framed moving image while unrolling picture-scrolls, Hockney meditated the two Qing-dynasty imperial ‘Southern Inspection Tour’ scrolls on the table in front of him and a Canaletto hung on the wall behind him. He lamented the mid-Qing court’s appropriation of the southern European iconology of vanishing-point perspectival depth in the two handscrolls between the Kangxi and Qianlong periods, which he saw as

sucking the life and air out of the picture-scroll’s internal ecology. The command and control craved by the Qianlong emperor were achieved pictorially through appropriation of the Baroque and its incorporation into the scroll medium but, perhaps ironically, without the militaristic applications derived from the subjacent technologies of triangulation and range-finding. In terms of their representation on the modern illustrated codex book page, handscrolls have presented unique challenges, but now the arrival of the digital age brings those very desirable qualities of the scrolling medium back into currency. The modern codex book or e-book can provide single details and some foldouts; for the future e-book, the questions revolve around the integration of more technologically complex presentation modes involving Internet-linked images that are scrollable and enlargeable using tabs. Driving this process of discovery are some notable digital initiatives involving picture-scrolls, including the University of Chicagoʼs Digital Scrolls Project for East Asian Handscrolls, to which museums are providing images, which the project stitches and makes available in scrollable form, with the option of toggling metadata (captioning, transcriptions of seals and inscriptions and so on) on and off. The challenge of an overarching curatorship with regard to the all-important metadata about date and authorship, however, remains as long as these details are delegated to providers and copyright holders. In the wake of the sars-cov-ii pandemic, we can expect ‘born digital’ content to become more and more the norm. Now firmly on the tech horizon is virtual reality or vr, with much of the going being made by companies like Vive Arts, an arm of the Taiwanese smartphone maker htc, which collaborates with the world’s major museums. Vr outputs have also appeared in the Western cultural mainstream in, for example, 249

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National Geographic magazine, enabling viewers to inhabit and move around inside virtual art spaces such as the Dunhuang cave-temples (Mogao cave 61) and some scrolls, such as Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Autumn Colours on the Que and Hua Mountains (see illus. 122).56 As the picture-scroll turns international beyond the Sinosphere and

the East Asian world, it retains a degree of the propaganda value to entrenched power of continuity and status quo, but also a latent capacity to voice dissent, one that is deployed now not just by Chinese or even just East Asians and for a global audience.

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References

Introduction

trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting (Leiden, 1954; reprint, Westport, ct, 1979), p. 48. 8 Kenneth J. DeWoskin, A Song for One or Two: Music and the Concept of Art in Early China (Ann Arbor, mi, 1982). 9 In Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (Lidai minghua ji), written around 845, Zhang Yanyuan asserts that ‘the famous works of the Han and Wei dynasties, and of the Three Kingdoms have long since vanished from the world’; Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts, p. 195. 10 For example, a 10-metre-long fourteenth-century Mamluk ‘Talismanic scroll’: see Jack Hartnell, ed., Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext (London, 2020), fig. 0.8, online at doi.10.33999/2019.15; and a Tigrinya (Ethiopian) protective Healing Scroll: see www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/320962, accessed 9 May 2021. Zhang Yanyuan refers to paintings having destiny: ‘things have their own destinations’; Lidai minghua ji, juan 1, section 2, in Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts, p. 129. 11 See, for example, Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 1992), p. 4. 12 For example, Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), referring to Li Gonglin’s Five Tribute Horses (see illus. 40); see Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong, 2011), p. 117. 13 The reference is to Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), p. 4. The application of the term ‘early modern’ to China is contested – see, for example, Richard Vinograd, ‘Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity’, in

1 Cixin Liu (trans. Ken Liu), The Three-Body Problem (New York, 2014), p. 112. 2 For a study taking marginalia in the medieval European context seriously, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992). 3 Jan Bäcklund et al., eds, What Images Do (Aarhus, 2019). 4 For related secondary historiography, including analysis of the concepts of tu (picture or diagram) and hua (painting), see Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, il, and London, 1996) and The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford, CA, 1989); as well as Francesca Bray, Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft (Leiden, 2007), esp. p. 49, Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds, Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, ca, and London, 2007), and Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu, hi, 2007). 5 For example, the Chinese Iconographic Thesaurus (cit); Hongxing Zhang, ‘Chinese Painting and the Chinese Iconographic Thesaurus: New Directions in Art Historical Research’, Sonia Lightfoot Memorial Paintings Lecture, Oriental Ceramics Society, London, 11 May 2021. 6 R. H. Mathews, A Chinese–English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission by R. H. Mathews (Shanghai, 1931; American edn, 13th printing, 1975), pp. 233, 950–51 (Romanization in pinyin added; my bolded text). 7 Referring to Shen Can, see Yao Zui, Xu huapin (Sequel to Paintings Graded), in Zhongguo shuhua quanshu, ed. Lu Fusheng (Shanghai, 1993), vol. i, p. 5; W.R.B. Acker,

251

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Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800, ed. David Porter (New York, 2012) – but it retains currency – for example, Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London, 2010). 14 Fang Xun, Shanjingju hualu; in Zhongguo hualun leibian (Chinese Theories of Painting, Compiled by Category), ed. Yu Kun (Taipei, 1984), vol. i, p. 238: 士人畫多卷軸氣, 人皆指筆墨生率者言之, 不禁啞然. 蓋古人所謂卷軸氣, 不 以寫意工緻論, 在乎雅俗. 不然摩詰龍眠輩皆無卷軸矣. 15 The use of the word format here echoes George Kubler’s appropriation of it from the arts of the book in ‘Toward a Reductive Theory of Visual Style’, in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1987), p. 170. 16 Cheng-hua Wang, ‘One Painting, Two Emperors, and Their Cultural Agendas: Reinterpreting the Qingming Shanghe Painting of 1737’, Archives of Asian Art, lxxi/1 (April 2020), p. 100. Thanks to Cary Y. Liu for this reference. 17 Pamela Kyle Crossley, ‘Xi’s China Is Steamrollering Its Own History’, Foreign Policy, 29 January 2019, online at foreignpolicy.com. 18 Zhang Yanyuan made this argument when asked why he did not model his chapter ‘On Grading by Name and Price’, in Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (Lidai minghua ji, c. 845), on the format of the wellknown High Tang (mid-eighth-century) text Calligraphy Dealer (Shu gu), by Zhang Huaiguan (active 713–56). He held that calligraphy and painting are ‘different ways’ since for a piece of calligraphy ‘one has but to take the characters as a standard in order to settle upon its value, but in a painting there are no such (well defined) limits by which to determine its merit’; Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts, p. 194. 19 As noted by Zhang Yu (1283–1350) on Qian Xuan’s (1239– 1301) handscroll Dwelling in the Floating Jade Mountains, discovered in 1348 in Hangzhou; see Brigitta Augustin, ‘Modern Views on Old Histories: Zhang Yu’s and Huang Gongwang’s Encounter with Qian Xuan’, Arts Asiatiques, lxvii (2012), pp. 63–76. 20 This would qualify as part of its Gellian ‘technology of enchantment’; see the next note. 21 Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford, 1992), pp. 40–63. 22 In the reign of the empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–705), a ruse by her favourite Zhang Yizhi to acquire paintings was presented as a restoration project. Artists were summoned and set to work restoring originals, but copies were also made and returned to the collections holding the originals, mounted ‘exactly as the old ones had been, so that they did not differ (from the originals)

by a single hair’, with the originals ending up mostly in Zhang Yizhi’s possession. Zhang Yanyuan, Lidai minghua ji, juan 1, part 2; Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts, p. 128. 23 Framing China, or rather framing Chinese art, is complicated in part because of the all-embracing politics of ‘positive energy’ in the modern nation-state, a condition in which art, like the human body, is tightly regulated by the Party-state. Lately, the art historian Craig Clunas has questioned whether ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the Party-state’s overarching post-socialist dogma, is indeed an inevitable result of the Chinese people’s consanguinity and unbroken culture over recorded history of the last five thousand years, as the leadership asserts, on the grounds that such claims to cultural exceptionalism are themselves a common characteristic of late modern nation-states since their emergence in the nineteenth century, in opposition to Goldsmith’s Enlightenment notion of ‘politeness’; see Craig Clunas et al., eds, Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400–1450 (London, 2016), p. 2. We could expect positivism about picture-scrolls (for example, seeing their integrity and symbolic or auspicious value as defaults) as a legacy of imperial connoisseurship to occupy some kind of core legitimizing role in this exceptionalist framework. Yet a spirit of open-ended curiosity should also allow for the possibility that in their nature they are or were in some sense culturally laundered. It is unclear to what extent the discipline of art history is truly ready to see scrolls as complicit records of more or less shady transactions, for instance. Scrolls will have passed through the hands of all manner of collector, good, bad and ugly, often in morally questionable ways and through distasteful political and legal processes as well as illegal ones. Working primarily on the Ming context, the contemporary scholar Pang Huiping has forensically explored evidence of the state’s heavy-handed branding of confiscated objects through tagging procedures, an intriguing space where dynastic bureaucracy and scroll culture coincide; see, e.g., her ‘Stolen Art and Lost Inscriber: Inventory Codes on Artworks in the Tumultuous Ming Wanli Period (r. 1573–1619)’, Artibus Asiae, lxxiii/2 (2012), pp. 399–441. Seeing scrolls as the redistributed spoils of political crimes and misdemeanours is a worthy endeavour, though it would call for a far more pathological attention to provenance detail than we can apply here. 24 For example, see www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/A_1965-0724-0-7, accessed 14 April 2021. 25 For example, the annotations of connoisseurs’ views in Xue Yongnian and Wang Lianqi, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan

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peitu ban (Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley, de luxe illustrated edition), 40 vols (Beijing and Nanning, 2015). For a scroll placed under an alias, see, for example, Episodes from the Career of a Yuan Official; illustrated in Shiqu baoji jingxuan peitu ban, vol. xxxvi, pp. 144ff. 26 See, for example, Zhang Yanyuan in Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts, p. 209ff. 27 Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 14; ‘Situation and Response in Traditional Chinese Scholar Paintingʼ, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xlvi/3 (1988), pp. 365–74, online at doi.org/10.2307/431107. 28 Most expensive to date is Wu Bin’s Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock of about 1610, which sold at auction in China in October 2020 for rmb513 million (almost £60 million); see ‘A Rare Classical Chinese Handscroll “Ten Views of Lingbi Rock” Fetches in Excess of rmb 500m after Its Auction Debut 31 Years Ago’, The Value, 19 October 2020, online at https://en.thevalue.com. 29 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, nj, 2000). Research on the semiotic content and intertextuality of the individual handscroll is an established mode. Some random examples are: Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian: ‘Qingming shanghe tu’ jiemalu (Hidden Concern and Subtle Critique: Decoding the Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival Scroll) (Beijing, 2015); Amy C. Riggs, ‘Properties of Word and Image: Mou Yi’s 1240 Fulling Cloth Handscroll’, PhD diss., Princeton University, 2017; Lara C. W. Blanchard, ‘Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth: Painting, Play, Rhetoric, and Discourse in Song China’, Artibus Asiae, lxxiii/2 (2013), pp. 295–341; Lara C. W. Blanchard and Kara J. Kenney, ‘Traces of Collaboration: Empress Yang’s Captions for Xia Gui’s Twelve Views of Landscape’, Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture, xviii (Fall 2009), pp. 6–33; De-Nin D. Lee, The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time (Seattle, wa, 2010); Lara C. W. Blanchard, ‘Huizong’s New Clothes: Desire and Allegory in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, Ars Orientalis, xxxvi (2006), pp. 111–35. 30 Recursion is a developing theme in research across the arts and music. For art history, see, for example, Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, nj, 2011), noted also by Jonathan Hay, ‘The Worldly Eye’, in What Images Do, ed. Bäcklund et al., pp. 113–43 (n. 5). 31 R. H. van Gulik, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome, 1958); James Cahill, ‘Approaches to Chinese Painting’, in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, ed. Richard M. Barnhart et al. (New Haven, ct, 1997), pp. 5–12; Maxwell K. Hearn, How to Read Chinese

Paintings (New York, 2008); Dawn H. Delbanco, ‘Chinese Handscrolls’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York, 2000–), see www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chhs/ hd_chhs.htm, accessed 12 May 2021. 32 Demonstrated by a Freer/Sackler (now National Museum of Asian Art) conservator: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=encwymbj8Ew, accessed 14 June 2017. See also a 2008 curatorial exploration of the Chinese handscroll by Maxwell K. Hearn of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: ‘Mountains and Water: Exploring the Chinese Handscroll (2 Parts)’, see www.youtube. com/watch?v=mgexh1–3wrY and www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nv-udym-bYc, accessed 14 June 2017. 33 The Marxist take on commodity fetishism, seen in the pioneering scholarship on Ming social art history by Craig Clunas, tended to move away from the object and towards sociological study. Now the present material turn comes about in the wake of studies that have linked the work of representation with the format and qualities of the physical medium or format. Wu Hung’s well-known study The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (1996) examined the standing pictorial art object and its space and in the process called attention for the first time to the particularities of the handscroll as a medium. Wu Hung was concerned primarily with the proximate architectural spaces defined by the Chinese screen and its often recursive imagery. But he was also perhaps the first modern scholar to show himself viewing a handscroll, in a photograph reproduced as a figure illustration, which staged for the reader the pre-modern scholarly mode of viewing a scroll solo at a desk, captioned ‘How one views a typical handscroll painting’; see Wu Hung, The Double Screen, fig. 35. In his book Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China, Jonathan Hay has investigated the phenomenological experience and agency of the materiality of the artwork as form and of its content as form. Both are instructive for this study and serve as reminders of how, regardless of its authorship, making, remaking or transmission history, the picture-scroll is an art object with haptic and display qualities. 34 Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago, il, 2016), p. 272. 35 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs, Mounts and the Tactile Archive’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, xix (2014), online at https://19.bbk.ac.uk. 36 For example, a twelfth-century painting of Emperor Xuanzong’s Flight to Shu now mounted as a hanging scroll; www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 40055, accessed 31 December 2020. Photographs can also ‘look wrong’: see Maurice Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography (Cambridge, 1970). My thanks to

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another visual physiologist, Andrew Parker, for this reference. 37 Melanie Holcomb, Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 2009), p. 116. 38 Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, nc, 2013). 39 Sonya Petersson, Christer Johansson and Magdalena Holdar, eds, The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection (Stockholm, 2018). See also Lars Elleström, ed., Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (New York, 2010). 40 See chap. 4, n. 58. 41 Camille Schmitt, ‘The Presentation and Preservation of Chinese Scroll Paintings’, in Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, 700–1900, ed. Hongxing Zhang, exh. cat., Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2013), pp. 107–13. 42 See Colin Chinnery, ‘Bookbinding’, http://idp.bl.uk, accessed 4 June 2019. 43 See ‘Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land’, www.britannica.com, accessed 24 August 2021. 44 Around works like Murasaki Shikibu’s (c. 978–c. 1014) The Tale of Genji, in a break from the early Heian (794–1185) practice of Japan importing culture from Tang China. 45 Besides two classic renderings of samurai wars in emaki and two fragmentary emaki of a romance and a legend – all four of the Kamakura period – there was just one other handscroll, Craftsmen at Work (1806), by Kutagawa Keisai (1764–1824); see Japanese Art at Its Finest: Masterpieces from the Tokyo and Kyushu National Museums, exh. cat., National Palace Museum (Southern Branch), Taiwan (Taipei, 2016), cat. nos 49, 50 (National Treasure), 42, 41 (Important Cultural Property) and 125. 46 Jonathan Hay, ‘The Worldly Eye’. 47 Jaś Elsner, ‘Art History as Ekphrasis’, Art History, xxxi/1 (February 2010), pp. 10–27, online at doi. org./10.1111/j.1467.-8365.2009.00720.x. 48 Hartnell, ed., Continuous Page, pp. 8–9. 49 Broadly speaking, within a postformalist or critical iconological approach, which takes seriously the agency of artworks and appropriation over influence as a model, I have been attracted to the notion of histoire croisée in its development into entwined or entangled histories, which is both a theory and a method in that it highlights the overlaps and intersections between pieces of history, models of historical thinking and research practice; see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, lxv/1 (February 2006), pp. 30–50. I am endebted to Sussan

Babaie for her introduction to this theory and method applicable to the ‘worlding’ of art history. The classic of postformalist art history is David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York and London, 2003). In critical iconology, I am thinking generally of the work of W.J.T. Mitchell and others. On the Gellian notion of ‘art and agency’ as applied in art history see, for example, the work of Jeremy Tanner. Some of these crossings concern how we model time and change within history and allow, for instance, the application of both diachronic and synchronic historicism: both an archaeological recovery of stacked layers of time and the act of suspending that timeline to look across comparatively in the moment at other things and other cultures, with one model informing the other. Crossed history also allows for the concurrent possibility or overlaying of other, messier conceptions of historical time, such as anachrony and recursive loopings back within standard chronologies (of historical progress or development, for example); see, for example, Dan Karlholm and Keith P. F. Moxey, eds, Time in Art History: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony (New York, 2018). On the research practice side, histoire croisée recognizes the context, situation and choices of the researcher at the point where these cross history: this book engages with its subject across time before and after the pandemic, informed by analogue and digital methods, and it is utterly dependent on a commercialdigital-legal framework whereby we access the corpus of historical artworks and related scholarship. Despite the recent trend towards mass availability of artworks online, not all can be easily accessed and reproduced, for example via Creative Commons or paid licensing arrangements, which will to a degree have shaped the presentation of the argument. Crossed history also makes sense, for instance, when we consider the ways in which our subject, the handscroll, has been accessed for viewing across its lifetime. It is still unclear how widely viewing practices varied in the past, but it is ever convenient to allow our forms of access today, which vary considerably, to offer a guiding analogy. Even the affinity of the picture-scroll with the narrative mode, which might be expected to provide a clue, does not indicate when scrolls were scrolled through by hand or else laid out fully unrolled for viewers to walk up and down and view, as in our exhibition culture today – as Wei Jiang maintains for a signficant example of Song scholarly narrative painting, in ‘Qiao Zhongchang’s Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff: Text and Image,

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Poetry and Painting, and Narrative and Lyrical’, PhD diss., Brown University, 2016; on narrative scrolls in general, see Kohara Hironobu, ‘Narrative Illustration in the Handscroll Format’, in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (New York, 1991), pp. 247–66. Some such present-to-past analogies may be unconscious, particularly because of the materiality of the picturescroll and the common-sense or embodied knowledge attached to it. 50 Consider how taxomonically, ‘oriental works on paper’ were until 1933 located in a ‘special subsection for Oriental art’ in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in London, along with Western materials. In her profile of Campbell Dodgson (1867– 1948), long-serving Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Museum from 1912 to 1932, Frances Carey, writes how ‘Dodgson himself did not collect Japanese prints, but he was abundantly aware of their impact, not only on some of the European artists whom he admired but through first-hand experience of this material in his own department which united European and oriental work on paper until 1933 when a separate Department of Oriental Antiquities was created. During the latter part of his career Sidney Colvin [1845–1927] had acquired four important private collections of Japanese woodcuts for the Museum, an area which during Dodgson’s Keepership was presided over by Laurence Binyon [1867–1943] as part of a special subsection for Oriental art.’ Frances Carey, ‘Campbell Dodgson (1867–1948)’, in Landmarks in Print Collecting, ed. Antony Griffiths (London, 1996), p. 220. My thanks to Esther Chadwick for this reference. 51 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, nc, 2011). 52 For example, Wen C. Fong’s Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 1992) is out of print but available online and as a pdf to download, see www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications, accessed 9 May 2021. 53 For the East Asian Scroll Paintings project at the University of Chicago, see https://scrolls.uchicago.edu, accessed 24 August 2021. 54 For example, ‘New Media Animation of the One Hundred Horses’, http://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh105/ npmTaichung/en/gallery.html, accessed 9 May 2021. 55 For example, Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (cit), see https://chineseiconography.org/section/cit/?facet_ him=anpm, accessed 4 May 2021. 56 Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, nc, 2005), ‘Introduction’; see www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/

academic-and-teaching-staff/daniel-miller/materialityintroduction, accessed 4 February 2020. 57 For a virtual exhibition of ‘42 representative works of 27 [Ming and Qing] women painters’ (of which four are Ming handscrolls), see Fine Works of the Ming and Qing Women Painters, https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/ English/E/E9/index.htm, accessed 12 November 2020. 58 In the Chinese connoisseur Xia Wenyan’s Precious Mirror of Painting (Tuhui baojian), completed in 1365, three years prior to the fall of the Yuan dynasty, there is only one woman listed, a Mrs Qiao, who was ‘competent’ (gong) in the genre of ink bamboo; Xia Wenyan, Tuhui baojian, juan 4 (Qinding siku quanshu, zibu 8, yishulei), http://ctext.org/library.pl?if=gb&file=63802&page=79, accessed 4 June 2019. For a popular but informative source on Chinese women artists, see http://bbs. panlonglishi.com/thread-45756-1-1.html, accessed 4 June 2019. 59 See https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/English/E/ E9/06-01.htm, accessed 12 November 2020. 60 Speaking of the Ming painter Li Yin’s Flowers and Birds handscroll; see https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/ English/E/E9/08–01.htm, accessed 12 November 2020. 61 Daria Berg, ‘Courtesan Editor: Sexual Politics in Early Modern China’, T’oung Pao, ic/1–3 (2013), pp. 173–211, online at doi.org/10.1163/15685322–9913P0005. 62 Jonathan Hay, ‘Art of the Ming/Art of the Qing’, Storia universale dell’arte: La Cina, ed. Michèle Pirazzoli t’Serstevens, 2 vols (Turin, 1995); see www.academia.edu. 63 For example, Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Enquiry, xxvii/1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1–22; Martin J. Powers, ‘Imitation and Reference in China’s Pictorial Tradition’, in Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago, il, 2010), pp. 103–26; Richard Vinograd, ‘Narrative and Metanarrative in Chinese Painting Studies’, in Stones from Other Mountains: Chinese Painting Studies in Postwar America, ed. Jason C. Kuo (Washington, dc, 2009), pp. 167–98. 64 For example, Roberta Wue, Art Worlds: Artists, Images and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (Hong Kong, 2014). 65 For a related introduction to how to read a scroll and its sections, see Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, il, and London, 1996), pp. 56–63. See also Maxwell K. Hearn, How to Read Chinese Paintings (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 2008), and Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style: Media, Methods, and Principles (Seattle, wa, and London, 1982). 66 The word xinpian (literally, ‘wick piece’) is the modern word for a microchip.

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(London, 2000), p. 33, https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/12784/1/ Court_Ladies_Scroll.pdf. 7 See the various photographs at www.britishmuseum. org/collection/object/A_1903-0408-0-1, accessed 25 June 2021, and a colour diagram of the damaged areas in Clarissa von Spee, ‘Nüshi zhen tu: Yifu mingpin de zhizuo yu zitan’ (The Admonitions Scroll: The Making of a Masterpiece and Its Reassessment), Diancang dutianxia (Artco China), 2014.6, figs 21 and 23. 8 Zhou Yi, ‘Lun Zhongguo huihua changjuan de yuanqi ji qi yanjiang’ (On the Origins and Development of Chinese Painting Long Scrolls), Qi Lu yiyuan: Shandong yishu xueyuan xuebao, 1998.2, pp. 3–6, 13, esp. p. 3. 9 Shuijing zhu, juan 3, see https://ctext.org/text. pl?node=568234&if=en#n568238, accessed 8 May 2021. 10 For the gable-end panel (h. 25 centimetres) see Kaogu xuebao, 1964.2. For an illustration, see ‘Zhongguo kaogu’, http://kaogu.cssn.cn/zwb/kgyd/kgbk/201509/ t20150911_3934750.shtml, accessed 18 September 2020. 11 For a telling of ‘The Guojian Story in Antiquity’, see: https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/11149.ch01.pdf, accessed 2 January 2021. On the sequence and temporality, see Murray, Mirror of Morality, pp. 32ff. See also https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/files/eaah/files/ mirrordeathrhetoric.pdf, accessed 18 April 2020. 12 Xia Wenyan, Tuhui baojian (Precious Mirror of Painting), in Zhongguo shuhua quanshu, ed. Lu Fusheng, 5 vols (Shanghai, 1993), vol. ii, pp. 847–93. 13 An exhibition in 2017 on the Scythians (900–200 bce), for example, showed a related transition in a vessel of 350–300 bce (Bosporan Kingdom, Kulʼ Oba, Black Sea) depicting Scythian tribesmen, possibly the legend of Heracles becoming ruler of the Scythians, which has, to a modern eye, a highly illustrational quality associated with steppe cultures. The four scenes, read in a circular direction, show two men failing to string a bow for their father and getting injured (on the shin and chin) in the process, whereas a third son is able to accomplish the task. Which scenes are first and last in the reading is not easy to determine, part of the skill of the maker, capitalizing on the potential of the circular form. See St John Simpson, Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia, exh. cat., British Museum (London, 2017). 14 For a virtual reality tour, see ‘Wu Family Shrines Pictorial Stones’, Asian Art Collection, Princeton University Art Museum website, https://static. artmuseum.princeton.edu/asian-art/china/viewers/ wu-shrine-viewer, accessed 18 April 2021. 15 ‘Yizi changshe chen fa’; see Li Lincan, ‘Zhongguo hua de goutu yanjiu’ (Research on Composition in Chinese Painting), National Palace Museum Quarterly (Spring 1971), pp. 22–3.

67 Daniel Miller has argued how the power of an art object lies not in the visibility but in the invisibility of its construction (Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, nc, 2005)), while Allan Sekula highlights the ways in which meaning is directed by design and layout, paratexts and captions, the materiality of mounting and so forth; see ‘Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital’, in Liz Wells, The Photography Reader (London, 2002), p. 445. My thanks to Angela Cheung for these references.

1 On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium 1 See, for example, https://visiontimes.com/2019/11/28/ a-short-history-of-chinese-handscrolls2.html, accessed 13 October 2020, and www.metmuseum.org/ toah/hd/jilh/hd_jilh.htm, accessed 6 May 2021. Cf. scholarly studies by Julia K. Murray, ‘Buddhism and Early Narrative Illustration in China’, Archives of Asian Art, xlviii (1995), pp. 17–31, Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu, hi, 2007), pp. 32ff., and, for context, John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (New York, 2003). 2 From a tomb at Zidanku, Changsha, Hunan, in a so-called peripheral or regional culture, Chu, not the ‘central plains’ or Yellow River ‘cradle of civilization’. See Alfreda Murck, ‘Words in Chinese Painting’, in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Malden, ma, 2015), pp. 458–9. 3 Liu An, ‘Huainanzi lunhua’ (Book of the Master of Huainan, Discussion on Painting) (c. 136 bce), in Zhongguo hualun leibian (Chinese theories of painting, compiled by category), ed. Yu Kun (Taipei, 1984; hereafter zghllb), vol. i, p. 6. 4 披圖幽對, 坐究四荒. Zong Bing, ‘Hua shanshui xu’ (Preface to Landscape Painting), in Yan Kejun, comp., Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han Liuchao wen (Taipei reprint, 1966), vol. iii, pp. 2545–6; see also https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=722744 para. 7, accessed 24 April 2021. 5 On mid-Yuan scholarly concepts of painting history, see Chen Yunru, ‘Tang Hou Huajian yu Yuan zhongqi huashi zhishi de chongsu’ (Tang Hou’s Mirror of Painting and Reshaping Knowledge on Painting History in the Middle Yuan Dynasty), Gugong xueshu jikan (The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly), xxxviii/1 (2020), pp. 97–146. 6 On the remounting see, for example, Kohara Hironobu ‘The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies Picture-Scroll’, in Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art Occasional Papers 1, trans. and ed. Shane McCausland

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References

16 See Margaret Hagen, Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art (Cambridge, 1986), for example, pp. 244ff. 17 Shane McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll (London, 2003). 18 Shane McCausland, ‘Intermediary Moments: Framing and Scrolling Devices across Painting, Print and Film in Chinese Visual Narratives’, in Bild. Erzählung. Kontext. Visuelle Narration in Kulturen und Gesellschaften der Alten Welt (Image. Narrative. Context. Visual Narration in Cultures and Societies of the Old World), Freiburger Studien zur Archäologie & visuellen Kultur series (Heidelberg, 2019), vol. i, pp. 157–75, doi.org/10.11588/ propylaeum.399. 19 Gao Jinlong, ‘Lun changjuan huihua ticai de yuanqi yu yanbian’ (On the Origin and Evolution of the Themes of Chinese Scroll Paintings), Shilun (Art Theory), xxxiv/1 (2016), p. 107. 20 See ‘East Asian Scroll Paintings’, https://scrolls.uchicago. edu/view-scroll/165, accessed 23 January 2021; see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/ 高逸圖.jpg, accessed 2 January 2021. 21 Chen Baozhen (Chen Pao-chen), Luoshenfu tu yu Zhongguo gudai gushihua (The Goddess of the Luo River Ode and Ancient Chinese Story Painting) (Taipei, 2011). 22 Prince Sattva Sacrificing Himself for the Tiger (74.1 × 1213.6 centimetres), datable to 1941–3; see Ge Su-ming, ed., Wanli jiangshan ping ru meng: Liang’an Zhang Daqian cishi sanshi zhounian jinianzhan (Dreaming of Boundless Homeland: A Cross-Strait Memorial Exhibition for the 30th Anniversary of Chang Dai-chien’s Passing), exh. cat., National Museum of History (Taipei, 2014), pp. 118–19. 23 See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/28127/courtladies-preparing-newly-woven-silk?ctx=f66df5f1–bfa0– 4c7f-9dc8–32bcfb3855fc&idx=0, accessed 2 January 2021. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Revels_of_ Han_Xizai, accessed 2 January 2021. 24 See www.lnmuseum.com.cn/huxing/show.asp?id=7105, accessed 27 April 2021. 25 See https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/view-scroll/165, accessed 23 January 2021. 26 Colin Chinnery, ‘Bookbinding’, http://idp.bl.uk, accessed 8 May 2021. 27 Gao Jinlong, ‘Lun changjuan’, pp. 106–7. 28 Lotus Sutra, juan 6, dated 675. Handscroll, ink on paper, 25.8 × 431.9 centimetres. Discovered in Cave 17, Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. Collection of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Pelliot chinois 2195. 29 Illustrated in Wu Hung, The Double Screen, fig. 41. 30 See, for example, the discussion of the opening scene of Min Qiji’s 1640 woodcut album, Story of Oriole

(Yingying zhuan) or Romance of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji, see illus. 113.) 31 In full, the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra 金剛般若波羅蜜經 (Jin gang bo re bo luo mi jing). See www.bl.uk/turning-the-pages/?id=1c92bc7e8acc-49b3-9a27-b5ad8f44230a&type=sd_planar, accessed 28 July 2022; see also https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Diamond_Sutra#/media/File:Jingangjing.jpg, accessed 23 January 2021. 32 See http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_scroll_h.a4d?uid= 8719419348;bst=1;recnum=40226;index=1;img=1 and www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_ 1919-0101-0-168, accessed 18 April 2021. 33 I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the observation on Dunhuang viewing practices. See also Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu, hi, 1997). 34 Mi Fu, ‘Jin hua’ (Jin dynasty paintings), Hua shi (History of Painting), para. 1, https://zh.m.wikisource. org/zh-hant/畫史, accessed 29 September 2021. 35 Jiang Zhaoshen, ‘Cong huajia goutu yinian lai kan Zhongguo shanshui hua de jiuyou jinzhan’ (Seeing the Early Development of Chinese Landscape Painting Based on Artists’ Compositional Thinking), Gugong jikan, iv/4 (1970), pp. 1–11, reference on p. 1. 36 Melanie Holcomb et al., Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2009), cat. no. 31, quote on p. 117. 37 Shanghai Bowuguan, ed., Hanmo Juzhen: Zhongguo Riben Meiguo Cang Zhongguo Gudai Shuhua Yishu (Treasures in the Spotlight: Art of Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in Chinese, Japanese and American Collections), 3 vols, exh. cat., Shanghai Museum (Shanghai, 2012). 38 Pei Xiaoyuan, Zhenguan gongsi hualu (Record of Official and Private Paintings of the Zhenguan [Era]), in zghllb, vol. i, pp. 16–7. 39 Gao Jinlong, ‘Lun changjuan huihua ticai de yuanqi yu yanbian’ (On the Origins and Evolution of the Painting Subjects in Long Scrolls), Zhongguo meishu, no. 1 (2016), pp. 106–7, reference on p. 107, citing Guo Ruoxu, Tuhua jianwen zhi (Record of Pictures that I Have Seen and Heard of) (Beijing, 1983), p. 7. The extant attribution to Han Huang, Five Oxen, may be a later, Song-dynasty painting in the Biographies of Exemplary Women mode. 40 See, for example, Zhu Jingxuan, Tangchao minghua lu (c. 760), ‘Preface’, in zghllb, vol. i, p. 23. 41 Zhang Zao, Wentong lunhua, in zghllb, vol. i, p. 19. 42 See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/29063?image=47, accessed 14 April 2021; Joseph Chang, ‘Conversations in Connoisseurship’, The Art Historical Art of Song China,

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Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival Scroll) (Beijing, 2015), fig. 7–16, p. 161. 4 Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian, p. 1. On Pu Yi’s use of these scrolls, see Shane McCausland, ‘The Flight of the Dragon: Modernism in China and Art at the Last Emperor’s Court-in-Exile’, Archives of Asian Art, lxx/1 (spring 2020), pp. 51–83. 5 See Wang Yao-t’ing, ‘Beyond the Admonitions Scroll: A Study of the Mounting, Seals and Calligraphy’, pp. 192–218, and Yu Hui, ‘The Admonitions Scroll: A Song Copy’, pp. 146–67, in Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, ed. Shane McCausland, Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, no. 21 (London, 2003). See www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/A_1903–0408–0–1, accessed 7 April 2021. 6 See, for example, Yu Hui, ‘Zhangzong chao de Jindai huihua chengjiu’ (The Achievement in Jin-Dynasty Painting at the Court of Jin Emperor Zhangzong), Xin meishu, 1991.1, pp. 45–9; Yu Hui, ‘Jindai renma hua chengyin yu chengjiu’ (The Causes and Achievements of Jin-Dynasty Human Figure and Horse Painting), Meishu yanjiu, i/65 (1992), pp. 55–8, 62; Yu Hui, ‘A Study of Ch’en Chi-chih’s Treaty at the Pien Bridge’, in Arts of the Sung and Yüan: Ritual, Ethnicity, and Style in Painting, ed. Cary Y. Liu and Dora Ching (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 152–79; Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian, fig. 1–1. 7 Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 1992), pp. 189ff., 436. 8 Susan Bush, ‘Five Paintings of Animal Subjects or Narrative Themes and Their Relevance to Chin Culture’, in China under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History, ed. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman and Stephen H. West (Albany, ny, 1995), pp. 183–215, quote on p. 199. 9 For ‘middle period’ see Patricia Ebrey and Shih-shan Huang, eds, Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China (Leiden, 2017). 10 While the main contents of artworks appear to be socio-politically comparable across medieval contexts, attitudes to what is or is not appropriate in marginalia differ widely. Cf. a bawdy picture of a couple about to copulate in the margin of the Bayeux tapestry; see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), fig. 68. 11 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fan_ Kuan_-_Travelers_Among_Mountains_and_Streams_-_ Signature.jpg, accessed 28 April 2021. 12 For the latter, see https://collections.mfa.org/ objects/30017/whiling-away-the-summer-by-alakeside-retreat?ctx=ccfbf6bc-e43e-49b5–8c16–

workshop at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, mi, 6 April 2017. 43 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seven_ Sages_of_the_Bamboo_Grove_1.Nanjing_Museum.jpg, accessed 22 January 2021. 44 For the Wu Zongyuan painting, see Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian: Qingming shanghe tu jiemalu (Hidden Concern and Subtle Critique: Decoding the Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival Scroll) (Beijing, 2015), illus. 62. A ‘long scroll’ of the Prince of Yue’s Palace Precinct (Yuewang gongdian changjuan) is recorded by Zhang Chou, Qinghe shuhua fang, in zghllb, vol. ii, p. 1248. 45 Cf. the Admonitions scene, ‘Lady Ban Declines to Ride in the Imperial Palanquin’, with the standard iconography for this subject in the Sima Jinlong (d. 484) lacquer screen version of the same scene; see https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lacquer_painting_over_wood,_ Northern_Wei.jpg, accessed 24 April 2021. 46 McCausland, ‘Intermediary Moments’. 47 Wu Hung, The Double Screen, pp. 29–30ff. 48 Mélodie Doumy, ‘The Grave Side of Fengshui’, in Manuscript of the Month, ed. Wiebke Beyer and Zhenzhen Lu, no. 7 (2017), pp. 119–21 and 146, online at www.csmc. uni-hamburg.de/publications/mom-1/mom-2015-2017.pdf. 49 Xue Yongnian and Wang Lianqi, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan peitu ban (Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley, de luxe illustrated edition), 40 vols (Beijing and Nanning, 2015), vol. xxxvii, pp. 148–9. 50 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39901, accessed 18 April 2021. 51 For the whole, see https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/江行初 雪圖, accessed 22 January 2021. 52 See https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/view-scroll/165, accessed 23 January 2021. 53 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zhou_Fang._ Court_Ladies_Tuning_the_Lute_(28x75)_Nelson-Atkins_ Museum_of_Art,_Kansas_City.jpg, accessed 22 January 2021.

2 Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period 1 Heping Liu, ‘“The Water Mill” and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce, and Science’, Art Bulletin, cxxxiv/4 (2002), pp. 566–70, dates it to early Song, 970s–980s. 2 For the tapestry that formed the outer wrapper (26 × 24.6 centimetres) of the Admonitions scroll, see illus. 16 and also www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/A_1903-0408-0-1, accessed 28 April 2021. 3 Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian: Qingming shanghe tu jiemalu (Hidden Concern and Subtle Critique: Decoding the

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3af6581870af&idx=3, accessed 8 April 2021; Alfreda Murck, ‘Su Shi and Zhao Lingrang: Brush Ideas of Wang Wei’, Ars Orientalis, xlix (2019), online at doi. org/10.3998/ars.13441566.0049.002. 13 This device was also a common way to embed text inscriptions in extended narrative paintings, for example Qiao Zhongchang (active early twelfth century), Latter Red Cliff Ode, about 1120; see https://scrolls. uchicago.edu/view-scroll/232, accessed 8 April 2021. For a call for ‘composition theory’, see Ogawa Hiromitsu, ‘The Continuity of Spatial Composition in Sung and Yüan Landscape Painting’, in Arts of the Sung and Yüan, ed. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York, 1996), pp. 339–66. 14 See www.comuseum.com/blog/category/exhibition/ page/2/#yang-wei_two-horses_part, accessed 8 April 2021. 15 See https://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page. aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=32, accessed 8 May 2021. 16 See www.tjbwg.com/cn/collectionInfo.aspx?Id=2545, accessed 8 April 2021. 17 For example, Li Gonglin, Guo Ziyi Accepting the Surrender of the Uyghurs; see http://painting.npm.gov.tw/ Painting_Page.aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=1294, accessed 8 April 2021. 18 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231655.html, accessed 19 April 2021. 19 See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ 3/37/Wang_Ximeng._A_Thousand_Li_of_Rivers_and_ Mountains._%28Complete%2C_51%2C3x1191%2C5_ cm%29._1113._Palace_museum%2C_Beijing.jpg, accessed 10 April 2021; and www.comuseum.com/ blog/2017/09/15/one-thousand-li-of-rivers-andmountains, accessed 14 April 2021. See also Richard Vinograd, ‘Some Landscapes Related to the Blueand-Green Manner from the Early Yüan’, Artibus Asiae, xli/2/3 (1979), pp. 101–31. 20 Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian, p. 49. 21 See ibid., p. 23; Xu Bangda, ‘Zai tan gu shuhua jianbie: kuan, yin, tiba ji qi dui gu shuhua de jianding zuoyong’ (Another Discussion on the Connoisseurship of Ancient Calligraphy and Painting: Signatures, Seals and Colophons and Their Function in the Authentication of Ancient Calligraphy and Painting), Gugong Bowuyuan kan, iii (1979), doi.10.16319/j.cnki.0452–7402.1979.03.014. See www.chinashj.com/ysll_ysllsy/17203.html, accessed 23 April 2021. 22 Known as the Mingchang (1190–96) qixi (‘Mingchang seven seals’); see Wang Yao-t’ing, ‘Mingchang qixi ji qi zhoubian’ (The Mingchang Seven-Seal Set and Its Surroundings), Gugong xueshu jikan, xxxiv/3 (2017), pp. 1–43.

23 See https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/山鷓棘雀 圖/4gFolnykG02_Ww?hl=zh-tw, accessed 10 April 2021. See also Xue Yongnian and Wang Lianqi, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan peitu ban (Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley, de luxe illustrated edition), 40 vols (Beijing and Nanning, 2015), vol. fuzeng (Palace Museum, Taipei, vol. i), p. 62. 24 See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/29081/five colored-parakeet-on-a-blossoming-apricot-tree? ctx=6bf02a9b-f117–48ce-8c77–0b4fb89a6331&idx=0 and www.lnmuseum.com.cn/huxing/show.asp?id= 6787 respectively, accesssed 23 April 2021. See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39936, accessed 24 April 2021. 25 Li Zhi, Deyuzhai huapin; in Zhongguo hualun, ed. Wu Mengfu (Hefei, 1995), pp. 452–3. 26 See https://en.dpm.org.cn/collections/collections/ 2013-04-23/18.html, accessed 7 April 2021. 27 See https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-fiveplanets-and-twenty-eight-constellations-attributed-tozhang-sengyao/-af4pxDswfk_fg?hl=en, accessed 28 April 2021. 28 For the Su Shi attribution, see www.christies.com/ auctions/sushi?sc_lang=en, accessed 22 April 2021. 29 See Richard M. Barnhart, Li Kung-lin’s Classic of Filial Piety (New York, 1993). 30 Itakura Masaaki, Ri Kōrin Gobazu (Li Gonglin Five Horses) (Tokyo, 2019). 31 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/handwriting/231255. html, accessed 22 April 2021. 32 See Peter C. Sturman, Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997), p. 200. 33 See https://minghuaji.dpm.org.cn/paint/appreciate?id= kin4v5glc9xfuz32ovf60w45xv85hb7t, accessed 4 March 2021. 34 See Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, il, and London, 1996), pp. 79–84. 35 Mi Fu, Hua shi, in Zhongguo hualun, ed. Wu Mengfu, p. 407. 36 On Han Zhuo’s terms see Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, ma, 2000), pp. 199ff., and Chen Pao-chen, ‘Cong kongjian biaoxianfa kan Nan Song xiaojing shanshui hua de fazhan’ (Seeing the Development of Southern Song Small Scene Landscape Painting through Methods of Spatial Expression), Gugong xueshu jikan, iii (1996), pp. 83–104. 37 Foong Ping, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Cambridge, ma, 2015). For the painting, see https://painting.npm.gov.tw/

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Painting_Page.aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=47, accessed 22 April 2021. 38 Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China. On the theorization of spatial distances through form, see Jennifer Purtle, ‘Double Take: Chinese Optics and Their Media in Postglobal Perspective’, Ars Orientalis, xlviii (2018), pp. 71–117, esp. pp. 82ff. See also Richard M. Barnhart, ‘Landscape Painting around 1085’, in The Power of Culture, ed. Willard J. Peterson et al. (Hong Kong, 1994), pp. 195–205. 39 It has Huizong’s (early twelfth-century) bridging seals at the end but not at the leading edge of the ‘painting heart’; see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/39915, accessed 13 April 2021. 40 Liu Daochun, ‘Shengchao minghua ping’, in Zhongguo hualun, ed. Wu Mengfu, pp. 261–2. 41 Fan Jeremy Zhang, ‘Dreams, Spirits, and Romantic Encounters in Jin and Yuan Theatrical Pictures’, in Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China, ed. Ebrey and Huang, pp. 115–50, figs 3.1 and 3.2. 42 Foong, Efficacious Landscape, esp. chap. 4; see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39668, accessed 10 April 2021. 43 In a colophon, dated 1243, transcribed and translated at https://asia.si.edu/object/F1961.34a-c, accessed 1 February 2020. 44 Trans. after Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, pp. 68 and 193 (no. 123): 余家董源霧景橫披全幅, 山骨隱 顯, 林梢出沒, 意趣高古. 45 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/228260.html, accessed 19 April 2021. 46 Peter C. Sturman, ‘Citing Wang Wei: Mi Youren and the Temporal Dimensions of Landscape’, Ars Orientalis, xlix (2019), online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/ ars/13441566.0049.004?view=text;rgn=main. 47 Deng Chun, Hua ji; cited in Peter Sturman, ‘The Poetic Ideas Scroll Attributed to Mi Youren and Sima Huai’, Zhejiang University Journal of Art and Archaeology, i (2014), pp. 97–8. 48 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40106, accessed 11 April 2021. 49 See Malcolm McNeill, ʻNarrative Agency in 13th–14th Century Chan Figure Painting: A Study of Hagiography– Iconography Text–Image Relationshipsʼ, PhD thesis, soas University of London, 2015. 50 Cf. the later Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) print The Origin of Scrolls, from One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Toheki-do Eirakuya Toshiro, 1835–88), vol. ii, in which a servant removes a window cover to reveal a squarish framed view of Mount Fuji. 51 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40284, accessed 8 January 2023.

52 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category: Yurinkan_Museum#/media/File:Wang_T’ing-yün_001. jpg, accessed 11 April 2021. 53 Cf. Zou Fulei’s masterly painting in this mode from 1360, A Breath of Spring: see ‘Google Arts & Culture’, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/a-breathof-spring-artist-zou-fulei-inscription-inscription-byqianlong-emperor-calligrapher-frontispiece-by-yangyu-colophon-colophon-by-yang-weizhen-colophoncolophon-by-gu-yan-colophon-colophon-by-guobaochang/tahjazle1zuapg, accessed 11 April 2021. 54 See https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/nine-songsqu-yuan, and https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/view-scroll/59, accessed 7 April 2021. 55 See https://minghuaji.dpm.org.cn/paint/detail?id= xapmjsriacde5xqle172cfh7hftwktuy, accessed 7 April 2021. 56 See https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/ objects/32799, accessed 7 April 2021. 57 Illustrated in Susan Huang, ‘Imagining Efficacy: The Common Ground between Buddhist and Daoist Pictorial Art in Song China’, Orientations, xxxvi/1 (2005), p. 67, fig. 8. 58 See Dore J. Levy, ‘Vignettism in the Poetics of Chinese Narrative Painting’, in Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia, ed. Alexandra Green (Hong Kong, 2013), pp. 27–40. 59 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40287, accessed 7 April 2021. 60 Chen Pao-chen, ‘Cong kongjiang’, p. 90. 61 See, for example, John Hay, ‘Surface and the Chinese Painter: The Discovery of Surface’, Archives of Asian Art, xxxviii (1985), pp. 95–123. 62 See https://asia.si.edu/object/F1911.235, accessed 7 April 2021. 63 Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu, hi, 2007), p. 106. 64 On Tang Hou’s interpretation, see Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian, p. 186. 65 Murray, Mirror of Morality, p. 108.

3 Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces 1 Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Susan Shih-shan Huang, eds, Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China (Leiden, 2017). 2 Marsha Weider, ‘Yuan Dynasty Court Collections of Chinese Painting, Part 1’, Central & Inner Asian Studies, ii (1988), p. 29. On, for example, Tugh Temür’s collection, see Ankeney Weitz, ‘Art and Politics at the Mongol Court of China: Tugh Temür’s Collection of Chinese Paintings’, Artibus Asiae, lxiv/2 (2004), pp. 243–80.

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3 Chen Yuanjing, Shilin guangji, ‘Wenji lei’ (Literary records category) (Yuan Zhixun [1330–33] edition; facsimile, Beijing, 1963), juan 4: ‘Wenji lei’. 4 John W. Haeger, ‘Marco Polo in China? Problems with Internal Evidence’, Bulletin of Sung and Yüan Studies, no. 14 (1978), p. 23. See also Yuri Pines, Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpke, The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared (Cambridge and New York, 2021); Jennifer Purtle, ‘The Far Side: Expatriate Medieval Art and Its Languages in Sino-Mongol China’, in Confronting the Borders of Medieval Art, ed. Jill Caskey, Adam S. Cohen and Linda Safran (Leiden, 2011), pp. 167–97. 5 Pace Arthur Waley and Osvald Sirén, up to about 1958, as Marsha Haufler (Weidner), Fu Shen and others have documented. Wang Yun, ‘Shuhua mulu’, in Zhongguo shuhua quanshu, ed. Lu Fusheng, 5 vols (Shanghai, 1993), vol. ii, p. 954; Marsha Haufler (Weidner), trans., ‘Yuan Dynasty Court Collections of Chinese Paintings, Part 2’, Central and Inner Asian Studies, iii (1989), pp. 83–7. See also Lu Hui-wen, ‘Yuanchu beifang shidafu de shuhua huodong yu jiancang: yi Wang Yun (1227–1304) Qiujian xiansheng daquanji wei zhongxin de jidian kaocha’ (The Activities and Connoisseurship of Painting and Calligraphy among Northern Literati in the Early Yuan: A Survey of Several Points Focusing on Wang Yun’s [1227–1304] Complete Collected Works of Qiujian), Gugong xueshu jikan (The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly), xxxviii/2 (2020), pp. 47–81. 6 Cf. the figure of Noah in ‘Noah’s Ark, from The Jami’ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din’, mss 727 Folio 45a, at www.khalilicollections.org, accessed 23 August 2021. 7 See Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong, 2011), pp. 312–13. 8 See https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55002481n. image, accessed 23 August 2021. 9 Rao Ziran, ‘Huizong shier ji’ (The Twelve Flaws to Avoid in the Art of Painting), in Zhongguo hualun leibian (Anthology of Discourses on Chinese Painting), ed. Yu Jianhua, 2 vols (Taipei, 1984), vol. ii, pp. 691–4, quote on p. 694. 10 See Richard Vinograd, ‘Some Landscapes Related to the Blue and Green Manner from the Early Yüan Period’, Artibus Asiae, lxi/2/3 (1979), pp. 101–31, at p. 129. 11 See https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/52453, accessed 10 August 2021. 12 See https://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page.aspx? dep=P&PaintingId=14711, accessed 12 August 2021. 13 Cf. the assessment that the ‘activities [of these Mongol royals] were not a match for Song royal patronage’; see ‘Chinese Painting, Yuan Dynasty (1206–1368)’, www.britannica.com.

14 For a text-based study identifying the musician as possibly the Taoist scholar Tao Hongjing, see Geng Jipeng, ‘Beijing gugong cang “Boya guqin tu” ticai kaobian jian lun dingming wenti’ (A Textual Research on the Subject of “Boya Play Guqin Map [sic, Painting]” in Beijing Imperial Palace), ma diss., Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyuan, 2017. 15 顧長康道畫：畫手揮五絃易，畫目送飛鴻難 For muliple references, see https://ctext.org/text. pl?node=91626&if=gb&show=parallel, accessed 23 August 2021. This is probably one of many poetic allusions. 16 Wai-kam Ho, ‘The Literary Concept of “Picture-Like” (Ju-hua) and “Picture-Idea” (Hua-i) in the Relationship between Poetry and Painting’, in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 359–404. 17 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231409.html, accessed 13 August 2021. 18 See, for example, Jonathan Brack, ‘Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260–1335’, Past and Present, ccl/1 (February 2021), pp. 11–53, and the work of Devin DeWeese and Alan Strathern on the wider global pattern of ruler conversion, especially from immanentist to transcendentalist modes. 19 Noted by Xu Bangda in Shiqu baoji jingxuan peitu ban (Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley, de luxe illustrated edition), vol. xxi, p. 294. 20 Sanguo zhi in Taiping yulan, juan 48, http://ctext.org/ text.pl?node=383301&if=en&searchu=%E5%8D%81%E5 %85%ab%E5%85%ac&searchmode=showall#n383306, accessed 23 August 2021. 21 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/230459.html, accessed 13 August 2021. 22 For a list of extant and recorded works bearing her seal, see Marsha Haufler (Weidner), ‘Yuan Dynasty Court Collections, Part 2’, pp. 91–3. 23 See https://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh105/ GatheringPrincess/en/page-4.html#main, accessed 22 May 2021. See also Haufler, ‘Part 1’, pp. 10ff.; Chen Yunru, Gongzhu de yaji: Meng Yuan huangshi yu shuhua jiancang wenhua tezhan (The Elegant Gathering of the Princess: The Culture of Appreciating and Collecting Art at the Mongol Yuan Court), exh. cat., National Palace Museum, Taipei (2016). 24 Yuan Jue, Qingrong jushi ji, juan 45, http://ctext.org/ library.pl?if=en&file=53234&page=107, accessed 23 August 2021. 25 See http://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page.aspx? dep=P&PaintingId=43, accessed 21 February 2021.

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26 Cf. the format of the Catalan Atlas of 1375, attributed to the Minorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques (1325–87), which unfolds across four vellum folding leaves, each measuring 64.5 × 50 centimetres. The accompanying texts and illustrations, including the caravan of Marco Polo travelling to Cathay, mainly sit around the edges, indicating that it was probably viewed by laying it out on a table and walking around it. See https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55002481n/f11. item, accessed 18 August 2021. 27 黃太史書。自謂得江山之助。此詩與書皆其得意處。涪翁人 品如此。詩什又如此。書法又如此。宜其為內家之珎玩也。翰 林侍讀學士李源道拜下觀。 28 Xue and Wang, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan, vol. xxi, p. 216. 29 John D. Langlois, ‘Yu Chi and His Mongol Sovereign: The Scholar as Apologist’, Journal of Asian Studies, xxxviii/1 (1978), p. 108. 30 Herbert Franke and Denis C. Twitchett, eds, Cambridge History of China (Princeton, nj, 1995), vol. vi, p. 554. 31 Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, il, and London, 1996), fig. 75. 32 Chen Yuanjing, Shilin guangji (Forest of Affairs), section 4, p. 83; see https://archive.org/details/02097995. cn/page/n82/mode/2up, accessed 13 November 2020. 33 David Summers’s ‘real spaces’ approach would be warranted; see his Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London, 2003). 34 On affine perspective, see Margaret Hagen, Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 102ff. 35 See https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/ maest%C3%A0/zwF3haL1RjxMeg?hl=en-gb, accessed 13 August 2021. I am grateful to Carl Strehlke for this reference. 36 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Derun#/media/ File:Zhu_Derun_-_Primordial_Chaos_(painting_only). jpeg, accessed 13 August 2021. 37 See, for example, Wen C. Fong, Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliott Family and John B. Elliott Collections of Chinese Calligraphy (Princeton, NJ, 1984). 38 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40284, accessed 15 August 2021. 39 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gong_ Kai-Zhong_Kui_Traveling.jpg, accessed 27 February 2021), and https://asia.si.edu/object/F1938.4, accessed 27 February 2021. 40 See Klaas Ruitenbeek, ‘The Islands of the Immortals’, in Ka Bo Tsang, Lennert Gesterkamp and Klaas Ruitenbeek, Beyond Clouds and Waves: Daoist Paintings in the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, 2013), pp. 101–23.

41 For the Zhao Cangyun, see www.metmuseum.org/ art/collection/search/39545, accessed 15 August 2021; for the Chen Jizhi, see www.dpm.org.cn/collection/ paint/234613.html, accessed 15 August 2021. For part of the Li Kan, see https://art.nelson-atkins.org/ objects/20877, accessed 15 August 2021. 42 See Chen Xiejun and Chen Kelun, eds, Youlan shencai: Yuandai qinghua ciqi teji (Splendors in Smalt: Art of Yuan Blue-and-White) (Shanghai, 2012), cat. no. 2 and fig. 13. 43 See Lu Minghua, ‘Yuan qinghua ciqi zonglun’ (A General Study on Yuan Blue-and-White Porcelain), Youlan shencai (Splendors in Smalt), ed. Chen Xiejun and Chen Kelun, pp. 30–54, esp. fig. 12. 44 See http://discover.durham.ac.uk/permalink/f/1sbb0j7/ 44dur_adlib_ds11977, accessed 27 February 2021. 45 See www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/ 66256, accessed 27 February 2021. 46 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/228521.html, accessed 15 August 2021. See also Awaiting a Ferry on an Autumn River, www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231513. html, accessed 16 August 2021. 47 Shandong Provincial Museum, ‘Fajue Ming Zhu Tan mu jishi’ (Report on the Excavation of the Tomb of Zhu Tan of the Ming Dynasty), Wenwu, v (1972), pp. 25–37. 48 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gong_ Kai,_Emaciated_Horse.jpg, accessed 16 August 2021. 49 Wang Yao-t’ing, Looking at Chinese Painting: A Contemporary Guide to the Philosophy, Technique and History of Chinese Painting (Tokyo, 1995), p. 168. 50 See https://asia.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ F1938–4_Documentation.pdf, p. 6, accessed 28 February 2021. See also Peter C. Sturman, ‘Confronting Dynastic Change: Painting after the Mongol Reunification of North and South China’, res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, xxxv, ‘Intercultural China’ (spring 1999), pp. 60ff. 51 See Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu, fig. 4.35. 52 For a kongbai example, Fang Congyi’s Cloudy Mountains, of c. 1360–70, see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/45652, accessed 12 April 2021. Ni Zan collaborated with Zhao Yuan in 1373 to create the short handscroll The Lion Grove Garden, illustrated in Wu Hung, The Double Screen, illus. 149. 53 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39901 ?searchField=All&sortBy=Relevance&ft=Dai+Jin&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=14 (see no. 8), accessed 21 February 2021. 54 See, for example, McCausland, Zhao Mengfu, esp. chap. 1. 55 Another example is his colophon to the Zhao Lingrang attribution, River Village in Autumn Dawn, for which see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39920, accessed 23 August 2021. Zhao Mengfu’s colophon to

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Museum of Art), Shanghai wenbo, no. 11 (2011), pp. 14–29. 7 See, for example, Pang Huiping, ‘Heritage or Imperial Violence: A Hidden History of Early Ming Princely Acquisition of Art’, Ming Studies, no. 74 (2016), pp. 2–26. 8 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/230966.html, accessed 24 July 2021. 9 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231048.html, accessed 24 July 2021. 10 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/232944.html, accessed 24 July 2021. 11 Hou-mei Sung Ishida, Wang Fu and the Formation of the Wu School (Ann Arbor, mi, 1984). 12 See Jonathan Hay, ‘Green Beijing: Ecologies of Movement in the New Capital c. 1450’, in Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450, ed. Craig Clunas et al. (London, 2016), pl. 5.4. Hay notes the contested authorship; see also Kathlyn Liscomb, ‘The “Eight Views of Beijing”: Politics in Literati Art’, Artibus Asiae, viiii (1988), pp. 127–52, and Xue Yongnian and Wang Lianqi, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan peitu ban (Precious Cases of the Stony Gulley, de luxe illustrated edition), 40 vols (Beijing and Nanning, 2015), vol. xxxv, p. 151. 13 For example, Bamboo and Rocks (35.6 × 232.4 centimetres); see https://art.nelson-atkins.org/ objects/4784/bamboo-and-rocks?ctx=d39c5644–ad69– 4162–bd83–c362193a9ba1&idx=158, accessed 2 July 2021. 14 Trans. https://asia.si.edu/object/F1952.7, accessed 14 April 2021. 15 For example, Xiang River in Wind and Rain, which may be a studio work, for which see www.dpm.org.cn/ collection/paint/234418.html, accessed 24 July 2021. 16 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/234577.html, accessed 25 July 2021. 17 See http://masterpieces.asemus.museum/masterpiece/ detail.nhn?objectId=11076, accessed 1 December 2020. 18 For example, by Zhuang Su, Huaji buyi (1298), who described his landscape and figure painting as ‘vulgar and tasteless in the extreme’ and his reputation as ‘without substance’; https://zh.wikisource.org/ wiki/%E7%95%ab%E7%B9%bc%E8%A3%9C%E9%81 %ba, ‘juan xia, Xia Gui’, accessed 27 September 2021. 19 See http://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page. aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=30, accessed 9 December 2020. 20 See, for example, Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness (London and Chicago, il, 2007), fig. 19 (datable to c. 1414). 21 For example, The Xuande Emperor at Leisure (36.7 × 690 centimetres), see www.dpm.org.cn/ collection/paint/228988.html, accessed 23 August 2021. 22 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231097.html, accessed 24 July 2021.

Qian Xuan’s Crabapple and Gardenia is, again, written somewhat unusually on the end border-panel; see https://asia.si.edu/object/F1917.183, accessed 11 August 2021. 56 See, for example, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/es/ collections/maker/4214, accessed 23 August 2021. 57 See www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/ A_1903-0408-0-1, accessed 16 August 2021. 58 See Hui-Wen Lu, ‘A Forgery and the Pursuit of the Authentic Wang Xizhi’, in Ebrey and Huang, eds, Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China, pp. 193–225. 59 See https://asia.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ F1980–7_Documentation.pdf (see no. 3), accessed 28 February 2021.

4 Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll 1 See Shane McCausland and Ling Lizhong, Telling Images of China: Narrative and Figure Paintings, 15th–20th Century, from the Shanghai Museum, exh. cat., The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (London, 2010), no. 33 and Shane McCausland, ‘Exemplary Complicity: The Pictorial Lives of Han Court Beauties in Two Narrative Handscrolls of Mid-Ming Suzhou’, in On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture, ed. Shane McCausland and Yin Hwang (Hong Kong, 2014), pp. 89–116. 2 Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven, ct, and London, 1995). See also the work of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. 3 John Dardess, ‘Ming T’ai-tsu on the Yuan: An Autocrat’s Assessment of the Mongol Dynasty’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, no. 14 (1978), pp. 6–11. See also Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall, Ming: 50 Years That Changed China, exh. cat., British Museum (London, 2014). 4 For example, Chen Ruyan (1331–before 1371), painter of Mountains of the Immortals, which bears a commemorative inscription by Ni Zan (1301–1374), dated 1371; see www.clevelandart.org/art/1997.95, accessed 14 December 2020. 5 See https://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page.aspx? dep=P&PaintingId=1722, accessed 27 November 2020. 6 Fu Xinian, Fu Xinian shuhua jianding ji (Collection of Authentications of Calligraphy and Painting by Fu Xinian) (Zhengzhou, 1999), pp. 80–97; Lin Meicun, ‘Yuan Dadu de kaixuanmen: Meiguo Naiersun-Ajinsi Yishu Bowuguan cang Yuanren “Huanji tu” duhua zhaji’ (The Triumphal Arch in Xanadu [sic, in other words, Daidu] of the Yuan Dynasty as Seen in the Painting Huan Ji Tu in the Collection of the Nelson–Atkins

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mianxiang’ (Solving the Puzzle of the “Curled-Up Cat” – an Avenue of Exchange in Painting between China and Persia), Gugong wenwu yuekan, no. 3 (2014), pp. 2–11; Paramita Paul, ‘The Eccentrics of Istanbul: Chan, Art, and Cross-Asian Networks in the Ming’, Ming Studies, no. 78 (2018), pp. 7–31, online at doi.org/10.1080/014703 7X.2018.1505132. For the cat, see https://painting.npm. gov.tw/Painting_Page.aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=3885, accessed 25 July 2021. 34 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1511_ Westminster_Tournament_Roll, accessed 23 August 2021; and cf. Alison Tara Walker, ‘The Westminster Tournament Challenge (Harley 83 H 1) and Thomas Wriothesley’s Workshop’, eblj (2011), article 9, pp. 1–13. 35 See https://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/?query= search=/record objectnumbersearch=[25205]&show type=record, accessed 27 August 2021; and www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/359787, accessed 25 July 2021. 36 See www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_pdf704, accessed 25 July 2021. 37 See www.dia.org/art/collection/object/landscape-andfisherman-poem-2016, accessed 25 July 2021. 38 For example, Wen Zhengming’s son Wen Jia (c. 1501– 1583) comments that the combination of a Zhao Yuan painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981.285.15) with a Ming work by Shen Xuan in one mounting occurred in the sixteenth century; see www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/45650, accessed 23 August 2021. 39 See https://art.nelson-atkins.org/objects/27840/ life-cycle-of-the-lotus-;jsessionid=732B110A3745c b38C40C73C5ac119B24?ctx=f2602ae5–c2a2–4a9d9d40–51232575d096&idx=1, accessed 25 July 2021. On the relationship between this subject and the artist’s body see Kathleen M. Ryor, ‘Fleshly Desires and Bodily Deprivations: The Somatic Dimensions of Xu Wei’s Flower Paintings’, in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Harvard East Asian Monographs 239 (Cambridge, ma, 2005), pp. 119–45. 40 Xue and Wang, eds, Shiqu baoji jingxuan, vol. xxxvi, pp. 156ff. 41 For example, Flowers and Birds (24.6 × 639.8 centimetres) on satin; see https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/ English/E/E9/08–01.htm, accessed 4 June 2021. 42 See Xu Wei, Handscroll of Plants and Flowers; illustrated in Jonathan Chaves, The Chinese Painter as Poet, exh. cat., China Institute Gallery, New York (New York, 2000), cat. no. 15. See also https://asia.si.edu/object/F1954.8, accessed 25 July 2021. 43 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/230214.html, accessed 25 July 2021.

23 See, for example, for a slightly later period, Pang Huiping, ‘Stolen Art and Lost Inscriber: Reconstructing Artwork Inventory Codes in the Tumultuous Wanli Period, 1573–1620’, Artibus Asiae, lxxii/2 (2012), pp. 399–441, online at www.jstor.org/stable/i24237296, accessed 30 September 2021. 24 Cédric Laurent, ‘Narrative Painting Viewed as Major Art in Sixteenth-Century Suzhou, in On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture, ed. Shane McCausland and Yin Hwang (Hong Kong, 2014), pp. 141–76. On Qiu Ying, see Stephen Little, ed., Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA, 2020). 25 Wai-Yee Li, ‘The Collector, the Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibility’, T’oung Pao, lxxxi/4/5 (1995), pp. 269–302. 26 Freer/Sackler (now National Museum of Asian Art), ‘How to “Read” a Chinese Scroll’, www.yumpu.com, accessed 22 October 2017. 27 See https://m-minghuaji.dpm.org.cn/paint/detail?id= v04di475j6ul42yc031hf32l2fhr5yal,; and http://mongo lschinaandthesilkroad.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/morenews-and-photos-map-of-silk-road.html, accessed 23 August 2021. 28 ‘“Silk Road Landscape Map” Donated to the Palace Museum’, China Daily, 30 November 2017, www.chinadaily.com. 29 See, for example, Pang Huiping, ‘Competition and Confiscation: Reconstructing the Siyin Seal Networks in Late-Ming China’, Artibus Asiae, lxxv/2 (2015), pp. 221–67; Pang Huiping, ‘Stolen Art and Lost Inscriber’. 30 Yutong Li, ‘Bridging the Dichotomy: The Synthesis of Literati and Popular Culture in Late Ming Illustrations of the Story of the Western Wing’, ma diss., soas University of London, 2017; Hsu Wen-Chin, ‘You qing zhi huan – Ming kanben Xixiang ji banhua chatu tanjiu’ (From Sentiments to Metaphysics – Research upon Ming Print Books of The Story of the Western Wing), Yishu xue yanjiu, no. 6 (2010), pp. 63–159. See also Yao Dajuan, ‘The Pleasure of Reading Drama: Illustrations to the Hongzhi Edition of the Story of the Western Wing’, in The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the Western Wing, ed. Shifu Wang, Stephen H. West and W. L. Idema (Berkeley, ca, 1991). 31 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/228792.html, accessed 25 July 2021. The painting may be based on an essay about this woman by Wu Wei’s contemporary Xu Lin (1462–1538). 32 See https://minghuaji.dpm.org.cn/paint/detail?id=5d1be8 edd3794f2a8c6b6c6d968a33d2, accessed 3 October 2021. 33 Wang Ching-ling, ‘“Na shengmao” zhi mishijie – youguan Zhongguo yu Posi huihua jiaoliu de yige

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44 See Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica) (1590; reprint, Beijing, 1988), vol. i, juan 3, tujuan zhong, p. 92. 45 See Chin-chi Yang, ‘Canon Formation: The Painting of Xu Wei and Daixieyi Painting Lineage’, PhD thesis, soas University of London, 2020. 46 See Yang, ‘Canon Formation’. 47 See McCausland and Ling, Telling Images of China, no. 33 and McCausland, ‘Exemplary Complicity’. 48 See https://www.dia.org/art/collection/object/viewkeyin-pavilion-paradise-baojie-mountain-64509, accessed 22 November 2020. 49 See https://honolulumuseum.org/collections/39171, accessed 25 July 2021; Yu-ho Tseng, ‘“The Seven Junipers” of Wên Chêng-Ming’, Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, viii (1954), pp. 22–30. 50 One of the first celebrated depictions in painting of a scholar with his coterie of ‘female disciples’ is the handscroll by You Shao and Wang Gong (active 1796–1820), The Female Disciples of Master Suiyuan, dated 1796, illustrating the teaching of Yuan Mei (1716–1798) in Nanjing; see McCausland and Ling, Telling Images of China, no. 34, and www.shanghaimuseum.net/mu/ frontend/pg/m/article/id/ci00004723, accessed 4 January 2023. 51 For the latter see Peter C. Sturman and Susan S. Tai, eds, The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China, exh. cat., Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Asia Society, New York (Santa Barbara, ca, 2012), p. 162. 52 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/228759.html, accessed 12 November 2020. 53 Jonathan Hay, ‘Art of the Ming/Art of the Qing’, Storia universale dell’arte: La Cina, ed. Michèle Pirazzoli t’Serstevens, 2 vols (Turin, 1995); see www.academia. edu. A recent exhibition at the Palace Museum, Beijing, under ‘Ming’, lists seven women artists who painted handscrolls – see https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/ English/E/E9/index.htm, accessed 23 August 2021 – but they are not featured in the online database: see www. dpm.org.cn/collection/paints.html, accessed 23 August 2021. For a popular history, see https://kknews.cc/ culture/plpyza2.html, accessed 26 June 2021. Attention to the presence of women in Ming art is becoming more normal in monographic studies, although this is not without critique; see, for example, J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle, wa, 2012), chap. 4, and the review by Monica Merlin, East Asian Publishing and Society, no. 4 (2014), pp. 192–3. 54 See https://en.dpm.org.cn/www_oldweb/English/E/ E9/19–01.htm, accessed 4 June 2021; cf. Hui-shu Lee,

‘Voices from the Crimson Clouds Library: Reading Liu Rushi’s (1618–1664) Misty Willows by Moonlit Dike’, Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, ii/1 (2015), pp. 173–206. 55 For example, Mi Wanzhong’s Shao Garden; see Philip K. Hu, ‘The Shao Garden of Mi Wanzhong (1570–1628): Revisiting a Late Ming Landscape through Visual and Literary Sources’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designated Landscapes, xix/3–4 (2010), pp. 314–42, doi.org/10.1080/14601176.1999.10435581. 56 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/233715.html, accessed 28 July 2021. 57 Zhou Jiazhou, Zhuanghuang zhi (Treatise on Mounting); ‘Chinese Text Project’, https://ctext.org/ wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=98450 (‘Handscrolls’: line 51ff.; ‘Antique records’: line 81ff.), accessed 22 November 2020; on Zhou Jiazhou see Qin Zhen, ‘Zhou Jiangzuo shiji’, Shilin, no. 5 (2012), pp. 71–4. For a Ni Zan painting with this title, see www.dpm.org.cn/collection/ paint/234605.html, accessed 22 November 2020. 58 In a popular anecdote, noted above, Sun Yang’s son, using the illustrated Classic, took a toad to be a fine horse ‘but for the hooves’, much to his father’s amusement. This was the tale behind a popular aphorism of the period, ‘to seek a fine steed using its picture’ (antu suo ji 按圖索驥), for which see Yang Shen, Yilin fashan (Lumbering in the Forest of Arts), ‘Xiangma jing’ (Classic of Judging Horses); ‘Chinese Text Project’, https://ctext.org/library.pl?if=gb&file=104984&page=93, 22 November 2020. 59 Including at court. See Richard Vinograd, ‘Some Landscapes Related to the Blue and Green Manner from the Early Yüan Period’, Artibus Asiae, xli/2–3 (1979), pp. 101–31, regarding forgeries being substituted under empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–705) and for a case of outsourcing of remounting to Wang Zhi in 1301 (Wang Shidian and Shang Qixi, Mishu jian zhi [11 juan; 1342 edition], juan 3, p. 18). 60 See www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/artwork/the-sense-of-sight/494fd4d5–16d2–4857–811be0b2a0eb7fc7, accessed 23 August 2021; and Timon Screech, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625 (London, 2020). 61 Nicholas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. i: 635–1800 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2001), p. 810. An enduring problem around the arrogation of standards of excellence in painting of the Italian Renaissance is already found in Ricci’s comment that ‘the Chinese . . . are very primitive in the use of these latter arts [of casting images . . .] They know nothing of the art of painting in oil or of the use of perspective in their pictures, with the result that their productions are likely to resemble the dead rather than the living’;

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see L. J. Gallagher, trans., The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610 (New York, 1953), p. 22. 62 Chiu Shih-hua et al., eds, Fineries of Forgery: ‘Suzhou Fakes’ and Their Influence in the 16th to 18th Century, exh. cat., National Palace Museum, Taipei (2018), nos 31–33. 63 See https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/immortals-playing-weiqi-on-penglai-artist-formerly-attributedto-leng-qian/nwExaLdMpl69cQ?ms=%7B”x”%3A0.52C”y ”%3A0.5%2C”z”%3A9.068512808353658%2C”size”%3A% 7B”width”%3A1.4495031969280008%2C”height”%3A1.23 74999999999987%7D%7D, accessed 23 August 2021. 64 It is not clear if the order is the artist’s or the mounter’s. On the scroll see Kojima Naoko et al., Taketori monogatari emaki (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Picture-Scrolls), series Yomigaeru emaki ehon 2, Chiesutā Bītī Raiburari shozō (Tokyo, 2008); and https:// viewer.cbl.ie/viewer/image/J_1125_2/7/log_0000, accessed 21 May 2021. 65 J. S. Edgren, ‘Late-Ming Erotic Book Illustrations and the Origins of Ukiyo-e Prints’, Arts Asiatiques, lxvi (2011), pp. 117–34. 66 Gu Bing, Lidai minghua dacheng (reprint, Beijing, 1988), p. 107. For the genealogy of these manuals in the tradition of copying old-master paintings since the eleventh century, see J. P. Park, Art by the Book, chap. 1. 67 Roderick Whitfield, ‘Chinese Rare Books in the P. D. F.’, unpublished catalogue (London, 1986), no. 7, online at https://digital.soas.ac.uk/loaa000011/00001/1x. 68 See https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/view-scroll/190, accessed 4 June 2019. On Gu Bing, see also Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London, 1997), p. 143: ‘many of his subjects verge on the fantastical’. 69 See https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O134710/feedinghorses-painting, accessed 9 August 2021. 70 See https://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page. aspx?dep=P&PaintingId=3439, accessed 9 August 2021. To underscore the similarity of approach, see also Cangyun tu of 1626 and the Buddha handscroll of 1631; see Shanghai Museum, ed., Nan Chen Bei Cui: Gugong Bowuyuan Shanghai Bowuguan cang Chen Hongshou Cui Zizhong shuhua ji (Chen of the South, Cui of the North: Paintings and Calligraphies of Chen Hongshou and Cui Zizhong from the Palace Museum and the Shanghai Museum), exh. cat., Palace Museum, Beijing, and Shanghai Museum (Shanghai, 2008). 71 For a study, see Jennifer Purtle, ‘Scopic Frames: Devices for Seeing China c. 1640’, Art History, xxxiii/1 (February 2010), pp. 54–73. 72 See McCausland, ‘Intermediary Moments: Framing and Scrolling Devices across Painting, Print and Film in Chinese Visual Narratives’, in Bild. Erzählung. Kontext. Visuelle Narration in Kulturen und Gesellschaften der Alten

Welt (Image. Narrative. Context. Visual Narration in Cultures and Societies of the Old World), Freiburger Studien zur Archäologie & visuellen Kultur series (Heidelberg, 2019).

5 Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll 1 ‘On Decoloniality’, a series from Duke University Press, takes as its goal ‘to interconnect perspectives, expressions, thought, struggles, processes, and practices of decoloniality that are emerging in and from different corners of the globe’ in the wake of colonialism; Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, On Decoloniality (Durham, nc, 2018), p. 1. 2 See, for example, Jeremiah Jenne, ‘Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Throwing Shade at the New Qing History’, 23 April 2015, www.jeremiahjenne.com, 8 April 2018. 3 A travelling exhibition in preparation, ‘A New Perspective’, co-ordinated by Jay Levenson and others, will compare Chinese and Italian painting traditions. As part of this project, neuroscientists of visuality plan to track and compare the eye movements of East Asian and European visitors before Chinese and Italian paintings displayed in China and Italy to draw conclusions about the roles of Chinese and Baroque perspectival systems. 4 Philip Haas and David Hockney, A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (46 mins) (United States, 1998). 5 Jonathan Hay, ‘Art of the Ming/Art of the Qing’, Storia universale dell’arte: La Cina, ed. Michèle Pirazzoli t’Serstevens, 2 vols (Turin, 1995); see www.academia.edu. 6 An interesting example of the genre is the Yangzhou painter Luo Pin’s (1733–1799) Climbing Mount Tai 登泰圖 (Deng Tai tu) scroll, measuring 52.2 × 307.8 centimetres, in Guangdong Museum. 7 See http://hotgates.stanford.edu/Eyes/library/kircher. pdf, p. 102, illustrations on pp. 106–7, accessed 17 March 2018. 8 James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, ca, 2010), fig. 5.19. 9 See http://painting.npm.gov.tw/Painting_Page.aspx? dep=P&PaintingId=43, accessed 22 October 2017. 10 A process documented by Wai-Yee Li, ‘The Collector, the Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibility’, T’oung Pao, second series, lxxxi/4 and 5 (1995), pp. 269–302. 11 Sun Chengze, Gengzi xiaoxia ji, juan 1; see https://ctext. org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=670320 (line 49), accessed 3 March 2019. 12 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/embroider/229605. html, and www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/246358. html, accessed 4 April 2019.

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References

13 See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O16105/themustard-seed-garden-manual-print-wang-gai, accessed 4 April 2019. 14 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/233796.html, accessed 4 April 2019. 15 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/233722.html, accessed 4 April 2019. 16 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44620, accessed 21 August 2021. 17 For a study on the artist, see Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, ‘Yu Zhiding and the Envisioning of the Early Qing World’, PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018. 18 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paints.html (search: Qing), accessed 4 April 2019. 19 Scheier-Dolberg, ‘Yu Zhiding’, p. 94. 20 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/49156, accessed 8 November 2020. 21 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, nj, 1998), pp. 183–9. For a four-panel screen (218.2 × 273.2 centimetres) attributed to Matteo Ricci, see www. lnmuseum.com.cn/shengbowenenglishi/huxing/show. asp?id=6700, accessed 21 May 2021. 22 For example, Fei Danxu, Encountering (1839), see collections.artsmia.org/art/120424/encounteringfei-danxu, accessed 22 May 2021; and Ren Xiong’s long (35.8 × 705.4 centimetres) handscroll Thatched Cottage of Fan Lake (1855), for which see Britta Erickson, ‘Zhou Xian’s Fabulous Construct The Thatched Cottage of Fan Lake’, in Phoebus 8: Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed. Ju-hsi Chou (Tempe, az, 1998), pp. 67–93. 23 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231444.html, accessed 22 May 2021. 24 See Bada Shanren, Fish and Birds (1693), 25.2 × 105.8 centimetres, in the Shanghai Museum. 25 Yuan Liezhou, ed., Bada Shanren shuhua ji (Selected Calligraphies and Paintings of Bada Shanren) (Beijing, 1983), vol. i, nos 116–20 (called Fish and Crows, dated jisi chongyang [1689], Shanghai Museum, 23.2 × 572.2 centimetres). 26 Yuan Liezhou, ed., Bada Shanren shuhua ji, vol. i, nos 123–37 (Tianjin Art Museum, 47 × 1292.5 centimetres); Yuan Liezhou, ed., Bada Shanren shuhua ji, vol. i, nos 104–15 (Shanghai Museum, 41 × 1310.8 centimetres). 27 See www.criticalcommons.org/Members/andydancer/ clips/seven-intellectuals-in-a-bamboo-forest-2/view, accessed 4 June 2019. 28 Yongle dadian (probably a 1562–67 copy of the 1403–22 original), fascicle containing juan 11,302–3; see Roderick Whitfield, ‘Chinese Rare Books in the P. D. F.’, unpublished catalogue (London, 1986), no. 11, https://digital.soas.ac.uk/loaa000011/00001/1x.

See www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_pdf-3, accessed 30 September 2021. 29 Shane McCausland, ‘The Emperor’s Old Toys: Rethinking the Yongzheng (1723–35) Scroll of Antiquities in the Percival David Foundation’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramics Society, no. 66 (2001–2), pp. 65–75. A doctoral project on these scrolls by Kexin Ma is under way at soas University of London. 30 For an example of the use of the scrolls to confirm the appearance and position of architectural features, see Lianming Wang, ‘How Water Became Landscape: Fountains and Hydraulic Devices in Early Modern China’, in Memorial Landscape: World Images East and West, ed. Uwe Fleckner, Yih-Fen Hua and Shai-Shu Tzeng (Mnemosyne 6. Schriften des Internationalen Warburg-Kollegs) (Berlin, 2020), pp. 193–215, esp. p. 195. 31 Wang Yuanqi, Leng Mei et al., Illustrations of the Grand Birthday Celebration of the Kangxi Emperor (Beijing, 1715–17), woodblock-printed book mounted as handscroll, ink on paper, c. 33 × c. 2499 centimetres. A copy is in the Shanghai Museum. 32 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/234158.html, accessed 5 June 2019. 33 See asia.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/F1931–4_ Documentation.pdf, accessed 8 November 2020. 34 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/231643.html, accessed 5 June 2019. 35 Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu, hi, 2003), p. 63. 36 See theme.npm.edu.tw/exh108/npm_anime/One HundredHorses/en/index.html, accessed 28 May 2021. 37 Shane McCausland and Matthew P. McKelway, with Lichiang Lin, Chinese Romance from a Japanese Brush: Kano Sansetsu’s Chōgonka Scrolls in the Chester Beatty Library (London, 2009). 38 George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven, ct, and London, 1962), p. 128. 39 Robert Barker, Repertory of Arts and Manufactures (London, 1796) (British Library: 258.d.13–27), p. 165; see Markman Ellis, ‘The Spectacle of the Panorama’: ‘Picturing Places’, www.bl.uk, accessed 10 November 2020. 40 Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London, 2002). 41 Related designs for social projects were also in vogue, such as Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) panopticon prison commissioned of and drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791, but never built. 42 David Carrier, following Gombrich, has argued that such a thing is not possible; ‘Meditations on a Scroll, or the Roots of Chinese Artistic Form’, Word and Image, xviii

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(2002), pp. 45–52, online at doi.org/10.1080/02666286.20 02.10404976. 43 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40393, accessed 14 November 2020. 44 Eugene Y. Wang, ‘The Elegiac Cicada: Problems of Historical Interpretation of Yuan Painting’, Ars Orientalis, xxxvii (2009), pp. 176–94; Roderick Whitfield, Fascination of Nature: Plants and Insects in Chinese Painting (Seoul, 1993), p. 24. 45 See www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1998– 1112-0-1-ch, accessed 3 October 2021. 46 For the quote and its context, see Louise Tythacott, ‘The Yuanmingyuan and Its Objects’, in China’s Summer Palace, ed. Louise Tythacott (New York, 2017), p. 10. 47 For example, Illustrations of the Antique Collection of Kezhai (1892), a pair of scrolls. Reproduced in Shanghai: Art of the City, see archive.org/details/ shanghaishanghai00shan/page/74, accessed 31 May 2019. For Zheng Wuchang’s Tasting Tea (Pincha tu), see Zheng Wuchang: Zhongguo jindai huihua congkan, ed. Shi Yunwen (Taipei, 2008), no. 5. 48 Wu writes 圖 tu instead of 國 guo in Wen Xinguo’s name on the first occasion (Xinguo is correctly written the second time), but he left this uncorrected, having presumably already continued writing. In the second line he miswrote 灑 li but was able to add the conventional two dots beside the character to indicate the error to the reader and then proceed to write the correct character 湘 xiang. 49 Michele Matteini, ‘The Story of a Stone: Mi Fu’s InkGrinding Stone and Its Eighteenth-Century Replications’, Arts Asiatiques, vxxii (2017), pp. 81–96, online at doi. org/10.3406/arasi.2017.1964. 50 Éric Lefebvre, ‘L’“Image des antiquités accumulées” de Ruan Yuan. La représentation d’une collection privée en Chine à l’époque pré-moderne’, Arts Asiatiques, lxiii (2008), pp. 61–72, online at doi.org.10.3406/ arasi.2008.1660. 51 For the painting (Zhejiang Provincial Museum), see Wang Yifeng, Guzhuan huagong: Liuzhou yu 19 shiji de xueshu he yishu (Old Bricks and Flower Display: Liuzhou in 19th-Century Scholarship and Art) (Hangzhou, 2018), www.zhejiangmuseum.com/Research/SpecialThesis/ 18401zhebomenhulunwenlunzhu, accessed 21 August 2021. 52 John Thomson, Through China with a Camera, second edition (London, 1899), pp. 35–6: 21 × 14 centimetres. 53 See Angela Cheung, ‘China as Image, Object and Opportunity: A Critical Reassessment of John Thomson’s Photography of China’, PhD thesis, soas University of London, 2021, pp. 229ff. 54 For Beato’s panorama of North Taku Fort following its capture in August 1860 see also www.hpcbristol.net/

visual/ga01–044, accessed 21 August 2021. See also David Harris, Of Battle and Beauty – Felice Beato’s Photographs of China, exh. cat., Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, ca, 1999). The physical and formal qualities of the print in relation to its content are highlighted by Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs (New York, 1998). 55 For Beato’s Panorama of Beijing (1860), 23 × 173 centimetres, see https://loewentheilcollection.com/ artist_t/felice-beato, accessed 9 November 2020. The illustration is a detail from the panorama in the Wellcome Collection, London (reference 569915i), wellcomecollection.org/works/skjyc2cn/items, accessed 24 July 2022 and permalink, https://wellcomecollection. org/works/skjyc2cn. 56 See www.nfm.go.kr/common/data/home/relic/ detailPopup.do?seq=ps0100200100107899600000, accessed 23 August 2021. My thanks to Charlotte Horlyck for this reference. 57 See smartcollection.uchicago.edu/search/1983.9, accessed 4 June 2019, and scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/ orchids, accessed 4 June 2019. See also Harrie A. Vanderstappen, Richard A. Born and Sue Taylor, eds, Ritual and Reverence: Chinese Art at the University of Chicago (Chicago, il, 1989), no. 121. 58 See 66.111.6.68/objects/5281/orchids;jsessionid=B477558C 3ecb5bdb100ab747D01867de?ctx=3eb0bc7d-4508–460fb8f7–252a6ccafb54&idx=0, accessed 14 September 2021. 59 The novelty and conventions of a nineteenth-century genre of picture-scrolls dubbed ‘biography landscape’ are being investigated in a doctoral project at soas University of London by Jennifer Chih-chieh Chang. 60 Ju-hsi Chou with Anita Chung, Silent Poetry: Chinese Paintings from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, oh, and New Haven, ct, 2015), pp. 336–41; see www.clevelandart.org/art. 61 For Wu Zhiying, see Ying Hu, ‘Writing Qiu Jin’s Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning’, Late Imperial China, xxv/2 (December 2004), pp. 119–60, doi:10.1353/ late.2005.0005, and Ying Hu, ‘“Tossing the Brush”? Wu Zhiying (1868–1934) and the Uses of Calligraphy’, in Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China, ed. Nanxiu Qian, Grace Fong and Richard Smith (Leiden, 2008), pp. 57–85, online at doi.org/10.1163/ ej.9789004167766.i-417.18. 62 A. W. Bahr, Old Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art in China: Being Description and Illustrations of Articles Selected from an Exhibition Held in Shanghai, November, 1908 (London, 1911); see Nick Pearce, ‘Shanghai 1908: A. W. Bahr and China’s First Art Exhibition’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material

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References

Culture, xviii/1 (2011), pp. 4–25, esp. fig. 15, online at doi.org/10.1086/659382.

fast-changing 1920s canon; see Shane McCausland, ‘The Flight of the Dragon: Modernism in China and Art at the Last Emperor’s Court-in-Exile’, Archives of Asian Art, lxx/1 (spring 2020). 12 Jan Bäcklund et al., eds, What Images Do (Aarhus, 2019). 13 In Sir Reginald Johnston’s memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City (London, 1934); see McCausland, ‘The Flight of the Dragon’. 14 See www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-pu-ru-1896– 1963–6147021, accessed 21 August 2021. 15 See www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/museecernuschi/oeuvres/l-histoire-du-the, accessed 9 June 2021. 16 Yoskiko Ushioda with Jessica Baldwin, ‘The Chōgonka Scrolls: Their Rediscovery and Conservation’, in Shane McCausland and Matthew P. McKelway, Chinese Romance from a Japanese Brush: Kano Sansetsu’s Chōgonka scrolls in the Chester Beatty Library (London, 2009), p. 166. 17 Okakura, letter to Isabella Gardner, 13 May 1908; ‘Gardner Museum’, www.gardnermuseum.org/ experience/collection/30100, accessed 17 October 2020. 18 For example, Laurence Binyon, The George Eumorfopoulos Collections: Catalogue of Chinese, Corean and Siamese Paintings (London, 1928). 19 Craig Clunas, ‘The Admonitions Scroll in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Discussant’s Remarks’, in Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, ed. Shane McCausland (London, 2003), pp. 295–8. 20 Shane McCausland, ‘Nihonga Meets Gu Kaizhi: A Japanese Copy of a Chinese Painting in the British Museum’, Art Bulletin, lxxxvii/4 (December 2005), pp. 688–713, online at doi.10.1080/00043079.2005. 10786266. 21 See, for example, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, mn, 2015); Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs (Baltimore, md, 1998), an aim of which was ‘not to explore photographic content’; and Laurie Taylor, The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era: Form, Content, Consequence (New York, 2021). 22 See leaves 7, 9 and 14 of the album Twenty-Four Views of Shimen, some of the compositions of which, including leaf 9, were adapted from types, such as the ‘level vista viewed from a tower’ (pingtai chonglou shi), in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting; see Lv Xiao, ‘Hua wu zi hua: Qi Baishi shanshuihua de chuang zuo licheng ji tedian’, in Beijing Art Academy, ed., Xiongzhong shanshu qi tianxia: Qi Baishi shanshuihua jingpin ji (Nanning, 2018), pp. 011, 025, 080, 082 and 097. 23 For a sample of the oeuvre, see www.dpm.org.cn/ collection/paints.html (search 作者：傅抱石), accessed 1 November 2020.

6 Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll 1 See Hanmo Juzhen: Zhongguo Riben Meiguo Cang Zhongguo Gudai Shuhua Yishu (Treasures in the Spotlight: Art of Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in Chinese, Japanese and American Collections), ed. Shanghai Museum, exh. cat., Shanghai Museum (Shanghai, 2012), no. 14. 2 See, for example, Yusen Yu, ‘From the Picture Gallery of China: A Glimpse into the Persianate Collecting of Chinese Religious Painting in the Late 14th to 15th Centuries’, Aziatische Kunst: Uitgave van de Vereniging van Vrienden der Aziatische Kunst, xlvii/2 (2017), pp. 13–20. 3 See, for example, Lisa Claypool, ‘Ways of Seeing the Nation: Chinese Painting in the National Essence Journal (1905–1911) and Exhibition Culture’, positions, xviiii/1 (2011), pp. 55–82, online at doi. org/10.1215/10679847–2010–024. 4 See www.mbaa.besancon.fr/wp-content/uploads/ 2013/01/983–19–1.jpg, accessed 4 June 2021. 5 See, respectively, https://collections.lacma.org/ node/228406, accessed 4 June 2021, and www.tate.org. uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/amrita-sher-gil/ amrita-sher-gil-room-1-early-years-paris, accessed 4 June 2021. 6 Meizhan tekan (The National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1929) (2 vols; Shanghai, 1929), vol. i: Oil Paintings, n.p. 7 For example, Cao Yue (active late seventeenth century), Landscape after Juran, a handscroll of 1673 (lacma, l. 2012.32.113), has a 1938 title-piece and a later colophon by Yi Da’an (1874–1941) in which he calls the painting a ‘horizontal picture’ (hengfu) that he had remounted as a ‘small handscroll’ (xiaojuan); Stephen Little, ed., 17th-Century Chinese Paintings, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, 2016), no. 57. 8 Li Chong, Wanyan Jingxian ji qi shuhua shoucang (Wanyan Jingxian and His Collection of Calligraphy and Painting) (Tianjin, 2015); see also Franklin D. Murphy and Thomas Lawton, A Time of Transition: Two Collectors of Chinese Art (Kansas City, KS, 1991). 9 See p. 196, n. 9. 10 Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, trans. W.J.F. Jenner, From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (Beijing, 1964; 2nd edn, 1979), pp. 128–9. 11 Pu Yi took, for example, the Winter Vegetables for the Recluse’s Kitchen scroll by Chen Shu (1612–1682), a painter who was no more than a third-tier artist in the dynastic critical hierarchy but whose painting mode was associated with the up-and-coming xieyi lineage in the

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38 Li and Wan, Zhongguo xiandai huihua shi, give 1945; see vol. ii, fig. 7.1. See also Jonathan Chaves, Chinese Painter as Poet, exh. cat., China Institute Gallery (New York, 2000), no. 29. 39 Ding Cong, Zhongguo manhua shuxi: Ding Cong juan (Shijiazhuang, 1994), p. 7. 40 For colour illustrations and further discussion of both these wartime cartoons by Ding Cong, see https://k.sina. com.cn/article_7505202169_1bf584bf902000yaj7.html, and https://freewechat.com/a/MjM5odiwndiwma==/ 402241772/3, accessed 6 January 2023. 41 Ding Lanxiang, ‘Chong fang “Shancun yuejin tu”: Cezhan shijian zhong de tianye kaocha yu tuxiang zhi yanjiu’ (Revisiting The Great Leap Forward in Mountain Villages: Fieldwork Investigation and Iconographic Research in Curatorial Practice), Jinxiandai meishushi yanjiu, pp. 61–8. 42 For illustrations of five ‘long scrolls’ from this group, see www.namoc.org/zsjs/zlzx/201512/t20151231_295003_ mobile.htm, accessed 4 June 2021. 43 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42036, accessed 21 August 2021. 44 Jason Steuber, ‘The Exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House, London, 1935–36’, Burlington Magazine, cxlviii/1241 (2006), pp. 528–36, http://staging. burlington.org.uk; Chelsea Schlievert and Jason Steuber, ‘Collecting Asian Art, Defining Gender Roles: World War ii, Women Curators and the Politics of Asian Art Collections in the United States’, Journal of the History of Collecting, xx/2 (November 2008), pp. 291–303, online at doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhn001. 45 See www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Beyond_ Representation_Chinese_Painting_and_Calligraphy_ Eighth_Fourteenth_Century, accessed 14 April 2018. 46 For example, the Rupert Bear comic strip annuals, published by the Daily Express newspaper in the uk from 1936. 47 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1971). 48 Isaac Bashevis Singer, with illustrations by Julian Jusim, Der Kaiser von China, der alles auf den Kopf stellte (Munich, 1993); first u.s. edition: Isaac Bashevis Singer with illustrations by Julian Jusim, trans. Elizabeth Shub, The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996). 49 Julian Jusim, personal communication (email, 8 November 2020). 50 See www.julianjusim.de/galerie/index02.php, accessed 1 November 2020. 51 See http://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/39153/ painting-after-zha-shibiao?ctx=69a3e43a-d48c-4656– a795–27ac1260d94d&idx=15, accessed 20 November 2020. Chang was the co-author, with her husband,

24 See Wen C. Fong, ‘Art and History: Zhang Daqian, In and Out of the Twentieth Century’, Art as History: Calligraphy and Painting as One (Princeton, nj, 2015), pp. 388–90. 25 A few handscrolls feature rivers or else lotuses: for example, a ‘small scroll’ from 1978, entitled Lotus, painted after his return to Taiwan from California, for Khoan and Michael Sullivan. See www.jameelcentre. ashmolean.org/collection/8/per_page/25/offset/0/ sort_by/date/object/23111, accessed 31 October 2020. 26 See Ge Su-ming, ed., Wanli jiangshan ping ru meng: Liang’an Zhang Daqian cishi sanshi zhounian jinianzhan (Dreaming of Boundless Homeland: A Cross-Strait Memorial Exhibition for the 30th Anniversary of Chang Dai-chien’s Passing), exh. cat., National Museum of History, Taipei (Taipei, 2014), pp. 174–5. 27 See http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/object/ li2022.114, accessed 27 September 2020. 28 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=evkx16T1tsg, accessed 19 September 2020; Katya Kazakina, ‘Chinese Artist $507 Million Ousts Picasso as Top Auction Earner’, Bloomberg, 12 January 2012, www.bloomberg.com. 29 Frank Vigneron, ‘Period Style as “Life Cycle” in Euro-American and Chinese Painting History’, Visual Anthropology, xxviii/3 (2015), pp. 208–26. 30 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1999), p. 164 (ref. f6,2). 31 Werner Schweibenz, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, Museum International, lxx/1–2 (2018), pp. 8–21. 32 Li Yishi, Changhenge huayi (Shanghai, 1935); for the originals, see www.namoc.org/xwzx/zt/lhh/chghy, accessed 11 April 2018. 33 McCausland and McKelway, Chinese Romance from a Japanese Brush. 34 For an illustration see https://artsandculture.google.com/ asset/the-foolish-old-man-moves-a-mountain-xu-beih ong/VwF2eurldtunww?hl=en, accessed 26 July 2022. 35 See www.namoc.org/en/collections/201306/ t20130619_253960.htm, accessed 1 November 2020. 36 Wang Wei, ed., Liangyang er hua, fengshen duyun: Guan Liang xiansheng 115 zhounian danchen tezhan (Special Exhibition on the 115th Anniversary of the Birth of Mr Guan Liang) (Shanghai, 2015), esp. p. 279. 37 A series of these works on human misery featured in the 2007 exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, ‘A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: The Art of Lin Fengmian’, reviewed by Sandy Ng, caa Reviews, online at doi.10.3202/caa.reviews.2007.95. See also Li Zhujin and Wan Qingli, Zhongguo xiandai huihua shi, Wan Qing zhi bu (History of Modern Chinese Painting, Late Qing Part) (Taipei, 2003), figs 5.1, 5.9 and cf. 6.2.

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References

of Ch’ung-ho Chang and Hans H. Frankel, Two Chinese Treatises on Calligraphy: Treatise on Calligraphy (Shu pu) [by] Sun Qianli; Sequel to the ‘Treatise on Calligraphy’ (Xu Shu pu) [by] Jiang Kui (New Haven, ct, and London, 1995). 52 See www.lycfoundation.org/portfolio-item/foldingscrolls, accessed 21 August 2021.

13 Scrolls given to the Cultural Relics Bureau (Wenwuju) include Wang Juzheng’s (active eleventh century) Spinning Wheel (Fangche tu) (see https://en.dpm.org. cn/collections/collections/2014-03-31/9.html, accessed 21 August 2021) and Wang Yuan’s (active fourteenth century) Ink Peony (Mo mudan tu); others were sold, including the Dong Yuan (934–965) Xiao Xiang attribution and The Night Revels of Han Xizai attributed to Gu Hongzhong (937–975). 14 See ‘Large Gift of Chinese Art Goes to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’, www.nytimes.com, 1 December 2018. 15 See Angelica Villa, ‘Rare Chinese Scroll Makes $42 M. After 75-Minute Bidding War at Auction, Acquired by Shanghai’s Long Museum’, www.artmarketmonitor.com, 8 October 2020. 16 East Asian Painting Conservation Studio, Department of Conservation and Scientific Research, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (now National Museum of Asian Art), Smithsonian Institution, ʻMylar Preservation Rollers for Storing East Asian Scrollsʼ, http://stashc.com/the-publication/supports/rigidsupports/3158–2, accessed 14 April 2018. 17 A major issue in photography; see, for example, Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs, Mounts, and the Tactile Archive’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2014), online at doi.org/10.16995/ ntn.716. 18 Caroline van Eck, Miguel John Versluys and Pieter ter Keurs, ‘The Biography of Cultures: Style, Objects and Agency: Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Approach’, Cahiers de l’École du Louvre, no. 7 (October 2015), pp. 2–22, quote on p. 6, online at doi.org/10.4000/ cel.275. 19 See Stephen Little, ed., 17th-Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, ca, 2016), no. 17, p. 242 (Tsao Family Collection, L.2012.32.21). See no. 59 and 68 for colophons by Xie Zhiliu and Yang Renkai. 20 See, for example, Tseng Yu-ho, ‘Hsüeh Wu and Her Orchids in the Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts’, Arts Asiatiques, ii/3 (1955), pp. 197–208, www.jstor. org/stable/43483978; Tseng Yuho, ‘Women Painters of the Ming Dynasty’, Artibus Asiae, liii/1 and 2 (1993), pp. 249–61, online at doi.10.2307/3250517. For an example of Tseng’s large-scale calligraphy, see www. christies.com/en/lot/lot-6276855, accessed 26 June 2021. 21 For example, Court Lady in Tang Style of c. 1961, in ink on silk (Honolulu Museum of Art, 5691.1). 22 See ‘Remembering the Multi-Talented Dr Tseng Yuho’, https://honolulumuseum.org, September 2017. 23 De-Nin D. Lee, ‘More than Mere Diversion: Painting and Tihuashi in the Life of Luo Qilan’, Archives of

7 The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World 1 Ju-hsi Chou with Anita Chung, Silent Poetry: Chinese Paintings from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, oh, and New Haven, ct, 2015). 2 See www.shenwei.art/scroll, accessed 25 September 2020. 3 Frank Vigneron, ‘“Conservative Nativist” Chinese Art in Hong Kong and Mainland China’, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, i/1 (March 2014), pp. 25–43, online at doi.org/10.1386/jcca.1.1.25_1. 4 On the display and removal after an outcry of a painting featuring Xi Jinping’s father at the National Art Museum of China, see Lucy Hornby, ‘Xi versus Deng, the Family Feud over China’s Reforms’, Financial Times (15 November 2018). 5 Tang Hoi-chiu, ‘Preface’, in The Pride of China: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy of the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties from the Palace Museum, exh. cat., Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong, 2007), pp. 8, 12. 6 Ibid., p. 16. 7 For example, Vimalakirti Preaching Buddhist Doctrine is given as by Li Gonglin (cat. no. 12); cf. its listing as a Song work ‘attributed to Li Gonglin’ on thewebsite; see https://en.dpm.org.cn/collections/collections/2020– 02–27/5827.html, accessed 2 October 2020. 8 See www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/229381.html, accessed 8 July 2019. 9 James Macdonald, ‘A Turn of the Tides: Art Is Flowing Back to China as the Chinese Market Grows’, Art Newspaper, 1 February 2005, www.theartnewspaper.com. 10 Chris Gosden, ‘What Do Objects Want?’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, xii/3 (September 2005), pp. 193–211, www.jstor.org/stable/20177516, accessed 30 September 2021. 11 See the related study by Wen C. Fong and James C. Y. Watt, Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1996). 12 Chen Rentao, et al., Gugong yi shi shuhua mu jiaozhu (Notes on Paintings and Calligraphy Lost from the Forbidden City) (Hong Kong, 1956).

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Asian Art, lxvii/1 (2017), pp. 61–82, online at doi. org/10.1215/00666637–3788645. 24 See www.clevelandart.org/art/2012.99, accessed 9 October 2020. 25 Illustrated http://searchcollection.asianart.org/view/ objects/asitem/objecttype@Painting/773;jsessionid= 90D494fd6B8ffe15cf80072B9fe48dcb?t:state:flow =bd0c0be8–723c-4e3c-a82f-63adf76cd461 and https:// artsandculture.google.com/asset/river-liu-xiaodongchinese-born-1963/DwEyrg8z3LktsQ?hl=en, accessed 26 July 2022. 26 See Wu Hung, ‘Internalizing Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art’, Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, ed. Wu Hung, exh. cat, Smart Museum of Art (Chicago, IL, 2008), pp. 9–32, fig. 12. 27 See https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/fresh-ink#widget-2, accessed 8 June 2021. 28 See www.mfa.org/media/video/9121 and https://eaa.fas. harvard.edu/li-huayi, accessed 8 June 2021. 29 See https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/yu-hong, accessed 8 June 2021. 30 See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/34114/number10–1949?ctx=e64b02f2–fba5–443a-bf58822179ed9dae& idx=5, accessed 21 August 2021. 31 See https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/arnold-chang, accessed 8 June 2021. 32 Wen C. Fong, Between Two Cultures: Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2001), p. 412. 33 Liu Dan, quoted in Jerome Silbergeld, Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art (Princeton, nj, 2009), p. 245. 34 Alexandra Munroe, ‘Why Ink? The Art of Liu Dan’, Alternative Visions: Liu Dan and Hiromitsu Morimoto, exh. cat., Gallery at Takashimaya (New York and Tokyo, 1993), p. 8, https://studylib.net/doc/10172389/ why-ink%3F-the-art-of-liu-dan-by-alexandra-munroe, accessed 1 October 2021; Maxwell K. Hearn, ‘Past as Present in Contemporary Chinese Art: New Landscapes’, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2013), p. 74; Jane DeBevoise and Liu Dan, ‘Conversation with Liu Dan’, see www.aaa-a.org/programs/conversationwith-liu-dan, accessed 1 October 2021. I am grateful to Alina Sinelnyk for these references (email, 11 February 2021). 35 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78290, accessed 4 June 2021. 36 See https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/liu-dan, accessed 8 June 2021. One of the few known comparable artists within

China would be Jizi, the pen-name of Wang Yunshan (1941–2015). Systematically excluded from the art world in China because of his class background until late in life, and as such a kind of naive savant artist, Jizi’s aesthetic enquiry into nature took form in cosmic landscape imagery in very long handscrolls. See David Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China: Unification (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2015). 37 See www.vmfa.museum/exhibitions/exhibitions/ xu-bing-tobacco-project, accessed 21 August 2021. 38 See https://eaa.fas.harvard.edu/xu-bing, accessed 8 June 2021. 39 See, for example, Shelagh Vainker, Landscape/Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, exh. cat., Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 2013). 40 For example, The Character of Characters (2012); see http://searchcollection.asianart.org/view/objects/asitem/ search@/2?t:state:flow=b114c219–7f20–482e-90a3– b49e27a61492, accessed 26 July 2022. 41 Christie’s, ‘Chinese Contemporary Ink’, Hong Kong, 27 May 2019, lot 842. 42 See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_Qian_ Xiuan._Dwelling_in_the_Floating_Jade_Mountains._ (29,6x98,7cm)_Shanghai_Museum.jpg, accessed 5 January 2023. 43 Conversation hosted by Philip Dodd between Sean Scully and Ding Yi, see Sean Scully, Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully, 1964–2014, exh. cat., Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, and Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing (Shanghai, 2014), conversation on pp. 72–83. 44 See Holland Cotter, ‘China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge’, www.nytimes.com, 30 July 2008. 45 See www.mplus.org.hk/tc/collection/objects/cantontokyo-1–20121660, accessed 21 August 2021. 46 Li Xiaobin, ‘Yongyuan de huainian’ (Forever Cherishing Memory), in Yongyuan de siyue: jinian siyue yinghui ershi zhounian (Eternal April: Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the April Photo Society) (Beijing, 1999), pp. 18–29. 47 Shi Li, ‘The April Fifth Movement: Marking the Rise of Citizen Photojournalism in the People’s Republic of China’, Visual Communication Quarterly, xviii/2 (2019), pp. 68–84, online at doi.org/10.1080/15551393.2012.682 851; see also Martin Mulloy, ‘Resisting Amnesia: April 1976 and the Challenge to State Control of China’s Visual World’, PhD thesis, Birkbeck University of London, 2019. 48 For another panorama made by Chi Xiaoning around the same time, see Shuxia Chen, ‘The “Grey Zone”: The emergence of self-organised photography groups in post-Mao Beijing, 1977–1988’, PhD diss., Australian

272

References

National University, 2019, p. 97, fig. 2.32, and on the making of private photo albums, p. 132 ff. In the early 2020s, references in Chinese to Bai Naiyong’s ‘paintingscroll’ disappeared from the Internet. 49 See www.nmh.gov.tw/nmhcollection_77_48.html, accessed 18 November 2020. See also Shengqing Wu, Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (New York, 2020), n. 71. 50 See Lang Jingshan, Jingshan jijin zuofa (My Techniques in Composite Picture-Making) (Taipei, 1958), referenced in Wu, Photo Poetics, n. 35. 51 Shahzia Sikander, ‘Reclaiming Indo-Persian Miniature Painting. Reclaiming History: A Feminist Story’, in Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future, ed. Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (New Haven, ct, 2019), p. 127. See also www.shahziasikander.com/artworks/thescroll2?view=slider#2, accessed 11 June 2021. 52 See www.miaoxiaochun.com/Texts.asp?language= en&id=23, accessed 21 August 2021.

53 See https://uscpacificasiamuseum.files.wordpress. com/2013/09/miaoxiaochun_bhs_080425b.jpg, accessed 4 June 2021; Angela Becher, ‘Back to the Future? Chinese Artistic Tradition and Topologies of Urban Modernity’, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vi/2–3 (September 2019), pp. 285–304, online at doi. org/10.1386/jcca_00008_1. The Qingming scroll was also presented in a giant animated version as part of the exhibition in the China Pavilion in Shanghai Expo 2010. 54 Zhu Derun, Cunfuzhai ji, in Yuan shixuan chuji (skqs), juan 46, p. 27b; https://ctext.org/library. pl?if=gb&file=77258&page=56, accessed 27 June 2021: 人生盗賊岂愿為，天生衣食官迫之. 55 For example, ‘Safe Handling Practice for Chinese Handscrolls’; see above, p. 14, n. 32. 56 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnumh_OvptU and www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3zzcggLgjm, accessed 8 June 2021.

273

Further Reading

Brown, Bill, Other Things (Chicago, il, 2016) Cahill, James, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, ca, 2010) Carrier, David, ‘Meditations on a Scroll, or the Roots of Chinese Artistic Form’, Word and Image, xviii (2002), pp. 45–52, doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2002. 10404976 Chen Baozhen (Chen Pao-chen), Luoshenfu tu yu Zhongguo gudai gushihua (The Goddess of the Luo River Ode and Ancient Chinese Story Painting) (Taipei, 2011) Chen Yunru, Gongzhu de yaji: Meng Yuan huangshi yu shuhua jiancang wenhua tezhan (The Elegant Gathering of the Princess: The Culture of Appreciating and Collecting Art at the Mongol Yuan Court), exh. cat., National Palace Museum, Taipei (2016) Chiu Shih-hua et al., eds, Fineries of Forgery: ‘Suzhou Fakes’ and Their Influence in the 16th to 18th Century, exh. cat., National Palace Museum, Taipei (2018) Chou, Ju-hsi, with Anita Chung, Silent Poetry: Chinese Paintings from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, oh, and New Haven, ct, 2015) Clunas, Craig, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London, 1997) Comment, Bernard, The Panorama (London, 2002) East Asian Scroll Paintings project at the University of Chicago, https://scrolls.uchicago.edu Ebrey, Patricia, and Shih-shan Huang, eds, Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China (Leiden, 2017) Eck, Caroline van, Miguel John Versluys and Pieter ter Keurs, ‘The Biography of Cultures: Style, Objects and Agency. Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Approach’, Cahiers de l’École du Louvre, no. 7 (October 2015), pp. 2–22, online at/doi.org/10.4000/cel.275

Fong, Wen C., Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New York, New Haven, ct, and London, 1992), online at www.metmuseum.org Freer/Sackler Educator Resource, ‘How to “Read” a Chinese Scroll’, online at www.yumpu.com, accessed 22 October 2017 Fu Xinian, Fu Xinian shuhua jianding ji (Collection of Authentications of Calligraphy and Painting by Fu Xinian) (Zhengzhou, 1999) Gao Jinlong, ‘Lun changjuan huihua ticai de yuanqi yu yanbian’ (On the Origin and Evolution of the Themes of Chinese Scroll Paintings), Shilun (Art Theory), xxxiv/1 (2016), pp. 106–7 Green, Alexandra, ed., Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia (Hong Kong, 2013) Gulik, R. H. van, Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (Rome, 1958) Haas, Philip, and David Hockney, A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (46 mins) (originally released 1988; London, 1998) Hagen, Margaret, Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art (Cambridge, 1986) Hartnell, Jack, ed., Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext, Courtauld Books Online (London, 2020) Hay, Jonathan, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London, 2010) Kohara Hironobu, ‘Narrative Illustration in the Handscroll Format’, in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (New York, 1991), pp. 247–66 Lang Jingshan, Jingshan jijin zuofa (My Techniques in Composite Picture-Making) (Taipei, 1958).

274

Further Reading

Ledderose, Lothar, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, nj, 1998) Li, Wai-Yee, ‘The Collector, the Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibility’, T’oung Pao, lxxxi/4/5 (1995), pp. 269–302 McCausland, Shane, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia series, no. 21 (London, 2003) McCausland, Shane, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong, 2011) McCausland, Shane, and Yin Hwang, eds, On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture (Hong Kong, 2014) McCausland, Shane, ‘Intermediary Moments: Framing and Scrolling Devices Across Painting, Print and Film in Chinese Visual Narratives’, in Bild. Erzählung. Kontext. Visuelle Narration in Kulturen und Gesellschaften der Alten Welt (Image. Narrative. Context. Visual Narration in Cultures and Societies of the Old World), Freiburger Studien zur Archäologie & visuellen Kultur series (Heidelberg, 2019), vol. i, pp. 157–75, online at doi. org/10.11588/propylaeum.399 Mair, Victor H., Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu, hi, 1997) Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, nc, 2011) Moxey, Keith, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, nc, 2013) Murray, Julia K., Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu, hi, 2007) Pang, Huiping, ‘Stolen Art and Lost Inscriber: Reconstructing Artwork Inventory Codes in the Tumultuous Wanli Period, 1573–1620’, Artibus Asiae, lxxii/2 (2012), pp. 399–44

Powers, Martin J., and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds, A Companion to Chinese Art (Malden, ma, 2015) Sikander, Shahzia, ‘Reclaiming Indo-Persian Miniature Painting. Reclaiming History: A Feminist Story’, in Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future, ed. Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (New Haven, ct, 2019) Singer, Isaac Bashevis, with illustrations by Julian Jusim, Der Kaiser von China, der alles auf den Kopf stellte (Munich, 1993); first u.s. edition: Isaac Bashevis Singer with illustrations by Julian Jusim, trans. Elizabeth Shub, The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996) Summers, David, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York and London, 2003) Walsh, Catherine E., and Walter D. Mignolo, On Decoloniality (Durham, nc, 2018) Wang, Yao-t’ing, Looking at Chinese Painting: A Contemporary Guide to the Philosophy, Technique and History of Chinese Painting (Tokyo, 1995) Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, XLv/1 (February 2006), pp. 30–50 Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, il, and London, 1996) Wue, Roberta, Art Worlds: Artists, Images and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (Hong Kong, 2014) Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian: ‘Qingming shanghe tu’ jiemalu (Hidden Concern and Subtle Critique: Decoding the Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival Scroll) (Beijing, 2015)

275

Acknowledgements

In the writing of any book, and this one is no exception, there are scores of debts incurred by and kindnesses done for an author. Fortunately, I had completed much of the archival-type research of visiting specific collections and seeing requested scrolls in storage before the first sars-cov-ii pandemic uk lockdown in spring 2020. Thereafter, the project necessarily changed into more of a kind of desktop digital humanities one. In both these stages, many colleagues and professionals, students and friends, too many to name individually, helped me in all sorts of ways big and small, for which I can only record my thanks and appreciation here. Various colleagues in British academia have patiently followed the development of the project, offering insights, advice and critical support along the way, sometimes by way of invitations to present new work in research seminars, including Charlotte Horlyck, Scott Redford, Polly Savage, Pedith Chan, Malcolm McNeill, Stacey Pierson and Panpan Yang at soas, as well as Stephen Whiteman, Esther Chadwick and my dear friend Sussan Babaie at the Courtauld, to name just a few. For their help in the shaping of a world-class environment for interdisciplinary research in the arts at soas, I could not fail to mention also our lively community of postgraduate students and in particular my own doctoral crew. Arguments and ideas in the book were further developed through opportunities to present research and visit collections in the uk and overseas and to collaborate on research outputs and projects, for which I must acknowledge Adam Yuet Chau, Shih Ching-fei, Wang Chunchen, Andrew Parker, Sare Aricanli, Sarah Fraser, Juliane Noth, Klaas Ruitenbeek, Ulrich Pfisterer, Christiane Hille, Shen Shu-chi, Yu Hui, Chen Yunru and Marty Powers. For their generous help and assistance with resources, among other things, I am grateful to

Yu-ping Luk, Éric Lefebvre, Jaeho Kang, Marine Cabos, Mariana Zegianini, Angela Cheung, Pauline J. Yao and Isabella Tam, Victoria Chang, Zhang Hongxing, Joe Scheier-Dolberg, Alina Sinelnyk, Carl Strehlke and Cary Y. Liu. Julian Jusim was a gracious and patient correspondent in response to my queries about his illustrations. I am particularly grateful to the readers who have offered me thoughtful feedback and usually merited critique at various stages in the development of the manuscript, including Stacey Pierson, Stephen Whiteman, Sarah Wong and Mariana Zegianini, who read multiple chapters, and Nick Pearce, Roz Hammers and the anonymous readers for the press who read the proposal and in due course the entire manuscript. Although they have provided important checks and balances, challenged flights and fancies and generously thought to spare me from blunders, I alone own any remaining errors and infelicities. I was also greatly assisted by my stalwart research assistants, namely Chin-chi Yang, Yingbai Fu and Janet Zhi Jie Jin. I remain full of respect and admiration for the publisher, Michael Leaman, and am grateful to Alex Ciobanu, Katya Duffy, Martha Jay and all involved in the production for their professionalism in steering the manuscript through the press into print. This book could never have been completed without the loving support of Sarah and our family, never better exemplified than during a period of convalescence and writing which coincided with the sars-cov-ii pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. After travel became possible again, we all gathered, family and clan, to participate in a long-awaited commemoration of my great-uncle, Piers Richard Edgcumbe (1914–1940), and it is only right that this book should be dedicated to his memory.

276

List of Illustrations

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; should there be any we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgements have been made, please contact the publishers and full adjustments will be made to any subsequent printings.



Frontispiece Chen Shizeng 陳師曾 (Chen Hengke 陳衡恪, 1876–1923), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition 讀畫圖 (Duhua tu), 1917, hanging scroll, detail of illus. 147, ink and colours on paper, 87.7 × 46.6 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 1 Diagrams of the basic handscroll format. Courtesy of Mariana Zegianini. 2–6 After Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之 (c. 344–c. 406), Admonitions of the Court Instructress 女史箴圖 (Nüshi zhen tu), late 5th or 6th century, former handscroll mounted on panel, ink and colours on silk, 24.37 × 343.75 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 7 ‘Story of Wu Zixu’ 伍子胥故事 , 3rd century, rubbing of a bronze mirror, d. 20.7 cm. Shanghai Museum, drawing after Shanghai Bowuguan cang qingtongqi (Shanghai, 1964), vol. ii. 8 Middle register: ‘Loyal assassin Jing Ke attempts to slay the Prince of Qin’ 荊軻刺秦王 (Jing Ke ci Qinwang), ink rubbing from a stone engraving at the Wu Family Shrine, Shandong Province, c. 168 ce. Chinese Rubbings Collection, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma. 9 Scene of ‘Raising the Cauldron’ 升鼎圖 (Sheng ding tu), ink rubbing from a stone engraving at the Wu Family Shrine, Shandong Province, c. 168 ce.













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Chinese Rubbings Collection, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma. 10, 11 Attributed to Yan Liben 閻立本 (c. 600–c. 673), The Thirteen Emperors 歷代帝王圖卷 (Lidai diwang tu juan), c. 650, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 51.3 × 531 cm. Photos © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. 12 Sun Wei 孫位 (active late 9th century), Lofty Scholars 高逸圖 (Gaoyi tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 45.2 × 168.7 cm. Shanghai Museum. 13 Attributed to Yan Liben 閻立本 (c. 600–c. 673), Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy 步輦圖 (Bunian tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 38.5 × 129 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 14 Unknown painter and calligrapher, Illustrated Sutra  of Past and Present Karma 絵因果経 (E inga kyō), c. 750–c. 800, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 26.5 × 1,100.5 cm. Tokyo University of the Arts/dnpartcom. 15 Unknown painter (Tang dynasty, 618–907), ‘Itinerant Story-teller’ (or ‘Travelling Monk’), c. 851–900, painting for hanging, ink and colours on paper, 41 × 29.8 cm. From the Mogao caves, Dunhuang (Ch. 00380), Gansu. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 16 Silk tapestry (kesi 緙絲) outer wrapper formerly attached to the Admonitions scroll (illus. 4), late Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), early 12th century, now mounted as part of a panel. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 17 Unknown painter and calligrapher (c. 10th century), Josua-Rolle (Joshua Roll) (now dismantled),

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL























10th century, detail, ink and colours on sheepskin, 31 × 1,063.8 cm. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (ms Pal. gr. 431 pt. B, fol. 1r). 18 Attributed to Wu Zongyuan 武宗元 (d. 1035), Procession of Taoist Immortals (also known as Procession of Immortals Paying Homage to the Primordial) 朝元仙仗圖 (Chaoyuan xianzhang tu), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 58 × 777 cm. Private collection (whereabouts unknown). 19 Attributed to Liang Lingzan 梁令瓚 (active c. 721; possibly a copy of a Liang dynasty work by Zhang Sengyou 張僧繇, active c. 490–540), Five Planets and Twenty-Eight Mansions 五星二十八宿神形図巻 (Wuxing ershiba su shenxing tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 27.5 × 489.7 cm. Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. 20 ‘The family scene’, detail from Admonitions of the Court Instructress (illus. 4). © The Trustees of the British Museum. 21 ‘Lady Feng Confronting the Bear’, detail from Admonitions of the Court Instructress (illus. 4). © The Trustees of the British Museum. 22, 23 Attributed to Zhao Ji 趙佶 (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), after Zhang Xuan 張萱 (c. 713–c. 755), Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk 搗練圖 (Daolian tu), early 12th century, handscroll, ink, colours and gold on silk, 37.7 × 466 cm. Photos © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. 24 Attributed to Zhan Ziqian 展子虔 (c. 545–618), Spring Excursion 遊春圖 (Youchun tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 43 × 80.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 25, 26 Attributed to Han Gan 韓幹 (active 742–56), Night-Shining White 照夜白圖卷 (Zhaoyebai tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 30.8 × 34 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 27 Zhao Gan 趙幹 (active 961–75), Early Snow along the River 江行初雪圖 (Jiangxing chuxue tu), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 25.9 × 376.5 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 28, 29 Wei Xian 衛賢 (active 10th century), A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel Built over a Canal Lock 閘口盤車圖 (Zhakou panche tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 53.2 × 119.3 cm. Shanghai Museum. 30 Zhang Zeduan 張擇端 (c. 1085–1145), Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival 清明上河圖 (Qingming shanghe tu), c. 1100–1105, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 24.8 × 528 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 31 Unknown weaver (Song dynasty, 960–1279), Riches in an Everlasting Spring 宋緙絲富貴長春軸 (Song kesi





















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fugui changchun zhou), hanging scroll, silk tapestry, 87.5 × 39 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 32 Zhang Yu 張瑀 (active 13th century), Lady Wenji Returning to China 文姬歸漢圖 (Wenji guihan tu) (alternatively identified as Bright Consort Leaving China), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 29 × 128.8 cm. Jilin Provincial Museum, Changchun. 33, 34 Li Shan 李山 (active mid-late Jin dynasty, 1115–1234), Wind and Snow in the Fir-pines 風雪杉松圖 (Fengxue shansong tu), late 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 29.7 × 79.3 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 35 Yang Wei 楊微 (active c. 1180), Two Fine Horses 二駿圖 (Erjun tu), 1184, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 25.2 × 81 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. 36 Unknown Song court painter, after Xiao Zhao 蕭照 (active 12th century), Auspicious Omens of Dynastic Revival 中興瑞應圖 (Zhongxing ruiying tu), handscroll originally comprising twelve scenes, detail, ink and colours on silk, 26.7 × 397.3 cm. Tianjin Museum. 37, 38 Wei Xian 衛賢 (active 10th century), Lofty Scholar 高士圖 (Gaoshi tu), small hanging scroll mounted as a handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 134.5 × 52.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 39 Attributed to Zhao Ji 趙佶 (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), Willow and Crows, Reeds and Geese 柳鴉蘆雁圖卷 (Liuya luyan tu juan), early 12th century (the first half) with a later addition, handscroll, detail (the first half), ink and light colours on paper, 34 × 223.2 cm. Shanghai Museum. 40 Li Gonglin 李公麟 (1049–1106), Five Tribute Horses 五馬圖 (Wuma tu), c. 1090, handscroll, detail, ink and light colours on paper, 28 × 257.2 cm. Tokyo National Museum. 41 Yi Yuanji 易元吉 (c. 1000–c. 1064), Gibbon and Kittens 猴貓圖 (Hou mao tu), c. mid-late 11th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31.9 × 57.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 42 Zhang of Handan family kiln (Jin dynasty, 1115–1234), Cizhou-ware pillow, with a scene of three horsemen in a steppe landscape, Henan Province, China, stoneware, slip-painted and glazed, h. 14.9 × l. 40.6 × w. 18.1 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 43 Xu Daoning 許道寧 (c. 970–1052), Fishermen’s Evening Song 秋江漁艇圖 / 漁舟唱晚圖 (Qiujiang yuting tu / Yuzhou changwan tu), c. 1050, handscroll, ink and light colours on silk, 48.26 × 225.4 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, mo.

List of Illustrations























44 Southern Song (1127–1279) court artists (13th century), Odes of the State of Bin 豳風七月圖卷 (Binfeng qiyue tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink, colours, gold and silver on paper, 29.2 × 1,398.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 45 Mi Youren 米友仁 (1086–1165 or 1074–1153), Revelling in Cloudy Mountains 雲山得意圖 (Yunshan deyi tu), c. 12th century, handscroll, ink on paper, 27.2 × 212.6 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 46 Yujian 玉澗 (active Southern Song, 1127–1279), Mount Lu 廬山図 (Lushan tu), mounted as a hanging scroll, ink on silk, 35.5 × 62.7 cm. Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art. 47 Xu Yugong 徐禹功 (active mid-12th century), Plum Blossoms and Bamboo in Snow 雪中梅竹圖卷 (Xuezhong meizhu tu juan), handscroll, ink on silk, 30 × 122 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. 48 Formerly attributed to Zhang Dunli 張敦禮 (late 12th century), Nine Songs 九歌圖書畫卷 (Jiu ge tu shuhua juan), c. 1225–c. 1250, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 24.7 × 608.5 cm. Photo © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 49 Xia Gui 夏珪 (active c. 1180–1224), Twelve Views of Landscape 山水十二景 (Shanshui shier jing), handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 27.3 × 253.7 cm.  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, mo. 50 Li Song 李嵩 (1190-1230), Watching the Tidal Bore on the Qiantang River 錢塘觀潮圖卷 (Qiantang guanchao tu), 1127–1279, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 17.4 × 83 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 51 Takekawa (‘Bamboo River’) scene detail from The Tale of Genji 源氏物語絵巻 (Genji monogatari emaki), early 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 21.8 × 48.3 cm. The Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya. 52, 53 Xia Gui 夏珪 (active c. 1180–1224), A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains 溪山清遠圖 (Xishan qingyuan tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 46.5 × 889.1 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 54–6 Attributed to Liu Cai 劉采 (active c. 1080–1120), Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers 落花遊魚圖 (Luohua youyu tu), c. 12th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 26.4 × 255.3 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, mo. 57 Attributed to Yan Liben 閻立本 (c. 600–c. 673), Admonishing in Chains 鎖諫圖 (Suojian tu), 15th century, handscroll, ink and colours on silk,  36.9 × 207.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc.

























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58 Wang Zhenpeng 王振朋 (鵬) (active early 14th century), Boya Playing the Qin 伯牙鼓琴圖卷 (Boya guqin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 31.4 × 92 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 59 ‘Pictures from the [Meng] River’ and ‘Writing from the Luo [River]’, ‘Wenji lei’ section from Chen Yuanjing, Forest of Affairs 事林廣記 (Shilin guangji), woodblock printed book, Yuan Zhishun (1330–33) edition. 60, 61 Shang Qi 商琦 (active early 14th century), Spring Mountains 春山圖 (Chunshan tu), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 39.6 × 214.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 62 He Cheng 何澄 (1223–after 1314), Returning Home 歸去來圖 (Guiqulai tu), 1314, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 41 × 723.8 cm. Jilin Provincial Museum, Changchun. 63, 64 Attributed to Guan Daosheng 管道昇 (1262–1319), A Bamboo Grove in Mist 綠締圖 (Ludi tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 14.9 × 112.4 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, ct. 65 Wang Zhenpeng 王振朋 (鵬) (active early 14th century), Boya Playing the Qin 伯牙鼓琴圖卷 (Boya guqin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 31.4 × 92 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 66 Wang Zhenpeng 王振朋 (鵬) (active early 14th century), Vimalakirti and the Doctrine of NonDuality 維摩不二圖卷 (Weimo buer tu juan), 1308, handscroll, detail, ink on silk, 39.2 × 218.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 67 Attributed to Lu Sheng 盧生 (active early 14th century), spurious signature of Cao Zhibai 曹知白 (1272–1355), The Eighteen Gentlemen 十八公 (Shiba gong), handscroll frontispiece, ink and light colours on silk, 35 × 128.1 (?) cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 68 Traditional attribution to Zhao Chang 趙昌 (d. c. 1016), Picture of Insects and Butterflies from Life 寫生蛺蝶圖 (Xiesheng jiadie tu), handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 27.7 × 91 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.  69, 70 Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind 松風閣詩 (Songfeng ge shi), handscroll, ink on paper, 32.8 × 219.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 71, 72 Wang Zhenpeng 王振朋 (鵬) (active early 14th century), Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha 姨母育佛圖卷 (Yimu yufo tu juan), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31.9 × 93.8 cm. Photos © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. 73 Gong Kai 龔開 (1222–1307), Zhongshan Going on Excursion 中山出遊圖 (Zhongshan chuyou tu),

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

Huineng liudai xiang), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 33.8 × 219.5 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. 89 Wang Fu 王紱 (1362–1416), A Myriad Bamboo in Autumn 萬竹秋深圖（Wanzhu qiu shen tu), 1410, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 26.1 × 847 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 90 Zhu Zhanji 朱瞻基 (1399–1435, r. 1425–35), Marquis of Wu at His Lofty Ease 武侯高臥圖卷 (Wuhou gaowo tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 27.7 × 40.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 91–4 Sections from Romance of the Western Wing 西廂記 (Xixiang ji), 1498 (Hongzhi 11th year), printed book imitating the format of a handscroll. 95 Wu Wei 吳偉 (1459–1508), Zilu Asking for the Ferry 問津圖卷 (Wenjin tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink on gold painted and flecked paper, 46.3 × 110.2 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 96 Unknown painter (c. 15th century), Three Chan Eccentrics, format unknown, ink and colours on paper, 37.2 × 28 cm. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul (h.2154, fol. 55a). 97 Unknown Ming Jiajing (1522–66) court artists, Departure Herald 出警圖 (Chujing tu), c. 1536–8, one of a pair of handscrolls, detail, ink and colours on silk, 92.1 × 2,601.3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 98 Workshop of Thomas Wriothesley, ‘Henry viii tilting in front of Katherine of Aragon’, from the Westminster Tournament roll, 1511, colours on vellum, 37.5 × 1,828.8 cm. College of Arms, London. 99, 100 Wang Wen 王問 (1497–1576), View from the Keyin Pavilion on Paradise Mountain 寶界山可吟亭圖 （Baojieshan Keyinting tu), 1562, handscroll, ink on silk, 39.4 cm × 5,089.3 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, mi. 101 Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559), after Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322), Seven Junipers 七星檜圖 (Qi xing hui tu), 1532, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 28.3 × 361.6 cm. Honolulu Museum of Art, hi. 102 Zhang Ling 張靈 (active early 16th century), Beckoning the Immortal 招仙圖卷 (Zhaoxian tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 29.8 × 111.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 103–5 Xue Susu 薛素素 (c. 1564–c. 1650), Wild Orchids, 1601, handscroll, ink on paper, 32 x 598 cm. Honolulu Museum of Art, hi. 106 Swatow-type Zhangzhou export ware ‘split pagoda’ design dish, south China, late 16th–early 17th century, porcelain painted in overglaze enamels,

handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 32.8 × 169.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 74, 75 Gong Suran 宮素然 (active c. 1127–62), Bright Consort Leaving China 明妃出塞図 (Mingfei chu sai tu), 12th–13th century, handscroll, ink on paper, 30.2 × 160.2 cm. Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. 76–9 Stoneware jar, covered with buff white slip and decorated in brown with a scholar-in-landscape design, Cizhou ware 磁州窯褐彩山水高士圖罐 (Cizhouyao hecai shanshui gaoshi tu guan), Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), 21.7 × 17.6 cm. Oriental Museum, Durham University. 80 Wine jar painted with fish and aquatic plants, Yuan dynasty, mid-14th century, porcelain with underglaze cobalt blue decoration, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, 30.3 × 34.9 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York. 81 Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322), Sheep and Goat 二羊圖 (Eryang tu), c. 1305–10, handscroll, ink on paper, 25.2 × 48.7 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 82 Qian Xuan 錢選 (1239–1301), White Lotus 白蓮 (Bai lian), handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 32 × 90.3 cm. Excavated in 1970 from the tomb of the Ming prince, Zhu Tan 朱檀 (d. 1389), Shandong Province. © 2019 Christie’s Images Limited. 83 Zheng Sixiao 鄭思肖 (1241–1318), Ink Orchid 墨蘭図 (Molan tu), 1306, handscroll, ink on paper, 25.7 × 42.4 cm. Osaka City Museum of Fine Art. 84 Attributed to Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1301–1374), Bamboo Branch 竹枝圖卷 (Zhuzhi tu juan), handscroll, ink on paper, 34 × 76.4 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 85 Qian Xuan 錢選 (1239–1301), Eight Flowers 八花圖 (Bahua tu), before 1289, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 29.4 × 333.9 cm. Inscription by Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322). The Palace Museum, Beijing. 86 Attributed to Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (344–86), Epitaph for My Nursemaid 保姆志 (Baomu zhi), early 13th century, handscroll, detail, ink rubbing and ink inscriptions on paper, 31 × 29 cm (the rubbing). Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 87 Digitally generated reproduction of a blue-and-white jar with scrolling design, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Tianshun period (1457–64), Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 88 Dai Jin 戴進 (1388-1462), The Six Patriarchs (from Damo to Huineng) 達摩至惠能六代像 (Damo zhi 280

List of Illustrations 118 Wang Gai 王槩 (1645–1710), after Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains 富春山居圖 (Fuchun shan ju tu), as interpreted by Xiao Yuncong 蕭雲從 (1596–1673). From Li Yu 李漁 (c. 1611–80), Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting 芥子園畫傳 (Jieziyuan huazhuan), first edition 1679, woodblock printed book, ink and colours on paper, 24.4 × 30 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 119 Wang Kui 汪奎 (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911), after Hua Yan 華喦 (1682–1756), Peach-Blossom Spring 桃源圖卷 (Taoyuan tu juan), embroidery, detail, 33 × 185 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 120 Luo Pin 羅聘 (1733–1799), Narcissus, Bamboo and Rocks 水仙竹石圖 (Shuixian zhushi tu), handscroll, ink and light colours on paper, 14.8 × 113.3 cm. Tianjin Museum. 121 Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng 王志誠, 1702–68), The Qianlong Emperor Practising Archery 乾隆射箭圖屏 (Qianlong shejian tu ping), framed ‘screen’ (ping) painting, oil on paper, 95 × 213.7 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 122 Yu Zhiding 禹之鼎 (1647–1709), Copy of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colours on the Que and Hua Mountains 臨趙孟頫鵲華秋色圖卷 (Lin Zhao Mengfu Que Hua qiuse tu juan), 1693, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 28 × 152.5 cm. Jilin Provincial Museum, Changchun. 1 23, 124 Fan Qi 樊圻 (1616–after 1694), Yangzi Riverscape 長江圖 (Changjiang tu), 1660s, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 31 × 207 cm. Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo bpk/ Jürgen Liepe. 125 View of Aden, from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cologne, 1572). Photo courtesy of the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the National Library of Israel. 126 Bada Shanren 八大山人 (Zhu Da, c. 1626–1705), Flowers on the River 河上花圖卷 (Heshang hua tu juan), 1697, handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 47 × 1,292.5 cm. Title-piece by Xu Shichang 徐世昌 (1855–1939). Tianjin Museum. 127 Painter unknown, Calendar Print (4th–6th months), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China, early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 17th century, polychrome woodblock print, 33.4 × 25.7 cm. Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo bpk/Jürgen Liepe. 128 Unknown Yongzheng 雍正 (1723–35) court artists, Scroll of Antique Trinkets 古玩圖 (Guwan tu), 1728, handscroll (from a series of 16 or more), detail, ink

depicting the Daoist isles of the blessed, d. 38.3 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 107 Ye Cheng 葉澄 (active c. 1522–66), Mount Yandang 雁蕩山圖卷 (Yandangshan tu juan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 35 × 290.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 108 Ascribed to Leng Qian 冷謙 (14th century), Immortals Playing Weiqi in Penglai 蓬萊仙弈圖 (Penglai xianyi tu), 18th-century forgery, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on silk, 29.6 × 100.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc. 109 Circle of Kano Takanobu 狩野孝信 (1571–1618), Tale of the Bamboo Cutter 竹取物語 (Taketori monogatari), detail from scroll two of a pair of handscrolls, early 17th century, ink, colours, gold and silver leaf on paper, 27.8 × 1,419 cm. © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. 110 Page reproducing a painting by Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1301–1374), from Gu Bing 顧炳 (active 1594–1603), Master Gu’s Painting Manual 顧氏畫譜 (Gushi huapu, 1603). Japanese reprint of 1798, woodblock print, 26.9 × 41.9 cm. 111 Unknown painter (signature of Ren Renfa 任仁發, 1254–1327), Feeding Horses, 1400–1600 (?), hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, 50 × 75 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 112 Cui Zizhong 崔子忠 (1574–1644), Dogs and Chickens amid the Clouds (Xu Xun Going into Reclusion) 雲中雞犬圖 (Yunzhong jiquan tu), hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, 191.4 × 84 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. 113 Unknown painter, ‘Scene 1: Scholar Zhang Junrui rides to the Pujiu Monastery (投禪 Tou chan)’, from Min Qiji 閔齊汲 (1580–after 1661), Romance of the Western Wing 西廂記 (Xixiang ji), also known as The Story of Oriole 鶯鶯傳 (Yingying zhuan), 1640, album of woodblock print illustrations (multi-block polychrome xylography). Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne, photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne. 114, 115 Huang Xiangjian 黃向堅 (1609–1673), Searching for My Parents 萬里尋親圖卷 (Wanli xunqin tu juan), 1656, handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 36.5 × 553.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 116, 117 Two ‘Chinese noblewomen’ from Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata . . . (Amsterdam, 1667). Jesuitica Collection, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, MA.



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and colours on paper, c. 62.5 cm × 20 m. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 129 Anonymous Qianlong (1736–95) court artists, Qianlong Emperor’s 80th Birthday Celebration 高宗純皇帝(乾隆)八旬萬壽圖卷(下卷) (Gaozong chun Huangdi (Qianlong) baxun wanshou tu juan (xia juan)), 1790, second of two handscrolls, detail, ink and colours on silk, 45 × 6,389.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 130 Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining 郎世寧, 1688–1766), One Hundred Horses, 1723–5, draft handscroll, detail, ink on paper, 94 × 789.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 131 George Scharf (1788–1860), Panoramic View of that Part of Ratisbon West of the Cathedral (view of modern-day Regensburg, Bavaria), 1845, folding panorama in sections, watercolours, gouache and pencil drawing on paper, 30.48 × 184.15 cm. © The British Library Board (Add ms 36489 c). 132 Xu Yang 徐揚 (1712–after 1777), Prosperous Suzhou 盛世滋生圖/姑蘇繁華圖 (Shengshi zisheng tu/Gusu fanhua tu), 1757, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 35.9 × 1,243.4 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. 133 Liuzhou 六舟 (1791–1858), Old Bricks and Flower Display 古磚花供圖 (Guzhuan huagong tu), 1835, handscroll, detail, ink rubbings, ink and colours on paper. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou. 134, 135 Dai Xi 戴熙 (1801–1860), Rain-Coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt Tiantai 石梁雨來亭圖 (Shiliang Yulaiting tu), 1848, handscroll, ink on paper, 34.5 × 142.6 cm. Title-piece by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). The Cleveland Museum of Art, oh. 136 ‘Section of an old scroll painted on silk’, from John Thomson (1837–1921), Through China with a Camera, 2nd edn (London and New York, 1899). Photo University of California Libraries. 137 Buildings at the entrance to the Chinese quarter of the city, Beijing, section two, detail of a panorama of photographs by Felice Beato (1832–1909), Panorama of Pekin, 1860, 21.5 × 29.2 cm. Wellcome Collection, London. 138–41 Yun Xiang 韻香 (Wang Jinglian, d. 1827), Orchids, 1824, handscroll, four painting panels and a colophon panel, ink on silk, 33.7 × 95.7 cm. Photos © 2022 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, IL. 142, 143 Title-piece by Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛 (1868–1934), dated 1910, for Wang Jianzhang 王建章 (active 1621–62), Spring Rain, Thatched Hut 春雨草堂圖 (Chunyu caotang tu), 1650, handscroll, ink on paper,

31 × 81.5 cm (overall: 34.2 × 1,164 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, oh. 144 Famille noire vase lent to the 1908 exhibition by Ma Chang-kee, painting by Wang Zhenhai 王鎮海 (active c. 1908). From A. W. Bahr, Old Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art in China (London, 1911), photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 145, 146 Attributed to Huaisu 懷素 (737–99), Bitter Bamboo Shoots 苦筍帖 (Kusun tie), handscroll, ink on silk, 25.1 × 12 cm (the calligraphy: detail, right). Colophon of 1910 at the end of the backing paper. Shanghai Museum. 147 Chen Shizeng 陳師曾 (Chen Hengke 陳衡恪, 1876–1923), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition 讀畫圖 (Duhua tu), 1917, hanging scroll, ink and colours on paper, 87.7 × 46.6 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 148 Zheng Wuchang 鄭午昌 (Zheng Chang 鄭昶, 1894–1952), Tasting Tea 品茗圖 (Pinming tu), 1930, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 34 × 150 cm. Private collection. 149, 150 Pu Ru 溥儒 (1896–1963), Ten Gibbons 十猿圖 (Shiyuan tu), handscroll, ink on paper, 17.5 × 110.4 cm. National Museum of History, Taipei. 151, 152 Wu Zuoren 吳作人 (1908–1997), History of Tea, 1945, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 39.4 × 299.7 cm. Calligraphy by Shen Yinmo 沈尹默 (1883–1971) and Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 (1904–1965). Musée Cernuschi, Paris, photo © Musée Cernuschi/Roger-Viollet, reproduced courtesy of Wu Zuoren International Foundation of Fine Arts (WIFA), Beijing. 153 Unknown late Qing (1644–1911) artist (signature of Yu Zhiding 禹之鼎, 1647–1709), scenes from Romance of the Western Wing 西廂記 (Xixiang ji), also known as The Story of Oriole 鶯鶯傳 (Yingying zhuan), handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, h. 29.6 cm. © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. 154 Kobayashi Kokei 小林古径 (1883–1957) and Maeda Seison 前田青邨 (1885–1977), Copy of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress 女史箴図巻の 模写 (Joshi shin zukan no mosha), 1923, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 26.8 × 469.5 cm. © dacs 2022, Tōhoku University Library, Sendai. 155 Qi Baishi 齊白石 (1864–1957), Festival Gathering at the Overlook Tower 超覽樓禊集圖 (Chaolanlou qiji tu), 1938, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 36.1 × 132.4 cm. Private collection. 156–9 Ling Shuhua 凌叔華 (1904–1990) et al., Spring Trees, Evening Clouds, 1925–58, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, painting: 6.8 × 29.6 cm, colophon:

282

List of Illustrations

171, 172 Chang Ch’ung-ho Frankel (1931–2015), Painting after Zha Shibiao (Zha Shibiao 查士標, 1615–1698), 1970–80s, handscroll, ink and colours on paper, 34.9 × 962.7 cm. © Seattle Art Museum, wa. 173 Li Yuan-chia 李元佳 (1929–1994), Folding Scrolls, one of a series, Bologna, 1963–6, 10.5 × 69.3 cm. © Li Yuan-chia Foundation (reg. charity no. 1098517), all rights reserved, dacs 2022, photo Phil Gammon. 174 Shen Wei 沈偉 (b. 1968), Scroll, performance, section of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. © Shen Wei, courtesy of the artist, photo © Lin Yi. 175, 176 Zhao Ji 趙佶 (1082–1135), Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126), Auspicious Dragon Rock 祥龍石圖 (Xianglongshi tu), handscroll, ink and light colours on silk, 53.9 × 127.8cm. Colophon by J. D. Chen  陳仁濤 (Chen Rentao, 1906–1968), dated 1951. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 177 Attributed to Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), Tree and Rock 木石圖 (Mushi tu), handscroll, ink on paper, painting: 26.3 × 50 cm; overall with mounting: 27.2 × 543 cm. © 2018 Christie’s Images Limited. 178 Futomaki, Japanese wooden supports for handscrolls. Department of Conservation and Scientific Research, Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc, photo Andrew Hare. 179 Tseng Yu-ho 曾佑和 (Betty Ecke, 1925–2017), The Settlement, 1957 or before, folding screen, ink on paper, (each panel) 56.5 × 86.4 cm; photograph taken on 12 November 1957. © Estate of Tseng Yu–ho, photo Honolulu Museum of Art, HI. 180 Tseng Yu-ho 曾佑和 (Betty Ecke, 1925–2017), Prospect, 1959, dsui paper collage with watercolour and ink calligraphy, watercolour and ink, 26.7 × 119.4 × 2.5 cm. © Estate of Tseng Yu–ho, photo Honolulu Museum of Art, HI. 181–3 Yun-Fei Ji 季雲飛 (b. 1963), Last Days of Village Wen 文村記事 (Wen cun jishi), dated 2011, pair of handscrolls, scroll one, ink and colours on paper, 34.6 × 657.8/34.6 × 610.8 cm.  © Yun-Fei Ji 2022, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York, photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, oh. 184 Yu Hong 喻紅 (b. 1966), Spring Romance, 2008, fabric dye on satin, 600 × 912 cm. © Yu Hong, photo courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing. 185 Arnold Chang (Zhang Hong 張洪, b. 1954), Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains, 2008, handscroll, ink

9.4 × 39.4 cm, scroll: 9.4 × 397 cm. © The artist’s estate, courtesy of Chen Xiaoying (Hsiao Ying Chinnery), photo © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 160 Unknown artist, The Triumph of the Kaleidoscope; or, The Demise of the Chinese Game (Le triomphe du kaleidoscope, ou Le Tombeau du Jeu chinois), 1818, lithograph collected by Robert Delaunay and Aaron Martinet. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 161–3 Li Yishi 李毅士 (1886–1942), Pictorial Impressions of the Song of Lasting Sorrow 長恨歌畫意 (Changhenge huayi), 1929. Three from a set of 30 illustrations in monochrome gouache on paper, landscape and portrait orientations, 22.5 × 17 cm (or 17 × 22.5 cm). Reproductions with paired calligraphic inscriptions from the eponymous ballad, after Li Yishi, Changhenge huayi (Shanghai, 1935). Right to left: scenes 8, 3 and 9. Original pictures in the Central Academy of Fine Arts Library, Beijing. 164 Kano Sansetsu 狩野山雪 (1589–1651) and studio, Song of Lasting Sorrow 長恨歌画巻 (Chōgonka gakan), detail from scroll 1 of a pair of handscrolls, ink and colours on silk, 31.5 × 1,048.5 cm. © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. 165 Ding Cong 丁聰 (1916–2009), Images of Today 現象圖 (Xianxiang tu), Chengdu, 1944, handscroll in three sections, ink and colours on paper, 28.6 × 149.9 cm. Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, MO, reproduced courtesy of Ding Wayne (Ding Xiaoyi). 166 Ding Cong 丁聰 (1916–2009), A Picture of Reality 現實圖 (Xianshi tu), Hong Kong, 1947, dimensions unknown. Ding Cong Art Museum, Shanghai, reproduced courtesy of Ding Wayne (Ding Xiaoyi). 167, 168 Liu Zigu 柳子谷 (1901–1986) and Man Jian 滿鍵 (active 1950s), Painting Scroll of the War Against America in Aid of Korea 抗美援朝戰爭畫卷 (Kang Mei yuan Chao zhanzheng huajuan), 1958, handscroll, details, ink and colours on paper, 47 × 2,700 cm. Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, Beijing, reproduced courtesy of Liu Yongxu. 169 Julian Jusim (b. 1946), frontispiece and title page design for Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902, Poland–1991, usa), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996). Reproduced courtesy of Julian Jusim. 170 Julian Jusim (b. 1946), illustration for Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902, Poland–1991, usa), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (New York, 1996), first illustrated in Der Kaiser von China, der alles auf den Kopf stellte (Munich, 1993). Reproduced courtesy of Julian Jusim.

283

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

on paper, 61 × 349.6 cm. © Arnold Chang, collection of the artist. 186 Liu Dan 劉丹 (b. 1953), Ink Handscroll, 1990, handscroll, detail, ink and colours on paper, 95.6 × 1,780 cm. © Liu Dan, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, photo the San Diego Museum of Art, ca. 187 Xu Bing 徐冰 (b. 1955), Landscript (A ‘play on Qian Xuan’), 2008, scroll, mounted and framed, ink on paper, 58 × 343 cm. © Xu Bing Studio, photo © 2019 Christie’s Images Limited. 188, 189 Ding Yi 丁乙 (b. 1962), 70 Circles 柒十個圓  (Qishi ge yuan), Shanghai, 2013, concertina album, pencil and acrylic on rice paper, 35.5 × 25.3 (folded), 648 cm (unfolded). © Ding Yi, photos © The Trustees of the British Museum. 190 Lu Qing 路青 (b. 1964), Untitled 無題 (Wuti), 2000, acrylic on silk, 4,670 × 82 cm. M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong, © Lu Qing, photo Li Xianting Archive, courtesy of Lu Qing and Asia Art Archive. 191, 192 ‘Tian’anmen photographic panorama (4 April 1976)’, from Bao Naiyong 鮑乃鏞 (1938–2016), Painting-Scroll of the Times  時代的畫卷 – 天安門的攝影集 (Shidai de huajuan – Tian’anmen de sheying ji), home-made book in landscape format with single stitch binding. © Bao Naiyong | Yingyi Shidai | courtesy of Photography of China. 193 Lang Jingshan 郎靜山 (1892–1995), A Panoramic Embrace of Landscape 湖山攬勝 (Hushan lansheng), 1981, composite photography mounted

in a handscroll, 40 × 296 cm. © The artist’s estate, courtesy of Long Yuwen, photo National Museum of History, Taipei. 194 Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969), The Scroll, 1989–90, vegetable colour, dry pigment, watercolour and tea on hand-prepared wasli paper, 34.29 × 162.24 cm. © Shahzia Sikander, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London. 195, 196 Miao Xiaochun 繆曉春 (b. 1964), Beijing Hand Scroll 08.04.25B 北京手卷 (Beijing shoujuan), 2009, digital ink painting, handscroll, 35 x 374 cm. © Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin | Beijing, photo usc Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, ca. 197 Michael Cherney 秋麥 (Qiu Mai, b. 1969),  New Primordial Chaos 新渾淪圖 (Xin hunlun tu), 2014, photograph in handscroll format, ink on mitsumata washi paper, 29.7 × 86.2 cm; scroll: 31.6 × 337.2 cm. Seal: Qiu 秋 (autumn). © Michael S. Cherney (Qiu Mai), photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, oh. 198 Zhu Derun 朱徳潤 (1294–1365), Primordial Chaos  渾淪圖 (Hunlun tu), 1349, handscroll, ink on paper, 29.7 × 86.2 cm. Colophon by Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559), 1548. Shanghai Museum. 199 David Hockney (b. 1937, writer) and Philip Haas (b. 1954, director and producer), film still from A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth (1988). Courtesy of Milestone Films and Philip Haas.

284

Index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics Admonitions see Gu Kaizhi Attiret, Jean-Denis, The Qianlong Emperor Practising Archery 164–5, 121 Auspicious Omens of Dynastic Revival 64–5, 131, 36 Bada Shanren, Flowers on the River 169–72, 187, 219, 126 Bahr, A. W., Old Chinese Porcelain 187, 189, 144 Bao Naiyong, Painting-Scroll of the Times 241–2, 191, 192 Beato, Felice, Panorama of Pekin 182–5, 137 Beijing (also Beiping) 135, 173, 183, 185, 192ff., 202, 212ff., 223ff., 236, 241, 137 Beijing Hand Scroll 08.024.25b 243–5, 196 Daidu (Khanbalik, Yuan winter capital) 91, 94, 105, 124 Eight Views of Beijing (Wang Fu) 124, 128 Book of Change (Confucian classic) 10, 30, 90 Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum 167–9, 125 Buddhism 23, 31, 36ff., 76, 99, 105ff., 119, 127, 154, 174, 182, 192, 194, 198

Calendar Print (Suzhou print) 146, 159, 167, 170, 127 Castiglione, Giuseppe, One Hundred Horses 175–7, 130 Chang, Arnold (Zhang Hong), Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains 234–5, 185 Chang Ch’ung-ho Frankel, Painting after Zha Shibiao 220–22, 171, 172 Chen Shizeng (Chen Hengke), Viewing Paintings at an Exhibition 6, 194–5, 204, 143 Chen Yuanjing, Forest of Affairs (Shilin guangji) 24, 90, 108, 59 Cherney, Michael (Qiu Mai), New Primordial Chaos 243, 246–8, 197 Confucius and Confucianism 9, 126, 128, 133–4, 174 Confucian classics 9, 30, 107, 127, 129 Cui Zizhong, Dogs and Chickens amid the Clouds 150–54, 112 Dai Jin, The Six Patriarchs 127–9, 88 Dai Xi, Rain-Coming Pavilion 169, 182–3, 134, 135 Departure Herald 134–6, 97 digitally generated reproduction of a jar 126, 87

285

Ding Cong Images of Today 214–16, 165 A Picture of Reality 214–17, 166 Ding Yi, 70 Circles 238–9, 188, 189 Dunhuang (Gansu) 16, 31, 36–7, 47, 250 Itinerant Storyteller (hanging painting) 37, 15 East Asia 16, 17, 26, 38, 80, 91, 126, 146, 156, 159, 194, 196, 202, 211 emaki (picture-scrolls) 16, 81, 148, 51, 109 European arts 14ff., 89, 92, 108, 135, 143ff., 155ff., 176ff., 194ff., 202, 210ff., 249 evidentiary scholarship movement (kaozhengxue) 12, 21, 180 Fan Qi, Yangzi Riverscape 167–9, 123, 124 Fang Xun (Qing critic) 10, 13 Forest of Affairs see Chen Yuanjing futomaki 229, 178 geshui (water dividers) 20, 107, 133 Gong Kai, Zhongshan Going on Excursion 99, 110–11, 119, 73 Gong Suran, Bright Consort Leaving China 111–13, 74, 75

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

Gu Bing, Master Gu’s Painting Manual 148ff., 159, 110 Gu Kaizhi, Admonitions of the Court Instructress 22ff., 30ff., 37ff., 42ff., 50–51, 57, 70, 98, 106, 123, 133, 143, 174–5, 192, 194, 202, 216–17, 221, 229, 2–6, 16, 20, 21 Nihonga Copy (Kobayashi Kokei, Maeda Seison) 204, 154 Guan Daosheng, A Bamboo Grove in Mist 94–7, 116, 185, 63, 64 Gulik, Robert van (Dutch sinologist) 13, 21 Han (dynasty) 8, 10, 23ff., 30–31, 106, 131, 139 Han Gan, Night-Shining White 48, 121, 197, 25, 26 handscroll (juan, shoujuan, tujuan) anatomy 20–21 glosses 8ff., 40–41 long scroll (changjuan) 24, 65, 111, 157, 169 size and scale 13, 111, 173 Hangzhou (also Khinsai) 80–81, 91, 50 He Cheng, Returning Home 94–5, 62 Henry viii (king of England) 17, 135, 137, 98 Hockney, David, and Philip Haas, A Day on the Grand Canal 155, 166, 248–9, 199 Huaisu, Bitter Bamboo Shoots 191–3, 195, 145, 146 Huang Tingjian, Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind 104–7, 159, 69, 70 Huang Xiangjian, Searching for My Parents 157–8, 114, 115 Huizong (Zhao Ji, Northern Song emperor) 20, 34, 57, 60, 64ff., 98, 105ff., 123, 127, 149 Auspicious Dragon Rock 65, 67, 226–7, 175, 176 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk 31, 44–5, 67, 234, 22, 23 Willows and Crows 68, 129, 39 Xuanhe seven seals 37, 67, 37 Illustrated Sutra of Past and Present Karma 36–7, 14

Japan 13, 16, 18, 36, 76, 78, 80, 94, 111, 146, 148ff., 187, 192ff., 202, 205, 214, 228ff., 14, 51, 109, 154 Edo (period) 156, 175, 212 Ji Yun-Fei, Last Days of Village Wen 232–3, 181–3 jiehua (architectural painting) 42, 91, 99 Jin (Jurchen ‘Golden’ dynasty) 19, 40, 53–87, 91, 94, 99, 111, 113, 123 Josua-Rolle 17, 38–9, 57, 17 Jusim, Julian, Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China 218, 221–2, 169, 170 Kangxi (Manchu Qing emperor and his reign name) 156–7, 160–69, 173–4, 187, 249 Kano Sansetsu, Song of Everlasting Sorrow 175, 210–12, 164 Kano Takanobu, Tale of the Bamboo Cutter 148–9, 156, 109 Khubilai (Yuan khan/emperor) 91, 95, 116–17, 123–4, 127, 160 Kircher, Athanasius, China Illustrata 158–9, 116, 117 Kobayashi Kokei and Maeda Seison, Copy of the Admonitions 202–4, 154 Korea 16, 91, 127, 184, 192, 217–18, 167, 168 Lang Jingshan (Long Chin-san), Panoramic Embrace of Landscape 242–3, 193 Leng Qian, Immortals Playing Weiqi in Penglai 126–7, 146, 108 Li Gonglin (Longmian), Five Tribute Horses 10, 57, 67–9, 99, 127, 174, 40 Li Shan, Wind and Snow in the Fir-Pines 60–61, 74, 33, 34 Li Yishi, Pictorial Impressions 209, 211–14, 161–3 Li Yin (courtesan painter) 18, 138 Li Yu (Li Houzhu) 48, 60, 121, 27 Li Yuan-chia, Folding Scrolls 221–2, 173 Liang Lincan, Five Planets and TwentyEight Mansions 41, 68–9, 19 Liao (Khitan dynasty) 53–87, 94 Ling Shuhua et al., Spring Trees, Evening Clouds 206–8, 156–9 Liu Cai, Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers 83–6, 54

286

Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem 7–8 Liu Dan, Ink Handscroll 235–6, 186 Liu Zigu and Man Jian, Painting Scroll of the War Against America 217–18, 167, 168 Liuzhou, Old Bricks and Flower Display 181, 133 Loyal assassin Jing Ke attempts to slay the Prince of Qin (ink rubbing) 28, 8 Lu Qing, Untitled 240, 190 Lu Sheng, Eighteen Gentlemen 102–5, 67 Luo Pin, Narcissus, Bamboo and Rocks 164–6, 180, 120 Mathews, R. H. (missionary) 9–10 Mi Fu 37, 48, 69, 74, 75, 121, 181 Mi Youren, Revelling in Cloudy Mountains 75–7, 191, 45 Miao Xiaochun, Beijing Hand Scroll 08.024.25b 243–5, 195, 196 Min Qiji, Story of Oriole/Romance of the Western Wing 151–4, 113 Ming (dynasty) 10, 18, 21, 86, 105, 110, 117, 125–90, 191, 194, 225, 231 Modernism 7, 8, 19, 187, 194, 208ff., 219 Nara e-hon (Nara picture-books) 16, 148, 156, 202, 109 Ni Zan 95, 111, 113, 128, 143, 149–50, 159, 167, 242, 110 Bamboo Branch 120, 225, 84 Nine Songs 79, 48 Odes of the State of Bin 74–5, 80, 44 panorama 17, 19, 177, 178–9, 183, 185, 241, 243, 131, 137, 191–2, 195–6 Pu Ru, Ten Gibbons 198–9, 149, 150 Pu Yi (last emperor) 57, 195–202, 225ff. Qi Baishi, Festival Gathering at the Overlook Tower 194, 205, 218, 155 Qian Xuan 99, 107, 111, 116ff., 134, 197, 236–7, 187 Eight Flowers 121–2, 85 White Lotus 118, 127, 82 Qianlong (Manchu Qing emperor and his reign name) 11, 20, 103, 156–7,

Index

160, 144, 164–5, 169, 172–6, 177, 181, 191, 202, 225, 229, 249, 121, 129 Qianlong Emperor’s Eightieth Birthday Celebration 174–5, 129 Qin, prince/First Emperor of 28–30, 8, 9 Qing (Manchu dynasty) 7, 11, 48, 55, 155–90, 191–8, 202ff., 210ff., 225–6, 249 Qingming scroll see Zhang Zeduan ‘Raising the Cauldron’ (ink rubbing) 29–30, 9 Ren Renfa, Feeding Horses 149–51, 111 Riches in an Everlasting Spring 54, 56, 31 Romance of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji) 132, 134, 151, 153, 202, 221, 91–4, 113, 153 Scharf, George, Panoramic View of Ratisbon 177–9, 131 Scroll of Antique Trinkets 172–3, 176, 197, 128 Sengge Ragi (Mongol princess) 89, 95, 103ff., 123, 127, 160, 65, 67–70 Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove 31, 42, 172 Shang Qi, Spring Mountains 92–4, 99, 111, 60, 61 Shen Wei, Scroll 223–4, 174 Sikander, Shahzia, The Scroll 242–5, 248, 194 Song (dynasty) 7, 19, 31ff., 40ff., 51, 53–87, 91ff., 103ff., 111ff., 121ff., 126ff., 131, 139, 141, 160, 172, 187, 191, 221, 226ff., 234 loyalism 99, 111, 117, 119, 123 stoneware jar (painted with a scholar in a landscape) 113–16, 76–9 Su Shi, Tree and Rock 68–9, 83, 228, 177 Sun Wei, Lofty Scholars 31, 35, 42, 12 Suzhou print 167, 170, 127 Swatow dish 143, 106 Tale of Genji, The 80–81, 51 Tang (dynasty) 10, 12–14, 24, 31ff., 40ff., 46ff., 53, 67ff., 70ff., 87, 91, 98, 119, 123, 139, 191, 213, 231, 248 Tang Yin, Beckoning the Immortal 141–2, 102

Tao Qian (poet) ‘Peach-Blossom Spring’ 16, 162–3, 119 Returning Home 94, 62 Thomson, John, Through China with a Camera 182–4, 136 Three Chan Eccentrics 135, 96 Toghon Temür (Yuan khan) 89 Triumph of the Kaleidoscope 208–10, 160 Tseng Yu-ho (Betty Ecke) Prospect 231, 180 The Settlement 230, 179 Tugh Temür (Yuan khan, emperor Wenzong) 89, 107–8 Wang Fu, A Myriad Bamboo in Autumn 128–30, 89 Wang Gai, Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting 161–3, 236, 118 Wang Jianzhang, Spring Rain, Thatched Hut 187–8, 195, 230, 142, 143 Wang Kui, Peach-Blossom Spring 162–3, 119 Wang Wen, View from the Keyin Pavilion on Paradise Mountain 139–41, 99, 100 Wang Xianzhi, Epitaph for my Nursemaid 41, 122–3, 86 Wang Ximeng, One Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains 34, 65, 67, 94 Wang Xizhi (Orchid Pavilion Preface) 41, 106, 123 Wang Zhenhai (illustrator) 189–90, 144 Wang Zhenpeng 91–2, 105, 107 Boya Playing the Qin 88, 95, 98–9, 105, 110–11, 58, 65 Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha 99, 108–9, 71, 72 Vimalakirti and the Doctrine of Non-Duality 99–101, 66 Watching the Tidal Bore on the Qiantang River 80–81, 50 Wei-Jin (period) 9, 24, 38, 40–42, 53, 87 Wei Xian A Flour Mill Powered by a Waterwheel 50, 52, 54, 28, 29 Lofty Scholar 66–7, 37, 38 Wen Zhengming, Seven Junipers 141–2, 101

287

Westminster Tournament roll 135, 137, 98 wine jar (painted with fish) 115–16, 126, 80 Wu Family Shrine (Shandong) 28ff., 8, 9 Wu Wei, Zilu Asking for the Ferry 132, 134, 95 Wu Zhiying (calligrapher) 187–8, 195, 230, 142 Wu Zixu, Story of 26ff., 7 Wu Zongyuan, Procession of Taoist Immortals 40, 42, 18 Wu Zuoren, History of Tea 198–201, 151, 152 Xia Gui A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains 82–3, 52, 53 Twelve Views of Landscape 80–83, 131, 219, 49 Xiang Yuanbian 95, 131, 133, 160, 174, 191, 225 Xu Bing, Landscript 235–9, 187 Xu Daoning, Fishermen’s Evening Song 72–3, 219, 43 Xu Yang, Prosperous Suzhou 173, 177–9, 132 Xu Yugong, Plum Blossoms and Bamboo in Snow 78, 47 Xue Susu, Wild Orchids 18, 142–5, 231, 103–5 Yan Liben 42, 69 Admonishing in Chains 86–7, 57 Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy 31, 34–5, 41, 47, 68, 107, 13 The Thirteen Emperors 31–3, 91, 10, 11 Yang Wei, Two Fine Horses 62–3, 35 Ye Cheng, Mount Yandang 146–7, 107 Yi Yuanji, Gibbon and Kittens 60, 70–71, 41 Yu Hong, Spring Romance 234, 240, 184 Yu Zhiding 173 Copy of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colours 166, 122 Romance of the Western Wing/Story of Oriole 202–3, 153

THE ART OF THE CHINESE PICTURE-SCROLL

Yuan (Mongol ulus/dynasty) 19, 24, 40, 48, 57, 76, 86–7, 89–124, 126ff., 131, 134, 149, 159ff., 174, 180, 213, 225, 248 Yujian, Mount Lu 76–7, 46 Yun Xiang, Orchids 184–6, 138–43 Zhan Ziqian, Spring Excursion 41, 46–7, 24 Zhang Daqian (modern painter) 31, 206–8, 156–9 Zhang of Handan family kiln, Cizhou-ware pillow 71, 73, 42 Zhang Sengyou (early figural master) 41, 42, 68–9, 19

Zhang Yanyuan (Tang painter and critic) 12, 42, 48, 121 Zhang Yu, Lady Wenji Returning to China 58–9, 80, 32 Zhang Zeduan, Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival 7, 34, 42, 54ff., 65ff., 87, 218, 225, 30 Zhangzong (Jurchen Jin emperor) 57, 123 Zhao Chang, Picture of Insects and Butterflies from Life 102–3, 68 Zhao Gan, Early Snow along the River 34, 48, 50–51, 108, 27 Zhao Ji see Huizong

288

Zhao Mengfu 94–5, 106, 116–23, 142, 150, 166, 250, 85, 101, 122 Sheep and Goat 117, 174, 81 Zheng Sixiao, Ink Orchid 99, 111, 117–18, 196, 83 Zheng Wuchang (Zheng Chang), Tasting Tea 180, 197–8, 148 Zhu Derun, Primordial Chaos 108, 243, 246–7, 198 Zhu Zhanji (Ming Xuande emperor), The Marquis of Wu at His Lofty Ease 130–31, 90