A Companion to Chinese Art

Notes on Contributors

Qianshen Bai is Associate Professor of Zhejiang University, formerly at Boston University and author of Fu Shan's World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century (2003) and is currently working on a book on Wu Dacheng, a government official, scholar, collector, and artist in the nineteenth century.

Tani E. Barlow is T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor at Rice University where she teaches in the History Department. Professor Barlow's research focus is Chinese women's history. Her study of early twentieth century Chinese vernacular sociology and commercial art, In the Event of Women, is forthcoming. She is founding senior editor of positions: asia critique.

Susan Bush is an Associate-in-Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her publications include: The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555–1636) (2012), Early Chinese Texts on Painting compiled with Hsio-yen Shih (1985), and Theories of the Arts in China, co-edited with Christian Murck (1983).

Jianhua Chen received his PhD in Literature from Fudan University and Harvard University. He is currently Ziyuan Professor at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His recent publications include books and articles on revolution and literary modernity, popular literature, print culture, and cinema in modern and contemporary China.

Dora C. Y. Ching is Associate Director of the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University. She has co-edited numerous volumes on East Asian art and has published several articles on Chinese imperial portraiture. She is currently writing a book on the history of portraiture in China.

Patricia Ebrey is Professor of History at the University of Washington. A specialist on the Song period, she was awarded the 2010 Shimada Prize in East Asian art history for Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (2008). Earlier books include The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Women in the Sung Period (1993) and The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (1996, 2010). She recently published Emperor Huizong (2014), bringing to completion a project that absorbed many years.

Ronald Egan is Professor of Chinese Poetry at Stanford University. He is the author of The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (2006) and translator of Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letter by Qian Zhongshu (1998). His most recent project is The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (forthcoming).

Antonia Finnane is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications include Speaking of Yangzhou, A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (2004), winner of the 2006 Levenson Book Award for a work on pre-1900 China, and Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (2007).

Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside and the author of A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-Century Yangchow (2001). She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, with recent work focusing on art and travel in the Qing dynasty.

Scarlett Jang is Professor of Art History at Williams College. Her research and publications include topics such as high-level official patronage of painting in imperial China, the Ming imperial court's publishing enterprise, illustrated, woodblock-printed popular books of the Ming dynasty, and art, politics and palace eunuchs in Ming China.

Jason C. Kuo is Professor of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, College Park where he is also a member of the Graduate Field Committee on Film Studies. He has published monographs on Wang Yuanqi, Hongren, Huang Binhong Chen Qikuan, and Gao Xingjian. His most recent books include Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted (editor, 2013) and The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian (2013).

Cary Y. Liu is Curator of Asian Art, Princeton University Art Museum. A specialist in Chinese architectural history and art history, he has MArch and PhD degrees from Princeton University, and is a licensed architect. Exhibitions for which he has been curator include: Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art (2009), Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the Wu Family Shrines (2005), and The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection (1999). Among his publications are contributions to Art of the Sung and Yüan: Ritual, Ethnicity, and Style in Painting (1999), and the journals Hong Kong University Museum Journal, Oriental Art, Orientations, and T'oung Pao. He has also published the essay Chinese Architectural Aesthetics: Patterns of Living and Being between Past and Present, in Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo (eds.), House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese (2005); and most recently Archive of Power: The Qing Dynasty Imperial Garden-Palace at Rehe in the Taida Journal (March 2010).

Shane McCausland is Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS, University of London. He has published books, edited volumes and articles, and organized exhibitions on many aspects of Chinese and Japanese art, including most recently The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368 (2014).

Alfreda Murck (Jiang Feide) is an authority on Chinese painting. She authored a book on how eleventh-century scholar-officials used poetry with painting to express dissent. She is collaborating with the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, on a 1968 turning point in the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong presented mangoes to workers.

J. P. Park teaches Asian Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and Leisure Life in Late Ming China (2012) and Keeping It Real! Korean Artists in the Age of Multi-Media Representation (2012). He is currently working on the impact of early modern Chinese print media to Chos inline n Korea and Edo Japan.

Martin J. Powers is Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, and former director of the Center for Chinese Studies. In 1993 his Art and Political Expression in Early China (1991), received the Levenson Prize for the best book in pre-twentieth century Chinese studies. His Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China, was published by Harvard University Press East Asian Series in 2006 and was awarded the Levenson Prize for 2008. In 2009 he was resident at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently writing a book on the role of China in the cultural politics of the English Enlightenment.

Jessica Rawson is Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her principal areas of research are the bronzes and jades of ancient China and ornament of all periods. Her current project focuses on China's relations with inner Asia as witnessed in material culture.

Jerome Silbergeld is the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History at Princeton University and director of Princeton's Tang Center for East Asian Art. He has published more than seventy books, catalogs, articles, and book chapters on topics in traditional and contemporary Chinese painting, traditional architecture and gardens, cinema and photography.

Peter C. Sturman is Professor of Chinese Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China (1997) and primary editor of The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (2012). He is currently writing a book on literati painting in the Song dynasty.

Katherine R. Tsiang is Associate Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia in the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Her research has concentrated on art and visual culture of medieval China. She guest curated the exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (2010).

Richard Vinograd is the Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900 (1992) and co-author of Chinese Art & Culture (2001).

Eugene Y. Wang is Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor at Harvard. His research ranges from early to modern Chinese art. A Guggenheim Fellow (2005), his book Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) received the Sawamoto Nichijin Prize from Japan. His current research explores processes involving art and visualization.

Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author and editors of more than 20 books and anthologies on traditional and contemporary Chinese art, including Monumentality of Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995) and The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (2010)

Xin Wu is an assistant professor of art history at the College of William & Mary. Her research interest focuses on the history of representation of nature in China and East Asia, and contemporary environmental art. Recent publications include books, articles, and columns in English and Chinese.

Xiaoneng Yang, Consulting Professor at Stanford University and Senior Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, specializes in Chinese archaeology, history of art, and material culture. His recent publications include The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology (1999); New Perspectives on China's Past (2004); Reflections of Early China (2000); Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future (2010); and Hello, Shanghai (2010).

Introduction

Historiographic Perspective

Martin J. Powers

The Tang period poet Wang Zhihuan (688–742) once observed that if you want a more comprehensive view, you have to move to a higher vista.1 The poet was not referring to altitude, but to that broader perspective one obtains from a higher intellectual stance. For historians, a broader perspective can lead to a more abstracted, theorized view, which can be stimulated by an encounter with the unfamiliar. Nietzsche famously made this point with an equally homely metaphor of the voyage away from familiar shores, such that, when we return, we feel estranged, and so can view what had seemed familiar more critically. It is hoped that this volume of chapters on the most theorized body of art outside of Europe may stimulate comparative contemplation about broad and basic issues in the history of art.

Within the historiography of Chinese art history in the West, the chapters in this volume are unusual in that every single writer has pondered what basic information about China a non-specialist would need to acquire before rethinking the core issues of the discipline from a higher vista. The scholars writing for this volume adopt a wide range of perspectives, not only in relation to the topic of their chapters but also with respect to the historiography of Chinese art. Most of our authors do not engage in comparative study themselves. Rather they provide the necessary evidence and analysis for those who wish to do so. The result is a richly informative and thought-provoking collection of chapters that, we hope, will challenge the China specialist as well as students of other traditions in the history of art. In order to appreciate the historiographic position of this volume, however, it will be helpful to take a longue durée look at the cultural politics of modern scholarship on China, with a special focus on the arts.

Long-Term Controversies

Many of the leading lights in the European tradition adopted a higher vista in viewing cultures other than their own. Oliver Goldsmith, Goethe, Bertrand Russell, and Roger Fry all embraced a cosmopolitan view of the world, and we might push it back to Voltaire, whose cultural cosmopolitanism helped to enlighten his contemporaries. Such cosmopolitanism, sadly, is the exception; throughout much of human history cultural politics appears to have been the rule, and it remains a challenge for any attempt at cultural comparison. According to Heinrich von Staden, as early as classical times the Greeks already were engaged in the construction of self-serving cultural myth. Diodorus of Sicily observed that ‘with respect to the antiquity of the human race not only are the Greeks in disagreement among themselves but so are many of the barbarians, all claiming that … they themselves were the first of all humans to become inventors-discoverers of the things that are useful in life’ (Von Staden 1992: 581).

In The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements, George Frederickson distinguished two kinds of historians: those who seek to develop a better theoretical understanding of a process, and those who do comparative work as a stimulus to the production of nationalist, self-celebratory histories (Frederickson 1997: 49–50). In the wake of Edward Said's contributions to historical study, few could doubt that European and American scholarship on Asian and African cultures, at times, has been written in a self-serving manner. But in the case of China it would be misleading to view Euro-American scholarship primarily in postcolonial terms. The problem Europeans had with China was not a function of their superiority in weaponry or science; rather it was the threat that China posed to the European tradition. This threat precipitated a rhetoric of self-justification among European and American writers that has deeply colored scholarship in the Humanities. That tradition, in turn, has given rise to a number of critical studies attempting to nudge China scholarship away from occidental self-justification and back toward a better theoretical understanding of human behavior and institutions (Pulleyblank 1958; Cohen 1993; Farquhar and Hevia 1993: 491; Goody 1996; Vinograd 2012; Clunas 1991). The chapters in this volume cannot be extricated from this polemical dynamic. It is ever present in Chinese studies. The problem, as we shall see, is embedded in the very terms conventionally used to describe China's history.

When Europeans arrived in other parts of Eurasia bent on conquest, rightly or wrongly, they readily convinced themselves of their cultural superiority, if not by force of arms then by the sophistication of their arts; if not the latter, then because they thought that theirs was the true religion (Blaut 1993: 50–63). China was different. European travelers could not but notice that, while commodities such as tea, porcelain, and silk enjoyed worldwide demand, European nations could boast nothing comparable. Moreover, there was no denying that this demand had created serious trade deficits in their own countries back home, thus demonstrating palpably China's global impact on European nations (Frank 1998: 110–116). This was China's challenge.

But that wasn't all. While Europeans remained locked in bloody contests over the True Religion, China offered a non-sectarian moral system and religious toleration as standard policy. Worse still, China's post-aristocratic social system suggested to Europe's leading radicals a viable alternative to the European tradition of political authority as hereditary esteem, an alternative offering opportunities for talented but non-noble intellectuals (Israel 2006: 640–642). This was China's threat. What could have been more terrifying than the destabilization of a tradition of hereditary privilege spanning more than a thousand years (Scott 2008: 5–7)? And so, while Louis Le Comte cautiously admired China's system of salaried officers, men who were held to public legal standards, the French authorities took a different view, banning his book and burning the copies that remained. Christian Wolfe thought that China's non-sectarian morality might be useful in a Europe torn by religious strife. For this he was stripped of academic rank and told to leave town in 24 hours, or be hanged. And then there was Abbe Raynal, who wrote the most widely read radical text of the late eighteenth century. He, too, admired China's post-aristocratic social system, but he was exiled, and his book was burned (Lottes 1991: 69–70; Israel 2006: 640–642).

From these examples it should be clear that Europeans responded to China's threats, not with the confidence of conquering colonizers, but rather more defensively. Louis Le Comte in fact did not often approve of Chinese ways. He dismissed China's tea as a necessary remedy for their foul water. He could not deny that many of China's cities seemed larger and more prosperous than most back home, but then, he claimed those cities have been forced to open their gates to the Gospel, and are partly subdued by our religion (Le Comte 1698: 89). The formula employed here, Yes, the Chinese accomplished X but it doesn't count because of Y, can be found repeatedly in Le Comte's text. Today all this sounds like special pleading, but the point is that claims about China remained defensive for centuries to come, giving rise to a wide range of rhetorical ploys that must be appreciated in order to understand the nature of modern China scholarship in the humanistic disciplines, including the history of art.

Fortunately many colleagues in Chinese studies have devoted no small effort to exposing these sophistries and their origins. Paul Cohen, for example, disparaged what he called the intellectual imperialism of American historians, identifying some of the more common rhetorical ploys he found in American scholarship. One of the most widely used was the impact-response paradigm (Cohen 1984: 150–151). This paradigm, which has had considerable influence on histories of Chinese art, achieves its effect by presuming, a priori, that China's history is best understood as a series of reactions to Western stimulus. In this way, without needing to argue the point, the historian situates the agency for change in China's history, in the West. A few years later Jack Goody, in The West's Problem with the East, likewise detected signs of intellectual finagling: In looking at Europe, and specifically England, our natural egocentricity has often led us to assume a priority at deep, socio-cultural levels whereas the evidence for this is either thin or non-existent" (Goody 1996: 8). More recently Ming Dong Gu has published a thorough critique of the long-term biases in Euro-American descriptions of China, arguing that these distortions are systemic and fundamentally distinct from the phenomenon we now call Orientalism (Gu 2013: 1–14).

Each of these critiques is a response to a long history of historical misrepresentation, but I would suggest that the distortions to which these authors refer are not so much the product of egocentricity as an attempt to defend an imaginary West from the threat posed by the basic facts of Chinese history. In essence this has meant denying, disguising, or trivializing those developments in China's history that are meant to feature as uniquely Western in triumphalist narratives. Craig Clunas has been among the more forthright of art historians in excoriating such practices. Referring to Quentin Bell's work on fashion, Clunas observed Despite the fact that everything Bell has to say about China as a ‘static’ society without the concept of fashion is quite wrong and offered without any supporting evidence, it has become part of the general currency of consciousness about the distinctiveness of the West (Clunas 1991: 170–171).

Loaded Terms

What follows is a review of three of the most important deceptive ploys devised for China so that the reader may appreciate better the historiographic position of the chapters in this volume. The arguments discussed below occur commonly in sinological writing but, with few exceptions, I will not cite specific examples. The aim is not to cast blame—particularly as I am not blameless in all this—but simply to provide samples of common rhetorical practices that may still be found and, it is hoped, occur rarely in this volume.

Oriental despotism

One of the oldest and most persistent of defensive ploys is oriental despotism. E. G. Pulleyblank wrote of this theory during the Cold War era in words that might well have been written yesterday: It is a matter for great regret that such a hoary stereotype should be given fresh life and apparent scholarly justifications [in Karl Wittfogel's work] at a time when so much depends on the creation of real mutual appreciation and understanding between East and West (Pulleyblank 1958: 657). Originally oriental despotism was the brainchild of Charles the Second, Baron of Montesquieu. To properly deconstruct this hoary stereotype it will be necessary to understand what the good baron meant by despotism."

Prior to Montesquieu, Giovanni Botero (1540–1617) had observed that The government of China has much of despotism. Despotism was the only term Botero could conceive for describing a nation that was not governed by aristocracy: one should know that there is no other lord in all of China than the king; neither do they know what is a count, marquis or duke; nor is there any other one to whom taxes or duties are paid (Demel 1991: 55). Like most seventeenth-century Europeans, Botero could not have imagined a system such as China's where political authority was invested in hundreds of offices under the state, and where the state was formally distinguished from the court. Since he knew there was no aristocracy, the only conceptual alternative the classical tradition offered was despotism.

Baron Montesquieu, as a member of the European aristocracy, was concerned about the possibility that China's meritocratic ideals might be adopted in Europe. His defense of hereditary privilege therefore required a sustained attack on China's meritocratic system. He favored the English approach. In England the hereditary privileges of the aristocracy were protected even as the latter claimed to be looking after the commons. Despite this noble concern for commoners, it was clear that the latter should not be allowed to look after themselves:

There are men who have endeavored in some countries in Europe to abolish all the jurisdiction of the nobility; not perceiving that they were driving at the very thing that was done by the parliament of England. Abolish the privileges of the lords, of the clergy, and of the cities in a monarchy; and you will soon have a popular state, or else a despotic government. (Montesquieu 1752, vol. I: 22)

Here despotic clearly derives from earlier usage, designating a political system in which the aristocracy has been deprived of its social and political privileges. Ironically, Montesquieu's subtle equivocation enabled him and other aristocrats to demonize the only major government of the time that made political authority available on the basis of public service rather than hereditary privilege. This subterfuge was revived by Karl Wittfogel, the primary academic McCarthyite according to a study published only a few years ago (Cummings 2010: 94–99). While acknowledging that few today would promote the theory in Wittfogel's terms, this author observed The theory never really got a proper burial, though, it just reappears in less-conspicuous forms.

Here is where the history of art enters the narrative. In what less-conspicuous forms did the despotic oriental theory survive in the field of Chinese art history? Ironically, because Marx adopted Montesquieu's locution for China's political system, the theory survives robustly in China itself. In the academic world in China, including the History of Art, despotic (zhuanzhi) is the technical and ordinary designation for the political system of late imperial China. Oddly that is not far from the truth if we take that word to designate a post-aristocratic political system, but that is not what is intended. In China this locution is essentially a pejorative term sanctioned by intellectuals who continue to work under the thrall of the May Fourth tradition, which construed all things Western as enlightened and all things Chinese as benighted. To be fair this, and other Cold War constructs, have been critiqued in Chinese scholarship in recent years (Yang 2005: 3–9).

Social hierarchy

In the United States the term oriental despotism is rarely mentioned explicitly, but the idea survives in Cold War scholarship and even up to the present in a preference for descriptive terms that cast China's cultural tradition and social practice as normatively dogmatic, inflexible, or servile. As a common example, Cold War warriors rarely lost an opportunity to characterize China's late imperial social order as hierarchical, usually preceded by one or more intensifiers. Generally they neglected to mention that all advanced societies are hierarchical in structure, as are all modern corporations, governments, universities, and indeed any advanced form of administration. The point of repeating this term was to hide the fact that China's hierarchy differed fundamentally from those of European nations in that one's place in the hierarchy could be based on talent and performance rather than inherited social station. Acknowledging this fact would have threatened Cold War claims to long-term cultural superiority. The simple yet elegant solution was to repeatedly characterize China's social order as hierarchical" without getting mired in factual detail.

The skillful deployment of loaded terms also could have the effect of turning imperial China's most valorized social critics into exemplars of oriental despotism. In the history of art perhaps the most often cited case is that of Su Shi (1037–1101), a towering figure who appears frequently in this volume. Su was openly critical of the most powerful clique of the late eleventh century and was famously framed, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. Su himself saw these actions as a departure from normal procedure (Egan 1994: 36–37). Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), looking back hundreds of years later, likewise regarded the suppression of dissent at that historical moment as an outrageous abrogation of normative standards (Wang 1964: 114). Yet, particularly in China, this case is often treated as if it were a typical instance of despotic imperial practice.

In most early modern traditions of art making, the royal court exercised hegemony over artistic taste. If there is a moment when artists reject that hegemony in favor of their own standards, historians generally regard this as a watershed in the history of artistic agency (Crow 1985: 110–133). In China, this moment occurred fairly early when, in the late eleventh-century literati artists rejected the standards of the court academy (see Patricia Ebrey, Court Painting and Academies). John King Fairbank covered over this important fact by describing the late imperial monarch in sweeping terms as an oriental despot in absolute command of artistic taste, religion, and indeed all other aspect of his subjects' lives:

At the apex of the Chinese world was the Son of Heaven, who eventually became in theory omnicompetent, functioning as military leader, administrator, judge, high priest, philosophical sage, arbiter of taste, and patron of arts and letters, all in one. In performing his multiple roles he was more than human. (Fairbank 1968: 6)

The irony here is that Fairbank's description of China's emperor seems modeled on the absolutist kings of seventeenth-century Europe, monarchs who set the model and standard for religion, philosophy, and artistic taste. In early modern China, by contrast, people chose their own religion and philosophy, and officials in the various ministries made most of the decisions Fairbank here attributes to the emperor.

Individuality

Fairbank was writing at a time when American artists had developed considerable interest in the wild and idiosyncratic brushwork of the so-called Zen masters, in both China and Japan (Munro). This created a problem, for the artistic freedom such men exercised contrasted with the servile station of European artists at that time (tenth to thirteenth centuries) and so flew in the face of the despotic oriental narrative. Like Le Comte, Fairbank's response was to adopt the yes, China may have accomplished X, but it doesn't count because of Y ploy: As in all countries, the creative Chinese writer, artist, or craftsman expressed his individuality, while the hermit or recluse could become a private individualist outside his community. But what was the degree of individualism in the sense of individual rights within the old society? (Fairbank 1991: 36).

Historians of art know, of course, that it is not the case that, in all countries artists openly expressed their individuality. Throughout history artists have only rarely been able to assert their own will against aristocratic tutelage. Nothing could be more unusual, yet Fairbank implied that this was the norm, thus trivializing what in fact was an important development. He followed this ruse with anachronism, one of the most common of Cold War devices, asking why tenth-century Chinese artists lacked those constitutional rights that were unknown even in Europe before the nineteenth century. For those familiar with Fairbank's scholarship, the implication was that the Chinese ink-flingers labored under a despotic, oriental regime.

Orthodoxy

The preference for terms suggestive of dogmatic rigidity is perhaps most evident in the odd use of the term orthodox. I've written elsewhere that the Chinese term translated as orthodox (zhengtong) could not have possessed the semantic implications of the English term, seeing as those promoting what we call orthodox views often were critical of courtly taste and values (Powers 1997: 73–74). By labeling the Courbet's and Manet's of China as orthodox, scholars effortlessly transform acts of cultural defiance into examples of servile obedience.

Servile obedience

It is important to understand that the use of loaded terms was a response to basic facts of Chinese history that challenged common claims for Western superiority. China's long tradition of social criticism, for example, undermined the claim that defiance of authority is a unique expression of a Western love of freedom, but intellectuals who defied the authorities are so important in the Chinese tradition that it would have been impossible to ignore their writings entirely. The solution Cold War scholars found was to refer to such literature as didactic, a term that normally refers to the moralizing teachings of establishment authorities. Few readers would imagine that didactic literature could refer to trenchant criticisms of social injustice.

Officials who defied the monarch for the good of the people and the state were valorized in the Chinese histories as "zhongchen," or courageously forthright officers. The term was frequently applied to men who defied authority rather than obeying the monarch's every wish, but readers of English language sinology would never guess as much because zhongchen is always translated as loyal official or loyal Confucian official. Since loyal, in English, implies obedience, who would imagine what the term actually signified?

China's early modern administration was characterized by a separation of powers, with budget authority separate from policy-making, civil administration separate from the military, the court separate from the state, and so on (Kracke 1953: 28–33). Policy decisions generally were made by the cabinet, in which the emperor participated, but most judicial, financial, or personnel decisions—such as official appointments—were made within the relevant ministries. This contrasted with the more informal administrations of Europe (Scott 2008: 13–14, 27–28) in which the monarch personally made many of the decisions that, in China, were left to the experts. Knowledge of these facts would be embarrassing to the Western modernization narrative, and so Western writers often refer to the site of official decisions in China simply as the court, thereby reinforcing in the reader's mind the notion that all decisions were made personally by an all-powerful despot.

One of the most distinctive and remarkable of late imperial institutions in China was the Yushitai, a branch of government that E. A. Kracke referred to as information and rectification agencies (Kracke 1953: 31). During the Northern Song this bureau was charged with opposing unjust laws, exposing the use of public office for private benefit, reversing excessive criminal sentences, and addressing any instance in which injustice had not been exposed. A sub-agency transmitted complaints from taxpayers on to bureau officers who then could act upon them (Qu 2003: 33–42). This institution remained an important part of the central administration in Ming and Qing times. In the 1730s, The Crafstman, observing that England lacked any comparable system of formal checks, suggested that the nation might benefit from a similar arrangement (Fan 1949: 145–146). Readers of China scholarship today would be unlikely to arrive at similar conclusions because in Chinese studies we refer to this institution as the Censorate, implying to most English readers that its principle function was the suppression of seditious literature as befits a despotic oriental regime.

Social status

Another class of misleading terms has the unintended effect of disguising the fact that early modern China, unlike early modern Europe, was not an aristocracy (Bol 1991: 37–41). There was a hereditary monarch but, with few exceptions, he did not choose, appoint, promote, or demote officers. These were chosen through the examination system, reviewed periodically, and promoted, demoted, or fired depending upon the evaluation of the ministry of personnel. Unlike Europe, where political authority was tied to social status, a Chinese officer's political authority resided in the office that he occupied within specified term limits. For this reason it is misleading to speak of Chinese taxpayers as commoners. A society does not have commoners unless those who rule are nobility. Min refers to taxpayers who have specific rights, such as the right to bring suits to the magistrate's court (Qu 2003: 33–42). Likewise using the term gentry for shidafu implies that political authority was situated in social status and privilege, as in England, but in China, as just mentioned, political authority was situated in the office (zhi). Elites, for educated people, likewise is misleading for, in early modern Europe, elites were hereditary elites while in China they were not. Few readers know this, however, so the sinologist who uses a term like elite can be confident that the reader will assume it refers to hereditary elites. A related term is status. Social historians all know that it is important to distinguish between ascriptive status—inherited social status—and achieved status, or official rank achieved through merit, but we sinologists rarely make the distinction. Instead we prefer to refer to high status individuals. While this sounds agreeably like social science terminology, it leaves out precisely that information that a social historian would need to know, namely, whether the status was ascriptive or achieved. This ambiguity ensures that most readers will interpret high status as referring to hereditary social status when sinologists more typically have in mind achieved official status.

It is important to stress that the use of such terms cannot be dismissed as a function of personal or institutional bias. The use of loaded terms and translations has been so widespread in Chinese studies that most scholars working today, including the present writer, simply learned these locutions as the standard apparatus that marked a person as a professional sinologist. In recent years, most have fallen out of use; we hope that this volume will bring greater awareness to the misunderstandings they have induced.

Western Influence

An important intellectual frame for Chinese studies during the Cold War era was the impact-response paradigm critiqued by Paul Cohen (1984: 151). Cohen was concerned principally with scholarship on modern China. He was referring to the notion that China's modern history could be adequately understood as a series of responses to cultural impact from the West. In the field of Chinese art history, this paradigm generally took shape as the search for Western influence. During the 1950s and 1960s this was a common narrative thread in studies of Chinese art, as if the only significant information one might uncover about China's artistic tradition was evidence of Western influence. The term had been employed by nineteenth-century German art historians who presumed that the history of any nation—meaning a people sharing a common blood origin—was driven by the unique and unchanging spirit (Volksgeist) of that nation. Naturally it was thought that some national spirits were finer than others, and that superior civilizations would tend to influence inferior ones.

Finding evidence for Western influence consequently became an important means whereby Cold War sinologists could demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of the West. This trend is not difficult to find in scholarship on Chinese art as late as the 1980s. By that time, however, the discipline of the history of art had already begun to turn away from studies of influence and lineage for, in 1985, the eminent art historian Michael Baxandall published an incisive critique of influence as an analytical term arguing that, among strong artists, it was usually the borrower who exercised more agency than the source (Baxandall 1985: 58–62). Since then few art historians in the United States employ the term analytically. At about the same time, area studies expertise had undermined so many of the facile assumptions of impact-response scholarship that Albert Feuerwerker felt confident that this paradigm would soon be history (Feuerwerker 1985: 579–580).

In recent years, many scholars have turned away from nation-centered influence narratives to study regional interactions. Such study necessarily involves tracing exchanges and translations of cultural resources between and among peoples in the region, but the aim is not to assign agency for historical change to one, putatively superior source. The aim is to understand the structures and principles governing the translation and exchange of resources. Some recent studies even seek to examine the flow of visual resources so as to uncover the cognitive, ontological, or epistemological implications of certain kinds of pictorial practice. Such studies should not be confused with more old-fashioned methods bent on the pursuit of influence. The latter can be recognized by taking note of what constitutes an explanation. In an influence study, the author generally will be satisfied once the putative source of influence has been determined. Finding the source is considered tantamount to explaining why a given social practice existed in a particular place.

Despite the general trend away from influence narratives, old style studies still survive here and there. For instance, because German-derived nationalist rhetoric was adopted by the Soviets, it became normative in Chinese scholarship produced during the mid-twentieth century. As a result influence and even national spirit remain common terms in certain arenas of discourse in China to this day, and the game of claiming cultural priority through influence likewise retains its vitality in some areas of scholarship. Having said that, it is not all that difficult to find remnants of this argument in Western scholarship as well.

Philosophical Pluralism

Another challenge to comparison is the premise that different cultures are equal, but only because they are fundamentally incommensurate. This view has some historical depth in that any self-reflective individual who attempts to assess another culture using local categories prompts the question of whether comparison is, in fact, possible. In his sixth-century history of art, Yao Zui observed that people from foreign countries also produce fine paintings, but that their standards were different from those of China, and so he declined to rank them (Acker 1954: 57). Possibly he was able to remain neutral because distant foreign nations at that time, while posing a military threat, did not pose a cultural threat to China. That was no longer the case after European missionaries arrived. By the sixteenth century, contact between European and Chinese intellectuals had given rise to a host of arguments designed to glorify one group at the expense of the other. Matteo Ricci, like most other Europeans, denigrated Chinese painting as lacking in skill, but Wu Li (ca. 1632–1718) turned this argument around to China's advantage: Our painting values originality, not resemblance. We call this ‘inspired and free’. Their painting is all about shading, volume, and resemblance, and is achieved by laboriously following convention (Powers 2013: 316).

By this time the literati notion of art as self-expression was to some extent normative even in the court, and so European artists working at the Qing court were classified as artisans (Arnold and Corsi 2003: 4). Of course two can play that game. Some will recall Kenneth Clark's tome on landscape, where he suggested that Chinese landscape isn't really landscape because it doesn't use one point perspective. Clark's criteria appear to have been devised, not for their heuristic value, but rather to support an exceptionalist narrative. W. J. T. Mitchell pulled the rug out from under Clark's argument. He compared the rise of landscape in China with various European nations and concluded that landscape is more likely to develop in burgeoning empires (Mitchell 1994: 9).

Mitchell's use of the comparative method suggests that there can be heuristic value in employing analytical categories alien to the cultural tradition under examination. In the eighteenth century Hu Jing (1769–1845) did just that, describing Guiseppe Castiglione's painting using Chinese critical terms, including shengdong, lifelikeness, and fa for style. He even compared Castiglione's work to Chinese masters such as Li Gonglin (1049–1106), applying Chinese analytical terms and ignoring European period terms, a method not so different from what European and American scholars do in the other direction (Hu 1995: 41).

But philosophical pluralism remains an influential counter-argument to the comparatist method. It was noted earlier that influence and impact theories declined during the 1980s because area studies expertise tended to expose the weakness of those claims. Obviously this made it more difficult for nationalist scholars to assert cultural superiority. Philosophical pluralism solved that problem by doing away with evidence altogether: one need only take the desired conclusion as one's premise to proclaim that just about anything is a Western concept. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group exposed the subtleties of this strategy years ago. The Group noted that, in some contexts of cultural criticism, the assertion of difference has been to convert a liberal politics of tolerance, which advocates empathy for minorities on the basis of a common humanity, into a potential network of local alliances no longer predicated on such universals. Those local alliances, of course, would be founded on strong assertions of fundamental cultural difference. As an example they cite arguments against multiculturalism published by the National Association of Scholars, an organization they describe as reactionary. According to the Chicago Group, NAS argues that cultural difference makes no valuable sense without the liberal norm of tolerance, itself of Western origins (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1992: 537).

NAS felt no need to argue or demonstrate their claim. They assumed, a priori, that the ideal of toleration was unique to the West, in spite of the fact noted above that Christian Wolfe was nearly hanged for advocating China's policy of non-sectarian morality and religious toleration.

The unspoken premise here is that cultures are incommensurate and, therefore, if toleration is a Western concept then it cannot possibly appear within the intellectual repertoire of a different cultural system. One could argue, for instance, that people in China lacked eating utensils because this is a Western concept. Should someone counter with facts, noting that chopsticks appear in the archaeological record more than three thousand years ago, the philosophical pluralist need only point out that chopsticks are not eating utensils, in the Western sense of the term. In this sense such arguments are similar to influence narratives but, unlike the latter, they are not subject to refutation by means of historical evidence. They are immune to refutation, so long as one feels comfortable with tautological argument.

More recent versions of this argument are common in certain strains of postcolonial scholarship, taking the form of word games derived from the premises of philosophical pluralism. The logic seems to go something like this: art (for instance) is an English word and, therefore, must be Western. Since cultures are fundamentally incommensurate, whatever concepts the Chinese may have, they would not include the word art in exactly the same sense as in English and, therefore, will be lacking in that respect. It follows further that English words, that is, Western terms, cannot be applied to alien cultures because the set of concepts belonging to English cannot belong to any non-Western group of people, cultures being incommensurate.

Subtle as these arguments may be, they failed to impress James Cahill. In his essay on the history and post-history of Chinese painting, Cahill defended the use of modern, analytical terms in the study of all premodern cultures, including China's:

You may wonder why this point needs to be made—it may seem self-evident—after all, scholars of Italian painting do not limit their investigations to those issues that concerned Vasari. I make it to answer another familiar charge: that introducing and pursuing matters that do not figure, or figure only weakly, in traditional Chinese writings is tantamount to imposing foreign attitudes onto Chinese art. That argument seems to me completely specious. (Cahill 2005: 20)

It is specious because it conflates the distinction between analytical terms and period terms. The term gender, in its current, theorized sense did not exist anywhere in the world before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet it has been applied quite profitably to Renaissance Italy as to Edo Japan, peoples who never could have conceived such a term. To claim that the term can be applied to Italy but not Japan is to suggest that ideas are not simply instruments of analysis but rather are the expression of latent ethnic genius and therefore cannot be transferred from one culture to another. This argument, of course, strains credulity. The history of China's people is peppered with resources adapted from other cultural traditions, as chapters in this volume show. Likewise the history of European peoples is riddled with borrowed resources. Paper money, for instance, would have been unthinkable for Thomas More, but was as familiar to Edmund Burke as it was to Lu You. It should be obvious that people growing up in different cultural traditions can borrow, share, or adapt intellectual and technological resources that had been absent at earlier moments in their local histories, while already present in the histories of others.

Let me conclude with some reflections that might help to restore clarity to these debates. Years ago in Critical Inquiry Walter Benn Michaels addressed the ins and outs of the pluralist argument, interrogating its most fundamental premises:

Why does it matter who we are? The answer … must be instead the ontological claim that we need to know who we are in order to know which past is ours. The real question, however, is not which past should count as ours but why any past should count as ours. Virtually all the events and actions that we study did not happen to us and were not done by us. In this sense, the history we study is never our own; it is always the history of people who were in some respects like us and in other respects different. (Michaels 1992: 684–685)

Such an attitude opens the possibility of historical study premised on the assumption of a common humanity. People in many times and places faced the same constraints we face today: the seasons, gravity, disease, and the inescapable scarcity of natural resources. All societies must contend in some way with human avarice and mendacity, or find ways to encourage altruism and kindness. From this perspective, is it really so surprising that humans in many times and places have invented and re-invented systems of law and administration, or markets for the sale of artworks? The history of art, as a discipline, can contribute substantially to understanding such developments, as artifacts of human consciousness, but only if we recognize that none of the local solutions to the conundrum of personhood, or creativity, has ontological priority over any other. Rather, by examining a range of such solutions, historians can better understand the structural dynamics giving rise to each.

The Volume

How, then, does this volume relate to the long history of debate regarding China and its history? Neither this volume nor any other offers a panacea for that debate. Nonetheless, the best cure for sophistry is a good dose of the facts, and the chapters in this volume provide the most essential information and the latest thinking on core topics in the history of art for those who wish to acquire a thoughtful understanding of the situation in China in 30 pages or less.

We do not claim that this collection offers a comprehensive reference for the art of China. Excellent publications in that genre by Richard Vinograd and Robert Thorpe, or Craig Clunas, already exist. Yet many of these chapters are the first of their kind, offering broad treatment and scholarly depth on such matters as art collecting, print culture, the language of quality in art, personal accessories as art, the visualization of time, or popular literature and visual culture, to name only a few. There are regrettable omissions, due to the vicissitudes of the moment and the many demands impinging upon colleagues in their daily lives. We had hoped to include chapters on the cultural coding of materials, especially ceramics; the social coding of painting formats and apparatus (seals, colophons); and the gender coding of natural objects such as birds, flowers, or insects, yet we are fortunate that at least some of the chapters address some of these topics to a degree.

The chapters have been arranged under five rubrics. All art-making traditions develop systems of production and distribution. Our authors address four, important dimensions of that problem, from early modern academies to the modern excavation of a constructed artistic past. In advanced traditions of picture-making across Eurasia, independently so far as can be told, figure painting, portrait painting, religious subjects, and even landscape recur in different times and places. Artists who engage such subjects necessarily wrestle with the pictorial means for asserting the reality of such things in visual terms. The chapters in this volume relate how these genres developed in China and explore period terms as well as later analytical categories. The third category focuses on theories of art, period terms, and their development over time, a valuable resource for those attempting to theorize the language of art. The chapters in the fourth rubric explore the ways in which objects shape persons, and how persons become something different in the shaping of objects. The final set of chapters examines a topic central to the period literature of art in China and Europe alike, the relationship between word and image. It is hoped that these topic areas will be as interesting to readers as they may be productive for cross-disciplinary reflection.

Overview of the Chapters

Katherine R. Tsiang

The chapters in this volume have been arranged topically rather than chronologically, grouped into five sections by general themes. The introduction by sections below explains the range of material discussed, summarizes the perspectives of authors, and highlights some of the interrelations between the chapters. At the same time many chapters relate to studies in other sections and should also be explored in order to make full use of the material offered in this volume. Cross-references between chapters in the volume are indicated at the end of each chapter.

Production and Distribution

As part of cultural production through history, art has been a generator of cultural capital that distinguished social ranks and marked those that controlled wealth, technology, and other assets. Much of the early production of art served the hereditary nobility in China as in other parts of the world. However, an unusual feature of China is the prominent role of the private sector in the production and distribution of art in China from the first millennium onwards.

Patricia Ebrey examines the factors that supported the production of court paintings: institutional structures, the involvement of emperors, and connections between the court and artists outside the court at the capital as well as in society at large. Art works made at the imperial court as commissions created not only the buildings and furnishings of palaces but also the ceremonial implements and costumes, musical instruments, and so on, for the enacting of court culture. During the Song dynasty, the painting academy produced many high-quality paintings for the imperial collection, and some of that has been handed down to the present day. During the reign of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125), the painting academy had a three-year program of instruction in six subjects and a ranking system for awarding positions to its graduates. A permanent staff of artists trained students in canonical styles and techniques of painting. The famous Xuanhe Painting Catalogue, was compiled for Huizong at this time. It details painter's biographies and the titles of paintings collected, arranged under different genres of art. This work remains an invaluable source of information for the study of painting history. The development of connoisseurship and collecting in the private sector during this period further enhanced the court's interest and knowledge of art, and had its effect on courtly taste. Other emperors, too, were closely involved with the production of art, practicing calligraphy or painting, and composing poetry. These institutional foundations of the court painting academy continued or were revived in varying forms through the later imperial era.

While the collecting of art by the court was a major source of sponsorship for art production, especially in early imperial times, over time many ordinary Chinese built private art collections and supported the work of accomplished individual artists. From as early as the fourth century CE, received texts record artists who were recognized as masters and whose works were collected or commissioned by educated common people. Art markets thrived in the Song period, and by the thirteenth century, educated individuals accounted for the bulk of private art collecting. Scarlett Jang discusses collecting in terms of interrelated regional, social, and economic dynamics, noting in particular the importance of the Jiangnan region (the lower reaches south of the Yangzi river, including present day southern Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, and northern Jiangxi and Zhejiang). Art collecting was an activity in which a broad spectrum of society participated, including scholars, women, and merchants, who aspired to more prominent social status. By the Ming period the growth of printing and popular literature fed this interest and provided novices with advice on connoisseurship, tasteful living, and famous collections as well as artists and paintings. Jang presents a richly textured picture of the complexity and variety of the art market that reached a high point in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As artists, dealers, and collectors collaborated to serve this extensive market, imitations and reproductions abounded and played many roles. They could be created as examples for study and emulation, for sale in the popular market, or as expensive forgeries of the work of famous artists. The discourse and terminology of these various kinds of copying and imitation are the focus of Ginger Hsu's chapter in this volume.

Printing, whose earliest known examples in the Tang period (618–907) helped to promulgate Buddhist texts, became more widely used from the tenth century onward. J. P. Park provides details of the rapid expansion of printing and its impact on popular culture and society during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Printing as a commercial enterprise grew rapidly during this period and spread to many parts of China, spurred by lower costs and the growth of literacy. The large number of candidates studying for the official examination system, in addition to increased numbers of educated women, fed this market demand. In addition to literature, and theoretical and critical writing about literature and visual art, illustrated books such as novels and plays, illustrated albums of art and collecting, and manuals on how to paint began to circulate widely by the late Ming period. In the seventeenth century, so many formulaic guides appeared, written for ordinary people seeking to enhance cultural capital through signs of cultural refinement, that intellectuals frequently dismissed these people as vulgar and tasteless. At the same time, published writings on the originality of artists and poets and further defined artistic ideals of genuineness and inspired deeper discussions of the innate source of personal artistic expression, creative spontaneity, and of the genuine appreciation of art.

Excavated finds of ancient Chinese art, including material in many media and for a variety of functions, have been of interest to scholars and collectors since early imperial times. Collectors from the Song and later imperial periods have favored ancient bronzes and jades in particular. In the past century, discoveries of great caches of ancient material in tombs, buried hoards, and settlement sites has led to the acquisition of such materials by art museums and private collectors around the world, and to the study of such objects in the field of art history The excavations and reports of important archaeological discoveries in recent decades offers a wealth of information about their construction and the original placement of objects in tombs. Xiaoneng Yang emphasizes the need to consider these objects in their original contexts making use of new methodologies. Yang discusses some major finds of ancient tombs from the Neolithic to Han periods in terms of the kinds of assemblages provided for the deceased, such as food and ceremonial vessels, furnishings, clothing and accoutrements. These rich collections of objects were part of larger burial complexes or cemeteries that included surface architectural elements and subsidiary burials. The physical characteristics of these tomb furnishings can reveal much about the function of burial objects and their relation to the social and political status of the deceased. From the perspective of the art historian today, ancient artifacts can be approached from multiple analytical frameworks: as objects of daily use in ancient times; as provisions for the afterlife; as political emblems and signs of social rank; as fine personal collectibles; and as museum pieces assembled and displayed for public education in a global culture.

Representation and Reality

Visual representation of ideas about the reality of human existence, the natural world, and the larger cosmos informed images conveying a variety of culturally specific meanings. The authors grouped below examine imagery and period concepts associated with depictions of human figures, divinity, landscape, and architectural spaces.

Figure painting, the earliest form of pictorial representation recognized as art in China, emerged initially as a medium for social and moral self-reflection, a metaphorical mirror. Shane McCausland examines the early masterpiece Admonitions of the Court Instructress, a painted handscroll based on a third-century text written to provide instruction on moral ideals and proper conduct for women in the imperial court, in these terms. His analysis of three of the nine scenes (of an original twelve) elucidates the pictorial, thematic, moral, and psychological elements informing the painting. In terms of technique, from this early work through later periods, artists in China for the most part painted the human figure with brushed ink outlines for the contours of clothing, depicting flowing garments suggesting the form and movement of the body beneath. As seen in later centuries, these lines could be drawn in dynamic calligraphic ways to express the figure's individual character or special powers. McCausland expands his discussion to a larger epistemic view of Chinese figure painting showing the various traditions and major artists and categories used historically to define this large genre: Buddhist and Daoist figures, other figures (including portraiture), foreigners, etc. With the emergence of landscape as the predominant theme of painting around the thirteenth century, one finds a shift from figural depiction to the use of natural imagery in representations of moral, social, and political themes.

Dora Ching examines Chinese portraiture, a class of painting in her analysis that cuts across various period genres of art to encompass a large part of figure painting production, including ink painting, ancestor portraits, and religious painting. She expands the common perceptions of Chinese portraiture in both historic China and the West that have focused either on scholarly portraits or on paintings of deceased ancestors from the late imperial period. She makes an assessment of types of early portrait paintings together with the historical criteria for evaluating them and period terms used to discuss them. Beginning with early imperial commemorative depictions of historical paradigms in funerary contexts, many of the portraits were imaginary character depictions of exemplary officials and martyrs. This is also true of religious figures and portraits of emperors that did not necessarily represent likeness to the original figure, but were imaginary constructions based on reputation and status. Ching examines historical discourse on portrait painting that emphasized character, or what Ching calls transmitting the spirit as well as similitude and suitability to social status depending upon period and genre. The kinds of terminology used to refer to portraits of different types demonstrate a wide range of artistic approaches to this expansive area of artistic activity. Greater awareness and interest in the individual and self-expression can be seen in portraiture from the Song and later periods. Artists also used portraiture and self-portraits as a vehicle for individualized brushwork and expression of personal identity.

Religious art in China has been much studied in the West, particularly the art of Buddhist temples and cave shrines that preserve a wealth of surviving paintings and sculptures. For this reason, art historians have generally approached this art first in terms of religious categories: that is, Buddhist and other. Katherine Tsiang notes the