Christensen Lecture, Stanford, May 16, 2002: “Passages of Felt Life: A Genre Shift in Ming-Qing Figure Painting.” (Or: revised title: Paintings Made for Women in Ming-Qing China) Shortened version
I’ll begin by outlining very briefly the background of this lecture. In the course of revising for publication my 1991 Getty lectures on images of women in late Chinese painting, I was drawn off into what was to be a chapter but ended by growing into a separate book, about the kinds of artists who produced these pictures, and what other kinds they painted: occasional and decorative and narrative and auspicious and otherwise functional pictures that were kept and used somewhat apart from the “fine art” paintings that made up serious collections. That book, now more or less completed and accepted for (long-delayed) publication, is titled Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China. Most recently I’ve been pulled off onto a more focused pursuit growing out of that one, a hypothetical category of paintings done principally for a clientele and viewership of women, and that’s what I’ll talk about tonight. Occupying the center of this still-blurrily-defined category is a small, very modest eight-leaf album of paintings kept in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, a work not only unpublished and unnoticed, but one that any traditional Chinese connoisseur would close quickly after glancing briefly into it. Later I’ll show the leaves of this album while talking about some large questions that it raises, and new directions of investigation that it points.
In the course of all this, and in describing how virtually all the materials I’m now working with are outside the perceived mainstream of Chinese painting, I find myself arguing against the very positions I espoused in my early writings and lectures. One might see my career as taking a shape like, for instance, Hindemith’s piano suite Ludus Tonalis, in which the last section repeats the first, only backwards and upside down. In early writings I tried to elucidate the theories of the Chinese literati, the culturally dominant male elite who wrote virtually all the Chinese literature on painting, and to use those ideas in interpreting literati or scholar-amateur painting, which at that time was not well understood in the West. When my recent writings touch on literati painting at all, they are more likely to question and undermine the literati ideal, to the dismay of some colleagues and former students.
S,S. (Tianjin Leng Mei, 1724, w. detail.) When I delivered the Getty lectures in Los Angeles, and repeated them in Berkeley and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they were generally well received, but a few people--three, as I recall, one of them my daughter Sarah--criticized them as presenting too exclusively a male viewpoint: how might women have responded to these pictures? I said I would like to have evidence for answering that question, but didn’t know of any. (The painting on the screen, done in 1724 by an artist named Leng Mei, can represent the category of male-oriented meirenhua or beautiful-women paintings that were a major topic in my lectures. Her pose, her come-hither look, touching her pinky to her lips, etc.)
S --. (Another detail; almost blatant in its erotic implications.) The question I’m now pursuing is not exactly the same as the one that Sarah and others raised, but it's closely related: how were women involved, in the late Ming and Qing period, as viewers, owners, consumers of paintings? What kinds of paintings did they prefer? And, still more pointedly, were there kinds of painting particularly addressed to them, intended for their acquisition and enjoyment? Now, with some new materials and new ways of looking at old materials, I feel ready to attempt a provisional answer. I believe, in short, that just as we can infer an intended male viewership through an informed reading of a painting such as this one, we can infer a female viewership through informed readings of some at least of the paintings I’ll show tonight. We do this always with suitable cautions (to which I’ll come back), such as that we don’t suppose any neat division, or aim at fitting every painting into one or the other category, as though all Chinese figure paintings were gender-specific; they obviously weren’t.
A few bits of literary and pictorial evidence can be brought to bear on the paintings-for-women question: they include four mentions of paintings of women hanging in the rooms of characters in the 18th century novel Hong Lou Meng, the Dream of the Red Chamber. I’ve dealt with these in two published articles, and to save time, will say only that they indicate a practice of men hanging provocative, up-to-date pictures of beautiful women like this one in their bedrooms,
S,S. while women hung older, cooler pictures of women by famous artists of the past, especially pictures of women outdoors, or, in one case, a picture of the Nymph of the Luo River. (Identify slides.) The women presumably chose these paintings for themselves, on the market or from dealers; they did not, on the other hand, take part in building the family collection of prestigious, name-artist paintings; that was the man's prerogative. That women were mostly excluded from the male world of connoisseurship and collecting can be judged from Dong Qichang’s listing of five conditions under which calligraphy and paintings should not be shown: the fifth, following on bad weather and vulgar guests, is “in the presence of a woman.”
The paintings that I now believe enriched the cultural lives of guixiu or cultivated women of the late Ming and Qing, along with certain kinds of literary writing to which we know they were often passionately devoted, were decidedly outside the male world of connoisseurship, and consequently have had no respected place in histories of Chinese painting, either Chinese or ours. Very little of what I’ll show has been reproduced in any serious scholarly or museum book, nor is it, with a few exceptions, to be found in any major collection, except in neglected corners of old collections. It’s mostly unpublished, or taken from auction catalogs and similarly obscure sources. What I believe must once have been a large and popular body of painting, then, now has to be reconstructed from scraps that have somehow survived the scornful dismissal by literati critics, the failure of collectors to value and preserve them, and the dealers’ practice of turning them into “fakes” by adding false signatures and attributions--the only way, within the Chinese system, they could be given any commercial value at all.
S,S. With all that as introduction, I’ll begin showing leaves from the album, and talking about it and the larger issues. I saw the album at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst (Museum for East Asian Art) in Cologne. It bears a false signature of Qiu Ying, the great professional master active in Suzhou in the first half of the 16th century, who was the leading practitioner at that time of the conservative, representational style of figure painting: much of what I’ll show today is by followers of his, and quite a lot of it is similarly misattributed to Qiu Ying himself. The album appears to be late Ming or early Qing in date--that is, early to mid 17th century--and by some follower of Qiu Ying. It will appear unimpressive to most viewers at first sight, and it would. as I say, be quickly closed and dismissed by any traditional Chinese connoisseur. But as I looked at it longer, I realized that it offered what may be a first foothold on the project of determining a body of painting intended primarily for an audience of women.
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