The Painting of T'ang Yin (review)

86 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 countries (particularly in capital goods); Aie homogeneity of Aie export responses of the "four tigers" to changes in the U.S. market (except for R&D-intensive goods); die tendency of NIC export mixes to become more diversified (diversification and specialization ebbed and fiowed in a cyclical fashion during the period ); and the prospects for ASEAN members to replicate the NICs' success (Malaysia and Thailand have the best chance). The book concludes with projections of export competitiveness to the year 2000, which the authors aver are simply "technical projections of autoregressive patterns, buttressed by our judgement, given the world economic environment as viewed today" (p. 165). I know from personal experience that highly quantitative narratives such as this, in attempting to distill meaning from masses of massaged data, always have a forest/trees problem. At the beginning of the book, die authors do a nice job of remaining above the fray. But from the middle of the book onward, they are less successful in staying at treetop level. As a result, economists specializing in East Asia will want to read the book in its entirety. For others, the first chapter should suffice. David McClain University of Hawai'i F Anne De Coursey Clapp. The Painting ofT'ang Yin. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. xix, 300 pp. 94 black-and-white figures, 7 color plates. Hardcover $45. The painter Tang Yin (1470-1524) has long occupied a special place in Chinese cultural history, based on the dramatic trajectories of his life and on a reputation for prodigious talent. Emerging from a modest merchant-family background into meteoric cultural and examination success, but struck by early personal tragedy and entanglement in a cheating scandal, Tang's career as a gifted, somewhat dissolute professional painter in Suzhou both fit and fed a pattern of artistic life that became, by Aie later Ming, a literary type in which Tang Yin figured as a fictional character. It is a cultural and literary type closely related to the Romanticist image of the artist in the West, and which in both spheres encouraged criticism centered© 1994 by University on biographical incident and the painter's creative acts. One ofthe many merits ofHawai?PressofAnne Qapp's excellentbook on TangYin is that,without undertaking a conscious debunking project, her study emphatically shifts the focus of concern from Reviews 87 the independent artist to his social situation, audiences, and patrons. In so doing, Professor Clapp illuminates the workings of functional categories ofpainting that have broad implications for our understanding of cultural processes in middle Ming-period Suzhou. The heart of Professor Clapp's argument emerges in her early chapter discussions of commemorative program painting. Through a careful collation of surviving and recorded paintings, she has discerned a pattern of frequently collaborative painting and writing projects aimed at an honorific commemoration of the key life events or social identity of the subject. These often took the form of short handscroll paintings by Tang Yin, with attached tide calligraphies, prefaces, and colophons written by a recurring circle of eminent literary men and calligraphers. While such projects might be understood in terms of the scholar-amateur ideology of a spontaneous creative collaboration of like-minded literati, they better fit a more down-to-earth pattern: a loose enterprise of artistic and literary specialists , characterized by division of labor and large-scale production, aimed at meeting the demands of an emerging market of merchants, professionals, and officials for emblems of their participation in elite cultural circles and values. To observe these patterns of production at work is not so much to diminish Tang Yin's (and his collaborators') inventiveness as to resituate it from a sphere of isolated self-expression to an arena of conceptual problem-solving, satisfaction of patronage conditions, and adjustment to the demands of taste and audience expectation . In the process, we are made aware of an active network of social relationships , obligations, and operations, extending through the patron or subject, the artist and his collaborators, and later viewers and commentators. The focus shifts from independent creation to social production and reception. Professor Clapp distinguishes several subgenres of what...