CLP 43: 2001 Lecture given at U. C. Irvine on “Alterity”

Irvine lecture on Alterity, Feb. 26, 2001

I’ll begin with observation that will seem so trite, so self-evident, that you will think: is that all he has to tell us? We knew that already. And then I’ll spend some time trying to convince you that the observation is not only true, but important.

It’s this: a culture will find it easier to accept and absorb images and pictorial ideas from a foreign culture if these can be seen as echoing some elements from its own past, however far in the past they may be, and however neglected they may have been in the intervening centuries.

S,S. You may wonder why I begin with these two: what can they have in common? Both are LS; both are regarded now as highly original works, as masterpieces of their artists (Gong Xian, Hokusai).

More importantly for my argument, both made a deep impact and were deeply admired by western viewers, at early stages in our study of E. Asian art, when traditions they belong to were little understood. (In case of Gong Xian , not nec. this very picture, but something like it by the artist.)

Finally, and most to the point, western viewers who were so struck by them didn’t realize, at that early stage, that part of reason they seemed relatively accessible to western eyes is that both artists had incorporated strong elements of western, or European, style into their pictures. In both cases, I believe, the response of western viewers was directed chiefly at the strangeness of the images; but it also, mostly unconsciously, was tinged with a recognition of strangely familiar aspects of them that made them more visually acceptable, saved them from seeming entirely alien. (Same elements, of course, made them seem strikingly original, visually arresting, to viewers w/in the artists’ own cultures.)

Hokusai’s great Red Fuji (or Fuji at Sunrise, or “South Wind, Clear Weather”): What were familiar to western eyes, but original & striking to Japanese, were the blue sky w. white clouds, and the effect of morning sunlight & shadow on the upper & lower parts of the mountain. Familiar to Japanese but strikingly new to western eyes were the flat, shaded areas of color, without dark shadows, and the boldly simplified, strongly patterned composition--for which, if it were to our purpose, I could show precedents in Jap. representations of particular places--shinkeizu--and espec. Mt. Fuji. Edmond de Goncourt wrote about this print in 1896: “Fujiyama colored brick red with a few snow lizards at its peak, against an intensely blue sky lined with layers of white clouds like a beach with the tide out. A print of considerable originality in which the artist has tried to render the effect he has seen [that is, in nature] in all its barely credible reality.”

-- S. Goncourt was aware of Hokusai’s series of strongly westernized LS prints, done some twenty years earlier, around 1810; he writes that these landscapes “have a Dutch feeling about them.” (A bit of an understatement.) But to account for the striking coloring in the Red Fuji, coloring that was quite outside the Japanese LS tradition, he makes the European assumption that Hokusai had simply imitated the coloring of nature, as any observant artist might do. About the whole Views of Fuji series he wrote, “The series . . . with somewhat garish colors that were chosen to match as closely as possible the colors seen under every light in nature, is currently the source of inspiration for the landscapes of the Impressionists.” Europe was getting back what it gave, somewhat altered.

-- S. (Another of the westernized series, for the shading.) I oversimplify the responses, of course, to make my point--which is that aspects of the image that fit w/in one’s own tradition render the picture acceptable and readable, even comfortable, while those that are adopted from another tradition supply a special visual stimulation, a sense of newness, and so save it from banality, from being just another picture of Mt. Fuji. By brilliantly bringing these together, Hokusai could (without meaning to, of course) dazzle both Japanese and foreign viewers.

S -- Gong Xian’s masterwork “Myriad Peaks and Ravines” in the Rietberg Museum, Zurich. Arthur Waley ended his 1923 book Introduction to Chinese Painting with this extraordinary paragraph, perhaps the first perceptive thing that a western viewer had written about a post-Song Chinese painting: “He [Gong Xian] saw Nature as a vast battlefield strewn with sinister wreckage. His rivers have a glazed and vacant stare; his trees are gaunt and stricken; his skies lower with a sodden pall of grey. Many of his pictures contain no sign of man or human habitation . . . Such houses as he does put into his pictures have a blank, tomb-like appearance; his villages look like grave-yards. With this tragic master I conclude.” Words that fit this picture, whether or not Waley knew it (as he could have, from reproduction.)

--S. Waley had no way of knowing that behind Gong Xian’s most striking effects, and behind their relative accessibility to western eyes, lay Gong’s familiarity with European prints, which could be seen by Chinese painters from the late 16th century in increasing numbers, brought first by Jesuit missionaries and later imported through other channels. I have suggested even that Gong Xian’s “Myriad Peaks and Ravines” was a brilliant reworking of the print at right, the “View of Tempe” from Ortelius’s atlas of 1679, which was well known in China. It was the western-derived elements that must have struck Gong Xian’s Chinese contemporaries most forcefully: the highly unusual composition, based on diagonals that don’t recede, and the strong effect of light and shadow, achieved by a system of applying ink in a manner closer to western stippling than to Chinese texture strokes (cunfa). Yet Gong Xian could claim that his ptgs were solidly in the lineage of such great early Chinese landscapists as Dong Yuan and Mi Fu, and Chinese viewers would know exactly what he meant, recognize traits of those styles in his ptgs and accept his works as permissable departures from tradition.

I begin with these two examples to make as forcefully as I can my two principal points: the one about what appear to be echoes of one’s own tradition making an art work easier to assimilate; and another, that adoptions by artists of elements from an alien tradition, far from reducing the originality of their works (as is sometimes charged, or at least implicit in writings on the subject), more often permit strikingly innovative effects exactly by incorporating unfamiliar materials or techniques into a native context. Doing this broadens the appeal of such works to viewers of diverse backgrounds and tastes. For just that reason, the literati or scholar-amateurs in China, who had nothing but scorn for appealing or stimulating effects in painting (and who were even inclined to push Gong Xian outside the pale, for what they took to be his “bad brushwork”) condemned all borrowings from European styles, while the professional masters, including the ones I’ll talk about tonight, were more likely to make use of them, in some form.

S,S. But before turning to that I want to offer one more example of this phenomenon. Adoptions from European pictures by landscapists of the late Ming period were more acceptable because they could be presented as reviving the style of the monumental landscape painting of the Northern Song period, the 10th-11th centuries. I treat this phenomenon in my book The Compelling Image, and will only refer to the argument here, without taking time to present it fully. In the late Ming it’s Wu Bin, whose impressive landscapes, such as this one from 1615, indeed re-introduce ways of rendering space and mass, as well as compositional devices, from the Northern Song, (Identify: Yan Wengui, 10th-11th cent.)

-- S. But this revival was in part inspired, I’m convinced, by the artists’ sudden exposure to European pictures, chiefly engravings, such as this one (from the Braun and Hogenberg Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Cities of the World, known to have been in China by the late 16th century.) While working through this problem I asked my then-colleague Michael Baxandall whether he could think of a similar situation in European art, and he offered one: how German painters, confronted suddenly with the styles of Renaissance Italy, managed to find precedents in their own past for what they took.

S --. Similarly, late Ming landscapes done in bright colors, such as this one by Lan Ying, were presented and understood as allusions to the so-called “boneless” styles, done in color without ink outlines, that had been practiced in the Tang and pre-Tang periods, instead of responses to European oil paintings, as I believe them to have been, in some part. Again, I discuss in my Compelling Image book, with examples, this Chinese tendency to avoid acknowledging borrowings from outside their tradition, preferring to say, with a modicum of validity, “Oh yes, we were already doing that back in the Northern Song period.”

S --. In the early Qing it’s Gong Xian, among others, who (as we saw a moment ago) takes up the new modes of representation while referring them back to the distant reaches of China’s own past. The point is that nothing of the kind had been painted in the six or seven centuries that intervened; it was the sudden coming of the Western pictures that stimulated Gong Xian and others to explore this direction once more, after the long lapse.

S,S. More overtly westernized landscape paintings are also done in China--here, two leaves from an album of scenes of Mt. Tiantai by Daocun, dated 1706 or 1766 (his period of activity is unclear.) These present a very strange, even bizarre, mixture of Chinese and European style. What can he have seen and imitated?

-- S. Perhaps something like this “Landscape with Flight Into Egypt” by the 17th century (Dutch?) master Paul Bril, with which it has quite a lot in common. But the origins of this kind of landscape in Northern Europe, in the Danube School, Altdorfer etc., may well have been stimulated significantly, in turn, by seeing Chinese pictures--at least, this argument has been made, with good basis, I think. Someone of a diffusionist temperament who is truly conversant with both traditions, and who is thick-skinned enough to withstand the remonstrances of colleagues who point out that such a project goes against current trends in art-historical studies, will eventually have to straighten this all out.

S,S. A few other odd examples of Europeanized Chinese painting from the 17th and 18th centuries, just to dispose of them before we go on to more interesting cases, in which the foreign elements have been more effectively absorbed into the fabric of Chinese painting. Pictures of European figures and scenes held for Chinese viewers the same kind of fascination that pictures of an imagined China had for westerners--these represent, that is, a kind of reverse chinoiserie. They belong on the outer fringes of our subject. But note, while they are on the screen, the view into a shadowy interior in the one picture, the heavy shading of the folds of the robe in the other, features of the foreign style that the better Chinese artists used in more creative ways, as we will see.

S.S. Studies of so-called European influence in Chinese painting have mostly concentrated on a single aspect of it, the Chinese use of vanishing-point perspective as it was developed in Europe, especially in Italy. In this I think they have missed the main points, and concentrated on the wrong materials. It is true enough that some Chinese artists of the period, and their audiences, reveal their fascination with it in pictures like these--at left, a cityscape attributed (unconvincingly) to the late 17th-early 18th cent. academy master Jiao Bingzhen, in the Yamato Bunkakan, Japan; at left, one of a series of paintings of Chinese interiors in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 18th century in date. It was also used in some illusionistic, even trompe l’oeil wall paintings within the Manchu palace, as exotic diversions for the Manchu emperors. We read of Chinese being so fooled by such pictures that they tried to walk into them, and bumped their heads.

S,S. As in Japan, Chinese makers of popular prints, who wanted always to offer their customers something new and exotic, designed prints in which the vanishing-point perspective was the organizing principle of the compositions, and all the rest arranged along the receding lines and planes. But linear perspective was not, in the end, attractive to Chinese audiences, except as a novelty, and played no notable part in serious painting. In spite of some experimentation with the device in Tang wall painting, both at Dunhuang and in the Xi’an tomb paintings (you may have heard about this from Roderick Whitfield), there was no precedent for it in Chinese painting; moreover, it had the disturbing effect, I think, of rupturing the picture plane more than the Chinese, who had never thought of the picture frame as a window through which one looked into a separate space, were comfortable with.

S --. An engraving from a series of scenes from the life of Christ, pictures by the brothers Wierix illustrating Nadal’s Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, copies of which had been brought to China by the Jesuits, and which appears to have been drawn on, along with other western pictorial sources, by many Chinese artists of the late Ming and Qing. Apart from the linear perspective, which is indeed used in these (less conspicuously), two other devices can be marked that seem to have exerted greater attractions on Chinese painters of the kind I will be discussing. One is the heavy light-dark shading in the figures; the other, even more important (but quite missed up to now by scholars studying “western influence” in Chinese painting) is the northern European device, familiar in Dutch and Flemish painting of the 16th-17th centuries, of drawing the viewer back into further spaces beyond the principal foreground space. We look into a side room at left, and further back through a doorway into a more brightly lit room beyond. How some Chinese artists adapted this device to their needs will be the main theme of what remains of this lecture. First, however, still another brief excursion (the last): Chinese responses to the heavy shading in the robes of the figures, and in some architectural elements, furniture, etc. that can be seen in the European print.

-- S. Chinese artists who employed this technique typically used it to make their pictures more bizarre, instead of more realistic. Although illusionistic in intent, that is, it must have impressed Chinese viewers of the western pictures as oddly unreal and excessive, as indeed it looks to us. The anonymous artist of this album of arhat paintings in the Freer Gallery, datable to the late Ming or early Qing period, uses it that way,

-- S. as does the major late Ming figure master Cui Cizhong, in this, one of his pictures of the Bodhisattva Manjusri supervising the washing of the white elephant. (Point out.) The shading serves to give an effect of volume to radically distorted forms, only enhancing thereby their strangeness--a strategem common in late Ming painting, discussed at length in my Compelling Image book.

-- S. A painting given recently to the Yale U. Art Gallery as a gift, anonymous and presumably early Qing in date, carries this curious practice further. It must be one of a narrative series, illustrating an unidentified story--it’s unintelligible alone. (Somebody being whipped.) This is one of those pictures that must represent a whole lost type or category, the nature and purpose of which we can only dimly imagine from this chance survivor. There are many such in Chinese painting, mostly in foreign collections and minor Chinese holdings such as so-called study collections, works that testify to an unsuspected multiplicity of styles and types within Chinese painting, and also to the depressing success that the literati critics and collectors achieved in suppressing most of them as low-class, not worthy of preservation.

S --. Now, at last, into the main material & phenomena of my lecture: adoptions from European pictorial art by artists I am calling (for lack of established term, since they have been largely ignored in studies of Chinese painting, both Chinese and foreign) urban studio masters. (Explain.) The period I am concerned with is mainly the later 17th and 18th centuries, sometimes called High Qing; and the borrowings I will now discuss are those that have to do with space and shadows. And I will argue, again, that (etc.--corres. in past.) This is another of the prints from the series by the Wierixes illustrating Nadal’s Life of Christ, produced in Antwerp in 1593-4, a major source for Chinese understanding of these European devices. Again, the viewer’s eye is drawn back through two successive openings into depth, and also leftward through an arched doorway into the town outside.

-- S. This is a leaf from an album of occupations of palace ladies painted in 1738 by Chen Mei, who was working at that time in the imperial academy. Writings on semi-europeanized Ch ptg of this period have concentrated on the court academy in Beijing, not recognizing that most of the artists who served there came from the southern (Jiangnan) cities; Chen Mei, for instance, was from Songjiang in Jiangsu Province. And, I have argued, they brought more with them than they took away; so that locating the focus of this phenomenon in the court presents the matter upside down. In any case, they took up eagerly the northern European spatial system used by Dutch and Flemish artists--a system contrasted, in Svetlana Alpers’s well-known formulation, with the linear perspective of the south, or Italy, which, as I’ve shown, was less appealing or useful to the Chinese. (Point out similarities.)

S,S. Two leaves from a similar album painted by Chen Mei’s teacher Jiao Bingzhen, who is commonly regarded as the central figure in the adoption of these foreign techniques into Chinese painting. He was a northerner, perhaps trained in a Shandong tradition continuing from Cui Cizhong; after entering the Academy he had served, along with Jesuit astronomers, in the imperial observatory, and a standard explanation is that he learned perspective and the rest through these contacts. There is no doubt some truth in this, but I think that what Jiao and other painters learned was more likely through observation of paintings or prints than through learned discourses and diagrams from European astronomers. The dialogue, that is, is mainly between the pictures, here as elsewhere. (Show: thickness of door & window, etc.)

S,S. Now, part of what made this device more acceptable than Italian-style perspective, I think, is that something like it could be recalled from the distant past of the Chinese painting tradition. It had happened back in the tenth century, the Five Dynasties and early Song period; I gave a paper on it some years ago. After centuries of cumulative, collective mastery of techniques for giving a sense or illusion of space in their pictures, Chinese artists of this period were able to create intricate structures of interpenetrating spaces opening back and sideward from the foreground space, and to give their viewers a sense of being able to explore the paintings visually, penetrating ever further, discovering more and more detail, as they might explore a real, three-dimensional world. Examples that survive include the picture at left of a Daoist retreat in the mountains, found in a tomb dating to the mid-10th century or a bit later, and so especially important (show composition); a painting titled “A Lofty Scholar” attributed to an artist active at this time named Wei Hsien;

S --. Here is a detail from it (show);


S,S. an anonymous work in the Shanghai Museum portraying in astonishing detail a flour mill powered by a water wheel built over a canal lock, in which one looks not only at the mechanism of the mill and the waterwheel but even through windows of the inn at lower right, to see diners,

-- S. or, below, through an entranceway in the foreshortened, receding front of the building, where a servant waits, and two scrolls of calligraphy can be seen on the further wall;

S,S. And, most to our purpose, the famous handscroll “Han Xizai’s Night Revels” attributed to the 10th century master Gu Hongzhong, of which these are the first two sections. It exists now only in a copy made two or three centuries later, at a time when such illusionism was no longer practiced and artists had forgotten how to do it; the copyist no doubt loses much of the spatial complexity and persuasiveness of the original. Even so, we can imagine (etc., describe. Recessed spaces in beds--accessible by sight and sound--gratifies voyeuristic impulses. Original perhaps more titillating.)

We should note here this conjunction: spatial penetration and eroticism, since it is crucial to all that will follow. Simple way of associating these too obvious to need pointing out; I attempt in my book more complex and subtle ways, which I can only suggest here.

So, how are these 10th century achievements followed up in succeeding centuries. Answer is: they aren’t. Chinese painting has “advanced” (if one chooses to see it that way) in the direction of lifelikeness, “truth to optical experience,” etc. (and I know perfectly well the problematic character of such terms, without giving in to the extreme contention that they are meaningless) --”advanced” in this direction by the 10th--11th century as far as it was ever to go; and for the remainder of its history, moved in distinctly different directions. What those were is too large a subject even to outline here; it’s enough to say that nothing of the kind is even attempted in painting of the next six or seven centuries. And when something like it is attempted again, it is stimulated, I believe, by new contacts with a pictorial art (the European) in which such illusionism had continued to be a goal. as it had long ceased to be in China, at least on what were considered to be the loftier levels of the art.

S.S. A pivotal part in developing the old/new techniques, partly revived, partly imported--but with the latter playing, I believe, a more decisive role--can be credited, on present evidence, to the early Qing Suzhou master Gu Jianlong--a painter of small reputation who scarcely figures in conventional histories of Chinese painting, but who begins to loom large as an unrecognized innovator when we look beyond the boundaries of literati or scholar-amateur painting, the lineage that has claimed the forefront of Chinese painting from the 14th century on, a claim to which we have unthinkingly acceded. One of Gu Jianlong’s specialties appears to have been erotic albums; and an album by him of that kind, bowdlerized by having the naughty bits painted over, was published as a reproduction album in the 1940s. These are two leaves (describe).

Now, these leaves don’t exhibit any notable spatial illusionism, nor are they in any recognizably westernized style. But they do make effective use of further spaces for establishing an implied narrative or a voyeuristic sub-theme. And it’s clear that this new mode of composing the picture, although it might have some precedent in early Chinese painting, was mainly inspired by contacts with the European pictures.

S,S. A series of 200 illustrations to the late Ming erotic novel Jin Ping Mei, produced by Gu Jianlong while he was serving at the Manchu court under the Kangxi Emperor in the 1660s-70s. exhibits the same spatial devices. Most of the leaves are known now only from an old reproduction book; these are two of them, unbowdlerized. (Point out what’s happening.)

S,S. Another leaf from the series, now in the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, KC; and a painting of Emperor Ming-huang spying on his favorite concubine Yang Gufei bathing, attributable by style to the same Gu Jianlong. (Describe.)

S,S. I will offer a few more pairings, western painting or print with Chinese, to point out other devices the Chinese artists were adopting and turning to their very different purposes. (Lecture in symposium in NYC next month in which main point will be wrongness of idea of “influence” in art-historical situations of this kind---) Here, a leaf from a later erotic album (mid-18th century; the last openly erotic painting I will show--they’re not what my lecture is about) with the Dutch painter Nicholas Maes’s 1657 “The Eavesdropper,” to represent the device of the split view, drawing the eye in two directions away from the focal center: the complicit maid in the Dutch picture, the uncouth traveling merchant propositioning the tavern girl in the other. I am certainly not suggesting that this artist saw this picture--for one thing, Dutch paintings of this kind weren’t to be seen in China, and the compositional devices must have been transmitted by way of engravings or other prints. My point is that as time went on, more and more interesting compositional types from European pictorial art were accessible to the Chinese, and could be drawn on for a diversity of effects.

S,S. The device of using objects to bridge the transition from nearer to further spaces: a painting by Jan Steen of a woman in her boudoir (the Chinese equivalents for these we will see later) with a lute in the doorway; and one of Jiao Bingzhen’s series of scenes of silk-weaving, now preserved only in woodblock prints, the original paintings being lost. (Point out dogs)

S,S. Really deep spatial penetration, room beyond room: Emmanuel de Witte’s “Woman at Clavichord” and the well-known anonymous 18th century painting in the Freer Gallery, by one of our city artists, usually identified as portraying the principals of the “Western Garden” drama. The main difference is that where the Dutch ptg locates the narrative elements to the sides of the recession--maid playing music at right to divert attn. from hanky-panky going on in bed at left, between her mistress and some gallant--the Chinese one places them center-stage and draws the eye sideward into the further room and thence out into the garden. The experience of being presented first with the large figures absorbed in their love affair and then moving back into a fully-furnished, lovingly detailed room (the setting of these scenes in richly-appointed interiors has implications that I haven’t time to take up here) and finally through the further door--all this works to engage the viewer more insistently and completely than looking into a simple foreground space could do--again, a process that merits deeper analysis, and receives it in my book-in-progress.

S --. A painting by the 18th century academy artist Jin Tingbiao uses a similar composition, this time to enable us to see around, and so envelop visually, a lovely court lady who is preparing, we can suppose, for the emperor’s visit. (Describe)

S,S. You may be surprised to learn that in speaking or writing about these borrowings, I constantly run up against a disbelieving response from people, Chinese and other, who want to preserve a notion of Chinese cultural self-sufficiency, even insularity, and who would rather believe that the Chinese artists developed all these devices--unknown previously in Chinese painting--quite on their own, independently. But that argument can’t be sustained in the face of the visual evidence, pairings like the ones we’ve seen, or this one. The image of the woman in her boudoir, developed in Dutch painting in the 17th century for the voyeuristic pleasure of male viewers, reaches China somehow--probably through engravings based on paintings (which were being imported by the thousands) and transforms the whole genre of meiren or beautiful-woman painting. moving it, so to speak, indoors. A painting by Gerald Dou, at left, done in 1667; one by Leng Mei at right, probably from the 1720s. (Point out: curtain etc.)

S.S. Before we return to the boudoir, let me show this very beautiful painting, now in a private collection in Boston. It is very large--about 10 feet wide--and is by one of the little-known urban masters, Hua Xuan who worked in Wuxi. (Sig. w. date probably 1726.) (Subject) Uses trick of having women seem to come out into our space--this one with her fingers and her fan in front of the pillar, her sleeve overhanging the railing,

S --. this one leaning on it, her sleeve hanging down in front as she gazes provocatively out at the viewer. (Make point of size, realistic style (in Chinese context), no large insc. or seals to hold viewer’s attn. on surface--closest possible approximation to gazing at subject in real life. (True of nearly all these.)

S,S. Ptg that started me, years ago, on this whole line of investigation (describe--) So-called Mme. Hedong, or Liu Yin. Most of these ptgs, in order to survive, had to be misrepresented in some way--

S --. (Other version, complete, known only in old reproduction.)

S,S. Earlier, in Ming dyn., beautiful women had been set in gardens: (describe) (Shen Shigeng 1642; other early Qing.)

S --. Image could be made sexier by various devices: deshabille, provocative pose & look (pinky to lips) (Huang Shifu, 1640, ident. in inscription as #18--belongs in series of portraits of someone’s concubines?

-- S. First datable meiren picture to locate woman in her bedroom is this one, by Yu Zhiding, 1696. Much less sexy; belongs to “waiting woman” type. (etc.)

S --. To illustrate the lively back-and-forth going on at this time between China and Europe, I show this picture, about thirty years earlier, an illustration in Aloysius Kircher’s book on China, published in Amsterdam in 1667. Meant to represent Chinese woman in her boudoir. (Describe: European artist is more than a little mixed up about how a hanging scroll is displayed. Yu Zhiding has trouble fitting woman convincingly into newfound spaces.) Each artist understands something of the other’s tradition, but not enough. Once more, not suggesting any direct link between the two; only using them to show what can happen when two great cultures with highly developed traditions of pictorial art suddenly become involved in this kind of interchange. And this whole fascinating episode has gone untreated by art historians, largely because of the squeamishness I spoke of earlier, both in recognizing adoptions by Chinese from Europe and in admitting that paintings of this kind deserve serious attention at all.

S,S. I will conclude quickly. Two examples of the new illusionistic meiren pictures, one by Leng Mei, 1724, other by Wang Chengpei, beginning of 19c.. (I know it only from auction cat.--if anybody knows its present whereabouts, I’d like to learn it.) Wang’s is a near-photographic depiction of “waiting woman”--but cool in tone. (Tell of one in Honglou Meng, hanging in bedroom of hero, Baozhai.) Other less illusionistic, but sexier:

S --. Detail of face

S --. Detail of lower part.

S, S. In a variant of this type, the woman is seen through a window; the viewer must remain outside, although the possibility of access is implied by the large round window, which in Chinese houses is always on the ground floor. One on left by Yangzhou master Zhang Zhen, specialist in these; one at right by him or his son--both served in the court academy--one of series done for prince who would become Yongzheng Emperor. Paper of mine builds elaborate argument around these & others.

S,S. Voyeuristic effect of these ptgs is enhanced when women are spied on doing something seemingly illicit--engaged in erotic reveries. Describe--Yu Zhiding; “Leng Mei” (not really) in Chicago Art Inst. cataloged as “Portrait of a Court Lady.” Did nobody look at these pictures?

S,S. Last slides of evening. So as not to end on a lurid note, I show finally the whole and a detail of this cool, beautiful, little-known imaginary portrait of the Song-period poet Li Qingzhao, active in the early 12th century. Artist is also little-known: Cui Hui, active in north, assoc. somehow w. imperial acad. but never served in it. Nothing enticing or sexy here--Li Qingzhao is presented as beautiful, but that’s almost beside the point. She’s portrayed as a serious, dignified woman in her study, pulling back a chair and gesturing, perhaps inviting a fellow-poet to join her. Only an art historian would notice that the drawing of the window and the furniture, the clear and orderly spatial scheme, depend in some part on the developments we’ve been considering. Everything that derives from the foreign pictures is by now so thoroughly absorbed into the very fabric of the Chinese pictorial tradition that there is no sense of strangeness at all. Alterity transcended, if you will. I could elaborate on that observation with quite a few other examples, if time permitted; but I’ve run on quite long enough. Thank you.

CLP 38: 2000 "How the Chinese Conquered Space (in Painting) and Lost and Found it Again." Talk for US-China Business Council dinner in support of "Culture and Civilization of China" project, New York

US China Business Council talk, June 1, 2000 (5/17)

(Something on the series, Jim Peck, etc.)

Anyone who studies Chinese culture over a long period, in the context of world history, is likely to be struck by a remarkable repeating pattern. Nothing is more characteristic of the Chinese than to do something first, to do it as well as it’s ever going to be done, and then to stop doing it, as if deliberately and almost arbitrarily. A well-known example of this is in science: up to the 14th century or so, China was well ahead of the rest of the world in technological and proto-scientific discoveries, but they never made the crucial steps that led in Europe to the development of an experimental science, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest. I’m certainly not going to try to tell you why it happened that way, or didn’t happen; it’s a central problem for historians of China--one of them, my colleague at U.C. Berkeley David Johnston, has a lecture titled “Why the Chinese Didn’t Invent the Steam Engine” that proposes some answers. (Elvin book)

S. The pattern can be seen also in Chinese art: we could, if we wanted, write its history--which is arguably the longest continuous history of any artistic tradition--as a series of brilliant technical and aesthetic achievements that the Chinese, for whatever reason, don’t follow up. For instance, color printing: in the early 17th century, the late Ming period, methods of woodblock printing with multiple blocks for the different colors are used to produce colorprints of a refinement unmatched elsewhere else in the world. (In fact, it wasn’t practiced anywhere else at that time--it was essentially a Chinese invention.)

S. (Another example from the same period, an illustration to a popular play.) But instead of continuing to develop this art, the Chinese largely drop it, producing nothing of comparable quality in the 18th-19th centuries, leaving it for the Japanese to learn it from them and use it for the great Ukiyo-e colorprints that everyone knows. When the Chinese begin again in recent times to do serious color woodblock printing, they have to take the Japanese as their teachers.

S. The topic of my brief talk tonight follows this distinctive pattern: it’s about the Chinese conquest, and loss, and regaining (with some foreign help) of effects of space in their painting. (I’m talking mainly about interior space, as in a room; space in landscape is another, separate topic.) In the early periods, as in this tomb tile from the 2nd century A.D., interior space was represented by the placement of the figures and furniture on a ground plane--it was space between things. The people face each other across an interval, so there is space in the picture.

S. By the tenth century, when this famous painting was done--or, properly speaking, the original of this painting, since it survives only in an early copy, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing--by the tenth century, that method had been elaborated by the use of screens, beds, tables, and other objects, along with the figures, to produce a rich and readable interior scene. (It represents the story of a government official named Han Xizai who, when the state he served was nearing its end, began to hold wild and dissolute parties in his villa; these were observed and portrayed by a court artist who was sent by the ruler, and who hid himself in the house for that purpose.) The painting has been much written about, but most accounts of it fail to comment on its subtly scandalous character, perhaps because to the casual observer it looks pretty sober. One has to look longer to find the suggestive passages, the naughty bits. Note the bed at the right end,

S. of which this is a detail. The bedclothes are obviously occupied-- some lovely entertainer has laid down her lute to misbehave with one of the guests, in a space not at all concealed from the others, which makes it all the more improper.

S. A similar passage occurs further on, where Han Xizai is seen again playing a drum to accompany a girl dancing (the presence of a Buddhist monk again violates propriety) and further on, another bed with rumpled bedclothes,

S. this time next to an alcove where Han Xizai is seen again, sitting with four female entertainers, three of whom appear to be reacting to sounds from the other side of the partition.

S. A similarly sophisticated use of interpenetrating spaces appears in another tenth century painting, of a very different kind, this one in the Shanghai Museum. It portrays in great detail a flour mill powered by a waterwheel built over a canal lock. The social, technological, and commercial aspects of a whole industry are represented in this extraordinary picture--the grain brought by boats, weighed, and milled--the mechanism of the mill could be reconstructed from the precise information the artist provides; the manager dealing with the landlords and merchants in the upper left; and in lower right,

S. a place to spend some of the money they carry away, a wine-house drawn so meticulously that we are permitted to look through the upstairs window at banqueters around a table (and, to the left, at someone looking out of the window),

S. and below, at the entrance (which is blocked, as always, by a large wooden screen), we can see a servant, partly hidden, in the doorway--and, most amazing of all, a pair of calligraphy scrolls hanging on the opposite wall. The artist seems to be saying: What I’ve given you here is a complete world, a microcosm; the more you explore it, the more you’ll find.

S. This passion for intricate effects of space seems to have given way, in the period that followed, to a very different pursuit: the portrayal of monumental, spacious landscapes--mountain-and-river pictures, as the Chinese call them--which are the glories of Song dynasty painting. This is a section of an 11th century scroll painting in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. (I should add that if you want to contemplate these paintings longer, they are all reproduced in the 3000 Years of Chinese Painting book.) Landscapes of a comparable spaciousness and naturalism were not to appear in European painting for several centuries; and their appearance may well have been affected by contacts with China. There are those who believe, for instance, that misty landscapes like the one in the background of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa were inspired by Chinese examples that the Italian artists somehow knew about. I leave that question open.

S. This conquest of space in landscape is also short-lived: some time around the early 14th century the best Chinese landscapists appear to shift their interest to other concerns, especially ways of evoking old styles (without copying them) and of producing unsettling landscape imagery of a kind we might call expressionist. (Great landscape by Wang Meng, dtd. 1366, in Shanghai Mus.; was in the 1998 show of Chinese art at Guggenheim Museum in New York.) This, too, is outside our subject, and I mention it only in passing.

S. Paintings of figures in architectural settings, done between the 11th century and the 17th, are much simpler in their spatial layouts than the 10th century works had been; proper interior scenes disappear, to be replaced by a system in which one looks into an interior room from outside. In this 13th-century album leaf (originally mounted on a flat fan) we see a courtyard in the palace grounds; an imperial favorite has been summoned to the emperor’s bed in the middle of the night, and is being urgently awakened by a maid, while another picks flowers to arrange in her hair, and musicians and attendants wait to accompany her. The painting is a good example of the Chinese artist’s ability to embed a whole mini-narrative in a single picture.

S. All the foregoing was to introduce my main topic, which is a major theme in my book-in-progress: the rediscovery of interior space in Chinese painting in the early Qing dynasty, from the mid-17th century. (I should add that doing this book, and pursuing these lines of research, have drawn me into areas that are completely new not only for me but for Chinese painting studies as a whole.) By the 17th century, European pictures were to be seen in China in considerable numbers, some of them oil paintings but mostly prints (engravings), brought by the Jesuits, who had come to China in the hope of converting the Chinese to Christianity, and who were establishing missions in the Chinese cities. The pictures they brought had effects on the Chinese that they never intended. Most of them were religious images, such as this scene from a life of Christ, and they were mostly Flemish and Dutch, produced in Northern Europe. Many of them portrayed interiors with figures, with views beyond the foreground space into further rooms. This Northern European way of handling space, along with the heavy shading of the figures and objects, was taken up by many Chinese professional artists, of the kind I’m studying.

S. Some of them, especially in popular prints, attempted the southern European ( or Italian) system of linear, vanishing-point perspective, along with the device of having the things in the picture diminish in size as one moved into distance--which was certainly not unknown in Chinese painting, but hadn’t been used so systematically as this.

S. By the mid-18th century or so, some Chinese artists were quite capable of making strikingly, almost photographically realistic paintings using western perspective and shading and heavy colors, such as this one, from a series of pictures of Chinese interiors, probably done for foreign visitors. But linear perspective was never more than an exotic trick in China; no major artists used it, and it was ultimately rejected by Chinese painters and their clientele, who felt about it as we do about 3-D movies: a good trick, but what does it have to do with art? Western studies of the influence of European art on China have all concentrated on linear perspective, and so have missed the point about what the Chinese artists really adopted enthusiastically from European pictures, which was

S. the Dutch system of showing interiors spaces opening back into further rooms, or through windows and doors. This example was painted in 1738 by an artist working in the imperial court, where the Sino-European mixed style was enthusiastically promoted under the tutelage of European Jesuit artists also serving there. (Describe).

I want to go back a bit, though, and show how painters outside the court, working in the real cultural centers of China at that time, the great cities of the Yangtze River region--the ones my book is mainly about--were taking new ideas from European pictures, especially Western-style shading and the representation of interior space, and using them in their own original ways. (The Chinese virtually never copied the foreign works, but only borrowed techniques from them.)

S. This painting was done in the mid-17th century by an artist named Gu Jianlong, and represents the 8th century emperor Xuanzong spying on the famous beauty who would become his favorite consort, Yang Guifei, as she bathes--he’s in the upper right, she is seen in lower left behind a split-bamboo blind. It doesn’t look especially convincing spatially to us, but for Chinese viewers of the time it must have been strikingly so, in the way it encouraged the viewer to explore the spaces visually, looking through openings and behind and around things. This was not entirely new to the Chinese--we saw it in the 10th century paintings. But they had stopped doing it for centuries, and perhaps forgotten how to do it. One is reminded of the case of astronomy: when the Jesuits came to China in the late 16th century, they found sophisticated astronomical instruments there that the Chinese (so the story goes) had forgotten how to use.

S. The viewer is turned into another voyeur, along with the emperor. The figure of Yang Guifei in this painting scarcely seems voluptuous to us; but again, it satisfies different, Chinese criteria for what is sexy. The image of the nude (or nearly nude) woman in China is another theme I’ll explore in my book, to correct the common impression among Western writers that it’s unknown in Chinese painting.

S. A bit later, in 1697, an artist active in Yangzhou named Yu Zhiding did this picture of a beautiful woman playing the board game weiqi (go) with herself while she’s waiting for her husband or lover to come. The shadowy areas under the table and behind the curtain reveal the artist using illusionistic effects learned from European painting that will draw the viewer into the picture in exciting new ways.

S. That one was done by a Chinese artist trying to look European, this was done by a European artist trying to look Chinese. It’s another picture of a woman in her boudoir, a print from a book about China published in Amsterdam only thirty years earlier, in 1667, with illustrations based partly on Chinese pictures brought back by travelers, partly on imagination. The Dutch artist does his best with the Chinese robe and the bronze vase and the wallpaper, but misunderstands how hanging scroll paintings were displayed, and drapes one of them awkwardly over the table. My point isn’t that either artist saw the other’s work, but that there was a lively interchange going on between Europe and China at this time, in the arts as in other spheres.

S. Pictures of that kind, showing women in interiors, belong to the Chinese category of paintings called meiren or “beautiful women.” They had been popular in China for centuries (although you don’t read about them in the histories), and now the new European techniques for making the pictures appear astonishingly real made them even more popular. Dutch artists also produced pictures of women in interiors, often their boudoirs, for their customers; these also had erotic overtones, giving the viewer a privileged, voyeuristic look into places he ordinarily couldn’t see. This one is by Gerald Dou, dated 1667, a woman looking into a mirror and having her hair done by her maid. Note the heavy curtain that is pulled back theatrically to reveal the scene.

S. Here is a Chinese painting from the 1730s by an artist named Leng Mei, obviously imitating the Dutch type, which he must have known from prints--the correspondences are too close for coincidence, especially as there are no Chinese precedents for them. I don’t have a color slide of this picture, but I can show color details of

S. another by the same artist, painted in 1724 (color details in a moment.) Western devices of illusionism were especially effective in pictures of a single beautiful woman shown in her boudoir, because they were so convincing visually that they seemed to invite the viewer (male, of course) into the picture where he could imagine engaging physically with the woman. We read in fiction of that time where someone mistakes such a picture for a real woman, and talks to her. (We might recall that American pin-up pictures by such artists as George Petty and Anton Vargas were always shaded realistically with an airbrush, to make them look 3-dimensional, almost palpable.) The woman’s pose here is very provocative,

S. as is her gazing directly out at us, with what we would call a come-hither look. Her touching her lips with her little finger is an expression of sensuality in China, and a turn-on.

S. The lower part of the pictured is even more suggestive, if one reads it in a kind of Freudian way. The painter, using the western technique of shading, has created a hollow space in that area of the woman’s lower body, and she thrusts into it a rolled-up book--which, when one reads the carefully-written characters on it, turns out to be a book of love poetry. These pictures, once they are decoded, often turn out to be positively lurid; but the Chinese have forgotten the code, and neither Chinese nor western scholars have paid serious attention to them, as I am now trying to do

S. A little-known artist named Hua Xuan, working in Wuxi in the early 18th century, did this large painting (it’s nearly 11 feet long!) of eight beautiful women on the balcony of a brothel looking down, holding flowers and other objects that send erotic signals, and gesturing invitingly. It may have been done for hanging in an establishment of that kind; it hangs now in the living room of a private collector in Boston, who loves it. (Serious Chinese collectors would never think of owning and showing a picture of this kind.) The eight women are subtly differentiated in facial shape and color--they may represent particular women--and are given volume and a sense of real presence by shading. Moreover, they lean over the railing and beyond the pillar at one end into the viewer’s space, another device taken from European pictorial art.

S. A detail of one of the women, the owner’s favorite and mine. All this belongs to a popular tradition within Chinese painting, and one that has been so neglected and even scorned by the Chinese that it’s hard to piece together again. But that’s what I’m trying now to do, along with my Chinese collaborator on the book, Yu Hui of the Palace Museum in Beijing, who will explore some areas that he’s better equipped to handle than I. I want to emphasize this aspect of the Culture and Civilization series, the advantages of collaboration: the Chinese scholars have better access to the materials, a better control of the texts, and an insider’s view of the whole tradition; but the foreign scholar can ask questions, and follow lines of investigation, that haven’t been asked or pursued by the Chinese, and that often are more or less taboo within the Chinese tradition.

S. I’ll conclude with an early 18th century painting by a little-studied artist named Cui Hui, in the Palace Museum in Beijing, an imaginary portrait of the famous 12th century poet Li Qingzhao in her study. I offer it partly to counter any impression I may have given that paintings of women in China all have erotic overtones and show the women only as objects of male desire; this one gives Li Qingzhao the stature and dignity she deserves, and is a decidedly cool picture. But I show it also to make a final point. Scarcely anyone but an art historian would look at such a picture and be aware that the artist was borrowing from foreign sources (in the spatial scheme, the depiction of the furniture, and so forth.) And these foreign-derived elements will seem irrelevant to the whole nature of the work, because they’ve been so thoroughly absorbed into a Chinese subject and a Chinese image. But the borrowings are there, and they allow the artist to create effects that he otherwise couldn’t, such as the feeling of being able to enter into the picture space (Li Qingzhao is gesturing to a chair, as if inviting a fellow-poet into her study)

S. or the sense of real presence in the image of the woman. The idea of “influence,” with one culture imposing itself on another, usually a stronger one on a weaker one, is objectionable when thought of that way, and it’s generally avoided by cultural historians today. But a recognition of the ways in which artists and writers and others working in one tradition could appropriate freely what was useful to them from another and use it for their own, independent purposes is, I think, not only unobjectionable but a quite proper way to think of fruitful cross-cultural interaction. And the whole basis for our Culture and Civilization of China series is just that, with scholars inside China and others outside working together, learning from each other, appropriating ideas and information and methodologies from each other, contributing their particular strengths, producing books of a kind that neither we nor they could do alone. Thank you.

CLP 42: 2001 "The Problem of Value in 17th Century Chinese Painting."

The Problem of Value in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting
(James Cahill, February 2001) (Jason: see note at end.)

Introduction

Writing as someone who in years past has published two books, several exhibition catalog texts, and quite a few articles about 17th century Chinese painting, I can say that it is no less a pleasure and a challenge to return to this familiar terrain for yet another encounter. The problems and rewards of late Ming-early Ch’ing painting are inexhaustible, if only because so many schools and movements and stylistic directions make it up. This same extraordinary diversity, which we see as a positive condition, was viewed by writers and artists of the time, however, as a symptom of decline and weakness. I began the last chapter of my book The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting by quoting three major masters of the time giving their assessments of what had gone wrong in painting, and what the remedy might be. Wang Hui wrote in 1669:

“It is indeed a pity that painting of the present day has reached a new low, a decline occasioned by an overabundance of different ‘schools’. . . This predilection for schools stems from the lowering of artistic taste and the vulgarization of style.” (He lists four leading schools of his time, the Che, Wu, Yün-chien--Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and his followers--and the Lou-tung, his own. He continues:) “In addition to the painters in these main schools, those belonging to smaller branches and those claiming to be ‘individualists’ are too numerous to be counted. At any rate, with the existence of the four main styles and the handing down of misconceptions from generation to generation, there has been as a result the exhaustion of artistic excellence . . . To put it briefly, painters of Yün-chien laugh at the Che school and followers of Lou-tung scold the Wu school. In such confusion, the students, with brush in hand, are at such a complete loss that it is virtually impossible for them to penetrate the secrets of the art.”

The other two artist-writers quoted were Wang Yüan-ch’i and Shih-t’ao. Wang Yüan-ch’i agreed generally with Wang Hui (both were adherents of the Orthodox school) but saw salvation in a strict adherence to the right stylistic lineage, as it had been traced through a succession of old masters and continued in his own practice by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. Shih-t’ao took a diametrically opposite position: he wanted to put an end altogether to imitation of the old masters and paint as if from a fresh, pristine beginning. Different as these three were in their paintings and their beliefs, they were in agreement that painting in their time was in a state of crisis. For us, by contrast, this is a great age of painting, producing a dazzling panoply of major masters and exciting stylistic innovations. We can take time, before turning to the paintings, to consider some of the factors that underlay the great diversity in 17th century painting.

Chinese painting after the Sung dynasty enters, I have argued in recent writings and lectures, a condition we can call post-historical. I took the term from writers such as Hans Belting and Arthur Danto who point out that while western art (primarily European) exhibits a traceable, seemingly orderly art-historical development through successive periods (medieval, early to late Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo/Romantic/Neo-classical etc.) up to Post-Impressionism, no such developmental pattern can be discerned in it after that. The same is true, I think, for Chinese painting after Sung. This is not the place to make that argument at length; I mean here to suggest only that the great diversity of 17th century painting is a natural outcome of that breakdown of developmental order--which was, to be sure, exacerbated by the social and political breakdown of that period. Even in an age when the best artists no longer feel constrained to commit themselves to any particular lineage or tradition, however, and enjoy far more latitude of stylistic choice, most of them are still inclined to follow artists and trends of their time or their recent past. Accordingly, we can classify painting of the period, following Chinese practice, into categories: Individualists, Orthodox, archaistic/bizarre, literati amateurs, etc. But these are only a tool for organizing our accounts. Most artists were affected also by regional affiliations, which permit us to write about a Nanjing school, an Anhui school, and others.

Other factors that underlay artists’ choices of styles included the social and economic situations in which they found themselves, and, closely tied to this, their educational backgrounds and training as painters. A major calligrapher such as Wang To would naturally be drawn to a painting style that built on the skills with the brush and abstract design with which he was already endowed through the practice of calligraphy. A more or less self-taught painter such as Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, committed as he was to the project of “imitating” ancient masters, obviously would not attempt to use the polished, professional ways of painting. For Chen Hung-shou, who was obliged to earn his living mainly as a painter, the scholar-amateur styles were of no use--although he was a classically educated scholar himself, he never attained the political rank or status that authorized the artist, so to speak, to paint in an amateurish manner, and also created a demand for his works among those who wanted them as emblems of that status.

Shifting our vantage point and considering the matter from the position of the painters’ audience, including collectors, we recognize immediately that no single set of value criteria can be effectively applied to such a diversity of styles and types of paintings. Connoisseurs who take pride in having “an eye for quality” are employing a figure of speech that simplifies a very complex process. Anyone engaged in the actual practice of making judgements of Ming-Ch’ing Chinese paintings is forever shifting from one set of value criteria to another; the unarticulated knowledge of which set is proper to a given kind of painting, and the ability to move smoothly from one to another is, in fact, an important aspect of becoming a connoisseur. The same is of course true for the earlier periods: one does not look at and judge a Ni Tsan landscape with “the same eyes”--the same set of visual responses, with their attendant evaluative functions--that are proper for appreciating a painting by Ma Yüan.

All the above is to introduce what will be the main theme of this essay: the problem of values in different types of paintings in Ming-Ch’ing China. While my discussions of the paintings and what makes them good or great--or, in a few cases, mediocre or bad--must necessarily be in some part subjective, I will try to formulate and articulate the values I believe they embody. I do not assume that these are necessarily the same that motivated Mr. Chen Chi-te in acquiring them; he has his own tastes and preferences, although I hope that some of what I write will resonate in his mind with the feelings he must have had at that exciting moment of acquisition.

Before the Late Ming

With a work like “Auspicious Snow at South Mountain” ascribed to Shen Yü (no. 3), the problem of value criteria scarcely arises, since it is a powerful and highly successful work by the most traditional standards. While I admit some hesitation in accepting the inscription with Shen Yü’s signature and the date 1458,[1] the period and school seem roughly right, and the work quite believable as by a professional master working in Suzhou in the decades before the ascendancy of Shen Zhou (whose teacher Shen Yü was), using the broad, blunt brushwork that characterized much of the output of the Suzhou masters. Compositionally, it is a monumental landscape in the Northern Sung tradition; Chinese connoisseurs would classify it as in the style of Fan K’uan, while recognizing touches of Hsia Kuei. At the same time, the prominence and the dispersal of the narrative materials, figures and buildings, belong to a Ming mode: Ming viewers of paintings liked to have the implicit stories in their landscapes spelled out, not hidden or hinted at. Much of the monumentality of the Fan Kuan model survives in this impressive composition: the steep ascent of the mountain ridge, the pockets of dark, wintry mist at the sides, the diminution of the tree groves into distance, all are readable, ring true. Later Ming masters, even Hsieh Shih-ch’en (the successor to this kind of painting in the Suzhou region), could scarcely match it.

Large pictures such as this, intended for hanging in entrance halls and other high-ceilinged, semi-public rooms in large households, had to be stable and satisfying in composition and thematically unchallenging; in function and effect they were like Japanese screens. The expressiveness of the brushwork was less an issue than the pictorial whole. Not so with the handscroll, which, seen close-up, confronted the viewer inescapably with the painter’s hand, as making up the image or, it might be, even as somewhat independent of the image. In the 1540 landscape handscroll by Ch’en Shun (no. 6), a significant part of the pleasure a viewer takes in reading the scroll comes from the seemingly free way the ink is applied, and how the scenery nonetheless pulls together into clarity. Such a style is best applicable to conventional imagery, since the viewer of the painting must constitute the picture out of the loosely-rendered materials. So we are presented with, successively, a man crossing a bridge, another waiting for him in a house, another in a boat near the shore, gazing off at the hills (echoes of Wu Chen), two friends conversing on the riverbank, two more in boats pulled up alongside each other. A boldly energetic style and restful scenery: this was a winning combination for many middle-Ming artists and their audiences.

Another was the use of a familiar, well-established style to depict scenes of particular places, a pictorial strategem that had the effect of investing those places with cultural overtones, advancing further a process already initiated when the places were named and poems about them composed. The strategem was a favorite among Wu school or Suchou artists, who would portray in this way a series of notable places in their region, or the scenery along some route of travel, or. at the request of a rich landowner, poetically designated places in his villa or garden. Wen Po-jen’s 1560 album of “Fourteen Views of Hsün-yang” is an excellent example of the last type. The writers of the colophons identify the recipient, the owner of the estate, and set up poetic resonances around the pictures and the places. Although Wen Po-jen is known to have labored to free himself from dependence on the style of his famous uncle Wen Cheng-ming, and was largely successful in this work, the paintings remain comfortably within the collective school manner, while exhibiting the originality in compositions that the album form encouraged.

It was noted above that large hanging scrolls tended to be compositionally stable and relatively conventional in their materials; an impressive exception is Chou Lung’s “Seeing a Dragon in a Rainstorm,” painted in 1617. The subject and style belong to the Che school (an example by Wang Chao, active about a century earlier, is in the Palace Museum, Beijing.) Here the dashing brushwork and dramatic ink contrasts serve to stimulate the viewer’s visual sense, and the monumentality of the composition increases the powerful effect. The figures of the old man and his boy servant are highly active both in their poses and in the brushwork that delineates them (the latter in fact anticipates the figure style of Huang Shen in the 18th century.) The boy points excited upward at the dragon appearing in the clouds, while clutching a wrapped ch’in or zither--an instrument quite out of place in this tumultuous setting, in which nothing short of kettledrums could be heard. The rocks and tangled vegetation that fill the lower half all but obscure the thatched shelter and bridge over a rushing stream, and provide a highly activated base for the main theme in the upper part.

The above discussions give some sense, however incomplete, of the range of possibilities open to Ming artists up to the early 17th century, the late Wan-li period, and of the qualities their works could embody. Two artists, the towering figures of late Ming painting, vastly expanded that range, creating works that demanded more complex, multi-leveled responses from their viewers: Tung Ch’i-ch’ang for landscape and Ch’en Hung-shou for figures. But before turning to them we will consider a few other artists and trends in the late Ming period.

Amateurs and Calligraphers

The problem of value in Chinese painting has special ramifications in the cases of the amateur artists, since older values--entertaining or instructive subject matter, skillful execution, decorative beauty--were scorned by the literati painters, who aimed at persuading everyone that they were pursuing higher goals. In the cases of serious painters such as Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, the claim had some validity; but it could also be used to justify or excuse paintings that were amateurish in a negative sense. I will use two handscrolls in the exhibition (with apologies to their owner) to exemplify what I take to be this failing. Both are genuine works, and worthy of places in the collection on other grounds; my criticism is of their aesthetic qualities.

Feng K’o-pin’s “Rocks and Bamboo” (no. 20) bears a title and colophons by several notable men of his time; Feng appears to have been a highly respected person. But if he was also a good painter, there is little sign of it here: he has simply repeated, throughout the scroll, a simple lumpy convention for “rock” and another for “bamboo,” grouping them differently and placing them here and there in an attempt to provide variety and avoid monotony. But the attempt fails; appeals to “good brushwork” etc. will not save such a work as this. Much the same is true, I think, although to a lesser degree, of Wei Chih-huang’s landscape handscroll of 1640 (no. 22). At a time when stylistic individualism was becoming more prized than ever before, Wei attempts to create an eccentric style out of wavy contour drawing, repeated folds in the terrain forms, and simple shading--adding to these a few standard motifs such as a waterfall and a man in a house. Again, the result falls short of success, I believe, and monotony ensues. What we miss is the working of a real artistic intelligence. Perhaps over-production was a factor: the painter Kung Hsien tells us that Wei Chih-huang tried to support a household of forty people with his painting. His best work, moreover, had been done decades earlier; he may simply have run out of new ideas.

These relative failures, as I would see them, can be offset with a notable success: the handscroll of “Orchids in Ink” painted in 1651 by the calligrapher-painter Wang To (no. 28). The creative intelligence deficient in the other two is admirably at work here. With a subject that could easily have been treated repetitively (as it is in numerous ink-orchids handscrolls that one rolls through quickly), Wang To invents variations, presenting, instead of the usual succession of clumps of orchids, passages with orchids growing with fungus and brambles, orchids with gravel in a shallow pot, orchids and bamboo on an earthy bank, all interspersed with inscriptions in his excellent calligraphy (written, he notes, with the painting brush.) Satin is a difficult ground for painting because its smoothness rules out rough-brush effects; Wang To exploits it for fluid strokes that can be shaded, or turn dry at their endings, while moving through a broad tonal range of ink values that is partly decorative, partly depth-creating. Calligrapher-painters are often carried away by the velocity of their brush movements to the point of dissolving their images; Wang To makes firm pictorial structures throughout. This is a scroll that offers rich visual pleasures.

Ch’en Hung-shou and Tseng Ching

For better or worse, landscape is the main subject of later Chinese painting, and masters of figure portrayal are relatively few. Standing out among them, surely, is Ch’en Hung-shou, as accomplished a painter in his way as Tung Ch’i-ch’ang was in his. But Ch’en was never to be deified as Tung was, not did he enjoy such a following--for one thing, his style, requiring a high level of technique, was more or less inaccessible to the amateurs. Moreover, figure painting, including most of Ch’en’s, is usually more overtly functional than landscape or plant subjects, and depends more than those on literary, historical, and other associations. In critical writings, then, it could be made to seem a less self-sufficient art, indebted to outside factors for much of its value. In practice, however, Ch’en Hung-shou can charge his painted images with refinements, resonances, and expressive complexities quite equal to those of Tung’s best landscapes.

In the case of Ch’en Hung-shou’s set of playing cards with imaginary portraits of the heroes of Shui-hu chuan (no. 15), the function is not only clear--the cards were used for a game played at drinking parties and other convivial gatherings--but is one that limits, in principle, the likelihood of survival for the works of art. The cards show signs of wear, suggesting that they were really used. For a major master, even at an early stage of his career (the style suggests a date in the 1620s), to expend so much time and painstaking skill on works that would in the natural course of things be worn out by use will seem to us excessively lavish. It fits easily, however, into late Ming patterns of elegant consumption of high-level craft objects, along with I-hsing tea wares, colorprinted poetry papers, and ink-cakes molded with fine relief designs. We can thank the person who made the decision to remove Chen’s paintings from the playing-card drawer and mount them for preservation before it was too late.

Ch’en Hung-shou’s fine, crotchety drawing of the Water Margin heroes, a manner seen also in others of his early works, appears to follow no established figure style, whether professional or amateur; it is perhaps best understood as a variant of pai-miao fine-line drawing but with the brushline moving somewhat more freely and fluctuating more markedly in breadth. It is reminiscent of some fen-pen or preparatory drawings, and may be based in part on those. Ch’en already, at around the age of twenty, has an impressive repertory of figure types, costume patterns, and props, and the poses of his figures are strongly varied--he introduces already a motif that he will favor later, the figure facing away from the viewer.

The four “Historical Scenes” by Ch’en Hung-shou, which belong to a later period, most likely the 1640s, are probably survivors from a larger series, and in the absence of the remainder or any inscriptions, their subject is difficult to identify. The scene of hanging the belt (of office) on the tree and the one featuring chrysanthemums would suggest T’ao Yüan-ming, a subject Ch’en depicted a number of times in his later years, but the other two, and the theme of the whole, remain to be determined. We are thus deprived of some part of the experience that the pictures would have provided to cultivated contemporaries of the artist. What we can still admire, no less than they, is the extraordinary strength and refinement of the drawing. If line is read as movement, what we read here is movement so controlled, so unrelentingly severe, as to scarcely reveal its agency in a human hand. The archaistic aspects of the style further distance it from any effect of arbitrariness in the artist: these images and their mode of delineation, the style implies, are as they must be, as if they had been engraved long ago in stone. And yet the highly special taste of Ch’en Hung-shou is actively present everywhere; even incidental patterns such as the weave of baskets or the crackled glaze on a porcelain brush-washer are visually absorbing. The exaggerated postures and gestures of the figures are equally affecting, and would be more so if we understood their literary or historical resonances. Such an achievement can make us for a time impatient, as Ch’en Hung-shou was, with the “inspired” brush-waving of ambitious amateurs; brushwork for him was something fundamentally other than what they argued it should be. But after noting this we will, of course, “shift aesthetic gears” once more and return to recognizing as well the inescapable greatness of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang.

More mundane and overtly functional, but still affecting in its own right, is Tseng Ching’s 1640 portrait of Liu Ching-t’ing (no. 23.) Liu, seated informally on a rock with his legs crossed, looks out at us, thrusting his face forward, with slightly hooded eyes and an expression that seems strangely plaintive. He is set, however, in the most comfortable and secure setting a Chinese litterateur could desire: some eighteen inscriptions, mostly by his contemporaries, hover in the space around him. They appear weightier than the picture--which is, nonetheless, a sensitive and accomplished work by this leading late-Ming portraitist, who raised this genre of painting to respectability after several centuries of languishing.

The original painting by another major late Ming master of figures, Ting Yün-p’eng, on which the copy by Ch’ing court artist Ting Kuan-p’eng (no. 60) is based, would have expanded this brief look at late Ming figure painting by introducing another subject type, Buddhist arhats, and another set of issues, including iconography. As it is, we can admire the later Ting’s work as polished and diverting, full of anecdotal indications of how these holy men and their attendants passed their time in religious devotions. The older Ting’s original must have exhibited some of the grotesqueries that appear in more extreme form in paintings of the same subject by Wu Pin.

Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, His Circle and His Following

Three paintings by contemporaries of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang can further fill in, before we turn to Tung himself, the art-historical ambiance within which he came to prominence. One is the six-leaf album of landscapes “after Yüan masters” painted in 1617 by Li Liu-fang (no. 12). Li, who lived in Chia-ting northwest of Shanghai and north of Sung-chiang, did not properly belong to Tung’s circle, but must have known him and his works, and can be seen as engaged in a large movement within literati painting for which Tung became the spearhead. Artists who followed this direction (which was in the following generation to become the Orthodox school of landscape) employed a compound mode of brushwork, derived from Yuan masters, notably Huang Kung-wang and Ni Tsan, in which the forms were rendered with overlays of brushwork, dry and wet, lighter and darker; they eliminated all narrative or anecdotal or historical themes from their paintings; and they practiced a kind of free imitation of canonical old masters called fang. Li Liu-fang’s album exemplifies all these: each leaf is inscribed as “imitating” (fang) one of the Yuan artists, and the brushwork, while wetter and looser than Tung’s, remains well within the prescribed mode. One appreciates, then, the sensitive execution of the paintings while also catching the nuanced references to the styles of the Yuan masters; both aspects of the experience are flattering to the viewer in their implication of a cultivated taste. The scenery is correspondingly unpeopled and unexciting. Nothing could move us further away, in intent and effect, from Chou Lung’s dynamic storm scene done in the same year.

The other two paintings are by Sung-chiang artists of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s time, artists more professionally oriented than he, who lacked status as scholar-bureaucrats or gentry: Chao Tso and Shen Shih-ch’ung. Both reportedly ghost-painted for Tung on occasion, and indeed we can find paintings signed by Tung that might well be their work. Chao Tso’s handscroll of 1611 (no. 11) bears a title written by Tung, and a colophon by him full of praise for the artist. But Chao’s work, fine as it is in itself, represents just the kind of mild, inoffensive picture from which Tung was determined to break away, as a comparison of it with any of Tung’s from the same period (e.g. his “Calling the Hermit at Ching-hsi” of 1611)[2] will immediately reveal. Viewed on its own terms, Chao’s picture has notable strengths: the masterly ease with which he draws the viewer’s eye between leafy trees to a further space in which he sets a pavilion with two figures, or back over marshy ground, peopled with fishermen and travelers, to a distant shore with houses, or up two ravines, the first occupied by a recluse’s dwelling, the second only by mist. Tung can admire pictorial richness and atmospheric effects such as these, but is unwilling to attempt them in his own painting, choosing to move instead into starkness and abstraction. The leaves of Shen Shih-ch’ung’s undated eight-leaf album (no. 21) portray the same warm, idealized world as Chao Tso’s scroll, in which old friends meet beneath bare trees or rest in a mountain inn. Shen follows expertly the practice of doing his leaves “in old styles,” but not at the expense of simpler pictorial pleasures.

If Chao Tso’s and Shen Shih-ch’ung’s paintings were designed to soothe and charm their audiences, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s were intended to unsettle, even shock, his. Where Chao and Shen soften their masses in atmospheric haze, Tung sets his off with heavy contours; where they lean toward naturalism, he leans toward abstraction. There are, to be sure, exceptions: a leaf in Shen Shih-ch’ung’s album (ref. to reprod.) in a highly geometricized form of the Ma Yuan-Hsia Kuei manner is as stark and striking in its way as one of Tung’s pictures. But Shen, the secondary master, lacks the creative drive and historical sense to exploit his own semi-chance openings to new stylistic directions, and such a leaf represents an isolated achievement. Tung, by contrast, with his seldom-relaxed artistic intelligence, never misses a chance to push to a further extreme some anomalous configuration that appears in his work. This side of Tung’s art, its propensity for stylistic extremism, was to be a powerful inspiration for the Individualist masters of the early Ch’ing.

The other aspect of Tung’s art that was to have a profound effect on landscape painting of the following periods is its insistence on following self-imposed formal strictures, imposing a special order on the work and the depicted world. What we have termed the post-historical state of later Chinese painting, and see as a condition of exciting diversity, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang saw as a weakening lack of clear direction, a condition he set about to remedy single-handed with his grand concept of the Southern school and his creation of its stylistic coordinates for his time. He was only partly successful, fortunately for the rest of Chinese painting-- which, if he had succeeded and all later landscapists followed his Orthodox direction, would have been immeasureably impoverished. As it happened, both the Orthodox masters and the Individualists were able to draw heavily on the theories and practice of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, and a healthy diversity continued, at least for a century or so.

The two landscapes by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang in the exhibition are from the same period, 1620-21, when Tung was nearing the end of a long period of living in retirement in Sung-chiang; in 1622 he would return to Peking, and later Nanking, for four years of service as historian and high minister. “A Winding River and Twisting Road” (no. 17) was painted in 1620, and augmented or retouched in the following year, according to Tung’s brief second inscription. We can speculate that it was the rows of horizontal tien or dots along the upper contours of his forms that were added, perhaps together with some other dark accents; some of these appear a bit detached from the rest of the picture. They suggest low vegetation, and serve to blur slightly the outlines. The system of building the landscape masses as composites of repeated forms, distantly derived from Huang Kung-wang, supplies the basic structure within which oddities are inserted: in this picture, several huge slanting slabs of earth or rock--Tung Ch’i-ch’ang scarcely distinguishes one from the other--that stand out in the upper part, relieving, along with other formal oddities, what might otherwise have slipped into monotony, a kind of orthodoxy before the founding of the Orthodox school.

The other 1621 work (no. 18) is inscribed by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang with a poem by the Tang poet Wang Wei, and, although he does not say so explicitly, is based on Tung’s understanding of Wang Wei’s painting style. which in turn was based largely on certain archaistic paintings known to him that were ascribed to Wang Wei. As usual in Tung’s pictures of this type, the upper and lower parts answer each other formally, even though the materials--trees on a shore vs. rocky cliffs--are entirely different. The geometricizing mode of Tung’s middle period is seen here at its best. The brilliant new compositional structures he creates are sanctioned, in his own view and that of his adherents, by their supposed reliance on the styles of the Southern school founder and other early masters; for us this is a lesser attraction than their quasi-cubist manipulations of mass and space. It is obvious that the value system by which we evaluate Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s works must be as complex as those we apply to the great 20th century masters of the west. Neither criteria of representation, at one end, nor pure brushwork at the other are alone adequate.

The two older of the Four Wangs, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s leading followers in the Orthodox school direction, Wang Shih-min and Wang Chien, are unrepresented in the exhibition, but the two younger can be seen in excellent works: Wang Yüan-ch’i represented by two hanging scrolls and a handscroll, Wang Hui by two albums. Although Wang Yüan-ch’i is the younger by ten years we will consider him first, as the more direct recipient of the master’s legacy (his grandfather Wang Shih-min was Tung’s direct pupil) and as more unproblematically Orthodox in his production. That last observation is not at all intended to disparage him--he is one of the strongest, most consistently masterful of later Chinese painters.

His two hanging scrolls, one from his middle period and in the manner of Huang Kung-wang (no. 50, dated 1686), the other late and in the Wang Meng manner (no. 51, dated 1710), exemplify the uniformly high quality of his output: they present no surprises to the artist’s admirers--who, to be sure, neither expected nor desired surprises. The two pictures differ slightly in style: brushwork is looser in the earlier work, done when Wang was still more concerned with the special textures of the school’s prescribed system of overlaid brushstrokes; in the later one, a formalist or constructivist urge replaces brushwork as the central concern, and the earth masses are more clearly demarcated modules that make up the whole structure. Even the trees function more as compositional units than as natural images. The slightly sloping water plane at right, and the sense of mismatched horizons on the two sides of the continuous upward-rising ridge that dominates the picture, are features often seen, sometimes much more radically, in Wang’s late works.

These hanging scrolls are in the styles of two of the Four Yüan Masters; Wang Yüan-ch’i’s undated handscroll (no. 52), according to his incription on it, follows the “brush ideas” of all four, and all at once--without shifting, that is, from one style to another within the scroll. In his inscription after the painting, dated 1710 (the painting must be from around the same time), he expresses some pride in having thus combined or synthesized the styles. But the Orthodox school landscape style was already, in large part, a synthesis of those styles, and it is in Wang Yüan-ch’i’s particular version of it that this handscroll is executed. The homogeneity of the landscape materials recalls Max Loehr’s well-known characterization of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s style as “volumes of nondescript matter arranged in a disarrayed space.” To write this is, again, not to disparage either artist: it is exactly this abstraction, this stripping away of all differentiations of geological forms, tree types, even houses, that clear the way for the powerful compositional manipulations they give us. Their practice sets severe limits on what they can adopt from the old masters whom they invoke, any one of whom (even Ni Tsan) would have endowed his picture with more of truly pictorial qualities, more readable masses and spaces, more particularized details. The pleasures of viewing Wang Yüan-ch’i’s scroll arise from encountering his familiar materials engaged in ever-new patterns of movement and stasis, tension and resolution, “opening” and “closing” movements, forms answering forms in intricate interplay.

Wang Hui, even while he became in principle an adherent to the Orthodox school (as a protégé of both Wang Shih-min and Wang Chien), resisted accepting its regimentation to quite such a degree. Especially in his earlier period, as beautifully exemplified in the album of 1672 (no. 38), Wang Hui recognizes that old masters such as Chü-jan or Chao Ling-jang or Chao Meng-fu were making landscape pictures, not abstract designs, and does the same in his “imitations” of them. For some critics of his time this might seem to be compromising principles; for us, it augments the Orthodox formulae with pictorial pleasures. Moreover, Wang Hui will include leaves in his albums, such as the storm scene with a dragon in the clouds in this one, that follow no old master at all, and are all the more fresh and stimulating. His sensitive hand sets up variety even within the old-masterish exercises, never--at least at this stage of his career--slipping into repetition and monotony.

The other album (no. 39) is undated but, judging from the style, belongs to his middle period. Here Wang Hui seems more consciously art-historical, invoking particular old paintings (Chao Meng-fu’s Shui-ts’un t’u, Ni Tsan’s Shih-tzu lin) in original variations, including less revered masters, or later ones such as Shen Chou and T’ang Yin, among his models. The viewer’s memories are stirred at the same time that his visual sense is deeply satisfied. In later years Wang Hui, driven by over-production, would come to rely too heavily on formulae, but there is no sign of that failing here.

The Anhui School

The two leading regional movements in early Ch’ing painting, the Anhui and Nanjing schools, are well represented in the exhibition in works by major masters of both schools. We turn first to the Anhui school, which was more strongly affected by the ideas and stylistic innovations of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. In the 1981 exhibition catalog Shadows of Mount Huang devoted to this school, I and my graduate students argued that the spare, linear styles that originated in Sung-chiang painting and were taken up (and taken to extremes) by the Anhui-school artists were, among other things, emblems of high-culture values for merchant class and other newly affluent patrons, just as Ni Tsan’s paintings had been in the late Yüan; and that formulation, even while it over-simplifies the situation, still seems true.

Hsiao Yün-ts’ung’s 1664 album of landscapes after Sung and Yüan masters (no. 31), for instance, was surely affected by the popularity of such albums among Orthodox-school artists and their audiences. He writes that he painted it after acquiring (or, one suspects, being able to see and study) genuine works by these masters. The changes in style from one leaf to another seem in fact minimal, and Hsiao does not name his sources (with one exception) in his inscriptions. But the pictures do reveal some general acquaintance with old modes of composition and old motifs, and stand high among Hsiao Yün-ts’ung’s works. He was one of the older and more conservative artists of the school, and although he would sometimes venture into the more extreme reaches of the Anhui manner, the striking innovations were to be in the paintings of others, especially Hung-jen.

Hung-jen’s 1656 Strange Scenery at Huangshan (no. 30) is from a period when he is just moving into his full maturity, but exhibits already most of the subtle devices that raise him above the other masters of the school and manifest a high level of artistic intelligence: the shift in scale between the house atop the middleground bluff and the simple shelter below at right, contradicting their location equidistant from the viewer; the exaggerated size of foreground trees, as against the bluff and house; the leftward leaning of that bluff and its answer in the rightward progression of flat-topped masses above; the extreme economy with which he applies grey washes in a few areas, and adds squared outcroppings here and there. And all this is rendered, cleanly and precisely, in an extremely sensitive hand, going far beyond any simple “imitation” of Ni Tsan. In his inscription Hung-jen uses the term hsieh-i, which usually would suggest a degree of sketchiness, but nothing that is gestural or improvisatory is permissable within this cool, disciplined style.

The minimalist direction seen in Hung-jen’s painting, in which the landscape is executed in a dry, linear manner and decorative effects of all kinds are eschewed, became very popular among Anhui collectors of paintings and is used in different forms by most of the other masters of the school. While the tendency toward geometricism is strong, the aim in their best works was to reconcile this manner with effects traditionally pursued in landscape painting: volumetric mass and space, deep distance, even monumentality. Occasionally they would venture into other modes of painting, to sustain variety within their works. Cheng Min, for instance, who was a friend of Hung-jen and often painted in a manner similar to his, could also work in a wetter, inkier style, as his “Landscape After Rain” (no. 40) reveals.

In the generation after Hung-jen, two leading painters of the school were Cha Shih-piao and Ch’eng Sui. Both spent much of their later life in Yangchou, a city where patronage and the market for paintings were abundant--many merchants who had made their fortunes in Anhui and elsewhere moved to Yangchou to build mansions and gardens and enjoy the elegant pleasures the city afforded. The emergence in Yangchou of a middle-level clientele for paintings encouraged artists who worked there, Cha Shih-piao among them, to adopt looser and quicker manners of painting. Works from Cha’s earlier years are typically in the dry Ni Tsan/Hung-jen manner; after the move to Yangchou he paints prolifically and too often repetitively. His 1696 long handscroll in the manner of Wu Chen (no. 36), done for a particular patron from whom he had received or expected more substantial rewards, is especially fine for his late period. The style is derived, not directly from Wu Chen, but from Shen Chou’s works in the Wu Chen manner.

Ch’eng Sui came from a well-off family and did not depend on painting for his livelihood; each of his relatively few surviving works is the outcome of unhurried, original thought. His “Autumn Hills” handscroll (no. 35), done for Cha Shih-piao, is an exercise in building a complex landscape out of dry brushline and large tien or dots, both applied in a range from pale to deep black. The faux-naif drawing of houses and trees further removes the picture from any mundane realism. An even more remarkable achievement is his undated “Landscape” (no. 34). Artists of his time and region, he writes in the inscription, all follow the “level distance” mode of composition; here he attempts the neglected “high distance” mode, in which one ascends a steep mountain slope to a high skyline. Most of the picture space is filled with small forms done in dry brushwork and even ink tone, seeming to allow no recession, leaving only small areas of sky at the top and water at the bottom. And yet the ascent of the mountainside, as one gazes longer, becomes both readable and visually engrossing. When this picture was shown in our Shadows of Mount Huang exhibition, it proved to be one of the most popular; visitors would stand for long periods in front of it, fascinated by its subtlety and complexity.

A somewhat separate branch of the Anhui school was located in Hsüan-ch’eng in northern Anhui; the principal artists active there were Mei Ch’ing, his younger brother Mei Keng, and his grand-nephew Mei Ch’ung. Mei Ch’ing, the oldest and most famous, is a painter stronger in poetic fancy than in painterly technique; his style nonetheless dominates the family output. Even Shih-t’ao, who lived in a monastery near Hsüan-ch’eng from 1666 to 1680, was affected by it. Of the Mei family, on the other hand, Ch’ung may be the most technically accomplished. His undated album of ten scenes of the Huangshan region (no. 37), with inscriptions by both the artist and Mei Ch’ing, follows a practice seen earlier in Hsiao Yün-ts’ung’s 1648 woodblock-printed series of Landscapes of T’ai-p’ing County, in which each leaf, besides portraying a real place, refers in its style to some old master. The pictures thus require of the viewer a multilevel reading, which includes appreciation of the poems and the calligraphy in which they are written, making up an intricate, culture-heavy, and necessarily unhurried experience within which the topographically descriptive aspects of the pictures are all but obscured. But it was exactly the long-established function of such paintings to endow the places with overlays of literary culture. Pictures of the local scenery, notably Huangshan, constitute, in fact, a major part of the school’s output, as it had of the Wu or Suchou school in the Ming.

The Nanking School

The city of Nanjing, which had been a secondary capital in the Ming, was another major center of painting in the seventeenth century. The Nanjing masters, for the most part, resisted being caught up in the new movement of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and his Sung-chiang followers, along with the extensions of this movement into Anhui and other parts of the Chiang-nan region. Instead, they were inclined to preserve their commitment to the tradition of the great Sung landscapists, who were well represented in local collections. They were also affected by the illusionistic devices to be learned, by anyone who chose to do so, from the European engravings and paintings brought by the Jesuits, who had one of their major missions in Nanjing. This unlikely coming-together of Sung Chinese and northern European pictorial traditions, reflected already in the best works of the late Ming master Wu Pin, pervades much of the Nanjing-school painting of early Ch’ing.

The leading master, for us--he was not recognized as that in his time--is Kung Hsien. His 1655 landscape in the exhibition (no. 29), however, does not bear out the above observations. In his early years Kung employed the dry linear manner; by 1655 he was adding shading between parallel contours and multiplying forms to produce monumental landscapes, of which this one is a prime example. It was only later that he would move into the extraordinary explorations of illusionistic light and space, and the quasi-expressionist compositions, for which he is best known. The 1655 landscape, packed with heavily-outlined and strongly shaded forms, evokes the massive power of Northern Sung landscapes, but without the atmospheric and naturalistic softening of those; it follows rather the abstracting direction of much early Ch’ing painting, adhering to the picture surface for the most part, moving back only in a few scooped-out gullies and hollows behind repoussoir trees.

Nothing could be further from this in intent and effect than the 1666 album by Kung Hsien’s contemporary Fan Ch’i (no. 32). Atmospheric space pervades these enchanting pictures, recessions into deep distance is essential to them, and transit through the landscape is their very theme: moving through the world, along paths and roads, or, in two of the leaves, by boat. Effects of sunshine and dusk, and sensitive evocations of time of day, intensify the immediacy of the experiences. Houses are stopping places on the journey, not (as in typical Wu-school paintings of the Ming) refuges for reclusion. Roads lead to temples or hamlets, but are understood to continue beyond. The thematic program seen here originates in painting of the Southern Sung, and is continued in some works by late Ming painters such as Sheng Mao-yeh; it is the central subject of my book The Lyric Journey (1996). Fan Ch’i’s re-creation of of it sacrifices nothing of its evocative poignancy, the feelings of transience and lateness. The original order of the leaves is unknowable, but the winter scene bearing Fan’s inscription must be the last, and is an effective close: the cluster of houses, with no passage indicated beyond them, represents shelter from the cold and a destination finally reached.

Wang Kai was a later and lesser master of the school, best known for his role in the production of the landscape section of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, published in 1679. His 1686 Pavilions on Mt. Li in Snow (no. 48) exemplifies his eclectic approach to painting, and his preference for Sung models. It is a work solidly put together, with no surprises.

Pa-ta Shan-jen and Shih-t’ao

These two major Individualist artists worked independently of regional schools, the first because he lived in a city, Nan-ch’ang, that was far from the major centers of painting, the other because he moved around the great regional centers during his long career--Anhui, Nanjing, Beijing, Yangchou--without, until the end, settling into any one place or style. Both are represented in the exhibition by works so unlike as to demonstrate already the brilliance and versatility of their artists.

Chu Ta or Pa-ta Shan-jen seems to have begun by following a mode of painting, devoted mainly to plant and bird subjects, preserved from the late Sung in Ch’an monasteries, and developing this in odd, non-conformist directions as he painted more and was able to see more paintings by other artists outside that tradition. His “Ink Lotus” (no. 42) is a fine and typical work from his great period in the late 1680s and 1690s, his full maturity. Paintings from this period offer visual ambiguities of space and mass--here, for instance, in the way the lotus stalks are readable (mistakenly) as the outer contours of solid forms, like the outline of the rock--and effects of unbalance, with the weight of massed ink at the top insufficiently supported by the curving lotus stalks. No other late artist except Shih-t’ao stands so prominently apart from his contemporaries, or sustains such a level of originality throughout his oeuvre.

A seemingly minor production comprising two album-leaf landscapes and two works of calligraphy (no. 43) proves to be another that plays tricks with the viewer’s perception. One of the landscapes loosely alludes to the Tung Ch’i-ch’ang mode, which Pa-ta often followed. The other, small and simple as it is, holds more interest, as a kind of backwards performance of the Ni Tsan formula. By placing the ting-tz’u or rest-shelter, a staple of Ni Tsan’s pictures (one imagined sitting in it and gazing off at distant hills), in the far distance without diminishing it in size, Pa-ta turns an old idea upside down, forcing the viewer to locate out there and look back at the ungainly pine tree. The picture offers a quiet jolt with this strange confrontation. If it were done in the ordinary Ni Tsan manner it would be only a trick; in Pa-ta’s prickly brushwork and tight compositional structure it is a small delight.

In a consideration of the problem of value in later Chinese painting, the most difficult artist to encompass, but also the most rewarding, is Shih-t’ao. If he can be very great, he can also, especially in his late period, be dull. He cannot, like Wang Yüan-ch’i, be held to a single standard of quality, nor is he so consistent in stylistic direction as Pa-ta Shan-jen. He seems to experiment with every style he encounters, seeing how he can turn it to his purposes, sometimes but by no means always rewardingly. Any attempt to appraise him as a whole must take into account so many factors that no simple set of criteria will encompass it.

Shih-t’ao’s early style is now established by enough datable works to allow us to place in it such a picture as his Boating on a Clear River (no. 44). At this stage, his strength is in the delicacy and imagination with which small passages are executed--the group of trees in upper left and another just below it, the trees-and-house unit below the boating scholar. The larger projects of organizing these into a coherent composition and controlling specific effects (do the slanting strokes of ink in the upper part indicate rain, or approaching dusk, or just murky sky?), still elude the artist somewhat. Even so, the picture offers many subtle pleasures. By the time of the superb album of 1678 (no. 45) Shih-t’ao has all of his artistic means under control, and can draw on an impressive repertory of brush-manners and compositional types without risking awardness. Each leaf is consistent in style, original in conception, clear in theme--and, most extraordinary of all, the themes are fresh and unhackneyed. Much of the rest of Shih-t’ao’s long career is anticipated in this album--which has been so much written about, by myself among others, that it need not be dealt with at length here.

The other masterwork among the Shih-t’ao group, and a prize within the whole collection, is the 1696 hanging scroll representing The Blue Lotus Pavilion at Kuang-ling (no. 47). This is a painting that deserves quiet, prolonged viewing, a richly-furnished world in itself, revealing more the more one gazes. Shih-t’ao did it while staying in Yangchou, several years after his return from Peking; he records a gathering of friends at this pavilion and adds that at the request of his host he “casually caught its likeness.” The pavilion is presumably the two-storey bulding in lower right, with birds flying around it; another flock of birds is seen in middle left, circling over the village, about to roost, as some have already in the foreground trees. Beyond are masts of fishing boats pulled up on the river shore. The time is evening, and the scene is suffused with mist and sunset light. No human figures are to be seen. The passage into far distance, ending in an undramatic row of hilltops, is done with an ease that belies its real mastery, accomplished through diminution of trees, gradual elimination of detail, atmospheric blurring and dimming.

This nostalgic, poetic, meditative picture bears out Shih-t’ao’s late-period claim to having given up the practice of imitating old styles--or, for that matter, recent and contemporary styles--to simply paint as though he were inventing the art. Just as Shih-t’ao challenged the orthodoxies of painting in his time, a work such as this challenges the Chinese connoisseurs’ contention that one should look at the brushwork in a painting, not the “scenery.” To do that here, to attend to brushwork and style and fail to read the painting as a picture, would be to miss its essence, and miss also much of the pleasure it offers. The same is true of many others of Shih-t’ao’s best works, and much of the best painting that followed him. His achievement, besides opening the way for a broad range of stylistic departures (by artists who mostly cannot, however, be said to have imitated him in any direct way) reveals a large, important truth about eighteenth century and later Chinese painting: the best of the artists after Shih-t’ao were emancipated from the orthodoxy of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and the Four Wangs, while at the same time most of the critics and theorists, up to the present day, were not. The gap between the values of later Chinese painting as they are manifested in the works themselves and the values propounded by theoretical writers of the same period is a problem that confronts anyone trying to deal with the late period. We are best advised, I think, to recognize the gap and believe the paintings.

The Eighteenth Century

The deaths of three major early Ch'ing landscapists within a decade--Shih-t'ao in 1707, Wang Yüan-ch'i in 1715, Wang Hui in 1717--mark a turning point in Chinese painting, of which the sharp decline in the production and importance of landscape is only one symptomatic aspect. We will conclude with a brief look at the small but high-level representation in the exhibition of this aftermath of the 17th century.

Marxist writers in P. R. China were inclined to regard the Yangchou “eccentrics” of the 18th century, as they regarded Hsü Wei and Shih-t’ao before them, as artists who liberated painting from a stifling orthodoxy, which they associated with political conservatism and oppression. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and the Four Wangs were the villains in this particular narrative, and Tung’s works were not to be seen in pre-1977 exhibitions in China. More recent scholarship, whether by Chinese or foreign specialists, has largely rejected this ideological approach and judgements based on it, to adopt more apolitical stances. There is still enough truth in the argument, however, leaving politics aside, that it need not be discarded altogether. Before Shih-t’ao (to oversimplify), good painting accomplished its ends within sets of rules; after him, it often accomplished them by breaking the rules. The corollary of this observation is that breaking the rules can carry more risk, bring about more bad painting, than working within them--a practice that never (as Sung painting attests) precluded or even diminished originality. Non-conformist artists are obliged to formulate styles that offer new value systems to replace the old-established ones, in order to sustain a comparable level of quality and interest in their works.

Before turning to the radicals, a brief look at a curious conservative: Ku Fu-chen. Because of his meticulous and antiquarian style, one encounters his paintings sometimes with false attributions to old masters. Good works by him, nonetheless, such as his 1715 Road to Shu (no. 53), have their charms, in diverting detail and a mild quirkiness. The profusion of small, evenly-weighted forms, however, precludes compositional strength, and Ku’s works in the end barely escape being merely decorative.

Kao Ch’i-p’ei’s variety of rule-breaking lay, as is well known, in his use of his fingers instead of a brush to apply the ink and pigments, a departure that can be a refreshing relief from “good brushwork,” especially when the pictures hold up as interesting and original in other regards--too many of them depend on the unorthodox technique for their appeal. The 1722 album (no. 54) contains leaves of both kinds: some that present too-familiar imagery and do not hold one’s attention for long, others (the female immortal riding a tiger in the clouds, the cormorant fisherman, the two men gazing upward at a rather ominous flight of large, black birds) that seem fresh and unhackneyed.

Ch’en Chuan’s small album of ink-plum paintings (a work I have known for many years--it was owned by a little-known Tokyo dealer, Murakami Tôjidô) is one of the delights of the whole collection. The subject is conventional enough, and the extraordinary dry-brush drawing requires you to attend closely to the pictures for intimate encounters, since they will not leap out at you. Ch’en Chuan’s compositional method, and especially the way he brilliantly exploits the frame, letting it partly dictate the crotchety movements of the branches and twigs, constricting them without uncomfortably cramping them, is anticipated only in some pictures of the same subject by Shih-t’ao, and imitated by later Yangchou artists, notably Wang Shih-shen. But it is the slow, sensitive, dry brushline, often so pale that it all but disappears into the paper, that is most affecting, conveying the extremely soft touch of the artist’s hand. Remains of creases up the center of each leaf show that the album was originally folded vertically, and so was only half its present size; such an album could be carried about in one’s handbag and enjoyed in quiet moments.

At an opposite extreme in manner of execution is Huang Shen’s 1726 album of flower and plant subjects (no. 56). Here the brush moves quickly, as if flutteringly, over the paper. in some places to the point of nearly dissolving the image into configurations of brushstrokes--it is like Hsü Wei without the tension, Pa-ta Shan-jen without the dark aberrations. Huang Shen has learned from Pa-ta the device of isolating the image in the picture space, or forcing it partly out through one margin. His brushwork is dashing, exhilarating, especially where he leaves breaks between strokes without losing the momentum between them, so that the whole structure keeps its coherence. The pervasiveness of tightly curling brush movements stops just short of creating a rococo effect. Even so, this is a performance few artists in the late period could match.

Two more 18th century landscapes and one from the early 19th century complete the exhibition, but, good as they are in themselves (one would be happy to live with Li Shih-cho’s, no. 59, on one’s study wall) they cannot sustain the level reached by the great 17th-century landscapists; the main energies of Chinese painting had moved elsewhere. The exhibition leaves us, then, with the big picture of later Chinese painting essentially unaltered, but filled out with a series of high-quality works by the major masters that allows us to experience again its complexity and its greatness.

Jason: I count on you to make corrections--this was written rather in a hurry, and must have factual mistakes. I didn’t have available most of my library (still in Berkeley, or packed in boxes until we build an addition to this house), or the catalog notes on the individual paintings--some of these are being sent to me by Ms. Huang, and I will write you again with corrections and additions. I’m probably inconsistent in Wade-Giles/pinyin; I used the former, thinking it is standard in Taiwan. (No?) Please insert, wherever you think wise, references to Compelling Image and Distant Mountains, books you know all too well; insert also dates for artists, biblio. info. for books, etc. if the editor requires them. And generally, coordinate with the rest of the catalog. Many thanks, as always. JFC

Dear Ms. Tsai: Here is my manuscript, which I will send in both hard copy and on disc. The latter may have a problem: My computer has recently been de-bugged--a number of viruses--and some may survive on this disc. I assume you have the means to eradicate them.

In Taipei I was shown by Ms. Huang two works by Mei Ch’ing, a hanging scroll and an album, which were not on the printed list. If either or both of these are to be included, let me know and I will write paragraphs about them to be inserted at the proper place--I have slides of both.

I don’t think I will include the album for Wen Cheng-ming’s 80th birthday of which you sent me photos, since I haven’t seen it in the original.

I’m glad to learn from your most recent fax that you are considering printing my essay in English--I would be especially pleased if this were possible.

All the best. Yours,

References in the text

[1] To my eye, the writing may lie too much on the surface of the worn paper. But since the painting might have been trimmed at top--the mountain peak is very close to upper limit, and probably originally had more space above it--the inscription could have been copied from a now-missing upper section.

[2] Cahill, The Distant Mountains, Fig. 39.

CLP 37: 2000 "Painted Illustrations for Jin Ping Mei and Chinese Erotic Albums." Assoc. for Asian Studies, San Diego

Painted Illustrations for Jin Ping Mei and Chinese Erotic Albums

Paper for panel at AAS 2000, San Diego, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Jin Ping Mei.”

This brief presentation--more a report than a paper--has two main aims. First, to pass on to people in other fields of Chinese studies some discoveries and conclusions to which my recent research has led me, and so to open up materials that may be of interest to you; and second, to ask for your help in following up some of these new directions, with information and references that are outside my field of competence. I have already received a great deal of that kind of help from David Roy, Keith McMahon, Charles Stone, and others; but large areas of the picture I’m trying to put together are still fuzzy, and major questions remain unanswered. Because of these aims, today’s talk will be broad rather than focused, a rapid run through a set of interlocked matters, spreading well beyond the Jin Ping Mei illustrations that are its proper topic. Everything I will speak about grows out of a book project on which I’ve been engaged for several years, tentatively titled “Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China”; parts of it, including nearly everything in today’s talk, have been published in three articles, which are listed on the bibliographical handout, and I refer you to those if you want to read more on these matters.

The paintings I’m writing about make up a large and important but unstudied area of Chinese painting, ignored or even scorned by traditional Chinese critics and collectors because they were functional rather than self-expressive. They include (among others) pictures of the kind one would purchase or commission for such occasions as special birthdays, New Year’s celebrations, and weddings; family group pictures, narrative pictures, beautiful women (meiren); and erotic pictures, chiefly albums, my subject today. One of several sub-themes that have emerged unexpectedly in the course of my work is the close relationship between these “urban studio artists,” working chiefly in the great Jiangnan or Yangtze Delta cities, and the painting academy in the imperial court in Beijing, which was in fact staffed mostly with such artists from the cities. The production of beautiful-women pictures and (I argue) erotic pictures within the court was mostly the work of painters from the Jiangnan cities, and reflects, I think, a powerful desire in the Manchu emperors to appropriate some elements of the romantic and erotic culture of the pleasure districts of those cities, more or less covertly, into their courts and their lives. I have tried in my published articles to develop this idea and support it with evidence, and can only allude to it here.

S. (Leaf from late Ming woodblock-printed album pub. by van Gulik.) Up to late Ming, the most common form for erotic paintings appears to have been the handscroll; from the late Ming-early Qing, the album is favored. This change in form accompanies, and partly permits, a deeper change in character. Evidence both literary and pictorial (for the latter, late Ming printed albums such as this one) suggests that typical works of erotic painting before the 17th century presented a series of depictions of sex acts, with titles such as “Twelve Postures” or “Ten Glorious Positions.” (No erotic albums from Ming or earlier survive, to my knowledge.)

S. (Another leaf from the same.) These series correspond loosely with erotic fiction before Jin Ping Mei, such as the 16th century Ruyijun zhuan translated and studied by Charles Stone, of which the second half details serially the debaucheries of Wu Zetian with her lover Xue Aocao. This type of erotic album continues into later periods, and accounts for the great majority of surviving examples, which can mostly be dismissed as crude and uninteresting.

S. (Leaf from album by early Qing master Gu Jianlong, about which I’ll speak in a moment.) A new type of erotic album, however, appears to have been created in early Qing, in which leaves with erotic imagery are interspersed with others presenting scenes of flirtations, seductions, poignant moments in love affairs. Even in the overtly erotic leaves, the hard-core images appear in richly complex settings with sub-themes such as voyeurism that embed them in quasi-narrative situations.

S. (Leaf from another album from same period; the erotic image in the mirror has been painted out by the publisher.) These new elements serve, in Stephen Owen’s term and sense, to contextualize the erotic imagery. It scarcely needs pointing out that this new form, which I call the part-erotic album, can be seen as corresponding loosely with the new type of erotic fiction, notably Jin Ping Mei, and was probably inspired by it, perhaps by the artists’ experiences in making illustrations for it.

S. The earliest identifiable example of the new type of erotic album bears seals of the early Qing Suzhou master Gu Jianlong, and is known only through an old reproduction album--in which the publisher has expunged the unprintable parts by painting them over. Here, for instance, the young man is offering a sheaf of bills instead of, as he surely was in the original, his penis; in either case, he is soliciting oral sex from the reluctant maid, while another watches from behind.

S. In another leaf, the young man shows an erotic scroll to several girls, to soften them up for seduction. The intricate spatial schemes of these leaves contribute to their effect in ways I cannot analyze here; they are in some part derived from European pictures, especially northern European pictures (Dutch and Flemish), that were to be seen in China by this time, mostly in engravings.

S. A leaf in which three maids gaze at a sleeping man, whose penis must have been exposed before bowdlerization. Another observation that I can only assert, since time doesn’t permit a full exposition, is that this new type of album introduces an unprecedented form: a set of self-sufficient scenes that I am calling vignettes, which neither illustrate any pre-existing text, nor present successive episodes in any story that binds them together. (Textually oriented people seem inclined to disbelieve this and look for passages in fiction and plays that the pictures can be seen as illustrating, or try to establish some narrative sequence within the leaves; both, I think, are misdirected projects.)

S. A leaf with no overt erotic content at all, only a group of women--wives, concubines, and servants?--playing cards around a table. Because of the limitations of single slide projection, I will ask you to hold this image in your minds while I show

S. This one, a leaf from the series of two hundred large leaves (over 15” tall), painted with heavy colors on silk, making up a set of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei. Numerous correspondences with the published album and others of his works allow us to attribute the set confidently to Gu Jianlong--figure style, compositional method, furnishings, and so forth. Originally mounted in four albums, the work has been published in reproduction (see handout), without an attribution, as Qinggong zhenbao bimei tu (Two Hundred Beauties Pictures [Formerly] Treasured in the Qing Palace.)

S. (Another leaf: Ximen Qing and Li Ping’er). It must have been produced in the palace during Gu Jianlong’s period of service as court artist under the Kangxi Emperor, from around 1662 to the late 1670s, when he returned to Suzhou. The albums remained in the palace through later reigns (they bear seals of Qianlong and Jiaqing) until they were removed in the 1920s, reportedly by Zhang Zuolin; his son Zhang Xueliang took them to Taiwan, where some part of the series was sold. I know the whereabouts of 25 leaves, eight in the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, 17 in a private collection. I would be very grateful for any news about the whereabouts of the remainder.

S. A sumptuous use of gold and pigments not easily available outside the palace, along with the lavishness of workmanship in detail and decorative patterns, confirms that this is a court production, probably accomplished by Gu with the help of assistants.

S. It seems most likely that the albums were done for Kangxi himself, seen here as a young man in an unsigned portrait that might well be by the same Gu Jianlong, since it belongs to the period when Gu was at court, producing among other things portraits much like this one. But while he was a capable portraitist, Gu’s reputation as a painter of high-level erotic pictures, and more broadly as a purveyor of Jiangnan popular culture, may have been another factor behind his invitation to court. The attraction exerted on Kangxi by the pleasures of the southern cities is expressed in his fear of being ensnared by them; in a poem he composed in 1705 he pities Sui Yangdi, who fell victim to them, and writes: “Oh, that I would not let [my heart] be driven to follow my lusts and my craving for extravagance.”[1]

S. Many of the scenes, but not all, follow the compositions of the better-known series of 200 woodblock-printed illustrations (two for each chapter), by an unknown artist, which accompanied the Chongzhen-era edition of the text. (These are the pictures that appear with David Roy’s translation.) In some, such as this scene in which Pan Jinlian is humiliated in the garden,

S. the composition is adopted by Gu Jianlong in a fairly straightforward way, only reversed and with minor changes in details. But of course the addition of color, and the larger size, alter the effect fundamentally, even raising the question: in what sense can the painted series be called illustrations at all? There is no indication that they ever accompanied a written text, and the albums would be too ponderous to hold while one read. They stand on their own more than the woodblock illustrations as self-sufficient works, less dependent on the text, although of course knowledge of the novel infused any cultivated viewer’s reading of them.

S. In some cases the painting adds resonances and depths to the event, as in the scene of Ximen Qing being fellated by the wetnurse Ruyi’er. The woodblock picture sets the figures in a small room opening onto the garden, while

S. the painting places it in a fully-realized interior, of the kind Gu Jianlong was so skilled at creating, and adds the presence of the two maids in the next room as at least potential voyeures.

S. Gu brings to the series of illustrations the skills he had developed earlier, presumably, in erotic albums such as the one introduced before. In one leaf of that album, the woman is in bed with her lover (absurdly replaced in the overpainting with two cats); the artist lays out in his composition an elaborate narrative leading up to the moment depicted: they enter in upper left from the garden, drink tea, move into another room where she starts to play the qin (it is partly out of its wrapper) before they both succumb to more urgent urges; they remove their clothes (seen draped hastily over furniture) and retire to the bed.

S. The implied narrative in one of the Jin Ping Mei illustrations is constructed along more or less the same U-shaped path: here it is Pan Jinlian who rises in the night, ostensibly to relieve herself but really to have sex with Wang Chao’er, and who makes her way from a further room into the foreground space of his, removes her clothes, and joins him in the bed--a course one follows by tracking the visual clues. In these ways and others, Gu Jianlong is expanding the capacities of narrative painting and erotic painting--the two are linked more closely than one might have expected, without the parallel linked development in fiction of the same period--to permit elaborate discursive programs that had scarcely been attempted in earlier Chinese paintings of interiors with figures. My analyses of these, while opening new lines of investigation, will leave a great deal of room for others who know the novel better than I to develop further parallels--and, of course, differences--between literary and pictorial means of expression.

S. Another of the leaves. From the historians, I would appreciate information and views, even conjectural, about this large question of the Manchu emperors’ involvement with Han Chinese erotic culture, a matter continually raised in my three articles but only on the basis of what I have been able to put together from the paintings and from limited readings, chiefly in secondary sources. A Manchu translation of Jin Ping Mei was made only in 1708, probably by one of Kangxi’s brothers; the emperor himself is said to have opposed translating it, because of its obscenity.[2] (If we find a contradiction here, it is not an isolated one; other discrepancies between the public stances and private behavior of the Manchu emperors in this area of their lives are touched on in my articles.) So Kangxi, if we are right in thinking that the albums were made for him, must have known the novel from reading it in the original (as Hal Kahn assures me he could have done.) It may simply be that he knew the original woodblock illustrations and wanted a larger, more revealing and engrossing set in color. This is another question best left open, but I will welcome informed opinions.

S. I’ll note quickly, in passing, that Gu Jianlong appears to have made also a series of illustrations for Rou Bu Tuan, but to my knowledge they exist only in copies, notably a sixteen-leaf album from which this is one leaf.

S. Among the fairly few other surviving examples of the artistically high-level part-erotic album known to me is an eight-leaf example by Xu Mei, another versatile master from Suzhou who was at court later in the Kangxi period; he was one of the team of painters who in 1713-14 produced the huge celebratory scroll for the emperor’s sixtieth birthday. So subtle are some leaves of this album that it may require close and sustained looking to absorb their erotic content. In a garden scene, for instance, the recumbent woman gazes out insouciantly, almost at us, as if oblivious to the exposure of her bare bottom through the transparent pantaloons. Her young husband or lover stares fixedly at what she reveals, while fanning the stove, with a corresponding air of calm that is belied by the erection faintly visible through his own. The girl servant at right turns back furtively to watch them both, as the cat does more openly;

S. (detail) and we apprehend all four in our own gaze, completing the criss-crossing pattern of looking, while assuring ourselves that our interest is purely aesthetic and scholarly. It is all very convoluted and pleasurable. Erotic pictures in China had come a long way from the time when they served principally for simple arousal and masturbatory purposes, a function assumed for the whole genre by those who dismiss it as unworthy of attention.

S. One more excellent erotic album bears seals of Leng Mei, who was a prominent figure master in the imperial academy in the late Kangxi period and again under Qianlong. But the paintings do not match Leng Mei’s in style or period, and are, I believe, by an artist active a bit later who was more sophisticated than Leng, perhaps a relative or studio assistant. Several of the leaves are set outdoors, and have an attractively bucolic character. In 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, with pastoral-like dreams of return to a pre-blasé state where youthful freshness can somehow be recaptured. It hints also at the allure of child sex, and thus, like so many leaves in these albums, contains a tinge of the near-perverse, which is somehow intensified here by the way the ox 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.

S. Finally, a series of leaves, probably originally around 50, produced by a so-far unidentified academy master under the Qianlong Emperor, whose seals are on it. Like the Jin Ping Mei illustrations, the work remained in the palace until some time in this century. 24 of the non-erotic leaves were published in an old reproduction album (see the handout); half of those were sold at auction in 1991. They must have been accompanied originally by a like number of openly erotic leaves, but the whereabouts of these is unknown, nor have they been reproduced.

S. We can get some sense of what they looked like from a similar album, probably by the same artist, in which the erotic leaves are preserved; this, again, is known only from its having passed through auction in recent years. There is no evidence of its having ever been in the palace; the artist, whoever he was, seems to have worked both inside and outside the court academy. Again, the questions raised by the production of this large-scale series, a work of particular refinement and elegance, within the Qianlong palace cannot be answered now, at least by me. But identifying it and placing it is a first step.

S. Some of the available leaves from the palace series are simply scenes of upper-class or aristocratic family life in sumptuously appointed villas; some of the men wear scholar-officials’ caps. This was exactly the milieu in which the leaves of the high-level erotic albums had from the beginning been set. What particular significance this imagery might have had in the Qianlong court is another question still to be answered. I will only point out that the pictures in these albums make up a largely untapped resource for social historians, historians of material culture, and so forth, offering imagery of a kind that can’t easily be found elsewhere.

S. I will conclude, and illustrate that final observation, with two leaves from an 18th century album by some follower of Gu Jianlong. This leaf I’ill show but immediately disown--as a true representation, that is, of typical reader response to Jin Ping Mei (which is the title on the book lying on the floor.) I show it for its immediate relevance to this panel--this is a new interpretation, whether or not interdisciplinary--and as another example (rather coarse) of the characteristics I ascribe to these albums: thematic inventiveness, an implied narrative, an ironic tone, a voyeure, a composition that encourages visual penetration, and so forth.

S. Another leaf from the same album. If these drop us to a lower level of refinement, we are compensated by a higher-than-usual level of entertainment. The master of the house is attempting sex in a garden house with a servant girl,

S. but proves incapable of carrying through his purpose. She lies back bored, impatient, and unsatisfied, while

S. the man’s wife approaches over the bridge, wielding a club. I offer this to all those who are looking, as indeed they should be, for images of strong women in Chinese literature and art, even those who paid for their strength by being branded as shrews and viragos. There is no question here about whose side the artist was on; she comes through far more positively than he. With this final image I look forward to the day when paintings, along with texts, will serve as more than illustrations, as part of the data, in our accounts of Chinese social history of the late period.

References in the text

[1] Silas Wu, Passage to Power, p. 90.

[2] Berthold Laufer, “Skizze der Manjurischen Literatur,” Keleti Szemle IX, 1908, p. 32. I am grateful to James Bosson for this reference.