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

THE "MADNESS" IN BADA SHANREN'S PAINTINGS

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Oddness of Bada's Style

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

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

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

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

The Oddness of Bada's Imagery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The "Madness" in Bada's Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The "Madness" in Bada's Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Afterword

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

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

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

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

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

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