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Introduction - The Social Status of Narrative Illustration in China
- University of Hawai'i Press
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1 Introduction The Social Status of Narrative Illustration in China n traditional China, as in many other cultures, the visual representation of stories served as a medium for creating, expressing, disseminating, and affirming cultural values. Starting around the second century BCE, Chinese pictorial art frequently portrayed human beings and deities with some relation to moralizing texts, whether written down or orally transmitted . Eminent artists painted such subjects, historical accounts recorded them, and critics praised them for inspiring viewers to greater moral awareness and attainment. Such pictures are rarely identified as a separate category by premodern writers, who are more likely to classify paintings by subject matter. It is largely due to Western art-historical concepts that “narrative illustration” has become part of the taxonomy of Chinese pictorial art.* From the late eleventh century onward, influential critics such as Su Shi (1036–1101; jinshi [hereafter js] 1057), Mi Fu (1051–1107), Deng Chun (fl. mid-12th c.), Tang Hou (fl. early 14th c.), Xia Wenyan (fl. mid-14th c.), and Dong Qichang (1555–1636; js 1589) articulated a more subjective approach to painting that was congenial to scholar-artists seeking to express their own thoughts and feelings in a visual medium.1 According to a long-dominant interpretation of the history of Chinese painting, this “literati” or “scholar-amateur” aesthetic offered such a compelling alternative to more objective modes of painting that the best creative artists turned their efforts toward self-expressive landscape and nature themes.2 Painters and paintings that represented different values were slighted or ignored by the prominent critics, who championed the literati aesthetic. In consequence, all kinds of figure painting, including later narrative illustrations as well as religious icons and commemorative portraits, declined in critical esteem. After the eleventh century, practitioners of narrative painting rarely were artists of renown, and most of their names are lost to history, sometimes literally effaced in favor of famous “old masters ,” whose signatures might be forged to give a work greater cachet .3 Conversely, most of the painters accorded critical acclaim in recent centuries are not known for narrative pictures, which is not to say that they never painted such works.4 Even today, many Chinese and Western scholars tend to regard later narrative paintings and other figural representations as the province of lowbrow professional painters catering to unsophisticated tastes. Although traditional Chinese critical assessments of the various genres of painting have their own validity, a dismissive view of later narrative illustration obscures its considerable social and political significance. Among other things the medium was congenial for promoting or affirming Confucian morality, a configuration of social and political values accepted at least nominally throughout Chinese society by the late Ming period. Many themes to pictorialize were selected from history, literature, and contemporary events by emperors, officials, scholars, and others, who used pictures in dealing with their concerns about such issues as political legitimacy and governance, social harmony (or disorder), group solidarity, and personal morality. Despite a critical discourse that relegated pictorial images to the humble role of instructing nonelite audiences of “stupid men and women” (yufu yufu), ample evidence suggests that many members of the literate elite also valued visual representation. Intriguing parallels can be drawn with Christian images in the West, which were conventionally called the “bible of the illiterate” but served other important functions as well.5 In the late imperial period, eminent officials and literati still sponsored, collected, or favorably commented on narrative illustrations of morally uplifting or culturally prestigious subjects. Oc7 *Throughout this book I will use the terms “narrative illustration,” “narrative painting,” and “narrative representation” interchangeably. 2 | m i r ror of mor a l i t y casionally their comments suggest an explicit rejection of the values espoused by more sophisticated connoisseurs. For example, the renowned Hanlin academician Zhuang Chang (1437–1499; js 1466) wrote a colophon in 1495 for the handscroll Illustrated Stories of Parental Love and Filial Piety (Cixiao gushi tu), purportedly by Li Gonglin (c.1049–1106; js 1070).6 Focusing on the familial virtues treated in the eight scenes, Zhuang praised the scroll’s presentation of “correct models” and expressed indignation that the preceding colophon, by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), had discussed only Li Gonglin’s artistry and Zhao’s response to it.7 Even in the late Ming period, when aesthetic preoccupations so thoroughly dominated colophon discourse, some writers criticized the prevailing convention of describing paintings as evocations of favored Song and Yuan literati masters. In a colophon on Lin...