James Cahill paper for NYU symposium: “Influence, Confluence . . .” March 15, 2001
I want to begin by distancing myself a bit from the title of the conference: I join Michael Baxandall in being uncomfortable with the formulation of artistic relationships in terms of influence, preferring to see artists as active agents choosing what’s useful to them from a diversity of sources, including some from other artistic traditions, rather than as receiving “influence” from them. Baxandall writes: “‘Influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient; it seems to me to reverse the active/passive relation. . . If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.”
Baxandall is writing about so-called “influence” among artists (and all uses of the term “influence” in this lecture should be understood as having quotation marks around them); but what he writes applies as well to cross-cultural transmissions--for my subject today, between China and the other two cultures of East Asia, Korea and Japan. If the formulation that sees the later, so-called “receiving” culture or artist as in fact the active party, making deliberate choices among a diversity of available styles and motifs and “pictorial ideas” to adopt or appropriate--if this formulation could be accepted and used by everybody who speaks and writes about the matter, replacing the “influence” model, much of the hostility that scholarship on this subject has met with would never have happened. In my case, it goes back to 1970, when Michael Sullivan gave a paper at an international symposium in Taipei on European prints and paintings that were in China (by way of the Jesuits) in the late Ming and early Qing, and I used that as a basis for arguing how Chinese artists took from these pictures new pictorial ideas and techniques that they found attractive. (For that occasion, it was principally Wu Bin; in later writings I made the same argument for quite a few other artists. In those days, I’m afraid that I myself sometimes slipped into the “influence” model, as I’ve tried not to do for some years now.) What China took from Europe isn’t properly relevant to this conference; I begin by confronting this matter to clear the way for the approach I’ll take this morning.
Adopting what we can call the Baxandall model (although of course it wasn’t new with him) will allow us also to take a more even-handed approach to the question of China’s relationship with surrounding cultures in art. In other fields of Chinese studies, the sinocentric version of this, in which China was virtually always the source of “influence” rather than the recipient, and incursions and invasions from other cultures were absorbed and “sinicized,” has given way to better-balanced accounts that can be summed up in the title of the 1983 book edited by Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals. My lecture this morning, which has to do with China’s relationship in the arts with Korea and Japan, will try for the same balance, attending both to what China gave them and what China received from them. The latter is more difficult to do, since for the reasons just mentioned, any scholarship on it has be recent and limited--and likely to be carried out against some opposition. One cannot write histories of Japanese or Korean art without acknowledging Chinese “influence”; one could, and we did, write histories of Chinese art in which all the important developments were internal (with the only significant exception in Buddhism and its art, which I won’t deal with today, leaving it to others more at home in it.) Only now do we begin to realize how inadequate that one-way version must be. However, I haven’t myself done more than begin to think about and look for evidences of adoptions by Chinese artists from Korean and Japanese art, so what I say about it will be very brief and preliminary.
First, Korea, in which I’m not at all knowledgeable, but since none of the Korean painting specialists is taking part (big symposium at UCLA coinciding with this one), I’ll have to stand in, however inadequately.
S,S. In 1973 the Yamato Bunkakan in Nara held an important exhibition of Korean paintings in Japanese collections. The catalog reproduces the pictures and gives minimal information on them, but doesn’t discuss the evidence for their being Korean. For most, from the later periods, there were signatures or seals of Korean artists, but for some, especially the early ones, it was simply a matter of their being “Korean by style.” I was in Japan at the time of the symposium held there in connection with the exhibition, on relations in art between Korea, Japan, and China, and I spoke at some length, raising the question of why two of the paintings in that show, now on the screen, were included, since they seemed to me to stand apart from the others, one looking very Chinese, the other very Japanese, neither demonstrably Korean. The painting at right was cataloged, on the basis of a seal in one lower corner, as by [Ri Shûbun], the artist of a well-known bamboo album painted in 1424, who is listed in early Japanese records as a Ming painter, but whom the Japanese came to consider Korean. In any case, inspection showed that the seal was on separate paper from the painting; and on all other grounds the picture appears to belong in Muromachi-period Japan (another version of the composition, by an early Kano master, is known.)
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