Lisa Claypool

“The Dim Stars at Dawn:” The Ding Family and its Portraits

This paper draws from a chapter from my book manuscript Figuring the Social Body analyzes the Ding family’s editorial attempts in the 1818 Mustard Seed Garden painting manual to craft family reputation by weaving their recent genealogy together with a history of Yangzhou — just as the city was being eclipsed and transforming from a flourishing salt entrepot into an economically plagued and almost ghostly metropolis. That is, it asks how portrait imagery (in the manual’s lessons, and through analysis of the extant portraits by the Dings) figured in the coproduction of familial and urban biography. I borrow Lawrence Grossberg’s conceptualization of popular culture as the imaginative and nearly invisible incorporation and excorporation of social formations as a way of thinking about how portraits mattered to the social body.

Lisa Claypool is an Associate Professor of Art History and Mactaggart Art Collection Curator. She has published articles on science and imagery, interculturalism and visuality, and exhibitions in early 20^th century China. She has two books in progress: Figuring the Social Body: Painting Manuals in Late Imperial China, and Artifactual Art: Painting and Science in Modern China.

Francesca Dal Lago

Why did Qing end with Realism?

Having become progressively preoccupied with the Realist turn at the end of the Qing period, I would like to profit from this distinguished gathering of visual scholars to discuss my still unresolved question of: why did Qing end with Realism? Or, possibly: why did Realism matter to Qing? While some scholars may argue that Realism in fact enters the Chinese artistic stage during the early, not late, Qing era, my concern is the scale of the popular and political shifts towards accurate representation that takes over Chinese visual culture at the end of the 19^th century. A more pressing question is whether theses shifts were inevitable necessities. Arguments used to explain this shift towards Realism include the social and economic decadence experienced at the end of the imperial time, Han nationalistic awakening and European encroachment. These are all ab-aesthetics explanations suggesting that Realism arrived at this time under the rubric of ‘science’, not ‘art’, mainly justified by socio-political reasons. In my paper I will provide some of the elements and images normally used to support such traditional narrative, but I would like to use this occasion to discuss whether other reasons may in fact exist, at the level of aesthetics and visual sensibility that may have prepared this momentous visual shift which, I hope you will agree, has forever changed the way things are not just represented but even seen in Chinese visual culture.

Francesca Dal Lago is a fellow at Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale, Collège de France. She has published numerous papers on modern and contemporary Chinese art. Her current research examines the transfer of art technical knowledge from the French academic system to China in the first half of the 20^th century.

 

John Finlay

“Is a Qing Court Painting a Painting?”

The broad category of “Qing court painting” appears to invoke the same criteria of judgment that we bring to other kinds of Chinese painting. But, by traditional Chinese standards—themselves incorporating the highly restrictive and self-validating values of a small class of scholar-amateurs of painting and calligraphy—Qing court painting can found to be sadly lacking in value as painting. Only relatively recently have Chinese art historians paid serious, sustained attention to court painting, in the publication of exhibition catalogues and volumes of reproductions of Qing court paintings as well as collections of Qing archival documents. The questions, then, are what qualities are shared by all “Chinese painting” (itself a problematic category); by what paradigms should court paintings be evaluated; and what attributes distinguish Qing court paintings from other kinds of painting. Simply listing shared characteristics of various genres of Chinese painting and then highlighting unique features of specific types goes a long way toward revealing what is especially distinctive in painted works produced for the Qing imperial court. Posing such questions sheds light on what makes a painting a “painting” and what do we mean by “painting” in the context of China under the Qing dynasty.

John Finlay is an independent scholar based in Paris, France. He was formerly Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the first Elizabeth B. McGraw Curator of Chinese Art at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is currently completing a PhD dissertation at Yale University, entitled “‘40 Views of the Yuanming yuan’: Image and Ideology in a Qianlong Imperial Album of Poetry and Paintings.” The thesis defense is scheduled for October 2011.

Kristina Kleutghen

One or Two, Repictured

Throughout his reign, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795) frequently commissioned complex portraits in which he oscillated between real and pictured presences as both viewer and subject. Perhaps the most compelling expression of these illusions is One or Two, an elaborate multiple portrait that fosters its own enigma in four versions consistently inscribed with a perplexing imperial poem. No other Qianlong court composition is known to exist in so many manifestations, testifying to its personal meaning for the emperor while inviting questions as to the precise nature of that significance. While the various version of the painting have been considered on the peripheries of other studies, One or Two has received remarkably little dedicated art history. Not only have the four known versions never been addressed together, but also the fourth version of the composition includes significant iconographic and stylistic changes. This paper offers a decisive reevaluation of the works’ intertwined histories, historiographies, and significances, as well as a new translation of the poem that recovers its original multifaceted references. Accessed individually and as a cohesive unit, this treatment offers new insights into the Qianlong emperor’s motivations for repeatedly recommissioning the composition. Far more than a collection of images, the various versions of One or Two lay bare the emperor’s application of materiality and memory to imperial portraits produced across the full breadth of his reign.

Kristina Kleutghen is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Washington University. Currently she is revising a manuscript on illusionistic court painting under the Qianlong emperor.

Yeewan Koon

The Image and the Witness: Paintings in post-Opium War Guangdong

Violence as a cultural expression of power and moral values is generally seen as absent in Chinese ink painting. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, the theme of violence emerges in unexpected art circles including in paintings by the literary elite. This paper will focus on the period after the Opium War from 1842 leading to the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850 focusing on why such themes emerged at this time. Moreover, I will map some of the strategies used by Cantonese artists and scholars as they responded to the violence and anxiety of war and rebellions. More specifically, I will be looking at how absence, disavowal, and anger haunt these paintings, and in so doing exert an agency that had both a private dimension and a public aspect that bridge the gulf between experience and narratives of defiance.

Yeewan Koon is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong. She is currently working on a manuscript on Su Renshan and early nineteenth century Guangdong art.

 

Michele Matteini

Issues of Figuration in Luo Ping’s Late Painting

The problem of figuration lies at the heart of eighteenth-century artistic practice. New concerns about painting’s value as ‘image’ emerged alongside the shift in calligraphy from ‘letter’ to ‘stele’ writing, and signaled a concerted moving away from a brushwork-centered, process-based aesthetics, in the direction of new forms of visual immediacy. Figurative thinking was also behind the Court’s grand spectacles of self-promotion, as well as much literary production of the time, insistently blurring the boundaries between the real and the deceiving. We usually invoke societal, economic, and political factors, but rarely do we account for the aesthetic and intellectual motivations that informed these changes. It seems to me that thinking about the world and oneself figuratively meant reconfiguring painting in its relational functioning- a critique to long-established tropes about self-affirmation and expression that late eighteenth-century painting shared in its different incarnations.

Luo Ping’s career could be seen as a life-long journey into figurative thinking. I want to discuss this question through the close reading of one of Luo’s most complex pictures, Su Shi and the Two Miao (1795). As a personal reflection on friendship and intimacy, the painting recast Luo’s bond to Weng Fanggang as the apocryphal encounter between Su Shi and the holy double Miaoshan and Miaoying. It will be linked to other objects, relics, and ritual performances that, as a chain of figurative analogies, guided Weng’s ambitious process of self-definition as Su Shi, and Luo’s responsibilities within it. In its spatial and compositional features, the painting will propose a radically new mode of conceptualizing relations, and a new attempt to rethink, or perhaps even to reinvent, community through images.

Michele Matteini is an Assistant professor of Art History and Humanities, Reed University.

 

Lihong Liu

A Bird Nesting on a Single Branch in a Forest: Court Painter Outside the Court– a case study on Chen Mei (ca. 1694-1745)

As a southerner from the then Lou county near Songjiang, Chen Mei had started to pursue his painting career in Beijing since the 1710s while living with his brother, also a painter, who was connected with the nobles in the city. After Chen’s painting was discovered by a court painter-officer, he was recruited into the imperial painting office under Yongzheng’s reign (1723-1735). Chen served for the court until the first decade of Qianlong’s reign (1736-1796) after he finished a monumental, collaborative painting, Qingming shang he tu. Recognizing Chen as a court artist, little scholarship has paid attention to the group of paintings that Chen painted outside of the court, on which he used a peculiar seal-signature, Jiaoliaowo (which can be read as “a bird nesting on a single branch among a forest”, according to Zhuangzi). By studying these paintings, my research investigates the intriguing interaction between a “court style” and the court artist’s individual practice on art. This essay will show the “microscopic” vision of the self-contented world that is conceived by the artist by monumentalizing ordinary things, and how the striking madeness of the paintings claim for the artist’s individuality.

Lihong Liu, Ph.D candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is currently working on her dissertation on the late work of Wen Zhengming and its connections to the community in the Lower Yangtze Delta Region area in 16^th century China.

 

Stephen Whiteman

Some First Steps into Wang Yuanqi’s Topographic Landscapes

This paper is intended as a first foray into several topographic landscapes painted by Wang Yuanqi. In particular, an attempt will be made through formal means to contextualize Wang’s handscrolls depicting Wangchuan Villa, Ten Views of West Lake and the Kangxi emperor’s sixtieth birthday celebrations, the Wanshou shengdian tu, and albums showing scenes from Lu Hong’s ‘Thatched Hut’ and the Qing park-palace, Bishu shanzhuang. I am interested in exploring distinctions between the paintings Wang executed for the court and those created outside it, the significance of generic conventions associated with 17^th c. Orthodox album painting within his oeuvre, and the formal relationship between album and handscroll paintings, whether topographical or otherwise. It is hoped that these and other concerns may offer insight into the nature of Kangxi court painting, both stylistically and programmatically.

Stephen Whiteman is Visiting Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College. His current research focuses on Qing imperial gardens and landscapes. He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 2011.

 

Roberta Wue

Shanghai Painting as Fan: Format, Form and Function

The late Qing journalist and guidebook author, Huang Shiquan, noted the popularity of Shanghai painting with a broad clientele, observing that Shanghai’s “common crowd of butcher and vendors” vied to obtain works by the treaty port’s celebrity artists.  This essay investigates the painted fan as an exemplar of Shanghai painting in the 1870s and 1880s, and as an entryway to understanding the shifting and complex relationship between painting and its audiences in the treaty-port.  Affordable, fashionable, eye-catching and efficiently distributed by Shanghai’s glamorous fan shops, it is the painted fan’s confluence of identities in this period as a personal accessory, public statement and mobile – and thus highly public – painting format that spurred its success and energized the emerging Shanghai art market.  The popularity of this urban and accessible painting format can also be explained by the innovative themes and subjects rendered by luminary artists such as Ren Bonian (1840-1895), Hu Yuan (1823-1886) and Qian Hui’an (1833-1911), and their establishment of an innovative urban imaginary both in the Shanghai-centric subjects so au courant at this time, and in the reconceptualized relationships established between painting and viewer.

Roberta Wue is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine.  She has published on painting, advertising and photography in nineteenth-century China.  Her current book project addresses the relationship between late Qing Shanghai artists, art and audiences.