CLP 20 : 1995 Talk for Center for Chinese Studies, UCB

Center for Chinese Studies UCB, talk, Tues Sept. 27. 1995

I'm here to talk abt methodological issues, as I see them, raised by directions taken in Chinese painting studies of recent times. I've written out a kind of text, very quickly, as fast as I could type; no less rambling for being written down.

Let me begin by talking abt where I see myself going in my own research and writing. Some of you heard series of three lectures at UAM--representations of women in late Ch. ptg. I've recently prepared another, which I'll give on Oct. 14 in other CCS series (Friday lectures.) Both deal with bodies or groups of Ch ptgs that don't fit into standard accounts of the subject, accounts that are based heavily on Chinese textual sources. Almost everything I've been doing for some years is implicitly or openly a critique of those accounts of Ch ptg, including my own from earlier years, that accept more or less uncritically the versions of it presented in standard Chinese writings. What this means I can't go into here without pictures; but central to it is issue of pictorial representations that are more or less naturalistic, realistic, illusionistic--whatever. These words don't by any means mean the same thing; but can be lumped together for my present purpose as a kind of composite designation of what I'm talking about: Ptg that represents, somehow persuading us that it's "true to outer reality," showing us what the thing or scene really looks like. Chinese turn against this powerfully in their theoretical writings--refer to it as hsing-ssu or "form-likeness": which comes to be a pejorative term from at least the 14th century on. Looked on as low-class, philistine criterion for judging art. In recent western discussions of art we can find a curiously similar phenomenon: what was once an acceptable concept, "truth to nature" or "truth to outer reality", now not only questioned but denied as a workable idea--nothing is more unacceptable in recent discourses on art than that; kind of taboo topic. But I want nonetheless to make it central to my talk today.

In context of Ch. ptg, means (among other things) representations that don't emphasize hand or handwriting of indiv. master ("brushwork") , or include allusions to past styles in the ptg (giving it an art-historical character), or otherwise adopt one or another of the devices that serve to infuse high-culture values into work. I find myself more and more drawn to ptgs that implicitly (not explicitly--artists who do this kind of ptg are typically voiceless) implicitly reject the whole aesthetic system of literati or scholar-amateur ptg, pictures that are meant to be read & appreciated & used as pictures, as satisfying representations of their subjects, and that consequently are condemned & ignored & virtually expunged from "official" versions of Ch ptg--works by So. Sung acad. masters, certain Ming artists including those of late Ming Suchou, certain works of 17-18 c. that incorporate elements of western illusionism. (My preoccupation with the anti-representational bias of the literati, and with the excluded areas of Ch. ptg., began in my Norton Lectures fifteen years ago; I've been struggling with it ever since, and taking some flak from colleagues for it, especially Chinese.)

Now we get to crux. When we speak of "representation," term used these days (for instance in campus journal of that name) for literary, pictorial, even musical representations. (Trendy people hyphenate etc.) Although these dif. kinds of representation are sometimes treated as though they raise similar problems, really profoundly different. Possibility of illusionism--picture that persuades it's "like real thing," "like image in mirror" etc. more present in visual arts than in literary, where whole notion of "representing" thing or event in words raises big problems. In old-fashioned, somewhat discredited version, picture could be more or less truthful to nature, could approach status of photograph, i.e. as a seemingly "objective" rendering of what's out there before your eyes. Argument made that invention of photography coopted this function of ptg, made it pointless--photograph could do it better. Svetlane Alpers deals with 17th cent. manifestations--use of camera obscura in Dutch ptg or Canaletto etc. Music somewhere in between: if composer chooses to "represent" bird-calls, say (as 18c French composer did), we could presumably determine by computer or otherwise whether he had "got it right," or how right. Or Honegger, "Pacific 231"--or (moving away from "representation") Chopin in "Raindrop Prelude" or Richard Strauss or Berlioz, program music--etc. Electronic recording of course equiv. of photograph: "true" representation. 18th cent. composer made series of little tunes you could play on your recorder to teach to your finch. Now would play record. Nothing quite like this in literary "representation"--something in poetry or prose may seem "true" or "right" to us, but this dif. matter. Also, of course, question of objective truth in writing history (which I gather is becoming a discussable issue again.) At conference on sacred mts in China, one scholar (etc.)

In spite of these differences between basic nature of representation in different media, writers on pictorial art today (who would like us to call it "visual culture") try to persuade us that problems in pictorial art not essentially different from those in literature; all essentially matter of convention, like linguistic conventions, arbitrary and culturally-conditioned system of signs, one of which corresponds as well as any other with "outer reality". (I know perfectly well the objections to the terms I'm using; but don't want, for now, to be prevented or intimidated by that from using them.) Powerful argument made by dominant theorists that whole idea of "truthful" representation misdirected; illusionism purely another cultural convention, etc. I have on other occasions made arguments for why I think this doesn't work. Don't mean to do that today; will only say that the whole notion seems to me loony, leave it at that.

But: bigger implications. In highly moralizing & politicizing climate of scholarship now, argument being made that idea of illusionism, "truthful" and convincing representation, is stragegem of dominant culture to put down subordinate cultures. And (to get closer to point of my talk) China and Europe are only cultures that have produced pictorial arts that seriously undertake this project, and, in their different ways, produce immensely persuasive pictorial solutions to it. Leaving aside what position one takes on idea of illusionism, these are only two systems of pictorial art about which this claim can be seriously made. Which puts us Ch. ptg specialists in crucial position.

Story of Hist. of Art 30: my lecture; dev. of space system, for purpose of narrative etc.; afterwards confronted (in friendly way) by Joanna Williams & Maribeth Graybill, who pointed out gently that this left them in awkward position, since none of this happened in artistic traditions they were presenting, Indian and Japanese.

Another case (outside our subject a bit): argument abt Muromachi ptg: (continue. Shimada/Matsushita/Tanaka: all dominant males. All "privileging" ink-ptg based on Chinese models, which uses Chinese tech. of atmospheric perspective etc., over native Yamato-e trad. which derives from Heian ptg. Masculine vs. feminine. Chino Kaori. Norman Bryson. Bryson has taken up this cause as part of his anti- Gombrich project. (Gombrich, who was at recent symposium on Ch. ptg, best writer on theory of representation, takes it seriously.) Young art historians today learn Gombrich-bashing from undergrad. years, delight in it, feel it locates them on cutting edge. But if we ask a "wrong" question, who offers more useful understandings of how processes across time in art work, Gombrich is more or less unavoidable choice--I quote him frequently in my lectures--and Bryson essentially useless.

All this makes up one example of how following current trends in western scholarship can, I think, hobble you. Another: recent session at CAA mtg in NYC, in which group of papers intended to exemplify new approaches to Ch. art. In one of these, speaker was showing series of works by Chinese woman artist, very good artist, and talking about her dependence on her Chinese roots; but as I watched it became blindingly obvious (as it had been to me before--I've known her for some decades) that although she had indeed started from orthodox Chinese base, great transformation in her style occurred after she'd come to west, worked with her husband in museum that had important collection of Asian art, and been exposed to Japanese works. We can then observe her doing calligraphic configurations over torn-paper collages of different-colored papers, after Heian models; doing paintings on a ground of applied squares of gold foil, after Momoyama models; etc. We can observe it but we can't talk about it: if I had risen and pointed this out, I would have evoked a lot of resentment. Others must have been as aware as I was of this dependence on Japanese sources; others were, like myself, uncomfortable about pointing it out. We're obliged to pussyfoot, at some loss to scholarly integrity. That questions of derivation from other cultures have to be handled with sensitivity I would certainly agree, and try to do it myself; that they can in effect be taboo, at least when they go in certain directions, I'm reluctant to put up with. But that's where we are. My pursuit of evidences of the effect of European pictorial art on Chinese artists of the 17th cent. has got me charges of "orientalism." This will come out in my talk in October.

Another paper in same session questioned whether we could properly make distinction bet. early Ch. writing & early Ch. quasi-pictorial representations (of animals, chiefly) on bronzes: speaker used article by Chan Hansen, god help us, as support. When I read that article, I thought to myself: Oh no, somebody is going to use this to take us back to "writing & ptg have a single origin" myth--giant step backwards. And sure enough. Speaker also suggested that distinguishing writing from pictures and "privileging" writing was product of western Aristotelian thought, inapplicable to China. I rose after session and offered the view that arguments in too many of the papers were based on what seemed to me a grand non-sequitur: that if we can tie an opposition argument to one or another of the currently odious faults, western rationalism or logocentrism or Orientalism or elitism or whatever, this not only discredits your opponent's argument but also strengthens yours--they stopped short of saying "proves yours to be right," but that was implicit.. But of course it doesn't do anything of the kind; your argument is no better or worse in itself for being associated with this or that ideological position.

In a commencement address I gave several months ago (one I'm not proud of--Fred was there) I outlined some positions I'd arrived at in this late stage of my career, and said that anyone in my field--or in the fields of most of you--finds himself/herself pressed upon from two sides by great bodies of scholarship, Chinese and western, each advising us earnestly that if we don't adopt it wholeheartedly as the basis for our work, that work will be without value, or at least seriously weakened. And yet the two are in effect incompatible with each other. I suggested that to fail to draw productively on either one is fatal, but that to swallow either one whole, to accept its demands on us completely, is also fatal. How we maneuver between these, what we choose to adopt from each, goes a long way toward defining our scholarly stances or positions. Why I believe that swallowing whole the western cutting-edge approaches is fatal will be apparent from the foregoing: they impress and endear you to certain of your colleagues while alienating you from much of your audience, they close off too many moves that might be productive, and they don't in the end cast nearly as much real illumination on the materials you are dealing with as the approaches they repudiate. Why I believe that we can't accept uncritically the Chinese ways of dealing with Chinese cultural products scarcely needs outlining, in such a company--most of you have faced it, in one way or another--but let me try anyway, in my remaining minutes.

Back in the early 80s Martin Powers (then of UCLA) and I organized a panel at College Art Assn. meeting in L.A. on "New Directions in Chinese Art Studies." In position paper presented then, I took as my text a remark made by Cyril Birch in the doctoral exam of one of my students. Talking about the Confucian moralizing prefaces written for Chinese plays, he said to her: You should take them very seriously, but don't believe them. I broadened the application of that to Chinese writings on painting: take them very seriously, but don't believe them. Such a statement doesn't sound very radical; but question of how far we continue to follow long-established Chinese ways of thinking about their art and culture still a big issue in my field. At huge symposium on Tung Ch'i-ch'ang two years ago in Kansas City, it surfaced more openly than it had before: papers seemed more than previously divided between those that fitted comfortably within Chinese orthodoxy that Tung himself played big part in establishing, vs. those that questioned or attacked this orthodoxy, and tried to "deconstruct Tung" as somebody put it. Some speakers, including one Chinese (Lu Fusheng of Shanghai), trying to apply western critical theory, semiotic theory etc., to Tung's output; others (including organizer of symposium, Wai-kam Ho, who was very uncomfortable with direction it was taking) were arguing that because Chinese cultural expressions are created on fundamentally different premises from those that underlie the European and American, western critical theory can't or shouldn't be applied to them. Wen Fong and Tu Wei-ming both joined into this argument. I knew it already from Tu's arguments (made for instance at a symposium on Zen Buddhism that we both attended) that in dealing with Chinese thought and culture one has to do it from within, accepting on some level the assumptions that the thinkers or artists did; it's an argument that has a lot of merit. But it nevertheless makes me uncomfortable. In field of Ch. literature, some who argue that there is no true metaphor in Chinese poetry and literature, since the correspondences that seem to us metaphorical were for the Chinese real--in their correlative universe, that is, these weren't tropes invented by the poet or writer, but real correspondences that they were recognizing. After encountering this argument in writings of Stephen Owen, Pauline Yu, and others, I talked with several of you to find out how you deal with it--it makes me uncomfortable. This,. again, seems to me basic issue in our field, which I'm sure you've all come up against in some connection, and which you can probably formulate better than I have. Anyway, I'll stop here and let others talk.

CLP 16: 1991 "Chang Ta-ch'ien's Forgeries of Old Master Paintings." Symposium, Sackler Museum, D.C

CHANG TA-CH'IEN'S FORGERIES OF OLD-MASTER PAINTINGS

Paper by James Cahill for symposium "Chang Dai-chien and His Art, Sackler Gallery, Washington D.C., Nov. 22, 1991. (Note: the Ss in boldface are references to slide changes.)

(Introductory: compliments on exhibition, catalog. Fu Shen's surprising success in getting owners of fakes to lend them, and have them published in catalog, as that.)

This is a paper, or perhaps better a slide show with commentary, of which the public presentation has been long delayed--for nearly thirty years. I planned to deliver something like this at the first great gathering of Chinese painting specialists, the "post-mortem conference" for the Chinese Art Treasures Exhibition, held at Asia House Gallery in New York in October of 1962. My presentation has grown to be much larger, and now has a quite different purpose: to commemorate and in a curious way honor its subject, Chang Ta-ch'ien, as a great forger of Chinese old-master paintings, instead of warning the world about them, as I meant to do then. Since much of what I will present comes from personal experience, I hope you will forgive a somewhat autobiographical tone.

(S,S) I met Chang first in Kyoto in 1955, when I was a Fulbright student and he had come to work with the publisher Benrido on the four volumes of reproductions of his collection, Ta-feng-t'ang ming-chi. He was staying at Kyoto's most elegant ryokan, the Tawaraya, and I visited him there. Since he had studied textile making in Kyoto for two years from 1917 and had been back to Japan often since then, he knew the city well, and spoke some Japanese, so that we could communicate; also, he was traveling with the art critic Chu Hsing-chai, who served as his English interpreter. My memory is of sitting with Chang drinking tea and talking about particular paintings; he had a brush and paper in front of him, and was sketching passages from them as we talked--I would ask "What do you think of the so-called Ch'ien Hsüan in Detroit?" and he would do a detail from it, perhaps a frog and dragonfly, as he replied. This was my introduction, and an extremely impressive one, to his extraordinary visual command of the whole past of Chinese painting.

Other memories include being at painting viewings with him, arranged by my then-teacher Shûjiro Shimada--Osvald Siren was also in Kyoto at the time, and I recall a meeting at the Fujii Yurinkan when Chang wrote a colophon on a handscroll of theirs attributed to Hui-tsung, listing in it all our names; it will no doubt puzzle scholars of the future. I remember the dealer Kawai Shôgadô, whom Chang owed an obligation for a T'ang silver box Kawai had given him, asking him to paint an album of landscapes in the styles of early Ch'ing masters such as Shih-t'ao, Pa-ta, K'un-ts'an etc.; Kawai's intent, as he told me, was to use the album in detecting Chang's forgeries of those masters. But Chang, as always, was one step ahead: his "imitations" of them in this album were recognizably in their styles, but were quite different from the styles he would use when forging them. Again, a dazzling performance of which I was already able to appreciate the subtleties.

Other reminiscences are irrelevant to this paper, but are hard to suppress. Being introduced to Szechwan cuisine by Chang at the restaurant at Roppongi that he patronized, when I visited him in Tokyo; audaciously persuading this famous personage to come with me to the Yûshima Seidô, the Confucian temple at Ochanomizu that sold Chinese antiques, to give me courage to spend $150 of my Fulbright stipend on a handscroll painting (it was the "Fishermen" handscroll by Wu Wei). Chang pronounced it genuine, and I bought it.

I was not aware, then, that Chang was producing forgeries of T'ang-Sung paintings as well as Ming-Ch'ing; that realization came after I returned to the Freer Gallery in 1956. I brought with me color transparencies I had made from a remarkable painting that had appeared in Japan, owned by the dealer Ogiwara, which I hoped the Freer would buy. (S,S) It was a Bodhisattva holding a glass with flowers, purportedly from Tun-huang, with an inscription containing a date corresponding to 757. Most of you will be familiar with it from Wen Fong's excellent 1962 article on forgeries in Chinese painting, in which this work is analyzed skillfully and shown to be a fabrication, copied from a figure still on the wall of one of the caves at Tun-huang. (I deliberately begin with a case in which I myself was taken in, to avoid any implication in what follows of criticizing the connoisseurship of others--we were all taken in, at one time or another.) The Freer did not pursue the painting, but not because of any doubts I had about it.

(S,S) Some time after this, the dealer Joseph Seo brought us for consideration another would-be Tun-huang painting, also dated 757, with the same donor (or his wife) mentioned in the inscription; we borrowed it to study. (It is reproduced in color in one of the Ta-feng-t'ang volumes.) Now our suspicions were aroused a bit, by the circumstance of two related works appearing within a short time. The Freer's Japanese mounter Takashi Sugiura looked at it carefully and pronounced the damning verdict that this purported T'ang painting was in fact done on Japanese silk (he was quite firm and specific about this). (S--)With the owner's permission we took pigment samples that were analyzed by John Gettens of the Freer's technical laboratory; he told us that one of the pigments, the yellow as I recall, was not used until some time in the 19th century. (Note also the flattening, completely non-volumetric drawing.)

(S,S) The detection of this one focused my suspicions on a recent Freer purchase (for which I wasn't responsible--it had been accepted for purchase by the director Archibald Wenley before I joined the staff in 1957), the handscroll representing "Three Worthies of Wu-chung," which presented itself as a work of around the time of Li Kung-lin, possibly by him. We put this through the same kind of technical examination, and it also flunked. (S,S) Besides the yellow, a white pigment--titanium dioxide--again was impossible for the early date claimed for the painting. (The technical details are no doubt still preserved in the Freer's files.) (S--) And Sugiura pointed out that although the silk was rent everywhere, the individual threads had not decomposed, and still had their flexibility and tensile strength. This was enough in itself to indicate artificial aging.

It was clear that these three works, along with others that appeared over the next few years, had identifiable physical and stylistic characteristics that could not be easily matched in genuinely old paintings. (S--) The areas of heavy pigment were rubbed and abraded in a more or less uniform way, and sometimes partly blackened, as if by pigment discoloration. (This is a detail from another Buddhist painting, included in Chang's posthumous gift to the Palace Museum in Taiwan). (S--) Light spatters of dilute ink onto the silk were meant to represent mildew spots partly removed through washing in remounting. The silk itself had a distinctive color and look, the product of artificial aging. Shûjirô Shimada remarked to me that the inscriptions on these paintings, which purportedly spanned centuries in date, seemed all to be from a single hand. (Fu Shen has studied them and concluded that it is probably the hand of Chang himself, although he also reports another opinion that it was done by his third wife.) (S--) The brush-drawing is strangely lifeless, representing presumably Chang's attempted re-creation of the purity and impersonality of brushwork as he had seen it in anonymous early paintings such as those at Tun-huang. (S--) Structural faults can be detected, drawing that does not "read" representationally, such as the non-organic drawing of a Bodhisattva's hand pointed out by Wen Fong in his article. (S--) Most cleverly, clues are planted in hard-to-read seals and inscriptions, which, when deciphered and identified, prove to match up with old, somewhat obscure records. Scholar-curators followed these clues with increasing excitement, like Hansel and Gretel following the trail of bread-crumbs left by the witch to lead them to her house where they would be eaten; they arrived at the conclusion that Chang had intended them to, and felt pride in having uncovered a long-neglected masterwork. The construction of these false trails itself required an unusual knowledge and ingenuity, a kind of scholarship-in-reverse that creates the data instead of uncovering and analyzing it.

By this time, I was of course catching on to what was happening, and who was behind it. The project of following Chang Ta-ch'ien's tracks and trying to detect his fabrications became a fascination for me; it was like playing a complicated game with a very capable adversary. (S,S) For anyone working in the field of Chinese painting at that time, Chang was a more or less inescapable figure. For instance, after my Skira book on Chinese painting was published in 1960, more than one Chinese friend (one of them, I recall, was Cheng Te-k'un) told me that while my selection was generally good, I had made one major mistake: reproducing the Sumitomo Shih-t'ao "Waterfall on Mt. Lu" (a detail from which was on my title-page.) When I would argue for the authenticity of this great work, which I knew well from visits to Sumitomo Kan'ichi in Oiso, they would play their trump card: they had been personally assured by Chang Ta-ch'ien himself that he had painted it. These reports disturbed me, and I took the trouble of checking into the matter. What I discovered was that the painting had come to Japan, and entered the collection of Kuwana Tetsujô, as early as 1908, when Chang was nine years old. After that I had my counter-argument ready, for those unwilling to accept the simple truth that the painting was far beyond Chang's capacity: he was indeed precocious, but not that precocious. It would appear that part of his effort of obfuscation was to lay claim to works that in fact were not his.

(S,S) Chang visited the Freer on several occasions during these years, to see paintings and talk; here we see him on the steps of the Freer in October 1958 with his wife, his son Paul, the artist Fang Chao-ling, and a young Freer curator who was given at that time to bow ties. In the other photo, my infant son Nicholas is getting his first view of a great Chinese artist. I learned a lot from going through parts of the old Freer collection with Chang, showing him paintings I had discovered among the neglected ones, asking and recording his opinions on these and others, and listening always for clues to his practice of making forgeries. (S,S) I remember once asking him over dinner (at the Peking Restaurant, out Wisconsin Avenue) about the several versions of Chang Feng's portrayal of Chu-ko Liang: one in Japan (published in Yonezawa's book on Ming painting) and another in the hands of a New York dealer--both paintings for which I knew Chang had been the source; and a third, which I took to be the original, published in the volume of Ho Kuan-wu's collection, T'ien-ch'i shu-wu ts'ang-hua chi. Which, I asked him, was the genuine work? But Chang was not to be cornered: his answer was that Chang Feng was quite fond of that subject, and painted it several times. They were all genuine. Foiled again.

(S--) Meanwhile, more of Chang's fabrications were turning up in far-flung places, hailed as major acquisitions by some of the great museums. Some of them passed through the hands of the artist-dealer Chiang Er-shih, who was described to me (before I had actually met him) as the only person who ever managed to outsmart Chang Ta-ch'ien, and who seems nonetheless to have been acting sometimes as Chang's agent. In 1957 the Musee Cernuschi in Paris acquired the "Horses and Grooms" handscroll ascribed loosely to the T'ang master Han Kan, which was said to have been bought by Chang Ta-ch'ien from a local official while he was at Tun-huang. According to a colophon written by P'u Ju, it had been discovered in 1900 in one of the caves. I had been able to see it when I was in Paris at the beginning of 1956, and now recognized it as one of my growing group. (In more recent years I have used it to test and train the eyes of students: after showing them the stylistic characteristics of genuine T'ang figure and horse paintings, I put this on the screen and ask: What about this? The sharp-eyed ones notice at once that the figures and horses are pressed together as two-dimensional forms, occupying no space and with none around them, and that the straight, stiff drapery-fold drawing also works against any volumetric rendering.) As with the imitations of Vermeer by the Dutch forger van Meegeren, the passage of time seems to erode the plausibility of the fakes, until works that once fooled the great experts end up looking transparently wrong to undergraduate students. I do not know how to account for this phenomenon, and only mean to draw attention to it.

(S,S) The year before this, in 1956, the Honolulu Academy of Arts had purchased the "Sleeping Gibbon" with a Liang K'ai signature; I saw another version in the collection of the Falks in New York. (Both are in the present exhibition.) One of the collections in Kyoto to which Shimada had introduced me during my Fulbright year there was that of Professor Ando; and in it (S--) was the painting that served as a source for both forgeries: one of a pair of pictures of gibbons attributed to Mu-ch'i. It had been published in Kokka magazine in 1926, and I assume that Chang made his forgeries from that reproduction, although it is possible that he saw the original in Kyoto. Having recognized this source, I mentioned it in a letter to Gustav Ecke, who had acquired the so-called Liang K'ai for the Honolulu Academy, and he was unfazed, or professed to be. He wrote me on October 19, 1958 (I still have the letter): "Many thanks for drawing my attention on Kokka no. 425. As a diligent student I should have paged Kokka issue by issue years ago, but of course did not do so. This version of the Gibbon is for me an important document, especially as it comes from the Matsudaira collection and is thus likely to have been in Japan for centuries...[He goes on to agree with me in giving a Yüan date to the version in Japan, and continues:] The inferiority of the Matsudaira version seems to me to speak to the eyes, viz. [that is] bamboo, fur, splashes and washes, not to speak of the expression. [He mentions the Falk version as a well-known Chang Ta-ch'ien fake, which he had known in Peking, asks me to be "discreet" about it, and goes on:] Our Gibbon scroll has a good pedigree (back to Southern Sung), acknowledged long ago already, before Chang Ta-ch'ien's hay-days, by George Yeh's uncle [Yeh Kung-cho], then one of the best connoisseurs of the old school..." The version in Japan, then, was for him simply a copy of the "Liang K'ai" in his museum.

Ecke's faith in the Yeh Kung-cho inscription, however, was misplaced: Yeh was one of the several respected connoisseurs who inscribed authentications on Chang's forgeries, I believe knowingly. It was indeed disturbing at that time to find authenticating inscriptions on these paintings by some of the Chinese authorities we most respected, notably Yeh Kung-cho, Wu Hu-fan, and P'u Ju. The text of the exhibition catalog takes the charitable view that these people were genuinely deceived, at least at the time they wrote their inscriptions; but Mr. C.C.Wang, when I asked him about these surprising authentications of spurious paintings, told me that the writers were friends who regarded it as a kind of game to help each other out, besides being rewarded in some way for their participation. I have seen enough evidence since then to believe the truth of that version of the matter.

(S,S) A notable case is this well-known painting, widely accepted as a work of Wu Wei, in the Shanghai Museum. I made the mistake of publishing it in my Parting At the Shore without having seen the original; the quality of the painting, the inscription by Wu Hu-fan, and its acceptance and publication by noted Chinese scholars seemed to make it a safe choice. (Once again, I don't mean to criticize others for being taken in by Chang's fakes when I was myself, more than once.) (S,S) When in 1977 I was finally able to see the painting and make detail slides, I realized my mistake; it is clearly from Chang's hand; the drawing of the faces alone should have given it away. Showing these same details at a slide show after my trip, I turned to C.C.Wang, who was visiting Berkeley and sitting in the front row, and asked him: "C.C., who really painted this?" He looked for a while, laughed, and said "You're right--it's Chang Ta-ch'ien." [Later note: only shortage of time kept me from demonstrating Chang's authorship of this painting with slide comparisons, as could easily be done, I think, using the excellent and genuine Wu Wei pai-miao paintings on silk in the same collection on the one hand, and details, especially faces, from Chang's acknowledged figure works on the other.]

From the late fifties into the early sixties, Chang's forgeries continued to enter major collections. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts purchased his "Kuan T'ung" landscape, of which I will speak later, along with a Buddhist painting of purported Sui date; the Ohara Museum in Kurashiki was purchasing (unknown to me until much later) another, spurious version of the "Five Oxen" scroll ascribed to Han Huang in the Palace Museum, Beijing; and the British Museum bought (through Chiang Er-shih?) two notable examples of Chang Ta-ch'ien's fabrications, the landscape ascribed to Chü-jan (also to be discussed later) and (S--) a painting of gibbons in trees attributed to the Northern Sung master I Yüan-chi.

(--S) Chang's fondness for gibbons is well known; he kept them in cages on his estate in Brazil. (I remember suggesting to someone that the models for the British Museum "I Yüan-chi" might still be living happily in the vicinity of Sao Paolo.) (--S) He painted this subject under his own name many times: here in a work dated 1959. In the Chung-ch'ing Municipal Museum I saw another version of the same "I Yüan-chi" composition by Chang, dated 1945, purportedly his copy of this Sung masterwork. He commonly, I believe, did one "early" version of his forgeries and at least one acknowledged copy (typically on paper, and under his own name) of the same composition, passing off the latter as his copy of the antique original. (--S) Fu Shen includes in his list of Chang's forgeries the painting of gibbons purchased by Siren for the National Museum, Stockholm, while omitting the British Museum picture. He may well be right, but it is a less obvious case, and if by Chang, must come from an unusually early period, since the Museum purchased the work in 1938, from a Mrs. Burchard in London, perhaps the widow of Otto Burchard.

(--S, BM "Chü-jan") By the early 1960s I was seriously worried about the effect that Chang's forgeries would have on the future acquisition of important early Chinese paintings by major museums and collections. I did not especially begrudge him his success in foisting these on unsuspecting purchasers; there was little of moral censure in my concern. In the case of the British Museum, there was even a certain (quite reprehensible) satisfaction, or Schadenfreude (German term for pleasure taken in someone else's discomfort) involved in my feeling. On my visit to that great institution in 1956, although I was treated very kindly by Basil Gray and Soame Jenyns, I had also been made uncomfortable by their complaints that the market for Asian art was being ruined by the high prices that American buyers were willing to pay (and also by a larger condescension they exhibited toward their American cousins). I cannot remember my exact response to Jenyns, but it took the line that listening to someone standing in the British Museum, repository of the Amaravati sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, and other masterworks of art acquired without benefit of purchase, at least from their countries of origin, now complaining about how the upstart Americans were pursuing works of art by the base means of spending money for them--the great days of genteel looting being over--was a bit hard to take. So that now to watch them, at last possessed of some substantial funds to spend on Chinese painting, blowing them on Chang's creations was something less than bitter.

Nevertheless, it was unsettling to observe how large a part of the money being spent by museums for would-be early Chinese paintings was going for these fakes; and the danger that their subsequent exposure would discourage those museums from making other and better major purchases of Chinese paintings in the future was especially disturbing.

Also, these forgeries would find their way into our histories of early Chinese painting, and contaminate or falsify them. It seemed time to blow a whistle. The best occasion for doing so, it seemed to me, was the great gathering of Chinese painting specialists referred to at the beginning of this paper, organized by myself and held at Asia House Gallery in New York in 1962. I had my slides and arguments prepared. But older and wiser heads, those of Larry Sickman and Aschwin Lippe, dissuaded me from making my presentation, when I told them about it, on the very good grounds that reputations of curatorial colleagues were at stake; too much of public money had been spent for these fabrications, and I would seriously embarrass people who had made honest mistakes.I accepted the wisdom of what they said, and abstained; the numerous presentations since then of my slide-talk on Chang Ta-ch'ien's forgeries, well known to my students and many others, have all been non-public. Now, almost thirty years later, some kind of statute of limitations having elapsed (and with Fu Shen having already published some of the forgeries as what they are), the time seems right for a public presentation.

he British Museum purchase of the landscape attributed to Chü-jan had caused a good deal of discussion. Michael Sullivan published an article on it in Apollo magazine for July 1962, calling it "A Masterpiece of Chinese Painting" and arguing that it was "either by Chü-jan or by a Northern Sung master working in his style." He sent me an offprint inscribed: "This picture haunts me. Sometimes it looks thoroughly Yüan. But I don't think it's modern, in spite of the usual rumours!" Some time in the following year, writing him argumentative notes after reading the manuscript of a book in which he intended to publish this painting once more, I quoted a line from his manuscript, "It is impossible to be certain that [the painting] is an original," and commented "The Dept. of Understatement hereby awards you its prize of the year. I've been writing a preface for an exhibition of paintings by our illustrious Brazilian friend [this was my code-name for Chang at that time--the exhibition was the one held at the Hirschl and Adler Gallery in New York, for which I wrote a blurb for the brochure] to be held in New York in October, and going over a lot of photos and reproductions of his works very carefully, and getting, I hope, closer to understanding his individual traits." And I suggested to Michael that he stand before the British Museum painting and chant: "Chü-jan, Chü-jan on the wall,/ Have you any age at all?/ Are you fourteenth century? Did he who made Kuan T'ung make thee?" (The reference, of course, was to the recently-purchased "Kuan T'ung" in the Boston M.F.A.) Michael responded, almost by return mail, with a letter beginning "Dear Jim, Thank you for your chant. I got up, like Alice, and began to repeat it, but the words came very queer indeed: [Then followed a revised Jabberwocky, of which I will read only the first and last stanzas:] 'Twas Cahillig, and the murksome voles/ Did chang and fakem in the Freer,/ Brazilian were the sungish scrolls,/ But the Chü-jan--no fear! // [And the last stanza:] 'Twas s'picious, and the pedagogues/ Did grumm and wumble in their lairs./ All sniffish were the sinologues, --/ But the Chü-jan outstares./ [Footnote:] A slight flickering of the lids, perhaps, but no more." I hope that our younger colleagues still write verses to each other in pursuing their arguments.

(S--) My slide shows offered over the years have been pedagogical in purpose, using comparisons between genuinely old works and Chang's forgeries to sharpen the eyes of students. I will not repeat the arguments at length here, but will only give a few examples in outline. The "Chü-jan" landscape in the British Museum repeats in its composition a painting ascribed to the same artist in the Shanghai Museum, which was first published, I believe, in 1959; Fu Shen has determined that Chang was sent a photograph of the Shanghai painting as early as 1951, and assumes, rightly I think, that Chang used this photograph as the basis for his forgery. The fact that the Shanghai Museum painting is itself a late, mannered copy of an early composition permitted the argument, made for instance by Sullivan, that it was a copy of the British Museum picture, rather than the other way around. But comparisons of details reveal the Shanghai painting, hardened as it is, to be an "honest" painting of some age, perhaps Ming, while the British Museum version does not stand up to close scrutiny.

(S,S) The forms in the Shanghai picture, however debased, are firmly defined in distinct strokes; in the British Museum work, they are diffuse, blurred, fused together. Chang, working on silk that would be artificially darkened, evidently assumed that his drawing would be exempt from close examination.

(S,S) The man seated in the waterside porch at the bottom of the Shanghai painting is self-contained, exhibiting a proper Chinese decorum; his counterpart in Chang's copy leans moodily toward the water, gazing over his shoulder, as if wrapping himself against the unease of his vibrant, indistinct surroundings. (S--) The style of the British Museum picture is matched closely, on the other hand, in a landscape of 1954 in my own collection signed by Chang himself, based in composition on a recently-rediscovered work of Wang Meng, as Fu Shen identifies in the catalog, but in other respects in the Chü-jan manner. The distinctive patterns of exposed tree roots, the clumps of fat, blunt tien or dots along the slopes--the Morellian details that identify the hand--along with the larger running together of brushstrokes that are not clearly assigned to particular forms, join these two works and set them apart from anything genuinely antique.

(S,S) I have used such pairings of slides as this to demonstrate the stylistic agreement in essential features between the British Museum painting and mine, given differences in medium (silk vs. paper) and intent (honest imitation of the past vs. deception), and have unkindly pointed out that mine was acquired (through the introduction of C.C.Wang, then in Hong Kong) for the equivalent of around $250, while the British Museum picture cost them--shall we say, somewhat more. (S,S) (Theirs and mine; you can see them side by side in the exhibition; mine is in better condition, theirs deplorably beat-up.)

(S,S) The full detection of Chang Ta-ch'ien's fabrications, then, has required a combination of external criteria--identifying models--and internal--identifying his hand.The two did not necessarily happen together. When I was shown, some time in the mid-1960s, a painting ascribed to the 8th century figure master Chang Hsüan owned by a respected friend and collector who had acquired it, I was quickly able to add it to the group of Chang's forgeries--the flattening effect of the drapery drawing, the way the colors lay on the silk, the look of the faces, the calligraphy of the inscription, the ripping of the silk, and other features combined to identify it easily. But I had no idea what source he might have used for his composition, or even whether he had used a source, and not simply invented it himself. (S--) Many years later, visiting one of my favorite places in Kyoto, the villa of the painter Hashimoto Kansetsu near the Ginkakuji, I walked into a small exhibition of his works shown in the house, and saw Hashimoto's preparatory drawings, done in 1929, for a set of five paintings illustrating Po Chü-i's "Song of Endless Sorrow," the poem about Ming-huang and Yang Kuei-fei; (S,S) and there was the composition of the "Chang Hsüan" painting. The attendant must have wondered why I laughed aloud. It seems quite likely that Chang Ta-ch'ien had come to know the sinophile Hashimoto during his stay in Kyoto, especially in view of Hashimoto's involvement in Shih-t'ao collecting and scholarship.

I would take issue, by the way, with Fu Shen's statement in his article on Chang's forgeries that "Only in a few instances did Chang directly copy an existing early painting" and that "Usually he fabricated a new composition by subtly combining elements from more than one painting." I believe on the contrary that particular, single sources can be located for most of his forgeries, if we can only identify them. I will offer a few more as contributions to this project of "full disclosure."

(--S) This would-be T'ang painting of "Lao-tzu Going Through the Pass" was part of Chang's posthumous gift to the Palace Museum in Taipei, and is reproduced in the catalog of the present exhibition. Again, Chang's early period in Kyoto probably accounts for his choice of model: (S--) he must have acquired a copy of Tanke Gessen's Ressen zusan, "Pictures of [Taoist] Immortals" (preface 1780, printed in 1818), which was easily available in bookstores there, and appropriated the first picture in Gessen's book to "re-create" a Chinese original, adding some T'ang-style trees and flowers, shading the drapery folds and the ox in the T'ang manner as he understood it, etc. (I use the word "appropriate" with an uneasy feeling that someone is bound eventually to apply it to Chang's uses of the past and demand that we recognize him as an important Chinese precursor of post-modernism.)

I should mention that the Tokyo dealer Kusaka Shôgadô once showed me a box of materials that Chang Ta-ch'ien had left with him for safekeeping; I looked through them only briefly and made no notes or photographs, but my recollection is that they appeared to be rolls of paper and textiles etc. used by Chang in producing his forgeries, along with a few practice or unsuccessful efforts. If these still exist, they could add to the clues we have in our efforts at detection. I have written to Kusaka's son to inquire about them.

(--S) Paintings done by Chang under his own name also are often based on unacknowledged sources: the three early paintings in the manner of Jen Po-nien in the exhibition are, I believe, derived from particular Jen Po-nien compositions, and this one, rightly described in the catalog as in the style of Ch'en Hung-shou, (S--) is more specifically a copy of a leaf in Ch'en's album in the Nanking Museum.

(S,S) The two large, impressive paintings purportedly by Tung Yüan and Chü-jan that were among the treasures of the Hong Kong collector J. D. Chen are both based on identifiable prototypes. For the "Tung Yüan," it is a composition that survives in several versions, one being a leaf in the Hsiao-chung hsien-ta album of reduced-size copies with Tung Ch'i-ch'ang inscriptions, where it appears as a Wang Meng painting in the Tung Yüan manner, and (S--) another being a copy by Wu Li. Chang simply re-created the "Tung Yüan original" of these. (S,S) The "Chü-jan" forgery is not, as the catalog has it (p. 192 footnote), "based on Seeking the Dao in Autumn Mountains"--the well-known work in the Palace Museum, Taipei, with a composition similar but not identical to that of the forgery--but on a painting hidden a more obscure place, so obscure that anyone can be forgiven for having missed it: (S--) I refer to the storage room of the Freer Gallery, where this work, reg. no. 19.137 in the old Freer collection, languishes in obscurity. How Chang Ta-ch'ien can have known this painting, or a photograph of it, remains a mystery. He may have seen another, older version. In any case, the Freer picture matches exactly the J. D. Chen forgery. (Notice, by the way, how the mountaintop in the forgery disappears entirely, not through damage but simply through not being there; we will note the same curious feature later in what I believe to be another of Chang's creations.)

In spite of the efforts of Fu Shen and myself and others to identify the forgeries made by Chang Ta-ch'ien, quite a few no doubt remain undetected, and I would like to point to a few paintings that seem to me good targets for investigation, and explain why. (S,S) One of them is the so-called "Sun Wei" Kao-i t'u or "Lofty Recluses" handscroll in the Shanghai Museum. It is well known that Chang knew this work and did pictures based on the figures in it under his own name; I suspect that his involvement with it went even deeper, that it may well be another of his fabrications. (S,S) If we note in Chang's copy, for instance, the unnatural way the bands of cloth over the arm fall straight down, denying the arm any volume (I am using the kind of criteria employed by Wen Fong in his old article on forgeries), and then turn to the would-be archaic original, we find the same non-structural drawing there. (S--) The heavy, schematic shading resembles that in Chang's identified forgeries; so do the overly-aware faces, the pastiche-like combining of elements rendered in disparate manners, (S,S) the hard, stiff drawing of drapery, and other features. This painting has never been on view on any of my many trips to the Shanghai Museum, nor have several requests to see it been successful. It is reportedly to be seen in their new painting exhibition, and I look forward to viewing the original in a few months. Meanwhile, I only report serious suspicions.

(S,S) Several of the paintings that were among Chang's posthumous gift to the Palace Museum are strong candidates for inclusion in the group; one of these, certainly, is the "Chü-jan" riverscape, rightly included by Fu Shen in his article, a picture that appears to have been made to exemplify the well-known statement by Shen Kua about a painting by Tung Yüan, that it only revealed its quality when seen from a distance. Another is the "Wang Shen" handscroll. In both, Chang was "faking" in more senses than one: he did not take the trouble to give real shape and structure to his earth masses, relying instead on the viewer's willingness to read into the picture what in fact he did not provide. (S,S) The same is even more true of this quite similar handscroll which has been published as a work of Yen Wen-kuei: the artist, who I suspect was Chang Ta-ch'ien, has simply failed to define his forms as more than vague shapes, assuming that the darkness of the silk and the impression of great age will hide the truth: that they are quite empty and featureless. (I am not persuaded, by the way, by the argument that Chang never put his collector's seals on his own creations; this may well be a story he spread himself to divert attention from some of them.) (--S) Artists of antiquity provided their viewers with, among other things, distinct imagery, substantial and clearly-shaped masses, readable spaces. If artists and viewers of later centuries lost interest in these qualities, concentrating instead on brushwork and whole effect, this only facilitates the job of the modern forger, who can supply the visual clues for some old style without troubling to create its real substance. That is exactly what we saw Chang doing in the British Museum "Chü-jan," which dissolves into cotton-candy when one looks closely at details, or (S,S) the "Kuan T'ung" painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, another notable forgery by Chang, which looks complex and absorbing at first but turns out, when one gets further into it, to exhibit the same incoherence, lacking structure and substance, (S,S) besides betraying in some passages an anachronistic sophistication in the rendering of light on the forms.

When we admire Chang Ta-ch'ien as a great forger, then, we must admit one major weakness: he painted his "ancient" works as though he did not really care about their representational qualities, about making pictures that were clearly readable in the old manner. (S,S) He tended make them up of amorphous, essentially incoherent configurations that were not meant to be scrutinized closely. (S,S) He would paint passages of tangled tree trunks and branches and twigs that no amount of careful study can resolve into spatially and organically comprehensible images, because they were fabricated in a mode careless of representation. (S,S) At an exhibition of early figure paintings held at a major museum several years ago, I found myself going back and forth between two paintings separated in time by several centuries, if one believed the labels (the details I have been showing come from the one on the right, a picture ascribed to Li Ch'eng) and noting in both the same confounding of what should be distinct planes of depth in the trees, the same indecision about which branches belong to which tree, the same unintelligible tangles, and having a strong sense that the two pictures are in fact from the same hand. (At this point I sense the spirits of Larry Sickman and Aschwin Lippe standing behind me and saying: No, don't identify them. All right, Larry, all right Aschwin, I won't.)

(S,S) In some genuinely old landscapes, especially those of the Tung-Chü school--these are two that may be copies of works of that kind (ident)--the recession into depth is reinforced by long, winding movements out of the distance, continuing sometimes all the way into the foreground. There is no ambiguity in these about what is winding--a river, or a road. (S,S) Chang Ta-ch'ien was also fond of this device; but the way in which his use of it differs from that of the old artists exemplifies again his unconcern with integrity of representation, or readability. The streams in his paintings (these are two of his signed works) often cannot be distinguished visually from the paths, and the one turns into the other. (S,S) Two more. The artist is working on a plane raised above specific descriptive reference; the winding movement itself, as a visual marker of old style, is what matters.(S--) Still another, a painting in the exhibition (#37).

(S,S) Fu Shen identifies, in connection with one of the landscapes in the exhibition, a type of composition that Chang supposedly learned from Tung Yüan by way of Chao Tso (cat. #39); another example, which appeared in a 1986 auction in Hong Kong, belongs to the same type. In these, a vertical concavity on one side is occupied by a waterfall; a horizontal recession on the other side extends from the foreground to the high horizon.

(--S) All the elements I have been trying to define as characteristic of Chang's style come together in this much-praised work, ascribed to Tung Yüan and bearing his "signature". The composition is paralleled more closely in Chang's paintings (such as the two we have just seen) than in anything genuinely archaic, and is filled with spatially and formally unintelligible passages, which time does not permit me to point out individually. I have used the picture as a visual test for students in my early Chinese painting courses; the sharp-eyed ones point out, for instance, that what begins as a winding river in the distance turns imperceptibly into a road with figures walking on it. (I received for the first time a readable photograph of this painting from its owner, someone I respect highly, just as I was preparing the doctoral exams for Richard Vinograd, and gave it to him as a part of his connoisseurship exam; with no prior acquaintance with the painting, he analyzed it skilfully, coming, I think, to the right conclusion, that it could not be a genuinely old picture.) (S--) At the bottom, the same moody scholar leans on the balustrade of his porch and gazes out over the water. Here, too, he is surrounded by the kind of representational incoherence we saw in others of Chang's fabrications: spongy earth-masses of no plausible plastic form that blur ambiguously into trees and houses; a radical failure to attend to keeping one pictorial element distinct from another. (Yes, Larry, all right, Aschwin, I hear you; I'll finish in a minute.) The fact that the distant mountain disappears entirely at the top, as it does in the "Chü-jan" forgery shown earlier, cannot be explained as damage, or mildew, or mist; it simply isn't there. Chang, secure in his assumedly unfathomable murkiness of darkened silk, did not paint it in. (I hear a chorus of protest: Chinese artists were not concerned with such descriptive niceties of hsing-ssu or form-likeness. Wrong, I reply, they were; anyone arguing otherwise must explain why no comparable incoherence or form-faking can be found in reliably old Chinese paintings.)

It is of course quite possible that I am mistaken about one or another of these, or even conceivably all of them, and that they are respectable old paintings which I have maligned. If so, I apologize to them and their supporters. But those supporters would have a lot to explain away, definable features to be matched in Chang's recognized forgeries but not in reliably early paintings. I believe firmly that I could make the traditional offer--if this is a real Sung (or pre-Sung) painting, I'll eat it--without risking any substantial increase in my diet of silk fiber.

(S,S) A final note. In 1976 a young woman came to me to apply for our masters program; she was modestly uninformative about her parentage, but when I put together her surname, Chang, with the fact that her native language was Portugese, I had my suspicions, which she reluctantly confirmed: she was Sing Chang (properly Chang Hsin-sheng), youngest and most beloved daughter of Chang Ta-ch'ien. During the years she studied with me, whenever I would give my talk on Chang's forgeries, I would always refer to him as Mr. X, to avoid making her uncomfortable. But in fact she shared, understandably, my non-judgemental attitude toward her illustrious father, and would smile when I referred to him as a modern Till Eulenspiegel, whose knavery justified itself by its very brilliance. On one occasion, when I took my Wen Cheng-ming seminar (in which she was enrolled) for a weekend trip to Point Lobos to look at old cypress trees like those in Wen's paintings, we all stayed in Chang's house at nearby Pebble Beach and enjoyed his garden and studio.

After Sing had taken her masters degree in 1979 and was living with her father in Taiwan, I proposed a plan to her: I would make up an album of photographs of paintings that I suspected of being fabrications by him; she would persuade him to look through it with her, and to indicate by a simple nod or shake of the head whether I was right or wrong. And she would record his reponses, and report them to me. My purpose was of course to try to get the truth from him before he joined his ancestors--although I was quite aware that he might decide to have the last laugh, and claim pictures he hadn't done, or disclaim some that he had. At least it would be another document for my ever-growing dossier. Sing agreed, and wrote also that her father "was agreeable to the idea" and that I should send her what she called the "black list." I made up the album, giving it a title that I hoped would amuse him, "Secret Collection of Ancient Masterworks Imitated by Ta-feng-t'ang." And I wrote her that I would commit myself not to divulge his revelations during his lifetime, but would preserve them for the benefit of future scholarship. I sent it to her in August of 1981; when I met her subsequently and asked about the project, she replied that her father had not been well, and that the right moment had not come. Unhappily, it never did. Chang died in April 1983 without having gone through my album with her. Foiled again.

CLP 18: 1994 “A Foreigner Looks at Pan Tianshou.” Pan Tianshou Symposium, Hangzhou

Talk for Pan Tianshou Symposium, Hangzhou, December 1994

It's a very great honor to be asked to be the initial foreign speaker at this distinguished symposium on the great modern master Pan Tianshou, and to speak in the place where he spent so much of his career--first as the head of the Traditional Chinese Ptg. Dept. at the National West Lake Academy of Fine Arts, the first art academy in China, and later, for twenty years from 1945, as the Director of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, before his tragic persecution and death during the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution.

As a foreigner who had, and still has, a very limited comprehension of the problems that artists faced and the conditions they endured during those early years of the P.R.C., I would find it easiest to talk about Pan Tianshou's paintings purely in terms of style, staying safely out of the more difficult topics of their historical position and political implications, topics about which others can speak with far more knowledge and insight than I can. What I want to do, however, is to offer an outsider's view of this matter, acknowledging that it is partial and no doubt somewhat distorted. It may nevertheless convey to my Chinese friends and colleagues some sense of how their situation was perceived by those of us outside. And I want to use this as a tribute to Pan Tianshou.

In 1970, the year before Pan Tianshou's death, a great international symposium on Chinese painting was held at the Palace Museum in Taibei; of course, no mainland Chinese scholars were involved. After the symposium some of us came to Macao; and the first place we were taken by our guide, the exciting place where all American tourists wanted most to go, was the border with "Communist China." A road ran from one side to the other, but an invisible barrier separated our side from the other; we all stood looking across with fascination at scenery that was exactly like what surrounded us, but seemed mysteriously different--it was as if we expected the trees and grass to be red instead of green. China was then a remote, inaccessible place for us, and vaguely sinister.

Two years later, in 1972, Nixon made his visit to China; and in the following year I and ten others came in the first delegation of art historians and archaeologists for a month-long tour; and the mysterious realm at last became a living reality for us. Hangzhou was the last stop on our tour; in 1977 I came again as head of a Chinese Ancient Paintings delegation, and again we came to Hangzhou. But it was not until 1982 that I visited the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, met some of its faculty, and saw some of its collection of old paintings. Since then my association with it has become very close, I have visited it many times, and I feel very much at home here.

In the mid-70s I prepared, for delivery at a symposium at our Center for Chinese Studies commemorating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the P.R.C. a lecture on the vicissitudes of traditional painting during those years (a topic on which Judy Andrews has since published a serious study.) I concentrated on the problems that traditional Chinese artists had faced in adapting their art to the new conditions, under political pressures and perils of a kind we could only imagine. (It was not until several years later that we learned about what artists had really undergone.) In my ill-informed presentation of this subject, based largely on a survey of paintings done by traditional masters during those years, Pan Tianshou had a prominent place. I will summarize briefly what I said then, with slides.

S,S. Qi Baishi, as an old and revered master with peasant-carpenter origins and an international reputation, was permitted to continue working with only minimal accomodation to the new requirements; often it was simply a matter of adding an inscription with a patriotic or political message to a painting not essentially different from what he had done before, or adding symbols such as doves of peace to his paintings.

S-- Qi Baishi was able to continue doing this in a relatively unproblematic way until his death in 1957 (when this painting was done.)

S,S. There were precedents, of course, for this practice; Chinese painters had for centuries been giving their conventional images of ink bamboo or blossoming plum a diversity of meanings and functions by adding appropriate inscriptions; and more recently Xu Beihong had done the same: painting over and over his standard image of a spirited horse, but adding inscriptions with more specific messages,

--S for instance this one, on an example dated 1945, indicating that it was intended on this occasion to celebrate the defeat of the Japanese. The image of the horse is the same as always.

S,S. By the later 50s, and for artists not so old and established, more thorough-going and conspicuous kinds of adaptation seemed to be required. Attempts were made to incorporate the new imagery into the settings of traditional landscape paintings, such as in Ying Yeping's 1957 picture in which the traditional figure of the sage gazing into the void is replaced by a foreman supervising the building of a bridge, or Li Shiqing's 1958 work titled "Moving the Mountains, Filling the Valleys." The ideal of harmony between man and nature had given way to one in which man's technological domination of nature was celebrated. For those of us outside China who were familiar with traditional landscape painting, works of this kind seemed rather anomalous, even bizarre. But at the same time we tried to understand the problems and pressures facing these painters, and tried to be sympathetic rather than critical.

S,S. The same was true of our responses to the efforts made by other, more distinguished painters to turn their styles and compositions to new uses; we admired their ingenuity and resourcefulness, while remaining sympathetic, imagining the forces that imposed these requirements on them. Fu Baoshi found ways to transform his romantic landscapes with figures, based on his study of Shitao's paintings, into scenes of the new era, such as his painting of soldiers using a winch and cable system to transport (ammunition?) across a ravine on Mt. Emei.

S,S. Fu Baoshi's earlier paintings celebrated individualism, the solitary scholar in communion with nature, as in the work at right from 1948. Later, as in the 1964 painting at left, a more communal spirit had to be expressed, and we see a procession of farm workers, along with steamboats and factories emitting smoke--the red sky is no longer the nostalgia of twilight, but industrial pollution, and a positive emblem of progress.

--S. Another aspect of the individualistic ideal, the insistence on uniqueness in the work of art, similarly gave way to a tolerance, or even encouragement, of a multiple mode of production, better suited to the needs of the new society.

S,S. Li Keran, in the same spirit, adapted his familiar scene of sailing boats on the Li River to the purpose of illustrating, in a work of1964, a line from a poem by Mao Zedong about a crucial moment in the war to drive out the Nationalists: "Our Mighty Army, a Million Strong, has Crossed the Yangtze." As an example of turning a traditional style to a new use, this seems in itself quite successful.

--S. But beside another portrayal of the same event by a lesser artist, done in 1971, Li Keran's is seen as a work of primarily aesthetic value; although it is certainly the better painting of the two by traditional criteria, it is the other that achieves the greater impact, conveys the patriotic or ideological message with greater force.. This kind of adaptation of established themes and styles did not, in the end, prove to be a good direction for traditional Chinese painting to take.

S,S. Within this context, how did Pan Tianshou respond to the demand that the artist invest his works with political content? The answer, as I presented it in my lecture, was that he scarcely responded at all; he appears to have remained unwilling to compromise. I quoted the writer of the introduction to a book of reproductions of his works published in 1962 claiming that "his style and thought have undergone great change since the Liberation," but pointed out that the change seems more the natural evolution of an artist than a bending to outside pressures. In taking this stance he followed, perhaps, the example of his teacher Qi Baishi, but at a time and in a situation in which an uncompromising stance carried much more danger--his situation was far less secure than Qi's, and he may have paid heavily for his firmness. In putting the matter this way I do not mean to be critical of those other artists who bent more to the pressures, but only to point out that Pan Tianshou's unbendingness seemed to us outside China, or at least to me, an expression of artistic integrity.

Pan Tianshou had, over the years represented by these two paintings--a 1954 landscape at right, one from 1963 at left--developed a very distinctive type of river landscape, made up of strongly-outlined angular forms.

--S. In the late 50s and early 60s these forms evolved into even flatter shapes with equally flat washes of color. The paintings took on something of the look of color woodcuts, while retaining the special strengths, the nuances of touch, of brush painting.

S-- In this work of 1959 he used this fully-developed landscape type as an illustration of Mao Zedong's famous line "Our Rivers and Mountains are Beautiful Like This." The inscription, that is, identifies it as that; the painting does not change at all.

--S. Pan Tianshou's modest picture stands at an opposite pole from the famous, grandiose collaboration of Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue illustrating the same line. Theirs was of course intended for public display in a state hall, so that the requirements were very different. But Pan, too, could have paid more obeisance to political expediency; he chose not to. --S Another type of composition that was Pan Tianshou's own was the one made up of various flowers and other plants arrayed over the surface to make a strong linear structure, again flatly angular in character.

--S. In this work of 1960 he more or less repeats this type, only presenting a greater diversity of plants, and informs us in his inscription that this time it is intended to convey the idea of "Let the Hundred Flowers Bloom." Pan Tianshou's unwillingness to turn his art to the service of political rightness was paralleled, I now understand, by the arguments he was making at this time for preserving diversity and avoiding conformity, in art; but this matter will be dealt with later in a paper by Hsingyuan Tsao.I would assume that these courageous stances were in some part responsible for his persecution at the outset of the Cultural Revolution; if so, he paid a terrible price for integrity. But we can still respect it.

I want to conclude by noting that foreign scholars have another major reason for paying tribute to Pan Tianshou: his early arguments, made in 1926 when the question was still very controversial, about the borrowings from foreign art that Chinese artists of that time were undertaking. First, he pointed out that these borrowings or adoptions were not unprecedented--foreign artists had been coming to China since the Pre-Han period; Buddhism had strongly affected Chinese art and culture in the post-Han centuries; and the coming of Jesuit missionaries from the late Ming had introduced still more foreign elements to Chinese art.

Secondly, Pan Tianshou argued that the time was ripe for an increased receptiveness to the outside world. He gave four reasons, among them the observation that the long history of Chinese painting over three or four thousand years had brought it to a point when "It was not easy to open [new paths] for the future. Therefore, it was necessary to welcome new principles from the outside".

I have myself reached the conviction, after some decades of observing cases of it, that cross-cultural adoptions in whichever direction are on the whole healthy and invigorating, not corrupting, to an artistic tradition, especially when that tradition has reached some stage of stagnation or crisis. I have regularly given two lectures in a survey course on World Civilization at Berkeley: one showing how Chinese painters adopted elements of European style from the works brought by the Jesuits in the Ming-Qing period; the other showing how in the 19th and 20th centuries the borrowings sometimes went the other way: French artists affected by Ukiyo-e prints from Japan, American Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s and after inspired by Chinese calligraphy and painting. In all these cases, the artists who were open enough to take what was useful to them from the foreign sources end up as more interesting and creative than their contemporaries who tried (futilely) to preserve the native tradition uncontaminated.

I am sure that Pan Tianshou, in making this early and courageous argument as well as in his later teaching, established a model of openness that is still being followed by artists and art historians in the programs here today. I cannot, because of my limited knowledge, comment on the artists, but I can say that the art historians here are as a group far more open to methodologies of art history outside China than those in other programs. So I extend my tribute, finally, to our respected colleagues Pan Yaochang, Fan Jingzhong, Cao Yiqiang, Hong Zaixin, as well as their older mentor Wang Bomin--in their continuing efforts to enrich and broaden the great Chinese tradition of art-historical scholarship by selective adoptions of what they find most convincing and useful in foreign writings. In this they are establishing a kind of art-historical equivalent to the theory and the practice of Pan Tianshou as an artist.

Thank you.

Kao Mayching, China's Response to the West in Art: 1898-1937, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford, 1972, pp. 202-204.

CLP 12: 1989 "The 'Madness' in Bada Shanren's Paintings." published in Asian Cultural Studies (hard-to-find journal) no. 17, March 1989.

THE "MADNESS" IN BADA SHANREN'S PAINTINGS

Introduction

The accounts by Bada Shanren's contemporaries of the deranged or "mad" behavior that he exhibited in the later part of his life are well known, and some attempts have been made by more recent writers to distinguish what seems to have been real madness in it from the pretended. On the one hand, the circumstances of his life, beginning with the fall of the Ming imperial house from which he was descended and the death of his father when Bada was only nineteen, were ample causes for the emotional instability and sometimes derangement of his later years. His wild and irrational actions, his dumbness, his loud shouts, laughter, and weeping, all fit recognized patterns of insane behavior, Chinese or Western. On the other hand, pretending or enacting madness as a desperate expedient for placing oneself outside normal expectations of engagement with society, or to escape suspicion of involvement in anti-government activity or even of expressing loyalist sentiments, was a long-established practice in China, for which many noted men, artists among them, could serve as models. Li Dan has argued that Bada's first recorded violent outbreak of madness, at the end of his year-long stay with the prefect of Linchuan Hu Yitang, was a way of escaping from Hu's "incarceration." According to this theory, Hu meant to force Bada to submit himself to the Boxue Hongci examination of 1679, which was intended to draw Chinese educated men into the Manchu administration and put an end to their Ming-loyalist posture. Bada's madness, then, would have been a strategem for avoiding the examination without suffering retaliation. Other recent writers have suggested that Bada, as a descendent of the Ming imperial family, might have been approached by agents of Wu Sangui, whose anti-Manchu forces controlled in this period much of south China including southern Jiangxi, and that Bada's pretending of madness was to escape being implicated in Wu's doomed rebellion.2 Wu Tung, on the other hand, argues that Bada's outbreak of madness in 1680 was unrelated to his stay with Hu Yitang. In Wu's view, it was the outcome of a personal crisis over his decision to leave the Buddhist order and return to secular life, re-assuming and proclaiming his status as a scion of the Ming imperial house, with all the attendant alienation and risks that this change imposed on him.

Whichever of these versions we follow--and it is not my intention here to contribute in any way to this controversy--we can note that Bada's contemporaries also suspected some pretending of madness. Hu Yitang's son-in-law Qiu Lien wrote in 1679: "I have heard that Xuege [i.e. Bada] became mentally disordered and returned to Fengxin. I suspect that it was under some pretext." And Chen Ding writes that Bada became dumb after the Manchu conquest of 1644 "following his father's intention"--a renunciation of speech, these words suggest, more motivated by filial devotion and anti-Qing outrage than forced on him by mental illness.

Assumptions of this kind, in any case, can explain only a part of Bada's derangement, which was too severe and lasting to be dismissed entirely as "theatrical madness." The enactment of madness, moreover, could surely have aggravated whatever instability afflicted him already; as writers on Hamlet have pointed out, prolonged pretending of madness is in effect being mad. We must regard Bada's madness, then, as a dense, ultimately inextricable tangle of willed and unwilled, external and internal factors. Even so, and without attempting to disentangle these factors or even assuming that they were somehow distinct in Bada's psyche, we could analyze the traits of behavior that people of his time took to be symptoms of madness, considering these in the context of normal vs. aberrant social practice in China.

Similarly, although we cannot understand the strange and enigmatic qualities of his poetry, calligraphy, and painting simply as symptoms of pathological states of mind, we should be able to identify and analyze elements in his works that induced his audiences to read them that way. Shao Changheng, who records movingly his visit to Bada around 1688, intersperses descriptions of his fits of madness with characterizations of his literary and artistic productions: his calligraphy in the "wild draft" (kuang-cao) script was "exceedingly remarkable and strange"; his painting "did not recognize the limits and rules of other painters"; and his poetry was "interspersed with obscure incomprehensible turns of phrase" which Shao "could not fully decipher." Without specifying the relationship, Shao clearly intends that his readers should link the oddness and obscurity of the works with the craziness of the man. Modern writers imply the same connection, while also avoiding the problem of what kind of connection it was. The question, however, needs to be raised: what in fact constitutes the "madness" in Bada's poetry, calligraphy, and painting? This paper will attempt to answer that question, although only for his painting.

A section that follows discusses the obscurities and aberrations of his poetry, and concludes: The radical discontinuities of thought in Bada's poems, their enigmatic language and allusions, need not, then, be taken as signs of mental aberration; they could be the willed obscurities of someone who can only make an authentic space for himself in the midst of a corrupt society by refusing to engage himself in it. But they can also be read as expressions of a personality disorder manifesting itself in loss of sense of audience, and of the will or capacity to communicate intelligibly.

A section on the oddities of Bada's calligraphy follows, arguing that even when the script is not easily readable its abstruse elements are readily identifiable, through comparison with standard forms of the script.

It is not so with Bada's paintings, which do not reveal so easily the artistic means that produce their aberrant effects. We will attempt in what follows to identify and analyze the traits in his paintings, both in style and in subject, that viewers of the paintings, and particularly those familiar with the accounts of the artist's madness, will tend to read as expressions of a disturbed or even deranged mental state. We will not, however, argue that these traits necessarily represent direct and unconscious expressions of such a mental state, which afflicted the artist at the time he painted; on the contrary, we will allow the alternative possibility that they are expressive forms chosen deliberately by the artist because they somehow signified the idea of madness or some aspects of madness. There are three ways in which they could do this. First, by their similarity to forms that had been characteristic of works by earlier "mad" painters such as Xu Wei, and so had come to signify madness by convention. Bada Shanren in fact makes relatively little use of established conventions for "mad painting." Secondly, by violating, sometimes in extreme and striking ways, customary practice in Chinese painting, and so functioning in a way analagous to aberrant social behavior. And thirdly, by possessing some inherent characteristics that suggested derangement, incoherence, unbalance, etc., either in the choice and combination of subjects or in some special way of portraying those subjects. The traits of "madness" in Bada Shanren's painting are mainly of these last two kinds.

It will become obvious as we proceed that many of these traits could alternatively be regarded simply as innovative, successful artistic devices for enhancing the expressive power of the images and their impact on the beholder, giving them a pronounced sense of strangeness. Some of them can also be seen, and should be, as symbolic and somewhat covert responses to the situation in which Bada Shanren found himself in early Qing society; hidden political messages have been detected in certain of his paintings, and others no doubt remain hidden. But paintings by other Individualist masters of that period can be read as expressions of anguish and anger over the Manchu conquest without suggesting mental disorder in the artist, as Bada's paintings do. We are not arguing (to state our approach once more) that these forms and motifs are actual symptoms of madness, but only that they display characteristics that allow or even encourage such a reading of them, and that these characteristics can be identified.

In the Ming dynasty, from the late 15th century on, a series of artists beginning with Wu Wei had adopted stances of "professional madness," stances that gave them a privileged position in the society, exempting them from certain normal requirements of conformity and allowing them to project attractive, "bohemian" artistic personae. Painters of this group behaved strangely, and took names for themselves that featured such words as kuang or "crazy," dian or "insane," and chi or "idiot." Besides Wu Wei, they include such painters as Shi Zhong, Guo Xu, Sun Long, Zheng Wenlin, and (in a more limited way) Du Jin. The paintings of these artists tend to be relatively conventional in their compositions and imagery; their "craziness" was in the wild and undisciplined brushwork in which these images were executed. By the later 16th century, the time of Xu Wei (1523-96), a truly psychotic artist who mutilated himself, killed his wife, and failed tragically to accomodate to even minimal social requirements, spending much of his later life in states of inebriation and derangement, it was difficult to find new terms or new expressive forms for madness so as to extricate oneself from the conventions; Xu, in fact, for all his brilliant originality, conforms in some respects to the patterns set by his professionally-mad predecessors. The subjects he paints, and the ways in which he portrays them, are not in themselves expecially strange; it is only in the vehemence and unrestraint of his brushwork that we can sense some formal counterpart to his recorded madness. In Bada Shanren's works, by contrast, the oddness of his brushwork affects us less, in the end, than the unsettling oddness of his imagery; he has found, that is, a way around the conventions. We will consider these two aspects of Bada's painting in succession.

The Oddness of Bada's Style

Bada Shanren's earliest works, the 1660 album signed "Chuanqi" in the Palace Museum, Taipei, and a few others with the same signature, are (as one might expect) relatively tame in their style and ordinary in their subjects: fruits and vegetables, pine and plum and chrysanthemum and rock. Chinese viewers might associate the loose-brush and splashed-ink effects, even though these are used in moderation, with Bada's great predecessor Xu Wei, and the choice of subjects also recalls Xu Wei. But the interesting oddness of Bada's early pictures is chiefly in their compositions, and especially in the device of pushing the object portrayed to the edge or even beyond the frame, so that only part of it is seen. It is as though someone had made a photograph while aiming the camera in slightly the wrong direction. Another oddity is Bada's use of rectilinear stalks and branches to divide the composition geometrically into interesting shapes. Both devices recur often in his later works and are among his enduring traits of style; both are uncommon in earlier Chinese painting.

Brushwork in Bada's middle period paintings continues to be relatively controlled and static, and is characterized by flat, square-ended strokes. Even when this gives way to the more impassioned and idiosyncratic brush manner of his later years, control is not really relaxed, and the effect is never the explosive unrestraint of some of Xu Wei's painting. Where Xu engages in forceful gestures, so that his brush configurations seem to expend their energy outward into the surrounding space, Bada compresses the energies of his brushwork within more cohesive and self-contained forms. In the later works these tend to be rounded forms, and in the landscapes (such as the one in the Stockholm Museum) they are often bulbous as though distended by pressure from within. The tension between activated, uncouth brushstrokes, which in extreme cases attain the quality that one writer has called "brush delirium," and the contours or edges that enclose them and prevent the release of the forces they generate is a significant source of the power of some of Bada's best works. And it is an effect we inevitably associate with what we read about his repressed psychological state, his inability or unwillingness to express his thoughts and emotions in speech, the sense of pent-up passions felt by those who met him. This is in contrast to Xu Wei's unrestrained outbursts of violent and destructive actions, and the fervent, more accessible expressiveness of Xu's writings. The contrast is between two very different personalities, and it appears to be reflected in their paintings: for Xu Wei, it is typically a sense of exuberance and release that we feel; for Bada, a powerful urge to expression working against equally powerful constraints. "In his innermost being he was at once wildly ebullient and melancholy," writes Shao Changheng about him; "in addition to this he was unable to relax and seemed like a river bubbling up from a spring that is blocked by a large stone or like a fire smothered with wet wool. Thus deprived of an outlet, he would start raving at one moment and fall silent the next." Zhang Geng recognized a similar--one is tempted to say corresponding--conflict of forces in the brushwork of Bada's paintings, and he, too, juxtaposed his description of it with a characterization of the man: "His brushwork was impulsively reckless, not sticking to any established method; yet it was mature and muscular, well-rounded, sometimes with an untrammeled feeling . . . The boundless flood of his emotions was magnanimous, like a melancholy song. The world regarded him as mad."

The effect of repressed energy can be felt even in the individual brushstrokes of Bada's late paintings, strokes that move slowly and deliberately, often with a twisting motion, but with unabating force. Even in his sketchy works the brushwork retains a degree of restraint, a kind of discipline of its own; when it becomes truly loose and splashy we are justified in suspecting the hand of the forger. The accounts that describe Bada as splashing the ink freely while drunk and caring nothing about what became of the paintings, as though he were one of the wild ink-splashers of the i-p'in or "untrammeled" painting tradition, would appear to be accomodating him to a convention for "mad " artists instead of responding to the real character of his artistic practice.

The oddness and anomalies in Bada's compositions are of other kinds than ink-splashing, seeming more calculated, less the outcome of momentary whim or some release of motor energy; we must look elsewhere for a Chinese Jackson Pollock. Bada will construct compositions in which solids cannot easily be distinguished from voids, spatial relationships are unclear, and the function of contour lines ambiguous. He will distort the scale so that a huge lotus is made to tower like a tree over a dwarfed water-bird. He will shift suddenly the relationship of viewer to subject, so that after observing two birds in a bare tree close-up in the first half of a handscroll, we find ourselves abruptly looking at a landscape from a distance in the second half, with no softening transition between. He will upset normal positioning, so that a fish seems to swim above a bird resting on a rock, instead of (as one would expect) in the water below. And he will introduce effects of extreme unbalance and topheaviness into his pictures. But with these observations we move from a consideration of his style (in the Chinese sense of composition and brushwork) to consider his images, his choice of them and how he characterizes them.

The Oddness of Bada's Imagery

This section begins by considering the conventional subjects that Bada Shanren sometimes depicts--landscapes, pine trees, etc., as well as subjects associated with the Ch'an sect of Buddhism and speculates on their probable meanings. It continues:

We are not arguing that the significance of these subjects in Bada's paintings is limited to such conventional meanings, but only that portrayals of them do not, as others of his works do, confront the viewer with unusual or enigmatic choices of subject. It is only after we have cleared away these often-encountered themes that the uniqueness of the rest of Bada's imagery becomes apparent. The unusual and enigmatic subjects include animals such as rabbits, dogs, cats, and mice; birds of various species; and fish. Some of these, again, belong to the familiar repertories of earlier painters--eagles, chickens, quail--but others had rarely been seen, at least since the Song dynasty. To say that Bada depicted these creatures because he saw them around him is not an adequate explanation, since it was not the normal practice of Chinese artists to paint things simply because they were there. On the contrary, the restrictions on "proper" themes for painting, in China, especially in the later centuries, and the burden of meanings that had come to be attached to all the standard ones, meant that to depict an unfamiliar subject with little or no precedent was to challenge the audience to find an interpretation where no established one was available; it was to offer a puzzle instead of a message, like a Chan gong'an or conundrum.

Virtually all the creatures that Bada paints had been depicted by Sung artists, but few of them had been seen in paintings after the Song. A few Ming artists painted cats, but not as if the subject really interested them; birds appear frequently in decorative Ming bird-and-flower compositions, but are seldom isolated for "portraits" in the way Bada treats them; and fish are scarcely to be seen at all in Ming painting, with a few not very significant exceptions. We must look back four centuries or more to find real precedents for Bada's images of creatures in their natural habitats, and when we find them they mostly prove to be very different.

Birds and fish make up the most common subjects in Bada's paintings (apart from his landscapes), and if we ask what these have in common as motifs in art, the answer is that both represent the concept of freedom: neither birds nor fish are restricted by gravity to lateral movement on the earth's surface, as are animals or humans; both move fluidly in tri-dimensional worlds, darting up and down or sideward at will, in a state of perfect union with their unbounded environments. The dream of escaping the confines of earth-bound existence by becoming a bird or a fish is a constant among human fantasies, and traditional pictures of these subjects played on that universal dream. Bada Shanren, whose personal situation made the wish for escape especially poignant, evokes the ideal in many of his pictures only to undermine it: for his creatures, as for himself, there is no congenial environment and no way out. The birds are usually roosting, or sleeping, or otherwise grounded, and often seem oddly heavy, exhibiting no inclination to take wing; the fish sometimes appear motionless and sullen, as if pondering some predatory action. Comparison with Song-period portrayals of the same subjects is revealing. Where a quail in a Song painting exists in an unconscious rapport with its surroundings, Bada's quails are somehow ill at ease, and apprehensive as they look upward at the overhanging bank. Where fish in a Song painting are at one with their watery world and totally absorbed in their supple movement, Bada's fish seem suspended in space, and often wear menacing or glowering expressions that suggest a certain rupture with their environments.

To state the difference in the most general way: where birds and animals in Song paintings are portrayed purely for themselves, and shown as completely occupied in their natural concerns, Bada's creatures seem charged with human meanings and with feelings not normally attributed to non-human subjects. The effect may seem at first simply humorous, reminding us of Chen Ding's report that Bada, before his onset of dumbness, loved to tell jokes; people today seeing his paintings for the first time often laugh, and the response is not wholly inappropriate. But looked at longer, and cumulatively, his images of animals, birds, and fish reveal themselves as more darkly aberrant, sometimes even sinister. Their meanings are obscure, largely independent of the symbolic values that the same motifs had ordinarily carried in Chinese painting; we read them, instead, as elements in a private iconography. We can list some of the ways in which Bada Shanren invests them with idiosyncratic and incongruous meanings, and without pretending to be able to interpret these meanings fully, can suggest the kinds of issues they seem to raise.

- His creatures appear hyper-conscious, unnaturally aware of their surroundings, often looking apprehensive or mistrustful. Alternatively, they are presented as if self-absorbed, "meditating," or (frequently) asleep. The human dilemma on which they seem to comment is the burden of consciousness, a self-awareness that sets the individual in a subject-object relationship with his world. For Chan Buddhists and Daoists, the ideal state was being in the world "as a fish is in water"; to undermine pictorially the latter element of this analogy was to question or deny the former.

- The shapes of creatures are often distorted--a misshapen rabbit, a strangely geometricized cat, oddly lumpy birds. Birds perch on one leg, as they do in nature, but often are made to seem off-balance. The effect is a sense of alienation, a denial of the familiar.

- Creatures turn away from the viewer as if revealing a desire for withdrawal, an inward or anti-social temperament. Chen Hongshou in the late Ming had frequently depicted human figures facing away from the viewer, or partly hidden, for similar effect. Although it might be difficult to imagine that the same expression could be given to plants, Bada accomplishes it by having flowers turn away from the viewer, or by hiding blossoms behind leaves so that only parts of them are glimpsed, as in many of his lotus pictures.

- A bird will look suspiciously over its shoulder, as if aware of being watched. Bada painted several pictures of this kind. The only known precedent in earlier painting is in a picture that is attributed to Mu Qi, but is best considered an anonymous late Sung work. Together with the Riguan painting of grapes cited earlier and other comparisons that could be introduced, the similarity of this work to Bada's raises the interesting possibility of some separate transmission of Chan Buddhist imagery and symbolism within the Chan sect, from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, which permitted Bada to draw on a category of painting that is otherwise known only from examples preserved in Japan.

It might be argued that Bada is only revealing sharp powers of observation: mynah birds really strike such poses as these, and appear sometimes unnaturally alert and thoughtful. But the issue of being observed had special significance for Bada--he inscribed one of his paintings: "A solitary bird, afraid that someone is looking at it." Birds in Chinese painting were ordinarily portrayed as unaware of being watched.

- It was common in Song painting to depict birds in pairs, and to suggest by their poses some kind of silent communication between them. Bada, typically, refers to this convention only to subvert the idea of rapport that it usually signified; his paired birds are more likely to look in different directions, like two people pointedly ignoring one another. Sometimes one sleeps while the other peers about. They are related compositionally, but not by any sense of mutual awareness.

- Conversely, creatures are sometimes isolated in large, blank fields of space, as images of existential aloneness. For a small fish, this may seem a natural and unthreatening state; but for the chick portrayed in one leaf of the Shanghai Museum album, so newly out of its shell that it still retains the shape of the egg, the absence of any supportive environment is cause for anxiety: it huddles unprotected, fearful of what the world holds for it, looking apprehensively upward.

- Bada's creatures often gaze upward in this way, imparting a vague sense of foreboding to the pictures. Some of them only roll their eyes upward, but others twist their heads and crane their necks as if concerned or alarmed by something above them. The motif is so common in Bada's paintings that we must suppose it held some special significance for him. A deer looks up into a cedar tree in one painting, and in another watches a bird flying overhead. In one of his pictures two strange birds, which the inscription identifies as peacocks (although the casual observer might mistake them for turkeys), look intently out from the picture space. This, too, is a departure from the usual--birds in traditional paintings were concerned only with what was within the frame--but precedent can be found in the work of Chen Hongshou.

- Related in effect to the gazing-upward theme is the threatening overhang, a common motif in Bada's works, which renders the compositions unstable and the situations of the creatures below insecure. Even when we recognize that the rocks are meant to be solidly based on the river bank and the fish swimming in the water, the feeling persists that the fish are somehow at risk. Instead of being comfortably enclosed in its environment, a creature in Bada's paintings may appear trapped by it.

With such observations as these we can construct a kind of grammar and vocabulary for Bada Shanren's paintings, even though we cannot say with confidence what the words mean. And we can identify tentatively the issues that his paintings raise: freedom vs. constraints, alienation vs. adjustment, inwardness vs. sociability, a relationship of harmony or disharmony with the surrounding world, the oppressiveness of consciousness, the possibility of communication and obstacles to it. All seem congruent with Bada's own predicament. So, to return to our original question, what is there of madness in all this? Is it not just a matter of a highly original mode of expression conveying deeply-felt emotions?

Before attempting an answer to that question, let us consider one last aspect of Bada's paintings: their unorthodox compounding of subjects. Chinese artists and their audiences had reached general agreement over the centuries not only about what subjects were suitable for painting, but also on how these were to be combined: cranes with pine trees, quail with grain, and so forth. But in this, again, Bada refuses to abide by the rules, and invents odd juxtapositions of images. We have already seen several: a deer looking up at a flying bird, a sudden shift from birds-in-a-tree to a distant landscape. Quail can be combined with fish; an eagle, which had often been portrayed about to strike a smaller bird or a rabbit, appears in Bada's painting looking at a crab. Birds of different species that do not seem to belong together are nevertheless placed together, like strangers who have nothing in common and feel uncomfortable in each other's company. The juxtapositions can take the form of visual puns, as when a bird roosts on a stone that looks like an oversize egg, or the full moon, or a moon-cake, is made to echo the shape of a melon. But these are exceptions; Bada's purposes are not usually so penetrable, or so innocuous. When the individual motifs have well-established meanings, as in a picture of hibiscus, lotus, and chrysanthemums, the knowledgeable viewer attempts to interrelate them and make sense of the combination; when this proves impossible, the effect is subtly unsettling.

Bada's handscroll compositions, in particular, present as they unroll strange surprises, aberrations of pictorial syntax: one that begins with swimming fish ends with sleeping ducks; a painting of lotus and other flowers unexpectedly introduces a cat sleeping on a rock; one that features lotus and small birds in the first half presents a duck and a banana palm in the second. Examples could be multiplied. One is reminded of Bada's poems, which similarly force inexplicable leaps upon the reader, one line failing to lead to another in any normal discursive way.

We can note here, without elaborating the observation, that a supporting argument could be made for spatial incoherence, unbalance, and "mismatching" of elements in Bada's landscape paintings. It is worth noting also, again only in passing, that when Bada's paintings are accompanied by poetic inscriptions, the viewer is usually confronted by similar disjunctures between the pictures and the inscriptions: one expects the text to explicate somehow the image, and instead it only compounds the puzzle. A consistent kind of calculated incoherence, in fact, characterizes all the relationships in his works: between images within the paintings, between paintings and poems, and between images or allusions within the poems. It is not that any of these, poems or paintings, seem merely to ramble aimlessly; the juxtapositions, like the images themselves, appear loaded with significance, so that one is led to search for intelligible meaning and fails to find it. We are not permitted even to know whether it is some hidden purpose or an incoherence of mind that underlies the discontinuities; we are unsure whether to read the paintings as deliberately cryptic expressions or as the products of a mind incapable of sustained rational functioning. But the paintings, with their inscriptions, open the latter possibility forcefully enough to allow us to speak of an effect of madness in Bada Shanren's works.

Conclusion: The "Madness" in Bada's Paintings

Up to now, we have stayed entirely within the Chinese context. But in considering the relationship of madness to artistic creation, we can scarcely avoid the extensive Western-language literature on that problem.

The section that follows quotes and summarizes observations on the art of schizophrenic patients from Hans Prinzhorn's classic work of 1922, Artistry of the Mentally Ill. It concludes: The pictures, although not fully intelligible, seem charged with significance: " . . . we are not faced with a representation to which we can simply assent aesthetically, without asking about meaning." Later in his book Prinzhorn asks what pictures by schizophrenics have in common, and answers: "They have an arbitrariness otherwise foreign to us and refer to experiences which remain sinister to us even though we are familiar with the sinister elements of artistic fantasy." Trained artists who become schizophrenic, in particular, can create works of great power, not only in imagery but also in a special quality of drawing (=brushwork): "We can . . . accept that there is a kind of reckless, bold stroke whose breathtaking dynamism we find so disquieting that we experience the alienated psychic state of its author directly and visually." And the work of the schizophrenic artist among his patients who best exemplifies this observation is compared, expectedly, to "van Gogh's last pictures."

All this is valuable and largely convincing, coming as it does from a sensitive and trained observer who based his findings on an unusually large body of material and depth of experience. And the apparent applicability of much of what he writes to the painting of Bada Shanren, and to the ways in which Bada's work differs from the rest of Chinese painting, is striking. Nevertheless, before we rush to the conclusion that Bada's paintings are the typical productions of a schizophrenic, we should make one important qualification (of which Prinzhorn himself indicates awareness at several points in his book): When "sane" artists choose to give an effect of madness to their pictures--one thinks of Bosch, Grünewald, Goya, some of the German Expressionists, Dubuffet--they are quite capable of producing works that are not easily distinguishable, by Prinzhorn's criteria, from the art of the truly mad. Conversely, when a schizophrenic artist has the advantages of artistic training and technique (as does Franz Pohl, the last of the ten artists to whom Prinzhorn devotes long discussions), his work, or the best of it, comes to resemble the works of "sane" Expressionist masters of his time. It would appear that the ability to paint such pictures does not derive so much from being insane as from understanding insanity deeply enough to draw on its rich resources in one's artistic creations, and from possessing the artistic means to recreate some aspects of psychotic experience in the forms and imagery of art. A "sane" artist can do this in ways that are perhaps only intensifications and redirections of the ways in which any good artist draws on the irrational processes of his mind, and by imagining experiences he has not personally had. On the other hand, artists who are, or have been, in serious states of mental disorder obviously have more immediate access to that experience; and when their psychic condition is stable enough to allow them to function effectively as artists, after the illness has abated or in intervals between incapacitating bouts of madness, they can create more compellingly than the "sane" those expressive forms that somehow embody the psychological experience of madness. For them, doing so can be therapeutic, in addition to the usual rewards that the creation of art brings to the artist.

It will be useful here to recall the chronology of Bada Shanren's madness. However traumatically the fall of the Ming and death of his father affected him, he seems to have continued to function like a normal person, perhaps mentally disturbed but not psychotic, in the following decades. Chen Ding's report that Bada assumed dumbness upon his father's death in 1644 is unlikely to be true, since he became a Buddhist priest with many followers, and is said to have had at some time a wife and children. We even have reports of things he said during this period. According to Chen Ding's account, Bada's serious derangement had begun before he took the name Geshan, which was around 1671, but given the other chronological inconsistencies in Chen's biography, this is also open to question. Wu Tung dates the beginning of Bada's mental disorder to around 1672, when his Chan Buddhist teacher died, and Bada began to question his original decision to become a monk, and to signal in subtle ways his re-acknowledgement of his imperial lineage.

Wen Fong associates Bada's madness with his decision in the early 1670s to leave the Buddhist order and become a painter-monk, living by his painting; it was inspired, Fong believes, by a self-loathing over the falseness of his position.

In any case, by 1677 Bada was using a seal on his paintings reading "Curbing madness," which would seem to be an indication of his own awareness of his condition. The first violent outbreak of madness recorded for him occurred at the end of his year-long stay in 1679-80 with Hu Yitang at Linchuan. After that he burned his monk's robe, symbolizing his renunciation of his Buddhist priesthood, and returned to his home town, Nanchang, where he behaved like a madman in the marketplace, "waving his sleeves and spinning round in circles," until he was recognized by a nephew and taken home. There he gradually recovered, and returned to secular life.

The following decade, until 1690, Wen Fong terms his period of "emotional crisis." The works of the early 1680s, on some of which he uses the name Lu or "donkey," contain in their inscriptions bitter expressions of disdain for officials who were collaborating with the Manchus; they also include some of his strangest, most "mad-looking" paintings. From the second half of this decade we have very few works; if the handscroll of fish and ducks from 1689 (Shanghai Museum) can be taken to represent them, Bada has preserved the oddness but made notable advances in technique and expressive force: this is a thoroughly calculated, carefully executed painting, with a great deal of fine drawing.

Between then and his death in 1705 Bada presumably continued to exhibit the strange behavior that his biographers report, but otherwise seems to have functioned reasonably well as an odd but valued member of his society. He was able to communicate effectively by hand gestures and writing, as we know from Shao Changheng's account of his visit with him around 1688. Although the several letters Bada wrote to Shitao during the 1690s have not been preserved, Shitao's reply of 1698 contains no suggestion that they were other than intelligible; and the texts of twenty-three preserved letters to one Fang Shiwan, written in his late years, are difficult but not so incoherent as to indicate mental disorder. Most of Bada's extant paintings, and the best of them, are from these late years, long after the period for which his serious madness is recorded.

Karl Jaspers, in his 1922 book Strindberg and Van Gogh, describes two types of relationships between schizophrenia and artistic production: the type represented by Strindberg, in which his "productivity [of literary works] is wanting during the acute period [of his mental illness] while almost all of his impressive works were written [after that] during the final phase," and the type represented by van Gogh, in which the works "grow during a stormy mental agitation with a marked tendency to a certain culmination. From that moment on the process of disintegration gains strength. During the final phase the creative ability . . . ceases to function." What we know about the chronologies of Bada Shanren's life and his paintings indicates that in his case the relationship was of the former type, with the period of greatest productivity following on the period of most severe mental disorder. The qualities in his paintings that we have tried to define as constituting the "madness" in them mostly appear only long after his period of serious derangement, and they develop together with--are in fact inseparable from--the qualities that made him a great painter. And the conclusion strongly suggested by all this is that Bada in his best and strongest works is not merely reflecting whatever disorder still afflicted him, but is drawing on remembered states of mental aberration to create the aberrant forms and structures of his paintings--one might adapt Wordsworth's famous formulation for poetry to speak of this as "madness recollected in semi-sanity." We should not read the paintings, then, as symptoms of a mind incapable of tighter control, but as creations of a mind deliberately opened to unfamiliar areas of human experience, and able to impress something of the character of that experience on other minds through the power of artistic images.

If we understand the "madness" in Bada Shanren's paintings as retrospective, recalling mental states experienced in his past, then our question becomes different from the one with which we began. It is not simply: how is his madness expressed in his paintings? but: what are the artistic means through which he was able to evoke some aspects of the experience of madness, and convey these compellingly to those who saw his paintings? We can review these once more before concluding.

Brushwork, first of all, registers as the most immediately revealing index of the mind that controlled the hand and brush. Bada's is charged with a feeling of repressed fervor that we inevitably, knowing what we do about him, attribute back to the man. But like any other handwriting, brushwork continues to transmit its message long after the conditions of its creation are dispelled, becoming another habit of the hand. While Bada's may break at times into the condition of "brush delirium," it is mostly under control, albeit tenuous control, for all its effect of unmediated revelation of a psychic state.

In his imagery Bada manages to dissociate himself both from the "mad" artists of the past and from the "sane" painters of his own time, whether Orthodox or Individualist. He succeeds, that is, in creating a basically new pictorial language within later Chinese painting, portraying oddly expressive plants and creatures at a time when other major artists were largely limited to landscapes and figure subjects. He himself painted a great many landscapes, which, in spite of their seeming allegiance to orthodox types, are often more than a little hallucinatory. But the center of his individuality lies rather in his pictures of plants and animals, birds and fish, subjects that had seldom been treated in serious painting since the Song dynasty, and even then in quite different ways--the only earlier paintings that resemble Bada's significantly are works attributed to Chan Buddhist artists of the late Song. The creatures in Bada's paintings convey a strong feeling of alienation; they do this in ways we have suggested, through their poses and expressions, through their relationships with their environments, through juxtapositions that violate normal pictorial syntax for an effect of incoherence. The version of the world that they present is one alien to most viewers of the paintings, not fully intelligible and yet pregnant with meaning. The cryptic character of the paintings is not dispelled by repeated viewings. They seem to echo a mode of experiencing the world in which the familiar comes to seem threatening, normally benign features of nature appear suddenly lowering, stable objects seem to tilt or overhang alarmingly, successive events and sensations hold no sense of continuity. It is, in short, a mode of experience that we associate empathetically, without having experienced it directly ourselves, with the insane.

The mixture of motives that led Bada Shanren to continue to pursue the effect of madness in his paintings after the madness itself had abated is beyond analysis; they might include the personal and therapeutic, the artistic, the political, even motives of profit, if we think of the popularity of his pictures in an age that valued, like ours, oddness and aberrant expressions in art. What we can say is only that Bada had by then accepted the role of madman and enacted it consistently in his behavior and in his painting and poetry. Within that role he was able to carry out the artistic achievements that won him respect in his own time and a place among the major masters of later Chinese painting, a stature to which the present symposium attests.

(N.B. The following material has been added from a separate file called "Short Bada 2." The footnotes are at the end of the text, and are not formatted the same way the others before this section are formatted.--T.F.)

- Related in effect to the gazing-upward theme is the threatening overhang, a common motif in Bada's works, which renders unstable both the compositions and the situations of the creatures below. Even when we recognize that the rocks are meant to be securely based on the river bank and the fish swimming in the water, the feeling persists that the fish are somehow at risk. Instead of being comfortably enclosed in its environment, a creature in Bada's paintings may appear trapped by it.

With such observations as these we can construct a kind of grammar and vocabulary for Bada Shanren's paintings, even though we cannot say with confidence what the words mean. And we can identify tentatively the issues that his paintings raise: freedom vs. constraints, inwardness vs. sociability, a relationship of harmony or disharmony with the surrounding world, the oppressiveness of consciousness, the possibility of communication and obstacles to it. All seem congruent with Bada's own predicament. So, to return to our original question, what is there of madness in all this? Is it not just a matter of a highly original mode of expression conveying deeply-felt emotions?

Before attempting an answer to that question, let us consider one last aspect of Bada's paintings: their unorthodox compounding of subjects. Chinese artists and their audiences had reached general agreement over the centuries not only about what subjects were suitable for painting, but also on how these were to be combined: cranes with pine trees, quail with grain, and so forth. But in this, again, Bada refuses to abide by the rules, and invents odd juxtapositions of images. We have already seen several: a deer looking up at a flying bird, a sudden shift from birds-in-a-tree to a distant landscape. Quail can be combined with fish; an eagel, which had often been portrayed about to strike a smaller bird or a rabbit, appears in Bada's painting looking at a crab; two mynahs are combined with a peach tree. Birds of different species that do not seem to belong together are nevertheless placed together, like strangers who have nothing in common and feel uncomfortable in each other's company. The juxtapositions can take the form of visual puns, as when a bird roosts on a stone that looks like an oversize egg, or the full moon is made to echo the shape of a melon. But these are exceptions; Bada's purposes are not usually so penetrable, or so innocuous. When the individual motifs have well-established meanings, as in a picture of hibiscus, lotus, and chrysanthemums, the knowledgeable viewer attempts to interrelate them and make sense of the combination; when this proves impossible, the effect is subtly unsettling.

Bada's handscroll compositions, in particular, present strange surprises as they unroll: one that begins with swimming fish ends with sleeping ducks; a painting of lotus and other flowers unexpectedly introduces a cat sleeping on a rock; one that features lotus and small birds in the first half presents a duck and a banana palm in the second. Examples could be multiplied. One is reminded of Bada's poems, which similarly force inexplicable leaps upon the reader, one line failing to lead to another in any normal discursive way.

We can note here, without elaborating or even illustrating the observation, that a supporting argument could be made for spatial incoherence, unbalance, and "mismatching" of elements in Bada's landscape paintings. It is worth noting also, again only in passing, that when Bada's paintings are accompanied by poetic inscriptions, the viewer is usually confronted by similar disjunctures between the pictures and the inscriptions: one expects the text to explicate somehow the image, and instead it only compounds the puzzle. A consistent kind of calculated incoherence, in fact, characterizes all the relationships in his works: between images within the paintings, between paintings and poems, and between images or allusions within the poems. It is not that any of these, poems or paintings, seem merely to ramble aimlessly; the juxtapositions, like the images themselves, appear loaded with significance, so that one is led to search for intelligible meaning and fails to find it. We are not permitted even to know whether it is some hidden purpose or an incoherence of mind that underlies the discontinuities; we are unsure whether to read the paintings as deliberately cryptic expressions or as the products of a mind incapable of sustained rational functioning. But the paintings, with their inscriptions, open the latter possibility forcefully enough to allow us to speak of an effect of madness in Bada Shanren's works.

Conclusion: The "Madness" in Bada's Paintings

Up to now, we have stayed entirely within the Chinese context. But in considering the relationship of madness to artistic creation, we can scarcely avoid the extensive Western language literature on that problem.

A number of studies have been made of art produced by the insane; the classic work is Hans Prinzhorn's, published in 1922. Prinzhorn's book is based on his own experience as a psychotherapist and on the collection he made of over 5,000 drawings, paintings, and sculptures by patients in psychiatric institutions. On this basis, he attempts to identify the characteristics of art produced by schizophrenics, characteristics that are not equally present in the works of "normal" artists. The most relevant part of his study for us--leaving aside his treatment of the scribbles, obsessively repeated patterns, and other types of configurations done by mental patients--is the section on "Increased Significance--Symbolism," in which he discusses the elaborate and mysterious symbolic compositions made by some schizophrenic artists. Also of special interest are his final pages, in which he sums up his observations on the art of schizophrenics. Reading these sections with Bada's paintings in mind, one is struck by congruences, even though the works themselves look very different from Bada's, based as they are in a different artistic tradition (from which even mad artists cannot quite escape).

Art by the mentally ill, Prinzhorn observes, tends to be childlike, resembling in some respects the art of children, presenting an outward air of naiveté. It often seems also playful. At the same time, it can be "fantastically vivid," attaining levels of intense emotional expression scarcely accessible to the more inhibited art of the sane. The schizophrenic artist will produce such pictures obsessively, as though trying to discharge his inner tensions by expressing them in art. Prinzhorn writes of the "schizophrenic preference for the ambiguous, secretive, and eerie"; the pictures are typically "symbolically overladen," filled with secret meanings. They are characterized by "an absurd discrepancy between what is formally presented and its meaning." The artists, even those with no artistic training, will create elaborate, private symbolic languages. They are glad to explain these, but the highly detailed explanations, which can fill notebooks, are as cryptic as the pictures. Prinzhorn gives examples of poetry made up of long, unintelligible series of seemingly unrelated statements and images--reminding the English reader, perhaps, of the poems composed during his period of madness by the 18th century poet Christopher Smart. He acknowledges that the mind of a healthy person can produce similar successions of images and impulses, but says that "what is distinctive [in the schizophrenic's pictures] is the free rein given to any idea, however limited, as well as the pleasure taken in making various points which cannot be combined logically, but instead remain in the state on unresolved tension . . . " The pictures, although not fully intelligible, seem charged with significance: " . . . we are not faced with a representation to which we can simply assent aesthetically, without asking about meaning." Later in his book Prinzhorn asks what pictures by schizophrenics have in common, and answers: "They have an arbitrariness otherwise foreign to us and refer to experiences which remain sinister to us even though we are familiar with the sinister elements of artistic fantasy." Trained artists who become schizophrenic, in particular, can create works of great power, not only in imagery but also in a special quality of drawing (+ grushwork): "We can . . . accept that there is a kind of reckless, bold stroke whose breathtaking dynamism we find so disquieting that we experience the alienated psychic state of its author directly and visully." And the work of the schizophrenic artist among his patients who best exemplifies this observation is compared, expectedly, to "van Gogh's last pictures."

All this is valuable and largely convincing, coming as it does from a sensitive and trained observer who based his findings on an unusually large body of material and depth of experience. And the apparent applicability of much of what he writes to the painting of Bada Shanren, and to the ways in which Bada's work differs from the rest of Chinese painting, is striking. Nevertheless, before we rush to the conclusion that Bada's paintings are the typical productions of a schizophrenic, we should make one important qualification (of which Prinzhorn himself indicates awareness at several points in his book): When "sane" artists choose to give an effect of madness to their pictures--one thinks of Bosch, Brünewald, some of the German Expressionists, Dubuffet--they are quite capable of producing works that are not easily distinguishable, by Prinzhorn's criteria, from the art of the truly mad. Conversely, when a schizophrenic artist possesses artistic training and technique (as does Franz Pohl, the last of the ten artists to whom Prinzhorn devotes long discussions), his work, or the best of it, comes to resemble the works of "sane" Expressionist masters of his time. It would appear that the ability to paint such pictures does not derive so much from being insane as from understanding insanity deeply enough to draw on its rich sources in one's artistic creations, and from possessing the artistic means to recreate some aspects of psychotic experience in the forms and imagery of art. A "sane" artist can do this in ways that are perhaps only intensifications and redirections of the ways in which any good artist draws on the irrational processes of his mind, and by imagining experiences he has not personally had. On the other hand, artists who are, or have been, in serious states of mental disorder obviously have more immediate access to that experience; and when their psychic condition is stable enough to allow them to function effectively as artists, after the illness has abated or in intervals between incapacitating bouts of madness, they can create more compellingly than the "sane" those expressive forms that somehow embody the psychological experience of madness. For the, doing so can be therapeutic, in addition to the usual rewards that the creation of art brings to the artist.

It will be useful here to recall the chronology of Bada Shanren's madness. However traumatically the fall of the Ming and death of his father affected him, he seems to have continued to function like a normal person, perhaps mentally disturbed but not psychotic, in the following decades. Chen Ding's report that Bada assumed dumbness upon his father's death in 1644 is unlikely to be true, since he became a Buddhist priest with many followers, and is said to have had at some time a wife and children. We even have reports of things he said during this period. According to Chen Ding's account, Bada's serious derangement had begun before he took the name Geshan, which was around 1671, but given the other chronological inconsistencies in Chen's biography, this is also open to question. By 1677, in any case, Bada was using a seal on his paintings reading "Curbing madness," which would seem to be an indication of his own awareness of his condition. The first violent outbreak of madness recorded for him occurred at the end of his year-long stay in 1678-79 with Hu Yitang at Linchuan. After that he burned his mond's robe and returned to his home town, Nanchang, where he behaved like a madman in the marketplace, "waving his sleeves and spinning round in circles," until he was recognized by a nephew and taken home. There he gradually recovered, and returned to secular like, leaving the Buddhist order.

Between then and his death in 1705 Bada continued to exhibit the strange behavior that his biographers report, but otherwise seems to have sunctioned reasonably well as an odd but valued member of his society. He was able to communicate effectively by hand gestures and writing, as we know from Shao Changheng's account of his visit with him around 1688. Although the several letters Bada wrote to Shitao during the 1690s have not been preserved, Shitao's reply of 1698 contains no suggestion that they were other than intelligible; and the texts of thirteen preserved letters to one Fang Shiguan, written in his late years, are difficult but not so incoherent as to indicate mental disorder. Most of Bada's extant paintings, and the best of them, are from these late years, long after the period for which his serious madness is recorded.

Karl Jaspers, in his 1922 book Strindberg and Van Gogh, describes two types of relationships between schizophrenia and artistic production: the type represented by Strindberg, in which his "productivity [of literary works] is wanting during the acute period [of his mental illness] while almost all of his impressive works were written [after that] during the final phase," and the type represented by van Gogh, in which the works "grow during a stormy mental agitation with a marked tendency to a certain culmination. From that moment on the process of disintegration gains strength. During the final phase the creative ability . . . ceases to function." What we know about the chronologies of Bada Shanren's life and his paintings indicates that in his case the relationship was of the former type, with the period of greatest productivity following on the period of most severe mental disorder. The qualities in his paintings that we have tried to define as constituting the "madness" in them appear, with few exceptions, only long after his period of serious derangement, and they develop together with--are in fact inseparable from--the qualities that made him a great painter. And the conclusion strongly suggested by all this is that Bada in his best and strongest works is not only reflecting whatever disorder still afflicted him, but is drawing on remembered states of mental aberration to create the aberrant forms and structures of his paintings--one might adapt Wordsworth's famous formulation for poetry to speak of this as "madness recollected in semi-sanity." We should not read the paintings, then, as symptoms of a mind incapable of tighter control, but as creations of a mind deliberately opened to unfamiliar areas of human experience, and able to impress something of the character of that experience on other minds through the power of artistic images. The mixture of motivations that led Bada to continue to pursue the effect of madness in his paintings is beyond analysis; they might include the personal and therapeutic, the artistic, the political, even the motive of profit, if we think of the popularity of his pictures in an age that valued, like ours, oddness and aberrant expressions in art. What we can say in only that he had by then accepted the role of "madman" and enacted it consistently in his behavior and in his artistic and literary productions. Within that role he was able to accomplishartistic achievements that won him respect in his own time and a place among the major masters of later Chinese painting, a stature to which the present symposium attests.


Afterword

At some points in the above paper I have admittedly gone beyond the kind of argument that can be fully substantiated; I am aware too that a far more thorough investigation of Bada Shanren's life and works would be needed before conclusions of the kind I have attempted could be safely drawn. My intention has been to raise what seem to me crucial questions about the nature of Bada's paintings and how they relate to the circumstances of his life, and to propose in a provisional way some possible answers, in the hope of stimulating those more knowledgeable in Bada Shanren studies to investigate these same questions and provide firmer answers to them.

Some paintings of this kind, particularly some in which the individual images duplicate those in others of Bada's paintings, have the character of pastiches and may be suspected of being modern forgeries. But the same odd combinations of motifs are found in works that appear to be genuine.

Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Berlin, 1922; Englsih translation, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Berlin and New York, 1972.

Wu Tung discusses Bada's madness at length in his essay for Hachidai sanjin, presenting the view that it was internal, the culmination of psychological disorders continuing over the years, and was not brought about by any particular external event or political situation. I am indebted also to Wang Fang-yu for a letter on this subject, which I have used in what follows.

Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, English translation, Tucson, 1977, especially ch. 5, "The Relationship Between Schizophrenia and Creativity."