Erotic Painting in China (Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition, Museum Rietberg, from November 2002.)
Erotic painting has a long history in China. Examples are mentioned in texts from the early centuries of the Christian era, and a few crude representations of sexual couplings can be seen on painted tiles and relief designs from even earlier periods. The eighth century figure master Zhou Fang, who worked in the imperial court, is said to have made erotic pictures, and artists as prominent as Tang Yin, Qiu Ying, and Chen Hongshou in the Ming are reported to have included them in their output. However, no genuine erotic works by any of these survive. The erotic woodcut-printed pictures from the late Ming published by Robert van Gulik[1] probably represent a continuation of an early type of painting, in handscroll or album form, that presented a series of images of couples in various settings demonstrating different sexual postures; recorded works purportedly by Tang Yin and Qiu Ying have such titles as “The Ten Glorious Positions.” If we can believe accounts in poetry and fiction and a few pictorial representations, scrolls and albums of this kind were enjoyed by couples before lovemaking, to intensify passion and inspire sexual experimentation.
From the late Ming on, the album was the preferred, all but exclusive form, and in the best examples the simple series of copulating couples in different positions gives way to a more sophisticated and richer type in which open depictions of sex acts are interspersed with leaves portraying, or hinting delicately at, flirtations and seductions, even scenes of romantic love. Although the leaves of these, which can be called “part-erotic” albums, are not unified by any narrative or other program, and the participants in the scenes do not reappear from leaf to leaf, the non-erotic or subtly erotic leaves serve to contextualize the sexual acts depicted in the others, much as the non-erotic materials in the new high-level erotic fiction, beginning with the late 16th century masterwork Jin Ping Mei (Plum in the Golden Vase) and continuing with Rou Pu Tuan (Prayermat of Flesh) and others, frame and contextualize the more lurid accounts of sexual activities. This development in fiction probably inspired the new type of erotic album; in both, the way is opened for a much broader palette of literary and pictorial effects: irony, implicit narratives, intricate interactions among the participants.
Central to this expansion of the capacities of the erotic album, it would appear, was the Suzhou master Gu Jianlong (1606-1687 or later.) An undated album by him, known now only in an old reproduction book, is the earliest datable example of the new type.[2] The pictures in it make good use of complex spatial schemes--rooms beyond rooms, seen through doorways and other openings back. These not only draw the viewer’s gaze deeper and more insistently into the picture, for scopophilic effects of penetration, but also permit the introduction of sub-themes of voyeurism, sexual rivalries, and the like, as minor figures observe and become potentially engaged in the actions of the major ones. Spatial effects of this kind can be seen in some leaves of the Ellsworth album (no. ), which is by a follower of Gu Jianlong. Individual leaves in these albums are vignettes, charged with narrative implications beyond what is directly portrayed in them; the ingenious artists plant clues that arouse both curiosity and imagination: what is the relationship between the people? What has led up to the moment depicted, and what will follow it?
The creation of the new erotic album by Gu Jianlong and others, chiefly in Suzhou and in the early Qing period, does not supplant altogether the older type, which still dominates the large-scale production of erotic albums that continues down to recent times. The former C. T. Loo album (no. ), probably dating from late 17th or early 18th century, still exemplifies the older type, but on a level of quality well above the routine production. Chinese erotic albums truly worthy of scholarly study and museum exhibition--those comparable or equal in quality, that is, to the best paintings of other kinds from the same periods--are relatively few. I know only about twenty-five or thirty, in reproductions or originals. Most of what survivives--and, unhappily, most of what has been published--appears to be copies or copies of copies surviving from the copious commercial output of painters of lesser skills and little originality, made in response to a heavy and continuing demand. A mid-19th century prefect in Suzhou complains that the market in his city is flooded with lewd books and paintings, and that worst of all, these have even penetrated the women’s quarters. The paintings are worse than the books, he adds, since books can only affect those literate enough to read them, while just looking at the pictures is enough to corrupt.[3] Edicts prohibiting their production and dissemination seem to have had little long-term effect.
The painters who made the best of the erotic albums were not specialists in that genre, but highly trained, broadly versatile professional masters of the type that I term, in the title of a forthcoming book about them, “urban studio artists”: Gu Jianlong and his followers, Xu Mei, followers of Leng Mei, many others.[4] They might be summoned for some period of service in the imperial court, as Gu Jianlong and Xu Mei were: the Manchu emperors, fascinated by the popular and erotic culture of the southern (Jiangnan, Yangzi Delta) cities, employed painters from those cities to make pictures that captured some of its alluring aspects. The Kangxi Emperor probably commissioned a series of large painted illustrations to Jin Ping Mei from Gu Jianlong, and the Qianlong Emperor appears to have had one of his court artists, still unidentified, produce some of the most finished and elegant erotic paintings that have survived.[5]
Erotic paintings were associated with the imperial court in the popular imagination from much earlier times. Stories (probably apocryphal) about depraved rulers tell of lewd paintings executed on the walls or ceilings of their palace chambers, as stimuli for debauchery. An erotic handscroll that the antihero Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei gives to his favorite concubine Pan Jinlian is said to have come from the palace. This association is reflected in the common name for the genre, chungong-hua or “Spring Palace Pictures.” Erotic fiction in China similarly takes as its frequent subjects the misdoings of rulers and their consorts. Fervid imaginings of what went on behind the walls of the Forbidden City, and of the pleasures one might enjoy if possessed of absolute power, were irresistable to novelists and painters and the audiences for whom they worked.
Beginning with an important album by the Suzhou master Xu Mei, active in the early decades of the 18th century,[6] and continuing with other high-level 18th century examples such as the one that bears seals of Leng Mei but is probably by a somewhat later artist (no. ) and the Ellsworth album by some follower of Gu Jianlong (no. ), the erotic album in China develops in the direction of greater thematic diversity and complexity: voyeurism, masturbation by both sexes, homosexuality, bestiality, and incest are all portrayed or hinted at, along with simple sexual ennui and impotence. If this change had been directed only at titillating audiences bored with simpler sexual themes, the outcome might have been a descent into grossness. What saves the best of the later albums from that is a combination of high aesthetic quality and wit. The people in these leaves, engaged in devious, sometimes bizarre sexual pursuits, are observed and presented by the artists with an amused delicacy, so that actions and situations that may cross the line into the seriously kinky become somehow inoffensive. The same refinements, through which aesthetic response tempers the erotic, render the pictures unsuited to the function of simple arousal that the cruder albums performed, for instance as aids to masturbation.
Very little of comparable quality can be found in Chinese erotic painting done after the end of the 18th century, although a few albums from the Shanghai School in the later 19th century may eventually find places in the small body of surviving high-level examples. Erotic paintings from the best periods and artists, as represented in this exhibition, fully deserve to be included, I believe, in our accounts of later Chinese painting. That they play no part in Chinese histories is easily understandable when we note that the infrequent mentions of them in Chinese writings, down to the present day, are virtually all condemnatory. Although the acquisition and enjoyment of the albums was widespread and more or less tolerated, writing positively about them was evidently impermissable. The many denunciations of them, often virulent, are only rarely directed at consumers--the assumption, implicit or stated, is that if pictures of this kind are made available, people will acquire and enjoy them. Zhang Geng, writing around 1735, says of Qiu Ying’s erotic paintings, “It is human nature to like lascivious things, and there is no one who wouldn't want to obtain one of these for secret enjoyment.”[7] It is the artists who paint them and the dealers who sell them who are assigned to hell in one moralizing fulmination after another, Zhang Geng’s included. An exception is a late Ming writer who considers ownership of them a transgression, assigning “ten demerits a day” for “keeping lewd books or lewd paintings.” But even he goes on to assign “unlimited demerits” to those who sell them.[8]
Foreign writers in recent times, by contrast, have looked for ways to sanitize the Chinese erotic paintings, meaning perhaps to defend the Chinese against the stigma of having made pornography or “dirty pictures.” Dealers and collecters sometimes call them “bride’s books,” and argue that their purpose was to instruct newlywed women about the ways of sex. Some writers have associated them with religious sexual practices, whether Daoist or Tantric Buddhist; some maintain that since sex was regarded as a natural part of life by the Chinese, no onus was attached to depictions of it. But, although the erotic paintings were certainly used and understood in a diversity of contexts, none of these foreign beliefs about them is, to my knowledge, supported in Chinese writings, or in the pictures themselves. Perhaps, living in a society that is more open and uncensorial toward sex in its manifold forms of expression, we should no longer feel the need for seeing Chinese erotic paintings as anything but what they are: pornography, if you will, but most importantly, pictures that explore the intricate byways of human sexuality with perception and wit, and present them with a sensitivity that allows viewers to find in them images of their own open or hidden fantasies, and to experience vicariously the fantasies of others--and even to understand some aspects of Chinese culture and society that sources of other kinds leave out. What matters is that when all the copies and mediocre examples are removed from consideration, what remains makes up a tradition of erotic painting hard to match in world art in its depth, diversity, and high artistic quality.
Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition: the former C. T. Loo album.
Of the three Chinese erotic albums represented in this exhibition, this is the simplest and oldest in type. It probably dates from the late 17th or early 18th century, the Kangxi era, and may be by some artist working in Zhejiang province, perhaps the Hangzhou or Shaoxing region, since elements of style in it are reminiscent of the late Zhe school and even Chen Hongshou (but without Chen’s archaistic distortions.) The skilled and readable delineation of furniture, railings, and architecture, along with other well-drawn materials, suggests that it is an original work, not a copy. Each of the eight leaves depicts a heterosexual couple having or about to have sex. In one, a girl servant helps to support the woman, and in another the man appears to be of northern nomadic origin. Other than these minor variations, the pictures all present youthful couples engaged in amorous activities in garden or interior settings. The rich mineral blue-and-green coloring of the rocks, the luxuriant trees and flowers (which also serve to set the seasons), all contribute to the auspicious and comfortable atmosphere created in the pictures. The lovemaking is tender, unhurried; no signs of strong passion appear on the faces—at most, slight smiles of pleasure. Genitals are exposed and in most of the leaves engaged, but they are depicted modestly, not blatantly; the women exhibit little public hair. (All this is in strong contrast to Japanese erotic pictures, in which the size of genitals is typically exaggerated, pubic hair isabundant, and the participants often grimace as if in pain, or otherwise betray the intensity of their ardor.) The furnishings and appurtenances indicate well-off, cultivated households, ideal environments for pursuing amorous affairs. In one of the leaves the man is wearing a scholar’s cap, an indication of status. No irony colors the pictures, no tension between desire and circumstance. This is just the kind of album, arousing but at the same time calming, that might well have been used in the way seen in one of the pictures, looked at by the couple together before they proceed with sex. We can imagine that erotic albums by conservative Ming masters may have looked like this, allowing for updates in style.
Leaf with Couple Looking at Erotic Album
The young man and woman are looking at an erotic album before making love. He, at least, is looking at the album, and encouraging her to do the same; it is unclear where her gaze is directed, and she appears more engaged in clutching him and spreading her legs impatiently. The leaf exposed in the album is a composition quite like the one they themselves occupy: the couple on a mat beside an ornamental rock beneath a tree in a garden. This is one of several representations in the erotic albums of this theme, which is to be found also in fiction of the time--it is as though the artists are advertising the efficacy of their own creations.
Formal repetitions in the leaf are almost too apparent: the rock and tree backing up the leftward lean of the figures, the rhythmic disposition of their limbs, the similar ovals of the two faces in close proximity. The distinction in skin color, the woman’s whiter and the man’s darker, is common in the albums but more marked here than in other leaves; it may indicate a difference in social status, a possibility strengthened by his simple shirt and hairstyle. He may, that is, be dallying above his station. The peaches and lizhi fruit in the basin and the flowers in the bronze pot make this a scene of summer.
Leaf with Girl Leaning Over Pine
Small white chrysanthemums identify the season as autumn. Lovemaking is languid. The girl leans over a pine which leans over a stream; she rests her head on her crossed hands, looking more meditative than aroused. as he enters her from behind. The tips of her tiny bound feet protrude from beneath a red skirt below. These, along with the red rails of the low balustrade and clusters of red-brown leaves, add warm touches to the otherwise cool blue-green coloring. Here, too, the way the nearly horizontal leaning of the rockery and the pine echo the postures of the figures betrays an artifice typical of the professional master working at a late stage in a long tradition.
Leaf with Boy and Girl Beneath Willow
This, in contrast to the other leaves shown here, appears to be a scene of young love, carried out with enthusiasm and after some preparation; this is not a spontaneous encounter. They have spread a mat on the ground beside a garden pond, beneath a willlow. With an orchid in her hair, she leans against a backrest, and has set down a fan decorated with butterflies in flight, an emblem of light dalliance. She rests one hand on his shoulder, the other on a pile of painting albums, presumably erotic. She wears a light green gauze jacket over a red moxiong, a garment that Chinese women had worn since the Tang dynasty as a kind of broad brassiere[9]--it is often the only piece of clothing that the woman has not removed in Chinese erotic pictures, an indication, perhaps, that gazing at the female breasts was not the turn-on for Chinese males that it has been in the West. Far more arousing for them were the woman’s bound feet and the small embroidered shoes worn over them, which are shown prominently in the pictures.
[1] Especially the 24-leaf album titled Huaying Jinzhen published by him as vol. 2 of his Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Tokyo, 1961; reprint, Taipei, n.d.), based on woodblocks he had acquired in Kyoto. Other “late Ming” materials reproduced by van Gulik should be used with caution, since some are clearly from his own hand and may be his own invention, not based on any Chinese originals.
[2]Gu Yunchen Huachun Tuce (Shanghai: Yiyuan Zhenshang She, n.d.). The only copy I know was in the library of the late Osvald Sirén, and is now in the library of the Rietberg Museum, Zürich (M XI B81).
[3] Wang Xiaozhuan, Yuan Ming Qing Sandai Jinhui Xiaoshuo Xiqu Shiliao (Historical Materials on the Banned Fiction and Drama in Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) (Beijing, 1958) p. 111-112; quoted in part in Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), p. 118.
[4] The book is Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China, forthcoming. A second part, on Chinese erotic painting, will be separately published. A few passages from the latter book have been excerpted for these essays.
[5] For these, see James Cahill, "The Emperor's Erotica" (Ching Yüan Chai So-shih II) In: Kaikodo Journal XI, 1999, pp. 24-43.
[6] In the collection of Guy Ullens de Schooten; see Bilishi Youlunsi Fufu Cang ZhongguoShuhua Xuanji (Beijing: Palace Museum, 2002), no. 13. The whole album is reproduced in Sotheby’s New York Chinese paintings auction catalog for March 21, 1995, no. 52.
[8] Yuan Huang (1533-1606), see Wang Xiaozhuan, op. cit., p. 178; translated in Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 150.
[9] See Robert H. van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961) p. 299; also Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing, An Illustrated Guide, Hong Kong, 1994, pp. 22-23, where it is referred to as a "bib brassiere."
Spots of color and movement around the two lovers animate the scene and suggest the exhilaration they feel: white flowers, swallows darting over the pond, bright-green moss-dots on the tree trunk, the red and blue of their discarded clothes. But all this is peripheral, and the viewer’s gaze, like the gazes of the two lovers, returns always to the scopophilic focus, the point of their sexual union.
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