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CLP 81: 2002 “Passages of Felt Life: A Genre Shift in Ming-Qing Figure Painting.” (Or: “Paintings Done for Women in Ming-Qing China?”) Christensen Lecture, Stanford

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small, very modest eight-leaf album of paintings kept in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, a work not only unpublished and unnoticed, but one that any traditional Chinese connoisseur would close quickly after glancing briefly into it.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.

This is one of its eight leaves, with a detail. As a maid brings tea, a woman looks up from embroidering something--a cuff?--more study will be needed to identify exactly what is going on in these pictures. All of them represent women in domestic interiors, and all are quiet, unassuming portrayals of women’s occupations. And they are portrayed, I believe, in ways that suggest the pictures are directed toward women viewers, for reasons I’ll try to bring out as we look at them. I can’t remember seeing any other album of just this type, but the absence of other known examples is probably a matter of survival and identification--most haven’t been preserved, and those that have survived go unnoticed, as this one was. It would be hard to imagine that this was a singular creation; it probably represents a type of which more examples are probably buried in museum storage rooms, private collections, or dealers’ stocks.

S,S. Another leaf, in which a woman is having her hair done by a young maid. Books, an inkstone, and other objects are seen on a desk in the farther room. The album is an intimate form, to be looked at in private by one person or two. (It was also the chosen form in the late period for erotic paintings, about which I’ll speak later.) The drawing is precise, in its way elegant; the compositions are spacious, not constricting the women so severely as some later paintings of women in their boudoirs (such as the one I showed at the beginning) were to do. Close attention to sparse but telling details reveals the pictures to be of higher quality than one might suppose on first looking--designs on textiles, touches of gold on the flowers, the archaic bronze beaker, the painting on the fan, all reveal a high level of technical finesse. One is reminded of the great Suzhou tradition of handicrafts, some of it such as embroidery practiced by women.

What this album represents and why it is important can perhaps be best understood through some parallels, inexact but suggestive, with developments in Chinese literature of this same period. The late Ming-early Qing is now recognized in all fields of Chinese studies as an age of great economic and social changes, which affected every aspect of the culture. Rising prosperity, along with urbanization, meant more widespread literacy, an expanded readership that stimulated the production of popular and vernacular forms of literature to meet a new demand. Similarly, a great increase in the number of families sufficiently well off to aspire to elegant living created a demand for “pictures for use and pleasure,” as I call them in my forthcoming book to distinguish them from paintings intended for aesthetic contemplation.

The writers of the new fiction and drama turned away from the high-minded themes of classical Chinese learning (while often echoing or even parodying them), as well as from the unnaturalness of the literary language, to explore a “low mimetic” mode--in Northrup Frye’s definition, “a mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction.” The painters of our pictures, as we'll see, similarly break out of the limited thematic range of traditional painting, devoted as that was to edifying and symbolic subjects, all deliberately distanced from quotidian life. They create their own version of a low mimetic mode for painting, portraying scenes and situations that could be imagined as occurring, not as defining moments in the careers of Confucian exemplars or historical personages, or in the ideal lives of “lofty scholars” inhabiting an unreal realm, but as small events and epiphanies in the everyday lives of the real people who made up their audience. At their best, they can convey that quality that Susanne Langer, in a memorable phrase describing the real content of a work of art, calls “a passage of ‘felt life.’” (She doesn’t apply it especially to works with ‘low mimetic” subjects, but I’ve appropriated it in that meaning.)

S,S. Here the woman has simply dozed off into a nap, at a table on a garden terrace. A cat under the table looks out at us; on a plate at the far end are unidentified red and blue objects, perhaps rolls of cloth. Reading these leaves requires more work; but work that will be repaid with a better understanding of women’s lives in mid-17th century Suzhou. The pictures persuade us that nothing here is faked, or lightly invented. It is exactly this basic shift in mode, in effect creating a new genre, that opens Chinese painting, at least the kinds with which we are concerned, to wider participation by women. Ian Watt, noting the importance of women readers in the rise of the English realistic novel, quotes Henry James’s tribute: “Women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real with a kind of personal tact. . . .” David Johnson, writing about the readership for popular Chinese literature, points out that women “must have remained much closer to the main currents of non-elite culture; they had not been taught to prefer the monuments of the great literary tradition, the subtleties of classical scholarship, the systems of the approved philosophers. These literate, well-to-do women must also have formed a significant audience for popular written literature.” The same assumptions can be made--short of positive proof, but compelling--about the likelihood of women having been engaged in choosing and using popular paintings, which similarly presented familiar materials in traditional representational styles, free of allusions to the old masters and the like. It may well have been the wife or the matriarch of the household who selected paintings for family occasions, with the artists responding to her understood taste, while the dominant male chose the more prestigious name-artist paintings for the family “collection.”

S.S. The pictures in the album, which appear at first to be simple in subject and very traditional in style, and so of small interest, turn out to be much more than that. Here the woman, one leg bent with her foot on a stool, leaning on a side table, gazes pensively at what appears to be a short sword. (No, sorry, forget about Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith.) I’m sure that some in the audience will have ideas about what is represented in these, and I’ll welcome suggestions afterwards. I would guess also that some of the situations depicted probably wouldn’t have been clear to male viewers even in the artist’s time--if I can take my own responses as representative--another indication that the intended audience was women, who would recognize the implications of what is shown in them. The pictures belong, that is, to the somewhat mysterious feminine world from which we men are partly barred.

David Johnson continues, “It is not surprising, therefore, that . . . one of the hallmarks of true popular literature in China is the heroine who initiates actions, who is one of the moving forces of the plot, and who is not submissive but who, on the contrary, struggles against the restrictions of conventional domestic morality.” Again, something similar can be said of the paintings I’m showing: unlike the meiren (beautiful woman) and erotic genres intended primarily for male viewers, which treat women as objects of desire, the ones I’ve tentatively accepted as belonging to our category depict women with more dignity and individuality than they had commonly enjoyed in traditional Chinese painting. The women in this album, while not idealized or made noble, appear self-sufficient and secure in their domestic realm.

That being so, one might ask, why would women take pleasure in looking at such pictures as these? Because they present aspects of their lives in a way that valorizes them, treating them as equal in importance to the didactic and idealizing images of women in older paintings. Vignettes of everyday life, besides evoking pleasurable twinges of recognition, take on significance when artists and writers and their audiences have the sense that something extraordinary is happening in their lives. What this was has been explored in recent writing by scholars in Chinese women’s studies such as Susan Mann, Dorothy Ko, Victoria Cass, Ellen Widmer, others. Women’s lives were opening up, some old shackles were relaxing; they could participate more broadly, although still within limits, in the cultural life of the time.

S.S. Four of the leaves depict pairs of women who don’t seem to be in the simple mistress-servant relationship, but in one closer to equality. Here one woman carries what appears to be a bundle of scrolls? and approaches another, who looks up, resting her forearm lightly on a tao or case of books. Indications of literacy and culture are seen in most of the leaves; this is an upper-class household, and the women are cultivated people, representatives of the gui xiu, “talented gentry women of the boudoir,” who became more prominent in late Ming, along with a general rising prosperity. One would like to link such a picture to the literary networks, women writing for a readership of other women, which have been studied in recent years for just this period. Or to poetry clubs formed within large scholarly households, with all the women of the household, mothers and daughters, wives and concubines, taking part.

Whether that’s the right reading or not matters less than that the pictures allow, even encourage, such readings; they are evocative, subtle, their themes understated but rich and original. They don’t follow old conventions, so far as I can see, but depict up-to-date situations. I don’t think they illustrate a text, and we aren’t meant to read them in any sequence, or to find the same people appearing in successive leaves. A new type of painting album was coming into existence at this time, as I’ve argued in recent writings, a type best represented in certain erotic albums. Albums of this new type have no narrative or other program, but are made up of what can be termed vignettes--individual, non-sequential pictures that invite quasi-narrative readings: what is happening? what went before, and what will follow? What is the relationship between the women?

S.S. The theme of footbinding appears to underlie two of the leaves, if I’m reading them right. This is another hot topic--two recent books about it (Dorothy Ko, Wang Ping), both discussing this in the context of women’s bonding, which is exactly what appears to be happening in these leaves. In one, at right, two women of a household--possibly concubines--gaze at each other through a window between an interior room and what I take to be a verandah overlooking a garden. The one outside leans on a shelf, holding a fan; the one indoors, a book beside her, is holding her right foot with both hands, as if massaging it, perhaps preparing to unwind the cloth binding. The two women smile, as they might over some shared, private understanding. The space opens back in upper right to the indoor woman’s bedchamber. Although pictures of women in their boudoirs were sometimes done as turn-ons for men (as in the example I showed first), these are very different; the male viewer feels, again, somewhat shut out.

S,S, In the other leaf, one woman leans against a pillar to raise her foot and massage it? or simply to exhibit it to the other, who leans over to look. What is passing between them, as in all these leaves, must be inferred from their postures and situations. (I am sure that wheels are whirring in the minds of any Chinese women’s studies scholars in the audience, as they should be. The pictures invite more informed readings than mine.) The complete absorption of the women in their quiet concerns, in the objects of their gazes, in their relationships, is extended by the viewer to imbue the whole paintings and deepen their resonances.

S -- If we try to think of predecessors for this mode in earlier Chinese figure painting, they will all, I think, turn out to be very different. The figures in the Qingming cityscape, which might appear to be a genre scene, are in fact bit players in a grand tableau with a political theme, “a prosperous city in a well-ruled empire.” Quasi-genre pictures of beggars or happy farmers are presented as subjects interesting to the viewers but somewhat removed, not as having direct relevance to the viewers’ lives or as conveying truths about them. That capacity was new in paintings such as the album we’re looking at, and some related things I’ll show--as new to painting as the vernacular fiction was to literature.

-- S. To continue with this digression for a moment: it would not be difficult, on the other hand, to think of developments in late Ming and later painting that are somehow related. We can observe intricate plays between classical and mundane: Chen Hongshou replaces one of his “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” with an absurdly modern personage, probably the man for whom the scroll was done; Ren Xiong, in his self-portrait, makes the mismatch between the heroic image and his all-too-human self the very point of the painting.

S,S. Pictures that at least present themselves as portraying everyday-life scenes and common people appear in Qing painting from this time on--Hua Yan of the mid-18th century, Ren Bonian of the 19th. But even those, while not unrelated, seldom if ever convey the kind of intimacy and immediacy of the scenes of women in the album we are looking at, to which I now return.

S.S. Finally, a leaf in which we look from outside at two women in the moon window of a house, the older one with her arm around the younger and gazing fondly at her; the younger one, chin resting lightly on the back of her hand, looking at a pair of ducks in the lower left corner, a motif that in more usual contexts would stand for marital happiness. I don’t think we would be over-reading to detect lesbian overtones in certain of these pictures, including this one. But if so, it‘s presented from the women’s perspective, not displayed for the titillation of men, as in some erotic album leaves. Whatever the relationship, the picture is again subtle, evocative, elegant. And all of this is, as I say, quite unprecedented in Chinese painting. (One can, of course, find pictures of palace ladies leaning on each other and so forth in earlier paintings; but these belong, again, within a classical thematic, and offer nothing so particularized, so immediate as this. The many pictures of palace ladies and their activities with which we’re familiar are very different in character.) And all this is accomplished by an artist so obscure that his or her name was obliterated and replaced with that of Qiu Ying, so that the album might have some commercial value, as it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

Now, I would make this album a centerpiece of my hypothetical group of paintings done for women, and try to work outward, paying special attention to 17th century Suzhou figure artists, followers of Qiu Ying, in whose time and place the production of these paintings appears to have been concentrated.

S,S. If we look for paintings similar in compositional type and style, these present themselves: an album of eighteen scenes of sericulture or silk production, preserved in Japan (former Sumitomo Collection). The same spare compositions with the women drawn small, in what appears to be a similar style. But I know these leaves only from bad auction-catalog reproductions, and can't pursue the relationship further. (If anyone knows the whereabouts of the album, please tell me.) One could argue that unlike the other album, these represent a classical subject, of which earlier depictions exist; one could reply that they appear not to follow conventional designs, and may well be first-hand renderings of activities that did indeed figure in the daily lives of women of this time, especially those in Suzhou.

S,S. An early Qing Suzhou figure painter named Wang Qiao painted in 1657 this picture of a high-born, cultivated lady (note the scrolls and books) in her boudoir. The long inscription was written by an 18th century woman poet named Zhou Qi. Women in their boudoirs had been the most frequent image in Chinese love poetry from the pre-Tang period on. But where the poems usually imply a male viewer gazing voyeuristically at the woman in her bedroom, and many later boudoir paintings (such as the one I showed) suggest the same by presenting the woman as the focus of erotic desire, the earliest examples of the type in painting known to me, such as this one, may not have been done with that implication, and might well have hung in women’s chambers. The woman here, with her maids, is engaged in her morning toilette, perhaps after a night of lovemaking, as is suggested by the rumpled bedclothes and quickly discarded garments on the stool, as well as by her weary posture and a general effect of disorder in the picture. Or it may be not disorder but the aftermath of passion that the artist meant to convey, with the taut, supple fine-line patterns serving as a graphic articulation of qing, emotion.

S --. That everything in the picture, including the drawing, is to be read as distinctively feminine can be demonstrated by comparison with another work by the same artist, painted, as it happens, only a few months later (they differ in size, and are not a pair). This one represents a male scholar, his clothing drawn in heavy, angular brushstrokes strongly fluctuating in breadth, gazing at a hanging-scroll representation of a Buddhist figure (probably Guanyin) held by a boy servant. Everything in this composition is specific to the scholarly male subject: antique bronzes (not serving as flower-holders, but for antiquarian appreciation), the wrapped qin (zither) he holds, the bronze wine-pot and tipped winecup, the un-neat, looser drawing of the bundle of scrolls--and, of course, the high-mindedness implied by his absorption in an emblem of spirituality. The absence of the rectilinear frame set up in the other by the heavy furniture allows him a freedom of movement not enjoyed by her; and when we recall that the women in the album were similarly framed, we recognize in these compositional types a formal counterpart to the social duality of inner (nei) and outer (wai), feminine and masculine. Whether these stylistic distinctions imply different intended audiences for the two pictures is harder to say.

I should make it clear once more before going on that I’m not arguing for a sharp distinction, or supposing that all pictures of women were made for one gender-defined audience or the other; lots of them could have appealed more or less equally to both. I’m only trying to discern a general, very loose and tentative distinction between intended audiences for some kinds of figure painting, and to recognize how artists adapted their pictures to the tastes and preferences of the people who were expected to acquire and enjoy them, using gender, among other criteria, as a guide. I’ve lectured and written quite a lot already on the types that obviously were made for male viewers, with subtle or unsubtle turn-ons and invitational signals--they were treated at length in my 1991 lectures. Now we can begin to define another group that just as clearly appears directed more toward an audience of women.

S,S. Paintings of women in gardens make up another frequently-encountered type. The garden, as an extension of domestic space, allowed scarcely more mobility than the interiors, if we can believe the paintings. This one, representing a woman playing a flute before a tall screen, was painted in 1616 by another Suzhou minor figure master, Wang Sheng. From his hand we have also an erotic album, the earliest I know that can be ascribed to a particular artist, and a few other works. The style is enough like that of the album of pictures of women as to make Wang Sheng a candidate for having painted that.

S --. For the greatest contrast, I show an example of a late Ming painting of a woman in a garden, done in 1640 by a Fujian artist named Huang Shifu, that was decidedly aimed at a male viewership. The artist inscribes on it a sexy poem about the girl, dedicates it to a certain “old Mr. Can,” and notes that it’s the 18th scroll in a series, perhaps depicting Mr. Can’s concubines.

--S. She is placed up close to the picture plane, drawn in provocative dishabille, and looks directly out at us, touching her little finger to her lips in a winsome gesture often seen in meiren paintings of the pinup type.

-- S. It will no doubt sound simplistic to suppose that among paintings of women, the more sexy the picture, the more likely it was done for a male audience, while cool and unsexy ones were aimed at women; but I believe that approximates the true pattern. This is another painting of a woman in a garden, for which seals recently discovered on it allow an attribution to the early Qing master Yu Zhiding, an artist from Yangzhou. (Describe: poignant theme that might have appealed to women; no turn-ons of any kind. Very original, moving work.)

S --. Face (etc.)

S,S. (Dong Qichang, Mt. Qixia, Shanghai Mus.; Wang Qiao again) Already we can discern a body of painting arguably or assumedly done for women and definable by subject and style, and locate it mainly in 17th century Suzhou. The very center of both professional and scholar-amateur painting through most of the Ming, Suzhou by the late sixteenth century had slipped into decline, in the eyes of influential critics, cast into shadow by nearby Songjiang, where Dong Qichang and his adherents were creating and promoting a powerful new mode of literati painting, chiefly landscape, that quickly came to be accepted as the touchstone for high-level, prestigious painting, the kind that collectors should seek and artists aspire to. Suzhou painting was cast, in this scenario, as the survival of an outmoded tradition, commercialized, trivial or vulgar in its subjects, conservative in its styles. Painting production in late Ming Suzhou was dominated, in the critics’ view, by the numerous followers and imitators of the great early sixteenth-century professional masters Tang Yin and Qiu Ying. Many of these followers devoted their skills to producing what Chinese connoisseurs dismissively call Suzhou pian, Suzhou pieces, made up mostly of copies and forgeries of earlier masters. The term is commonly extended to include also original paintings by Suzhou small masters of the late Ming and early Qing: most of what we have seen so far (such as the work by Wang Qiao, at right) belongs, for Chinese collectors, in this scorned category of Suzhou pian. S,S. What has gone unremarked in this standard, dismissive account is a high-level continuation in late Ming-early Qing Suzhou of figure painting as it had been practiced in that city earlier in the Ming by Qiu Ying and his daughter Qiu Zhu (also known as Qiu Shi, “Miss Qiu,” since her given name is uncertain). Qiu Ying’s wide repertory had encompassed sensitive portrayals of women, including “women waiting” themes (describe) and Qiu Zhu had made a specialty of them: pictures of the “woman waiting” genre, of literary and cultivated women, of women engaged in leisurely pursuits in gardens. At left is a detail from Qiu Ying’s well-known painting in the Boston MFA, a woman in the open room of a riverside house awaiting the return of her husband or lover. The formula of opposing a rectilinear frame to open space, her constricted space opening onto his expansive one, is already used here with some subtlety. In the other, painted in a more conservative style, a woman gazes at a pair of mandarin ducks and again thinks of her absent husband. When we recall how Ming-Qing women had to endure long separations from their spouses, who were away on official postings or commercial travel, we realize how pictures of this kind would have sounded a familiar and poignant chord in their emotional lives.

S, S. From Qiu Zhu we have quite a few pictures of women in gardens and interiors, some in the traditional fine-line and color manner, others in refined baimiao, line drawing without washes of ink or color. Whether or not these were done with an audience or clientele of women in mind is unclear; I would hypothesize that many of them were. In any case, the beginnings of the phenomenon I’m investigating can be located here.

S,S. A few Suzhou women painters in early Qing, notably Fan Xueyi, carry on what Qiu Zhu had begun; these are two works by Fan Xueyi, one a leaf from an album of narrative pictures in which notable women of the past figure prominently, the other of a woman about to put brush to paper, perhaps composing a letter or a poem. Women artists are not our subject tonight, although a few of them made pictures that belong within our category, and we can assume that what Ellen Widmer writes for late Ming literature is equally true for painting: “It seems likely that the newly emerging woman writer, the newly emerging woman reader, and the appearance of writings about women are three aspects of a single trend.”

S,S. In some erotic albums produced in early Qing Suzhou, where the development of this genre as potentially a high-level art began, the openly erotic leaves are interspersed with others closer in theme and mood to the Cologne album of women in domestic interiors with which we began. There they serve to contextualize the amorous events, persuading the viewer that those events occur within passages of everyday life, as do the non-erotic narrative materials in high-level erotic fiction beginning with Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase. In this example (known only in an old reproduction album), again attributed to Qiu Ying but really early Qing in date, only two of the eight leaves contain scenes of lovemaking, and even in those it’s shown indirectly, as the dream of a sleeping woman or as reflected in a mirror.

S -- Other leaves portray the lovers in quieter moments, here gazing at their reflections in the garden pond.

S,S. In another erotic album known only in old reproduction, this one by Gu Jianlong, most versatile and interesting of the Suzhou figure artists of early Qing, portrayals of sexual couplings are relatively discreet--sex in the garden, for instance, with no display of genitalia. Another leaf depicts a group of wives and concubines playing cards. I’m not arguing that these albums necessarily belong in our category of paintings done for women, although the delicacy and restraint they exhibit, the prevalence of themes with overtones of qing, feeling or emotion, more than se, lust, suggest that they might not have been aimed exclusively at male viewers either--they could have entertained viewers of either gender, appealing to sensibilities of a kind not particular to either, and might well have been enjoyed by couples before lovemaking, as happens sometimes in Chinese fiction. We can only speculate. S,S. A recorded complaint by a mid-nineteenth century Suzhou prefect about how the book market in his city is filled with “lascivious books and pictures” that “inflame people with lust” adds that “The filth extends into the women’s quarters, increasing evil and licentiousness. There is nothing worse than this. The pictures that stimulate heterodox licentiousness are worse than lewd books, since books can only be understood by those with a rough knowledge of letters, while the pictures are perceptible to all.” This point about pictures being accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate is important for understanding the nature of the paintings done for women, since women were more likely to be semi-literate or illiterate. As for “pictures that stimulate heterodox licentiousness” in women, if we try to imagine how they might have looked, an album acquired recently by the Boston MFA would appear to supply an answer; two leaves from it are now on the screen. But I do not mean to get into the question of erotica for women, although I believe we now have evidence and materials for investigating it.

S,S. That Gu Jianlong’s “Cardplaying” leaf exists also in a hanging-scroll version allows the attribution of that picture to him, and introduces the large category of hanging-scroll representations of groups of women in rooms or gardens. These can plausibly be added to our group, since they concentrate attention on the women’s pastimes and occupations rather than on their physical selves, as male-oriented paintings tend to do. There is nothing of the seductive in these, except in the beauty of the picture itself.

They may echo classical compositions, as the one on the left does, a well-known picture in Tang style of palace ladies playing Double Sixes. But the costumes and the furnishings, including the bonsai and the kitten, are up-to-date, and the work reads, not as antiquarian but as low mimetic. The painter is a certain Sun Xiang, unrecorded, as are the artists of many of these.

-- S. Hanging-scroll pictures of ladies enjoying leisure-time pursuits in gardens survive in some number; few have been published, still fewer have received any attention. This one is by the Suzhou woman artist Fan Xueyi, an up-to-date scene in the garden of some spacious villa. There the women write and paint, play the board game weiqi and make music--the traditional Four Accomplishments, usually performed in paintings by men. Such pictures would be appropriate for the chambers of cultivated upper-class women.

S,S. In this one, attributed to Qiu Ying himself and perhaps by him or a close follower, the setting is a palace garden. It is a much-elaborated woman-waiting picture: the highest ranking woman, perhaps an imperial concubine, sits in the foreground, melancholy and bored, turning away from the book and other diversions spread before her. The inclusion in the foreground of pine and plum, deer and cranes, show this to have been designed as a birthday picture. The woman in the doorway behind may be her favorite companion--pairs of women, representing the theme of women’s friendships and bonding, make up one of the sub-categories worthy of exploration that I’m leaving out tonight, for lack of time.

S.S. I will show only a single example, an anonymous mid-18th century work, in which one woman, the older, gazes at the moon while the younger one beside her (not a servant) watches her and waits patiently. They take the same roles, that is, that men frequently do in landscape paintings, such as

S -- the pair at the base of Shitao’s well-known “Waterfall on Mt. Lu.” The appearance of women in places that had been reserved for men in more traditional paintings is one aspect of the large phenomenon this lecture is about. S,S. I’ll only mention three other types, before going on to our final category. One is domestic scenes with children, in which the woman is seen instructing her children, or watching them play, or, as here (an anonymous picture with the usual false Qiu Ying signature), watching from inside while two other women dicker with a knick-knack peddler. S,S. Another is the theme of women alone, sometimes in landscape settings, sometimes looking out from windows or doorways, not especially waiting for lovers but engaged in private reveries, their feelings subtly conveyed. In this picture the woman’s gaze is absorbed in a light spring rain. The artist is Yü Ji, active in the late 18th century, one of the very few in that late period who could still portray women with this sympathy and sensitivity.

S,S. A third is the category of imaginary portraits of notable women of the past. Quite a number of these survive and can be identified; they are decidedly worthy of study as a group, and will figure in the long-delayed book based on my 1991 Getty lectures. This one, painted in the 1730s-40s by the Northern figure master Cui Hui, represents the Song poet Li Qingzhao in her study, standing behind her desk, pulling back a chair and gesturing to it as if inviting a fellow poet to sit down. This cool, elegant picture is as unlike the conventional meiren image as any could be; her posture and facial expression, her placement in middle distance, project an impression of poise and dignity. It would be ideal for hanging in the chambers of an educated woman.

S,S. The theme of groups of women in gardens is treated also in numerous handscrolls or horizontal scrolls, most of them painted by Suzhou followers of Qiu Ying, and in many cases furnished with the master’s signature; this one was sold at auction as Qiu Ying, but is a later work. As everyone knows who has gone through drawers and cabinets in old museum collections, handscrolls by followers and imitators of Qiu Ying survive in large numbers; usually, we look at them briefly before thinking “another forgery” and rolling them up again. They make up a major part of the scorned category of Suzhou pian, a term introduced earlier that could almost be rendered, in its common usage, as “Suzhou fakes,” since the original works among them by Suzhou small masters of the late Ming and early Qing, of the kind with which this lecture is largely concerned, are not regarded much more highly than fakes. I have suggested that those should be reexamined with more sympathy, and now I will appall some of my colleagues, no doubt, by suggesting the same for these, which, by contrast, are mostly not original works but copies of older compositions.

S,S. Another section; and scroll depicting “The Return of Lady Wen-chi.” Two points should be made initially about what we can call Suzhou pian handscrolls: first, that they were produced in multiples, copied and recopied from sometimes distant originals, so that even today popular compositions are likely to survive in several or many versions; and second, that their subjects are disproportionately of a kind that would have held a special attraction for women. Often they are subjects charged with intense, poignant feeling; for these the handscroll form, both because of its special fitness for narrative presentation and because it permits privacy in viewing, is ideally suited.

S,S. Let me emphasize again that I am by no means arguing for a viewership exclusively female for some subjects and exclusively male for others; the appeal of these paintings was broader than that. Numerous copies of Qingming cityscape; entertaining for both. Another subject of Suzhou-pian handscrolls, the Imperial Hunt in the Shanglin Park, which survives in numerous versions, all attrib. to Qiu Ying (no slide), might seem to be a subject directed at males, with its sometimes bloody scenes of animals being slaughtered. But in fact we know that the original was done for a woman: Qiu Ying painted it over a period of several years on commission from a rich man, who paid the artist the highest price recorded for a Chinese painting, and who wanted to present it to his mother on her eightieth birthday.

S,S. As we might expect from the immense popularity among both women and men readers of the romantic drama Xixiang Ji, “The Story of the Western Wing,” painted illustrations to it, often accompanied by long passages of the text signed with the names of famous calligraphers, exist in some numbers. This one is from a series in the Freer Gallery, with Qiu Ying seals and signature.

S -- The writing at left, which accompanies another so-called Qiu Ying scroll, is by his contemp. Wang Chong. With their substantial texts and series of pictures elaborate enough to hold one’s attention over extended periods, the scrolls were in some respects more like illustrated books than like works of art in handscroll form. Other texts that were made into illustrated handscrolls in this way included the Nü Xiaojing or Women’s Classic of Filial Piety (for which I have no slides), and the story of Lady Wenji’s exile among the “barbarian” Hsiung-nu and her return to Han China. It makes sense that narrative and illustrative handscrolls would have been especially acquired and treasured by women: they can be enjoyed in private, and read quietly like a book, unlike literati landscapes which often demanded performances of cultivated connoisseurship before an audience of one’s fellows. Moreover, those who could not read, or only in a limited way, could skip the texts in handscrolls and simply read the pictures. S,S. Another popular theme in these handscrolls, and again one of special appeal to women, is Lady Su Hui and Her Palindrome, of which this is an example. Su Hui was a learned woman of the fourth century who, while her husband was away fighting a battle, composed palindrome poems and embroidered them on silk to send to him. Two women writers, Wu Zitian in the 7th century and Zhu Shuzhen in the 13th, wrote accounts of the story and interpretations of the poems; copies of their texts are sometimes included in the scrolls. In this one, the writing is supposed to be by Guan Daosheng, the Yuan-period woman artist and calligrapher, and the paintings by Qiu Ying. Neither is likely. Famous names were attached freely to these paintings, and shouldn’t be taken seriously, except as indications of style or tradition.

-- S. A detail from another version of the so-called Qiu Ying, in which the husband, far from home, is presented with Su Hui’s work; this one is in the Central Academy of Art in Beijing; and

S – here is still another in the old Laufer collection of the Field Museum, Chicago. I’m certainly not arguing against making judgments of relative quality, or of proximity to an assumed original, among the versions we encounter; that’s still a legitimate pursuit, and I believe no less than before in good paintings and bad paintings. But even if none of them qualifies as truly from the hand of Qiu Ying, that may not be sufficient reason to dismiss them all as simple fakes.

S,S. The last series I’ll show is made up of imaginary portraits of women of antiquity who were famous for particular arts and achievements. I know of four or five versions of this series, all attributed to Qiu Ying, who presumably did a scroll of this kind on which these are based. The one at right is in the Shanghai Museum, and has been published several times in mainland Chinese books as a Qiu Ying original. Again, it makes best sense, I think, to assume that women were most often the purchasers or recipients and “consumers” of these scrolls, which honor their predecessors who somehow managed to distinguish themselves within a male-dominated society.

The women are not differentiated in facial features, but follow, as they mostly do elsewhere in Chinese figure painting, a type of feminine beauty current in the artist's time and place. Some of us have written about this phenomenon negatively, as reflecting a failure of artists to attribute individual character to the women; but it may also have been what women viewers wanted: women distinguished in the pictures by postures, attributes. and accompanying texts, but alike in their conventionally beautiful faces. It may be time, that is, to move this practice, like footbinding, from the "victim account" to the "agent account."

S,S. Two more sections of the scrolls, with only one image corresponding. The images are not in the same order from scroll to scroll, and sometimes are not even identified as the same woman in the inscriptions. We are made to wonder: was it not only authorship, but also the identity of the woman in the image, that was of small concern to the viewers? How can we understand this? And those are not the only serious charges that might be raised against these scrolls. Those of you familiar with Chinese painting will have realized long ago that the paintings I’m speculating were done for women are nearly all in the technically finished, representationally meticulous styles that for Chinese critics would be taken to indicate a lower level of taste in the women consumers. One major reason why such paintings were consigned to the lower levels was that they required less literacy and cultivation for their enjoyment--male literati artists were careful to keep their works free of engaging narrative detail. We are in danger, then, of turning our perception into a put-down, as it would be in our culture to point out that popular novels of the kind called “romances” are mostly read by women, as those of the western and bloody-action genres are mostly read by men. But this misreading could be countered by arguing in the opposite direction, following David Johnson, pointing out that Chinese women were less tied to the taboos and compulsions that dominated the male world of connoisseurship, which included a scorn for most subjects outside the narrow literati repertory, and for color, and for fine workmanship and entertaining detail. We are not obliged to share those taboos and compulsions.

As for copies, they are ordinarily discussed in purely pejorative terms. Critics and connoisseurs from Song and Ming times to the present have taken special delight in identifying copies and fakes in other people’s collections; they are like preachers rooting out heresies, trying to cleanse the painting world of what they see as contaminations. But what if all this were beside the point? What if authenticity were not the main issue? What if the people who bought and enjoyed these paintings didn’t care whether they were really by Qiu Ying or not? (“Qiu Ying” by their time having become in any case a kind of generic designation. . .)

S,S. (Two more sec’ns of the version in Chicago.) Thinking further in that direction: why should a carefully-worked-out, popular composition be allowed to exist only in a single version? According to conventional values, only one person could own the “real” one (unless the artist did it more than once); others had fakes, which should be detected and exposed, to the shame of their owners. But what if we think of the scrolls produced in multiples as tu, pictures, rather than as hua, paintings (in Gong Xian’s distinction)? In an age without mechanical means of reproduction, if someone admired a certain picture and desired one of her own, where was the harm? And the benefits were clear: numbers of women who wanted an entertaining, instructive set of pictures illustrating a story or an historical incident, or an imaginary portrait of some famous woman to hang in their rooms, or pictures and text for some popular subject of special interest to them--and if they wanted it with the prestigious name of Qiu Ying associated with it--they could have it. The scrolls were not kept as “collection pieces,” for which the value depended on authenticity; they were kept as pictures--hanging scrolls hung in their rooms, handscrolls unrolled and the pages of albums turned, and enjoyed as interesting, attractive, instructive, stimulating, and otherwise desirable images or sets of images.

To see them this way is, in the common view, to move them out of the “fine art” category and into the category of Suzhou high-level craft objects. But again, what is the harm in that? especially if we remember how deeply women were involved in those crafts, both as makers and as consumers. We ourselves, trying to occupy a more removed vantage point outside the biases we have learned from Chinese texts and colleagues, can recognize some of these paintings, at least, as estimable or even excellent works of art as well (as indeed are many of the things that the Chinese have traditionally regarded as craft objects, such as blue-and-white porcelains and lacquer wares.)

S, S. Finally (and I near my conclusion), for some insight into this practice of replicating painted images, we can look at a particular type: the production and transmission by copying of imaginary portraits of heroines of fiction and drama. In Peony Pavilion, the late Ming romantic drama immensely popular (along with Western Wing) among woman readers, Du Liniang (“Bridal Du” in Cyril Birch’s translation) paints her own portrait, to record her beauty before dying (as shown in a print, of which I couldn't find the slide; this is another illustration); Liu Mengmei, the scholar she loves, finds it and, worrying about its fragility, has a copy made “by some eminent painter.” Tina Lu notes that nothing of the efficacy of the original was lost in the copy--”nothing unique to the original that the copy could not share.” (p. 45) In the “Three Wives Commentary,” an early Qing period writing (subject of an important study by Judith Zeitlin), the youngest of the three wives, Qian Yi, after re-enacting a scene from the play (to which all three wives are obsessively devoted), has a dream in which she and her husband encounter Du Liniang; when she wakes and learns that her husband has had an identical dream (again replicating an episode in the play), he advises her to paint the likeness of Du Liniang as she appeared to her in her dream. She does this, depending for her style on a portrait of a Han-period woman poet by You Qiu, Qiu Ying’s son-in-law; and copying, for her image, a portrait in the family collection of Cui Yingying, the heroine of Western Wing. Images seem to be both replicable and more or less interchangeable, without becoming any the less “true.”

-- S. The painting now at right, our last slide, is Tang Yin’s portrait of Cui Yingying, which, according to his inscription, he has copied after Wang I of the Yuan period, who copied it, he writes, from Chen Juzhong of the Song, who copied it from an anonymous Tang painting. (This work itself exists in several versions, of which this is the best, the most likely to be by Tang Yin himself.) The original, putative Tang-period painting was presumably taken to be a “true image” of this fictional woman, “done from life”; successive copies preserved her visage, her loveliness. It was the image that mattered, a true image, in a mystical or spiritual sense. Her likeness, in this sense, can be transmitted in copies, even from dreams. No one involved in this production and transmission and appreciation of somehow eloquent imagery worried about whether or not it was art.

Can we begin to discern, in the profound gulf between this way of thinking about painting and the elite literati way, a gendered distinction? Not entirely, because a similar way of thinking pertains as well to the much larger body of functional paintings my book is about--it is not, that is, exclusively a woman’s response, nor was there any obstacle to a person of either gender enjoying both kinds of painting. At the same time, one could characterize the two kinds, loosely, as belonging respectively to the domestic and the public spheres--and to say that, of course, brings us back to inner vs. outer, with implications again of gender. A parallel could be made to the argument of the late Chino Kaori for the gendering of Japanese painting, especially that of the Muromachi period: a succession of prestigious male scholars such as Shimada, Matsushita, and Tanaka, she argued, had skewed scholarship toward the Chinese-derived, ink monochrome landscapes of artists such as Shûbun and Sesshû, to the neglect of the older tradition of outline-and-color paintings of figural subjects, including the narrative and historical, or birds-and-flowers, derived from the native Yamato-e lineage, which in its origins was associated more with women. The parallel is provocative, even though the social correlatives differ in the two cultures. One might similarly argue for Chinese painting that an over-emphasis on literati painting and landscape, not only by Chinese writers but also by foreign scholars such as James Cahill in a previous incarnation . . . I will leave the thought unfinished.

From my use throughout this lecture of such terms as provocative parallel and reasonable assumption, it’s obvious that it isn’t a lecture of the kind that allows me to say at the end, q.e.d., I’ve proved my case. What I’ve presented doesn’t pretend to constitute real proof; my hope is only that it will be accepted as a strong and persuasive case. I’ve attempted to build around this body of paintings a cluster of factors or correlative circumstances like the cluster that Michael Baxandall presented, in a memorable lecture and book chapter, as surrounding the construction of the bridge over the Firth of Forth, taking care not to argue for any particular factor standing in a simple causal relationship to any particular part or aspect of the bridge. I’ve taken that as a model in my later work, along with a continuing conviction that the answers to the most interesting questions can most often be reached primarily through careful and informed readings of the paintings themselves and the relationships between them, and often cannot be reached in any other way.

I’ve tried to identify a substantial body of paintings that may have been enthusiastically acquired and enjoyed by late Ming and early Qing women, and may have penetrated deeply into their emotional lives. But for social and economic reasons well recognized in Chinese painting studies, this body of painting was so discredited by dominant male arbiters of taste and quality that it slipped later into the situation of being regarded as low-class work by minor artists or out-and-out forgeries, and lies neglected when it survives at all, enjoying no respectable place within the great corpus of surviving Chinese paintings. If my lecture is successful, it will stimulate some colleagues, especially younger ones, to change this situation.

Thank you.

CLP 79: 1995 “Nanga Artists Within Nihonga,” Nihonga Symposium, St. Louis Art Museum

Nihonga/Bunjinga talk, St. Louis, Nov. 2-3, 1995


It will be obvious to everyone who has seen exhib. that Jap. ptg. of century after Meiji Restoration cannot be neatly divided into schools & currents, even to degree that earlier Jap. ptg can. School divisions always problematic, although valid & useful; become more so when country suddenly opened to so much from outside at the same time that it is going in so many dif. directions internally.

Category assigned to me, Nanga or Bunjinga (and one of many things I'm not going to attempt in this talk is to distinguish between them) has less "shape," coherence, than, for instance, Shijô-ha (Prof. Sasaki's subject) or Rimpa (Prof. Guth's) or even Ukiyo-e, in same period. When we say these names, something comes into mind's eye. But say Nanga-Bunjinga, and images of Taiga & Buson, Gyokudô and Chikuden, are projected onto our mental screens. Then look at ptgs by artists I'm going to talk about: except for Tessai, and perhaps late Kagaku, not a lot of immediate resemblance. Of course, the divisions are in some part arbitrary; but I'm certainly not criticizing the categorization, espec. as I end up with group of artists & ptgs that on the whole I like, and enjoy talking about.

One thing everybody will agree on: just as dealing with western-style ptg in Meiji-Taishô period immediately raises issue of Japan-and-Europe cultural interactions, so does talking about Nanga raise issue of Japan-and-China. But I assume that that's what I was brought here to do. Nakamura Tanio, in list of school definitions in modern Jap. ptg, defines Bunjinga as: "Ptgs by scholars of Chinese and Japanese literary classics, usually in a Chinese style."[1] Again, this raises all kinds of questions, which I don't want to stop and consider now. Standard accounts of earlier Nanga (including my own old one) stress origins in Chinese painting for their styles; and session topic, "Traditional Sources of Nihonga," would suggest that I am expected to do that for my artists. But as you'll see, that's not what I mean to do. Cultural interaction goes both ways.

Nakamura writes, to quote him again: "Though not accepted by the academic schools, bunjinga was in fashion throughout the Meiji era." And he goes on to say, after a brief characterization of earlier Nanga and mentions of Taiga and Buson, "Though no less popular among art connoisseurs, the literati [i.e. bunjinga] art in the Meiji era, excluded from the fires in which Japanese painting was undergoing a rebirth, appeared to have become stagnant and to have lost its creativity. The advent of Tomioka Tessai in Kyoto, therefore, created a sensation in the art world of Tokyo." This is a good summary of the situation; we have to think of artists who somehow followed the Nanga tradition in the late 19th and early 20th cent. as on the one hand inheriting a movement or mode of ptg that for a half-century or so had been in decline, and on the other hand as open to the scorn of powerful people promoting other directions, such as Fenollosa, who wrote of Bunjinga as "scarcely more than an awkward joke." And we should see their art as produced under these conditions.

S,S. (Photos of Tessai). Since Tessai is older by some decades than any of the others (born in 1836), it's more or less unavoidable that I begin with him. Have to resist temptation to use most of my time for him: I've been deeply involved w. Tessai since my Fulbright year in Kyoto, 1954-55, when I originated U.S. exhibition, helped later with others, most recently one in China; I've written & lectured about him. That's all the more reason for not spending much time on him here. I want only to make a few comments that fit into my theme today.

S --. (Noro Kaiseki, 1836.) One major strength of Tessai was in his avoidance of "pure southern school" approach--that is, ptg that followed orthodox Chinese criteria of good brushwork, pure LS as subject, playing down narrative & anecdotal elements, etc. The faithfulness to Ch. models that was possible for some artists in late period of Nanga, 2nd quarter of 19c and beyond, is part of what brings about its decline. Tessai follows the good examples of Hyakusen and Buson & others in refusing to be constrained by this doctrine; he copies and imitates Ch ptgs of all kinds that came his way, w. kind of sinophile voraciousness.

[1]Nakamura Tanio, Contemporary Japanese-Style Painting, Tokyo and New York, 1967, p. 76.

S,S. (Tessai 1923, "Three Old Buddhas in Shrine", Lo P'ing Vimalakirti.) Many of his sources have been identified, either in particular Ch. ptgs or as types. But to do so doesn't account for much of greatness of Tessai, as it doesn't for Buson. Both profoundly original masters.

S --. Tessai develops mode of painting that combines disciplined fine-line drawing, partly learned from Chinese models, with bold, wet strokes of rich ink that lay out a spatial structure, opening hollows within which figural and narrative elements can be set. (Only one of his compositional types; of course.) Can be used for powerful compositions such as this "Listening to the Rain at a Window by Bamboo," ca. 1920? Tessai's air of spontaneity and semi-controlled splashiness can divert us from recognizing the extraordinary technical mastery that underlies it, keeps it from falling into real sloppiness.

S --. One of paintings in exhibition is this late work, "Founders of Religions Crossing the Sea," 1921--superlative example of this combination of passages of heavy, wetly-applied ink with

-- S. highly controlled dry-brush linear drawing, charged with kind of electric energy. No real precedent for this in Japan, or for that matter in China; beyond reach of Tessai's contemporaries or more recent Chinese masters. Who among them could approach it? Fu Pao-shih? We'll come to him in a bit.

S,S. Many other works of this kind from Tessai's late period, incl. plum ptg in exhib; 1921 ptg of herbalist Sun Tzu-mao.

S,S. Tessai deeply learned in Chinese literature; had special fondness for Su Tung-p'o (born on same day of year.) One of his ptgs based on Su Shih's "Red Cliff" Odes in exhib.

S --. In ptg of 1920, Tessai depicts visit of Su Tung-p'o to monk Fo-yin. Another example of his compositional type in which figural elements in fine inkline set in recessed spaces between broad strokes of deep-black ink.

-- S. And here is ptg, undated but probably from 1940s, by Fu Pao-shih. I make this comparison, not to put down Fu Pao-shih (excellent & original ptr) but to introduce a big point I want to make today: that in 19th & 20th cent., artistic interchange bet. China & Japan a real interchange, by no means one-way; adoptions by Chinese artists from Japanese ptg frequent and important, perhaps more so than other way. Unexplored, almost taboo subject, because of reluctance of Chinese to acknowledge any intrusions on their famous sense of self-sufficiency. Ways in which Nihonga served as sources for Chinese artists big topic for future investigation, when people are willing to risk offending sensitivities of Chinese and talk about it.

S,S. This kind of composition often used by Fu Pao-shih; comes, fairly obviously, from Tessai. Obvious, but no one points it out, least of all Fu Pao-shih himself. (Li K'o-jan, another who was prob. affected, did praise Tessai in essay for cat. of 1988 Tessai exhib. in China, saying that Chinese artists had long known and admired him.)

S,S. This Tessai-esque composition, with fine-line figures in a dense-ink setting, used effectively by Fu, in ptgs that are as original as any in recent times--such cross-cultural derivations entirely healthy, enriching the receiving tradition. Only unhealthy aspect of it is the reluctance of artists or scholars to acknowledge it.

-- S. Tessai himself takes what he wants from all over, in the way good artists do--in this fan in exhib., 1918 ptg of demon-queller Chung K'uei & sister, borrowings are obviously from popular ptg in China as well as Japan (Otsu-e)--probably with some minor nod to west--he must have had some inkling of what was going on in Europe, enjoyed being kind of Japanese fauve. Rich, multi-leveled, boisterous painting, to which ident. of sources largely irrelevant.

S --. Beside these, works by most other artists of time may seem a bit tame. This is by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), painted in1911, autumn scene with traveler titled "Mountain Road." I met the old artist in Tokyo in 1954, when I went there as Fulbright student; drank lots of sake with him, talked. When he discovered I was student of Chinese painting, wanted to discuss art theory of Ku K'ai-chih. By that time, like his contemp. Ch'i Pai-shih in China, had become kind of cultural monument, with his really creative period far in past. (Not so for Tessai, who did greatest work in his eighties.) Taikan belonged to a different, even an opposing faction, being a member of the Tokyo School of Art founded by Okakura in 1889, learning painting from Hashimoto Gahô, and later joining Okakura in founding the Nihon Bijutsu-in or Japanese Academy. Taikan is another who painted subjects from Chinese literature and legend in his early period--the poets Ch'ü Yüan and T'ao Yüan-ming, the Butcher Ting--but he wasn't sinologically learned to the degree that Tessai was; his use of old Chinese subjects was more like the French Academy masters' uses of classical Greek and Roman themes, aimed largely at giving a certain weight and authority to the pictures.

S,S. His "Wheel of Life" from 1923, long handscroll painting that was hailed in its time as a masterwork, but which from more critical viewpoint might be seen as misusing the handscroll form by offering less of interesting visual material per running foot than handscrolls traditionally had offered. As a Tessai fan, I would characterize Taikan as an artist of far less attainment but much more pretention.

S --. (detail). His landscapes sometimes credited with having the richness and resonances of Sung landscapes; I would see them rather as end-products of long process, in which Sesshû also implicated, by which the profundity and meaning, deeply evocative capacity of Sung landscape is progressively drained away, replaced by simplified forms and a dilute spirituality.

-- S. Passage from great Hsia Kuei handscroll. Unfair comparison, perhaps--no recent artist could stand up to Sung academy masters. But brings out, I think, the thinness of Taikan's painting, both formally and expressively. Hard to see it as embodiment of profound religious-philosophical concepts.

-- S. Painting in exhibition, done in 1928, "Spring Dawn Over the Sacred Mountain of Chichibu," done for shrine there, later presented to imperial family. This is Taikan at his best, imparting suitably mystic quality to landscape of specific, hallowed place (in this respect following trad. of Nachi Waterfall etc.) Exemplifies strengths and beauty of Japanese ink-painting trad. as separate from Chinese; quality hard to define but central to appreciating Nihonga; will touch on it later. I'm refraining from showing typical works of Taikan's late period, which consist in too large part of endlessly repetitive pictures of Mt. Fuji.

S.S. Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883-1945) is well known to Chinese painting specialists for his serious engagement with our subject (he had a fine collection, much of it still kept by his family, and wrote an early book on Shih-t'ao), and to Kyoto residents and visitors for his wonderful Hakusa Sansô villa up near the Ginkakuji, open to the public, presenting delights (such as the folksy stone arhats, brought from China and planted on a hillock among tall bamboo) that testify to the combination of highly refined Japanese and sinophile tastes that distinguished the man and his works.

S,S. His early travels in China supply the subject matter of many of his paintings, such as the1914 pair of screens "Land of the South," which embody vividly his response to the riverboat culture of the Chiang-nan region. Paintings such as this also display his high level of technical mastery and visual imagination, in my view quite beyond Taikan. He is classified, properly I think, as more a follower of Takeuchi Seihô and the Shijô School than of any Chinese tradition; he probably shouldn't be included among Nanga masters.

S,S. His 1923 sketch of scene at West Lake at Hangchou, in exhib., along with a slide made there recently. It's possible, of course, for an artist to be passionately devoted to Chinese culture, Chinese scenery, and Chinese painting and still be an essentially Japanese artist, and I would see Kansetsu that way.

S,S. 1939 "Autumn Field" (weasel) and 1941 "Summer Night" (white fox.) His pictures of birds and animals, close in style to Seihô's, are superlative expressions of a Japanese poetic sensibility.

S --. That this style and repertory of subjects were exported to China by the Ling-nan or Canton School artists, Kao Chien-fu and the others, who learned them during their periods of study in Japan, was clearly established by Ralph Croizier in his 1988 book on that school; another example of reversal, so common in late period, of trad. relationship of China and Japan in art. (Paralleled, of course, in literature and other areas of culture where is relatively well established and accepted; not yet so in art. Has to be eventually.)

S,S. With lots of time, I would try to show that Kansetsu's paintings depend less on direct adoptions from Chinese painting than on earlier Japanese masters who worked partly in Chinese-derived styles, such as Tôhaku; I would use such a sequence as this: Mu-ch'i to Tôhaku to

-- S. Kansetsu, and talk about how the finest Japanese ink-monochrome painting of the later centuries develops into a medium quite independent of China, in fact unmatched among Chinese artists of the late period, who mostly limit themselves to other, drier varieties of brushwork and fail to pursue fully the glories of a medium originated by their predecessors.

S --. The Kansetsu painting of a monkey in the exhibition, painted around 1940, represents another kind of domestication in that the animal itself is a thoroughly Japanese beast, with its ancestors native to the islands both zoologically and stylistically--works by Sosen and Seihô and others lie behind the image.

-- S. Somewhere behind all of them, of course, lies Sung painting. (One attrib. to Mao Sung: story.)

S,S. Another case of Chinese adoptions from Japanese painting, and an amusing one, is the late Chang Ta-ch'ien's borrowings from Japanese pictorial sources in producing some of his forgeries of early painting. Chang, who studied in Kyoto in (fill in), took a composition from one of Hashimoto Kansetsu's series of illustrations to the Ch'ang-heng ko, Po Chü-i's poem about Emperor Hsüan-tsung and Yang Kuei-fei, to fabricate a purportedly T'ang-period handscroll which he ascribed to Chang Hsüan. If challenged, he would simply have claimed that Kansetsu had taken it from the T'ang work.

S,S. These are fusuma ptgs in exhib. done around 1940 for Buddhist temple by Kosugi Hôan (1881-1964). He is an artist little known outside Japan; I'm glad to have a chance to talk about him. I came to admire him first at an exhibition of his paintings at the Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo, which has a fine collection of them, since he was a friend of the old Idemitsu. But they haven't published a volume of reproductions of his paintings, nor, so far as I know, is there any such collection available. This has hindered me from following up a line of investigation I've meant to do for years, which I'll speak of in a moment.

S,S. Kosugi Hôan is another who traveled a number of times to China. He had studied in his teens with a western-style oil painter, did illustrations for a magazine edited by the writer Kunikida Doppo, and in 1903, when he was 23, had a job as pictorial reporter in the Russo-Japanese war. (Someone of a different persuasion could present these artists as instruments of Japanese imperialism; that isn't my game.) His Kônan gasatsu, an album of sketches from a trip that he made in 1939 around the Chiang-nan region of China on the invitation of a Japanese railway company, was exhibited in 1947 and published in 1960. It includes affectionate sketches of well-known places such as the Hsi-leng Yin-she, the seal-carving society on the West Lake at Hangchou, but also scenes of the effects of war, such as his drawing of the bombed Commercial Press building in Shanghai. One can read in the pictures some sense of the ambivalent feelings of sinophile Japanese artists and intellectuals about what was happening in China.

S,S. His subjects are drawn from both Chinese and Japanese literature and history; this is the poet Bashô on his travels. Hôan has a special way of using brush, ink, and paper, in which the fibrous surface of the paper, the light touch of the brush, and relatively wet applications of pale colors and ink for a controlled suffusion, produce a distinctive softness in the forms and an atmospheric quality in the picture as a whole. If this looks familiar, it should. The group of us who went around the Idemitsu Museum exhibition (it included, I remember, Mary Ann and Howard Rogers, among others) all had the same immediate, rather surprised response: besides admiring the paintings for their poetic nuances and compositional originality and subtleties of brushwork, we all had a deep sense of deja vu, and went around saying: Fu Pao-shih! Fu Pao-shih! But of course Kosugi Hôan was doing it earlier; in fact, it would appear (this needs more investigation to confirm, but I believe it's true) that he was teaching at the Imperial Academy of Art in Tokyo in 1935 when Fu Pao-shih went there to study.

S --. This slide is made from an Idemitsu Museum postcard--the only reproduction of a Kosugi Hôan painting in their collection that one can buy. The painting represents the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu, and Hôan has copied a passage from his writing in the upper left. I show this to visiting Chinese scholars, who glance at it and say, "Oh, Fu Pao-shih," and I reply: "No, it's by Fu Pao-shih's Japanese teacher." This turns them off immediately.

-- S. Fu Pao-shih's figure style, with the distinctively long, mournful faces and fine line drawing, his way of depicting rocks, tree foliage, etc. with broad or scumbled brushstrokes for a soft, atmospheric effect, compositional types, all correspond; and nothing in earlier Chinese painting can supply real sources for these. (Don't have right slides to demonstrate this; but clearly true.) Lacking time to follow up this discovery, I've offered it to a number of specialists in modern Chinese painting, both Japanese and Chinese, as well as to Fu's daughter Fu Yiling, who lives in Tokyo and says she is studying her father's life and works. And I offer it freely to anyone in the audience who wants to pursue it, as no one has so far.

S,S. I will pass quickly over Hyakusui, Usen, and Keisen, since they seem not to fit easily into my theme of Japan and China nor, as a whole, into any definable aftermath of Nanga. One's first impression in looking over the paintings of Hirafuku Hyakusui (this is his "Windswept Seashore" of 1926), that he takes more from Rimpa sources than from anything Chinese, and therefore belongs more in Christine Guth's section,

S,S. is confirmed by his 1914 screens of "Turkeys" in the exhibition, which use the tarashikomi technique in a Sôtatsu-like way, while the portrayal of the birds otherwise recalls Seihô.

S --. His Kôgen or "Highland" of 1931, also in exhib., perhaps echoes Tôhaku's pine screens, but not much; German drawings? Kaspar David Friedrich? He's an artist of considerable interest, and I would like to see more of him.

S,S. Ogawa Usen (1868-1938) is best known for his sardonic, sometimes sinister pictures of kappa, a creature of Japanese folklore that has a special place in the hearts of sophisticated, urban Japanese. His ptgs of them can sometimes look like Waldpurgisnacht visions, as in these works from 1921 and 1923.

S,S. His "Imps in the Field" of 1929, in the exhibition, of course calls up Jakuchû's "Vegetable Nirvana," as well as the many popular scroll-paintings in which insects or mice or other creatures make up processions that parody the pompous daimyô progresses or wedding processions of the human world. These belong in Tsuji Sensei's book on humor in Japanese art.

S,S. Nanga painting, and especially Ikeno Taiga, also lie behind some of his work, notably the landscape "From Time Immemorial," painted in 1930, or the "Fox Procession" of the same year in the exhibition,

-- S. in which the pointillist rendering of the foreground recalls Taiga's characteristic touch. The foxes may remind us of the ones in the Chôjû giga scrolls. In any case, his sources appear to be all firmly within the Japanese painting tradition.

S,S. The same would appear to be true of the work of Tomita Keisen (1879-1936), for whose style, as seen in this handscroll in the exhibition representing the Uji River, painted in 1915, Ikeno Taiga is obviously an important source. But after having made this unenlightening observation, I must confess that I have no way to talk about his paintings.

S,S. A quite different direction, which charges the scene with a kind of mystery, or even mystical quality (which I noted in one Taikan painting, and will note again in late works of Kagaku), is represented by the other Keisen painting in the exhibition, the "Gion Yazakura" (viewing cherry blossoms at night at the Gion shrine) of 1921, and in the landscape screen at left, and in some others of his works. And still others follow different stylistic directions, leaving the foreign art historian, with his urge to make order, admiring but nonplussed. Kawakita and other Japanese scholars put artists such as Hyakusui, Usen, and Keisen into movements or groupings that represent break-aways from the mainline Nihon Bijutsu-in movement headed by Okakura.


-- S. I want finally to turn to the other recent Japanese master whom I myself most admire, along with Tessai: Murakami Kagaku (1888-1939.) I once had plans for a Kagaku exhibition to follow up the very successful Tessai one, but abandoned them when I found out the difficulty of locating and borrowing his works.

Kagaku, born in Osaka, studied art in Kyoto at the School of Arts and Crafts, and later the Art College; he learned the Shijô style, with Takeuchi Seihô as one of his teachers. In 1918 he and Tsuchida Bakusen and others formed a society of their own, the Kokuga Sosaku Kyôkai (Nat'l Ptg Creation Society), as Kawakita puts it "for the purpose of breaking away from the old Shijô School and creating more modern versions of traditional Japanese styles.". Around 1920 he contracted tuberculosis, and later asthma; from 1923 he lived in seclusion in Ashiya, realizing that he didn't have much time left in his life, painting fervently but not prolifically. He admired William Blake's mysticism, and believed that through the religious art of early Japan he could realize what Blake called "vision in a sublime degree." He wrote quite a lot about painting; I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read his writings and can't speak of them.

S,S. Many of his works are religious figure paintings; they include quite a few, his least appealing in my eyes, that represent sweet-faced Bodhisattvas with a kind of Tagorish spirituality laid on thick. Stronger than those are pictures such as these two, a Fudô Myô-ô that adheres fairly closely to old models, and an Arhat in the style used by artists working for the Ch'an Buddhist sect in Sung-Yüan China. To re-create centuries-old manners of painting with such fidelity and sure aesthetic taste is no mean achievement--it is like, perhaps, Rosanjin in ceramics. But it is not these that define Kagaku's stature as an artist.

S,S. The Arhat painting in the exhibition, dating from 1939; and a late Sung painting to represent the original type. I have tried on several earlier occasions to define what qualities allow Japanese suiboku or ink painting of the late period--say from Tôhaku through Miyamoto Niten, Sôtatsu, Gyokudô, etc., down to our Nihonga masters--to become somewhat independent of any Chinese sources. The best formulation I could arrive at--and still not entirely adequate--is to say that in Japanese suiboku, highly refined modulations or variations in ink tonality and brushstrokes shapes and types within the forms that constitute the image are less determined by representational or descriptive concerns, more by considerations that are aesthetic, formal, what is commonly called (somewhat demeaningly) "decorative," meaning sheer visual beauty attained for its own sake. That's certainly true of this, altho this is only one aspect of ptg.

S,S. True also of the peony painting in the exhibition. While Kakagu doubtless has in mind Sung-Yuan paintings such as the one at left, ascribed to Mu-ch'i (different flower, but no matter)--

S --. the sensibility behind the painting, the handling of ink values and shapes, has more in common with Sôtatsu; decidedly Japanese. Addition of green color also in line with Japanese taste, not Chinese.

S,S. Greatness of Kagaku, I believe, lies primarily in his landscape paintings. One on right, titled "February," ptd in 1911 as his graduation picture, exhibited with big success; "Season of Rice Planting" in exhib. is from following year, similarly rep. his early style. Nothing very distinctive in these; only upper part of "February" foreshadows later work. From his retirement into seclusion in Ashiya in 1923, however, he begins to paint landscapes of a new kind. By 1925, date of "Mountains" on left, he had narrowed his vision to pictures of hills around Ashiya and Kobe, and was working in fairly flat, dispersed configurations of curling brushstrokes, in a manner that would have pleased van Gogh.

-- S. This is from 1931. For someone familiar with Kagaku who drives through these hills, going, say, from mts. around Takarazuka (where I stayed many times at Kiyoshi Kôjin Temple) to Rokkô-zan, the Arima Onsen, or the Harihan (most elegant of ryôkan), the wooded hills, espec. on misty day, can suddenly look exactly like Kagaku paintings. As for the style, insofar as there are sources for it they are nowhere in Chinese painting, I think, but

S --. in Japanese Nanga, and especially Uragami Gyokudô, as in this small painting in Asian Art Mus. of S.F. Vibrant, visually absorbing interweavings of curling brushstrokes draw gaze of viewer into depths. Very different in effect, but alike in expressive method.

S.S. A series of small paintings from 1939, the year of his death, including one in the exhibition, "Pine Trees on a Rocky Mountain," which, like one on left sets foreground pines agst. BG hills without really separating them in depth, are the culmination of Kagaku's search for a sublime vision in the mystic mode of William Blake. When we use a word like "mystic" we mean, among other things, that the work transcends conventional understanding, arises out of state of mind and hand that can't be reconstructed and understood even to degree we can for other ptgs. In this case, they are the mind and hand of someone who is dying, and possessed by a visionary fervor that he wants to capture in ptg while he still lives.

S --. One with autumn foliage, same year. These are for me among most deeply moving works in 20th cent. art. With more time, I would try to build around them an argument about how the best Japanese ink painting of the later centuries leaves behind not only derivations from China but also anything that could possibly be called decorative, in pursuit of different goals, among which is this kind of mystic intensity. But my time is more than up, and I must leave my argument only in sketch form, with the hope that you will fill it in for yourselves as you spend more time with the exhibition.

CLP 70: 1986 “Chinese Landscape Painting: Content, Context, and Style.” CAA session, New York

NEW DIRECTIONS

Prefatory note

The two brief texts that follow are methodological remarks made in two sessions at the College Art Association's annual meetings: the first, for a session on "New Directions in Chinese Art Studies" organized by Professor Martin Powers and myself for the February 1985 meeting in Los Angeles, and the second for a session on "Chinese Landscape Painting: Content, Context, and Style," organized by Professor Jerome Silbergeld for the February 1986 meeting in New York. I have made a few deletions and additions, but the remarks are essentially as they were delivered on those two occasions.

New Directions in Chinese Painting Studies

Although the proper topic of this session is the innovative directions that are being taken, or might be taken, in studies of Chinese art, my remarks will apply principally to Chinese painting studies.

As many of you know, there was a session at the 1982 College Art Association meeting on style in Chinese painting, organized by Richard Barnhart. I was unable to be there, but I read his opening remarks and heard good reports on the papers and the session as a whole. Today's session, while it is based on a somewhat different viewpoint, is partly intended as a follow-up to that one, in that we hope to consider, among other things, new or alternative ways of understanding style.

By "alternative" I mean: other than the standard ways with which we are familiar, from a great many articles, dissertations, etc.: tracing sources of style, and influences; seeing styles in developmental sequences; writing about the expressive value of a style--that is, what the artist appears to be expressing by creating or adopting this style (always thinking of it as reflecting something the artist is feeling--style as a medium of personal expression). In the purest state of the enterprise, style becomes an element in the closed system we call style history. My teacher Max Loehr does this on the highest level.

To take the stands that I think some of us will take today is not in any sense to renounce this enterprise: it is, however, to turn away from its self-imposed limitations, its exclusivity, its attempts sometimes to discredit the alternatives by suggesting that they aren't really worth doing, or that the time hasn't yet come to do them, and so forth. Loehr has always argued that history and other outside factors, even circumstances in the lives of the artists, were more or less irrelevant to the work of art. It will be no surprise if I say that on that issue I broke with him a long time back, while continuing to have the highest respect for his ideas and his contributions.

Studies of the interrelationship of art and surrounding circumstance in the Western art history field have advanced to the point where we have a symposium at this year's meeting, chaired by Svetlana Alpers, titled "Art or Society: Must We Choose?" How, they are asking, can we get back to a fuller consideration of the formal properties of the work? Have we wandered too far from the work of art? We in Chinese art studies are still a long way from being faced by that danger; we are still struggling with the problem of how to draw the relationships with outside circumstance, for our material.

There have been no lack of writings in which the circumstances surrounding the creation of Chinese works of art have been studied--everybody has done artists' biographies, historical backgrounds, Taoist and Buddhist contexts for religious art, and so forth, in a straightforward way. What have been too rare are thoughtful considerations of what the relationship can be between such factors and works of art--how to avoid simple, misleading notions of causality, or juxtapositions of circumstance and object that imply a relationship without defining it. There haven't been enough studies, that is, that really integrate convincingly the object and the circumstances, instead of simply providing a "background" for the work. I once characterized as "artless studies of art" those studies that stopped on the periphery of the work of art, never really drawing the object itself into the relationship, as we should be doing, despite the difficulty of the project. It is relatively easy, that is, to relate the artist's biography to social history of the time, or art theorizing to intellectual history; what is more difficult is to relate convincingly the stylistic and other properties of the art object itself to outside circumstance. (I went on, in the same article, to downplay the importance of subject matter in later Chinese painting--I wouldn't write in quite the same vein today--I admit this change in my thinking, while continuing to believe that in a great deal of later Chinese painting, it is style more than subject that principally carries the meaning. But I don't mean to raise that issue here.)

Some recent, hopeful signs for the enterprise of integrating Chinese art with social and other kinds of history include Chu-tsing Li's workshop on patronage in Chinese painting held several years ago, and recent studies by a number of younger scholars, most of whom are here today. (I mean to include, for instance, John Hay, since for my present purpose, "younger scholars" is defined as younger than myself.) Some of the best articles and dissertations these days, along with doing the standard and necessary kinds of straightforward studies of artists and works, attempt both to construct contexts for the works and to define the relevance of these contexts. This is a large, difficult project, but good models for how it can be done are found in writings by some of our Western-art colleagues, as well as in methodological discussions of the problem, notably Michael Baxandall's.

Another direction in recent art-historical studies, besides the one that tries to integrate art with outside circumstance, is the one that tries to carry out closer and deeper readings of works of art--readings that take account of multiple levels of meaning in their imagery as well as in their style. Some writings by Svetlana Alpers or Michael Fried, or Edward Snow on Vermeer and Breughel, or Joseph Koerner on Hans Baldung Grün and Dürer, can serve as provocative and useful examples. This kind of study in European art history has reached the point where our Occidentalist colleagues seem to be engaged in a competition over who can perform the most intricate reading of "Las Meninas" by Velasquez. We are far from having reached that level of concentration of effort; but a few good individual attempts have been made. Richard Vinograd, who already demonstrated it in an extraordinary multi-leveled reading of Wang Meng's "Ch'ing-pien Mountains" painting of 1366, is now doing a study of Chinese portraiture that employs this approach; I myself tried to use it in the lectures published as The Compelling Image, for instance in writing about Ch'en Hung-shou's self-portrait. Richard Barnhart, in arguing at the 1982 session that we should stick with stylistic studies a while longer, pointed out that we still lack article-length studies of such masterworks as Fan K'uan's "Traveling Among Streams and Mountains." I would agree on the need for these, on the condition that such a study address the problem of levels of meaning in the work as well as its style.

In doing this kind of study that aims at interpreting the meanings of the paintings more subtly and deeply than we usually have, we are more or less required to adopt modes of reading the paintings that are not confined by the assumption that style must always be understood as the direct expression of the feeling and thought of the artist--an assumption which, although usually unacknowledged, underlies much of the writing in our field, and one that in the end doesn't get us very far toward interpreting the work. In saying that, we aren't denying the importance of personal expression as one element in the meaning and expressive content of paintings; but we are recognizing that it is only one element, one source of meaning, and not the only valid one in good art; that art can also, and more commonly, convey whatever message it may carry by drawing on the meanings attached to motifs and elements of style by convention. Martin Powers has argued, for instance, that the style of the Wu Family Shrines engravings should be understood as expressing the social aspirations and bureaucratic ambitions of the Wu family, and other families occupying the same position in Han society. I have argued recently that the landscape style of Ni Tsan, while it doubtless came into being primarily as an expression of Ni's special temperament and situation, came to signify by convention certain qualities and attitudes, the high-minded stance of the disaffected scholar-gentleman, and could be employed by anyone who wanted to project those qualities in his own painting, or attribute them to a dedicatee or patron.

Taking that approach, instead of the one that assumes always that what the work expresses is what the artist thought or felt--that always locates the meaning of the work, that is, inside the artist instead of in the surrounding society--will lead to very different, and I think fuller, understandings of the works we study. In doing this we can, but need not, adopt the method of semiotics--I myself have found it useful as a set of ideas about meaning in art, without having either the inclination or the knowledge to try to carry it through rigorously and systematically.

In using such an approach, we necessarily separate ourselves somewhat from Chinese approaches to art as they are preserved in the theoretical and critical literature. (I am not talking here about modern writings by our Chinese colleagues, but about older, traditional Chinese writings.) We have recognized that there is in Chinese writings on painting a built-in bias favoring the scholar-amateur artists. (It was they themselves, or other scholars of the same persuasion, who did most of the writing.) But we haven't entirely realized the implications of this: that the version of expression in art reflected in the Chinese literature tends to be the one espoused by the scholar-amateurs, a version in which they see themselves as embodying their refined feelings and thoughts in forms, unconstrained by more mundane and practical considerations. Meanwhile, the motives and methods of artists who were more responsive to the special concerns of patrons, or to the broader ones of the surrounding society, go virtually unreported.

This brings me to my final theme; the uses of Chinese writings in the understanding of Chinese art; and I will begin by quoting my Berkeley colleague Cyril Birch, who recently, in the course of a doctoral qualifying examination, remarked about the lofty-toned prefaces to Chinese dramas that one should "take them very seriously but not believe them."

To revert for a moment to history, I would suggest that there was a long and valuable period in our studies when we were so pleased at being able to read and understand Chinese ideas on art, and apply them in our own studies of the artists and paintings, that we tended to accept these ideas at face value and present them uncritically, as though they were ultimate truths about the paintings. Of course we must continue to read and study Chinese writings, translate them, take them very seriously; but we should also, I think, draw back from them enough to regard them more critically than we have. New directions in Chinese art studies will be new to the degree that they respectfully detach themselves, not only from the ideas of our own that were useful and enlightening once but have now become limiting, but also from the traditional Chinese formulations that we have tended to repeat as a way of avoiding thinking about the problems. All these formulations are no less true than they were, but we should be pursuing, I think, other kinds of truths as well, and recognizing that many of the old formulations are poetic truths, or historically-limited truths. We start out to write about bird-and-flower painting in China, and we begin by talking about Huang Ch'üan vs. Hsü Hsi, and defining the central issue as hsieh-sheng vs. hsieh-i, and from there it's like running the 100-yard dash in a diver's suit. We should respect these formulations but consider them as artifacts with their own sets of circumstances of creation and transmission--consider them, that is, as ideas that in some ways cast light on the objects and in other ways distort them, ideas that represented certain values for the people of their time and later, and that must always be understood in a problematic relationship to the works of art. To do this is no put-down of the Chinese tradition; it is only to recognize what any consideration of any aspect of human culture has to do these days to be taken seriously. It is to make our field of study methodologically respectable.

One reason why we cannot continue to accept always the traditional Chinese ways of defining the issues is that we now realize that to define them in a certain way is, in effect, to decide them. Hsieh-sheng vs. hsieh-i, or the Southern and Northern Schools of landscape painting as artistic equivalents to sudden and gradual enlightenment, are definitions with rhetorical force, used by proponents of one kind of painting in arguing against another. Our own definitions of the issues will not, of course, be bias-free themselves; but at least they will be our biases, and new ones.

We must also, I think, stop mistaking metaphor for profound and objective truth. If we are ever to write interesting and original things about the relationship of painting and poetry, we can't start out by saying that paintings are soundless poems and poems are paintings in sound. Or, if we are to reach any new level of understanding of the relationship of painting and calligraphy, we must begin by saying that painting and calligraphy didn't have a common origin, are not a single art, have quite different sets of formal and expressive problems, different patterns of development, and so forth. For my part, I would be happy if these attractive bits of wisdom were outlawed for at least a decade, during which we would be forced to consider these questions seriously.

(If you think I'm shooting at a straw horse, go back and read a representative selection of recent writings on Chinese painting, and you will soon discover that I am not.)

I don't completely understand, much less advocate, deconstructionist theory; but on the basis of a limited and no doubt muddled understanding, I suspect that Chinese theories of the arts, and critical writings on art, could use a bit of deconstructing. I myself was charged with doing that to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's ideas in one of my Harvard lectures, and I don't deny the charge. By this I certainly don't mean anything like debunking, because I certainly don't think the writings are in any sense bunk. Perhaps "demythologizing" would be better. Whatever we call it, I want to see them as conveying limited and contingent truths, which, if mistaken as complete truths, impede us from going beyond them. They inhibit, that is, our attempts to understand the works of art in ways that the Chinese themselves presumably also understood them, but which they didn't choose to write about. Why they chose not to write about certain aspects of their art is a question that we can consider and speculate about in itself; but the fact that they chose not to is obvious to any of us who have tried to work on patronage in Chinese painting, or social class as reflected in styles,or political meanings in Chinese painting (on which I am presently conducting a seminar), or any number of other promising and potentially enlightening concerns of the kind with which we are now beginning to engage, and for which we find little support in the Chinese literature. If we were to take the stand (as some do) that only those concerns directly addressed in the Chinese literature are legitimate concerns for us, we would be dead-ended on all these issues. In the opposite direction, we may begin to suspect that in fact many of the most interesting aspects of Chinese painting are just the ones the Chinese writers don't discuss.

Most of what I've said, if said in other sessions going on here now, would seem simplistic, and elicit the reaction: why tell us all this? We know it already, have known it for a long time. Many of you at this session may feel the same. But I will only ask, finally: if we know all this, collectively, why do we continue to write and talk, so much of the time, as if we didn't?

Chinese Landscape Painting: Content, Context, and Style

In some part, today's session is a follow-up to last year's symposium on "The Interpretation of Landscape"; it's obviously a subject in which there is a lot of interest. The problem of meaning in landscape draws our attention, among subject categories in painting, because it's the most difficult: landscape seems on the surface to be, as Susan Bush puts it, a "neutral" subject, but that impression lasts only so long as one doesn't look very hard into it or around it or behind it, as our panelists today have done, and as numbers of other writers have been doing lately, for other subject categories as well as for landscape. (Jerome Silbergeld's recently-published study of Chao Yung's painting of horses in a landscape is an excellent example.) Studies that take serious account of questions of content and context are springing up like healthy plants all over, to the point where the methodological disputes that Dick and I and others have engaged in over the past years perhaps needn't be continued. I have certainly never argued that studies emphasizing style and authenticity and traditional iconography should be banned--ours was the ecumenical side--but only that we should give a lot more attention to other aspects of our subject than we generally have in the past. And now that so many people are doing so, it may be time to heed the Taoist advice that when you have the fish you can discard the fish-trap.

In a short paper for last year's symposium I suggested in passing that it might be helpful to think of landscape not as a single subject category for which broad and inclusive characterizations can properly be made, but as a cluster of distinguishable types; and Jerome Silbergeld has invited me to expand on that suggestion here. I will do so, but I want to begin somewhere else. I have recently finished giving a seminar, with eight good graduate students, on "Meanings and Functions in Chinese Landscape Painting," which I began by arguing that for purposes of thinking we can divide our concerns with painting into three parts. Part one concerns the painting itself, its material existence, its style, its subject in a simple sense. Part two concerns its meaning, in the broadest sense; and for that we usually have to look beyond the painting proper. Part three is its function--how and in what circumstances it was made, what part it played in some social situation of its time. (Svetlana Alpers makes a similar tripartite division of concerns in her recently-published introduction to the papers of her last-year's symposium "Art or Society: Must We Choose?") The example I used, which appears also in Susan Bush's excellent paper (a paper that reached me in time to be required reading for my seminar) is the account in the Kuo Hsi essay of how he painted a picture with an old man leaning on a pine tree in the foreground and a great many other pine trees, large and small, stretching into distance. (This, in my formulation, is Part I, the picture.) His son Kuo Ssu goes on to say: "The idea was to express the wish that his sons and grandsons be dukes and ministers in unbroken succession" (this is Part II, the meaning); and that the painting was done for the 60th or 80th birthday of a great minister of the time (Part III, function).

Inadequate as such a division of concerns is in some respects--it is intended as no more than a way of thinking, a disposable trap for catching fish--it allows us to come up with a formulation of the following type: in such-and-such a painting, a certain subject, certain forms and images, certain features of style, gave it the potential for conveying to those who saw it certain ideas and meanings; and these, in turn, allowed it to function in a certain social context, fulfill a need, carry a message. Obviously, the Kuo Hsi case is exceptional: ordinarily we haven't enough information to construct such a neat three-part account of the painting, nor should we suppose that there will always be a clearly-definable Part III, a function. But I think there will be in a great many more cases than we have supposed, whether or not we have the evidence for determining what the function was.

Michael Baxandall of the Warburg Institute (and, I'm pleased to say, U.C. Berkeley) wrote at the beginning of his 1972 book on quatrocento Italian painting: "The picture trade was a quite different thing from that in our own late romantic condition, in which painters paint what they think best and then look round for a buyer." The regular reiteration by Chinese writers from Sung times on of an even more idealized version of the matter, in which the artist not only paints what he thinks best but doesn't even consider a buyer or consumer at all, has persuaded us too often to think of that as the norm--or at least to write with an implicit assumption that it was the norm, even though, if pressed, we might say we knew better. But the evidence, as we look harder for it and read it more subtly, indicates rather that paintings in China, as elsewhere, normally were elements in an elaborate system of social exchange, and economic or quasi-economic exchange, in which the artist painted in response to some kind of demand or expectation, stated or understood, and profited in one way or another from the exchange. In Baxandall's new book Patterns of Intention (the best methodological discussion of these questions I have read) the area of demand or expectations is termed "the pictorial Charge and the painter's Brief," and he uses the terms "market" or "troc" for "a coming into contact of producer and consumer of a good for the purpose of exchange."

Now, we can't profitably consider content and context of landscape without keeping these issues at the backs of our minds, if not the fronts. Kuo Hsi as presented in Susan Bush's paper, choosing a subject that would carry a suitable meaning for a painting to be placed in the emperor's summer residence, or for another in the Han-lin Academy, or one to function as an auspicious image in the midst of a great drought, was performing his part in such an exchange; and if it is objected that he was after all a court artist, and that the case of the scholar-amateur was different, I would agree but point out that even in the case of "self-reflexive paintings" (as Susan terms them) such as Mi Yu-jen's and Ssu-ma Huai's--reflective, that is, of the artists' own situations--they were, she assumes, done for another person in a similar situation. The pattern we can discern here--and, for instance, in Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's "Summoning to Reclusion" scroll (Chao-yin t'u) of 1611, done for a man similarly out of office after official service, or Fa Jochen's paintings of rainy landscapes done for men who, like himself, served in the Manchu government--the pattern is of landscape paintings reflective of political stances or circumstances shared by artist and recipient, as one side of an exchange that expressed and strengthened a community of interest.

The types of landscape that I had in mind when I suggested seeing Chinese landscape painting as a cluster of distinguishable types include some that can be defined functionally: birthday or farewell pictures done for those occasions; topographical pictures to record a trip or arouse memories of travel, or to convey information about places; pictures of gardens or villas, intended (with their inscriptions) to record and celebrate the impress of human designs and concepts on places. And determining more precisely the meanings of the paintings will allow us to conjecture, at least, about how and when and where they were presented, hung, or otherwise used. Taoist retreat and paradise pictures of the kind that Kiyo Munakata discusses so interestingly in his paper, for instance, were apparently done, in many cases, for birthday congratulations and celebrations. Robert Harrist's perceptive comments on how visual metaphors parallel the poetic might be understood in terms of an exchange between Li Kung-lin and his very cultivated audience for whom these metaphors were preferred carriers of meaning. Judy Andrews is inclined to see some of the characteristics of painting done in late 17th century Yangchow as responding to conditions of patronage in that city.

Our ultimate aim, of course, should be to understand how these different aspects of the painting--its subject and style, its content or meaning, and its context or function--interact and affect each other. Let me end with a brief look at two of the landscape types that seem to be relatively distinct and to exemplify these relationships.

(Slides) Farewell pictures, Sung-pieh t'u, done for someone who is departing for some faraway place, typically use a compositional structure designed to be read as conveying the idea of distance, separation, and deprivation, with a here-and-now foreground, often featuring a farewell party and waiting boat, and compositional markers indicating successive stages of movement into far distance and the future, into which the recipient is about to travel.

(Slides) Reclusion pictures (yin-chü t'u) also tend to use a common pictorial structure, in this case a compartmented composition with one closed-in part, containing the recluse's dwelling, and another that opens outward, signifying the option of venturing out when one pleases into the great world. Both types of landscape can be specific, with identifying references, or general and all-purpose: here, Wang Meng's depiction of his cousin's "Cloudy Forest Retreat," and a general reclusion scene by some early Ming Che school artist. In either case, to treat the style of the picture in isolation, or simply fit it (as is commonly done) into some stylistic sequence quite divorced from meaning or function, impoverishes our understanding of it. If someone, miraculously finding the very Kuo Hsi birthday painting described in his essay, wants to subject it to straight style-analysis, discussing the compositional role of the foreground figure and the use of the pine trees to establish a typical 11th century spatial recession, that's his privilege; but I think others will increasingly find such an account of the picture inadequate. If, on the other hand, we are able to recognize the functional type to which the picture belongs, how the artist has adapted the type to his special purpose, and how the particular features of the type are designed to be read as carrying a particular kind of meaning, and as fitting the picture for a particular situation or use, then we will not only enrich our experience of this picture, but enrich also our understanding of the role played by painters and paintings in Chinese society. We will not be neglecting style, but expanding our concept of it to demonstrate once again how style can carry human meaning to the world outside the painting.

Parts of the second essay were later incorporated into a lecture titled "Meanings and Functions in Chinese Landscape Painting" which I presented at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City in April, 1987. This will eventually be published by the University of Kansas Press, along with two other lectures given at the University of Kansas titled "Political Themes in Chinese Painting" and "Quickness and Spontaneity in Chinese Painting: The Ups and Downs of An Ideal," in a book tentatively titled Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting. These three lectures are also methodological in character, somewhat longer and fuller than the two essays published here.

The papers presented at this 1985 symposium were published, along with Alpers's introductory remarks, in Representations 12, Fall 1985.

"Style as Idea in Ming-Ch'ing Painting," in: The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson, Berkeley, 1976, pp. 137-156.

"Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting." Workshop held at Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, Nov. 20-24, 1980. The seventeen papers are being published as a volume by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (in press).

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford, 1972; Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven and London, 1985.

Some good examples are: Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, 1983. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley, 1980; and "Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins's Gross Clinic," Representations 9, Winter 1985, pp. 33-104. Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, Berkeley, 1979; and "'Meaning' in Children's Games: On the Limitations of the Iconographic Approach to Breugel," Representations 2, Spring 1983, pp. 27-60. Joseph Leo Koerner, "The Mortification of the Image: Death as a Hermaneutic in Hans Baldung Grien," Representations 10, Spring 1985, pp. 52-101.

Richard Vinograd, Wang Meng's "Pien Mountains: The Landscape of Eremitism in Later Fourteenth Century Chinese Painting, doctoral dissertation, Berkeley, 1970. See also his "Family Properties: Personal Context and Cultural Pattern in Wang Meng's Pien Mountains of A.D. 1366. Ars Orientalis XIII, 1982, pp. 1-29.

James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 106-145: "Ch'en Hung-shou: Portraits of Real People and Others."

Martin J. Powers, "Pictorial Art and Its Public in Early Imperial China," Art History vol. VII no. 2, June 1984, pp. 135-163; and "Artistic Taste, the Economy, and the Social Order in Former Han China," Art History vol. IX no. 3, September 1986, pp. 285-305.

James Cahill, ed., Shadows of Mt. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 10-14; and James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570-1644, Tokyo and New York, 1982, pp. 136-37.

James Cahill, The Compelling Image (cf. note 8), pp. 37-69, "Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and the Sanction of the Past."

Symposium organized by Charles Rhyne for February 1985 meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, "The Interpretation of Landscape Painting"; my paper was titled "Levels of Meaning in a Tenth Century Chinese Landscape." See also "Some Aspects of Tenth Century Painting as Seen in Three Recently-published Works," in: Papers for the International Conference on Sinology, Academic Sinica, Taipei, volume on Art History, Taipei, 1981, pp. 1-36.

Jerome Silbergeld, "In Praise of Government: Chao Yung's Painting Noble Steeds and Late Yuan Politics," Artibus Asiae XLVI/3, 1985, pp. 159-202.

The Barnhart-Cahill Rogers Correspondence, 1981, Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982.

See note 12.

Svetlana Alpers, Foreward to symposium "Art and Society" (cf. note 2).

Kuo Hsi, Lin-ch'üan kao-chih, translated in Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds., Early Chinese Texts on Painting, Cambridge, 1985; this passage on pp. 154-55.

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience (cf. note 5), p. 3.

Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (cf. note 5), pp. 42-50.

Susan Bush, "Landscape as Subject Matter: Different Sung Approaches," in session organized by Jerome Silbergeld for College Art Association meeting, New York, February 1986, titled "Chinese Landscape Painting: Context, Content, and Style." Unpublished.

For Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's painting of 1611, see The Distant Mountains (cf. note 10), Pl. 39.

James Cahill, "Awkwardness and Imagery in the Landscapes of Fa Jo-chen," paper for symposium held at Cleveland Museum of Art, March 1981. The papers from this symposium are being published in a volume by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (in press).

These three papers, all unpublished but presented at this session, are: Kiyohiko Munakata, "Chinese Literati and Taoistic Fantasy: Cases of Shen Chou and Wu School Artists"; Robert Harrist, "The Lung-mien shan-chuang t'u by Li Kung-lin"; and Julia F. Andrews, "Landscape Painting and Patronage in Early Qing Yangzhou."

CLP 71: 1986 “Some Observations on the Practice and Problems of Art History in China.” Unpublished paper written after spending several months in China

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRACTICE AND PROBLEMS OF ART HISTORY IN CHINA

(Unpub. paper, written after spending several months in China in 1986)

The Chinese literature on art, like the Chinese literature of most other subjects of cultural importance, is unmatched in priority and richness: by the time Vasari inaugurated European art history in the mid-16th century with his Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors of Italy, China had already produced a long series of histories of painting (leaving aside writings on other art forms). We could begin the series with Zhang Yenyuan's monumental ninth-century Lidai minghua ji, or "Record of Eminent Painters of Successive Dynasties," which is easily the most informative and sophisticated art-historical text written anywhere up to that time--or, for that matter, for some centuries after. The writings that precede Zhang's work, from the Six Dynasties and early Tang periods, although they set up the major issues and define the criteria by which painters and paintings should be assessed, cannot perhaps be considered as truly art-historical texts. But from Zhang's time onward, a succession of serious, informed, and comprehensive writings, down to Xia Wenyen's Tuhui baojian (preface 1365), carry the history of painting forward, each building on the last, providing basic information on artists and institutions, assessing trends, discussing issues, and telling us a good deal, at least, of what we want to know about painting of those periods. Our Western art colleagues, learning of this succession of major early texts, can only be envious.

Writings that can properly be called art-historical continue to be produced through the later periods; one has only to mention such names as Dong Qichang or Zhang Geng or Qin Tsuyong to realize on how high a level. But no comprehensive histories comparable to those of the earlier dynasties are attempted in later centuries, and the thrust of later writings tends to be rather toward art criticism, art theory, or matters of connoisseurship. No large-scale, general accounts of painting of the Ming and Qing periods, for instance, are attempted until quite recent times, and even then they are more documentary than (in our sense) art historical. Art history as it has developed in this century in the West--largely as a German invention, although with major contributions from other countries--has only begun to penetrate China. The recent Chinese literature on painting (to consider only one art form) is of course extensive and distinguished; biographical and other studies of artists, studies of paintings or of problems in the history of painting, or of art theory and texts, make up an extensive body of scholarship on which all of us outside China depend heavily. And it is by no means confined to traditional Chinese approaches--a good deal of innovative scholarship has appeared in print; the Chinese art journals are publishing more art-historical articles than ever before, and most of them are valuable additions to the knowledge and understanding of our subject. Nevertheless, there are some ways in which art history in China lags behind, or at least is out of step with, its practice in other countries.

Some of the reasons for this are the familiar ones: art history, like other areas of scholarship, is still emerging from the long and destructive hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, and from a longer period during which it was not considered an ideologically justifiable pursuit. I first came to China in 1973 as a member of what was called a Chinese archaeology delegation; in fact it was made up of art historians--only one of us had ever engaged in archaeology at all. We were, of course, deeply interested in the recent archaeological finds in China, and used them in our teaching and writing. But we could not have come to China then as art historians. Archaeology was at that time an acceptable discipline, providing as it did materials and information for the writing of history, as well as evidence for foreign observers of China's continuing commitment to the understanding of its past. Art history was not acceptable--although, as we soon learned, research on old works of art was still being carried on by knowledgeable people in the museums and institutes.

A follow-up delegation in October and November of 1977 was able to present itself openly as made up of specialists in the history of Chinese painting, and we heard everywhere on our travels about how the "second liberation" had made the display and study of old Chinese art once again possible. And the years since then have indeed seen a great rise in the quantity and quality of art-historical scholarship and publication, and the growth of teaching programs in art history. Nevertheless, in spite of all this activity, the practice of art history in China is not in as vigorous and healthy a state as I believe it should be. The factors impeding its development are no longer primarily political; they are more deep-seated than shifts in the political atmosphere will account for. I will try in what follows to suggest what some of these factors seem to me to be.

I recently spent three and a half months in China, between August and November 1986, traveling for pleasure and study, staying and lecturing at the art academies and at Fudan University in Shanghai, participating in a symposium, seeing exhibitions and collections, talking with people--art historians, museum curators, students, artists, editors and writers for art journals. In the course of all this I learned much more than I had known before about the teaching and practice of art history in China, and formed some ideas about its problems and its future, which I want to set down here for whatever they may be worth. I am quite aware of the limits of my knowledge: I have read only a fraction of the literature, come to know only some of the people, and have only a hazy understanding of how some of the institutions operate. But I feel it is worthwhile, even within these limitations, to offer a few observations. My feeling is that art history in China is on the verge of taking off on a great new development; teaching programs are expanding, new ones are projected, many intelligent and highly motivated students are choosing art history as a field of specialization. There is great interest among art historians and serious students in the new methodological directions being explored by their counterparts outside China. But with all this activity and enthusiasm, art history remains in what is still a somewhat anomalous position in China. Part of my intention here is to offer support and encouragement to colleagues and students there (some of whom are my good friends) by helping, from the viewpoint of an outsider, to define their situation and their problems.

One of the curious features of the teaching of art history in China is that it is carried on, not in university departments or programs as in other countries, but in the art academies, institutions of which the primary function is the training of artists. Art history in China, accordingly, is subsidiary to art practice. Many art history programs in the U.S. began the same way: at the University of California in Berkeley, for instance, the first art historian was hired (from Germany) to teach the artists about their past. There are still departments in U.S. universities where that relationship persists; but the major art history programs here are independent and self-sufficient. It is not so in China. The art academies where it is taught are principally three: the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the Nanjing College of Art, and the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, which is the oldest art college in China. Of these, only the Central Academy has an art history department at present; the other two have only programs. Still others, such as the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Zhongqing, offer courses in art history and theory but have no graduate programs. The Nanjing Academy hopes to institute a Ph.D. program in art history beginning next year; at present there are ten faculty members teaching art history and five graduate students studying it, three in Chinese art history and two in Western. The Ph.D. program at the Zhejiang Academy is recent, with less than ten students in it (out of a total student body of around seven hundred for the whole Academy), and no Ph.D.s have been granted as yet. From next year, they plan to have a proper art history department. What was to have been the Ph.D. program in art history at the Central Academy in Beijing somehow split off (Central Academy faculty speak of this with a tone of bitterness) and became a separate institution, directly under the Ministry of Culture, called the Institute of Art Research; two Ph.D.s in Chinese art theory have been awarded, both to students working under a professor who specializes in that subject. Another peculiar feature of the teaching of art history in China is that the right to grant Ph.D.s attaches to a professor, not to a program. At the Zhejiang Academy, for instance, one can study toward the Ph.D. with the specialist in Chinese sculpture, but not with the specialist in Chinese painting.

The surprising fact is that there is at present no art history department, or even a graduate program in art history, in any Chinese university. Peking University reportedly is considering such a program, but at present offers only archaeology. Fudan University in Shanghai, the other of the two great comprehensive universities in China, has a program in museum studies, of which art history is a component, and plans to expand this into a college, within which art history will be strengthened. But its purpose will be the training of museum curators, not academic art historians. Nankai University in Tianjin has begun to set up an art department, and has hired the painter Fan Zeng to chair it; the art historian whom Fan has reportedly chosen to head the other wing of the department is still studying in the U.S. I was told in Beijing that an education committee under the Ministry of Culture has recommended that in future art history courses should be taught in all universities, but this is unconfirmed, and the realization of the plan far in the future; and in any case, teaching courses is a different matter from establishing graduate programs. So for the foreseeable future, the art historians who teach and publish in China will be coming out of the programs in the art academies. For all the productive activity going on within art history in China, then, it exists institutionally and as an academic discipline chiefly in a state of potentiality.

The reasons behind this situation lie partly in the history of higher art education in China: the academies were founded and directed by notable artists. Xu Beihong's pupils, and pupils' pupils, still dominate the Central Academy in Beijing, and the ghosts of Lin Fengmian, Fu Baoshi, Huang Binhong, and Pan Tienshou still hover over the other two. No art historian of comparable fame and stature has appeared in any of them; in fact, the idea of an art historian of comparable fame and stature may still be foreign to China. So, for that matter, is the idea of art history as a discipline distinct from the practice of art, or of the art historian as a specialist quite separate from the practicing artist. Time and again, when one talks with a teacher of art history in China, or a writer for one of the journals that publish articles on art history, he turns out to have been trained originally as an artist. Trying to lecture on some art-historical subject in China, one finds oneself constantly pulled back, in the ensuing discussion, to the problems of contemporary artists, as though one's listeners, or many of them, were reluctant to give their attention for long to art history proper. Moreover, the art journals mostly include a few articles that are properly art-historical in content along with a larger number of others by artists and critics appraising each other's work, or discussing some recent artist or some trend in contemporary art. To the best of my knowledge, no Chinese journal is devoted exclusively to art history in the way that Art Bulletin is in the U.S.--or, for Asian art, Ars Orientalis, Artibus Asiae, or Archives of Asian Art. And many of the articles on Chinese art of the past are written in fact by people who are active mainly as artists. Both institutionally and in publications, then, art history in China is strongly dominated by artists.

Most artists in China, and perhaps many non-artists, will see this as a fundamentally healthy situation. They will point out, quite rightly, that the practice of painting and a kind of scholarship of old painting were often combined in China into a single person: Su Dongpo and Dong Qichang are examples that come immediately to mind. The brochure published by the Zhejiang Academy to publicize its teaching program tells us: "Traditionally, the Chinese artist is simultaneously a scholar, calligrapher, and poet." For one person to combine these attributes is in accordance with the traditional Chinese preference for an integral concept of culture against specialization, and is an ideal one can only admire, and welcome when one finds it exemplified in the present. But we can admire equally the corresponding ideal in Europe, the 18th or early 19th century gentleman of general culture who was at home and competent in literary, artistic, scientific, political, and other pursuits, without making the mistake of believing that anyone could pursue them all on a high level today. We live, for better or worse, in an age of specialization. The "amateur ideal" in the arts persists in China more than in most other places (exceptions might be found, perhaps, in England and Harvard); that so many Chinese, for instance, can paint and do calligraphy on an amateur basis but capably is a pleasure to see. But, as I had occasion to point out to artists in the academies: For you to say that because you are good artists, you can lecture and write effectively on art history is equivalent to my saying: because I am a good art historian, I can also paint well. The former statement is no more true than the latter. Art history as practiced outside China is a discipline in itself, with its own methodology, its own set of issues, its own training; and the same must be true for China before art history can have a healthy development there. Artists in China are reluctant to accept this truth; they insist on professional standards in the creation of art, but seem unwilling to grant the same to art history.

I am not arguing that the writing and teaching of a kind of art history by artists is without its positive aspects; on the contrary, I would argue strongly that artists can bring special insights to the interpretation of art works, enhancing our understanding of those works in ways that others of us cannot. I want only to point out that this characteristic of art history in China is unique--in all other countries I know about, artists and art historians are different people (allowing for the occasional overlap)--and also that it is not equally true in other fields: scholars of the history of drama, for instance, are not normally expected to be also practicing playwrights. And I want also to argue that the effects of this situation are not entirely positive. I suspect, from conversations with artists and others in the academies, that many Chinese scholars will continue to see this union of artist, theorist, and art historian as a special strength of the Chinese tradition, to be preserved at all costs. But the costs, for the future of art history in China, will be great. Art history as it is practiced in other countries can only develop there, I am convinced, to the degree that it succeeds in the future in emancipating itself from the domination of artists.

This may sound like an extreme and deliberately provocative statement; I nevertheless believe it to be true. In explaining why, let me begin by quoting again from the Zhejiang Academy's brochure, as representative of art-academy thinking in China. It says of Chinese art that it "seeks to join the subjectivity of the artist with the objectivity of reality, culminating in a self-enhancement for the artist." Herein lies the principal problem for an art history dominated by artists: they are mostly unable, or unwilling, to entertain any conception of art other than the one that "culminates in a self-enhancement for the artist." Art history, for them, can only be the history of the artist, a succession of creative acts by inspired individuals. And since art history is made up of artists, other artists are obviously best qualified to interpret it, to teach it, to write about it. But these assumptions go against the whole thrust of recent art-historical writing outside China, which is based on a different set of assumptions. One is that art history is not intelligible if it is seen only as a series of isolated, free creative acts by a series of individual artists; to see it that way is the equivalent of seeing history as a series of acts carried out independently by inspired individuals. Art historians today tend to believe instead that the work of art, or an art-historical development, can only be intelligible when seen as affected by historical circumstance, by economic and social and political factors.

It is understandable, perhaps, that artists in China should be uncomfortable with this way of thinking; after the terrible oppression that many of them underwent in the Cultural Revolution years, it would be natural enough for them to regard any constraints placed on the artist as having a negative effect on the quality of his productions, and the ideal state for the artist as being a total emancipation from such constraints. When one talks in China (as I did) about the economic and social conditions within which earlier artists necessarily worked, and about how their creative output can be seen in part as responding to these conditions, Chinese artists today are inclined to react negatively to such an approach, seeing it as somehow denigrating their tradition, making it seem commercialized and servile, and therefore less autonomous, less healthy. In giving lectures in which the forms that works of art took were considered as affected strongly by the historical, economic, or social circumstances within which they were created, I encountered regularly this response, a protective stance toward their tradition against someone they felt was denigrating it by treating it in this way. The most striking occurrence of this was at the Meishuguan in Shanghai, the gallery supported by the Chinese Artists Association. I argued in a lecture there, with some examples and evidence, that a change in the nature of the art market from the Kangxi era into the 18th century, expecially in the city of Yangzhou, encouraged painters to produce more work quickly and somewhat repetitively for a larger and more anonymous audience, instead of doing fewer paintings on a "custom-made" basis for particular recipients, and that this shift had an adverse effect not only on the output of individual masters (Zha Shibiao, Gong Xian, Shitao, as well as the Yangzhou masters of the 18th century) but also on the whole later history of Chinese painting. Some members of the large audience, which was composed of artists, critics, and museum people, reacted quite vehemently against this thesis, delivering impassioned counter-arguments after the lecture. (Interestingly, the principal attack came from a painter in the Shanghai Academy, and my principal defender was a noted museum curator who is not, so far as I know, a practicing artist.) But apart from the rightness or wrongness of my argument--and "rightness" is not even properly at issue here, since anyone suggesting causal factors in an artistic decline is obviously not operating in the realm of the verifiable--I had the strong impression that many of them were disturbed by this kind of argument. And they reacted, I think, as artists. (I can add that this was the only occasion in my lecturing in China when a few of the audience were not only disapproving but rude, talking loudly during the lecture, and even breaking in to question the authenticity of a painting I was showing in a slide--showing purely as an illustration of some point in my discussion, to which authenticity was quite irrelevant.)

On such occasions, I tried sometimes to argue that the autonomy of the artist is not an unmixed good, that in fact the artist seems sometimes to work best within, even against, a set of clearly-understood values and expectations in the society around him or in some particular patron, and that that situation could be healthy for him. Painters in the Italian Renaissance, or in the Sung imperial academy, worked within it and produced masterpieces, whereas painters in the West today work in situations of relative freedom from constraints, and produce--well, they could see for themselves. (This was of course a rhetorical position; on other occasions I found myself arguing for the strengths of recent Western painting.) Chinese artists were inclined to reject this idea, believing that the masterpieces were created in spite of such constraints, and that there are other reasons for the great decline (in which most of them firmly believe) in art of our time. The great achievements in art, for them, are to be understood as fruits of the genius of the individual artist.

So, what is wrong with that? It is certainly not entirely untrue, and there are many foreign art historians (such as my own teacher Max Loehr) who hold firmly to it still, rejecting the idea that outside circumstance exercised any significant effect on the essential qualities of the work of art. But it is a partial truth, and and concentrating one's attention so heavily on that part distorts, I believe, our understanding of the objects we study. This is not the place to make that argument once again; I have made it at length in a widely-circulated correspondence with two colleagues, and can now refer, for a vastly superior explication and exemplification of such an approach, to Michael Baxandall's recent Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (Yale University Press, 1985). But I would argue also that apart from whatever rightness it may have in itself, this way of dealing with works of art makes for a more interesting and rewarding kind of art history. To see the meaning or expressive content of the art work always as embodying the feeling of the individual artist is an art-historical dead end: a formulation of that kind (the artist felt like this, therefore the painting is like this), because it can explain anything, in the end explains nothing.

An example will illustrate this point. One of my students, who was working at the time on the theme of virtuous recluses of antiquity as depicted in early Ming court painting, asked an eminent Chinese art historian (who had begun his career as an artist) why the court painters of that time favored this theme. His answer was typical: "The artists admired these virtuous men, and expressed their admiration in pictures of them." The meaning of the work of art, in this way of thinking, is always pulled back inside the artist, so to speak, instead of being located (in part, at least) in the society around him. (The proper response to such a statement, which we did not use on that occasion, is to ask: why then did so many early Ming court artists feel that way about virtuous hermits, and so few artists of other times and other types? Skeptics of this approach can sometimes be silenced, or at least seriously disconcerted, by pointing out such inescapable correlations.) My student, fortunately, was unaffected by the Chinese scholar's answer and went on to write a ground-breaking and enlightening study in which the choice of this theme for paintings, and choice of particular hermits as exemplars of particular decisions to accept or reject service under more or less virtuous rulers, were related convincingly to the central issue in the lives of the court and high-official patrons for such paintings, the issue of chu-chu , accepting or declining posts, being appointed to official positions or retiring from them, and to the ethics of all these choices.

The student who did this study is Chinese, from Taiwan; and other examples could of course be cited of Chinese specialists, whether from Taiwan or overseas Chinese in the U.S. or Chinese in mainland China, who are doing innovative art history that departs from traditional Chinese approaches. Graduate students in China are attracted to new trends in foreign art history, insofar as they are able to learn about them; one of them told me, after one of my lectures, that my approach was close to what she herself had been wanting to do, but that she had difficulty finding anyone with whom she could talk about it, or who would support this direction in her work. I told her that in fact there were numbers of people in China who felt as she did, and that they should all form an organization, a Chinese Art Historians Association as a counterpart to the Chinese Artists Association. I added facetiously that they might stipulate that artists are ineligible to join. She said she did not think China was ready to go that far just yet, but that she welcomed the idea. (Later I learned that the idea of forming an art historians association has been under discussion for some time, but has not yet been realized.)

The irony of the matter is that Chinese scholars can usually do this kind of study, when they choose to, better than we outsiders can, because of their unmatched competence in dealing with the documentary sources, their access to sources unknown to us, and their generally broader knowledge of Chinese history and culture. My intention in arguing as I am here is to encourage those who want to practice this kind of art history, or may want to if they are better acquainted with it; I am certainly not admonishing anyone to stop doing their kind of scholarship and begin doing our kind. Chinese art historians, including young scholars but older ones as well, need to have more options open to them, and more sympathetic and understanding responses when they attempt untraditional and unfamiliar directions in their research and writing.

There are obstacles still to be overcome, even apart from the tendency noted above to treat art, old or new, always from the viewpoint of the artist. One is a quite understandable distaste for social and political interpretations of art among many scholars in China, as a reaction against the official mandating of such interpretations during the earlier years of the P.R.C. I began one of my lectures in China by pointing out that a curious turnabout has taken place. In the 1950s and early 1960s Chinese writers on art were compelled to evaluate and interpret it by social and political criteria, and wrote interpretations that some of them will now disavow. We, meanwhile, were inclined to stress style and individual expression. Now we seem to have switched sides: many Western art historians, influenced by Marxist art history without accepting all of its premises, are now attempting to study "the way a work of art looks and what it means. . .as functions of the society in which it was made and viewed," and to "consider art as a social practice." (Svetlana Alpers, in Representations 12, Fall 1985, p. 1), while our Chinese colleagues, no longer constrained to do that, are revelling in the freedom to emphasize the individual genius of the artist--the very anathema of Cultural Revolution doctrine about art and culture. Even while sympathizing with them, however, one may hope for a counter-swing back to a middle ground in which both kinds of art history can coexist and be valued.

Another obstacle to the acceptance in China of the kind of art history being practiced in other countries is, I think, the very perception of it as foreign. Chinese specialists are proud of their tradition of art-historical scholarship, and have good reason to be--it is, as I began this essay by remarking, older and also, until quite recent times, richer than any other. If it has undergone some decline recently, the causes are more political than any inherent weakness in it. But also involved is the well-known Chinese sense of exclusive possession of the truth, at least about their own culture. My relations with Chinese colleagues have on the whole been on a friendly basis of mutual respect. But along with a great many favorable, or at least courteous, responses to my lectures and writings, I sometimes encounter a response that could be stated (although in fact it is never so directly stated) as: Since you are neither a painter nor Chinese, how can you possibly have anything to say about Chinese painting that will interest us? The response is reasonable enough, within this way of thinking about art history. But that it is a special Chinese response becomes obvious if we once more consider parallel situations: if we were, for example, to compile a bibliography of major studies of the history of Italian painting over the last seventy years, we would probably find that most of them are by people who are neither painters nor Italian; and no one argues that this diminishes in any way their value. There can even by advantages in viewing cultural phenomena from the outside: one is less committed, for example, to those grand but tired old formulations--paintings are soundless poems, Chinese artists convey the inner spirit rather than (like Western artists) the outer appearance, etc.--which are all too often brought out by Chinese writers as though they still merited acceptance as profound and eternal truths. And as an outsider one can try, at least, to take a more objective stance on those issues that arouse ethnocentric passions, such as the presence and importance of European influence in 17th century Chinese painting, for which I have been arguing (with clear evidence, I believe) in recent years, but which Chinese scholars mostly seem to regard as another foreign attempt to erode the autonomous development of their cultural tradition, and to oppose vigorously.

To the degree that new ideas and methodology in art history are perceived as impositions from outside, then, they will have a difficult time taking root in China. One would like to be able to persuade those who have this perception that on the contrary, ideas adopted deliberately from outside can be liberating rather than constraining: like the engravings and other works of art from Europe that opened the eyes of late Ming Chinese artists to new options, ways of escaping the confines of their tradition, ideas from other schools of art history, adopted by choice and under no constraint, could now enrich the range of ways in which works of art, and art-historical phenomena, can be studied and understood by Chinese scholars. It is of course a true exchange, operating in both directions: one could as easily take as parallels the way French artists in the later 19th century accepted enthusiastically from Japanese prints some new ways of composing and coloring pictures, or Abstract Expressionist artists and others in U.S. took what suited their purposes in the 1940s and 50s from Chinese calligraphy.

Finally, I would suggest that art history in China would be on a firmer footing if it could disentangle itself, more than it usually does, from two other large sets of concerns, both in themselves entirely worthy and important, both closely related to art history and yet distinguishable from it. One is art theory, the other authentication. Both are able to make the claim that art history without them is insecure, since it obviously needs a solid theoretical basis, and obviously must distinguish genuine from false works of art before it can proceed. Both claims have considerable merit; but in fact theorizing about art and arguments about authenticity are, perhaps should be, both more or less endlessly ongoing pursuits, and art history must proceed on its own, somewhat independently of them.

Highly sophisticated theoretical discussions have been a principal strength of the Chinese literature of art from its beginnings, and continue today; the present Chinese fondness for theorizing about art may be only a continuation of that. Or it may be another function of the domination of art history by artists, who, for reasons I do not entirely understand, seem to be more strongly attracted to art theory than to art history. An essay by Xue Yongnian of the Central Academy, published in Meishu yanjiu (1985, no. 1), makes the convincing suggestion that the emphasis on theory over history in art studies of the past decades might have been because theory was judged to be more applicable to the concerns of present-day art and artists. Whatever the reason, writings by artists and others on large, general aesthetic issues make up a substantial portion of the contents of art journals in China. If I see this phenomenon as subtly undermining the status of art history, it is because art theory and art history are too often confused--asking about art history courses and programs, I would often be told about courses in art theory and aesthetics, as though they were the same thing. Also, this pursuit seems to draw off too much of the thought and energy that might otherwise go into art history. Thoughtful writing, that is, tends to be directed into these large, general questions; it is too seldom that a comparable thoughtfulness is directed toward writing about works of art, and art-historical problems, in theoretically interesting ways.

Authentication (jianding ), which is one part of connoisseurship but might also be regarded as an equivalent for art works of the Chinese practice of kaozheng or textual criticism, has a similarly old and distinguished history in China; to be an expert in painting and calligraphy in traditional China, as Wen Jia or Dong Qichang were, was above all to be able to distinguish true from false, or at least to persuade your audience that you could do so. From Ming-Qing times onward, and probably earlier as well, the fundamental act of the authority on painting appears to have been to stand in front of the work and say authoritatively: this is clearly genuine (or clearly fake, as the case may be). Again, this is an essential pursuit; we all must make judgements, as best we can, on the authenticity of the works we study. The practice of authentication has a negative effect on art-historical studies only when it becomes an end in itself, when scholars in the field cannot get beyond it and begin to argue that we can only start to deal with works of art in other ways after we have determined finally, to everyone's satisfaction, their dating and authorship--an end which, alas, will probably never be reached. Meanwhile, we must get on with other things.

I would like to end by saying that my most recent stay left me more than ever fond of China, its museums and academies and the people in them, many of whom have become good friends. If there are some who will find one or another of the arguments I have made here disturbing, there are others who are in essential agreement with them, as I know from talking with them; and it is to these people that I want to offer encouragement, with the hope that the discipline of art history in which they are engaged will come to be acknowledged, more than it is now, as an independent and respected pursuit. It is to the future of art history in China, then, that this essay is finally dedicated.

CLP 62: 2004 “Representations of Gardens in Chinese Painting.” Asia Society, New York

“Representations of Gardens in Chinese Painting.”
Lecture for Asia Society, New York, April 29, 2004.

I should clarify at the outset the topic of my lecture. I won't be talking about gardens--not qualified. Or even about what ptgs tell us about old gardens--or only a little of that. My topic is, rather, the different manners and forms in which gardens are represented in China, and what kind of visual information each of these forms gives us. My hope is that with the really informative paintings identified and established, others can make use of them for reconstructing the layout and features of great old gardens--that would make a very interesting and valuable book, but I'm not the one to write it.

What is basic aim of artist who does a garden painting? It isn't, I think, primarily to provide information about the garden; usually the ptg is done for the garden's owner, who doesn't need to be told that. Rather, it's to commemorate the garden, honor it as a portrait does the sitter; it provides the owner with something to show guests, for them to admire. And typically, it aims at evoking in the viewer an experience that is somehow analagous, or congruent, to the experience one has of visiting the garden. Artist presents visual materials, images that are recognizable as representing things and spaces of garden, arranging these so as to structure the viewer's experience, again in a way analagous to the way one experiences a garden.

Think of the defining characteristics of a garden:

- Enclosure; the sense of security if offers, or escape from the troubles and dangers of the outside world.

- Order, or organization: the arrangement of materials and spaces--trees, rocks, bodies of water, buildings--into a designed piece of terrain.

- The making and placing of certain arrangements or objects (jing, "scenes") to evoke memories, either of literary and historical themes and events, or of some themes or events in the life of the owner--and the poetic naming of these.

- The arrangement of all these so as to encourage certain ways of moving through the garden, or being in it, experiencing and enjoying it.

Now, what of all this is transferable, so to speak, from one medium to another? From garden to painting, that is. But of course it was a two-way relationship: the design of gardens followed in some respects the conventions of painting. From the time of the Yuan Ye by Ji Cheng, written between 1631 and 1634, the earliest and most informative treatise on gardens in China, the idea that a garden should be like a painting is expressed over and over. A person who built a garden thought of himself as inhabiting a work of art, with all the attendant sense of transcending the real world. Close affinities between gardens and paintings affirmed and enhanced this feeling. Garden designers were often also painters.

Simple answer to question of what is transferable: it depends on how you use the medium of ptg--what form you choose, and how you employ that form.

An aesthetic experience, as a general category to which a visit to a garden belongs, has certain characteristics: it stands somewhat apart from our everyday, routine experience; it has a beginning and an end; and it is structured somehow within that: theme and variations, building to climax and subsiding, and so forth.

Thee are many other ways one can think about garden: Craig Clunas's "Fruitful Sites," as a profitable piece of land, with orchards and edible or otherwise valuable plants; as display of wealth, way of impressing guests; as site for love affairs and other kinds of human interaction--all imposed by usage owners make of it. All these relevant, but too much to encompass in a single lecture. So, on to paintings.

Essentially three models, for which three standard forms that Ch. ptgs commonly take are appropriate.

A. Single, comprehensive view of garden, in hanging scroll. (Possible also in tall handscroll, not too long, so that it can be viewed all at once.) In these, garden laid out like map, seen from high vantage point. As if artist led you to nearby high hill, pointed out the features of garden visible from there.

B. Handscroll or horizontal scroll could provide pictorial analogue to more continuous, linear experience of entering garden, typically through gate seen at beginning of scroll, strolling through it and seeing its principal features, then leaving through another gate at end of scroll. As if artist led you through, directing your attention to important sights along the way.

C. Album can offer series of views, twelve or twenty or more, of "scenes" in garden--pavilions, ponds, rockeries, etc.--frequently with the name of each inscribed on the leaf. To continue my fanciful account, as if artist blindfolded you and took you through garden, turning you in right direction and taking off blindfold briefly so you can look at some designated "scene," while he tells you the name of it.

S,S. Fine example of first type is this anon. Ming (15-16c) horizontal painting that went through auction here a decade ago; don't know its present ownership. Detailed, technically high-level portrait of riverside garden, complete with owner and servants, and some indications of what its best features were-- row of bonsai, flowering trees, table with seats, preparations for visitors. But shows us only part of garden closest to us; rest hidden behind buildings and trees.

S,S. A painting by the early 18th cent. master Yuan Jiang in which the villa and garden are seen in an expansive setting; again, much of garden hidden from viewer's gaze. If you raise the vantage point and lay it all out, as in this large album leaf by the late Ming Qian Gu, you communicate more of the layout, but only in a diagrammatic way that doesn't tell much about the individual parts.

S,S. In this very fine painting by Wang Hui, done in 1717 and owned by Guy and Marie Helene Weill, we see a bird's eye view of the recipient's house and garden in a spacious setting; the garden is not the artist's main concern, so only a little of it is shown.

S,S. Turning to the handscroll, we can note that a short handscroll can be spread out to present a single, all-encompassing view of the garden. The earliest extant portrayal specifically of a garden, the picture of the Shizi Lin or Lion Grove garden by Ni Zan and Zhao Yuan, painted in 1373 and now lost and viewable only in old photographs, is of this type. We can also read it, however, from right to left, the common way of viewing a handscroll, entering the gate, moving through the trees and buildings, and at the end climbing the artificial mountain-rockery to the monk's hut atop it, meant to represent a retreat at the top of a towering mountain. Ni Zan and Zhao Yuan were reportedly involved in the planning of the garden; this picture presumably records their plan.

--S. The Yusong or "Friend of the Pines" Garden is portrayed in a short handscroll by its owner, the early Ming literatus-painter Du Qiong. At the opening of the scroll he is shown sitting with a guest, a high official, at the entrance to his house,

S,S. And in the remainder (see in bad slides taken by myself) he appears again with a different guest, walking toward a table where servants are preparing things to eat and drink. Nearby are potted bonsai; a railing marks the further limit of the garden; and at the end, again, is an artificial mountain that offers, through a cave door, escape into a world in miniature. where they can sit by the pond and listen to the waterfall, or visit a miniature Buddhist temple. Here we learn more than usually, and first-hand from the owner, about how the garden was experienced and enjoyed.

S,S. This type, the short handscroll offering a comprehensive view, is seen at its best in a high-technique portrayal of the Dong Yuan or East Garden by Yuan Jiang, one of whose specialties was paintings of this kind. We not only understand from it the whole layout of the garden, but

-- S. we can move in for closer views, since the artist's meticulous rendering permits this-- his picture and Du Qiong's differ in the way of high-resolution and low-resolution photos. (I am not suggesting a difference in quality--most Chinese connoisseurs would much rather own Du Qiong's scroll.)

-- S. Moving in still closer, we see the master of the garden and his guest sitting on the verandah of his house looking out at the courtyard with flowering trees.

S,S. A long handscroll by the great Ming master Qiu Ying in the Cleveland Museum preserves the composition of a Song-period scroll depicting the Du Lo Yuan or "Garden of Solitary Pleasure" in Loyang, owned by the great 11th century statesman and historian Sima Guang. Sima Guang retired there in protest against the policies of the reformer Wang Anshi, and composed an essay about the garden which is the basis for the painting. Here the handscroll form is used to depict successive parts or features of the garden in a sequential way, with no attempt at uniting them into a spatial continuum or showing how they relate in space. This painting and the garden have been written about often, so I will skip over it quickly.

S,S. Another long handscroll ascribed to the same Qiu Ying, this one in the Nanjing Museum, offers another kind of sequential presentation of a garden, whether imaginary or real we can't say--seen from an elevated viewpoint, as if arranged on an upward slope. It's well populated with scholars and servants who act out the ways in which the garden was enjoyed--for instance, in re-enacting the wine-cup-floating scene of the Lan-t'ing or Orchid Pavilion Gathering; the man in the pavilion in the foreground is taking the part of the great calligrapher Wang Xizhi.

S,S. The bird's-eye view gives the effect of passing over the garden, viewing it from a moving, elevated viewpoint. People in a house, one doing calligraphy; others outwide, strolling and reading; at the end, a pond with geese. The kay to uses of a garden is selection: just as you select rocks, trees, buildings etc. to construct your private world, so can you select friends to invite and activities to sponsor, narrowing real experiences to those you choose, instead of those that everyday life thrusts rudely upon you. A universal ideal.

S,S. Some time in the 15th century, it would appear, a new type of garden handscroll composition is invented; the earliest example known to me is this one, ascribed (unfirmly) to Shen Zhou. That it is certainly by an amateur artist is indicated by the difficulty he has connecting the wall to the gate--or rather, he doesn't even try. In this program, one enters the garden through a gate at the beginning, makes one's way through it, observing notable features along the way, and leaves it at the end. Many of this type survive; I'll show only a few briefly. We move through a grove of diverse flowering and other trees,

S,S. Cross a plank bridge, beyond which is a pond over which two dragonflies are flitting, and encounter the host and guest sitting outside the house;

S -- in the entryway to which antiquities are set out for their appreciation; we leave the garden at the end. Seals identify famous owners, from Xiang Yuanbian in the Ming to the late Zhang Xuezeng. These are of course part of the experience of the scroll, but are not our concern tonight.

S,S. An example by the later Ming master Qian Gu, the Qiuzhi Garden portrayed by him in 1564, follows this scheme: entry through a gate, the master and guest strolling through arbors and courtyards, servants here and there, a pond with ducks and geese, a well, exit at the end, where the painter's signature and dedication appear.

S,S. A particularly fine use of this handscroll type was accomplished by Sun Kehong, in a scroll he painted in 1572 representing the Stone Table Garden; it's in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Sun's long inscription for the painting praises this garden as the most beautiful in the region, and relates how the owner, Mr. Lu Ya-shan, planted a long grove of thousands of tall bamboo and placed in the midst of these a large stone table, building a pavilion over it. On nights of the full moon he would assemble his friends there to play games and compose poems. A short passage of bare terrain opens the scroll, with the city wall visible beyond. Inside the gate is a pond and a row of ornamental rocks. (The rocks from Sun Kehong's own garden are still to be seen in a park in Songjiang.)

S,S. Rolling further, we see the Stone Table Pavilion, with Mr. Lu leaning on the railing to watch a servant watering potted plants; behind him on the table are antique bronze vessels, an inkstone, and a case of books. We can imagine the full-moon parties held there, with drinking and games and poems. The profound difference between Japanese and Chinese gardens has often been observed: typical Japanese gardens are mainly for contemplation, as one sits on the verandah and gazes out over them; at most, one strolls along paths or stepping stones, careful not to deviate from the prescribed routes. Chinese gardens are definitely for participation, sometimes quite vigorous, drunken parties etc. Chinese erotic albums usually include scenes of sexual goings-on in gardens; how much of this really happened I can't say, but I could show you lots of pictures of it. (I won't, tonight.) Hard to imagine this happening in a Japanese garden; no furniture of the kind that would make it comfortable, and one would be afraid of upsetting the aesthetic balance. The Chinese garden is more accomodating in this respect.

S,S. The path disappears into a grove of bamboo, and emerges from the back gate of the garden; we see a visitor and his servant leaving. The artist's long inscription follows.

S,S. A brief look at a final example, by the 19th century master Xu Gu, painted in 1834 and executed in his distinctive and sensitive brushwork. The opening shows us guests approaching the garden through flowering trees,

S,S. Inside we see more flowering trees, rockeries, the host waiting for the arrival of his guests, a servant sweeping leaves,

S --. and beyond the house, more trees and the concluding fadeout.

S,S. I will only mention, without being able to follow it through, that the late Ming artist Wu Bin's long handscroll portraying Mi Wanzhong's Shao Garden, painted in 1615, belongs to this type. It was prominently featured in the 1968 China House exhibition "Gardens in Chinese Art" organized by the owner of the scroll, Wango Weng.

S,S. The third form in which gardens are represented in Chinese paintings, the album, typically offers a series of labeled pictures of notable views, or jing, in the garden. No attempt is made to connect these spatially; the garden in this version is an assemblage of designated sights; the visitor moves from one to the next, perhaps with a running account by his host of the meanings behind their titles. An early example, devoted to the Shizi Lin or Lion Grove garden, is attributed (insecurely) to the late Yuan master Xu Ben; another, by Du Qiong (whose handscroll representation of his own garden we saw earlier), was painted in 1443 and represents Tao Congyi's Nancun or "Southern Village" Garden. Both bear written titles identifying the sights.

S,S. An eight-leaf album in the Metropolitan Museum ascribed to Wen Zhengming presents prominent places in the Zhuozheng Yuan or Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician in Suzhou. The album exists in more than one version, and I lean toward accepting another; but authenticity is not, fortunately, our concern tonight. The scenes are, in any case, depicted in a schematic and amateurish manner.

S,S. Finally, an album painted in 1625 by the Songjiang artist Shen Shichong is made up of scenes of his patron Wang Shimin's Jiao Garden.

This completes our fast survey of Chinese garden pictures done in the three standard forms, and the kinds of experiences they convey. Fine as these all might be as works of art, none was adequate to provide comprehensive and believable visual accounts of the gardens, because of obvious problems of spatial disjuncture, limitations of a single vantage point, and conventionalization. But of course that was not their purpose. The feat of leaving these all behind and creating a completely new and (to my knowledge) unparalleled and unrepeated visual record of a great garden was accomplished by the late Ming artist Zhang Hong in his twenty-leaf "Zhi Garden" album. Once divided among four collections, it is now in two: twelve leaves in LACMA, eight in Berlin Museum (former Vannotti).

S,S. Before getting to the album proper, I want to make a few points about Zhang Hong's methods of representation, points I've discussed in various writings about him. First, he took a lot of ideas from European pictures he was able to see, prints chiefly, brought by Jesuit missionaries. At right a leaf from Zhang's "Scenes of Yueh" album painted in 1639; at left, a leaf from Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Cities of the World, a late 16th century Antwerp publication that is known to have been among the books of engravings to be seen in China in Zhang Hong's time, and one that appears to have fascinated some Chinese artists. (Describe).

Also, in the inscription on this album Zhang writes that when he went to Yueh (present-day Zhejiang) the sights there mostly weren't like what he had read about them; on his return he made this album to record what he had seen, becaus, he writes, depending on your ears isn't as good as depending on your eyes. A remarkable expression, for a Chinese artist, of an intent to adopt a visual approach and report what he sees--for late Ming, a very un-Chinese project.

S,S. A painting of the stone cliff at Mt. Xixia, outside Nanjing, done by Zhang Hong in 1634. From his inscription on this we learn that Zhang went to this place with a friend and viewed the cliff, with its shrine and rock-cut Buddha images, in the rain; and then, when he returned to Suzhou, painted what he had seen. But when I myself went to the place to figure out what Zhang's vantage point might have been, I discovered that there wasn't one--no place he could have stood to get this view. We are back to our imaginary helicopter, or hot-air balloon, the capacity of the artist to render the scene as it would be viewed from a vantage point that is in fact inaccessible to him. Also, Zhang does not, as a traditional Chinese artist would do, depict the notable features of the scene, the rock-cut niches with Buddhas, with unnatural clarity and emphasis; he allows them to merge with their surroundings, much as they would appear to an observor at the place. (I have slides to make this point, but won't show them.)

S,S. Now, at last, to the garden. At right, the first leaf from Zhang's twenty-leaf Zhi Garden album, painted in 1627. He labels it "Complete View of the Zhi Garden," what we would call a bird's-eye view. I put beside it, for contrast, Qian Gu's complete view of the Qiaozhi Garden, not far from Zhang's in time but profoundly different in conception and method. Although Qian Gu also seems to represent the scene from an elevated viewpoint, in the traditional Chinese way, he adheres to the Chinese tradition also in drawing everything in the picture--trees, buildings, rocks--as if seen straight-on, or from only a slight elevation; and there is no diminution from front to back. Zhang's picture breaks sharply with this old tradition. To learn what inspired this daring move, we need only turn to another leaf in the Braun and Hogenberg series,

S --. this one a view of Frankfurt. Both pictures lay out their scenery on a groundplane that is slanted not only upward but also sideward; one of the compilers, Hogenberg as I recall, writes about how the diagonal view of a city is most revealing since it allows one to look down into streets and spaces in a way the straight-on view does not. In both pictures, buildings and trees diminish into distance; in both, walls and boats and other things are shown as looked down on, or looked into.

S --. A detail of Zhang's bird's-eye view reveals these features more clearly. I will use it also to point out a few features of the garden that we will see later in individual leaves. A dike with willows growing on it divides the canal that borders the garden; (etc.--gate, ponds, one with island; bridge, diverging shores with bamboo, large rockery,)

S --. This is a bad photograph made from a diagram drawn from my sketch and printed in the LACMA 1996 publication, issued to accompany an exhibition of the album, titled Paintings of the Zhi Garden by Zhang Hong: Revisiting a Seventeenth Century Chinese Garden, with all leaves reproduced in color and essays by their curator June Li and myself. Unhappily, it sold out very quickly and has little chance of being reprinted--I wish it could be. This diagram shows, superimposed in different colors on a pale reproduction of the bird's-eye view, the area included in each of the leaves, the vantage point from which it is viewed, and the direction of the view. In short, by long perusal I had cracked the code, realized the extraordinary program of the album, and identified the location, scope, and direction of each of the leaves as they appear also in the bird's-eye view. Let me illustrate just how this program works by locating in this way the next four leaves.

S --. Leaf Two (the order and numberings are all mine--they are not written on the leaves) brings us close to the main gate of the garden; we descend, so to speak, to look over the dike with willows and travelers and the canal with boats, to see the nearer wall. There are two gates: one into the main section, another to a separate section of the garden, perhaps used by another family membrer, at the right.

S --. For Leaf Three we move over the wall at a point near this second gate, and view close-up the place of divergence: banks receding left and right, a bridge flanked by a wall, tall bamboo, a small house with two figures in lower right, another house beyond (all this visible, very small, in the bird's-eye view); and at left, a path going back along one of the large ponds.

S --. This same path reappears, along with the walled bridge, at the right of Leaf Four; it leads back to the open building at the far end of this pond. The small island with tingzi or kiosk is seen in lower left, as it is in the bird's-eye view; a covered walkway separates this from the other large pond. So far, the program seems fairly straightforward.

S --. But the leaf I take to be no. Five turns us all around. We are now seated in the pavilion at the far end of this other pond, looking back toward the outer wall of the garden. The covered walkway now runs along the left. And, most amazingly, the tops of two buildings, the main gate and another, which were seen from outside before, now appear above the trees, as they would be seen from inside.

Here we should pause to consider the implications of this program. In my essay I asked rhetorically how we ourselves might make a visual record of a garden that would convey enough information about it to allow an approximate reconstruction of it. "Imagine," I wrote, "that as a specialist in Chinese gardens you are given a single wish by a genie from a lamp, and your wish is to return to some great late Ming garden with a camera and make a series of color photos or slides of it. You are permitted a free choice of vantage points, even unnaturally elevated ones that would today require a helicopter. But the genie has craftily put only a twenty-exposure roll of film in the camera. You would use your initial shot for an all-over, or bird's-eye view, and for the remainder, you would roam over the garden selecting views that together made up a more or less comprehensive portrayal of it, choosing angles of view that were especially revealing. You would make a point of interlocking the photos spatially by including in each some visually identifiable materials--buildings, striking clusters of trees or rocks--that appear also in others. To the same purpose, you would take care that the area covered in each of the photos could be identified within the bird's-eye view."

S --. And that, in effect, is what Zhang Hong has done. (Here in Leaf Six we look leftward at the large rockery behind the first pond.) Or, to put it less anachronistically, it is as if he had gone around the garden holding up a rectangular frame and painting what appeared within it, from a fixed vantage point, without trying to arrange the visual materials into "good compositions." He adopts a determinedly non-literary approach, not even writing identifying labels on the pictures, since, contrary to standard practice, they do not focus on particular designated "scenes" in the garden. And he gives up "strong brushwork"--of which he was eminently capable, when he chose to play that game--in favor of a flexible system combining some line drawing with a pointillist technique of applying ink and rich colors sensitively in rendering the sensory surfaces of the garden's components: water, rocks, blossoming and leafy trees.

S --. Again we look leftward, where a bridge leads from a lattice arbor to a two-storey building; rocks and tall trees will appear in another leaf, seen from a different direction. There is not time to follow through with all the leaves; I think you understand now how the Zhi Garden album works.

The morning after I talked on this album at a symposium held on Chinese gardens in San Francisco, William Wu (a more serious student of Chinese gardens than myself) phoned me to say that he had decided that Zhang Hong didn't understand the Chinese garden. What he meant is that Zhang did not follow, and so presumably did not understand, the traditional system of focusing his leaves on particular, established "scenes"; to de-emphasize these so thoroughly seems to miss the point. I would be inclined to counter-argue that Zhang Hong always knoew what he was doing, and violated conventional practice in order to carry out his project of quasi-objective visual reporting.

Is there any comparable project in Chinese painting?

S,S. The closest I can think of, another systematic attempt to overcome the spatial limitations of Chinese pictorial practice by making multiple representations of a single subject from different vantage points, is in a handscroll by Zhang Hong's somewhat older contemporary Wu Bin, painted around 1610. Wu Bin's patron Mi Wanzhong has just acquired a new an d notable scholar's stone, and the artist records its appearance and shape by depicting it ten times, from ten different angles. The effect is of turning the rock in space and representing how it would look from each angle.

S,S. Like Zhang Hong, Wu Bin breaks the rules for how rocks should be represented and how ink should be applied to the paper. Both projects, un-Chinese and seemingly empirical, would seem to be been inspired by some new knowledge of European pictorial practice, perhaps a series of scientific or architectural illustrations; but no such model that they might have seen has been identified.

S,S. I will conclude with a look at a few more leaves in the Zhi Garden album, using a poor slide of the bird's-eye view. A large buiilding in upper left is screened by tall trees in that, but in the individual leaf, no. fifteen in the series, we see between the trees and realize that it is an audience hall where the master of the garden is talking with a guest. This is the "Great Hall" that Ji Cheng's treatise stipulates every garden must have.

S --. In front of that, as seen in leaf 16, is another courtyard with a rockery and servant women picking flowers; on the open porch of the two-storey building that faces onto it, antiquities are placed on a table; perhaps the master and guest will sit there later to enjoy them and admire the view.

S. -- In what I take to be the last leaf, we have moved again outside the garden and are looking across the canal into it. The building with the porch appears now in upper left; in a nearer building we see again the host and guest talking. We have emerged from the ideal realm of the garden, from which all commerce is banned; the flag of an inn or wineshop is seen in the foreground, and boatman poles his heavy load along the canal. The season is now winter--albums regularly end with winter scenes, and there may well be some seasonal program to the album that will yield to further observation. In a sense, we have followed also the simpler program of the handscroll, entering the garden by the nearer gate, making our way through it, and exiting at the end (another leaf shows the back gate.) The artist's longest inscription, with a date, dedication, and signature is another indication that this is the final leaf.

A great deal more could be said about this album as a work of art, and, now that its mode of pictorial exposition is understood, about the design of the garden. But your tour guide has run out of time. I will conclude by remarking that the Zhi Garden album is the only classical garden of the great period that could, if we had the land and water and other resources, be reconstructed with a high degree of fidelity to the original. And it is Zhang Hong and his highly unorthodox scheme for his album--which he himself, so far as we know, was never to repeat--that are to be thanked for this. Thank you.

Hist. of Art 192A, Undergrad. Seminar, Spring 1995. Slide Show

Shih-tzu Lin or Lion Grove Garden:

- Chao Yüan and Ni Tsan (?), The Lion-grove Garden (Shih-tzu Lin). Handscroll, 1373. Siren Ch.Ptg. VI, 162. Lost; known only from reproductions. Earliest safely datable & attributable garden ptg?

(- Album of scenes of Shih-tzu Lin attrib. to Hsü Pen, d. 1378, Palace Mus., Taipei; but later. Photos.)

- Handscroll by Ch'ien Wei-ch'eng (Ch'ing court artist) ptd. on command of Ch'ien-lung Emp. after CL's southern tour in 1757; CL's insc. dtd. 1774. Sotheby's auction, June 1986, #91.

(- Slides of Shih-tzu Lin taken there. Lots of photos of it in books.)

IV. The Early and Middle Ming

Hsieh Huan, "Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Gathering," 1437. Two versions: col. of Wango Weng; Chen-chiang Museum. Parting colorplt. 2; Smith & Weng; etc.

- Attrib. to him (by style): "The Nine Elders of the Mountain of Fragrance." Handscroll, Cleveland Museum (Eight Dynasties #133).

- Anon. 15-16c (again): A Villa by the River. (Christie's auction, Nov. '94, #89)

Tu Ch'iung (1396-1474), The Yu-sung (Friend of Pines) Garden. Handscroll, Palace Mus., Beijing. (Done for relative.)

- Ten Views of the Nan-ts'un (Southern Village), villa of T'ao Ts'ung-i. Album, dtd. 1437. Shanghai Museum.

Shen Chou (1427-1509), attrib. to. Tung-chuang t'u: The Eastern Villa. Garden of Wu K'uan. Album of 21 leaves (orig. 24). Copy? Not by Shen? Some compositions in common with album attrib. to Wen Cheng-ming (reproduction book).

- handscroll attrib. to Shen Chou, Sotheby's auction cat. (June '88, #7? can't locate.)

Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559). "Verdant Pines and Clear Springs," 1552; "Living Aloft," 1543. (Parting pl. 114 & colorplt. 13.)

- Various handscrolls depicting people's villas & retreats. "The Chen-shang Studio," Shanghai Mus. Another, same title. "The East Garden," handscroll, 1530. Palace Mus., Beijing. (Quanji 7, 53.) "Thatched House at Hsü-ch'i," Liaoning Mus. (Australia Exhib. #15).

Wen Po-jen (1502-1575). "The White Deer Spring Retreat at She-shan." Handscroll. Palace Mus., Taipei. Photos.

-- "Thatched Houses at Nan-ch'i," long handscroll,1569. Palace Mus., Beijing. (Wu-men #140.)

Ch'ien Ku (1508-1572, follower of Wen Cheng-ming), "The Ch'iu-chih Garden," handscroll, 1564. (Wu-men #61.)

Ch'iu Ying (d. ca. 1552). "The Golden Valley Garden," "The Garden of Peach and Pear Trees." Large hanging scrolls, Chionin, Kyoto. Parting pl. 101, 102.

-- "Master Tung-lin's Villa." Parting pl. 95.

-- "Drunkards in the Garden." Handscroll. (Where?) After old comp.?

-- "The Garden of Solitary Pleasure" (Tu-lo Yüan). Handscroll. Accompanied by calligraphy by Wen Cheng-ming (Ssu-ma Kuang's essay, see Hardie trans. of Ji Cheng, pp. 123-24.) Cleveland Museum (Eight Dynasties #166). Article by Ellen Laing; also Harrist, "Site-names" article.

- Attrib. to Ch'iu Ying (but by follower). Panoramic View of a Garden. Handscroll. Nanking Museum.

V. The Late Ming

- Sun K'o-hung (1533-1611), "The Stone Table Garden," 1572. Distant Mts. pl. 25 and colorplt. 7, cf. p. 67; photos.

- Shen Shih-ch'ung (active ca. 1607-after 1640). Views of the Chiao (Suburban) Garden (of Wang Shih-min?), 1625. Distant Mts. pl. 32 and p. 83, Compelling Image 3.8, photos.

- Mi Wan-chung (chin-shih 1595, d. after 1628). The Shao Garden. Detail from a handscroll, 1617, Peking U. Library. Distant Mts. pl. 83 and p. 167. Study by Wm. Hung.

- Wu Pin (fl. ca. 1580-1625). "Spring Party in the Shao Garden. Handscroll, 1615. Wango Weng, Gardens in Chinese Art, no. 9, fig. 13.

Diversion: slides of the Fen-yang Pieh-shu or Fen-yang Villa, also called Kuo Chuang or Kuo Estate, on the west shore of the West Lake at Hangchou, facing the Su Dike (or Causeway). Built in Hsien-feng era (1851-61), restored and opened to public in 1991.

(Wu Pin, handscroll, 1610, portraying rock owned by Mi Wan-chung from 10 different angles! Systematic, quasi-empirical visual investigation of three-dimensional object. Cf.:)

- Chang Hung (1577-after 1652.) The Chih Garden, 1627. Album of 20 leaves (now divided among four collections!) Restless LS #16, p. 70; Distant Mts. pl. 12-13 and colorplt. 4; Compelling Image I.20 (cf. I.21 and I.22), I.23-24. Photos.

Hist. of Art 192A, Undergrad. Seminar, Spring 1995: Slide Show p.6

VI. Some Ch'ing Dynasty Garden Paintings

- Hung-jen. Washing the Inkstone in the Shu Spring, 1663. Shanghai Museum. I-yüan to-ying 36/47.

- Wang Yün, The Hsiu Yüan (Garden for Resting). 1667. Dalian Mus.(?) Quanji 10/103.

- Lü Huan-ch'eng. The Hsi-ch'i (Western Stream) Garden, 1689. Shanghai Museum. Quanji 10/80.

-Wang Hui. Garden/Estate pictures. 1693: Suchou Museum. 1717: Guy Weill, New York.

- The Ts'ang-lang T'ing, 1700, Nanjing Museum. (Slide, detail.)

- Transporting Bamboo (Tai-chu t'u), handscroll, 1698. Former Wang Nan-p'ing collection. Jade Studio #51; essay on it by Marshall Wu, pp. 41-50.

- Yang Chin, The Ch'ing-ch'i T'ing (Pure Stream Pavilion) Garden, 1712. Handscroll. Tientsin Mus. (Tumu 10/0945.)

Yüan Chiang (fl. ca. 1690-1743.) Handscroll, Shanghai Museum: The Tung Yüan (East Garden). (Article on it in Chinese)

- Another, private col., New York: The Chih Garden? (so ident. in Keswick). See also Murck & Fong. Photos.

- Leng Mei, ca. 1720: The Pi-chu Shan-chuang (Mt. Villa for Escaping the Heat.) Quanji 10/116.

- T'ang Tai and Shen Yüan. The Yüan Ming Yüan. 1744. Keswick 26-7.

- Lo P'ing, "Elegant Winter Gathering," 1790. Sotheby's auction, Nov.'91, #77.

- T'ang I-fen. The Ai-yüan or Garden of Love (?!) 1848. British Museum. Unpublished?

- Jen Hsiung. Thatched Cottages at Lake Fan, handscroll,1855, Shanghai Museum. Transcending Turmoil 61; article by Britta Erickson (where?)

- Hsü-ku, The Mei-hua Shu-wu (Study Among Blossoming Plum), 1894. Handscroll. Christie's auction, Dec. 87

More Articles...

  1. CLP 61: 2004 Brief talk given at New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden Society
  2. CLP 60: 2004 “Eccentrics, Court Painters, and Professionals in 18th Century China.” Lecture, Berkeley Art Museum
  3. CLP 59: 2004 Respondent Paper for Distinguished Scholar session honoring me on the subject of “Decentered, Polycentric, and Counter-Canons in Chinese Painting.” Seattle
  4. CLP 55: 2002 “The Place of the Secret Spring Album in Chinese Erotic Painting.” Lecture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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