US China Business Council talk, June 1, 2000 (5/17) (Something on the series, Jim Peck, etc.)
Anyone who studies Chinese culture over a long period, in the context of world history, is likely to be struck by a remarkable repeating pattern. Nothing is more characteristic of the Chinese than to do something first, to do it as well as it’s ever going to be done, and then to stop doing it, as if deliberately and almost arbitrarily. A well-known example of this is in science: up to the 14th century or so, China was well ahead of the rest of the world in technological and proto-scientific discoveries, but they never made the crucial steps that led in Europe to the development of an experimental science, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest. I’m certainly not going to try to tell you why it happened that way, or didn’t happen; it’s a central problem for historians of China--one of them, my colleague at U.C. Berkeley David Johnston, has a lecture titled “Why the Chinese Didn’t Invent the Steam Engine” that proposes some answers. (Elvin book)
S. The pattern can be seen also in Chinese art: we could, if we wanted, write its history--which is arguably the longest continuous history of any artistic tradition--as a series of brilliant technical and aesthetic achievements that the Chinese, for whatever reason, don’t follow up. For instance, color printing: in the early 17th century, the late Ming period, methods of woodblock printing with multiple blocks for the different colors are used to produce colorprints of a refinement unmatched elsewhere else in the world. (In fact, it wasn’t practiced anywhere else at that time--it was essentially a Chinese invention.)
S. (Another example from the same period, an illustration to a popular play.) But instead of continuing to develop this art, the Chinese largely drop it, producing nothing of comparable quality in the 18th-19th centuries, leaving it for the Japanese to learn it from them and use it for the great Ukiyo-e colorprints that everyone knows. When the Chinese begin again in recent times to do serious color woodblock printing, they have to take the Japanese as their teachers.
S. The topic of my brief talk tonight follows this distinctive pattern: it’s about the Chinese conquest, and loss, and regaining (with some foreign help) of effects of space in their painting. (I’m talking mainly about interior space, as in a room; space in landscape is another, separate topic.) In the early periods, as in this tomb tile from the 2nd century A.D., interior space was represented by the placement of the figures and furniture on a ground plane--it was space between things. The people face each other across an interval, so there is space in the picture.
S. By the tenth century, when this famous painting was done--or, properly speaking, the original of this painting, since it survives only in an early copy, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing--by the tenth century, that method had been elaborated by the use of screens, beds, tables, and other objects, along with the figures, to produce a rich and readable interior scene. (It represents the story of a government official named Han Xizai who, when the state he served was nearing its end, began to hold wild and dissolute parties in his villa; these were observed and portrayed by a court artist who was sent by the ruler, and who hid himself in the house for that purpose.) The painting has been much written about, but most accounts of it fail to comment on its subtly scandalous character, perhaps because to the casual observer it looks pretty sober. One has to look longer to find the suggestive passages, the naughty bits. Note the bed at the right end,
S. of which this is a detail. The bedclothes are obviously occupied-- some lovely entertainer has laid down her lute to misbehave with one of the guests, in a space not at all concealed from the others, which makes it all the more improper.
S. A similar passage occurs further on, where Han Xizai is seen again playing a drum to accompany a girl dancing (the presence of a Buddhist monk again violates propriety) and further on, another bed with rumpled bedclothes,
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