Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (review)

Those familiar with Alfreda Murck's scholarship from the past fifteen-plus years will recognize Poetry and Painting in Song China as the culmination of a long journey that began with the author's study of a rare surviving scroll of Southern Song date depicting the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang (or XiaoXiang, as the author prefers), the single most celebrated landscape theme in the history of Chinese painting. The Eight Views remains a primary concern in this book, but the fact that it has been expunged from the title is a clear reflection of the distance Murck has traveled in her particular scholarship. Although a book advertising the Eight Views theme probably would have made good marketing sense, Murck clearly is not motivated by a desire for the neat academic package. Rather, with eyes singularly focused on the prospect that paintings in Song China, like poems, could be the vehicles of encoded messages, and with a clear conviction of having discovered the means to unwrap such hidden meanings, the author narrates a parallel history of Song painting unrecognized for the better part of a thousand years. The result is a challenging, independent, and highly provocative study.

The author's premise, stated in her Introduction, is that painting in the hands of the scholar-official could be used as a tool of complaint and remonstration. Her model is the veritable tradition of using poetry to express personal imbalances, but perhaps even more pertinent is the equally long tradition of reading such meanings into poems whose language does not necessarily offer explicit clues, most notably The Book of Odes (Shi jing) and Qu Yuan's "Encountering Sorrow" ("Li sao"). Citing the "Great Preface" to the Odes, Murck notes that delicacy and discretion were the preferred modes of admonishment. Focusing primarily on Su Shi (1037-1101) and his friends, who were in the center of the maelstrom of political clashes that polarized officialdom in the late eleventh century, the author offers a number of complicated interpretations of poem-painting ensembles to coordinate with the known facts surrounding Su's political woes. Su Shi and a few choice members of his circle, of course, are the primary figures credited with the watershed development that turned painting from a craft into an art of self-expression, and, with this in mind, there is certainly logic to Murck's overall argument: what Su Shi, Wang Shen, Wang Gong, and others were likely to "express" in their poems and art may well have concerned the profound events that nearly cost Su Shi his life in 1079 and the repeated exiles that largely defined his later life as well as those of his comrades. I, for one, am sympathetic with Murck's orientation, having found evidence in other examples of both painting and calligraphy by Su Shi and his colleagues to demonstrate that attitudes toward demotion, exile, and, conversely, success at court were capable of shaping the content and form of their art. However, the pattern that Murck asserts for these artists' expression of political dissent rests on evidence that is largely circumstantial and on an approach to interpretation that is controversial.

The book begins promisingly in the dank, malarial landscape of the XiaoXiang region, where the author effectively sketches a two-thousand-year-long history of dissent, exile, and lament associated with those who lived in the region, from the faithful wives of Shun to Qu Yuan (ca. 343-ca. 277 B.C.E.), Yu Xin (513-581), Du Fu (712-770), and Han Yu (768-824), to name but a few. A vocabulary of southern exile is created, and a literary tradition centered on the trope of the maligned loyal official is established, as later authors evoke their predecessors' similar circumstances through poetic allusion. The book quickly settles into the second half of the eleventh century and the political culture of the Northern Song period...