The Performance of Visual Narratives in Imperial Art

Two Case Studies from Assyria and the Khmer Empire

 

Dominik Bonatz

Free University Berlin

 

My contribution is concerned with the onset of narrative art and of empire in different cultural contexts. The initial goal is to heed the call for an integrated agenda in the study of political and historical narrative in text and image in the ancient Western Asiatic World. Through a comparison with the context and structure of visual narratives in ancient Southeast-Asia some cross-cultural assumptions may contribute to a better understanding of how visual narratives emerged and functioned in early imperial state systems.

 

The case study from ancient Western Asia will be the Assyrian Empire (9^th to 7^th cent. B.C.). It has been asserted that within the Assyrian realm the huge amount of annalistic texts, palace reliefs, stelae, and rock reliefs served as integrated representations of state ideology – of the institution of kingship and the ‘ideal of the Assyrian’ state. Many scholars have addressed the ideological and propagandistic values of Assyrian reliefs but only few have asked the question of how the narrative scenes might have been ‘read’.

 

My approach, therefore, concerns mainly the perception and performance of narratives in monumental art. It seeks to investigate how visual narratives have been made suitable for communicating ideological or rhetorical messages. The role of the audience as well as the relation between space and monumental art form important aspects of this study.

 

The comparison with the Khmer Empire in Cambodia (9^th to 13^th cent. A.D.) will show many similarities within the narrative techniques of two early imperial state systems. Concerning the question of performing visual narratives it can be confirmed that the embedment of monumental art in a large ceremonial context enhances the efficacy of both as “materialized ideology”. In reviewing the evidence, however, it will also be shown that both case studies have their own profound characteristics, through which a different patterning in socio-cultural behaviour and the ways in which visual narratives might have been functioned could become more traceable.         

 

 

Polymorphic Narratives of Asia and Europe in the Nineteenth Century

 

Ting Chang

Carnegie Mellon University

 

My proposed paper examines interactions between the arts of Asia and Europe not only in painting, but also in the literary genre of travel writing and the display of art and artifacts.  I draw on my current book-length study titled ‘Collecting Asia:  Desire, Travel and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris’ which examines the Asian travels and art collections of Théodore Duret, Enrico Cernuschi, Emile Guimet and Félix Régamey in the 1870s.  Best known for the Musée Cernuschi and the Musée Guimet, museums of Asian art that they created in France, European visitors represented Japan, China and India, among other nations, through collected art objects.  My paper would analyze interactions between written, visual and display narratives created by Guimet and Régamey in the illustrated travel account Promenades japonaises (1878 and 1880) and the Musée Guimet.

 

The two French travellers produced what I call ‘polymorphic narratives’ in words, images and displays.  I suggest that both dialogue and disparity can be found in Promenades japonaises between Guimet’s writing and Régamey’s illustrations.  Word and image thus represent cross-cultural contact in concurrent as well as contradictory narratives.  Further, in the transition from writing and illustration to the display of objects in space there is the important erasure of another dialogue – the interchange between traveler and native.  Guimet would remove from view any trace of the dialogical interaction that made possible the writing, collecting and exhibition of Asian artifacts in France.  I wish to conclude by showing how display strategies in the Musée Guimet would ultimately conceal the related forms and preceding phases of a cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century.

 

 

Translating Text into Image: Beyan-i Menazil, an Illustrated Ottoman Manuscript

 

Yonca Kösebay Erkan

Kadir Has University

 

Illustration of books starts from the 15th century on wards in the Ottoman Empire, although earlier examples are evident in the other parts of the Islamic realm. During the reign of Sultan Mehmed I, illustrations depict scenes in relation with heros, lovers, and Sultans. Portraiture began at this time with Sultan’s own initiative through relations with Italy. Another genre of the same period is the illustration of poetry books (Hamse). The narration of the history of the Ottoman dynasty enriched with these illustrations (Shehnames).  In the illustrations borrowings from eastern (i.e. Tabriz, Heart) and western artistic schools mingled with Ottoman costumes, scenery or historic events. In the 16^th century, just prior to the execution of Mecmua-i Menazil, several artists were taken from the royal scriptorium of Tabriz, to the royal scriptorium in Constantinople.

The illustrations of Mecmua-i Menazil (1537) form another genre, which are topographical views, devoid of human figures. They are unique, in the sense that they narrate the historical event, that is the military campaign of Sultan Suleyman II, from Constantinople to Baghdad, unlike its predecessors. 

In a way, the Mecmua-i Menazil is the turning point of the Ottoman Painting from the Medieval to the Renaissance in terms of conceptual framework. It is argued by several authors that the illustrations of Mecmua-,i Menazil are based on onsite observation. This claim, although it has rightful insights, does not clarify the unique and perhaps unusual character of the illustrations. The illustrations of Mecmua-i Menazil form a visual text, parallel to the narration. This visual compilation provides overlaid information about the journey itself and the places visited. The settlements, stopping points, flora and fauna enrich the portrayal of the journey parallel to the incidental events, such as increasing of royal tents with the commencement of the Sultan himself in the depiction of the encampment. On the other hand, visual symbols that is less familiar to the general reader like the use of view points, perspective and connective elements gives us the impression that the illustrations were planned as a whole.

The typological study of the schematized building depictions, repeating based on geographical locations, painting of the illustrations in layers by several different artist, as well as using textual inscriptions in anonymous places suggest that these illustrations were painted not onsite, but deciphered at the scriptorium from the textual notes. Therefore Mecmua-i Menazil should be treated as a manuscript which marks the transition from a textual narration convention to a visual narration. It is a production born in the textual convention but moved to a new genre represented by itself.

In this paper, other than the translation of textual notes into images, another unique aspect of this manuscript will be presented. It is understood that when these images are cut in a certain way they can be viewed as a model. This aspect of the illustrations, point to the involvement of the scriptorium, managing the arts, from calligraphy, to painting and even to model building for ceremonial processions.

 

 

Text and Image during the 11^th Century at Bagan, Burma – Reviewing Origins and Purpose

 

Charlotte Galloway

Australian National University

 

Buddhist narrative texts have been used extensively to determine the sources of visual representations of episodes from the Buddha’s life. This methodology has lead to conclusions relating to the form of Buddhism practised in a particular area, which in turn has been used to inform other historical discourses. Reliance on such methodology can lead to a limited understanding of the origins of narrative, and its purpose.

 

Narrative is the dominating theme of Buddhist imagery in Burma, and the historical site of Bagan represents the period in which this tradition developed and became entrenched within Burmese Buddhist art. Initial interpretations of these narratives favoured the Theravada traditions and texts. Yet early Bagan’s Buddhism was far from uniform. By analysing some of the narrative themes found at Bagan, it is proposed that there are multiple sources for such imagery. In particular, a hypothesis will be put forward that suggests a mix of possible pre-existing animist beliefs with Buddhism influenced the form of narrative favoured by the early Buddhist rulers. Such relationships must therefore inform our interpretation of narrative and the correlation between text and image. Using the narrative imagery at Bagan it will be demonstrated that any direct correlation between text and image must be treated carefully.

 

 

Prioritizing Enlightenment:

Organizing Burmese and Thai Murals of the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

 

Alexandra Green

University of Hong Kong

 

Both Thailand and Burma espouse the Theravada Buddhist faith, which unsurprisingly has resulted in similarities in the content of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mural paintings found in temples, assembly halls, and ordination halls. The organization of the murals, however, is radically different in the two countries.

 

In Burma the wall paintings, which are mostly found in temples rather than halls, are largely composed of representations of the twenty-eight previous Buddhas, the life of Gotama Buddha, and the Mahanipata (the final ten stories of the 547 Jataka tales), as well as hell scenes, images of people paying homage to the Buddha, magical protective devices, references to alchemy, and associations with the future Buddha, Maitreya. The majority of the wall space in Burmese temples is devoted to the canonical narratives, however, and these images are painted in strips which wend their way around the temple walls, climbing higher with each circumambulation. Arranged in a hierarchical fashion the narratives reflect the progress from sentient being to enlightened one. Thus, the twenty-eight previous Buddhas are found at the top of the walls, while the first of the Mahanipata stories is usually closest to the floor. Scenes of homage, hell, alchemical myths, and magic symbols are, other than a few exceptions, located in peripheral areas.

 

Thai wall paintings, on the other hand, are primarily located in ordination and assembly halls. Behind the main Buddha image can be seen the Traiphum, the Three Worlds or the thirty-one states of existence, while on the entrance wall is a representation of Mara’s assault on Gotama, the Earth Goddess’ watery evidence of the latter’s worthiness, and Gotama’s victory. On the lateral walls can be found, in rows or panels, celestial beings and/or scenes from the life of Gotama Buddha and his previous lives, particularly the Thosachat (Mahanipata).

 

In this paper I seek to explore how the space (temple or hall) in which the paintings are located has influenced the organization of the imagery, and I argue that the usage to which the sacred space is put has further determined the nature of the organization. Furthermore, I argue that despite seemingly radical differences in narrative structure, the meanings conveyed are very similar, in keeping with the shared religious beliefs of the Thai and Burmese cultures.

 

 

Tales of Courtship: Encountering the Mongols

 

Roslyn Hammers

University of Hong Kong

 

The development of the Mongol empire into a preeminent world power in the 13^th century in nearly all accounts was a dramatic episode in history. As the Mongols sped across Central Asia into Eastern Europe, various courts had to account for their undeniable presence. This paper, a preliminary exploration, offers an innovative approach to Mongol imagery from the 14^th to 15^th centuries, the height of the empire. It focuses on representations of the Mongols in conjunction with varying narrative frameworks that surround the Mongols, starting with paintings that were commissioned by the Mongol court itself in Yuan-dynasty China. The paper moves on to discuss depictions of the Mongols in two other settings, Il-Khanate Persia, and Latin Christendom Europe. Through analysis of Mongol self-representation in comparison with Mongol imagery created by others, the paper considers various strategies of pictorialization deployed to describe these powerful horsemen. In addition to telling stories about the Mongols, the manners in which the Mongols were depicted inherently provide commentary on the producers of the imagery and diverse narratological structures. The paper will explore how indigenous courtly narratives were modified to engage with the Mongols whilst serving the various courts.

 

 

Visual Narrative as Performative:

The Ramayana Murals of Mattanceri Palace, Kerala, India

 

Mary Beth Heston

College of Charleston

 

How many ways can a story be told?  What makes a story continually compelling?   And in what ways does a visual narrative distinguish itself from the written?  If a visual narrative fixes the images for its audience in a manner that other forms of narrative cannot, how can the visual also bring the audience to participate in their imagining of a story in a manner that parallels reading, recitation, and performance? 

 

When it comes to the Ramayana, the great epic of Indic tradition, the tellings are surely endless, from Valmiki’s classic tale of the first millenium BCE to its renderings over the centuries in vernaculars, in regional performative traditions, in architectural sculpture, in illustrated manuscripts and other painted media, as well as in the televised serial almost two decades back that continued for 90 weeks, or the Amar Citra Katha comic book Rama stories that can be found today throughout India.  The Ramayana’s antiquity and ubiquity are matched by its continuous contemporaneity.  Staged performances of Rama’s story were enacted as subtly veiled forms of resistance to the British Raj in the period of the Nationalist struggle; perhaps the most dramatic contemporary example of the ongoing power of Rama’s story is the destruction in 1992 of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, believed to have been built on the site of Rama’s birthplace.   The story of Rama, hero of the epic Ramayana, has resonated with themes of kingship in South Asia for more than two millennia: Rama, the rightful heir to his kingdom’s throne, whose ascent to that role is denied by the machinations of a jealous stepmother, spends fourteen years in exile with his devoted wife and brother.  His wife’s kidnapping by the demon king Ravana sets off a series of heroic exploits that come to define the nature of kingly virtue in South Asia; in the end he rescues Sita, is restored to the throne, and his kingdom is restored to “Ram Raj” or the rule of Rama, which in South Asia signifies a polity of enlightened, righteous rulership and earthly harmony.

 

This project involves mural paintings of the Ramayana in the king’s chamber of Mattanceri Palace, home to the erstwhile Cochin Rajas, in the modern state of Kerala in extreme southwestern India.  These seventeenth- to eighteenth-century paintings describe the epic in a densely detailed continuous narrative.  I argue that this telling of Rama’s story was intended as a sophisticated visual commentary on contemporary kingship in the region, with what I regard as its focus on fiercely heroic battle as the expression of what it meant to be a king in the region.  This emphasis is underscored, I argue, in several ways: of the seven “books” of the epic, the Book of War receives special emphasis.  This segment of the epic is by far the largest of any in the room, and is situated within its architectural context in such a way that the climactic battle scenes are the first paintings one encounters upon entering the king’s chamber from the adjacent Hall of Coronation.  This, and the style of the paintings themselves, suggest that this telling of the epic was intended to emphasize the heroic (vira) and furious (raudra) modes (of the nine modes within the rasa theory of audience reception in Indian aesthetics of performance), in much the same way that the regional dance-drama form taking shape at the same time and which told the same tales likewise emphasized the heroic and furious.  That is, the formal treatment of this visual narrative drew upon a visual vocabulary that signalled an audience response similar to expectations familiar to them from local performance traditions. The central role of performance in the cultural formation of the region, and the many parallels one may draw between the performing and visual arts of this era, lead me to believe that the viewers of these murals were expected to understand this intention by virtue of their familiarity with this shared aesthetic vocabulary.  The evocation would serve to strengthen the commentary on kingship in that it embeds this within a shared cultural system of visual-emotive language.  Thus, I argue, instead of a visual narrative that presented a sequence of fixed images, this imagery functioned more like performance, opening up the viewers’ experience of the well-known and beloved story and inviting them to experience it, to “taste” (rasa) it anew.

 

 

Modern Articulations: Visual Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India

 

Ritu G. Khanduri

University of Texas at Arlington

 

In India, the newspaper cartoon is outside the interpretive discourses of both art and journalism. This absent discourse generates tensions around the cartoon’s flexible meanings, which makes it a creative site for community activists, cartoonists, newspaper editors, and the state to intervene and settle interpretive dilemmas. For example, as part of their politics in the postcolonial context, minority activists have kept a vigil on offensive representations in cartoons. These articulations of the political have global linkages and emerge through a questioning of humor, liberal governance, and media ethics. Thus the interpretive dilemmas question not only aesthetics, but identity, minority rights, and citizenship that in turn frame a discussion of who belongs and who does not within a nation. In the colonial context similar debates around the cartoons’ meaning illuminate how images are deployed to negotiate the relationship between culture, aesthetics, and politics.

 

My paper analyzes the newspaper cartoon as an emergent site for the discursive confrontation of changing political currents, including encounters between imperial authority and subaltern resistance, between majority rule and minority rights, and between globalizing forces and local initiatives. Through a focus on three specific moments of debate around the meaning of cartoons, I trace the routes by which what was once a marginal art form became symbolically central to public life in colonial and postcolonial India. This paper emerges from my ongoing book project which highlights the professionalization of this visual practice, and its competing interpretations in India to disclose the making of an aesthetic sensibility intimately connected to modern political identity and the West.

 

 

Telling Tales (or How Su Renshan Berated Confucius)

 

Yeewan Koon

University of Hong Kong

 

Accounts of visual narratives tend to focus on the question of how images are able to narrate stories with the artist mediating the relationship between text and picture. At a deeper level, the protagonist of the narrative may also act as the displaced voice of the artist who uses the story as a foil to express their points of views. But what happens when a painter takes on a more active authorial role using first-person narratives in his or her paintings? This paper will examine the works of Su Renshan, a Cantonese artist active in the mid-19^th century when the first Opium War saw the beginnings of rebellions and violence that would devastate the country. In the 1840s when feelings of discontent and xenophobia were beginning to brew in Guangdong, Su began making paintings that vented his frustration towards literati values by angrily declaring that the writings of Confucius poisoned the people. As a literary artist, through his paintings and inscriptions, he created complex images that borrow structures and characters from literary novels, vernacular tales and classical histories to create angry tales that berate Confucian values. This paper will examine why Su uses the structure of narratives to convey his frustrations in paintings, and how his use of first-person structures represents a transgressive voice that foreshadows the making of a modern Chinese artist.

 

 

Narrating Historical Women and Fictional Characters in Ming and Qing China:

A Matter of Encoding Remembrances and Contemporaneity

 

Marion S. Lee

Ohio University

 

My paper is informed by the important assumption that narrative is less a code than “a meta-code”.  In the same respect, Hayden White (among other critical theorists) argues persuasively narrative functions as the naturalized mechanism for historical representation.  Put in another way, “the real” would make more sense when it is presented as narrative. 

The notion of conceptual permeability between “reality/truth” and “fiction” in the arena of representation is inherent to writing, discourse and cultural production in China from the early imperial era forward.  The notion was also a factor behind an overarching character of the textual traditions in China—Historical personages and events were readily engaged as respectively the protagonists and main plots in narrative: different poetic modes, stories, dramatic plays and novels.  Such employment of historical figures, events or anecdotes in different narrative forms together with the implicit presence of the undercurrent of didacticism helped to sustain their core historicist identity (of the characters and events) on the one hand, and on the other, functioned as device that encoded or re-encoded “meaning” to the historical characters/events in a way that refracted both the societal concerns in the time of and the subjectivity of the later story-teller/re-presenter.

            The quotidian presence of iconic historical figures, anecdotes or events in textual and visual narratives during Ming and Qing China (fifteenth through early twentieth centuries) resulted in the pervasive familiarity with them among readers and audiences in most societal segments.  Moreover, the dissemination of broad interest in narrativized history to the illiterate was also advanced through orality, which occupied a significant role in basic learning as well as in the practice of scholarship and literary writing throughout imperial China. 

            My paper is informed by the assumption described above that is the yoking of the compelling universality of narrative to the heightened importance of history and historicism within the cultural traditions of pre-modern China.   The central thesis is that representation of women in painted and printed matters as visual narrative in Ming and Qing was intended sometimes less to introduce or inform viewers about the represented subjects. 

            Rather, the visual images operated indexically as cue that enabled a viewer to rehearse his/her understanding of the alluded narrative.  The hypothetical viewer regardless of gender consideration would also be prompted to recall additional narratives about the same historical subjects or those with similar didactic underpinning or philosophical themes.  The sense of imagination and memory that would also be brought into play in the hypothetical viewer could result in further intellectual play, as part of the informed response to the alluded visual narrative.

In addition, my proposed thesis may bring up another point of consideration, one that would help to broaden the horizon for understanding particular times in Ming and Qing.  The hypothesis that visual narratives about historical women and fictional characters were already familiar to viewers and general audiences may help to refocus the attention on the same narratives as constituting less a divisive than cohesive sign, one that could plausibly illuminate intersections of commonality across broad demarcations (geographical, socioeconomic or gender) in changing and turmoil times within notably the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  The political transitions between respectively the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Qing and the Republican era took place in the stated two centuries.  In the same respect, visual narrative could further help us reach greater understanding of societal forces in a specific time and place. 

 

I propose presenting the thesis with the critical discussion of visual images that include:

 

1) Wu Wei (1459-1508)

Lady with Pipa  (Indianapolis Museum of Art)

2)  Du Jin (1465- 1509)

Female Immortal with Day Lilies (Indianapolis Museum of Art)

3)  Qiu Ying (ca.1495-1552),

Spring Morning in the Han Palace (National Palace Museum, Taibei)

4)  Fei Xiaolou (AKA Fei Danxu, 1801/2-50),

One Hundred Beauties  (Private collection, Phoenix)

5)  Gai Qi (1774-1829)

            Pictures and Encomia on the Honglou meng (1879 edition at C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley)

 

The work that is done by some art historians as well as literary historians and historians, all working within and outside the field of China, inform my rethinking on visual narrative.  Scholars such as Anne Burkus-Chasson, Julia Murray, Richard Vinograd, Susan Mann, Wai-Yee Li, Ellen Widmer, David Der-wei Wang, Judith Zeitlin as well as Hayden White and Roland Barthes help to direct my attention to overlapping conceptual concerns between visual narratives in Ming and Qing China and contemporary critical theory.  In my paper, such ready assumptions as the priority of text over image, the attribution of rigidity both to storylines and the identity of historical figures are of diminished importance when compared with the attribute of fluidity, the importance of authorial manipulation, as well as the attention paid to intellectual play arising from remembrance and imagination.  My paper is part of a larger project that seeks to reposition pictorial art practices in early nineteenth-century China through the exploration of narrative and collecting practices.

 

 

Storytelling in Real Space:

Viewership and Nirvana Narratives in Cave Temples of China

 

Sonya Lee

University of Southern California

 

            Stories about the life of the Buddha Sakyamuni have been recounted in diverse media and locations since the beginning of Buddhism more than two millennia ago. In China of the seventh and eighth centuries, a unique architectural design for cave temples came into vogue to house a pictorial narrative highlighting the final episode in the biographical cycle, the Buddha’s entry into nirvana. Scenes of the last lecture, moment of expiration, rising from the golden coffin, cremation and division of relics, among others, were strategically placed inside a structure filled with icons of various types in both sculpted and painted forms. A monumental reclining Buddha would often occupy the center as the principal figure of the entire ensemble.

 

            The rise of pictorial nirvana narratives in cave temples throughout medieval China offers a particularly rich case to explore some of the fundamental issues concerning the relationship between visual narrative and architecture. This paper takes the viewer as the conceptual bridge between the two by arguing that the discursive structure of a story in paint is often determined by the mode of viewing implied in the work’s formal configuration in real space. That is, how a nirvana narrative was made meaningful did not necessarily follow the storyline articulated in related textual accounts, but rather the way its intended viewers were guided through a cave setting to experience its material contents. To better understand why and for what purpose the patrons and builders of cave temples sought to communicate with their audience in such constructed environments, the paper focuses on a few well-preserved examples from the period, especially Cave 332 at Mogao of Dunhuang in Gansu and the Sleeping Buddha Cave at Qianfoya of Guangyuan in Sichuan. It shows that some of these projects were the artful fusion of religion and politics in a time when Buddhism was heavily promoted by the Empress Wu Zetian regime for its claim to power.

 

 

Becoming Active in a Central Theravada Buddhist Narrative:

The Vessantara Painted Scrolls of Northeast Thailand and Lowland Laos

 

Leedom Lefferts and Sandra Cate

Drew University (Emeritus)

San Jose State University

 

The long painted scrolls depicting the life of Prince Vessantara, the penultimate life of The Buddha, carried in procession and hung from the walls of temples during the recitation of his life’s story, constitute a unique contribution of the Thai-Lao and Lao people to Southeast Asian culture.  These visual narratives, 30-50 meters long by a meter high, painted by local artists, contrast with the single-panel, chapter-by-chapter paintings used during the recitation of the Vessantara Jataka in other Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia cultures.  During the Bun Phra Wet festival, Thai-Lao and Lao celebrants perform the story by collectively going to the forest to ask for Prince Vessantara to return and carrying these long scrolls in processions to accompany his return to his city – actually, the village from which they came. Their enactment of these final two chapters of the story provides the catalyst that shifts their position from third-person listeners to first-person, active, participants, bringing both the text and images of the story directly into their lives.  These scrolls, part of a package of material items that represent other, crucial aspects of the story, help make the Buddha-to-be “present” in the event, facilitate the generation of appropriate emotions, and elicit the awe and mystery basic to Buddhist practice.  The authors hypothesize that the performative use of these scrolls and the accompanying artifacts used in the festival result from and give voice to these people’s subaltern positions in the Bangkok and French colonial regimes in which they have lived for over a century.  This paper builds on over 30 years of fieldwork in Northeast Thailand and Lowland Laos, including a recent intensive study of the scrolls and their festivals. 

 

 

Finding a Place for the Jain Site at Udayagiri/Khandagiri in Orissa

 

Janice Leoshko

University of Texas at Austin

 

            The site of Khandagiri/Udayagiri in Orissa has long been recognized as a significant site of Jain practice.  The unusual character of its rockcut excavations as well as their date and the abundance of carved reliefs insure its fame.  While the site provides some of the earliest surviving Orissan artistic activity, its Jain character, I will argue, has led to an incomplete appreciation of this material. My paper proposes that in various contexts these reliefs, which are among the earliest narrative images surviving in South Asia provide significant evidence concerning the development of narrative imagery and the place of symbolic forms within such depictions.  Moving beyond false boundaries suggested by terms such as Jain art, Buddhist art or Hindu art, we may more fully engage with the meaning of the construction we call narrative in early Indian art.

 

 

Vignettism in the Poetics of Chinese Narrative Painting

Dore J. Levy

Brown University

 

 

Avadanas in the Newar Buddhist Tradition of the Kathmandu Valley:

Ritual Performances of Mahayana Narratives

 

Todd Lewis

College of the Holy Cross

 

Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahayana culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic, Hindu-Buddhist civilization. This paper will examine how two stories, the Sringabheri Avadana and the Simhalasarthabahu Avadana, have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. The former recounts the consecutive, linked lives of a husband and wife, in a story of karmic retribution and reunion, a narrative that has a role in contemporary Buddhist widow mourning rites at the major stupa, Svayambhu, in Nepal. The latter tale, among the most popular narratives in the Buddhist world, relates the fate of a group of Buddhist merchants who are shipwrecked and captured by cannibalistic demonesses; in Nepal this story was transposed into a tale of trans-Himalayan conflict and its central figure is regarded as a hometown hero. Through the present day, a three-day festival procession of this hero circumnavigates the city of Kathmandu. This paper will explore these local domestications of Buddhist stories and analyze how these traditional celebrations have changed in the context of the shifting regional and political landscape of Nepal and the region.

 

 

Visual Narratology in China and Japan around 1600 – A Comparative Study

 

Shane McCausland

Chester Beatty Library

 

For historians of East Asian art, the dazzling use of technology, during the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, to showcase the handscroll as a kind of mirror of and medium for relating Chinese cultural history before a world audience was especially eye-opening. This medium is indeed richly symbolic of China’s culture and embodies what might be called her process-based ontology. To this is now added a notion of China’s economic might and new-found prestige. Beyond its materiality and surface, however, the handscroll makes other claims on our attention, notably in regard to its content historically and indeed its historical life beyond China. Now, as China courts global attention, would seem to be an opportune moment to investigate, or deconstruct any claim to cultural distinction invested in the Chinese handscroll.

Although the handscroll as a medium for extended visual narrative developed in China, in East Asian art history, it is often thought that the art of the picture-scroll reached its highpoint in twelfth-century Japan, with monogatari emaki (narrative picture-scrolls) of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. Thus, research on the visuality of narrative illustration in the handscroll format has tended to centre on national cultural highpoints: Either on well-known examples of early Chinese painting in the didactic and/or narrative modes – such as the Admonitions of the Court Instructress scroll attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344-c. 406) in the British Museum, dateable to the 5^th or 6^th century, or the Song-dynasty (960-1279) Nymph of the Luo River paintings; Or else on medieval Japanese artworks such as the Tale of Genji and other picture-scrolls of the 10^th-16^th centuries. Less attention has been paid to ‘later’ cases of this narrative medium in East Asia, or, indeed, to comparative research.

This study sets out to compare Chinese and Japanese visual narration in the handscroll format through two early modern picture-scrolls that illustrate similar stories from ancient China. These are the Chinese professional You Qiu’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace (Hangong chunxiao tu) of 1568 (Shanghai Museum) and the Kyoto master Kano Sansetsu’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chōgonka gakan) picture-scrolls of about 1646 (Chester Beatty Library). In common, each illustrates the life-story a femme fatale, who is counted among the Four Beauties of ancient China. The first is about the Zhao Feiyan (‘Flying Swallow’ Zhao) and her sister, favourites of the Han emperor Chengdi (r. 33-7 BC); the second about Yang Guifei (Precious Consort Yang), beloved concubine of Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-56). Historically, the rise to power of Empress Zhao and Consort Yang almost toppled the great Han and Tang empires.

Despite their closely related plotlines, the processes of visual narration in these two scrolls continually bifurcate. You Qiu’s painting is in Chinese literati mode (monochrome ink on paper); the Japanese work, although made by a self-declared sinophile, is a studio painting done in lavish colours on silk. You Qiu’s painting is in twelve separate, rectangular scenes in sequence; Sansetsu’s comprises thirty-six scenes in twelve linked three-scene ‘acts’ over two scrolls. You Qiu’s painting is prefaced and post-faced with transcriptions of Zhao Feiyan’s ‘unofficial’ and ‘unauthorized’ biographies; Sansetsu’s painting includes not one word of the text it patently illustrates, the Chinese poet Bai Juyi’s epic romantic ballad, ‘Song of Everlasting Sorrow’, which it is assumed the reader knows by heart. In terms of visual plotting, You Qiu presents some salacious images and generally plays up histrionic details of the narrative, at times veering towards pornography and satire. By contrast, Kano Sansetsu keeps emphasising the romantic, epic and supernatural facets of the narrative.

To some extent these differences may be explained by the social context of these paintings, and the respective values and boundaries of decorum in late Ming (1368-1644) China and early Edo (c. 1600-1868) Japan. Both paintings were seemingly intended for male literati audiences, but You Qiu’s features calligraphy, whereas Sansetsu’s assumes knowledge of Chinese poetry. Both texts explicitly describe the emperor’s voyeurism – You Qiu’s interpretation underscores this with near-iconoclastic depictions of female nudity, while Sansetsu’s romanticises it. Thus, the guiding question of this proposed study has to do with how, in each case, the process of turning parallel texts into scrolling pictorial artworks is in itself revealing about values and the imagination in two related East Asian cultures. Paradoxically, insofar as the two paintings diverge, they also collectively establish some bounds for the genre of East Asian narrative scroll painting in the neglected early modern period.

 

 

Keynote Address

 

Julia K. Murray

University of Wisconsin

 

            My keynote address for “Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia:  Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives” will start with a topical survey of recent scholarship on narrative representations from a variety of regions and historical contexts.  The past decade has seen a wealth of new research on the techniques and conventions of visual narration, analyses of the diverse functions and multivalence of narrative imagery, and studies on appropriations of narrative themes and structures across social, regional, and national boundaries.  Moreover, in many parts of the globe, visual narratives have become vibrant elements of contemporary popular culture, from Japanese anime to Laotian story-cloths.   The efficacy of pictorial storytelling for instructing the young or illiterate has long been recognized, even overemphasized, but its utility for promoting social or political cohesion and its considerable power to entertain have more recently come into focus.

            After my general remarks, I will turn to a specific case of cross-cultural appropriation, examining the many iterations of the work known in Chinese as Dijian tushuo (The Emperor’s Mirror, Illustrated and Explained).  Created in 1573 at the court of the Wanli emperor for use in the young ruler’s tutorial sessions, the lavishly illustrated compendium of instructive anecdotes about past emperors was repeatedly reformatted and reinterpreted to adapt its material to new contexts and purposes.  From the late sixteenth century to our own day, versions of the work have been produced not only in China but also in Japan and Europe, modified to address specific local needs and historical conditions.  The originally didactic annotated pictures/illustrated texts acquired new meanings, connotations, and functions when different social groups and nationalities adopted them and radically revised the core work to promote agendas unimagined by its original creator.

 

 

Reading the World’s Landscape in Zhang Bao’s Images of the Floating Raft

 

Catherine Stuer

University of Chicago

 

This paper focuses on a pictorial travelogue in one hundred and three images, produced and privately published in the early 19^th century by a painter from Nanjing named Zhang Bao (b. 1763). Published in the form of a book, broadly mustering the language of book- and literary culture, this travelogue nonetheless is one where the image forms the ‘body’ of the text, and its headings, prefaces and colophons the so-called ‘paratextual’ frame. Two features of this book deserve particular attention: on the one hand, a process of narrative rewriting occurs with each addition to the series, and on the other, the site where that rewriting takes place is not confined to authorial composition alone.

As a result, the travelogue takes form through two main narrative figures. After first culminating with the figure of life-as-a-journey and thus in effect a form of pictorial self-writing, the author moves on from there to map the ‘great configuration’ of China’s lay of the land as a whole. This is accomplished through varied structuring of image sequences, shifts in the graphic language of representation, but also by framing and re-directing known perspectives on scenic views. In that process, Zhang Bao introduces novel views of Canton, Macao and the coastal areas, which can be shown to refer to famous ‘export’ imagery made locally for foreign consumption. The integration of such ‘allochtonous’ vision into his pictorial narrative, echoes with the insertion of allographic voices into the composition of the series. For this author who by all standards is highly invested with his own ‘making’ of the text, incorporates critical readings from allographic prefatorial commentary into the narrative itself. Zhang Bao thus initiates a self-conscious and strategic use of patterns of ‘diffuse’ or ‘interactive’ authorship that sheds a new light on patterns of narrative composition at the time of its making.

While this pictorial book thus raises fundamental questions about an intersection of issues, ranging from the relation of visual to textual narrative, of landscape- to self-representation, the status of authorship in its relation to that of the text, to that between book culture and narrative genres, it is the fundamental ‘openness’ in this narrative composition that I wish to pursue in this study. For this openness both in pictorial vision and compositional intent, urges us to rethink, in this picture-album where images form the ‘text proper’ or ‘body’ of the work, current definitions of the relation between the body of the narrative text to its so-called ‘paratext’, just as it invites us to re-inspect narrative representations of the ‘body’ of empire and its periphery.  

 

 

Poetry, Incense, Card Games, and Pictorial Narrative Coding

in Early Modern Genji Pictures

 

Sarah E. Thompson

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

Numerous paintings and prints made in Japan in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries condense the long and complex plot of The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century novel regarded as the greatest classic of Japanese literature, into tiny images that employ visual metonymy and synecdoche to represent each of the fifty-four chapters of the book in highly codified form: an empty birdcage for Chapter 5, a carriage for Chapter 9, a cat for Chapter 35, and so on. In a typical example such as the set of printed playing cards designed by Katsushika Hokusai in 1811, two visual images for each chapter are reinforced by inscriptions giving the title of the chapter, a poem that appears in the chapter, and a geometric diagram consisting of five vertical lines connected in various ways, known as a Genji crest (Genji mon). The system of interlocking symbols was not invented by Hokusai but seems to have originated in early seventeenth-century Kyoto as part of the revival of interest in classical literature in the social circles centering on the imperial court in the early decades of Tokugawa rule. Hokusai’s card game is closely related to an incense-identification game played in courtly circles in Kyoto and especially in the Buddhist convents associated with the imperial household; the Genji crests represent the mathematically possible outcomes of the incense game. This paper traces the development of the pictorial Genji code as it spread from imperial princesses in Kyoto to commoners in Edo, co-existing with other, more conventional traditions of Genji illustration that showed each scene in full. The mnemonic function of the abbreviated pictorial symbols and the poems that accompanied them was a factor in the spread of the cultural capital represented by The Tale of Genji from a small elite to a much larger group, thus contributing to the formation of a national culture. In nineteenth-century Edo, the Genji poems and pictures were also incorporated into visual and literary parodies that, by poking affectionate fun at the great classical tradition, made it a part of the contemporary popular culture as well.

 

 

Narrative Place and Network Thinking: The Ramayana and Krishnayana in Early Java

 

Mary-Louise Totton

Western Michigan University

 

The designers and artists of the largest Saivite temple complex in Southeast Asia employed highly complicated and theatrical narratives in the centrally placed Ramayana and Krishnayana relief series of Candi Loro Jonggrang.  Three relief scenes found in this ninth-century Javanese complex—one from each of the main three temples—will illuminate how their placement and the multi-layered meanings within these stories established deep spiritual and secular memories that reverberated throughout this great site.

 

Historical visual and material artifacts are tremendously important cultural “documents,” which must be considered on their own terms.  This paper aims to discuss a particular visual literacy and efficiency of design demonstrated by the organization and interconnectivity of Candi Loro Jonggrang’s carved relief narratives by using the theories scientists have recently developed about complex networks.  This ninth-century Hindu compound still stands as a powerful testament to its period and patrons.  Although much within the ornamental reliefs has been identified, my current research focuses on how information (largely spiritually infused but not wholly) was encoded within its built environment and how this coded data interfaced.