CLP 159: 2002 "Erotic Painting in China." published in German as "Erotische Malerei in China" (Erotic Painting in China), in Liebeskunst: Liebeslust und Liebeslied in der Weltkunst (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2002), pp. 201-215.

Erotic Painting in China

(Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition, Museum Rietberg, from November 2002.)

Erotic painting has a long history in China. Examples are mentioned in texts from the early centuries of the Christian era, and a few crude representations of sexual couplings can be seen on painted tiles and relief designs from even earlier periods. The eighth century figure master Zhou Fang, who worked in the imperial court, is said to have made erotic pictures, and artists as prominent as Tang Yin, Qiu Ying, and Chen Hongshou in the Ming are reported to have included them in their output. However, no genuine erotic works by any of these survive. The erotic woodcut-printed pictures from the late Ming published by Robert van Gulik[1] probably represent a continuation of an early type of painting, in handscroll or album form, that presented a series of images of couples in various settings demonstrating different sexual postures; recorded works purportedly by Tang Yin and Qiu Ying have such titles as “The Ten Glorious Positions.” If we can believe accounts in poetry and fiction and a few pictorial representations, scrolls and albums of this kind were enjoyed by couples before lovemaking, to intensify passion and inspire sexual experimentation.

From the late Ming on, the album was the preferred, all but exclusive form, and in the best examples the simple series of copulating couples in different positions gives way to a more sophisticated and richer type in which open depictions of sex acts are interspersed with leaves portraying, or hinting delicately at, flirtations and seductions, even scenes of romantic love. Although the leaves of these, which can be called “part-erotic” albums, are not unified by any narrative or other program, and the participants in the scenes do not reappear from leaf to leaf, the non-erotic or subtly erotic leaves serve to contextualize the sexual acts depicted in the others, much as the non-erotic materials in the new high-level erotic fiction, beginning with the late 16th century masterwork Jin Ping Mei (Plum in the Golden Vase) and continuing with Rou Pu Tuan (Prayermat of Flesh) and others, frame and contextualize the more lurid accounts of sexual activities. This development in fiction probably inspired the new type of erotic album; in both, the way is opened for a much broader palette of literary and pictorial effects: irony, implicit narratives, intricate interactions among the participants.

Central to this expansion of the capacities of the erotic album, it would appear, was the Suzhou master Gu Jianlong (1606-1687 or later.) An undated album by him, known now only in an old reproduction book, is the earliest datable example of the new type.[2] The pictures in it make good use of complex spatial schemes--rooms beyond rooms, seen through doorways and other openings back. These not only draw the viewer’s gaze deeper and more insistently into the picture, for scopophilic effects of penetration, but also permit the introduction of sub-themes of voyeurism, sexual rivalries, and the like, as minor figures observe and become potentially engaged in the actions of the major ones. Spatial effects of this kind can be seen in some leaves of the Ellsworth album (no. ), which is by a follower of Gu Jianlong. Individual leaves in these albums are vignettes, charged with narrative implications beyond what is directly portrayed in them; the ingenious artists plant clues that arouse both curiosity and imagination: what is the relationship between the people? What has led up to the moment depicted, and what will follow it?

The creation of the new erotic album by Gu Jianlong and others, chiefly in Suzhou and in the early Qing period, does not supplant altogether the older type, which still dominates the large-scale production of erotic albums that continues down to recent times. The former C. T. Loo album (no. ), probably dating from late 17th or early 18th century, still exemplifies the older type, but on a level of quality well above the routine production. Chinese erotic albums truly worthy of scholarly study and museum exhibition--those comparable or equal in quality, that is, to the best paintings of other kinds from the same periods--are relatively few. I know only about twenty-five or thirty, in reproductions or originals. Most of what survivives--and, unhappily, most of what has been published--appears to be copies or copies of copies surviving from the copious commercial output of painters of lesser skills and little originality, made in response to a heavy and continuing demand. A mid-19th century prefect in Suzhou complains that the market in his city is flooded with lewd books and paintings, and that worst of all, these have even penetrated the women’s quarters. The paintings are worse than the books, he adds, since books can only affect those literate enough to read them, while just looking at the pictures is enough to corrupt.[3] Edicts prohibiting their production and dissemination seem to have had little long-term effect.

The painters who made the best of the erotic albums were not specialists in that genre, but highly trained, broadly versatile professional masters of the type that I term, in the title of a forthcoming book about them, “urban studio artists”: Gu Jianlong and his followers, Xu Mei, followers of Leng Mei, many others.[4] They might be summoned for some period of service in the imperial court, as Gu Jianlong and Xu Mei were: the Manchu emperors, fascinated by the popular and erotic culture of the southern (Jiangnan, Yangzi Delta) cities, employed painters from those cities to make pictures that captured some of its alluring aspects. The Kangxi Emperor probably commissioned a series of large painted illustrations to Jin Ping Mei from Gu Jianlong, and the Qianlong Emperor appears to have had one of his court artists, still unidentified, produce some of the most finished and elegant erotic paintings that have survived.[5]

Erotic paintings were associated with the imperial court in the popular imagination from much earlier times. Stories (probably apocryphal) about depraved rulers tell of lewd paintings executed on the walls or ceilings of their palace chambers, as stimuli for debauchery. An erotic handscroll that the antihero Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei gives to his favorite concubine Pan Jinlian is said to have come from the palace. This association is reflected in the common name for the genre, chungong-hua or “Spring Palace Pictures.” Erotic fiction in China similarly takes as its frequent subjects the misdoings of rulers and their consorts. Fervid imaginings of what went on behind the walls of the Forbidden City, and of the pleasures one might enjoy if possessed of absolute power, were irresistable to novelists and painters and the audiences for whom they worked.

[1] Especially the 24-leaf album titled Huaying Jinzhen published by him as vol. 2 of his Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Tokyo, 1961; reprint, Taipei, n.d.), based on woodblocks he had acquired in Kyoto. Other “late Ming” materials reproduced by van Gulik should be used with caution, since some are clearly from his own hand and may be his own invention, not based on any Chinese originals.

[2] Gu Yunchen Huachun Tuce (Shanghai: Yiyuan Zhenshang She, n.d.). The only copy I know was in the library of the late Osvald Sirén, and is now in the library of the Rietberg Museum, Zürich (M XI B81).

[3] Wang Xiaozhuan, Yuan Ming Qing Sandai Jinhui Xiaoshuo Xiqu Shiliao (Historical Materials on the Banned Fiction and Drama in Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) (Beijing, 1958) p. 111-112; quoted in part in Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), p. 118.

[4] The book is Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China, forthcoming. A second part, on Chinese erotic painting, will be separately published. A few passages from the latter book have been excerpted for these essays.

[5] For these, see James Cahill, "The Emperor's Erotica" (Ching Yüan Chai So-shih II) In: Kaikodo Journal XI, 1999, pp. 24-43.

Beginning with an important album by the Suzhou master Xu Mei, active in the early decades of the 18th century,[6] and continuing with other high-level 18th century examples such as the one that bears seals of Leng Mei but is probably by a somewhat later artist (no. ) and the Ellsworth album by some follower of Gu Jianlong (no. ), the erotic album in China develops in the direction of greater thematic diversity and complexity: voyeurism, masturbation by both sexes, homosexuality, bestiality, and incest are all portrayed or hinted at, along with simple sexual ennui and impotence. If this change had been directed only at titillating audiences bored with simpler sexual themes, the outcome might have been a descent into grossness. What saves the best of the later albums from that is a combination of high aesthetic quality and wit. The people in these leaves, engaged in devious, sometimes bizarre sexual pursuits, are observed and presented by the artists with an amused delicacy, so that actions and situations that may cross the line into the seriously kinky become somehow inoffensive. The same refinements, through which aesthetic response tempers the erotic, render the pictures unsuited to the function of simple arousal that the cruder albums performed, for instance as aids to masturbation.

Very little of comparable quality can be found in Chinese erotic painting done after the end of the 18th century, although a few albums from the Shanghai School in the later 19th century may eventually find places in the small body of surviving high-level examples. Erotic paintings from the best periods and artists, as represented in this exhibition, fully deserve to be included, I believe, in our accounts of later Chinese painting. That they play no part in Chinese histories is easily understandable when we note that the infrequent mentions of them in Chinese writings, down to the present day, are virtually all condemnatory. Although the acquisition and enjoyment of the albums was widespread and more or less tolerated, writing positively about them was evidently impermissable. The many denunciations of them, often virulent, are only rarely directed at consumers--the assumption, implicit or stated, is that if pictures of this kind are made available, people will acquire and enjoy them. Zhang Geng, writing around 1735, says of Qiu Ying’s erotic paintings, “It is human nature to like lascivious things, and there is no one who wouldn't want to obtain one of these for secret enjoyment.”[7] It is the artists who paint them and the dealers who sell them who are assigned to hell in one moralizing fulmination after another, Zhang Geng’s included. An exception is a late Ming writer who considers ownership of them a transgression, assigning “ten demerits a day” for “keeping lewd books or lewd paintings.” But even he goes on to assign “unlimited demerits” to those who sell them.[8]

Foreign writers in recent times, by contrast, have looked for ways to sanitize the Chinese erotic paintings, meaning perhaps to defend the Chinese against the stigma of having made pornography or “dirty pictures.” Dealers and collecters sometimes call them “bride’s books,” and argue that their purpose was to instruct newlywed women about the ways of sex. Some writers have associated them with religious sexual practices, whether Daoist or Tantric Buddhist; some maintain that since sex was regarded as a natural part of life by the Chinese, no onus was attached to depictions of it. But, although the erotic paintings were certainly used and understood in a diversity of contexts, none of these foreign beliefs about them is, to my knowledge, supported in Chinese writings, or in the pictures themselves. Perhaps, living in a society that is more open and uncensorial toward sex in its manifold forms of expression, we should no longer feel the need for seeing Chinese erotic paintings as anything but what they are: pornography, if you will, but most importantly, pictures that explore the intricate byways of human sexuality with perception and wit, and present them with a sensitivity that allows viewers to find in them images of their own open or hidden fantasies, and to experience vicariously the fantasies of others--and even to understand some aspects of Chinese culture and society that sources of other kinds leave out. What matters is that when all the copies and mediocre examples are removed from consideration, what remains makes up a tradition of erotic painting hard to match in world art in its depth, diversity, and high artistic quality.

Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition: the former C. T. Loo album.

Of the three Chinese erotic albums represented in this exhibition, this is the simplest and oldest in type. It probably dates from the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the Kangxi era, and may be by some artist working in Zhejiang province, perhaps the Hangzhou or Shaoxing region, since elements of style in it are reminiscent of the late Zhe school and even Chen Hongshou (but without Chen’s archaistic distortions.) The skilled and readable delineation of furniture, railings, and architecture, along with other well-drawn materials, suggests that it is an original work, not a copy. Each of the eight leaves depicts a heterosexual couple having or about to have sex. In one, a girl servant helps to support the woman, and in another the man appears to be of northern nomadic origin. Other than these minor variations, the pictures all present youthful couples engaged in amorous activities in garden or interior settings. The rich mineral blue-and-green coloring of the rocks, the luxuriant trees and flowers (which also serve to set the seasons), all contribute to the auspicious and comfortable atmosphere created in the pictures. The lovemaking is tender, unhurried; no signs of strong passion appear on the faces—at most, slight smiles of pleasure. Genitals are exposed and in most of the leaves engaged, but they are depicted modestly, not blatantly; the women exhibit little public hair. (All this is in strong contrast to Japanese erotic pictures, in which the size of genitals is typically exaggerated, pubic hair is abundant, and the participants often grimace as if in pain, or otherwise betray the intensity of their ardor.) The furnishings and appurtenances indicate well-off, cultivated households, ideal environments for pursuing amorous affairs. In one of the leaves the man is wearing a scholar’s cap, an indication of status. No irony colors the pictures, no tension between desire and circumstance. This is just the kind of album, arousing but at the same time calming, that might well have been used in the way seen in one of the pictures, looked at by the couple together before they proceed with sex. We can imagine that erotic albums by conservative Ming masters may have looked like this, allowing for updates in style.

Leaf with Couple Looking at Erotic Album

The young man and woman are looking at an erotic album before making love. He, at least, is looking at the album, and encouraging her to do the same; it is unclear where her gaze is directed, and she appears more engaged in clutching him and spreading her legs impatiently. The leaf exposed in the album is a composition quite like the one they themselves occupy: the couple on a mat beside an ornamental rock beneath a tree in a garden. This is one of several representations in the erotic albums of this theme, which is to be found also in fiction of the time--it is as though the artists are advertising the efficacy of their own creations.

Formal repetitions in the leaf are almost too apparent: the rock and tree backing up the leftward lean of the figures, the rhythmic disposition of their limbs, the similar ovals of the two faces in close proximity. The distinction in skin color, the woman’s whiter and the man’s darker, is common in the albums but more marked here than in other leaves; it may indicate a difference in social status, a possibility strengthened by his simple shirt and hairstyle. He may, that is, be dallying above his station. The peaches and lizhi fruit in the basin and the flowers in the bronze pot make this a scene of summer.

[6] In the collection of Guy Ullens de Schooten; see Bilishi Youlunsi Fufu Cang Zhongguo Shuhua Xuanji (Beijing: Palace Museum, 2002), no. 13. The whole album is reproduced in Sotheby’s New York Chinese paintings auction catalog for March 21, 1995, no. 52.

[7] Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu, Huashi congshu ed., pp. 40-41.

[8] Yuan Huang (1533-1606), see Wang Xiaozhuan, op. cit., p. 178; translated in Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 150.

Leaf with Girl Leaning Over Pine

Small white chrysanthemums identify the season as autumn. Lovemaking is languid. The girl leans over a pine which leans over a stream; she rests her head on her crossed hands, looking more meditative than aroused. as he enters her from behind. The tips of her tiny bound feet protrude from beneath a red skirt below. These, along with the red rails of the low balustrade and clusters of red-brown leaves, add warm touches to the otherwise cool blue-green coloring. Here, too, the way the nearly horizontal leaning of the rockery and the pine echo the postures of the figures betrays an artifice typical of the professional master working at a late stage in a long tradition.

Leaf with Boy and Girl Beneath Willow

This, in contrast to the other leaves shown here, appears to be a scene of young love, carried out with enthusiasm and after some preparation; this is not a spontaneous encounter. They have spread a mat on the ground beside a garden pond, beneath a willlow. With an orchid in her hair, she leans against a backrest, and has set down a fan decorated with butterflies in flight, an emblem of light dalliance. She rests one hand on his shoulder, the other on a pile of painting albums, presumably erotic. She wears a light green gauze jacket over a red moxiong, a garment that Chinese women had worn since the Tang dynasty as a kind of broad brassiere[9]--it is often the only piece of clothing that the woman has not removed in Chinese erotic pictures, an indication, perhaps, that gazing at the female breasts was not the turn-on for Chinese males that it has been in the West. Far more arousing for them were the woman’s bound feet and the small embroidered shoes worn over them, which are shown prominently in the pictures.

Spots of color and movement around the two lovers animate the scene and suggest the exhilaration they feel: white flowers, swallows darting over the pond, bright-green moss-dots on the tree trunk, the red and blue of their discarded clothes. But all this is peripheral, and the viewer’s gaze, like the gazes of the two lovers, returns always to the scopophilic focus, the point of their sexual union.

Leaf with Northern Nomadic Man and Chinese Woman

Leaves with this theme appear frequently in Chinese erotic albums; they recall the stories of Lady Wenji and other Chinese women who became the wives or consorts of nomadic chieftains and lived long stretches of their lives in the cold northern steppe region. The man shown here, however, appears to lead a more settled life, with Chinese-style furniture and amenities. The setting, in fact, is not unlike a Chinese garden, with rocks, a rivulet beside which narcissus grow, and a plum tree beginning to bloom. The season is early spring, the weather still cold enough that the two cover themselves with heavy robes and look out upon a charcoal brazier heating pots of tea or wine. They clasp each other for love and warmth; both smile with pleasure. Two scrolls on the table may be erotic, but may also simply indicate that he is cultivated in Chinese ways, even though his facial features, beard, skin coloring and cap identify him as ethnically other than Han Chinese. The severe linear patterns of the thick robes and curtains, the sheer weightiness of the rocks and furniture that surround the central area with the figures, make this a more somber scene than others in the album.

Moss Album

This album is usually attributed to the famous northern figure master Leng Mei (ca. 1670-1742 or later), and it is true that Leng Mei seals appear on the leaves. But his seals often appear on paintings that are not by him. Some of these are crude imitations, forgeries of Leng Mei; others, including this album, are works of high quality to which Leng’s seals were added to make them more saleable. One of the finest of the meiren or beautiful woman paintings, for example, the well-known “Woman Resting from Reading” in the British Museum, bears Leng Mei seals but is a later, more sophisticated production, very different from the distinctive image of woman that can be seen consistently in Leng Mei’s reliable works. Leng Mei’s own paintings, moreover, reveal nothing of the urbane wittiness that distinguishes this album. It must be by an artist working around the third quarter of the 18th century, probably in the north. The style resembles not so much Leng Mei’s as that of a less-known northern figure master, Cui Hui, active around the same time; it may be one of Cui’s followers, not famous enough to market his work under his own name, who painted this album. We would like very much to know who he is, and to identify more of his work.

The album is executed in a highly finished, realistic style that owes much to European art, but with a lightness of touch, in both brush and conception, that tempers the indelicacy of the subjects. In one outdoor scene, for instance, two women hold down a third, exposing and fingering open her sex, while another picks an eggplant with which to violate her; a baby she carries looks slyly out at us, as if privy to the game. In another, a girl holds and gazes at the extended penis of a braying donkey, too absorbed to notice a boy who is reaching under her clothing. Our artist treats these as good clean fun, and almost persuades us that they are that.

We are a long way from albums of the type that presented simple portrayals of one sex act after another. In none of these leaves is the act really taking place--the one with the ox and calf (no. ) comes closest, showing the moment before penetration. In another, a confused-looking girl kneels before a plump, stern-faced woman, presumably her mistress, who appears to be demanding oral sex, while a young man in the doorway behind, penis exposed, signals a more attractive offer. In still another, a young man just arisen, still naked and erect, from the bed where his wife (?) lies sleeping after sex is already kissing the maid in the doorway. In the more straightforward scenes of less sophisticated albums, sex is unproblematic: he and she come together and go at it, with no interference. This album, by contrast, is devoted to subtle pictorial explorations of how young people and old attempt to negotiate the complex situations into which sexual desire, their own or others’, has drawn them. Some of the leaves suggest a reading of the album as, among other things, an artist’s fondly amused (and partly imagined) exploration of female sexuality. The effects are achieved, moreover, through truly pictorial means: no literary descriptions of the scenes could capture the nuances conveyed here (although, of course, literary description opens other possibilities, such as telling what preceded the moment depicted, or describing what the people are feeling.) The intricacy of the album’s program and its excellence as a work of art must place it, eventually, high up within this neglected genre.

Moss Album, Leaf with Garden Boy and Girl Servant

A garden boy has set down his bamboo broom to engage in a wordless interchange with a servant girl at the window. He pulls out the front of his pants and points to their furthest extension; her response is shown in her cautiously impressed look, and in the way she chews on her sleeve. But the artist has made us privy to the boy’s deception by allowing us to glimpse, through a gap in his pants, his much more modest member.

The composition exemplifies a device introduced to the erotic albums, it would appear, around the time of Gu Jianlong in the early Qing, and probably by him. It is seen also in much other pictorial art of the time, including the leaves of the imperially-commissioned Gengzhitu or “Pictures of Sericulture and Rice Culture,” based on paintings by Jiao Bingzhen (act. 1680-1720) and first printed in 1696. This is the opening back of the space of the picture through a door or other aperture in a wall, so that the viewer’s gaze is drawn into depth, beyond the figure group that constitutes the main subject. In the erotic paintings, the effect is of moving in imagination beyond the participants in the erotic action--or, in memorable cases, beyond and around the woman in her boudoir--so as to seem to surround and embrace them, heightening the sense of visual engagement and scopophilic pleasure.

Moss album, Leaf with Buffalo and Calf

Several of the leaves in the album are set outdoors, and have an attractively bucolic character. In this one, for instance, a herdboy is about to take the virginity (we assume) of a young girl, who may have come out onto the hillside to fly the kite that lies on the ground at left. This seemingly spontaneous and uncomplicated encounter evokes an interplay of innocence and knowledge, and pastoral dreams of return to a state of youthful freshness. It hints also at the allure of child sex, and thus, like other leaves in the album, has a tinge of the near-perverse, which is somehow intensified here by the way the cow and nuzzling calf, behind, roll their eyes back to watch. The rendering of the animals and the riverbank setting in the semi-Westernized illusionistic manner contributes to the ingenuous plein-air openness of the scene.

Moss album, leaf with Traveling Merchant and Tavern Girl

This is the only leaf among the eight that might properly be called coarse. We see an old, gap-toothed travelling merchant bargaining with a tavern girl, or perhaps a prostitute, over how much it will cost him to induce her to pull down her pants the rest of the way--or, in an alternative reading, preventing her from pulling up her pants while demanding, with his two raised fingers, a second bout for his money. When we turn our attention from this rather gross tableau, however we read it, we may be captivated by the meticulous reproduction of wood-grain on the partly-open door, and the glimpse through it into the stable below, from which wild-eyed horses look out. Even more absorbing is the townscape viewed through the open window, likewise painted in an enchanting version of the Sino-European illusionistic manner. Light snow is falling, and a traveller with an umbrella is leading a horse along the canal; the figures, together with the houses behind and the foreshortened wall of the building at left, are reflected in the water. All this, quite irrelevant to the erotic theme (apart from its usual function of lending to it a kind of credibility), is rendered with a delicacy and skill that make us wonder why an artist of this attainment did not become better known (it is quite beyond the capacity of Leng Mei, judging from any of his reliably signed works), or turn his abilities to other uses than settings for erotica.

Moss Album, leaf with Boy and Girl in Garden

This leaf, set in a garden, is another of the scenes of teenage sex of which this artist, or his clientele, appear to have been so fond. The boy’s pants are down, and the girl is taking off hers, while he unties her jacket. He appears younger than she; his smile expresses eager anticipation, hers a touch of uncertainty. Here, too, the contrasts are subtle but effective. Their respective moods and imagined responses are echoed in the energetic thrusts of the garden rock on his side, strongly outlined and colored with heavy blue-and-green pigments (qing, for youth and emotion), and the finely drawn banana trees on hers, the tips of their leaves browning, perhaps intimating the transience of her youth and beauty. The validity of this reading, and others proposed for these pictures, matters less than recognizing the power of the pictures to permit and encourage readings of this kind.

Ellsworth album

The previous owner of this album, from whom the present owner received it as a gift, was the late Alan Priest, longtime Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He acquired it in Beijing, and reportedly described it as “the best erotic album on the Peking market.” It is indeed a work of high quality and extraordinary imagination. The unknown artist was a follower of Gu Jianlong working some time around the mid or later 18th century. Not only the figure style but also the compositional types and the furnishings--notably the screen with many small paintings affixed to it--belong to Gu’s repertory. At the same time, the thematic diversity of the album goes far beyond anything Gu could have conceived, or at least painted. In this respect it is closer to the album with Leng Mei seals (no. ), with which it is probably roughly contemporary.

A few of the nine leaves (there may originally have been ten or twelve) offer relatively straightforward scenes of heterosexual sex: the traveling scholar dreaming of his faraway lover (no. ), a fisherman making love to his wife in a boat while their small child looks on, a nude couple copulating in a garden. But others, including three of the four included here, are anything but straightforward. One that is not included sets the tone, perhaps, for the album: we see the ultimately blasé and permissive couple having sex in his study. They have adopted a seated position for intercourse that requires little movement or even muscular strain; she passes her time looking through an erotic album, perhaps in search of some novelty that will spice up their sex life, while he turns the other away to flirt with the maid. In another, the aging master of the household is attempting sex in a garden house with a servant girl, but proves incapable; she lies back bored and unsatisfied. Meanwhile, his wife, not at all permissive, approaches across the bridge, wielding a club. Gu Jianlong’s capacity for creating scenes that imply narratives is continued here--it would not require much imagination to build around the album nine erotic stories of some complexity.

This stage in the (still only sketchily discernible) history of the Chinese erotic album 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 later artists, except when they are copying old models, simply cannot think of anything beyond the obvious for their amorous couples and their cohorts to do. Irony and aesthetic distance are generally beyond them, and their pictures as a whole exhibit the usual traits of the copyist’s hand: stiff or heavy-handed drawing, insensitivity to nuance, fixed expressions on faces, unintended distortions. Fine erotic albums from the 19th century and even the 20th may turn up in years to come, necessitating changes in the above judgments; for now, based on what we know, they seem valid.

Ellsworth album, leaf with Scholar’s Dream

In the context of the other leaves in the album, this one seems old-fashioned and innocent. Travelers dreaming of their wives and lovers far away are a common theme in literature and art; dreams are customarily enclosed in ovoid shapes, like the balloons in our comic strips, emanating from the dreamer’s head. Here it is a young scholar, still in his cap and robe, sleeping overnight in some hostel; he may be traveling to take the examinations that led to official appointments. The snow on the budding plum tree outside and on the pine tree at right suggest late winter as the season. Even in this cold environment he dreams of being with his lover in a warm garden, perhaps far to the south. His dream itself resembles an erotic album leaf: it is quite close to one in the former C. T. Loo album (no. ). Garden rocks in the dream take on the cloudlike forms of those in old paintings; the ordinary rocks in the “real scene” are plainer, inexpressive. This leaf is imbued with a concept of romantic love that other leaves in the album seem to mock.

Ellsworth album, leaf with Mirror and Voyeur

A man carrying a fan is skulking in a garden; from his dress and his manner, it appears that he is a member of the household, not an intruder from outside. He is spying on a woman through a very large moon window, seeing her image in a big mirror on a stand at the far side of the room. She is on a couch just inside the window; he sees directly only her head from the back, and her whole semi-nude body, with her sex visible, as reflected in the mirror. If she also looks into the mirror, as perhaps she is doing, she will see him plainly reflected in the window and become aware of being watched. Or she could turn her head and look directly at him. The whole pattern of illicit seeing here is more complex than it at first appears.

Mirrors and their reflections had played a part in erotic paintings at least since the time of Gu Jianlong, to compound the scopophilic experience of looking at the pictures by adding internal lines of sight to cross or repeat our own. In their simplest usage they enable a maid outside the room to watch a copulating couple inside. A woman having sex with a man may hold a mirror to admire her own face, or compare it to his; a woman masturbating can gaze at her body in a full-length mirror, while a man peering through a window behind her uses the same mirror to watch her doing it. Here the large size and square shape of the mirror gives it the added function of seeming to open a far window through which we look into a reversal—a true mirror image—of the already complex spatial scheme of the composition.

Ellsworth album, Leaf with Jin Ping Mei

A mature, bearded man has stretched out naked on a lounging chair on the verandah outside his study to rest from reading a steamy passage in Jin Ping Mei, “The Plum in the Golden Vase”—for that is the title written on the open book on the floor beside him, one ce or fascicle from a large set seen in the bookcase inside the room. He may be fanning his erect penis with the feather fan, or else is tickling it for stimulation. His eyes are closed, whether in a doze or in satisfied enjoyment is not clear. A young housemaid looks out at him, her sleeve-covered hand to her face in a gesture of concern and uncertainty, feelings that are hinted at also by her raised eyebrows: should she intrude on him, and what would she be risking if she did?
The picture is among other things an unfair slur on Jin Ping Mei, which, although it doubtless sometimes elicited in its readers responses of the kind shown here, was far more than a stimulus for sexual arousal. In such a picture as this, however, the urbane artist is not so much treating a theme directly as playing on a theme, or on a common notion about it. What we see is the painter’s facetious report of someone’s imagining of how the lofty scholars, in the privacy of their studies, really appreciated this great work of Chinese fiction.

Ellsworth album, Homosexual Leaf

It was not uncommon for erotic albums otherwise devoted to heterosexual encounters to include one homosexual leaf. In this one, a scholar in his study is sodomizing a youth, whose effeminate face and hair ornaments suggest that he is a bitong, a boy or young man who dressed in feminine garb and catered to the same-sex desires of men. For well-off males to enjoy sex with partners of both sexes was commonly accepted, not taken to be unnatural or censorable. Consorting with bitong not only carried no special stigma, but in some times and situations was considered more refined than heterosexual relationships with female courtesans and prostitutes. Recent studies claim to recognize bitong in some of the boy servants who accompany scholars in paintings.

As in the Jin Ping Mei leaf (no. ), 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.

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, nor are examples extant.[10] The antique bronze gu and ding vessels on the table indicate the man’s wealth and cultivation. The loosely-rolled handscroll is presumably an erotic painting; and 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, a collection of love stories by the late Ming Feng Menglong (1574-1646) which includes a chapter on homosexual love.[11]

[9] See Robert H. van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961) p. 299; also Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing, An Illustrated Guide, Hong Kong, 1994, pp. 22-23, where it is referred to as a "bib brassiere."

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

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

CLP 85: 2005 “Issues in Sino-Japanese Artistic Exchange.” Workshop on Sino-Japanese Artistic Exchanges Ohio State U

Sino-Jap. Workshop, Columbus, April 30, 2005

Issues in Sino-Japanese Artistic Exchange (James Cahill)

My title and topic were given me by Judy Andrews, but I’m happy with them, because “exchange” avoids the prickly issue of “influence.” I haven’t enough time this morning to argue that issue at length again, and most of you are familiar with it anyway. I sometimes quote Michael Baxandall, who wrote (in an “Excursus Against Influence” in his Patterns of Intention book): “‘Influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient; it seems to me to reverse the active/passive relation. . . If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.” He is writing about artist-to-artist situations, but what he writes applies as well to cross-cultural transmissions—for our subject today, between China and Japan. If the formulation that sees the so-called “receiving” culture or artist as in fact the active party, making deliberate choices among a diversity of available styles and motifs and “pictorial ideas” to adopt or appropriate--if this formulation could be accepted and used by everybody who speaks and writes about the matter, replacing the “influence” model, much of the hostility that scholarship on cross-cultural exchanges has met with would never have happened. And of course I’ll use that approach today. Seeing it as a matter of artists’ choices is backed up by the obvious circumstance that when the exchanges happen, some artists participate while others, often the majority, choose not to. This is true in Ming-Qing China, when some painters chose to adopt new ideas from Western pictures; in 19c France, when some painters (the most interesting, as it turned out) chose to adopt exotic and fresh pictorial practices from Japanese prints (and were in effect liberated, not constrained, by that choice); and in China and Japan in the situations we’ll be dealing with today.

Adopting what we can call the Baxandall model will allow us also to take a more even-handed approach to the question of China’s relationship with surrounding cultures in art. In other fields of Chinese studies, the sinocentric version of this, in which China was virtually always the source of “influence” rather than the recipient, and incursions and invasions from other cultures were absorbed and “sinicized,” has given way to better-balanced accounts that can be summed up in the title of the 1983 book edited by Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals. I’ll try this morning for the same balance, attending both to what Japanese artists took from China and to what Chinese artists took from Japan. The latter is more difficult to do, since for the reasons just mentioned, any scholarship on it has to be recent and limited--and likely to be carried out against some opposition. One can’t write histories of Japanese art without acknowledging Chinese “influence”; one could, and we did, write histories of Chinese art in which all the important developments were internal (with the only significant exception in Buddhism and its art, which I won’t deal with today, leaving it to others more at home in it.) Only now do we begin to realize how inadequate that one-way version must be—how much China adopted from the art of cultures to the west of them, for instance, is brought out clearly in the recent Met exhibition and catalog “China: Dawn of a Golden Age.” However, I haven’t myself done more than begin to think about and look for evidences of adoptions by Chinese artists from Japanese art, so what I say about it will be very brief and preliminary, and dependent on the work of others from whom you will hear later (Ralph’s book, Aida Wang’s work, others.)

I turn first to Japan, and what Japanese artists adopted from China. Since most aspects of this huge topic have been extensively worked over already, I’ll speak only about a few cases that bear out the argument with which I began, that such transfers are best regarded as active recipient adopting freely from passive source.

S,S. I argued in a lecture given some years ago, using as principal visual evidence a large 22-leaf album by Sesshu mysteriously ignored by Sesshu scholars, that Sesshu must have not only had first-hand familiarity with Southern Sung painting, but was able to recreate it, at some time in his life and when he chose to, on a level of finesse and fidelity that would be hard to match among the Ming painters of China. One might even argue that the full nuanced potential of ink-monochrome ptg as practiced in Southern Sung China is continued more in Japan than in China, where the scholar-amateur artists on one hand, and the Zhe-school masters on the other, are inclined to reject its refinements and pursue very different directions.

S,S. Once we recognize how closely Sesshu could imitate Southern Sung styles when he chose to, the question becomes: why does he stop doing that and transform those styles to accord with Japanese taste? We can begin by juxtaposing a Chinese original in the manner of Yu-chien (as I still take the fan ptg at right to be, although recently some Japanese scholars have argued that it’s Japanese) with Sesshu’s derivations, the well-known copy after Yu-chien and

S – The Tokyo Nat’l Mus. Haboku Sansui. I would speak of more distinct and discrete brushstrokes, a more stepped system of ink gradations, and allover a care for sheer visual beauty, sacrificing the sense of space and other traits of naturalism. But that’s too large a subject to pursue now

Sesshu was an exception in that he went to China and saw paintings there; most Japanese artists had access only to Chinese ptgs and prints that were in Japan. If we think of artists in both cultures choosing among available styles and motifs, the questions become: what was in fact available to them? And how did they use it? I myself was working on the problem of what Chinese Ming-Qing ptgs were in Japan in the Edo period for artists to see, pub. an article (etc.—have copy, can Xerox)

S,S. Cross-media borrowings are especially interesting in this regard. That Edo=period Japanese ptrs learned about Chinese ptg styles in part through woodblock-printed pictures based on ptgs is well known; but the implications of this for the artist’s styles have not been much explored. We’ve written about the drawbacks of learning Chinese brush painting through woodblock prints--an analogy I’ve used was having access to a Beethoven symphony only through a player-piano-roll reduction and then trying to turn it back into a symphonic work for full orchestra. The end product would sound very different; much of Beethoven’s greatness would be lost. But it’s also possible that there would be some gains in the new work. That possibility can be exemplified by the case of Ikeno Taiga, who had access to a copy of the Chinese Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (a double leaf at left, from the first part, 1679) and used it as a sourcebook, especially when he did sinophile subjects—at left a “Red Cliff” painting in the Freer Gallery of Art.

--S. Detail. Seeing how a color-woodblock style becomes the basis for a painting style is very interesting: the heavy, discontinuous contour lines, the shaded colors (based on the printmaker’s technique of wiping the block after applying the pigment), the depiction of masses of tree foliage by overlaying a bounded area of shaded color wash over an ink pattern of leafage—

-- S. Again, a device forced on the Chinese printmaker by the limitations of his medium but embraced as a feature of a new style by the Japanese painter.

S,S. What follows is well known: how Taiga exploits the abstracting and flattening potential of the new style in pictures such as this one of 1749, in which the borrowed elements are already assimilated into a coherent Japanese style, partly by reconciling it with the aesthetic principles of  Rimpa (note blue water pattern, flattened onto the picture plane.)

S,S. In his late work, such as this leaf from the great Juben album of 1771 or the “White Clouds and Red Trees” (detail), major features of the style still echo their woodblock origins: the heavy, discontinuous contours, the pointillist patterns. But the ultimate origin of these is of interest now only to art historians: the style is mainly to be credited to Taiga’s painterly genius, not to any derivation from China. The Mustard Seed Garden manual, itself a work of modest aesthetic merit, can scarcely be said to have exerted some powerful “influence” on all these brilliant stylistic moves; it was Taiga who saw possibilities in the book that the Chinese artists and artisans who created it could never have dreamed of, and exploited them.

S,S. With enough time and slides I could show you how Rimpa masters Sotatsu and Korin used simple ink-line pictures from a late-Ming woodblock-printed book on Buddhist and Daoist transcendants (for which I don’t have slides) as the basis for some of their finest works. Japanese scholars, notably Yamane Yuzo but also Kobayashi Hiromitsu (who is with us today) have identified quite a few cases of that kind. All redound entirely to the credit of the Japanese masters, who were able to transform the Chinese woodblock pictures, unpromising materials in themselves, into richly satisfying and highly original works of art.

S,S. The Japanese artist might equally, of course, begin with a recognized masterwork from the other tradition, if he has access to it—here, the great “Mountain Village in Clearing Mist” by the 13th century Yu-chien, long preserved in Japan (and belonging to a category of ptg disparaged and more or less obliterated from the record in China.) Korin rearranges and reworks its materials into a decorative two-fold screen (now in the Seattle Art Museum.) The greatness of the source picture does not induce Korin to really imitate it; here, as in the other cases, we observe a free and inspired manipulation of a freely-chosen model, in no sense imposed on the artist by some perceived notion of Chinese cultural superiority.

S,S. When, in the 1960s-70s, I was doing the research in Japan on early Nanga painting that eventually produced studies of Sakaki Hyakusen and Yosa Buson, I was able to revise the standard account laid out by Japanese specialists, in which the pioneer Nanga masters, having no access to original paintings by the Ming-Qing masters of China, had to learn about them through woodblock-printed pictures. This is true enough in some cases. But, as I was able to establish, this was only part of the story, probably not the most important part: they also copied and imitated real Chinese Ming-Qing paintings. The reason these hadn’t been identified was that the scholars were looking in the wrong places: they were not the familiar Ming-Qing paintings to be seen in books and museum exhibitions, but minor works, of small value in China, that were brought to Japan for sale by Chinese merchants, who sold them through Nagasaki. They could still be found, in unlikely places such as the storage cabinets of small dealers, and matched up with the Nanga masters’ works. The sources of paintings by Sakaki Hyakusen, for instance (I don’t have slides to show this—gave them all to Clark Institute in Hanford), proved to be based on minor Ming and Qing painting that could still be identified. Simple copying of that kind is relatively insignificant; more interesting is the case of an artist making the silk purse out of the sow’s ear. A small, loveable painting of 1781 by Yosa Buson, at right, proved similarly to be a copy, quite close in composition, of a low-quality work by a minor, unrecorded Chinese painter named Tang Xianzi, which turned up in the shop of the Shimmonzen dealer Taniguchi. (Again, no slide). Executed in the fluent brush drawing of Buson’s late style, and with all the materials transformed into items in his personal idiom, it becomes a new work. Although the Chinese picture wasn’t expensive, I left it there; I would happily have given several months’ salary, on the other hand, for the Buson, but the owner, Yabumoto Sogoro, would never let it go for several months of a professor’s salary.

S,S. A comparable phenomenon of good art derived from less good is seen in the ways some 19th century European artists (mostly French) took “artistic ideas” that were new to them from Japanese prints. It’s well known that except for the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the ones they could see were not the Japanese prints we now value highly, but were mostly of the school or period once classed as “decadent” (the term has been largely dropped in recent times, but I think retains some validity), Toyokuni III and Kunisada and the rest. Crude and repetitious as these were, they were nonetheless inspirational for the European painters, who mostly didn’t copy them directly (these two by van Gogh are exceptions, print-to-painting transfers far less productive than Taiga’s) but who made use of them in ways that profoundly changed the stylistic direction of European painting in its Impressionist - Post-Impressionist phase. Access to the masterworks isn’t essential, and in cross-cultural transmissions is usually not possible, since the works most easily accessible to the foreign artists are likely to be of a kind that the source tradition considers minor.

My last section will deal with what Japanese painting contributed to Chinese painting, and it will be brief, although the subject has begun to engage the attention of scholars in recent years. Japanese painted fans were on the market, and popular, in Song China; what Song artists might have appropriated from them, however, would be difficult to determine. The folding fan form originates in Japan, and to my knowledge was not used in China until the Ming.

S,S. An album by the late Ming figure master Chen Hongshou in the Palace Museum, Beijing, contains, in addition to more conventional leaves, a remarkable leaf titled “The Great Ford on the Yellow River” (right). Reproducing this in my book on late Ming painting, I commented that anyone familiar with Japanese painting will be reminded of “the superb wave-patterned stream that flows, similarly flattened onto the picture plane, between two blossoming plum trees in the famous Japanese screens by Ogata Kôrin” ( one of them at left) But I stopped short of suggesting any real connection, especially since the Korin work must be later than Chen Hongshou’s. Dick Barnhart, in an unpublished symposium paper, showed the same leaf by Chen Hongshou, suggesting that Chen had been looking at something Japanese, and got around the chronological disparity by suggesting that some work by or in the style of Tawaraya Sôtatsu, who was about twenty years older than Chen Hongshou, might have been seen by him. All this needs more work, as Barnhart agrees

We are on firmer ground with later Chinese painting, 19th-20th century, especially for painting in Shanghai, where a lively trade with Japan was going on, and Japanese paintings were to be seen; also, some Chinese artists were going to Japan to teach or to study. What the Shanghai School may owe to these contacts with Japan remains to be seriously investigated; once more, obstacles of national pride will stand in the way, and cannot easily be circumvented so long as the “influence” model continues to dominate.

S,S. It’s been suggested that Ren Xiong, another of those brilliant and versatile masters who availed himself of a great diversity of old and new styles, included Japanese styles among them—some of his pictures do indeed “have a Japanese look” (an evasive way of not taking time to say what I mean by that.) And the idea for his famous self-portrait, life-size and (at least in part) very realistic, which has no real precedent in China, could have come from contact with some Japanese work of the kind--Watanabe Kazan, for one, was making realistic portraits with elements of western illusionism in the 1820s and 30s (this one is 1827.) Once more, the differences in style are immense; I’m only suggesting, again, that artists pick up good ideas from each other, and use them in their individual ways.

S,S. The case of the Lingnan or Cantonese school in the early 20th century has been studied in a book by Ralph Croizier that has clarified what Japanese painters and paintings Gao Jianfu and the others saw, copied, imitated, and acquired to bring back to China—principally works by followers of Takeuchi Seiho. (Ptg by one of them, Nishimura Goun, 1910, on left; one by Gao Jianfu, 1928, on right.)

S,S. Other Chinese artists later spent periods of study in Japan; one who made good use of his time there to absorb elements of style that helped him establish himself as an independent artist, breaking from old-established Chinese habits, was Fu Baoshi. I’ve argued elsewhere that a Japanese master nearly unknown outside Japan, Kosugi Hôan, played an important part in Fu Baoshi’s formative period. I don’t have the right slides to make the point; I can only say that some years ago when Howard & Mary Ann Rogers. Hugh Wass and I went around a Kosugi Hoan exhibiion at the Idemitsu Museum (which has a big collection of his works—he was a friend of the old Idemitsu) we were all murmuring “Fu Baoshi! Fu Baoshii!” Unfortunately they haven’t published a reproduction album of his work, nor have I pursued the matter enough to get photos; I have to make do with the postcard at right. I show it to Chinese scholars and they say “Fu Baoshi,” and I say no, one of Fu Baoshi’s teachers. I believe that Kosugi Hoan was teaching at the Imperial Art Academy in Tokyo when Fu Baoshi was studying there, but that needs further investigation. Anyway, any Fu Baoshi specialist should spend some time at the Idemitsu Museum.

S,S. Another, clearly, was Tomioka Tessai. That Tessai himself adopted a great many motifs and ideas from Chinese painting is well known; his Vimalakirti (left) is derived from

-- S. a painting by Luo Ping—both look rather like Tessai himself.

S,S. Tessai’s late work, from his eighties (he died in 1924), often sets fine drawing of figures with spots of bright color into a framework of deep black areas of heavy ink applied in a semi-controlled way. His works in this style, striking and innovative, were much admired and exhibited and reproduced in the 1930s when Fu Baoshi was studying at the Imperial Art Academy in Tokyo. We can match up Fu Baoshi paintings with those by Tessai to show how Fu could take a whole composition from Tessai, besides the basic style of fine drawing and color set within heavy ink areas. (Here, Tessai’s picture of the Song poet Su Dongpo visiting the monk Foyin; and a detail from a picture obviously based on it by Fu Baoshi. Can’t find slide of whole.)

S,S. Details from other Tessai and Fu Baoshi paintings in this mode. The heavy-ink manner has been, from the 1940s on, one of the options open to Chinese painters; in tracing its origins they have, understandably enough, found them in the Chinese tradition, Xu Wei and Gong Xian and others. But a more immediate source, I believe, is the painting of Tessai as transmitted by artists who studied in Japan, as well as through reproductions.

S,S. (Last slides: another of Tessai’s late, inky landscapes, detail from one by Li Keran.) One of the heirs to this manner was Li Keran, who died as recently as 1990. When in 1988 a major Tessai exhibition was for the first time sent to China and shown at the Meishuguan in Beijing and Shanghai, Li Keran wrote a generous and revealing essay for the catalog, telling how Chinese artists of his generation had been very much aware of the works of Tessai, through reproductions and a few originals, and how they had admired them and learned from them. His words went beyond, I believe, standard expressions of inter-cultural friendship, acknowledging a truth. I’d like to suggest, finally, that the lively and productive back-and-forth that goes on between artists, which is revealed in their paintings, is perhaps most easily recognized and acknowledged by the artists themselves. Tessai had no problem in crediting his myriad Chinese sources, from which he plundered endlessly throughout his long career as a sinophile painter; Li Keran, at an uncharacteristic moment for China, acknowledged his and his fellow artists’ acquaintance with Tessai’s work, and at least implicitly, their debt to him. It’s rather the art historians and cultural historians, with their overt or covert political agendas, who will sometimes deny what’s before their eyes and continue to argue for some such myth as the cultural insularity of China. And my final plea is: let us all do our best not to. Thank you.

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you all for your encouraging responses to our symposium proposal, and please forgive this group mailing. We have circulated our tentative plan, but may we ask that you give us your actual paper title as soon as possible? We would like to finalize the program very soon in order to send out our announcements. We hope very much that we will be able to put the papers together as a symposium volume after post-conference revision.

Please expect to receive an inquiry soon from Erin Publow of our East Asian Studies Center ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) about your travel plans. If you wish, she will be able to purchase a pre-paid air ticket. She is required by the university to obtain your signature on travel forms in advance of your trip even if you prefer to purchase the ticket for later reimbursement.

I am attaching our most recent version of the schedule (times still tentative).

Cross-Cultural Artistic Exchange in Later Chinese and Japanese History

The movement of artistic and cultural exchanges between China and Japan from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, much of which occurred under imperial or elite patronage, has been sufficiently well-studied to establish canonical versions of the narrative of early Sino-Japanese cultural relationships. Less thoroughly examined by North American scholars, despite a wider range of surviving material evidence, are the transmission and exchanges of artistic ideas between China and Japan in later East Asian history, from roughly 1600 to the mid-twentieth century. Outlines for understanding these exchanges were proposed in publications of the mid-1980s, based upon studies of documents and a selection of surviving paintings. This workshop will examine new discoveries in this area of art history over the past two decades, particularly as measured against accepted art historical accounts.

It has become increasingly well-recognized by scholars outside art history, particularly in history and literature, that the earlier patterns of exchange, in which cultural innovations were transmitted from China and Korea to Japan via Nagasaki, were largely reversed following the opening of Asian ports to international trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From that time, novel modern ideas began to flow in the opposite direction, from Japan to the continent. The impact of Japan on China went beyond transmission of techniques for making art, and encompassed a totalistic view of the place of art in the modern world, including historiography, art education, art publishing, exhibitions, collecting, and sales.

Saturday, April 30, 2005

Session Chairs to be announced

Confirmed *

Session 1: Transmissions of Style and Technology in Momoyama and Edo Japan
9:30-12

1.James Cahill*
University of California, Berkele
Issues in Sino-Japanese Artistic Exchange (please update the title)

2. Hiromitsu Kobayashi *
Sophia University
Chinese Prints and Ukiyo-e (please update the title)

3. Masaaki Arakawa *
Idemitsu Museum
Kyushu Kilns and Jingdezhen (please update the title)

Discussant: Richard Vinograd*

Session 2
1:30-3:30
Artistic Exchanges in the Era of Open Ports: Shanghai

1. Kuiyi Shen *
UC San Diego (please update the title)

2. Lai Yu-chih *
National Palace Museum
Taipei, Taiwan (please update the title)

3. Yang Chia-ling *
University of Sussex
(please update the title)

Discussant: Joshua A. Fogel*

Session 3
Artistic Exchanges in the 20th Century
3:45-6:30

1.Aida Yuen Wang*
Brandeis University
(please update the title)

2.Julia Andrews *
The Guangzhou-Tokyo Print Exchanges of 1936 (?)

3. Nishigami Minoru *
Issues Raised by the Suma Collection of Modern Chinese Paintings
(please update the title)

4. Chen Ruilin*
School of Art and Design, Tsinghua University
(please update the title)

Discussant: Ralph Croizier*
Wrap-up

With warmest wishes,
Judy Andrews

Director, East Asian Studies Center
P: 614-688-8184; h: 614-457-8618

Dear Speakers,
We are looking forward very much to seeing you at the end of this month in Columbus for our conference on Cross-Cultural Artistic Exchange.

Please email a copy of your conference paper to me and to the discussant for your session approximately two weeks before your presentation (April 15). Unless I have instructed you otherwise, please limit your oral presentation to 20 minutes.

We will prepare two slide projectors and a computer for powerpoint presentations. Please let Erin ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) know if you have any other needs.

In addition to our conference, James Cahill will present a lecture on Friday night at 8 pm in the History of Art Department. The title is: “Passages of Felt Life: Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?”

CLP 158: 2006 "Chinese Erotic Paintings in the Bertholet Coillection." Published in French as "Les peintures érotiques chinoises de la collection Bertholet." In: Le Palais du printemps: Peintures érotiques de Chine., exhib. cat. (Paris, Musée Cernuschi, 2

Chinese Erotic Paintings in the Bertholet Collection

Chinese erotic painting is still an undervalued and understudied genre. The prevalence of late, poor-quality pieces among surviving examples has persuaded too many Chinese art specialists that it is unworthy of their attention. Quite a few books of reproductions have appeared, some with substantial accompanying texts, but a properly art-historical account of the genre has yet to be published. My own attempt, a long chapter in a book titled Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China (hereafter PUP), is more or less completed and awaiting publication. This essay will draw on that unpublished text, in addition to offering more specific commentary on the paintings in the exhibition.

Erotic painting in China has a long history. A few paintings and relief designs on tomb tiles, along with references in the literature, testify to beginnings at least as far back as the Han dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D. 220). The eighth century (Tang dynasty) imperial court master Zhou Fang is said to have painted them; a fenben (sketch copy in ink line) that may preserve one of his compositions is in the exhibition (no. 5a). Famous painters in the Ming, notably Qiu Ying and Tang Yin in the early to mid 16th century and Chen Hongshou at the end of Ming, are recorded as having produced erotic paintings, but so far as is known, none of these are extant. Qiu Ying's name, in particular, is often falsely added to erotic paintings from later periods (e.g. the "Subtle Pleasures" album, no. 10) with the aim of increasing their prestige and value. Erotic paintings with reliable signatures or seals of their artists are less common; the album by Wang Sheng (no. 1) may well be the earliest extant. A seal reading "Xu Guan" on one leaf of "A Private Assignation" (no. 6) is probably the artist's, but he appears to be unrecorded.

An important and unexplored aspect of the place of Chinese erotic painting in Chinese culture is the question of how the Chinese themselves regarded it and wrote about it. The perhaps surprising fact is that their preserved comments on it are almost entirely negative. What Zhang Geng, writing around 1735, has to say is typical:

“No one knows who first painted secret-play [erotic] pictures. It is recorded in the Hou Han Shu (Later Han History) that Prince Dai of Guangchuan had [the walls of] a room painted with scenes of men and women engaged in copulation, and set out wine and invited his family members to drink there, making them gaze at the paintings. [Because of this he was] destroyed. So we know that this kind of thing was already painted in the Han. The ones painted by Qiu Ying in the Ming are especially skillful, and consequently became popular. It is human nature to like lascivious things, and there is no one who wouldn't want to obtain one of these for secret enjoyment."

[Zhang Geng writes about two early Qing artists who specialized in erotic pictures, and continues:]

“I once said: If secret-play pictures aren't done skillfully, there is no point in painting them; but if they are done skillfully, they incite lasciviousness in people. [He mentions a writer of erotic poems, and adds:] "For this [the poet] should be sent down to plow the ground in hell--and those who depict such things in forms are even worse! It would be much better for them not to paint such pictures.”[1]

The early Qing landscapist Zou Zhe (1636 –ca. 1708) writes that his friends “all praise Chen Hongshou's ‘Scenes of Intimate Play’ as wonderful illustrations beyond compare,” but that he himself finds them offensive: “I was not aware that Chen had sunk into such evil pleasures as these are. I am not willing to look at them.” The painter Fang Xun (1736-1799), approached by a rich merchant who offered him a large sum to make an erotic painting for him, refused indignantly, saying “There is no skill worse than tempting evil minds to lust. Although I am poor, I will not do it!" A mid-nineteenth century prefect of Suzhou named Wang, visiting the book and painting markets in his city, was appalled by what he saw there, and issued an angry edict: “Each shop has lascivious books and pictures to sell for profit and to inflame people with lust. 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.”[2] The report that women as well as men were consumers of erotica (a report backed up by other evidence) and the observation that it could be enjoyed by those who were illiterate or semi-literate--as most women still were--have important implications in allowing us to break out of the over-protective taboos that have hindered considerations of women's involvement in erotic painting, and other kinds of painting as well, in this period.

Although the acquisition and enjoyment of erotic pictures was widespread and more or less tolerated (it was the artists who painted them and dealers who sold them who are castigated), writing positively about them was evidently impermissable. No Chinese written arguments in defense of them are known to me. This is in sharp contrast to foreign writers of recent times, who have typically looked for ways to sanitize the Chinese erotic paintings, intending perhaps to protect the Chinese from the stigma of having made pornography or “dirty pictures.” Dealers and collectors sometimes call them “bride’s books,” and argue that their purpose was to instruct newlywed women in sexual matters about which they had until then been innocent. Some writers have associated them with religious sexual practices, whether Daoist or Tantric Buddhist, and with Chinese sex manuals--which are indeed suffused with those doctrines, but which cannot, I believe, be shown to have any clear relationship to erotic paintings. Some have maintained that since sex was regarded as a natural part of life by the Chinese, no onus was attached to depictions of it. But, although the erotic paintings were certainly viewed and used in a variety of contexts, none of these foreign beliefs about them is, to my knowledge, supported in Chinese writings or in the pictures themselves. They may well have been used on occasion to introduce women to the byways of sex, a function they perform sometimes in Chinese stories and pictures. Many of them, especially the cruder ones, surely functioned more commonly at the other, seldom-mentioned end of a scale of gentility: as stimuli for male masturbation. We should add quickly, however, that high-level examples of the kind included in this exhibition are mostly ill suited to that function, their sexual impact too much diluted by nuances and thematic diversions, and do not appear to have been designed with that usage in mind. On the contrary, the best Chinese erotic paintings, besides being estimable works of art, 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.

[1]Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu, Huashi Congshu ed., pp. 40-41.

[2] Translation by Evenlyn Rawski. References for these and other quotations will be supplied in PUP.

Chinese erotic paintings were done mainly in two forms: the handscroll and the album, both of which are suited to intimate, close-up gazing; both have the advantage of concealing the pictures except when they are actually being viewed. The handscroll appears to have been most commonly used in the early periods, the album in the later, from late Ming on. "Secret Play on a Spring Night," the painting that was acquired in 1618 by Zhang Chou (1577-1643), who believed it to be a work by the Tang master Zhou Fang and describes it in detail in his catalogue, was a handscroll. Although the original painting is presumably long lost, the large fenben or study-copy in the exhibition (no. 5a) matches Zhang Chou's description in every respect, besides exhibiting a style distinct from that of all other erotic paintings known to me.

It presents a dramatic tableau with the Tang Emperor Xuanzong and his favorite consort Yang Guifei (or, alternatively, as Zhang Chou suggests, Empress Wu Zitian and her lover) engaged in lusty copulation, she in a chair wearing silk socks, he on a stool wearing a cap and boots. Both are supported by women servants: one pushes the emperor from behind, two more stand beside Yang Guifei, one of them leaning over to provide a backrest for her, while a fourth stands behind her chair to steady it. The large size of the figures within the frame brings the action up close; this, and the volumetric drawing of body parts, typical of Tang figure painting and surprisingly well retained in the copy, set the picture clearly apart from any other erotic painting presently known. Yang Guifei’s body, made up of fleshy, rotund masses, is entirely unlike the typical female nude of later centuries (see, for contrast, the "Meiren At Her Bath," no. 14.). Even her vulva, with its Y-shaped opening and thick labia, differs markedly from the modest slits that women in later pictures reveal. The copyist, while he must have followed the original closely in most respects, was apparently permitted some slight flexibility, as can be seen in the double drawing of the man’s penis, for which he tries alternative sizes and positions. (A distant echo of this composition may be recognized in a leaf in an album not included in this exhibition: see Dreams of Spring p. 78.)

From the late Ming on, the near-exclusive form of choice for erotic painting is the album; most high-quality surviving examples date between then (the early to mid-17th century) and the early or mid-19th century, after which a marked falling-off can be observed. Among albums, some illustrate texts, such as the Xi Xiang Ji and Rou Pu Tuan albums in the exhibition (nos. 2 and 3), while others, the majority, are made up of separate pictures with no narrative or other clear program connecting them. Up to the early Qing period, erotic series paintings, whether in handscroll or album form, typically depicted one sex act after another; they often bore titles such as "The Twelve Glorious Positions" for intercourse. In the early Qing period, albums with a different type of program begin to appear: leaves with depictions of active sex are interspersed with scenes of intrigues and seductions, even romantic love, which serve to contextualize the erotic events. In albums of this latter type, which I call part-erotic albums, the leaves are not linked by any narrative or other program, but are free-standing vignettes that invite the viewer to imagine mini-narratives around them. The earlier, simpler type continues to be used throughout the whole period of production; the "Gardens of Pleasure" album (no. 8) is an example probably from the late 17th or early 18th century. The Wang Sheng album (no. 1) might be seen as transitional, since it includes a single introductory leaf of a romantic scene. The "Scenes of Love" (no. 15) and "Subtle Pleasures" (no. 10) albums, as well as the album formerly published (wrongly) as illustrations to the novel Jin Ping Mei (no. 4), belong to the second, thematically richer type.

The creation of this new type, and its early development, appear to have taken place in the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu province. Suzhou had been the major center of painting for most of the Ming period, but by the end of Ming had slipped into a secondary position, in the eyes of influential critics, overshadowed by the new literati styles and doctrines promoted by Dong Qichang (1555-1636) and his followers in nearby Songjiang. Scorned or ignored by these critics was the continuation in Suzhou of a thriving commercial production of popular, non-elite painting in traditional styles, some of it forgeries of old masters, but including also original paintings, mostly figural, by lesser artists working in the tradition of Qiu Ying. One such "small master" was Wang Sheng, whose signed album (no. 1), as noted above, is probably the earliest erotic album assignable to a particular artist. Several other works by Wang Sheng are known; one of them, dated 1614, places his period of activity in the early 17th century. The style is skilled without being especially distinctive. Small refinements are seen in the fine, even line-drawing of the figures set against the firmer and fluctuating outlines of a bedcover, or the rough-brush depiction of the landscape on a screen against the meticulously rendered pattern of the surrounding brocade. The opening leaf with lovers on a riverbank, the alternation of indoor and outdoor scenes, a picture of sex in a boat, and a male homosexual encounter in the last, signed leaf, impart variety to the album.

A Suzhou artist active in the early Qing period who was known as a painter of erotic pictures was Gu Jianlong (1606-1687 or after); several of his works of this kind survive, in originals, close copies, or old reproductions. Attributable to him by style is a series of 200 illustrations to the great late Ming erotic novel Jin Ping Mei, probably done for the Kangxi Emperor while Gu was serving as a court artist in the 1660s-70s (Fig. 1). The albums remained in the Manchu court down to modern times, and bear seals of the Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1735-95); they are now dispersed among various collections. The series of illustrations to Rou Pu Tuan or "The Carnal Prayer Mat" by Li Yu (1610-after 1680) in the exhibition (no. 3) correspond to Gu's Jin Ping Mei pictures so closely in style and characteristic motifs as to suggest that they are close copies after a series by Gu Jianlong (which must have been done, one should note, more or less contemporaneously with the novel, written in 1657.) Only some hardness in the drawing and stiffness in the figures betrays the copyist's hand. The series of Xi Xiang Ji illustrations (no. 2), by contrast, are original works by some artist with a distinctive and elegantly mannered style, perhaps another Suzhou small master, who cannot be identified, at least by myself.

Two albums in the Bertholet collection (nos. 2 and 19--only one leaf from the latter is included in the exhibition; for others see Dreams of Spring pp. 102-109) have been misidentified as illustrations to the great late Ming erotic novel Jin Ping Mei. But in truth they do not illustrate any text, but are examples of the part-erotic album, made up of independent leaves, vignettes of upper-class or princely life. Most of the leaves in both are good copies after leaves in two extant albums by an unidentified master who served during the mid to later 18th century within the imperial academy in Beijing but also worked for some patrons, probably princely households, outside the imperial court--one of the albums bears imperial seals, the other has none. He is treated at some length in my chapter on erotic painting in PUP under the name "the Qianlong Albums Master." Part of one of the albums has recently been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fig. 2.) Together with a third album by the same artist, known only in reproduction, which also bears seals indicating it was done for the court, they belong among the masterworks of Chinese erotic painting. Nothing associates these albums with Jin Ping Mei or any other text; they bear titles such as "Intimate Scenes of Leisurely Love." A rare copy of one of these reproduction albums is included in the exhibition (no. 24).

Copies of leaves from these albums are found in a number of collections. The two Bertholet albums, besides being technically accomplished works in their own right, are valuable in that they contain some compositions, especially open scenes of sexual engagement, that have been lost or removed from the original series, both in the Boston album and in the publications. These allow us to reconstruct more completely the contents of the original albums. The albums, as noted, are fine examples of the part-erotic type, presenting scenes of seduction and philandering but also of romantic love and family life along with straightforward pictures of sex acts. In one leaf (no. 2x, cf. Fig. 2) a youth is making advances to an older woman, reaching out to loosen her sash, while she raises her hands in a manner more inviting than indignant. A bowl of Buddha's-hand fruits and a painting of peonies, both of which serve as displacements for the female sex organ, underscore the erotic message. The difference in ages between the two figures is more marked in the original than in the copy, and the titillating suggestion of incest (which in China included sex with the father's concubine) more distinct.

These and other part-erotic albums in the exhibition, including the "Private Assignation" album with a seal of Xu Guan (no. 6) and the "Subtle Pleasures" album (no. 10), draw for some of their leaves on an established repertory of themes and compositions, a repertory that was probably formed in early Qing Suzhou and was repeated loosely, after that, from one album to another: scenes involving voyeurs, a man taking the virginity of a young girl who is held by an older woman, a husband deceiving his wife by making sexual advances to (or, in some cases, having sex with) a servant girl, and so forth. Within these familiar themes the artists can exercise their originality in playing variations on them and introducing entertaining departures from them--besides, of course, inventing new themes and compositions in other leaves.

The "Gardens of Pleasure" album (no. 8), by contrast, contains fewer conventional motifs, more that seem entirely original. Each of the eight leaves depicts a heterosexual couple having or about to have sex. In one, a girl servant helps to support the woman, and in another the man appears to be of northern nomadic origin. Other than these minor variations, the pictures all present youthful couples engaged in amorous activities in garden or interior settings. The rich mineral blue-and-green coloring of the rocks, the luxuriant trees and flowers (which also serve to set the seasons), all contribute to the auspicious and comfortable atmosphere created in the pictures. The lovemaking is tender, unhurried; no signs of strong passion appear on the faces—at most, slight smiles of pleasure. Genitals are exposed and in most of the leaves engaged, but they are depicted modestly, not blatantly. (Women in Chinese erotic pictures, in sharp contrast to those in Japanese erotic prints, exhibit little pubic hair.) The furnishings and appurtenances testify to well-off, cultivated households, ideal environments for pursuing amorous affairs. In one of the leaves the man is wearing a scholar’s cap, an indication of status. No irony colors the pictures, none of the tension between desire and circumstance that adds expressive complexities to some other Chinese erotic painting. This is just the kind of album, arousing but at the same time calming, that might well have been used in the way seen in one of the pictures, looked at by the couple together before they proceed with sex. The album probably dates from the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the Kangxi era, and may be by some artist working in Zhejiang province, perhaps the Hangzhou or Shaoxing region, since elements of style in it are reminiscent of the late Zhe school and even Chen Hongshou (but without Chen’s archaistic distortions.)

Unique, to my knowledge, is the series of six fenben or ink-line sketch album leaves (nos. 5b-g) which accompany the larger fenben, the copy of the work ascribed to Zhou Fang discussed above (no. 5a). Fenben can be either study copies made to preserve older compositions for later use, as the large single one is, or preparatory sketches that precede the finished paintings, as are the set of six. While some older motifs and compositional types can be recognized in them, they are basically original works, and of high quality. According to the Shanghai artist who gave them to M. Bertholet, they came originally from the studio of Gai Qi (1774-1829), and this is not impossible, although a few features, such as the fixed smiles on most of the faces, suggests a somewhat later date and a different hand. There is no artist's signature or seal, or even an associated inscription, and the gap of a century and a half or more since their production allows the possibility of an added or changed attribution. Leaving aside the question of authorship, they can be seen not only as outstanding examples of Chinese brush drawing but also as valuable in revealing interesting aspects of the artist's working practice. Written on several of the leaves are notes on the colors and designs to be filled in the corresponding areas of the finished paintings. In two of the leaves the artist has drawn the amorous pair twice, to try alternatives; in one, the woman's hand grasping the man's penis appears three times, the problem being: how many fingers on each side? At least two of the compositions are very unusual if not unique among the erotic albums: the couple seated on an outdoor bench groping each other's genitals--this is not a practice commonly represented in Chinese erotica--and the one in which the man raises the robe of a sleeping woman to assault her sexually from behind. The leaf in which the cheating husband is about to be attacked by his angry wife wielding a club, while his partner in philandering hastily puts on her robe, is not without parallels in other albums (for instance, one leaf in the "Subtle Pleasures" album, no. 10x), but is entirely original in the unusual dramatic power it achieves by rendering well-articulated bodies in readable space. A “finished” version of it, probably not the only one derived from this fenben, appeared in a recent New York auction.[3]

[3] Sotheby’s New York, “Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art,” March 31-April 1 2005, Lot #309. It is one of a mixed lot of nineteen erotic leaves from different albums; only this one corresponds to one of the Bertholet fenben. A companion leaf, depicting a boy masturbating against a garden rock watched by two women in a nearby doorway, may have been derived from another fenben in the original series.

Welcome in this exhibition is the inclusion of homoerotic scenes (nos. 12, 17, 20, 22, 23)), which have usually been left out of collections of Chinese erotic paintings, perhaps out of fear that readers and viewers will find them offensive or distasteful. Viewers today are less likely to be offended than those of even a few decades ago, and the new openness permits a fuller consideration of our subject. 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. 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 in certain situations be 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.

Examples included in the exhibition are all, as it happens, scenes of male homoerotic sex. But pictures that were in all probability intended for a viewership of women also survive--a good example is an album recently acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to which they have given the title "Secret Spring," by an unidentified artist whom I call, accordingly, the Secret Spring Master. The leaves of this album represent the artist'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. In one leaf (Fig. 3) the mistress and maids have been playing the game of tossing arrows into a vase--itself understandable as a play on phallic penetration. 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.

Such paintings as this can presumably be taken to represent "the filth that extends into the women's quarters" about which the Suzhou prefect, quoted earlier, complained. Bisexual women appear in Chinese fiction and other writing. 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. Elite women also patronized courtesans themselves; special pleasure boats in the Yangzhou quarters were made to accomodate them.

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 period, probably after the mid-eighteenth century. It was not uncommon, however, for earlier albums otherwise portraying heterosexual encounters to include one male homoerotic leaf. An example is the last, signed leaf in the album by Wang Sheng (no. 1) in which an older (but still youthful) man wearing a scholar's cap is about to engage in anal intercourse with a boy who appears effeminate--his skin color is light, like a woman's--and who turns to smile seductively at the man about to sodomize him. Boys, some of them looking quite young, are the sex objects in many or even most of the male homoerotic pictures. Young girls also appear in the heterosexual scenes, but there they are in the minority, and pictures in which the two participants are more or less the same in age are most common. This is an aspect of Chinese pictorial erotica that might cloud our general tolerance or enjoyment of it--pictures in which the sexual object is a child, a young girl undergoing defloration in the Scenes of Love album (no. 15x), a boy being sodomized or practicing fellatio on an older man (no. 16.) Anal intercourse with women was less commonly represented, but is not unknown; in one of the Rou Pu Tuan illustrations (no. 3x), for example, the anti-hero Vesperus engages in this practice with the debauched Flora in a garden, assisted by the three sisters with whom he is also sexually involved, and who are enjoying her discomfort. On a nearby table are a wine ewer and a pile of erotic albums they have been looking at together.

Practices that are traditionally considered aberrational or even perverse appear with increasing frequency in the later albums. This is especially true of the oeuvre, identifiable by its highly distinctive style, of the Secret Spring Master. (His bizarre figure style may reflect, or exaggerate, some local tradition, but the stylistic consistency within this body of paintings attests, I believe, to their being the work of a single master, not a school.) Homoerotic albums accomodating the preferences of both sexes appear within his work, along with pictures offering intricate patterns of voyeurism in which the voyeurs spy on a diversity of sexual encounters: cunnilingus, a woman bathing while her maid straps on a dildo, and even--unusual for this artist--a scene of orthodox heterosexual coition. There is no easy way of determining the Secret Spring Master's period of activity; my guess would be the mid to later eighteenth century.

Two leaves in the exhibition, which might appear to be from a single album but cannot be, since one is on paper and the other on silk and the dimensions of the two differ slightly, represent extreme points in the Secret Spring Master's explorations into deviance and depravity. Both leaves seem the work of a painter who is nearing an exhaustion of imagination: how to escape the ennui of the familiar? One of them (no. 17) 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), 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 here becomes distinctly distasteful; we are made to become more visually engaged than we would like to be.

The other picture (no. 21) is less disturbing, only very kinky; it appears to be a parodistic, and no doubt to some viewers offensive, scene of a religious purification rite. The picture is not easy to read or 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 her 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. The picture might allude to Jewish practice, since the man is circumcised and wears a round cap that could 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 Muslim 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.

How can we understand these? 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, Cocteau that kind; Balthus was turned on by these, Mapplethorpe by those; and so forth. I leave their assumed preferences 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, revealing himself only very late as homosexual—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 again the pedophilic, those involving children), into good clean dirty fun.

We can conclude with three paintings in the exhibition that are, by contrast, only mildly erotic. The "Meiren (Beautiful Woman) At Her Bath" (no. 14) is a hanging scroll, meant to be hung on a wall and exposed for longer periods. We can only speculate about where it would have been hung; most probable is a man's bedroom. A similar picture, perhaps by the same artist or at least from the same studio, is in the Chicago Art Institute. These two probably represent a sub-genre that has mostly been lost; in later periods, pictures of this kind were not considered suitable hangings for a respectable household and were not preserved by collectors. Scenes of bathing appear also in the erotic albums, for instance in the voyeuristic leaf of the "Scenes of Love" album (no. 15x) The woman in the hanging scroll sits on a bamboo bench beside a large bronze bathtub with tripodal legs. A burning candle on a tall stand is mounted before a bronze mirror that reflects its light, Below is a planter with blossoming orchids. The woman holds her hands within the transparent robe, one raised close to her face, the other holding the robe below; she is about to take it off and enter the bath, but pauses for a moment contemplatively. The extreme delicacy of the picture can be realized if we think of Western depictions of similar subjects, such as, for extreme contrast, those of Degas. This and similar pictures (including, of course, erotic paintings like those in this exhibition) reveal the wrongness of the often-repeated claims that the Chinese did not represent the nude in their painting, and that Chinese males were not aroused by them. Another claim, that Chinese artists were inept at drawing the unclothed female form, also needs correction; it is enough here to observe simply that their depictions of it follow conventions of beauty that differ from ours, but are more or less consistent within surviving examples.

Another hanging scroll, "Beauty On a Verandah" (no. 13), is another that represents an all-but-lost sub-genre within meiren paintings, the erotic female image in an architectural and landscape setting. The woman is seen, most of her body exposed, escaping the summer heat on the verandah of her villa, with willows above and a lotus pond below. She holds a fan in a position that suggests she is cooling her groin area, which is hidden by a loosely-draped robe; her other hand touches her cheek as she gazes out at the viewer. The provocative ambiguity set up here, with the woman appearing aloof but nonetheless somehow available, is a favorite stratagem in meiren paintings. Scholarly paraphernalia in the study behind her, and the general appearance of affluence in the setting, reveal her to be a guixiu or cultivated gentlewomen. This handsome work must be a close copy after an original by the little-known but highly accomplished artist Cui Hui, whose inscription, a poem signed and dated to 1721, is copied in upper left, along with a longer inscription (apparently written by the same hand) copied after one by Yu Ji (1738-1823) that supplies information about the artist. Cui Hui was active in the Beijing region in the early 18th century and worked on the periphery of the imperial painting academy without ever being a member of it. Three others of his paintings of women, all originals and works of extreme refinement, are in the Palace Museum, Beijing.

The third painting, a large leaf from an album, here titled "Nostalgia" (no. 16), represents still another sub-category within the meiren genre, the woman aroused by the sight of copulating animals, here a pair of dogs, with a third watching and waiting. A seal reading Shizhou in the lower left corner is intended to ascribe the album to Qiu Ying, but again, this is transparent deception. The woman wears commoners' clothing and carries a drum, indicating that she is a traveling entertainer; the child accompanying her suggests she is also a family woman somehow separated from her husband. The positioning of her hands inside her shirt may signal that she is engaged in self-stimulation. Pictures of this type, the best of them sensitively evoking the lonely state of women forced to endure long periods of separation from their husbands and lovers (as many women indeed had to do, while the men traveled on business or official service), are common in the Ming-Qing period--a fine example painted in 1642 by the late Ming Suzhou master Shen Shigeng, in which the woman gazes at a pair of amorous dogs as she picks mulberry leaves, is in the Tianjin Municipal Museum. But these belong with another exhibition and another essay.

Questions:

-Can I refer to Dreams of Spring and Gardens of Pleasure without giving full bibliographical references? (Surely these will be referred to often in the rest of the catalogue?)

- The three illustrations of things not in the show: will you get them? (Identified in my email of November 18.)

- On p. 10 of my manuscript I refer to no. 4x, one leaf in that album. The description I give there should identify it; please insert the proper number for this leaf in place of my x. Same in several places later in my essay: please insert the proper letters for the leaves.

- Do I need to send a copy of this to the woman who sent me the contract? (I returned that signed, and now I can’t find the copy I kept.) Or will you deliver this text to her, after filling in the letters for album leaves? That should be the final step in my essay.

- No. 13 might better be titled “Beauty On a Verandah” rather than just “House in Landscape.”

CLP 84: 2005 "Late Paintings of Women in the Univ. of Michigan Museum of Art: Asking New Questions." Symposium, Seattle Art Museum

Paper for Seattle Art Museum symposium, April 17, 2005

"Late Paintings of Women in the U. Mich. Museum of Art: Asking New Questions" James Cahill

S.S. (Wen Zhengming #7 + detail?) Since neither Dick Edwards nor Marshall Wu, who both had a lot to do with bringing the U. Mich. collection together, can be here, I want to reminisce a bit about its formation, during the decades I’ve been somewhat distantly involved in it. Apart from some early acquisitions from the 1930s, the building of the collection was mainly accomplished by three people. The first is the late Max Loehr, who in the 1950s (besides teaching many students, including myself) pursued and acquired a number of paintings for the Museum, including this landscape by Wen Zhengming (about which he published an article). Marshall Wu, in his Orchid Pavilion Gathering catalogue, raises questions about its authenticity and suspects it’s really by Wen Chengming’s follower Chu Chieh. He may well be right. Loehr was mainly interested in style in a broad sense, and wrote about the painting in those terms; he was insufficiently concerned with questions of authenticity. My generation, following traditional Chinese scholarship, became so engaged with authenticity questions for a time that we neglected other, more interesting aspects of the paintings.

S,S. The second is Richard Edwards, who taught Chinese art history there for many years from 1960 and oversaw the acquisition of more fine paintings, including the Sheng Mao-yeh "Orchid Pavilion Gathering" handscroll and Zeng Jing's "Portrait of Pan Qintai," both painted in 1621. The third responsible person is Marshall Wu, who was Curator of Asian Art there for twenty-some years and was mainly responsible for the most recent acquisitions, including (I believe) several of the paintings I’ll speak about later. Marshall Wu also wrote the detailed and highly informative entries, based on exhaustive research, for the Orchid Pavilion Gathering catalog published in 2000, with its separate volume of notes, many of which are mini-essays in themselves.

I myself was the Chinese art curator, and before that a fellowship student, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from the early1950s until 1965, the period during which some of the U.M. Museum of Art's collection of Chinese paintings was coming together, and was involved in a few of its acquisitions--pieces which, after I had I recommended them unsuccessfully to the Freer director and vice-director, Archibald Wenley and John Pope, I then recommended with more success to Max Loehr or Dick Edwards. These include

S,S. The paintings by Zhou Chen and Li Shida, both of which I recommended as additions to the Freer collection but both were rejected. (The Chou Ch’en is another one doubted by Marshall Wu; and again, he may be right, I haven’t seen it for a long time.) As many of you know, the relations between the Freer and the University of Michigan are especially close because Freer, a Detroit man, first offered his collection to the U. of Mich. which turned it down, and then gave it, as you know, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Freer forgivingly established a fund at U. Mich. for the study of Asian art in connection with the Freer Gallery, and students regularly go back and forth between the two institutions, which also jointly publish the journal Ars Orientalis.

S,S. My subject today, however, is none of those, but a group of later and (most traditional Chinese connoisseurs would say) less important works: the paintings of women by or attributed to the late Qing masters Gai Qi and Fei Danxu, active respectively in the first decades and the second quarter of the 19th century. Both specialized in paintings of women, and a great many surviving works of that kind are by them or attributed to them. The name and seals of Gai Qi, in particular, appear on a great number of figure paintings of the late period. There is, then, a serious problem of authenticity; and the fact that the UM Museum's collection contains three versions of (more or less) the same composition, two with Gai Qi signatures and the third with the signature of his older contemporary Yu Ji, makes this a group very useful for pedagogical purposes, teaching students how to distinguish real from fake, and how to conduct research that backs up, or alters, the judgments one might make on the basis of connoisseurship. Marshall Wu's long and heavily annotated essay on these three paintings is a model for how such research might be conducted; it even extended to borrowing for comparison a set of four paintings, one of them with the same composition, from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. (I won’t go through his argument; would take too much time. Generally convincing, although I would differ on a few points, as we’ll see.).

At left, #43 in catalog., which Marshall Wu accepts as real Gai Qi. “A Lady in Her Study, with Attendants,” dated 1821, acquired by Museum in 1973. At right, catalog #44, also signed Gai Qi, undated, and acquired in 1982 at auction, presumably because the relationship between them would be interesting topic for study and connoisseurship training, as indeed it is. It partly repeats the other one in comp., but has dif subject: "presenting lichee fruit on ice platter." This one Marshall Wu doubts, along with two other versions of composition: the other one in their collection, which I’ll show in a moment, and a version in the Fukuoka Art Museum, where it is part of a set of four. None of these others qualifies, in his view, as a Gai Qi original.

I’m not going to challenge his argument, because I haven’t had a chance to study the two pictures in originals (saw them long ago, before I thought of treating them in a paper); the one at left seems quite consistent with other Gai Qi pictures, of which I’ll show a few later; the one at right I wouldn’t reject immediately, on the basis of the reproduction—there’s nothing obviously wrong with it, to my eye--but I’ll simply reserve judgement. I want to say only that the fact that it repeats in large part the other composition isn’t a strike against it, because, as I’ll show later, artists who did such pictures frequently repeated their own compositions.

-- S. Third ptg of set, catalog #45, acquired in 1990, again from auction and presumably for the same reason, as a study piece. This one is not signed by Gai Qi, but by the older artist Yu Ji, who also specialized in pictures of women. This one is quite rightly rejected by Marshall Wu, who points out (p. 277 center right) that certain details in it are misunderstood. I haven’t detail slides to show these, but the mistakes he writes about can be made out in reproduction. What should be an ice tray according to title is in fact red lacquer with gold design; lichees are too big and too pink, looking more like peaches; women in ptg all have same hairdos, where they should be distinguished by age and rank. ) He argues that copies can often be detected by the copyist's misunderstanding of representational forms; and since that’s an argument I myself have been making often in recent years, sometimes vehemently and against opposition, I find his use of it completely convincing.

-- S. This is a genuine picture by Yu Ji, in Chinese museum, based on Song poetic couplet written in upper right: woman comes out of doorway to gaze at flowering tree in rain. Touch of melancholy, sense of transience of beauty. Original, moving work.

-- S. Detail. Yu Ji, as an older specialist in this genre, depicts women with more feeling and variety than artists of the later period, including Gai Qi; by their time a greater degree of conventionalization has set in, women’s faces and postures more stereotyped, themes of such poetic subtlety less common. Michigan ptg with Yu Ji signature certainly not up to his usual standard. But I don’t mean to argue that quality is a safe criterion for authenticity—Marshall Wu’s reasons better.

--S. As for other works by Gai Qi, they are so diverse that a distinct style for him can hardly be recognized. A certain facial type—but even this isn’t absolutely consistent; ways of drawing robes, and so forth. I can’t claim to have made such a study, in any case. This one in Japanese col., lady inscribing poem on autumn leaf (old story).

-- S. Another, ideal portrait of Tang-period courtesan poet Yu Xiangji. Learned and talented woman, and depicted as such.

This brings me to one point to do with the real Gai Qi painting (at left) on which I would take a position different from Marshall Wu's. He writes ([P. 274) that pictures of female scholars are "quite unusual," and goes on about how literacy among women was discouraged in China, out of fear that it "might instill new and potentially troublesome ideas," such as that their confinement to domestic realms and activities was to be resisted. From this he argues that "the female scholar in Gai Qi's painting," as well as her setting, "are likely products of the artist's fertile imagination." And he speculates that the artist was doing this either to protest the "inequity and mistreatment of Chinese women," a positive reading, or "using the subject matter to amuse a patron," a negative one. But recent writings by specialists in Chinese women's studies, notably Dorothy Ko’s Teachers of the Inner Chambers, have shown that women's engagement in literature and general culture from the late Ming on was much more extensive than was once believed; and correspondingly, paintings of scholarly women from this period, whether representing real or ideal women, are in fact not unusual at all, but are fairly numerous--the only reason one might think otherwise is that they are far less likely than landscapes or portraits of men to be reproduced and exhibited. We are, that is, in the same kind of circular situation as with most of the kinds of vernacular or non-elite, non-literati painting I'm working on these days: there aren't enough of them, one can say, to make a significant genre; and the reason there aren't enough is that they weren't taken seriously enough in their time to be preserved, or to be published and exhibited now if they were preserved. Round and round in a circle, which badly needs to be broken. – S. A few examples. Qiu Ying’s daughter Qiu Zhu, or Qiu Shih (her name is uncertain), did many ptgs of women, some of them, like this one, engaged in literary composition, or writing a letter, gazing at a landscape screen behind her, perhaps because she could not have the same access to real LS as men had;

-- S. The early Qing woman painter Fan Xueyi, working in Suzhou as Qiu Ying and Qiu Zhu had and following their style, did this one;

-- S. and Cui Hui, a figure specialist active in the Beijing area in the early to mid-18^th century, painted this very fine imaginary portrait of the Song poet Li Qingzhao (sorry I haven’t a color slide.) (describe)

(I will introduce here, and go on to elaborate a bit later, the hypothesis that many paintings of this kind, along with certain other types, were done primarily for the use and enjoyment of women. It’s an idea I’ve been developing lately, in various directions, and have presented in lectures at a number of places. I offer in that lecture whatever evidence I can bring together to support that hypothesis, can’t do all of it here.)

Characteristic, I believe, of paintings done for an audience and clientele of women is their favoring of subjects in which women appear in more dignified and independent roles than they had traditionally occupied in Chinese painting; often they are roles previously assumed by men in paintings.

S, S. The paintings of this group are thus, I believe, to be kept separate, even if only provisionally and without firm evidence, from the more familiar meiren or "beautiful women" paintings intended for the enjoyment of men, in which by contrast the women are presented as objects of desire, and strike provocative poses and project come-hither looks outward to the presumed male viewer. (Leng Mei, 1724).

S,S. Another characteristic of these pictures—the ones for which, I believe, the intended audience was in large part feminine (not exclusively that, of course)--is that they are more likely than other types and genres to exist in multiples. Examples: Qiu Ying series of pictures of famous women of past. I know of five or six versions, all attrib. to Qiu Ying. Women not even identified as same from one scroll to another, not in same order.

S,S. Among the types included in my hypothetical group are handscrolls illustrating stories of special interest to women, such as the Xixiang-ji or Western Chamber story, a favorite of women readers, or Lady Wen-chi’s Return to China. Such scrolls combine text and pictures, and could be enjoyed in the quiet of one’s boudoir or study, reading the text and looking at the pictures. They vary in quality and certainly in date. But I am inclined to believe now that trying to find a “genuine” one and rejecting all the others as copies or fakes is going in the wrong direction; that they were acquired and appreciated by women as enjoyable and instructive pictures, not as works by particular masters. In that context, replicating them, so that everyone who wanted one could have one, makes sense. We are dealing, that is, with a mode of reproduction that isn’t simply forgery, as it later came to be misunderstood to be.

S,S. Another popular subject for these was Lady Su Hui and her palindromes. All of us who have been in the field long enough have seen quite a few different versions of these, mostly in old and minor collections; we’ve paid no attn., taking them all to be fake Qiu Yings. But, as I say, I now believe that’s going in the wrong direction. These belong mostly to the scorned category of Suzhou-pian, or Suzhou-pieces, usually dismissed as unworthy of notice, a category of forgeries.

-- S. Corresponding detall of another version. What I believe now is that there were in practice at the same time two different kinds or systems of collecting or using paintings, one of which (almost exclusively practiced by men) emphasized authenticity and the hand of the master, and insisted on the painting as a unique object; the other of which emphasized the image and the story or circumstances associated with it, and allowed replication of such images, with small concern for authorship and authenticity. Many pictures of the latter kind are attrib. to Qiu Ying, often w. signatures; but this is a kind of convention, operative in Suzhou which was the center of production for such works; the “Qiu Ying” attrib. prob. wasn’t really believed, wasn’t what the women who acquired and enjoyed these ptgs really cared about ...

We may find this idea hard to accept, since we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that connoisseurship based on recognition of artists’ hands and individual style is the only high-level kind; the other kind is low-class, and would be insulting if attributed to women. But if we can break that bias, and realize that paintings can be read for content, for stories and feelings, just as texts can, we can accept more easiiy what I’m proposing.

S.S. Metropolitan Mus. In NYC owns two versions of Qiu Ying ptg of woman in bamboo grove. I use this to stand in for a ptg by same artist of woman outdoors in snow, described in Hong Lou Meng as hanging in chambers of Grandmother Jia. (Two examples are described there of ptgs of women hanging in women’s chambers; both present the women outdoors, and are old ptgs by famous artists. The novel also includes two descriptions of ptgs of women hanging in men’s bedrooms; these, by contrast, are both apparently up-to-date and anonymous ptgs, evidently quite realistic or illusionistic, and probably more like Leng Mei we saw a bit ago, sexy.)

S,S. details. Even Met curator, Mike Hearn, not sure which is good one; nor am I (tend to favor one at left, although other has more the look of age.)

S.S. All this, which might seem peripheral to my subject, brings us back to ptg in U. Mich. Museum col. by Fei Tan-hsu, another specialist in ptgs of women active later in the 19c; this one dtd. 1847 and represents Nymph of Lo River. Marshall Wu has long, interesting essay on this, reproducing a number of other versions and discussing them. In the end he concludes not only that the U. Michigan painting is a copy, but that all of six other versions he has found are also copies, some perhaps produced by printing! (He writes that the Michigan painting was “purchased [by the donor] in 1980 from a small noodle shop in Macao.”) An album leaf version with Fei Tan-hsu’s signature he takes to be a genuine work, and he rejects all the others.

S.S. (Another of the other versions, in study col. of Central Acad. In Beijing.) Howard Rogers had already, three years before the Michigan catalog was published, brought these various versions together in an article titled “Second Thoughts on Multiple Recensions” (whch followed an article of mine centered on a painting of this theme) He makes the argument that while we can’t accept all the versions uncritically as works by Fei Tan-hsu, and discrimination of the kind Marshall Wu practices certainly needs to be done, we should not begin with the assumption that there can be only one original and all the rest are copies. It seems quite likely that the artist and his studio produced them in multiples.

-- S. (Still another, from a Chinese auction catalog.) Howard, after considering recorded and known cases of copying and multiple versions over the centuries, ends with the assumption that these, or most of them, were the outcome of a studio mode of production overseen by Fei Tan-hsu; he writes that “each of these paintings may be held a real and genuine member of the limited edition conceived and issued by Fei Tan-hsu . . .”

-- S. The article of mine that occasioned this response by Howard was titled “Where Did the Nymph Hang?” and introduced a leaf from an album of erotic pictures by the early Qing master Gu Jianlong, one of whose specialties this was. The album is known only in an old reproduction book, and some of the leaves, including this one, have been bowdlerized for publication—the woman, now shown waving a feather duster to frighten away two rats, was originally joined in bed by a lover. I used the picture as an indication that paintings of this subject were suited to hanging in a woman’s boudoir, or thought to be so by the artist; and, as I mentioned before, I’ve subsequently been exploring the possibility that certain kinds of paintings were made in the late Ming and Qing principally for an audience and clientele of women--the argument I alluded to earlier. The conclusion it leads to is that we have been, all this time, asking the wrong questions of these pictures, which were not done for male collectors to acquire as genuine works by this or that artist. In this context, the production of pictures of the Goddess of the Luo River in multiples makes perfectly good sense.

S,S. Let me show a few others (leaving aside the familiar Gu Kaizhi-attrib. pictures), to fill in context for Fei Danxu’s. This handscroll is by Qiu Ying, and is cataloged as a “Nymph” (etc.—Ellen Laing’s article. “Beauty in Spring Thoughts.” Not clearly separated? Amorous woman in either case.)

S,S. One in the old collection of the British Museum bears seals of Xu Mei, painter active in the early decades of the 18c who was sometimes active in court circles and partaking in collaborative projects. He is the artist of a particularly fine erotic album, one of the relatively few for which the artist can be identified.

S,S. At right, a fan ptg version by Fu Derong, early Qing woman ptr (from The Jade Terrace exhib. Although the authors of that ground-breaking and generally admirable catalog avoid finding, within the overall production of ptgs by women, tendencies to favor certain subjects, I believe that in the end we can, and that ptgs of women and female goddesses (including Guanyin) are among them. Other one isn’t Nymph, but another goddess, Magu, ptd in 1782 by little-known artist named Chang Yen-ch’ang.

-- S. Another Magu picture, this one by Hua Yan, w. same long insc. written on it, the account of Magu from the Shen-xian zhuan, biog. Of immortals, by the 4^th cent. Daoist Ge Hong. Ptgs of Magu were commonly hung or presented on the occasions of women’s birthdays; and again these combine a lengthy text with a picture. It’s too early to speculate on the significance of pictures accompanied by long texts (these are hanging-scroll counterparts of the handscrolls with familiar subjects and long texts) being prominent among the types I believe were probably aimed especially at women, and the same is true of the circumstance of their tending to exist in multiples. All this is for further research; for now, I only observe and speculate.

S,S. Another goddess, I’m not clear who it is, appears in a painting by Gai Qi that again exists in several versions. This one in Los Angeles County Museum of Art; another version was in Tomioka Col. In Japan; and I’ve seen several others. So, we begin to discern, without being able to explain it other than speculatively, a practice of doing pictures of female deities in multiples, probably for sale to women for birthdays and other occasions in their lives, and for hanging in their chambers.

S,S. I will conclude by pointing out that this practice can be marked as early as the late Ming, the time of Chen Hongshou, whose “Female Immortals Presenting Symbols of Longevity” exists in at least five versions. It would appear from their style that they date from the 1630s, when Chen was active as an unambiguously professional master, and employed studio assistants. Subject may be Magu: unclear, at least to me. Howard Rogers, writing about one of them, says that ptgs of Magu were also hung on the occasion of wedding anniversaries. (These in Palace Mus. Beijing and Taipei.) I called attn. to these already in my Painter’s Practice book, but w/o especially connecting them to a possible clientele of women.

S,S. Two more, private mus. in Beijing, auction cat. I’m not saying that all of them are genuine; some may not have involved hand of Chen Hongshou at all. But the right question isn’t, any more, “Which is the genuine picture?” Turned out in multiples in studio for functional purpose, sold to anyone who came in to buy one. Let me conclude with an outrageously incautious and premature suggestion. It is that the selection and hanging of occasional and other functional paintings in the household, such as New Year’s and birthday pictures, which make up some of the types treated in my (still unpublished) book Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China, may well have been mainly the responsibility of the principal women of the household, who were more concerned with getting a good and serviceable picture than with authorship and authenticity, while the men were responsible for the family “collection” of prestigious name-artist works. It will take a lot more searching for evidence before we can put such a speculation on any kind of solid footing (and I will appreciate any clues you may come upon in your research and pass on to me). But at least, I think, we are asking new and more interesting questions.

Thank you.

(Howard in "Second Thoughts on Multiple Recessions" (Kaikodo Journal V, Autumn 1997.)

Slides needed:

- several versions of Chen Hongshou "Magu & Attendant." (Have KK/T; others in drawer at home?

- Fei Danxu in Japan? Tomioka's? or have slide made.

- Pictures of literary ladies, to go with Gai Qi. Jin Ping Mei illus. w. one on far wall; ptgs by Qiu Zhu, etc.

Dear Prof. Cahill,
We have been working on getting the slides for you, I'm sorry to keep you waiting. We've had slides made from transparencies for 7 of the 9 on your list. Below are the two we don't have yet. We've asked Michigan for them and available details for others you mentioned. I should be able to get them to you on the 16th, either at the hotel or at the dinner.

Thank you, Sarah

44. Kai Ch'i, "Presenting Lychee Fruits on a Carved Ice Platter."

don’t have 45. Yü Chi, same title.don’t have