CLP 98: 1987 “The Insides and Outsides of Recent Chinese Painting.” Lecture, Mills College, Oakland

“The Insides and Outsides of Recent Chinese Painting.”

Mills College Lecture 1987

Introduction. Title. Theme. Much written on inside and outside; haven't seen any serious attempt to illuminate relation. between. Will attempt this large and ambitious topic tonight. Subject becomes more interesting in recent years, as two parts of this bifurcated tradition draw closer. To oversimplify plan of my talk tonight: will show how tradition splits, 1949; each part splays or ravels; later, some coming together, more and more interweavings. Time to reconsider relationship. Another reason difficult before: political. In the interest of Chinese in Taiwan to argue that they were preserving China's cultural heritage, and allowing artistic freedom, and that no good art possible on mainland. Could argue so, while cut off. Ca. 1970? conference organized at College of Pacific, with late Chang Ta-ch'ien as central figure, on "future of Chinese painting." We were all supposed to say that future was among certain expatriates, Chinese who chose to live overseas, like Chang himself. I was put off by this, said: future of Ch. ptg. in China, where always has been. Hard to argue then; easier now. So I want to look tonight at how Chinese painting inside and outside China pulled apart; how two parts coming together now, like healing of schism. Don't mean this as metaphor for political situation; have no more idea than anybody else whether P.R.C. and Taiwan coming closer to reuniting in other ways.

Must say at outset that this will be highly incomplete account, and very personal view. Will look only at Chinese call guo hua, sometimes rendered "trad. ptg" but not necessarily that. Paying no attn. (except side-glances) to oil ptg, or artists outside academies working in what they take to be avant garde styles, imitating new trends in West, etc. I'm historian of Chinese art, interested in how that history continues into our time.

My colleague Peter Selz recently spent several months in China, came back having found only one artist to admire (Rauschenberg-like young man). What would please NY critics. I think there are other valid criteria for judging value in contemp. art, will show things tonight, and express admiration for them, which would make Peter, or Rosalind Kraus, shudder. Whether that's my problem or theirs you can judge for yourselves.

S. CCW/Cheng Shifa ptg. What's wrong with this picture? (explain) Not unprecedented, but-- I offer as kind of symbol of reconciliation of inside and outside; but could equally be symbol of what caused them to diverge in first place. Can be used to represent initial perception on divergence of inside and outside of Ch. ptg. (to use short terms).

S,S. Ptgs of C.C.Wang (1961), Cheng Shifa (1960), separately. "Pure" landscape, with a few simply-drawn houses at most, no figures, no narrative content; other: figural, with "human interest" element. (Leaving out bird and flower subjects for now; will introduce them briefly later.) Former, "pure landscape, makes up big part of "outside" Ch. ptg.; and strong pull toward abstraction, disappearance of recognizable figural subjects. Figure ptg. not much done by leading artists. Inside: concerned with human themes, much of the time; even when subject seems to be landscape; figure ptg remains strong, "pure" landscape relatively rare, abstract or non-objective art impossible, at least until recently.

So, for a long time, real divergence; neither side had much understanding or respect for other. When exhib. w. Cheng Shifa ptgs shown at our UAM in 1974, critics found his ptgs "sweet" or "sentimental" or characterized them derisively as "good greeting-card material." Failed utterly to see beyond their subject matter to their strengths, power of line and forms. More recently, C.C.Wang's old friend Xu Bangda, w. whom he was assoc. closely in 1930s-40s, as part of group of ptrs and connoisseurs in Shanghai, has said that he can't understand Wang's later ptgs. Misunderstandings, or lack of understanding, in both directions. Ptrs themselves can sometimes be more broad in their tolerances and tastes: it was C.C.WAng who first, in the early 1960s, told me that Cheng Shifa was an artist to watch, and showed me an album by him he'd bought; and Cheng told me, after seeing exhib. of American ptg from Boston M.F.A. in l982, that he especially admired ptgs of Franz Kline.But, for moment, let's accept these as contrary directions, follow them separately, beginning in 1950s and 60s, as brief background for consideration of more recent developments.

S,S. In Taiwan, some continuation of very conservative ptg styles, carried on by old, established artists such as Huang Chun-pi (teacher of Mme. Chiang) and P'u Hsin-yu, member of Manchu imperial family. LS by P'u on right dtd. 1948. To trace this strand in recent Ch ptg through followers in Taiwan would be kind of dead-end, I think, like this kind of ptg itself. But something of it survives, e.g. in ptg of Yü Ch'eng-yao, old self-taught artist, former soldier, military man, recently acclaimed and exhibited in Taiwan. LS ptgs, elaborate in composition, richly textured, large in scale.

S,S,. In PRC, not so easy to do "pure LS," or completely traditional LS; hard to demonstrate its relevance to new socialist society. Work by Ying Yen-p'ing, 1957, titled "The Lofty Mt. Bows Its Head, the River Yields to a Road." Trad. LS with additions that turn its trad. meaning upside down: instead of harmony of man & nature, nature being conquered and changed by man's works. Work of Mr. Wang Ch'ang-chieh, painter of exhibition now on view here, comparable in effect although quite different in subject: traditional landscape with Golden Gate Bridge in distance.

S,S. Ptg by Li Shih-ch'ing, 1958, titled "Moving Mts., Filling VAlleys"; Ptg by anon. worker, early 60s? "A New Peak Among the Mts." Interesting; obviously no future to this, dropped.

S,S. Mr. Wang Ch'ang-chieh can make this work only by obscuring Golden Gate Bridge until it could be mistaken for two watch-towers or pagodas: doesn't seem jarring intursion.

S,S. During 50s and early 60s, before Cultural Rev., a few artists, espec. older and established ones, could experiment with abstracting direction which C.R. would put an end to, denouncing it as "formalism" or "bourgeoise formalism." Here, Li K'o-jan (still with us; spent day with him last November), 1959 LS; ptg of banana palms and beautiful woman. Undated; early 60s? Concentration on linear patterns gives interest to painting somewhat apart from subject.

S,S. LS by Lin Fengmien, who studied in France and was inf. by post-Impres. ptg; filling of ptg surface,basically a new idea in Ch. ptg., somewhat affected, I think, by Western practice. LS by P'an T'ian-shou, interesting artist not much known outside China (works rare), ptd in 1959, very linear and flat, like color woodcut. He died in 1971, victim of persecution.

S,S. Many works by Cheng Shifa from early 60s--here, two ptgs of 1963--were also exploring, in highly sophisticated and accomplished ways, use of brushstrokes and lines that were not simply descriptive of objects portrayed, and that turned them into bold, simple forms, flattened forms, that resisted simple representational readings. These were ptgs shown in our 1974 exhibition, mentioned earlier; newspaper critics, with single exception, got no further than seeing pink cheeks of girls, said "yuk", and went off to write their put-downs. Actually, as they would have seen if they had got beyond superficial impressions, these are sensitive and highly original works, and suggested another direction that Chinese painting could have taken. But this, too, w as cut short by C.R. Ptgs in heavy ink, like Li K'o-jan's or some of Cheng Shifa's, called "black ptgs" by Jiang Qing, denounced as antithetical to upbeat expression she demanded in art.

S,S. Meanwhile, Western oil ptg, especially Russian, was having another, dif. effect on other artists, inspiring them in directions seen here: Socialist realism. Outside our subject; introduce them only to note how this affected ptg in traditional media.

S,S. From late 50s thru 60s into early 70s, great bulk of ptg produced in China was of this kind--politically inspired, propagandistic, in one way or another. Much of it done in trad. media, ink and colors on paper, so still sometimes considered guo hua. Ptg of Norman Bethune, Canadian doctor who accompanied 8th Route Army, died of infection while working at front lines. "Eight Women Hurling Themselves Into the River." Martyrs. Much ptg of this kind and period was meretricious and low-level, like magazine illustrations, as they were usually cahracterized. I admit unashamedly that I find some of it moving and fine, and believe it's our own inability to tolerate serious figure ptg that blinds us to its strengths; but that, too, is a different lecture.

S,S. MEanwhile, some of younger artists outside China, espec. in TAiwan, were using styles that might be characterized as Chinese versions of Abstract Expressionism. Sometimes vaguely suggestive of LS imagery. Fong Chung Ray, ptg from 1960s (undtd) on right, one by Liu Kuo-sung, dtd. 1962, on left. Both members of Fifth Moon Group, formed in Taiwan. Liu Kuo-sung was perhaps most important of group. One of a number of artists outside China who were, at that time, experimenting w. semi-random techniques--in Liu's case, free running of ink and color and pulling out fibers of paper for streaks of white. (We will see other, related tech. in works of Ch'en Ch'i-k'uan and C.C.WAng.)

S,S. So, here in extreme form is the "confrontation" (polarity) that two branches of Ch ptg, inside and outside, had reached by later 60s and early 70s. "A New Face at the Coal Mine," by a certain Yang Chih-kuang, 1972; and "Earthscape" by Liu Kuo-sung, 1968. Virtually any viewer inside PRC at that time would have found ptg. on right attractive and intelligible, and one on left unintelligible and objectionable. Practically any viewer outside PRC, on other hand, at least any viewer seriously involved with art, would have found one on right impossible to accept as good art, and one on left to be taken seriously, whether he liked it or not. Since we are outside, we are inclined to latter view, and inclined also to see this as question of absolute value, good art vs. bad; to feel, in other words, that we are right and they are wrong. We would also tend to argue that any good artist, if free to make the choice, would choose to paint like Liu and not like Yang. I'm not sure it's so simple, although I might choose another ptg than "New FAce at Coal Mine" to base my argument on.

In any case, two directions seemed quite unreconcilable; no common ground. Stated in extreme form: art without imagery vs. imagery without art. An equivalent in art, perhaps, of seemingly irreconcilable political differences; the Two Chinas in art.

And yet in the rest of my lecture I want to argue that the inside and outside currents of Ch ptg are coming together, in very interesting ways; and not simply because PRC artists now have more freedom and can paint like artists outside China. Not that simple at all. To show how this is happening, I will treat a series of artists, each of them briefly, greatly over-simplifying the nature and direction of their work, for which I apologize to them as a group in advance.

S. Good place to begin is with late Chang Ta-ch'ien, who had distinguished career as artist on mainland before he left in late 40s, first for Brazil, then for the U.S., finally for Taiwan, where he died several years ago.

S,S. His early LS (1932, 1934) firmly in Ch. tradition; loosely follow models such as Shih-t'ao. He also, of course, ptd figures, flower, etc., but I'm concerned now only with his LS.

S,S. Here is a LS w. figures by him, one of his finest works, in which large areas of ptg are amorphous patches of ink, given scale and form by limited areas of finer drawing. Undtd. ptg. Creates mood of mystery, a certain foreboding--very effective. Not a completely new idea--Shih-t'ao etc., and something comparable achieved in some works of Fu Pao-shih on mainland.

S,S. Later, depended more and more on splashed ink and color. His eyesight failing; fine drawing difficult for him. He could present this change, more or less forced on him, as new artistic direction, responding to his contacts w. new trends in Western art after he left China. Never, with him, entirely a move into abstraction; always kept hold on ptg as image, even when seems close to abstraction,

S. Comparison of another of his late paintings w. photograph of Huangshan peaks in mist reveals how much responsiveness to LS imagery in nature remains in his ptg. But photographer no doubt influenced by Chang Ta-ch'ien.

S,S. In 1983, took on what one magazine article called "his greatest challenge," huge ptg. of scenery of Mt. Lu, done for old friend who was restauranteur, for foyer of new hotel. Worked long and hard on it; said to have been responsible for his death, Be that as it may, shows him returning to more traditional;, representational style at very end.

S,S. Woman ptr, Tseng Yu-ho, now living in Honolulu, began by receiving very traditional training in Peking from old conservative ptr, P'u Hsueh-chai, cousin of last emperor. Later came to Hawaii with husband, began to move into abstraction, in ptgs w. strong linear patterns, or ptgs that exploited semi random effects of suffusing ink and fibrous paper.

S,S. As time went on, came to depend more and more on paper collage, applications of gold and silver foil, minimum of brush ptg to make these amorphous configurations suggestive of LS. Art historian would be inclined to see heavy borrowings from Jap. trad. in these, in use of materials, ways of composing; she denies this, says all has precedents in Ch. tradition. Well. S,S. Two recent works, photographed when I visited her last spring. Very sophisticated manipulations of materials, creasing of paper, webs of fiber on surface, combined w. minimal brush-ptg to suggest mysterious LS w. trees.

This exploitation of special qualities of paper, ink, colors, and of unorthodox ways of combining them, is a feature of much of most interesting recent ptg by Chinese artists outside China. Does it respond in some part to work of Paul Klee and others? perhaps.

S,S. Another who makes use of these techniques is Ch'en Ch'i-k'uan, China-born, trained at MIT as architect, disciple of I.M. Pei, now living and working in Taiwan. He sometimes plays with calligraphic abstraction in witty ways, as in this 1952 ptg titled "Football" --(Hope everyone sees joke--)

S,S. But more often, and more interestingly, he works w. semi-controlled, mottled effects of ink and color, produced by elaborate procedures of resist techniques, soaking colors from back of paper, etc., to produce such absorbing works as this, one of series done after visit to Venice around 1960, rep. St. Mark's Cathedral and square in front, with pigeons.

S,S. In his many LS, he likes to play on traditional Chinese compositional types, such as tall, narrow LS w. forms vertically disposed. Here, too, combines semi-random areas of mottled ink and colors w. finer drawing that makes us read these as rocks and cliffs: trees growing out from them, monkeys in trees. One can read ptgs as abstractions, from distance, or as busy, populated scenes from close-up.

S. One other younger artist from Taiwan is Hung Hsien or Margaret Hung. Born in Yangchow, moved to Taiwan while young, studied there w. P'u Hsin-yu, old conservative master who spent last years there, had many pupils. 1953 blue-and green LS by her; scarcely promising; just another performance in old manner.

S,S. Changed her style, becoming associated with Fifth Moon Group, taking direction more like that of Liu Kuo-sung etc.; into kinds of calligraphic abstraction. After she moved to U.S. with husband, spent time on Hornby Island near Vancouver, where she roamed seashore, and began to make its rocks and tidal pools into the materials of her painting.

Now, what I've been showing so far of ptg by overseas Chinese artists may seem only to affirm the seemingly irreconcilable divergence I remarked on earlier: moves into varieties of expressive abstraction. But what I want to stress is that these ptrs mostly keep some tenuous hold on representation by continuing to incorporate rather ambiguous references to LS and other imagery into the pictures. Tension between readings as abstract form and as pictures creates much of interest of ptg, providing complex, absorbing visual exper. for viewers. (I'm quite aware that representation vs. abstraction is a simplistic issue to place at the center of an artistic development these days; I'm using the terms for lack of better, but trying to show how recent Ch. ptrs deal with this issue in special Chinese ways, and that it's an issue that seems to concern them deeply, if I read their paintings and their own statements correctly.)

Now, following that same issue, I want to show how a few overseas artists--as well as others, if I had time to deal with them--are moving in opposite direction, from abstraction back into more overt and distinct imagery, espec. landscape imagery.

S,S. I begin with Liu Kuo-sung. We already saw his calligraphic abstractions of the 1960s. By the 70s, as seen here in work of 1976, he was adapting the free, vigorous brushstrokes of that manner to ptgs more clearly meant to be read as LS. One on right, 1975: reading as waterfall, jutting boulder, gorge and cliff reinforced by clear representation of rivulets of water running down further cliff; one on left, 1976, large boulder in FG treated w. highlights and shadows that evoke styles of Sung masters such as Li T'ang, supplying a massive, readable form around which other materials of the ptg arrange themselves as elements of LS.

S. Detail of rock. Again, this is nothing entirely new in itself; Ch ptrs had been playing on ambiguities of image vs. abstraction from beginnings of their art, neolithic ptd pottery. Liu's work of this kind distinguished by excellence of his technique, evocative power of his forms.

S,S. Liu's "Murmuring Peacefully in a Lonely Valley" and "Wintry Mts. Covered with Snow," both 1977. Titles alone would betray new intention of artist: not only to revert to clearly intentional representation of LS scenery, but of specific types of scenery: stream winding between heavily wooded shores, rocky crags with snow. One could place each of these beside some old Ch ptg of Sung or later period, and suggest that Liu was finding inspiration there; but I'm not trying, in this lecture, to identify precedents for certain features and trends in contemp,. Ch. ptg--did that in dif. lecture given in S.F. several years ago.

S,S. In 1986, Liu ptd long handscroll--trad. Chinese form he hadn't used before, to my knowledge--rep. "LS of Four SEasons"--LS, that is, that changes through four seasons within continuous composition. Not unknown device in China, again--Ming examples--also practiced by Muromachi-period ptrs in Japan, in handscrolls and screens. Early in scroll, spring scenery portrayed w. blossoming trees on mountainside, green fields in distance. Moving further, section with imposing mountains painted in ink with blue and green color; flowering trees in lower right, pine trees in distance at upper right, depicted in way not too different from traditional Chinese ptg.

S,S. Further on, where trees turn autumnal in color. Adopts Ch. convention by which distance of most of scenery from viewer clearly understood, with trees on lower edge for nearest element and glimpse of recesses of river for furthest. Space filled with light and mist--may recall Kung Hsien of 17th cent.

S,S. Ends w. imposing snowscape, representing winter. Culmination, perhaps, of Liu's reversion to fully representational style--not reversion for him, that is, but w/in whole tradition. Critic in Taiwan writing in 1970 catalog of exhib. of Liu Kuo-sung and four others, says: "We hold in contempt the rumor that abstract art is declining in the West. (Despairing statement of someone with finger in dike.) Style of artistic expression, abstract or non-abstract, depends upon the intrinsic need of the artist and faithfully reflects his aesthetic belief." Artists themselves, and some critics, always arguing for complete autonomy of artist, rejecting idea that they learn from each other, follow trends, etc.; art-historians continue to recognize correspondences in directions taken by artists that indicate they are quite responsive, like anyone else, to what they see and hear. This is one of our own polarities or divergences.

S,S. Another younger artist who made this move from abstraction to overt landscape imagery is Wang Wu-hsieh or Wucius Wong. I knew him first when he was student at Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore in early 60s; I taught course in Ch. ptg there, and he was my teaching assistant. Perhaps I can claim some minor credit for making him look harder at certain kinds of early Chinese painting. At that time and for some years after he returned to Hong Kong, he was engaged in explorations of geometric abstraction, like ptg on right, titled "Connected Circles," done in Chinese ink on paper, dating from around 1966. But during 1970s, and in some ptgs even earlier, he was experimenting also with ways of using semi-abstract forms in configurations reminiscent of LS. HIs 1978 "Cloud Harmony" on left will make Ch. art historian think of Kung Hsien working in manner of Chu-jan; device of dividing composition into squares, with forms sometimes continuing and sometimes discontinuous across joins, could be seen as play on Chinese practice of creating multiple horizons within single picture, but probably inspired also by device used in 60s and 70s by some Occidental artists; makes picture, for me, a bit too New Yorky.

S,S. His "Purification #2," on right, evokes intentionally style of great 11th cent. master Fan K'uan; his "Aloof Peaks" of 1980 was painted after he had climbed Huangshan in that year, an experience that had a profound effect, he says, on his paintings. He himself writes that this is point at which he came "closest to the tradition," and that in the mid-70s he "suddenly felt the need of returning to the cultural roots of the Orient. That was the time I started my journey back into the Chinese tradition."

S. Painting of 1983, titled "Mountain Dream #2." I wish I could show you his most recent works, which I saw in exhib. at Meishuguan in Beijing last November. I talked with him there, and said that even after one has given proper due to the Chinese trad. and the Chinese terrain, Fan K'uan and Huangshan, something remains (even more in latest works than here) which for me evokes kind of painting known in European and American ptg of 18th and 19th centuries as "LS of the sublime." He agreed enthusiastically, saying that he had indeed become very interested in Western LS ptg of that kind lately. Strong sense of light and shade, grandeur of whole effect, congruent with European ptg of that kind; also reliance on suggestiveness of indistinct forms. Edmund Burke, writing in 1757 on the sublime in art, pointed out that "a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture," because "dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate." Applies to much of best recent Ch ptg: strange correspondence over the centuries and across cultures. Chinese artist both inside and outside China during past decades, faced w. continuing problem of wanting to join "international mainstream" somehow w/o giving up Chinese heritage, have been looking for affinities between Western and Chinese art. Found one in 1950s-60s, as we have seen: Abstract Expressionism for West, calligraphy and rough-brush painting for China. This convergence was being exploited early e.g. by Zao Wouki, who moved to Paris in 1948 from being prof. in Acad. of Art in Hangzhou, and has been successful artist there. This worked very well for a while. More recently, as Western ptg moves back more into the figural, Ch. artists looking for other areas of affinity. One is in LS: Sung monumental LS in China, "LS of sublime" from 18th cent. in Europe. Later is not a trad. that has much following in West today; but Western audiences, like Chinese, still respond to it--still has its emotional impact. I've suggested in recent writings that some 17th cent. Chinese artists seem to have recognized affinities in similar way bet. Western LS (becoming known to them thru prints brought by Jesuits) and Sung-period monumental LS of their own tradition.

S. Now, want to turn briefly to ptr whose long career sums up all I've been talking about, ptr central to all of it, Wang Chi-ch'ien or C.C.Wang (One of two ptrs w. whom we began; to be distinguished from other artist named C.C.Wang, whose exhibition now here. Will come to him later.) Wang Chi-ch'ien born 1907 in Suchou, estab. as orthodox LS ptr in China before he came to U.S. in 1940s and settled in New York.

S,S. During 1950s, studied Western-style ptg in oils; here are two still-life pictures done by him in 1956 and 1959, seen here in public perhaps for first and last time. I got to know him quite well in 1953, when at Met. Mus. as fellowhsip student; was one of those who admonished him agst. continuing in this direction. But, even though ptgs hard to admire today, had great effect on his later work, espec. his use of color.

S,S. By later 1960s--these are 1969 and 1970--he was experimenting, in way related to works of Tseng Yu-ho, Ch'en Ch'i-k'uan and others--with semi-random effects of resist, applying ink with crumpled paper, etc. Impossible to establish priority for these ideas--artists themselves don't know--and not important anyway. Amorphous configurations suggestive of LS, forms of which he could enhance the readability as LS imagery by addition of indicators or clues.

S. As here, in another work of 1970, where a few touches of bluish color and a few simply-drawn roofs suggest clusters of trees and houses, and give scale and definition to the rest. A series of horizontal brushstrokes turns vertical streak into stone steps, suggesting ascent. Again, precedent in old trad. of i-p'in or "untrammeled" ptg in which artist splashed ink and colors onto ptg surface, or applied them in unorthodox ways w. pieces or rope or dried sugarcane or his hair, and then turned chance formations produce in this way into readable picture by addition of brush-drawing.

S,S. Gradually, in ptgs or 1970s and 80s, he relies less on random effects of patterns of ink impressed with crumpled paper and more on brush painting, and his LS become more easily readable, more spacious, more monumental. This is not, to be sure, necessarily an advance--I'm not arguing that representation is better--but it's the direction he's taking, by his own choice, and it seems to me a good one. Not simple unilinear development --still moves back and forth between amorphous and defined--but all-over movement, like that of other artists we've seen, is toward more spatially readable LS w. strong element of grandeur, whether it echoes Sung LS or European LS of sublime, or, as I would believe, both.

S,S. One interesting feature of some of his recent LS is heavy application of brilliant color, espec. in trees. Seen also in some recent LS ptgs by PRC artists, such as this one by Chang Pu, painted in 1981, around same time that C.C. Wang took up this technique. Source of both may be : S. in certain works by Chang Pu's teacher Li K'o-jan, painted during 19670s and early 70s, after his "black" LS had been denounced, and a more colorful and visually appealing style more or less imposed on him. But this is only a preliminary reading of relationship, perhaps wrong.

,S. Some of Wang Chi-ch'ien's most recent LS--one on right 1982, one on left 1986--bring us as close to successful recreation of Northern Sung monumental LS as anything painted in recent times. Not only that, of course--strongly original ptgs, in style reached through long personal evolution. And by no means can he be said to have "come full circle," since these ptgs are completely unlike orthodox-style ptgs w. which he began. For young ptr such as Wucius Wong to "return to his roots" out of earlier stage of abstraction is interesting; for seventy-year-old ptr to do this, with such power and originality, is even more impressive, and very moving.

Finally, I want to return to P.R.C. to look briefly at some developments in guo hua or so-called traditional ptg since the "second liberation" of 1977, which followed on death of Mao and the fall of Jiang Qing.

S,S. Figure ptg continues strong. Cheng Shifa, the leading figure specialist in China, has more or less dropped his fine-line manner of the early 60s, and paints a lot that can be dismissed as kitsch--he is under considerable pressure to produce his popular images in quantities--but also continues to stay well ahead of his many imitators in strong, moving ptgs such as this portrayal of the third-century poet and musicial Hsi K'ang playing his ch'in as he waits in shackles to be executed. This was in our 1981 exhibition in S.F.--my choice; such is the foreigners' discomfort w. figure ptg that he otherwise would have been rep. only by a LS and bird-and-flower ptg, quite uncharacteristic of his output.

S,S. I photographed this recent ptg of two deer, buck and doe, in his studio last November--just finished, not yet mounted. Indicates how far he can go in direction of brush-abstraction, and with what mastery he reconciles this with the rendering of organic form.

S,S. Some of older artists, such a Li K'o-jan, have gone back to painting much the same kind of thing they did before Cultural Revolution, rejecting altogether the ideological figure art of the 1960s and 70s. This is understandable enough. But some of best of younger artists, by contrast, more deeply affected by that kind of ptg, because they grew up with it, and are unwilling to throw it over altogether; more inclined to try to raise it to the level of good art and purge what is objectionable in it. Nieh Ou, young woman painter in Beijing Ptg Academy, continues to take scenes from lives of common people as her subject, but renders them in brushwork that is tender and unassertive but strong, endowing the people represented with these same characteristics.

S,S. Some of her works take us farther into another kind of brush-abstraction; this is a prevalent tendency among many of the younger guo hua artists in China, and one that narrows the distance between them and the overseas Chinese painters, I think. S,S. Tseng Shan-ch'ing, whose work of ca. 1982 was in our exhibition, seems to be taking that direction; his painting on the left, done this year, was reproduced on the cover of an exhibition announcement he sent me recently.S,S. Chou Ssu-ts'ung, a woman painter who produced conservative figure pictures at an earlier stage in her career, now does powerful, sombre works such as these: "Purgatory" from 1982, on right, depicting Chinese people interned by Japanese during occupation, behind barbed wire; and the landscape with waterfall of 1981 at left, which again draws closer to some LS by Chinese artists working outside China, of the kinds we've seen.

S,S. Specialists in flower-and-plant subjects are taking their part in this shift from traditional styles into styles that hover between the figurative and the non-objective. Ptg of gourds and vines on right by P'eng P'ei-ch'uan, young artist of Beijing Ptg Acad whose works I especially admire; one of a lotus on left by Ts'ui Tzu-fan, older artist also working in Beijing. By retaining this much hold on established Chinese modes of composition and brushwork as well as subject matter, these painters can draw on strengths of a tradition not yet exhausted while taking promising new directions.

S. Artists who loose this hold altogether, by contrast, to pursue Western models for abstract styles, as seen in this work by the leader of a Shanghai group called the "Grass Grass" art group, seem to me on the whole far less satisfying. I offer this only as a personal view, by someone deeply committed to Chinese tradition; others may feel differently on the matter. I'm not simply evading value judgements, but I don't want to try to justify mine on this occasion--perhaps another time. My familiarity with the works of the "avant garde" ptrs in China is insufficient, in any case, for me to have any really informed opinion on them.

S,S. It's interesting to see that Mr. Wang Ch'ang-chieh, the other C.C.Wang whose exhibition is now on view here, in addition to his many excellent bird and flower and animal paintings in a relatively traditional mode, also does some paintings in a more abstract manner, either through decorative flattening of the forms, as here, S,S. or through geometricizing, as in the painting on the right, or execution of the picture in wet, suffusing brushstrokes, as in the one on the left. Here, too, we can see a convergence of "inner and outer" Chinese painting styles.

S,S. Not enough time remains for me to deal broadly with landscape painting in China in recent years; if I were to do so, I would show how another of the older and established artists , the Shanghai master Lu Yen-shao, has gone from a more traditional style into his own form of brush abstraction in recent works. I would talk about how painters as diverse as the young Szechwan painter Li Hua-sheng (right) and the older Wu Kuan-chung (left), whose style has been affected by his three years of study in Paris and his knowledge of Post-Impressionist painting, are rendering landscape scenery in calligraphic brushline with strong tendencies to making the forms ambiguous, still another apect of the abstracting tendency.

S,S. Two more by Wu Kuan-chung: "Great Wall," "Old Trees." And I would talk of the revival of the dark, inky landscapes at the hands of many artists. But instead, I will conclude with a consideration of a single landscapist who seems to me one of the most interesting and hopeful among those now working in China, at least among those known to me, and one whose work seems to me a fitting conclusion for this overlong lecture.

S,S. HIs name is Jia Youfu, and he is a professor in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a man in his forties. HIs subject matter is always the same: the T'ai-hang mountains in Shensi province, the same that inspired Ching Hao in the tenth century, and the same region, at least, that was the inspiration of Fan K'uan a century later. Jia Youfu has been going there every year for many years, painting not only the scenery but also the lives of farmers and oxherds and others there. Most of his pictures are small, studies of this kind: a thatched house by moonlight, with a dog in the yard outside; boys swimming in a pool in the rocks.

S,S. As the heir to centuries of ink-monochrome painting, he is still able to find fresh ways to use the medium, for highly original effects of light breaking through clouds, or reflecting off water.S,S. He especially likes to do pictures of woodcutters or herdsmen making their way home in the evening, with lowering skies beautifully rendered in smoky clouds of wet ink wash, and patches of red sunset light on the ground.

S,S. Others of his works, sometimes huge in size, are contemporary evocations of the Northern Sung monumental mode of Fan K'uan and others of that age: like those artists, Jia Youfu sets the overpowering scale of the painting by placing small figures at the bottom--here, two woodcutters walking beside a stream. When we think back to Wang Chi-ch'ien's or Liu Kuo-sung's or Wucius Wong's versions of this same landscape mode, we are brought back to a basic difference between the "inner" and "outer" branches of Chinese painting, the one with which we began:

S. Painters in the PRC prefer to present a more humanized, habitable world, engaging to the senses, often with touches of the narrative or anecdotal in their pictures; Chinese painters outside seem to have absorbed, whether consciously or not, the Western distaste for painting of that kind, which was once central to our own tradition but has more recently all but disappeared from it. Typical works by the overseas Chinese artists seem, beside those of their contemporaries in China, cool and withdrawn, fastidiously avoiding any overt appeal to the emotions, or even the kind of nostalgic mood that Jia Youfu creates. Again, most western critics are too prone to reduce this distinction to the difference between good art and bad, mistaking cultural and period predilections for absolute criteria of value, and to accuse the Chinese of sweetness and sentimentality; but that, I think, reflects only the limitations of our own tastes and tolerances.

S,S. Jia Youfu himself, in some of his recent works, has eliminated the human presence to present the landscape as self-sufficient; here is an impressive work of that kind, which still retains, however, the concern with sensory experience, the distinctions between soft and hard tactile materials, that he handles so well. No other contemporary Chinese master, so far as I know, is so accomplished in the old techniques of ts'un-fa or texture-strokes for rock surfaces and massed, repeated , softer strokes for vegetation and trees.

S,S. One one of my visits to his studio last fall Jia Youfu told me that he wants to become a great artist, a world-class artist, and with this as his goal, he is altering radically his style. And the new direction he is taking is seen in this extraordinary work. He understands very well all that I have just tried to define as a basic inner-outer distinction, and is giving up some of the attractions of his old style--lyricism, responsiveness to conditions of weather and times of day, human themes--to achieve this stark power. He hopes that this change will lift him from the ranks of Chinese artists who do what foreign observors will see (however wrongly, however narrow their vision) as trivial and traditional, and out of step with the world mainstream; he hopes that in his new style he will be recognized as a world-class artist, transcending cultural boundaries. Perhaps he will. He asked me what I thought of this new direction, wanting an initial Occidental reaction; I muttered something about how I hoped he would not give up his old style entirely in pursuing this one, but have little hope of influencing his decisions, and indeed would be fearful of doing so.

S,S. Here, in our final slides, is another work of Jia's new style--harsh, uncompromising, cold--and purged totally of that taint of appeal to simpler human feelings that makes so much of contemporary Chinese painting in China unacceptable to Western arbiters of artistic quality. Is this the future of Chinese painting? As a final personal view, I can say that I hope not; that we should pray that the grand reconciliation of inner and outer does not go too far in the direction of the inner adopting the special values of the outer, to the point of losing the qualities that have always distinguished Chinese painting: sensitivity of execution, responsiveness to the world around us, a deep humaneness, which no amount of scoffing, or shifting of fashions, can really discredit.. Thank you.

CLP 117: 2005 “The Place of the National Palace Museum in My Scholarly Career.” published in National Palace Museun Monthly (Gugong Wenwu), special issue commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Museum.

“The Place of the National Palace Museum in My Scholarly Career.”

(Published in Chinese in Ku-kung Wen-wu (National Palace Museum Monthly), v. 23 no. 8, Nov. 2005, 93-99).

I first visited the National Palace Museum collection in 1955, when I was a graduate student doing doctoral dissertation work on the “Four Great Masters” of Yuan dynasty landscape painting, and needed access to this greatest single concentration of their major works. The collection was then kept in storehouses near the village of Pei-k’ou some miles outside Taichung, reachable by bus but also, as I chose more often to do, by bicycle. The Palace Museum staff were generous in bringing out the paintings I needed to study, and helpful with advice; I remember especially the wise, sharp-eyed, and highly informed counsel of Mr. Chuang Yen (or Chuang Shang-yen), Director of the Museum.

I came again in 1959, this time with my friend the artist-collector Wang Chi-ch’ien and a photographer, to choose and photograph paintings to be reproduced in the book Chinese Painting that I was writing for the Swiss publisher Albert Skira, which was published in the following year. The photographer was Skira’s favorite, whom he used whenever possible: Henry Beville of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The generosity and patience of the Museum’s staff this time was even greater: we spent about a month looking at a great many paintings, not only those in the main group (cheng-mu) but also several large crates of the chien-mu or “simple list” paintings, so designated in the recently-compiled Ku-kung shu-hua lu catalog. These were supposed to be lesser or unreliable works, but in reality included many fine and original pictures. Wang Chi-ch’ien and I were accompanied in all the viewings by Mr. Li Lin-ts’an, who coined for us the term “Three Painting Worms” (by analogy with “bookworm.”) Li Lin-ts’an was a good friend over many years, both in Taiwan and in the U.S., where he came often. Fine early paintings that were unpublished and little known emerged during this exciting time, and I was given the extraordinary permission to reproduce several of them for the first time, along with more familiar masterworks, and all in color; they contributed greatly to the success of my book.

By this time, the planning for the great “Chinese Art Treasures” exhibition of 1961-62 was underway, and since the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.. where it was to open, had no Chinese art specialist on its staff, the Freer Gallery of Art’s director, John Pope, and myself as Curator of Chinese Art there, took much of the responsibility, along with Aschwin Lippe of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for the U.S. input into the selection of objects and for the writing of the English-language catalog text. I remember well a tense time, while Pope and Lippe were both away in Switzerland working on the production of the catalog (again with Skira as publisher), when I was summoned to the Chinese Embassy by Ambassador George Yeh (Yeh Kung-chao), whom I had come to know well through his involvement with Chinese art as a collector. A crisis had arisen: conservative voices on the committee that governed the Museum, to whom the catalog text had been sent for approval, were objecting to entries for early paintings that did not follow traditional attributions. While respecting the importance, even greatness of these works, we had given some of them datings and attributions that accorded with more recent scholarship, including that of the Palace Museum curators themselves. Now we were being told that unless we reverted to the traditional attributions—which still followed those in the catalog of the 18^th-century Ch’ien-lung Emperor—the exhibition was off. John Walker, Director of the National Gallery, who was also present at the meeting, capitulated immediately, saying that it was his museum’s policy to follow always the owner’s attributions (a cowardly and unscholarly policy, in my view, then and now.) I wanted to stand fast, arguing that the catalog would in future become a major reference for students and scholars, so that we should not mislead them with obsolete information. George Yeh, to his everlasting credit and my great admiration, saved the day, appointing his Cultural Officer (whose name I don’t recall) to meet with me and work out compromise wordings that would give the traditional attributions but then go on to suggest the revised judgments of more recent scholarship. He said he would personally stand behind whatever new formulations we arrived at. It was these compromise statements that appeared in the catalog for some of the early paintings. Happily, no such crisis could arise today: the National Palace Museum has long since been open to the most advanced scholarship in Chinese art, in which its own director and curatorial staff are actively involved (as indeed they have been all along), and the judgments of Ch’ien-lung and his court connoisseurs no longer prevail.

While the exhibition pieces were kept at the National Gallery before the exhibition opened, a large-scale project of photographing and making slides from them was carried out there, by Henry Beville together with the Freer Gallery’s photographer, Raymond Schwartz. The photographing of the paintings—the division of handscrolls into sections, the choice of details, etc.—was directed by myself. All slides were made in originals, not copies, using a special camera that would make multiple exposures on long rolls of film. The sets of slides—complete sets for institutions most seriously involved in the study and teaching of Chinese art, smaller sets for others that did not need so many details or complete coverage of handscrolls and albums—were made available at cost to a great many museums and teaching institutions. They transformed the teaching of Chinese art, especially painting. Before, we had studied the great paintings in slides made from old black-and-white reproductions of the whole works; now these high-quality slides not only conveyed the real look of the paintings, including subtle nuances of ink value and color, but also revealed in close-ups the hand of the artist, intricacies of drawing, and hidden details unnoticed before.

The success of this photographing project suggested another, even larger, to cover, insofar as possible, all the pieces worthy of serious attention in the whole collection. No complete photographic record of this great collection existed anywhere, and, given the precarious position of Taiwan (as perceived at that time), this was cause for alarm and reason enough for undertaking such a project. It was organized by the Freer Gallery of Art and the University of Michigan, funded by three foundations (Henry Luce, JDR IIIrd, Bollingen), directed by myself, and carried out during the winter of 1963-64. I oversaw the photographing of paintings, over a period of about three months; Laurence Sickman came after that to direct, over a shorter period, the photographing of calligraphy, ceramics, and other objects. The photographer this time was Ray Schwartz of the Freer Gallery. George Yeh had by then returned to Taiwan and was a minister without portfolio in the cabinet; he was my principal advisor and liaison with the Museum authorities, one of whom was Mr. K’ung Te-ch’eng, 88^th-generation descendant of Confucius and Director of the Joint Administration of National Palace and Central Museums. These two, in addition to their other areas of expertise, were great bon vivants and arrangers of banquets, and the negotiations preceding the photographing were accompanied by nightly feasts that could go on for hours, with K’ung sometimes playing the erh-hu to entertain the guests, and both of them sending messages to the chef about changes and refinements in the menu. Photos of me up to that time show me as a tall, slender person; the transformation toward the portly figure of my later life began at this time.

When the negotiations (and banquets) finally ended and the photographing began, it was carried out in a manner based completely on George Yeh’s advice, I myself being too young and inexperienced to devise and implement such a plan. In an arrangement that was open, entirely honorable, and very effective, those on the Palace Museum staff who handled the paintings, loaded and processed the film, and did other vital jobs within the whole operation were persuaded to expend extraordinary amounts of their time and energies while the work was underway, and were suitably recompensed for this extra time and effort with provender and luxuries that Ray and I, as U.S. government employees, were able to purchase at the local PX. This completely legitimate arrangement (which was, nonetheless, later criticized by some, quite wrongly, as a form of bribery) permitted us to organize the whole operation on something like an American production-line basis, and to get a remarkable amount of work done in our brief time there.

The news that virtually the entire collection of paintings would be brought out for photographing spread quickly through the Chinese painting world, and quite a few of the major scholars in the field managed somehow to escape their academic and other commitments and come to Taichung and Pei-k’ou. C. C. Wang, who was then teaching at New Asia College in Hong Kong, wanted desperately to join us, but when he asked the president of the college, the famous historian Ch’ien Mu, for permission to miss his lectures, he was turned down. Wang, ever resourceful, then played his trump card: Ch’ien Mu’s wife had been auditing Wang’s courses and had developed an enthusiasm for Chinese paintings; she arm-twisted her husband, who had little choice but to grant both of them permission, and they joined the group. The number of outside onlookers grew so large that Ray, viewing on his ground-glass camera back what should have been the image of the painting (upside down), would find the space occupied instead by an expanse of the backs of heads, as the determined kibitzers pushed in to see the newly-exposed work close up. In the end, we had to establish rules that allowed him to work efficiently.

All the black-and-white photography was done on 8”x10” negatives; a sliding screen on the camera back permitted the division of this into two 5”x 8” pictures, used mainly for sections of handscrolls and leaves of albums. All the negatives were made in two copies, one set to be taken back to the U.S. and a duplicate set to be left with the National Palace Museum for their use. All the photographic equipment, and quantities of film and other photographic materials, were also left.

Our only serious setback was the result of bad advice from back home: a D.C. photographic company had persuaded us to do the color photographing, not in Kodachrome positive slides (always my preference) but in Ektachrome negatives, from which slides could later be made. After a lot of this film had already been exposed and returned to D.C. for processing, we learned that it was a failure: poor contrast, bad color. All the color photographing had to be redone, this time as Kodachrome positives. These slides, along with those made earlier at the National Gallery, have made up an invaluable visual coverage of the great paintings in the collection, and a significant part of the advances made in Chinese painting studies since then have depended on them. Skeptical people at that time were saying that Kodachrome slides would fade after a few years, but those I have used are still sharp and rich in color, and entirely usable. They have conveyed the glories of the Palace Museum collection on a great many lecture-room screens over the forty-odd years since then, and will presumably continue to do so far into the future.

Late in the photographing, another potential problem arose and was overcome, again with the full-scale cooperation of the Museum’s director and curatorial staff. Once more, conservative voices on the committee of political figures that administered the Palace Museum, the same who had made trouble during the preparation of the Chinese Art Treasures exhibition catalog, were attempting to limit our photographing of the “less important” paintings in the chien-mu or “simple list” group, feeling (as it was explained to us) that to open these to study and potential publication would call into question the validity of the original division, in which some of those same people had taken part. It had been carried out, that is, not by the really professionally-trained Palace Museum specialists who knew the paintings best, but by members of the governing committee higher up, whose expertise, although they were themselves collectors, was more in the political than in the connoisseurial sphere. They had been joined by a famous traditional Chinese connoisseur-collector, whose judgments , however, depended heavily on seals and inscriptions. In this matter, the Museum’s director and curatorial staff were entirely on our side, since they themselves had only very limited access to these “lesser” works, and welcomed outside intervention in getting them photographed and made accessible. By the original plan and timing, we had been expected to spend our entire period in Taichung photographing the cheng-mu, or “main list” paintings. Part of the motivation behind the extraordinary speeded-up procedures described above was to confound this prediction, and we succeeded, completing the photographing of the entire cheng-mu group with about two weeks, as I remember, remaining of our time in Taichung. Once more in consultation with our friends among the Museum curators, we sent to the authorities in Taipei what was meant to sound like a modest proposal: we would use these remaining days to choose and photograph a limited number of the chien-mu paintings, only as many as could be done in this short time. The response came back: agreed.

Now began a super-speeded-up phase of the project that made the earlier production-line methods seem slowpoke. Everybody involved realized how much was at stake: this was an opportunity, not soon to be repeated, to open up this “off-limits” body of paintings, or as much of it as seemed to be worthy of the effort, to study by both Chinese and foreign scholars. Everybody took part. In the storage rooms, workers were hanging the hanging scrolls in rows, or rolling out handscrolls and opening albums on tables, while Dick Edwards and I walked past them exercising a kind of instant connoisseurship, saying “yao!” or “pu-yao!” (Even my very limited spoken Chinese allowed that.) Those chosen for photographing were rushed off to the building where Ray Schwartz was shooting them as fast as they could be hung and rolled up. Another team was constantly reloading the camera backs with fresh film, and taking the exposed film off to the photographic studio where the terribly overworked Palace Museum photographer and darkroom specialist, Mr. Mai Chih-ch’eng, was tirelessly developing and drying the negatives. (If my memory is right, his wife was having a baby just then, and he gave up the pleasures and responsibilities of being with her to carry out our work.) By means of this extraordinary procedure we were able to get through the entire chien-mu group (excepting a few categories we chose to leave out, such as the works of Orthodox-school landscapists in the Ch’ing court) and photograph, both in black-and-white negatives and in color slides, all those that seemed to us of sufficient interest.

When word of all this got to the authorities in Taipei who had tried to limit our chien-mu photographing (we knew that they had an ally and informant among the curatorial staff in Taichung, and knew who it was), a stern directive came down to us: pending further negotiations, we were not to take the negatives and slides made from the chien-mu paintings back to the U.S., but were to leave them in Taiwan. This message came by telephone as I was having lunch with the director and curatorial staff in their lunchroom. As we quickly realized the implications of this order and how we should respond to it, we smiled at each other in silent agreement, and I told the person who had relayed the telephone message to reply to Taipei that it was too late, the slide film and negatives had already been shipped to the U.S. All those present—or all but one—were in agreement with this “white lie,” or justifiable untruth; they knew that the negatives were still in a back building, where I was sorting them into two sets, one to take, one to leave. I finished this sorting quickly during the remainder of that and the next day, and on the following day, our last, while I was bidding fond farewells to our Chinese friends, Ray was loading the boxes of our set of negatives into the trunk of our car. After our return to the U.S. we received another directive forbidding us to make prints from the chien-mu negatives or copies of the slides, but this was difficult to enforce at such long distance, and the works had in effect become accessible to scholarship. Some years later the Palace Museum would itself offer for sale complete sets of photographs made from their set of the negatives, and the taboo was broken forever.

It is important to emphasize that while we on the U.S. side, because of economic advantages, could accomplish things on a material and technological level that were difficult or impossible for the Palace Museum staff, they had a knowledge and understanding of the paintings and their background far superior to ours, so that we needed to depend on them for their expertise at every stage of the operation. It was entirely a cooperative project, carried out in an atmosphere of mutual dependence and respect. The things we did were things they also wanted done, and were never, I hope, imposed on them.

I do not remember exactly the number of black-and-white negatives and color slides that Ray Schwartz shot in those remarkable three months, but it was a staggering number, something like 2,500, perhaps more. Ray also managed, with considerable help from others, a major change of life during this same time: shortly before we returned he married a Chinese young woman, Jenny, whom he had met at the Taichung Officer’s Club, where we went every night to draw money and where she worked behind the cash-dispensing window. When I had left the Freer, the women employees there had charged me with an extra responsibility: to find a wife for Ray, who had reached an age of over forty without marrying (prevented until then by problems with a difficult mother and a Catholic religious faith.) He was very shy, and the whole courtship had to be managed and nurtured by others; Dick Edwards’s wife Vee, for instance, who came from Fukien and so could speak intelligible Taiwanese, undertook the job of persuading Jenny’s family that Ray was a legitimate and honorable suitor, while I and my family took the two of them on long outings into the mountains, to give them opportunities to be alone together--a difficult thing to arrange in Taichung at that time, since foreigners courting Chinese girls were regarded, with good reason, as probably having bad motives. But in the end it all was successful, Jenny said yes, and they were married in Taipei, again under the sponsorship of George Yeh, who speeded up the whole process of getting permission for her to accompany him back to the U.S. George, not understanding the ramifications of Ray’s Catholic faith, asked him after the civil marriage in the U.S. Embassy, which enabled him to begin work on Jenny’s exit permit: “Where are you two staying tonight?” Ray’s reply, “Jenny is staying with her relatives, and I’m staying at the YMCA” mystified George, who had, of course, expected them to spend their nuptial night together. What needed to be explained to him was that for Ray the marriage would not be legitimate until it was carried out before the altar in a Catholic church, as happened the next day in a second ceremony. Ray and Jenny are still living happily in Washington; Ray is long retired.

The negatives and slides from the photographing project were all consigned to a newly-created photographic archive at the University of Michigan, which has greatly expanded since then, adding material from many other collections and exhibitions, to become the Asian Art Photographic Distribution. They have made the photos and sets of slides from the National Palace Museum photographic project available to institutions everywhere, again making a major positive impact on the teaching and study of Chinese art.

My involvement with the National Palace Museum since that time has been less personal, more as a member of the wider community of Chinese art scholars. The first great international gathering of Chinese painting specialists--apart from a modest two-day “Chinese Art Treasures Post-mortem Conference” that I had organized in New York on October 4-5, 1963, to argue authenticity and dating issues concerning the paintings that had been in that exhibition--was held at the National Palace Museum in 1970; the papers from it were published in 1972 in a volume titled Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting. A number of notable writings that were to have a big impact on our field of study were presented at this symposium, which was also notable for opening some controversies that were to continue. Michael Sullivan presented a paper on European pictorial engravings in books recorded as having been brought to China by Jesuit missionaries in the late Ming, pictures that were thus made potentially accessible to Chinese artists. I used his paper to argue that some Chinese painters of the time, notably Wu Pin (the subject of my paper), adopted in their paintings features of foreign style that they must have learned from these prints, to enhance the illusionistic power of their pictures. This argument was relatively new and controversial at that time, and both Michael’s paper and mine were denounced vigorously in the discussion period by two young Chinese scholars and greeted with skepticism by some others. Again, this response belongs to that early time; the negative response would not be so severe today, when the visual impact of foreign pictures on Chinese late-Ming and early-Ch’ing artists is generally accepted by most people in the field. (Most of us, moreover, have by now turned away from the “influence” model of understanding such cross-cultural episodes, in which one cultural tradition is seen as “influencing,” i.e. imposing itself on, another, a version that understandably makes the whole process seem objectionable; we recognize that artists of the receiving tradition can freely and voluntarily, and to their benefit, adopt or appropriate new “stylistic ideas” from the foreign tradition that has somehow become accessible to them. This is, for example, what French painters of the later 19^th century did when they encountered Japanese prints; the effect on French painting was stimulating and liberating--no one sees this as a case of Japanese art somehow forcing itself on the French artists.) My Wu Pin paper was supported by a special exhibition of this artist’s works, his first “one-man show,” held in one of the galleries of the new Museum; it was made up of all the Wu Pin works in the National Palace Museum collection (including one formerly catalogued as “Anonymous Sung” which is clearly identifiable by style as Wu Pin’s work), together with three paintings by him that I had brought for inclusion.

I came to the National Palace Museum many times after that, to see and study paintings for various research and writing projects. An “International Conference on Sinology” held in 1982 was under the sponsorship of the Academia Sinica, but several of the Palace Museum curators participated in the History of Art section, and viewings and a banquet were held at the Museum. I was not involved directly in the great 1996 exhibition “Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum,” which was organized mainly by Wen Fong and James Watt for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but I contributed an essay to the catalog, and enjoyed seeing the paintings, most of them by now very familiar, in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. And, like most Chinese art history specialists, I have found myself writing often for permission to reproduce paintings in this greatest of collections, and have always received it, along with help and advice from the curators. All in all, it is difficult to imagine—and again I speak for others in the field as well as for myself--how impoverished my career would have been without the unfailing generosity and cooperation of the National Palace Museum administration, curators, and staff. I feel a deep debt of gratitude to all of them, along with nostalgic memories of our pleasant, productive, and sometimes lively interactions over half a century.

Captions for Photos:

1. Eight people in tropical dress: outside storage buildings at Pei-k’ou, during photographing for Skira book Chinese Painting, 1959. From left: Wang Chi-ch’ien; Mr. Chang? (in charge of storage; unclear on name); Li Lin-ts’an; Mr. Wu (ceramics specialist); Henry Beville; James Cahill.

2. Small photo: James Cahill, 1959. I stopped off at a small rural photographic studio while bicycling between Taichung and Pei-k’ou and had this made; it catches something of my feeling at that time.

3. Photo of five people: during negotiations for photographing project in Taipei, 1963. Far right: K’ung Te-ch’eng; center: Han Li-wu? (unclear: I think so); second from left: myself. Other two I don’t remember; maybe someone else will recognize them.

4. Seven people in suits: opening of Chinese Art Treasures exhibition at National Gallery in Washington, D.C. From left: Na Chih-liang, Aschwin Lippe, T’an Tan-ch’iung, James Cahill, Henry Beville, Li Lin-ts’an (holding catalog), John Pope. (Behind: famous painting by Ts’ui Po.)

5. Group of participants in 1970 International Symposium on Chinese Painting, gathered in San Francisco en route to Taipei. From left: Tour leader for Lotus Tours (forget name); William Wu; Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott; Joan Hartmann (New York dealer); Max Loehr; Margaret Chang (artist); Richard Barnhart; John Crawford; Susan Bush; James Cahill; Chu-tsing Li.

Dear Professor Cahill,

Sorry that I just came back from London for the Three Emperors' exhibition.I am happy that you are satisfied with our presentation of your article.I am sorry that there are some confusions here...

What we are doing for celebrating the 80th anniversery of the Museum in our Monthly is actually not a special issue, but a special column. Until next August, we will have an article about the past of the museum in every issue. It is this special column that you, Professor Lawton, Professor Wen Fong, and many others have all contributed. We are also thinking about to put all these valuable articles into a book and publish it next year. When this happens, I will let you know.

As for the reactions to your revealing, I am quite surprised that everyone here in the musuem seems all very calm about it. I think the atmosphere here has changes a lot since DPP took the office.

Anyhow, have a very nice day!

All the best,
Yu-chih

Dear Lai Yu-chih,

Thanks for your email. Now I understand about your plan for the NPM Monthly. If you do publish a book with these articles, would you include the original English-language texts also, in cases where the original is in English? It would be a help for non-Chinese readers.

One minor matter: I sent, with the photos, identifications of the people in them. For one of them, with myself and Kung Te-ch'eng in a group, you identified others I'd forgotten about but didn't identify K'ung. Any reason? Is he now somehow in bad repute?

Interesting that no one reacted to the revelations about out photographing project. I guess nearly all the old people who were somehow involved have died out, leaving only a few survivors such as myself.

Best wishes for the New Year.
James Cahill

CLP 118: 1990 “Notes on the Painter’s Practice in China.” Trinity College in San Antonio, Texas

Trinity lecture: Notes on the Painter’s Practice in China

Our image of China has undergone many changes in recent years; perhaps they can be summed up if we say that China has lost much of its mystique for us. Successive versions of China in the West, from the time of our earliest contacts, have always been somewhat idealized and mysterious: a land of philosophers and enlightened rule for 18th-century Europeans; a land of mystery, more than a little sinister, for the popular view in the late 19th and early 20th century; the egalitarian, morally dedicated society that many of us wanted to believe in for the early decades of the P.R.C. None of these can be easily accepted today, and no new idealized vision has been created to succeed them. Perhaps last year’s horrors at T’ien-an-men completed a process long underway in the fading of unreal foreign visions of China.

Another set of special visions of Chinese culture and society, representing another kind of mystique, were created by the Chinese themselves, over the centuries, and largely accepted, for a long time, by those of us in various fields of Chinese studies. These, too, are tending to give way as we try more and more to uncover the reality behind the constructed versions. In Frederick Wakeman’s massive study of the Ming-Ch’ing transition, The Great Enterprise, the Manchus conquerers are seen as a far more positive force in bringing stability and effective rule to China than any traditional Chinese account could have made them. The history of Buddhism in China is being rewritten in a revisionist way by Robert Gimello and others who increasinglyg recognize how over-emphasis on sectarian distinctions, by Japanese writers as well as Chinese, distorted the realities of that history. And so forth. Long-standing myths of China’s cultural insularity and self-sufficiency, and of the virtues of elegant amateurism both in practical affairs and in the arts, are similarly crumbling. It is not a matter of “bursting balloons”; no disrespect is entailed in looking for the real China beneath the unreal visions that have heretofore been presented. It certainly is not a matter of launching some subtly “orientalist,” demeaning assault on traditional Chinese formulations and values. At least in intent, it is a matter of removing a mask in order to find an equally admirable real person beneath. Unlike the unmasking at the end of Max Beerbohm’s “Happy Hypocrite,” which revealed a spiritualized countenance identical to the one the mask had presented, this unmasking uncovers a quite different face--but one no less admirable or absorbing, only more human.

The creation of the myth of China in writings by Chinese was itself a great cultural achievement, comparable to the creation of the myth of romantic love in late medieval Europe, or that of man as a rational being in the European enlightenment. We can admire it without continuing to believe it; we are increasingly unwilling elsewhere to accept as truth the protective, self-enhancing structures that intellectual elites build as “history,” and there is no reason why China should be an exception. For China, it was the Confucian literati who wrote the standard texts that created and propagated the myth. Looking beyond these, or beneath them, is more difficult, obliging us typically to turn to unofficial sources, such as letters and informal jottings.

My argument in this lecture is that writers on Chinese painting created such a myth, and that we are only beginning to look beyond it. How doing so changes our understanding of Chinese paintings, the circumstances of their creation and the meanings and functions they originally had, is the subject of the lecture. I will begin with a brief consideration of the late seventeenth century master Cheng Min, an artist of the Anhui School.

(S) (Note on use of slides) Here is one of his works, an album leaf in the collection of Liu Tso-ch’ou, Hong Kong. Like others of the Anhui masters of this period, Cheng Min painted river landscapes, unpeopled and unembellished by enlivening detail, in a manner that relies heavily on line-drawing, or sketching of contours in dry brushwork, to render the forms. More or less overt references to the Yuan-period master Ni Tsan are common in his works, as they are in other Anhui-school paintings.

Since Ni Tsan is the quintessential example of the cultivated amateur in Chinese painting, and his style is the very emblem of Confucian high-mindedness, this painting would alone set up expectations about the artist’s character and the basis on which he worked in anyone familiar with the signification of styles in Chinese painting; and those expectations would appear to be confirmed in what we read about him. His contemporary T'ang Yen-sheng, who frequently inscribed works by artists of the time, writes about Cheng Min:

"The master immerses himself in old books, not caring whether it is cold or hot, living tranquilly, uttering few words, magnanimous in disposition, his mind fixed on distant goals [i.e. unconcerned with day-to-day affairs]. All difficult questions in the classics and histories he can resolve. He is an accomplished seal-carver, using the pre-Ch'in and Han [scripts] as models. His painting style is lofty and antique, completely following the 'engendering movement [through] spirit consonance' (ch'i-yün sheng-tung) mode of expression. Accordingly, he can rival the Yüan masters. In the most refined of his works, whether feelings of sadness and melancholy or complaint and anger: if these were not aroused by his great talents, then they must come from his own experience."

The image of the artist presented here is a familiar one: a person of deep cultural refinement, he lives quietly, caring nothing for worldly matters, practicing scholarly pursuits, doing paintings or calligraphy on an amateur basis, to express his feelings--and, to follow through with the usual implications of scholar-amateur status, presumably giving them to his friends, expecting no recompense other than occasional gifts and favors in return. We have not always accepted this image entirely uncritically--suspicions have been expressed, especially in recent years, that it must often mask some more down-to-earth reality. But we have repeated it and allowed it to underlie our writings and our understanding of the paintings without giving it much thought. Even the most sceptical among us have seldom argued for any really radical mismatch between image and reality.

(S) Another of his works. At a symposium on Anhui-school painting in 1984, Huang Yung-ch'üan presented a paper on the newly-discovered diary of Cheng Min, quoting some passages from it that pertain to his activity as painter and calligrapher. Here are some excerpts:

"[1672] tenth month, fifth day: I did three fan paintings for Fu-wen . . ."

" Seventeenth day: cloudy. Yen-ch'ing and K'uan-chung 'moistened my brush' [gave me money for painting] and I added bamboo and rock for them [to some previously-done painting?]"

"Eleventh month, eighth day: I went into town and wrote a fan for Yen-ch'ing . . . Keng-yü summoned me, and I added to [retouched?] a painting by T'ang Yin for him. . . "

"[1773] sixth month, third day . . . Mu-ch'ien ordered a painting for Hsü Erh-ming, and I used the money for food."

"[1674] second month, sixth day: cloudy. After supper I visited Tzu-yen, and entrusted him with three paintings to sell for me."

"Sixth month, sixth day: I visited Hsüeh-hai, where the owner of the I-kuan [an inn?] . . . summoned me to do a painting for him."

"[1676] first month, sixth day: rainy. Ssu-jo visited me to order a painting, bringing payment [lit. 'moisture,' as above.]"

"Ninth month, eighteenth day: for my 'elder brother' Yin-nan I did a painting on satin. Also did five fans for . . . [names]."

"Twelfth month, fourth day: This line [of poetry] came to me: 'To get through the year, I need the money from selling paintings.'"

"Twenty-ninth day. Snow has been falling for the whole month. Fortunately, I have managed to get through my New Year's obligations with the small income from my paintings. I sit recalling that there are a great many really poor people now, and wish that I had a spacious, myriad-roomed house [to entertain them in]--an empty thought."

Other entries record his carving seals for patrons in return for grain or presents, and borrowing money from one of them to buy food. (Slides off.)

In the cases of most artists, we have no such detailed information about the real conditions of their daily lives, and even if we had it, the disparity between conventional image and what we might call adjusted image would not always be so great as with Cheng Min. But as we uncover more evidence about the circumstances under which Chinese paintings came into being, how they were acquired by others, and how the artist was rewarded, as well as about other practical details of the artist's activity, the degree to which standard accounts of Chinese artists are commonly idealized and untrue to their realities is increasingly apparent. (I gave last spring a seminar titled "The Painter's Practice in China," with graduate students and several Chinese specialists participating, in which we tried to assemble just this kind of information, mostly from scraps and clues contained in a diversity of materials. Our findings are now in the form of a database, which I mean to use for a series of studies.) Along with a new, badly-overdue recognition of the implications for our understanding of Chinese painting of this idealization and distortion of how the artists worked, it is worthwhile, I think, to take a moment to consider how it came about.

The truth, I believe, is that a set of powerful conventions for writing about artists and their works, originating principally in early appreciations of the scholar-amateur painters and in recorded statements by those painters themselves, spread beyond the categories of artists and paintings to which they are properly applicable--the truly amateur artists and their works--to encompass virtually the whole of Chinese painting. The underlying problem was the mismatch between admiration for outstanding artists who were committed, more-or-less full-time professional practitioners of the art, and the failure of the traditional Chinese social order to accord honored places for people in that position. Professionalism was looked down on, amateurism exalted. Intensifying the problem was the increasing practice of painting on an income-producing basis, from the mid-Ming on, by learned and cultured people, as rising levels of affluence and education created a much larger pool of people qualified for bureaucratic service (the Chinese scholar's traditional occupation) than the bureaucracy could absorb, and many of them were forced to turn to other ways, including painting, of putting their learning and talents to use in earning their livelihoods. Attitudes and value criteria that pertained properly to the amateur painters, then, came to be applied more broadly to artists of other kinds, until we reach the situation in which a writer scarcely could praise a painter, even an unambiguously professional one, without making some effort to accomodate him, however forcedly and misleadingly, to the amateur ideal. And praise is what writings on artists usually had to be: most of the literature that we depend on for our understanding of them takes the form of encomia of one kind or another: tributes to the painter included in inscriptions to his paintings, tomb biographies, entries in books made up of "biographical information" on artists, and so forth.

What we are concerned with, then, is the forced accomodation of artists' lives and circumstances to pre-existing types, and the expunging of whatever actualities fail to fit these types. To give enough examples of this phenomenon to convince everybody would take more time than I have, but anyone working in the field could come up with quite a few from memory. They include cases in which an artist who is in fact a hard-working and prolific professional master is described as one who only dabbled in the art, and painted out of purely inner motivations. (S, landscape attrib. to Li Ch’eng) The eleventh century writer Kuo Jo-hsü considered Li Ch'eng, the great landscapist active a century earlier, to have been productive enough that a collector of Kuo's time could be credited with owning over ninety of his winter landscapes. (S, Fan K’uan) By the thirteenth century Chao Hsi-ku, a writer imbued with the new literati or scholar-amateur painting doctrines, wrote of Li Ch'eng (along with Fan K'uan, to whom the characterization is even less appropriate) as "scholar officials who, when they were inspired, would leave behind a few brushstrokes." (Let us take a moment to consider this great landscape by Fan K'uan, and ponder how well it accords with the idea of a painter who "leaves behind a few brushstrokes when inspired.")

After scholar-amateur painting came to greater prominence in the Yuan period, it became more difficult to praise artists of other kinds except by distorting their situations. (S, Tai Chin) A contemporary of Tai Chin's named Wang Chih describes that fifteenth century master as one who "delights in poetry and calligraphy as ways to seek the Tao,/ Painting spontaneously to cheer his heart." (S, Wu Pin) The late Ming literati painter and critic Tung Ch'i-ch'ang describes his contemporary Wu Pin, an excellent and productive specialist in both figures and landscapes, as a lay Buddhist who "painted in his leisure time." One wonders how the artists, who were meanwhile no doubt hard at work on fulfilling commissions in the practice of their livelihoods, can have responded to this well-intentioned but quite misdirected kind of "praise," which subtly maligned their real situations by implying that these were somehow dishonorable, and so could not be reported truthfully.

Even more numerous are cases, like the one of Cheng Min with which we began, in which the standard accounts are contradicted by other, presumably more reliable evidence. (S, Pa-ta) The most often-quoted biography of the late 17th century Individualist master Pa-ta Shan-jen, for instance, tells us this about him: "He often used to pass his time at a Buddhist temple outside the town. When the novices there jokingly asked him for a picture and actually tugged at his sleeves or his belt, he did not resist, nor did he refuse when some scholar friend offered him a gift for a picture. But if highly placed people offered him a whole barrel costing many gold pieces, they got nothing. If they brought painting silk with them, he would take it without hesitation but then would say: 'I shall make stockings of it!' For this reason the highly placed people were accustomed to approach the poor scholars, mountain monks, or butchers and inn-keepers when they wanted calligraphies or pictures by Shan-jen, and to buy from them." (S, leaf from Ho Yao-kuang album) But, as we know from an inscription on the Pa-ta album in the Ho Yao-kuang collection, the Nanking collector Huang Yen-lü had no such trouble getting an excellent album from the artist: he sent a sum of money and twelve sheets of paper through one of Pa-ta's patrons, who acted as the artist's agent in getting commissions for him, and in due time he received his album, with which he was very pleased, remarking (S, leaf from sketchy album) that Pa-ta would never have given him the kind of rough and hasty sketches he did to repay gifts from the Kiangsi salt merchants. Again, these are two images of the artist that cannot be brought together--that are, in fact, incompatible.

(S, Wang Meng Ch’ing-pien. Identify; will bring back later.) The "amateurization" of artists, or at least most of those who were considered to merit approval at all, in Chinese writings is part of a larger complex of interdependent ideas and attitudes, all aimed at "dematerializing" the art, removing from it all taint of vulgarity, of commercialism, of functionalism, of philistine responses. They include: an all-but-exclusive emphasis on art as personal expression, and a concomitant de-emphasizing of most other factors that motivated the production of art, including, much of the time, those that in fact brought the work into being and constituted the basis for its reception and appreciation in its original context; in connoisseurship, a focus on authenticity, the determination of authorship, and a diversion of attention from the subject of the work and its meanings, its value as representation; and in criticism, a preoccupation with the "hand" of the artist and with style, both the artist's individual style and his uses of older styles, or references to them. These attitudes are, as I say, interdependent: one more or less leads to another. The connoisseur's concentration on authenticity, for instance, allowed the viewer to read the picture as the personal expression of a particular master, and to appreciate the qualities of his mind as manifested in the painting. It allowed him also to ignore, as the prevailing critical theory said he should, the technical prowess of the artist, his representational skill, the decorative values of the work, whatever narrative or symbolic or other human-interest content it might have--the qualities that had originally allowed it, in a great many cases, to function in some social situation of its time. All qualities of the work other than the aesthetic, all motivations other than those of personal expression, tended to be relegated to the lower levels of response, the philistine, the su or banal. Indoctrinated constantly with this ideology, Chinese collectors and painting enthusiasts of the later centuries appreciated paintings, and wrote about them, in ways quite divorced from the original contexts of the works; this "aestheticization" of the Chinese painting tradition makes it difficult, much of the time, for us now to recover the meanings and functions that the paintings originally had. (Something of the same kind was characteristic of our own responses to art, until relatively recently; now art historians have become more concerned with the social and economic context of the work.)

(S, Wang Meng Hua-ch’i). I myself was, for my sins, one of the earliest foreign exponents of the literati or amateur painting ideal as a key to understanding certain kinds of painting. What seems remarkable from today's perspective is the degree to which we have allowed it to pervade our own interpretations of Chinese painting. In our culture, no special stigma is attached to professionalism in art--if a painter has an exhibition and sells all the paintings in it, we see this as cause for congratulation, not disdain-- although it is true that studies that make production for profit central to interpretation of the artist's works, such as Svetlana Alpers' recent book on Rembrandt, can still call forth angry responses from those who feel that the factor of artistic genius has been slighted in the process. With studies of the social and economic contexts of artistic production so prominent in art-historical studies these days, it is all the more remarkable that we in the Chinese painting field seem not only disinclined to recognize the inherited biases that impede our own studies of this aspect of our subject, but even prone to share the traditional Chinese squeamishness about discussing it. We write, too often, as though we were defending or protecting the artists we admire by downplaying their engagement in the somehow shameful business of profiting from their art. The result is a badly unbalanced view of our subject. And it is only balance I am arguing for, not some heavy emphasis on the social and economic factors behind artistic production. Without undervaluing the self-revelatory function of art, we can play it against other, more mundane and socially-conditioned functions, and try to understand how the one impinged on the other. Without taking any kind of reductive approach, we can aim at a more clear-eyed recognition of the true situation, often the predicament, of the artist behind the work.

(S. Ch’en Hung-shou: Lady Hsuan-wen-chun.) The negative effects of our failure to pay attention to the meanings and functions of Chinese painting have been, I now believe, serious ones: the decontextualizing of a great deal of Chinese painting, the divorcing of much of it from its original meanings and purposes, the distortion of its very character, too often, to make it fit an inapplicable set of ideals. We have done this, as I have suggested, on the basis of our readings of Chinese texts. In the early period of our studies, we felt so proud of being able to make sense of these and apply them to the paintings that we never questioned their status as representing the final truth about the paintings. (S. Detail.) But we cannot remind ourselves too often that the standard sources on which we depend in studying Chinese painting--or almost any other subject in Chinese cultural history--are inherently biased toward the literati viewpoint, since it was the literati who wrote them; the scholars “controlled the media,” in effect, and rewrote history freely, suppressing or altering whatever did not fit their doctrines. The fact that many of them held official rank in the bureaucracy made their pronouncements all the more authoritarian. And their bias was strongly against professionalism in the arts, and in favor of their fellow amateurs. (S, detail of same.) In trying to imagine how the professional masters of their day (who in fact comprise most of the best painters) can have felt about this constant denigration and distortion of their achievements, we find little evidence in writings by any of them from which to reconstruct their responses. We long to have a Chinese counterpart to the English artist and novelist Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, that brilliantly bitter attack on upper-class amateurism in the arts and the confusion of critical values it can lead to. But, here as elsewhere in traditional Chinese society, there was no organized voice of opposition, no countervailing force to the dominant faction of literati. (Essay by Ch’en Hung-shou an exception; isolated instance of professional artist criticizing amateurs.)

S. My purpose, however, is not so much to advocate a re-appraisal of the professional painters’ tradition in China as to suggest that we do these artists no service when we perpetuate the well-meant Chinese myths in which they are made respectable by being transformed into amateurs. Nor is it useful to adopt the Chinese elegant disdain for the practical and economic realities of the painter’s practice. Apart from the desirability of giving as complete and balanced an account of our subject as we can, we will find these realities to be thoroughly absorbing in themselves. The complex and varied ways in which some seeker after a painting conveyed his wishes to the artist; the equally diverse ways in which the artist was rewarded if he complied (and of course he did not always comply); the dilemma of the artist who accepts too many commissions and must deal with impatient clients while trying to step up his rate of production--these prove to be interesting and enlightening.

The fruits of our searches for information on the painter’s practice in China could be material for a series of lectures; I can touch on only a few points, emphasizing those that alter our way of looking at the paintings. If we begin to pay attention to the occasion for which the painting was done, the circumstances under which it was created, the function it served--our understanding of it is enriched.

(S. Kuo Hsi, “Early Spring,” 1072.) Chinese landscape has customarily been seen as having aesthetic and philosophical value; it has seldom been seen in terms of function. I have begun to do that recently, with interesting results. Kuo Hsi’s well-known essay stresses the spiritual benefits of contemplating landscape imagery in paintings, as a kind of substitute for landscape in nature. But a recently re-discovered additional section, written by his son, tells of the commissions Kuo Hsi received and carried out, imperial and other, and why certain subjects were chosen for particular places and situations, e.g. ptg of whirling snow at time of drought (which, in a quasi-magic way, helped to end the drought); or a wall painting of pines, rocks, and rushing water in a pavilion for escaping the heat of summer. (S. Section of Freer scroll.) Also, his son tells of a painting his father did: (etc.)

Now, this enables us to give a fuller, three-part account of the painting: what it looked like, in subject and composition; what it signified (meaning); what occasion it was done for (function). We can’t always do this for other Chinese paintings; but we can assume that much of the time, they had specific meanings and function. We can assume, that is, some demand or desire for a painting, which was somehow communicated to the artist, who somehow reponded. Or, he might be responding to an understood, general demand, e.g. for paintings for presentation on birthdays.These aspects of Chinese paintings have virtually been ignored in studies of them, up to very recently.

How, then, were the wishes of clients conveyed to the artist? If he was a straightforward professional master, it could be a simple commission, specifying the subject of the picture and the amount of the payment. Even these were often sent through go-betweens,a practice we will consider later.

S. Ch’iu Ying, early 16th century, done for the brother of Hsiang Yuan-pien. Birthday? presumably (describe). (S. detail) Ch’iu Ying lived at Hsiang’s house for several years, as painter-in-residence; a common arrangement, in which the artist repays hospitality with paintings, which the patron can either keep for himself or use as gifts for his clients and friends. The host communicates his wishes to the painter-guest, who responds.

How would an ordinary commission be conveyed? By good fortune, we have a letter from Ch’iu Ying to one of his patrons which gives some insight. After an effusive opening (“Your attendant Ch’iu Ying kowtows and bows ...etc) he gets to the point: “Recently you favored me with an order to make a painting for a birthday celebration. It has been respectfully completed and hereby presented for approval and acceptance. When you place another order, just send a word to me and it will be done and delivered; but please do not place any more orders through Hsi-ch’ih. Although he and I are relatives, we do not get along at all. Kindly keep this in mind. The other two paintings will be delivered soon. Not yet recovered [from my illness] I have written this in too careless a hand. Hoping for your forgiveness, I am” (etc.--more politenesses.)

(S. Kung Hsien landscape, K.C. scroll, section) Commissions, in the form of requests, could be conveyed to the artist in the form of letters. Chinese epistilatory manuals give, along with models for other kinds of letters, examples of how to write to an artist to request a painting. They are always full of effusive praise, or flattery. The artist, whether amateur or professional, could not be treated like an artisan, the person who makes one’s furniture, or whatever. Anne Burkus (my former student, now teaching at U. Chicago) introduced several of these in an unpublished paper. (S. another section) One, for instance, to be used when asking a landscapist for his works, might begin with a statement that his paintings rival nature: “What is this thing? You, sir, are able to make clever contest with the work of Heaven (i.e. nature) . . . I beg that you bestow upon me several pictures from your flourishing wet brush to hang in my central room. Thus the three tributaries of the Hsiang River, the Five Sacred Mountains, the stony chambers of Mts. Heng and Lu, may be seen without emerging from out my door...”

(S. Another section of Kung Hsien handscroll) Letter to great Nanking master Kung Hsien, active in late 17c. (painter of this scroll), from one of his would-be clients praises his reclusiveness: “The place you, sir, chose to live must be at a distance from the town. Those who command others to seek you out cannot get to see your face directly; you, sir, are truly eminent . . . Each work of your brush and ink is worth a thousand antiquities. You, sir, therefore keep people at a distance. And yet people still seek you out.” And so forth: the client writes as though the artist is favoring him in agreeing to paint for him, even though he must have known (as we know from other evidence) that Kung Hsien was badly in need of money, and would paint for almost anyone who was willing to pay it.

(S. Ch’ien Ku, travel painting.) Commissions, or requests to artists, were often conveyed through go-betweens. The use of go-betweens (chung-jen, literally “men-in-the-middle”) was not, of course, peculiar to Chinese painting; it was a pervasive feature of Chinese society, smoothing interpersonal transactions of all kinds, helping to avoid frictions that might result from direct negotiations between the two principals. Go-betweens could be relatives of one or the other of the parties (as in the Ch’iu Ying letter I read) or friends of both parties; they had to be trustworthy and unbiased, and perceived so by both. Many exmaples are recorded, from which we can reconstruct the practice in some detail, how the go-between was rewarded, etc. In a typical example from the late 16th century, the Suchou calligrapher P’eng Nien relays a request to the painter Ch’ien Ku:

“I send you herewith a blank silk album. It is Hu Liang who commissions me to ask for an album of pictures of Mt. Pai-yueh from you, so that he can send it to the Official Ho. I hope that within a day or two, I can gather a few woodblock craftsmen to work on it. Master Ho loves literature very much; he is surely able to appreciate your ingenious art. Most sincerely I plead with you: please do your scroll in a day or two.” (And again, effusively polite phrases to conclude.) (This is a leaf from a similar album by Ch’ien Ku.)

(S. Another leaf.) The category represented here is the travel painting; we have a great many examples from the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties. We might suppose that these typically record travels made by the artist; and indeed, some of them do. But in most cases for which we have evidence for the motivation and circumstances of the painting, it turns out to have been done at the request of someone else who either had made the trip, and wanted to recall it in the artist’s picture, or who planned to make the trip, and wanted some foreknowledge of what he would see. This revision in our understanding of how the paintings came into being follows a general pattern. Formerly we were inclined to locate the impetus and meaning of the painting inside the artist, seeing it as expressing some feeling of his or recording some experience. Now, as evidence accumulates, we are more and more inclined to locate these outside the artist, in some situation in which society to which he responds.

(S. Shih-t’ao, Huang-shan). The pictures may be based on past experiences of the artist, as in the case of this one by Shih-t’ao, who visited the great mountain range Huangshan in the 1570s, and continued to paint its scenery for the rest of his life, for instance in this great handscroll of 1699, done for someone who had recently traveled there. But the pictures can often be quite schematic, not conveying much detailed information about what the scenery looks like; there are even instances of famous places depicted by artists who never visited them, but depended on schemata adopted from other painters who had.

(S. Ending of scroll, with his inscription.) I should add that another matter on which we have been assembling evidence has to do with how artists were paid, or recompensed. The true scholar-amateurs often did paintings for people they knew, or responded to requests for their works, without thought of monetary payment, which in fact would have offended them. Instead, they received their rewards through an elaborate system of exchanges of favors, in which one party obligates the other through a gift or favor, and the other party must chscharge the obligation. So effective was this system that literati-amateur painters whose works were in demand could live comfortably on the proceeds from their paintings while maintaining in principle their status as amateurs. Professional masters, in order to cover their daily needs, were forced to demand more direct kinds of payment; but even these were often conveyed to the artist in some roundabout way that softened the commercialism of the transaction.

(S. Wang Fu farewell ptg.) One might ask: does the “meaning and function” approach to Ch. ptgs really affect our understanding of them significantly? That objection is sometimes raised these days: the paintings remain exactly the same; who cares how and why they came to be made? But they aren’t exactly the same, when we understand these aspects of them, in that our experience of them changes, how we read them, what we pay attention to. This landscape by Wang Fu, early 15th century, was subject of paper by one of my colleagues, who translated the inscriptions, made a formal analysis of how the artist carries the eye systematically into depth etc., did all the standard things, but took no account of the work’s original purpose: as a farewell painting, done for someone departing for the capital to take up an official post. His friends gather to see him off; boat about to carry him away. Reading it in these terms, we realize that the long, step-by-step recession isn’t simply a matter of style; the artist has embodied in pictorial form the idea of the painting, and of the recipient’s passage into distance. (describe).

(S. Chang Feng, same) Moreover, when we assemble a group of paintings of different periods that had this function (which we can ascertain from the inscriptions on them) we become aware that they follow a compositional type. this one, by Chang Feng, dtd. 1648, (etc., describe). What then becomes interesting is the way in which successive artists have manipulated the basic formula in individual ways, or altered it to fit particular circumstances and occasions. The paintings then take on another dimension of meaning, of expressiveness, and our understanding of them is enriched.

(S. Wang Meng, reclusion ptg) We can make groupings of this kind within the large category of landscape painting. Another type is the landscape of reclusion, done for someone who has built a villa away from the world, in which to live quietly--a common practice in turbulent times in China. this one, by the late 14th century master Wang Meng (two of whose paintings we saw earlier), was painted for a relative who had done this; its composition reflects, or expresses, the idea of seclusion, being shut off from the outside world, again in its composition: (describe).

(S., Wang Meng, Hua-ch’i) Bringing back one of the ptgs by Wang Meng seen earlier, we can confirm that subject to this additional insight into the meaning that underlies the composition, the painting looks different. (Describe).

(S. Wang Meng, Ch’ing-pien Mts.) Another Wang Meng painting, his masterwork of 1366 in the Shanghai Museum, “The Ch’ing-pien Mountains.” Now we can add another level of meaning, in reconstructing the original circumstances of the painting... (etc.)

(S. One of Nanjing Museum portrait series). Similar considerations arise when we approach the genre of portraiture in this way. An album of portraits of famous men of chekiang Province in the Nanking Museum, dating from the late Ming period, the early 17th century, was published by the museum and later (four leaves) by myself in my 1982 book on late Ming painting. I wrote about them, as the authors of the museum publication had, as uncharacteristically realistic, unidealized, for Chinese portraits, presenting the sitters “warts and all,” so to speak, and with facial expressions quite different from the standard bland benevolence that we see in Chinese portraits. (S. Another of series.) We failed to recognize what I now believe to be the truth about them: that they are not finished ptgs at all, of the kind that the sitters would have received, or their family if it was a posthumous portrait. Chinese portraits began with sketches from life, and then apparently made preliminary depictions based on these, aiming at the most realistic portrayal possible within the Chinese techniques and conventions. But these, in turn, would then serve as the basis for finished paintings that would have a quite different character:

(S. Finished portrait of same period) in which the unattractive aspects of the sitter’s physiognomy would be expunged, and a more acceptable and conventional visage would replace the more true-to-life one.

(S. Yuan Mei by Lo P’ing) We have preserved, in fact, an extremely interesting example from the 18th century, painted in 17 by Lo P’ing, and representing the famous poet Yuan Mei. This preliminary portrayal was given to Yuan Mei by the artist for his approval, and was rejected. (Describe).(S. detail of face)

This is center-piece in a book-length study of later Chinese portraiture, in press, by my former student Richard Vinograd.

(S. Cheng Hsieh) Finally, what of the subjects that seem most free of functional character, subjects such as bamboo, orchids, etc., the favorite subjects of the scholar-amateur artists? These are ordinarily read as expressions through symbolic forms and expressive brushwork of the high-minded Confucian attitudes of the artist, his personal character, his freedom from commercial restraints, etc. Cheng Hsieh, or Cheng P’an-ch’iao, was one of the most prolific and popular artists of the Yangchou school in the mid-18th century, whose romantic personality us felt to be expressed in his paintings, which always represent the same symbolic subjects: bamboo, orchids, and rocks. Most of his painting was done in his later years, when he was living in Yangchou after retiring from a career as a bureaucrat.

(S. Another of his works.) But another of my students, Ginger Hsu, working on him in her doctoral dissertation on the economic life of the artist in 18th century Yangchou, was able through a detailed investigation to establish that even these paintings, seemingly so independent of commercial considerations, were made to answer needs in Cheng’s clientele and to perform social functions in a variety of circumstances. Cheng was able, through ingenious manipulation of his highly restricted repertory of subjects, to suit them to a wide range of situations.

For instance, when he retired from his official post, he presented a painting of bamboo to the people of his district, indicating in an inscription that the slender stalk represented the fishing rod that symbolized the reclusive life he intended to lead. Bamboo could also stand for longevity, and so serve for birthday paintings. The vigorous growth of the plant made a picture of it (properly inscribed) suitable to congratulate someone on the birth of a son.

(S. Orchids by him.) the orchid had long been established as a metaphor for the talented and virtuous man; blossoming in the wilds, it stood for unrecognized talent; growing in pots, it could represent capable scholars who had been drawn into service. So pictures of orchids, suitably inscribed, could carry a diversity of messages to members of the Confucian bureaucracy, who made up a large segment of the artist’s clientele. Cheng even used a painting of a profusion of orchid plants to congratulate a woman on her thirtieth birthday and to wish her many children.

(S. Chin Nung plum.) And so forth. the blossoming plum stood for purity, because of its whiteness and fragility; it also stood for rejuvenation, since it puts forth flowers after surviving the long, cold winter. This is an example in the Freer Gallery by Chin Nung, another Yangchou painter active in the mid-18th century. Formerly, we would have read the conventional meaning into the image and paid little attention to the inscription. But when we do read it, we learn that Chin painted it to congratulate a friend who had acquired a beautiful new concubine, likening the red color of the blossoms, in his inscription, to her rouged cheeks, but also calling up the associations of the subject to felicitate his friend’s continuing virility.

It will be evident from these examples--and from a great many others that I have assembled and could introduce--that Chinese painting, seen in this way, proves to be far more closely interlocked with the everyday social practices and transactions of the real inhabitants of the real China, insofar as we can discern them, than with the ideal, unreal China of the myths that are being displaced. Such an adjusted view of Chinese painting is thus in close accord with the demythologizing direction of Chinese studies today, and perhaps in a broader way with the fading of China’s mystique. But we can be confident that what we gain through this process is a vision of China no less absorbing, no less admirable, than the one we give up; only humanized and made believable.

Thank you.

CLP 115: 1995 “Huangshan in Modern Chinese Painting.” Preface, reproductions of paintings of Huangshan by recent and contemporary Chinese artists

Huangshan in Modern Chinese Painting

The scenery of Huangshan, the spectacular range of "Yellow Mountains" in southern Anhui province, is seen so frequently in recent Chinese painting that one might assume it to have been an old, classical subject within Chinese landscape. In fact, Huangshan was seldom depicted before the late Ming period. It was not until the beginning of the 17th century that Huangshan was "opened" by a Buddhist monk named Pumen, who began the construction of climbing paths and rock-cut steps, and of temples where travelers could lodge, that made the mountain accessible to seekers after its sublime views. Before this, Huangshan was principally a Buddhist and Daoist sacred mountain, with its two principal peaks, the Tiandu-feng (Heavenly Citadel Peak) and Lianhua-feng (Lotus Peak), climbable only by skilled herb-gatherers--others could do no more than gaze up at them in awe, from a distance. After its opening, Huangshan became a place for aesthetic and literary pilgrimages by scholars and poets, as well as commercial travelers engaged in the thriving trade of the Huizhou region to the south. The peaks and pines were given names, and became the subjects of a large outpouring of poetry composed by climbers of the mountain. The association of Huangshan with Ming political loyalists and their doomed resistance during and after the Manchu conquest deepened the meaning carried by portrayals of the mountain in poetry and painting.

A school of artists, known sometimes as the Huangshan-pai, flourished in the region during the 17th century and into the 18th. Masters such as Hongren and Xiao Yuncong, Mei Qing and Zheng Min, devoted a large part of their output to portraying the thirty-six major and thirty-six minor peaks of Huangshan, along with the sheer, angular cliffs and the pines that hang from them, typically using a linear manner of painting with dry brushwork and only spare washes and pale colors if any. Paintings of Huangshan scenery were popular: those who climbed the peaks wanted pictures to remind them of their experience; those who planned to do so, or were unable to make the trip, wanted them as sources of visual information.

Huangshan has become a favorite subject for landscapists again in the 20th century, with the revival of landscape as a major subject of painting from the 1930s on. As the present volume amply illustrates, most of the famous landscapists of the past sixty years have traveled to Huangshan and made paintings of it, and new political and other meanings have built up around its now-familiar sights. The scenery of Huangshan continues to offer artists the possibility of reconciling abstraction with naturalistic representation, since the angular patterns of the fractured rock formations can suggest cubist or minimalist forms of art, while permitting also evocations of the grandeur of nature at its most sublime.

International recognition of the importance of Huangshan and the Anhui School of painting culminated in 1984 in a great symposium held in Hefei, the provincial capital, in which I was privileged to participate--this was, so far as I know, the first international symposium on Chinese painting to be held in China. Afterwards we all visited the home-towns of the artists and climbed Huangshan together. The symposium was accompanied by a large and excellent exhibition of works by the Anhui artists, drawn from thirty-six museums in China. Professor Chen Zhuanxi, editor of the present volume, was principal organizer of that symposium and exhibition, so we have been friends from that time. He tells me that he plans another volume made up of reproductions of Huangshan paintings by Ming-Qing artists, as a companion to this one. I congratulate him on the success of all these projects, and express the gratitude of scholars of Chinese painting for his important contributions to this absorbing branch of our study.

James Cahill

Professor Emeritus, History of Art
University of California, Berkeley

3641 SE Martins St.
Portland, OR 97202

November 17, 1995
Professor Chen Zhuanxi

Art Department
Nanjing Normal University
Nanjing, P.R. China

Dear Prof. Chen:

After receiving your letter of October 18, with the news of your new publication of recent and contemporary paintings of Huangshan, I have written out a preface which I hope will serve the purpose. It may be a bit shorter than you asked for, but I can't quickly think of anything to add. Hsingyuan is very much occupied with teaching here (at Reed College in Portland) and on other work, as well as in taking care of our twin boys Benedict and Julian, now nearly three months old. So I can't ask her now to make the Chinese translation. If you will have one made by someone there--it should be simple and straightforward--and send it to us before the book is printed, she will go over it and check for accuracy.

I don't have a photograph of myself here that I can send; I will try to remember to send you one after I return to Berkeley in early December, and will hope that it arrives in time to be used.

Best wishes,
James Cahill