James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

11. Homoerotic Love and Beyond: The “Secret Spring” Master

 Homoerotic Love and Beyond: The “Secret Spring” Master

A point to be made at the outset of any consideration of scenes of homoerotic love in Chinese painting is that neither the participants in the pictures nor the intended audiences for them need be understood as gay or lesbian by sexual inclination, although they might be that. For well-off males to enjoy sex with partners of both sexes was in most times and situations commonly accepted, not taken to be unnatural or censorable. Several of the Ming emperors had had male imperial favorites, and Qianlong's infatuation in his later years with the handsome imperial guardsman Heshen was well known. For those with long-term attachments, a kind of homosexual marriage was even sometimes tolerated.[1] Male brothels were common in the cities; boy servants were often subject to the pederastic urges of their masters. Boys and youths who dressed in feminine garb and catered to the same-sex desires of men were known as bitong, catamite boys.  Consorting with bitong not only carried no special stigma, but could be, in certain situations, considered more refined than heterosexual relationships with female courtesans and prostitutes. Early European visitors to China were often scandalized by the prevalence and openness of male homosexuality they encountered.

As for homoerotic love among women, van Gulik's observation still seems valid: it was “quite common, and viewed with tolerance. Provided that excesses were avoided, female homosexual relations were considered as a custom bound to prevail in the women’s quarters. . . .”[2] It was never illegal; Matthew Sommer writes: "I find not a single mention, let alone prohibition, of female homosexual acts in any Qing or earlier legal source (not to mention other extramarital practices familiar from the Western legal tradition, such as masturbation and bestiality.)" To refute another possibility, that same-sex love might have been regarded as a sickness or perversion, he quotes Charlotte Furth: "No kind of sex act or object of desire was singled out in the medical literature as pathological."[3] The main thrust of the law was against acts that involved penetration, whether male-male anal penetration or penetration of a girl or woman by a male, when it was non-consensual--the heaviest punishments were for heterosexual or homosexual rape, unwanted violations of the body.

Bisexual women appear in Chinese fiction and other writing. In Li Yu’s play Loving the Fragrant Companion, Mrs. Shi, a young married woman, visiting a temple, meets a beautiful and talented young girl called Yunhua. The two fall violently in love; Mrs. Shi arranges for the girl to become her husband’s concubine—an arrangement with which the husband is very happy. The writer of a preface to the play defends Li Yu's choice of subject on the grounds that love affairs between young women are commonplace--"Everyone has seen that sort of thing!"[4] A similar occurrence, but this one real-life, is recorded in Shen Fu’s autobiographical Six Records of a Floating Life. In 1797, when Shen is considering taking a girl as his concubine, with his beloved wife Yün’s encouragement, Yün takes the girl off into her room for a private talk, and when she comes out, reveals that they are intending to follow the pattern of Li Yü’s play. Shen Fu, again, seems entirely happy with this comfortable triangular relationship.[5] The passionate friendships formed between literary women in late Ming and Qing sometimes shaded into sensuality and same-sex love; guixiu, cultivated gentlewomen, wrote love poetry to each other or to courtesans.[6] Elite women also patronized courtesans themselves; special pleasure boats in the Yangzhou quarters were made to accomodate them, with square corners to facilitate entry of the closed sedan chairs in which they would arrive.[7] A commentary to the Western Wing play written by a woman and published in the Yongzheng era (1723-35), directed at a readership of women and explaining in explicit terms the erotic implications of the language in that work, specifically authorizes sex between women as a legitimate expression of the sexual desire with which women are as strongly charged as men.[8]

From examples known to me, it would appear that albums entirely devoted to homoerotic scenes, whether male or female, were made only in the later periods, probably after the mid-eighteenth century. It was not uncommon, however, for albums otherwise portraying heterosexual encounters to include one male homoerotic leaf. One such leaf is among the twenty-four in the Huaying Jinzhen woodblock-printed album; it depicts an older man, wearing a scholar's cap, sodomizing a youth seated on his lap in a garden (Muban C1.04, Fig. 81). The face of the youth is effeminate, and his hairdo is like a woman's. The accompanying poem, however, seems to imply that this is an ordinary boy, not a bitong. It reads:

Fig. 81

Seated on a fragrance-filled fruit-laden cart,

Where did this young boy so pure come from?

To test the enchanting rose,

And to try the backwards flower.

As if half shy, half reluctant,

The unrestrained wind-moon [sexual encounter] is not ordinary.

With a turn of the head, the boy persuades haste,

And entreats him to speak to no one.[9]

A similar scene is the last, signed leaf in the album by Wang Sheng (cf.    Figs. 9, 10), which is more or less contemporary with the Huaying Jinzhen album (Fig. 82). Here, too, the older (but still youthful) man wears a scholar's cap, a reference to the association of male anal intercourse with scholar-officials and the imperial Hanlin Academy. Again, the boy appears effeminate--his skin color is light, like a woman's--and again he turns to smile at the man about to sodomize him.

Fig. 82

We see still another such scene, rather more blatantly revealing and in a more elaborate indoor setting, in one leaf of Album K, the eighteenth-century work by some follower of Gu Jianlong (Fig. 83). The older man is again a scholar, seen here in his study; the nude youth he is sodomizing has the effeminate face and hair ornaments of a bitong, and he, too, turns back to smile, resting his chin on his hand. As in the Jin Ping Mei leaf from the same album (Fig. 48), female onlookers complicate the scene; here it is two young women in identical postures who look in from the doorway, one from behind a split-bamboo blind. Both raise their sleeved hands to their faces, as does the girl in the other leaf, expressing the same ambivalent feeling. If we suppose that the artist included two young women here because the central scene involves two males, the implications for what might follow become too devious to pursue.

Fig. 83

The screen behind the figures, with rows of small paintings affixed to it, belongs to a type commonly seen in paintings by Gu Jianlong and his followers; to my knowledge, it is seen nowhere else in painting, nor are examples of such screens extant.[10] The antique bronze gu and ding vessels on the table indicate the man’s wealth and cultivated tastes. The loosely-rolled handscroll is presumably an erotic painting; the book, one fascicle spread out as if they had been reading it together, proves when one looks closely (its title is exposed by the open tao or case on the table) to be none other than the Qing shi, or "History of Qing" a collection of love stories by the late Ming scholar-author Feng Menglong (1574-1646) which indeed includes a chapter on homoerotic love.[11]

Until recently, little evidence was known that would allow even speculation about what form a woman's pictorial erotica might take; the question was raised but left unanswered in an earlier section. The acquisition of a twelve-leaf album by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to which they have given the title "Secret Spring," appears to offer an answer, and also provides an example of an album made up of consistently female homoerotic scenes (Album T). The artist cannot be identified, and will be referred to here as the Secret Spring Master. Other extant works can be provisionally attributed to him on the basis of his highly distinctive style.[12] There is no easy way of determining his period of activity; my guess would be the later eighteenth century. The bizarre figure style may reflect, or exaggerate, some local tradition. The heads are disproportionately small and unnaturally ovoid, with eyes squinting and arched upward, prominent noses, high foreheads, and, on many of the faces, fixed smiles. Bodies are elongated and often shown in contorted postures, with the heads cocked sideward; clothing folds are heavily shaded.

Two of the leaves more or less repeat compositions from the "Qiu Ying" album C: one in which a woman stretches while waiting for her lover to come (cf. Fig. 24) and another in which a woman makes up her hair, perhaps preparing to receive her husband or lover, while a maid outside picks a flower (cf. Fig. 26).  In his version of the latter, the Secret Spring Master has added a touch of more open naughtiness: the maid’s skirt hikes up as she climbs over the railing, revealing her sex. We might initially think that this exposure was meant to titillate male viewers of the album, but we would probably be wrong. Something quite different is going on here: it is the woman herself who is supposed to be gazing at what the maid reveals, and is aroused.

The truth is that the people portrayed in the album are all women, and it is female same-sex activities in which they are all engaged.  What we are seeing is the Secret Spring Master's imagining, or his portrayal of what he believes some segment of his audience might want to imagine, of what might go on among the women and girls of a large and rich household--wives, concubines, maids--when they are left alone too long by husbands and masters away on business or official duties. The women's "natural" inclinations are assumed to be heterosexual--in one leaf two of them are admiring the extended penis of a donkey, and in another (Fig. 84) a group of them look at erotic albums, of which the single exposed leaf depicts a scene of heterosexual sex, suggesting that the rest are probably the same. A writer was quoted earlier offering the opinion that pictures of women gazing at erotic paintings probably represent only male imaginings, and the comment made that that version of the matter seems to me overly restrictive of women's sexual responses to a diversity of stimuli. There are indications in the subjects and style of this album, I believe, that it was probably aimed at women viewers.

Fig. 84

One indication is its restraint--a quality that becomes evident only after one gets beyond an initial impression of excess. Male-oriented erotica typically presented males doing things in which a male viewer could enjoy vicarious participation; no males are to be seen in any of these leaves. Erotica for males, as we have seen in numerous examples, was usually open in its depiction of sex organs and sex acts; neither is prominent here. In fact, one can scarcely speak of portrayals of sex acts in the album at all: what the leaves mostly depict are scenes of temptation, anticipation, and arousal, not of vigorous action or consummation. Most remarkably, none of the common means of female same-sex stimulation listed by van Gulik in his discussion of female homosexuality in China--rubbing pudenda against each other, rubbing or massaging the clitoris, cunnilingus, and the use of a dildo, especially a double-ended dildo--is being openly practiced in these leaves.[13] In one leaf, an old woman is selling dildoes at the door, but that instrument is not to be seen in any of the other leaves. As Matthew Sommer points out, dildoes figure large in male imaginings of female homosexual activity, since "male writers had difficulty imagining sexual activity in other than phallic terms even when no men participated."[14] Instead of any of these, the Secret Spring Master invents a series of ambiguously suggestive images of a kind that could entertain and titillate semi-liberated women who might or might not themselves have personal experience in such matters, but who could in either case enjoy the contemplation of them. This avoidance of the expectable and free invention of the unexpected, which may remind us of certain kinds of Chinese “strange stories” such as those in Liaozhai Zhiyi, is, as we will see, characteristic of the Secret Spring Master's creations.

The paintings repay close inspection with witty details. In the leaf with the old woman at the door selling dildoes, younger women of the household, seen in the doorway, appear interested--the one offered for sale is longer and thicker than the one (held by one of them) that they already own. Another leaf parodies the scene, established in the part-erotic albums by Gu Jianlong and his followers, that showed people sitting around a table playing a game, with some detail hinting at intersex hanky-panky, such as the master reaching behind to hold hands with the maid (cf. Fig. 70). In the Secret Spring leaf, the participants are all women, and one of them is reaching through the open back of the chair to place a cylindrical pile of what appear to be game-pieces on it for one of the others, who is leaning out over the table, to sit down on, unexpectedly, when she sinks back. Another turns her head to watch the reaction. Such an invention belongs to the genre of cheerfully bawdy humor, not to serious pornography. In the most openly lurid of the leaves, two women lie in bed, one leaning back against the other and enjoying bestial cunnilingus from two small dogs with long tongues; two other dogs on the floor signal their eagerness to take part, having presumably been trained to perform this service.

Fig. 85

About half of the leaves are night scenes; this is the hour, we are to understand, when the women's lubricity rises as they disrobe and prepare for bath and bed. In one leaf, the mistress has fallen asleep in the garden, her legs spread and draped over the shafts of the barrow-couch on which she lies (Fig. 85). Her maid is about to insert a fruit of some kind--a dish of them is nearby--into her exposed sex, perhaps as a stimulant. Details that appear mysterious to us were probably easily readable by the intended audience of the time, especially an audience of women, who may have been partial to non-phallic plays involving the female genitals--we recall that a leaf in the "Leng Mei" album (Album M), described earlier, presents a related outdoor all-female frolic in which the women are seen holding down one of their number and preparing to insert an eggplant into her vagina. Similar pictures today would feature vibrators.

In another scene of dusk, this one an interior, the mistress and maids have been playing the game of tossing arrows into a vase--itself understandable as a play on phallic penetration. (The arrows have all missed; the mouth of the vase is too small.) (Fig. 86). Tiring of this and tipsy (a wine ewer and cups are on a table in lower right), the mistress now wants to cavort a bit with two of her maids before sleeping; disrobed, she embraces one of them while hooking her leg over the head of the other, as if inviting cunnilingus. Two younger maids in the foreground look coy, perhaps wondering whether to join in. In what is probably the last leaf (it bears the artist's seal, unfortunately unidentifiable) the partly-disrobed and randy maids are cavorting in the outer room; one of them peeps through a crack at their mistress, who lies in bed at upper left but appears restless, unable to sleep (Fig. 87). One of the maids tickles with her toe the exposed sex of the peeper; the implication is that they and their mistress will come together for an orgy. The drawing of the sleeping woman, oddly perhaps for this context, has an almost Yamato-e-like elegance, as do the rich designs on the embroidered cloth draped over the chair and the lamp above, along with the abstract wave pattern on the screen behind. The whole milieu presented by this strange, expressively intricate and visually rewarding work is of a wealthy household lavishly appointed but occupied by rather messy and undisciplined people.

Fig. 86

Fig. 87

So far, what we have seen can be accepted as mildly titillating entertainment. Why not? The women and girls all appear to be enjoying themselves, no one is hurt, and the assumption is that most of them, at least, will revert to their usual heterosexual ways when the men return from their official posts, or commercial travel, or military service, or whatever else has kept them away from home. But other works by the Secret Spring Master, known in originals or from reproductions and tentatively attributable to him on the basis of their highly distinctive style, are less innocent, stranger and more transgressive. To my eye, these all fall easily within the range of possible variance in the oeuvre of a single master (although, since we do not have access to the originals for most of them, the possibility of copies or studio works should be left open); they exhibit quirks of temperament and imagination that to me speak of a single artistic intelligence behind them all, a personage whom I will continue to call the Secret Spring Master.[15]

Fig. 88

An album of nine male homoerotic pictures that appears to be by him was offered at auction in 1995; two leaves are reproduced in the catalog.[16] In one of the published leaves (Fig. 88), two men strolling with their youthful boy-favorites pass on the street and turn back to observe each other, one of them through an eyeglass; a third man seems to be sending some kind of signal to one of the boys by pointing to his eye, or to his nose. Once more, a detail that must have been easily readable to the intended audience is obscure to us. In the other leaf (Fig. 89), an interior scene, two men and three boys are sporting together around a table, much as the women do in the Boston album, striking similar postures and playing similar tricks. The setting here, however, is not domestic, but probably a gay male bordello, where the boys have been entertaining the men, singing to the accompaniment of the pipa or lute and a samisen-like instrument. These have now been laid aside, and the scene is in the state of disarray this artist likes to create in his pictures. The men are drunk and ready for sex; one leans across the table to urge a cup of wine on one of the boys, while the other stretches out a leg under the table to play footsie with a second. A third boy, older, creeps from behind him to pilfer his purse. Whether we find all this amusing or sordid is a matter of temperament and inclination: the Secret Spring Master is uninterested in catering only to delicate sensibilities.

Fig. 89

Three album leaves by him that feature male voyeurs supplement our earlier discussion of that theme. The leaves have been reproduced separately, and may or may not have belonged originally in a single album; their whereabouts are unknown to me.[17] In one (Fig. 90) a male voyeur stands at the right of a bed, peering over a screen, observing through an eyeglass, like the one used by a man in the street scene just considered, that allows him to see the action more clearly or closer-up. On the bed a man is performing cunnilingus on a woman, who sits raised on the bolster-headrest. The drawing of the man is grotesque, his penis small and buttocks and scrotum enormous. The woman looks down at the man's head between her thighs; a white cat, seated in lower right on a clothes-warming device of brazier with basketry cover, looks not at the couple (as does the cat in another voyeuristic leaf, Fig. 68) but back at the voyeur. The artist appears to be playing with the practice of constructing a pattern of criss-crossing gazes within the composition. Like the male homoerotic leaves, the picture corresponds in details with the Boston album: the paintings on the canopy of the bed, the textile patterns. Most of all, the ungainly figures belong to the Secret Spring Master's bizarre company of erotic players.

Fig. 90

The other two leaves are outdoor-indoor scenes in which the voyeur looks into a room where sexual acts are taking place. What he sees in one (Fig. 91) is a woman sitting beside her tub bath, leaning over to grasp a dildo tied around the waist of her maid. It is a hot summer day, and the two are enjoying a cooling bath and preparing for sex. The watcher, hidden behind a rock, masturbates while continuing to fan his sleeping master. In the other (Fig. 92) it is a wizened night soil gatherer who has propped his bucket on a well and stands tiptoe on this rickety support to peer over a high wall and watch, through a window, a couple making love. Since the sexually engaged heterosexual couple he spies on is the only depiction of that common theme known to me in the oeuvre of this master, it is worth noting that he manages to make even it look somehow like an unnatural act. This quality is especially striking if the leaf is compared with one devoted to a similar theme in Album K, the album by some Gu Jianlong follower (Fig. 63), and the contrast is not only in the figures: even the melon vine growing on the thatch-topped wall adds somehow to the effect of excess and transgression in the Secret Spring Master's picture.

Fig. 91

Fig. 92

Two paintings that appear to have been large album leaves, now separated from whatever other leaves originally accompanied them (they did not belong together, since they are different in size and one is on silk), represent, among what is presently known, the extreme point in this artist's explorations into deviation and depravity. One of them (Fig. 93) takes us into the realm of the seriously perverse. The domestic setting and the props indicate that this is a family scene; if so, what we see is homosexual incest, as the seated father sodomizes the boy. The mother--in this context it must be she, although one would prefer to think not--combs the boy's hair, while he ties a sash around his head. This is no longer harmless fun, but, however we draw our boundaries (mine would follow the standard formulation, "anything non-injurious between consenting adults is O.K."), is true depravity. The artist compounds the nastiness by the device, brilliant in itself (and known to me nowhere else in Chinese painting),[18] of placing in the lower left corner a large, round mirror, seen from the back, into which the three are gazing delightedly, enjoying their own enjoyment. And he locates us, as viewers/voyeurs, just behind and above the mirror, so that we inescapably watch them watching themselves. An experience in cross-patterned looking that might in other pictures be engagingly naughty (cf. Figs. 68, 90) here becomes distinctly distasteful; we are made to become more visually engaged than we would like to be.

Fig. 93

Fig. 94

The other leaf (Fig. 94) is less disturbing, only very kinky; both seem the work of a painter who is nearing an exhaustion of imagination: how to escape the ennui of the familiar? (Cf. Fig. 47). The picture is not easy to read, and even less easy to interpret. A woman leans back against a table, one knee on a chair, masturbating against the rounded end of the armrest. Her right hand holds lightly a fan with a flower design embroidered on translucent gauze--a touch of extraordinary refinement in this context. Meanwhile, the man, his large penis dangling, uses a razor to shave the woman's pubic hair. Beside them, one woman raises a ewer to pour a thin stream of water from high up onto the pudendum (it strikes exactly on the region of the clitoris) of another who lies back, looking very satisfied, in the bathtub. It has been suggested (by an unidentified member of a lecture audience) that the picture might allude to Jewish practice, since the man is circumcised and wears a round cap that might be a yarmulke. But it could equally, and more probably, allude to ritual purification within Islamic practice, in which women were required to remove body hair and men were circumcised. The cap worn by the man would then be a kind of fez. A Moslem community existed in China in this period, and the Secret Spring Master must have learned enough of their ritual to produce this obscene parody of it, adding the sacrilegious to his repertory of transgressive imagery.[19]

Supposing these were two leaves from an album, one has difficulty imagining what might have gone on in the rest; but, perversely perhaps, one would like to see, since it would surely expand even further the boundaries of Chinese--or, for that matter, the world's--pictorial erotica.

How can we understand all this? As the work, I think, of a highly inventive master who was willing to produce specialized erotica for people with a great diversity of proclivities and tastes--or, alternatively, for people who wanted to imagine themselves into a great diversity of sexual situations. About his own leanings it tells us nothing at all; and that is in itself worthy of note. With most modern Western erotic painting and drawing by known artists, we are inclined, rightly or wrongly, to associate the sexual proclivities portrayed or suggested in the pictures with those of the artist: Picasso, we are persuaded, liked this kind of sex, Jean Cocteau that kind; Balthus was turned on by these, Robert Mapplethorpe by those; and so forth. I leave their assumed proclivities unspecified to avoid being chided for thinking this way by more severe-minded colleagues, and perhaps I still will be; but it is hard to resist making such associations, in view of the nature of the pictures and the consistencies they exhibit. When there are exceptions—E.M. Forster, for instance, writing penetratingly perceptive fiction about heterosexual love throughout most of his career—we recognize these as exceptions, and admire the artist or writer all the more for his success in transcending the personal.

For the Chinese makers of erotic pictures, we do not have enough evidence yet to say categorically that the same pattern does not apply to them, although the thematic diversity to be seen in some of the albums, especially later ones, suggests that it does not. In any case, it is possible to say with confidence that it certainly does not apply to the Secret Spring Master. We have no idea what his sexual preferences can have been, and do not care; he was a master at, among other things, imagining himself into multifarious, sometimes extreme sexual feelings and situations, and embodying them in pictures for the pleasure and gratification of people of every sexual persuasion imaginable, and some beyond our ordinary imagination. There will be those who see this as nothing more than evidence of a deeply dirty mind, or a meretricious catering to depraved tastes. I would prefer to see it as revealing an advanced level of empathy, especially because he detaches himself a bit from his creations through his bizarre distortions, which turn most of them, if we are sympathetic (I exclude the pedophilic, those involving children), into good clean dirty fun.

Notably absent from Chinese erotic painting, at least as it is known to me, are scenes of sadism and violence such as can be found sometimes in Japanese and European erotica. Illustrations to fiction may include gory details when the text calls for them, but nothing of the kind is to be seen in Chinese erotic pictures. The participants in these exhibit pleasure, excitement, surprise, occasionally apathy or boredom, but never (excepting, mildly, in defloration scenes) pain.

L. The Late Period; Conclusion

The stage in the (still only sketchily discernible) history of the Chinese erotic album represented by some of the Qianlong-period examples discussed above, culminating in the work of the Secret Spring Master which I date (without clear evidence) to that period, should not, I think, be taken as a decadent phase, since both the artistic quality and the level of sophisticated imagination remain high. Decadence comes rather in the form of thematic monotony--most of the artists in the period after the Qianlong era, except when they are copying old models, simply cannot think of anything beyond the obvious for the amorous couples and their cohorts to do. Irony and aesthetic distance are generally beyond them, and subtle and particularized facial expressions give way too often to uniformly vacuous smiles. The general falling-off of originality and quality in erotic painting of the late period in China is only one aspect of the larger decline in the practice of the professional styles in this period, a phenomenon noted and briefly lamented in the Conclusion that ends PUP Chap. 5. Most of the later pictures, which fill the low-level compilations of Chinese and Asian pictorial erotica as well as appearing frequently in auctions, exhibit the usual traits of the copyist’s hand: stiff. unsupple drawing, failure to open space around the figures, insensitivity to nuances of relationships, unintended distortions.[20]

It seems likely that high-quality erotic painting was produced by artists of the Shanghai School in the period of that school's flourishing, the mid and later nineteenth century, given the excellence of figure painting done by these artists and their willingness to paint subjects that were in demand. In particular, Ren Yi, or Ren Bonian (1840-95), could no doubt have created a brilliantly original new type of pictorial erotica if he had turned his hand to that genre. I know of no evidence that he did, nor have I seen erotic paintings by other leading artists of the school, either signed or identifiable by style.

Fig. 95

Fig. 96

An album by an early 19th century artist named Yin Qi (Album U) retains much of the polish of works from the great period, and sets the figures in meticulously rendered settings as before, but also invests its scenes with an air of ennui that is not deliberate.[21] A couple lies clasped together on a broad bed (Fig. 95), surrounded by emblems of luxury and sensuality: a bamboo lattice screen with painted panels of flowers, carnations? and orchids in vases of archaic form, Buddha's-hand fruit in a dish--a motif that, in such a context, can often be erotically suggestive. None of this inspires any passion in the sexually engaged couple; they are upstaged by the furniture. In another leaf (Fig. 96), the postures are familiar: she lies back, he is about to penetrate her. But their points of physical contact are only her heels on his shoulders and the tip of his penis against her sex; the two of them appear wooden, only minimally involved in their coupling. Perhaps these are the erotic equivalents of the meiren or beautiful-women paintings from the same period that were dismissed toward the end of PUP as elegant but mostly bloodless and conventional.

Fig. 97

An example of an erotic fenben or study-sketch was introduced earlier as probably preserving an old composition (Fig. 6). Sketches of this kind were made as copies from existing works to serve as basis for reproducing their compositions, but also simply as the preparatory sketches that preceded finished paintings, permitting the artist to try out details before committing them finally to paper or silk. A preserved series of six fenben of the latter kind appears to be relatively late in date but original and interesting in drawing and themes. The artist can be seen to be trying variant renderings of details, such as the way, in one of them (Fig. 97), the woman grasps the man's penis (how many fingers on each side?) as they grope each other on a garden bench. Unusual here, apart from the groping (uncommonly seen in Chinese erotica), is the man's hand holding her breast, a female body part in which males in these pictures seldom show any interest. On another (Fig. 98), in which the nude man is about to take advantage of a sleeping woman to initiate sex with her, the artist has jotted written notes reminding himself (or a studio assistant) about the flower design on her robe and the kind of wood the pillar is made of. In both, details of drawing are left incomplete that would have been fully worked out in the finished pictures. Fully-realized paintings corresponding in part to several of these fenben drawings can be found; they demonstrate once more that it was the figure groups that were principally transmitted, with settings filled in ad lib by the individual artists.[22]

Fig. 98

Fig. 99

A leaf that is more elaborate in its spatial and narrative structure (Fig. 99) presents another version of the familiar theme of the philandering husband caught in flagrante delicto by the wife: she storms through the door, wielding a club and followed by a servant with a candle, while the husband cowers before her, holding up his hands to protect his head, and the second woman, in the bedroom, hastily pulls on her clothes. It is hard to judge this woman's reaction to the interruption, since these pictures belong to the period of decline when most or all of the figures, regardless of their roles and relationships, are likely to exhibit the same empty smiles. The drawing in the leaves is strong, however, executed in sure, flexible line and rendering anatomy as organic form with considerable success, although hardly realistically. This and other erotic albums challenge the common notion that Chinese artists were inept at drawing the nude figure--as argued toward the end of PUP, they were perfectly capable of rendering them, but in images that conform to different anatomical conventions and ideals than ours.

Fig. 100

Four colorful leaves that probably date from around the end of the 19^th century depict scenes in a Shanghai bordello, and are of some interest, assuming that the unknown artist knew his subject and was not simply imagining, as pictorial records of how such an establishment looked and what went on there. Artistically, the paintings betray a decadent stage in their all-over decorative character and the failure of the compositions to create readable space. In one (Fig. 100) a customer has sex with one of the women while a younger prostitute listens and observes from the next room. In another (Fig. 101), the man appears impatient, pushing the woman onto the bed without giving her time to undress, and without even taking his shoes off. The other two depict a girl playing a three-string lute to entertain an older customer while he drinks tea, and the madam of the establishment sitting contentedly in a foreground room while the customer and one of her girls have sex in the room beyond.[23] The settings in all four are lavish, with up-to-date appurtenances such as clocks, water-pipes, and a goldfish bowl along with traditional-style paintings scarcely distinguishable from those to be seen in eighteenth century depictions of domestic interiors. All the faces have the identical smile, all the eyes are arched upward; the paintings seem as emptily commercialized as were the couplings they portray.

Fig. 101

A further step into modernity is undertaken by the artist of a twelve-leaf album probably painted in Shanghai in the 1920s-30s.[24] The amorous couples now are liberated young women and men wearing Western clothing of that period (when they are clothed at all) and sporting fashionable Western-style haircuts. The faces are drawn in the foreign manner, although the painter betrays what was probably a traditional studio background by lapsing into the old nail-head rat-tail linear mode, a pervasive mannerism of the Shanghai school, in drawing the clothing. The rocks and vegetation that make up the setting of the opening leaf (Fig. 102) are rendered in traditional style, and the low railing belongs to old garden imagery, although a public park may be intended here. The exposed surroundings, and the impediment of tight clothing, might be taken to account for the coolly formal demeanor of the two, were it not that all the couples in the other leaves, engaged in their sexual pursuits in safely secluded interiors, exhibit the same coolness. In portraying the nude bodies the artist seems to reveal some knowledge, but not enough, of Western anatomical rendering: an effect of realism is marred by awkwardness in proportions and positions. The program of the album belongs to the old type in which the successive leaves differ chiefly in the sexual positions adopted by the participants, and any effect of novelty depends on intrusions of the new into the old formulae: in one leaf, the woman and man signal their modernity by her keeping on her visored cap and he his wool socks (Fig. 103).

Fig. 102

Fig. 103

Finer and more original erotic albums than these from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may turn up in years to come, necessitating changes in the the judgments offered here; for now, based on what we know, the judgments seem valid. The creative period of the art, from the late Ming through the Qianlong era, merits a great deal more study, based, one may hope, on a much larger body of material than could be included in this book, as more high-level examples are discovered and made accessible. The outlook for that happening is good: owners are increasingly willing to make their holdings public; excellent erotic albums are exhibited and acquired by major museums; political changes in China may allow access to presently unviewable collections of erotic paintings in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and other collections. As for serious writing about them, a major impediment up to now, the perceived need to distort the nature of Chinese erotica in order to rescue it somehow from the status of pornography, is being overcome. As members of a society that is strikingly more open and less censorious toward sex in its manifold forms of expression, we should no longer feel the need for seeing Chinese erotic paintings as anything but what they are: pornography, if you will, but most importantly, in the best examples, pictures that explore the intricate byways of human sexuality with sensitivity and wit, and present them with sharp perceptions that allow viewers to find in them images of their own open or hidden fantasies, or to experience vicariously the fantasies of others--and even to understand some aspects of Chinese culture and society that sources of other kinds have censored out. As stated at the beginning of this book, the sheer quantity of routine or embarrassingly bad Chinese erotic painting surviving, and the publication of so much of it in popular books, have discouraged serious considerations of the whole subject.  What matters is that when all the copies and crude or mediocre examples are cleared away, what remains makes up a tradition of erotic painting hard to match in world art in its depth, diversity, and high artistic quality.

[1] Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 131-34. A general study of homosexuality in China is Fang-fu Ruan, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1991), Chapter 7, pp. 107-143, "Homosexuality: From Golden Age to Dark Age."

[1] van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China, p. 163.

[1] Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, p. 115, 116.

[1] Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988) pp. 15-16. Martin W. Huang's discussion of homoerotic love in Chinese fiction and drama is especially enlightening; see his Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001) pp. 176-205.

[1] Shen Fu, trans. Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui, Six Records of a Floating Life (London: Penguin Books, 1983) pp. 50-51. The relationship does not continue happily; the loss of this girl to a rich man brings about Yun's sickness and death.

[1] Examples may be found in Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), for instance the late Ming Suzhou poet Xu Yuan (pp. 257-65). On her, and on companionship between gentry women and courtesans "on a friendship-love continuum," see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1994) pp. 266-274.

[1] Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 133,

[1] Wei Hua, "How Dangerous Can the Peony Be? Textual Space, Caizi Mudan ting, and Naturalizing the Erotic." In Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 4, Nov. 2006, 741-762, espec. 752-3.

[1] Translation by N. S. Wang and B. L. Wang, from The Fragrant Flower. 19. Note that the Chinese text for the poem is mistakenly printed below a different poem, on p. 21. Van Gulik (Erotic Colour Prints, pp. 211-212) misreads the picture as a heterosexual coupling and refers to the boy as a girl.

[1] In China, that is; in Japan such screens are common. For the absence of extant Chinese examples, I depend on a personal communication from Sarah Handler, a specialist in old Chinese furniture.

[1] For a discussion of the book and a translation of a selection of thstories, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Chinese Love Stories from “Ch’ing-shih” (Hamden, Connecticut, Archon Books, 1983.)

[1] A seal on the last leaf of the Boston album reads Yuzao, a style-name meaning something like "Bathing in Elegant Prose." No known artist is recorded as having used this name. The identity of the three writers of poetic inscriptions mounted opposite the leaves cannot be identified either. The "Secret Spring" appelation comes from one of these inscriptions.

[1] van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient  China, pp. 163-66.

[1] Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 366, note 1.

[1] A seeming clue to his identity which, however, turns out to lead nowhere is a series of seven non-erotic paintings of women, from an album of twelve, reproduced in Etiemble, Yün Yü, pp. 79-88. Written on one of them is a "signature" of an artist named Zhao Shipeng, with a date corresponding to 1633. But no artist of that name appears in standard references, and the style is quite wrong for so early a date.  The paintings may not be by the same artist as the leaves here credited to the Secret Spring Master, but share with them distinctive features of style. Also related, although less closely, is a group of paintings of women in interiors reproduced on pp. 42-48 of the same book. These suggest that the Secret Spring Master may be exploiting, like Chen Hongshou in the late Ming, the unintended bizarre features of a degenerative local tradition for intended effect.

[1] Christie's New York, "Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art," September 21-22, 1995, no. 507.

[1] The book in which all three are reproduced, Marc de Smedt, trans. Patrick Lane, Chinese Eroticism (Fribourg-Geneve: Liber, 1981/1983), pp. 46, 52, and 89, credits the Institute for Sex Research (Kinsey Institute) at the Indiana University for two of them, and the collection of Lawrence Gichner for the third--and since the bulk of the Gichner Collection was given to the Kinsey Institute, they may be together, as parts of an album. However, the Kinsey Institute has been unable to locate them among its holdings.

[1] As a space-defining device it is paralleled, for instance, by the placement of an end-table with books, inkstone, and other objects in the lower left corner of one leaf of the fenben album discussed below (Fig. 99); it is its function as a mirror that is to my knowledge unparalleled

[1] This leaf was reproduced in Bertholet, Dreams of Spring , p. 33, but is there mistakenly associated with two unrelated leaves, pp. 31 and 32, and called a "scene in a brothel." Professor Edward Davis, a specialist in Chinese religion, gave me valuable advice on the subject of this leaf.

[1] Christer von der Burg of the Muban Foundation reports visiting, along with Soren Edgren, a warehouse storage of the Zhongguo Shudian in Shanghai in November of 2008 and being shown some 150 erotic scrolls and albums, many of them confiscated from private owners in China. These are, in principle, available for purchase by foreign buyers.

[1] For Yin Qi, a native of Shicheng in Jiangxi, see Yu Jianhua, Dictionary, p. 736, information from Duhua Jilue, an anonymous  compilation included in Qing Huazhuan Jiyi Sanzhong (“Three Lost Collections of Ch'ing Painters' Biographies”), ed. William Hung (Beijing, Harvard-Yenching Sinological Index Series no. 8, 1934). The date of this compilation is unknown; it includes artists active through the early 19th century, when Yin Qi, whose period of activity is uncertain, probably painted the album. See Paul Moss, Between Heaven and Hell, no. 17, where all the leaves are reproduced.

[1] For a leaf corresponding in its figures to Fig. 98, see Le Palais du printemps, 131.

[1]For these, see Bertholet, Dreams of Spring, pp. 187 and 188.

[1] The whole album is reproduced in Bertholet, Dreams of Spring, pp. 190-97.

• Next >