Issues in Sino-Japanese Artistic Exchange (James Cahill)
My title and topic were given me by Judy Andrews, but I’m happy with them, because “exchange” avoids the prickly issue of “influence.” I haven’t enough time this morning to argue that issue at length again, and most of you are familiar with it anyway. I sometimes quote Michael Baxandall, who wrote (in an “Excursus Against Influence” in his Patterns of Intention book): “‘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.” He is writing about artist-to-artist situations, but what he writes applies as well to cross-cultural transmissions—for our subject today, between China and Japan. If the formulation that sees the 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 cross-cultural exchanges has met with would never have happened. And of course I’ll use that approach today. Seeing it as a matter of artists’ choices is backed up by the obvious circumstance that when the exchanges happen, some artists participate while others, often the majority, choose not to. This is true in Ming-Qing China, when some painters chose to adopt new ideas from Western pictures; in 19c France, when some painters (the most interesting, as it turned out) chose to adopt exotic and fresh pictorial practices from Japanese prints (and were in effect liberated, not constrained, by that choice); and in China and Japan in the situations we’ll be dealing with today.
Adopting what we can call the Baxandall model 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. I’ll try this morning for the same balance, attending both to what Japanese artists took from China and to what Chinese artists took from Japan. The latter is more difficult to do, since for the reasons just mentioned, any scholarship on it has to be recent and limited--and likely to be carried out against some opposition. One can’t write histories of Japanese 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—how much China adopted from the art of cultures to the west of them, for instance, is brought out clearly in the recent Met exhibition and catalog “China: Dawn of a Golden Age.” However, I haven’t myself done more than begin to think about and look for evidences of adoptions by Chinese artists from Japanese art, so what I say about it will be very brief and preliminary, and dependent on the work of others from whom you will hear later (Ralph’s book, Aida Wang’s work, others.)
I turn first to Japan, and what Japanese artists adopted from China. Since most aspects of this huge topic have been extensively worked over already, I’ll speak only about a few cases that bear out the argument with which I began, that such transfers are best regarded as active recipient adopting freely from passive source.
S,S. I argued in a lecture given some years ago, using as principal visual evidence a large 22-leaf album by Sesshu mysteriously ignored by Sesshu scholars, that Sesshu must have not only had first-hand familiarity with Southern Sung painting, but was able to recreate it, at some time in his life and when he chose to, on a level of finesse and fidelity that would be hard to match among the Ming painters of China. One might even argue that the full nuanced potential of ink-monochrome ptg as practiced in Southern Sung China is continued more in Japan than in China, where the scholar-amateur artists on one hand, and the Zhe-school masters on the other, are inclined to reject its refinements and pursue very different directions.
S,S. Once we recognize how closely Sesshu could imitate Southern Sung styles when he chose to, the question becomes: why does he stop doing that and transform those styles to accord with Japanese taste? We can begin by juxtaposing a Chinese original in the manner of Yu-chien (as I still take the fan ptg at right to be, although recently some Japanese scholars have argued that it’s Japanese) with Sesshu’s derivations, the well-known copy after Yu-chien and
S – The Tokyo Nat’l Mus. Haboku Sansui. I would speak of more distinct and discrete brushstrokes, a more stepped system of ink gradations, and allover a care for sheer visual beauty, sacrificing the sense of space and other traits of naturalism. But that’s too large a subject to pursue now
Sesshu was an exception in that he went to China and saw paintings there; most Japanese artists had access only to Chinese ptgs and prints that were in Japan. If we think of artists in both cultures choosing among available styles and motifs, the questions become: what was in fact available to them? And how did they use it? I myself was working on the problem of what Chinese Ming-Qing ptgs were in Japan in the Edo period for artists to see, pub. an article (etc.—have copy, can Xerox)
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