In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping
  • Michael Sullivan (bio)
Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping, ed. Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michelle Matteini (Zurich: Museum Rietburg, 2009), 304 pp.

Unlike most of the great Western masters, very few Chinese painters have been accorded a major exhibition in the West and a definitive catalog to match. Eccentric Visions accompanies the exhibition at the Museum Rietberg, mounted by Dr. Albert Lutz, to celebrate Luo Ping (1733–99), who lived in Yangzhou and later in Beijing at a high point in the history of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. What makes Luo Ping so interesting, and so deserving of this scholarly and richly-illustrated volume, was not only his attractive character, the range of his friendships, his paintings and seal-carving, and his convincing imitations of the work of his master Jin Nong (1687–1763), for whom he was long a “substitute brush,” but also his extraordinary imagination and skill as a painter far greater than his master. Jin Nong, for example, could not have painted, as Luo Ping did, a monumental landscape in the manner of the Yuan master Wang Meng (c. 1305–85). The versatile Luo Ping was also good with more modest subjects (insects, flowers) and was a witty painter of friends’ portraits — although the poet Yuan Mei rejected his own, saying in a whimsical letter that his family did not think it looked like him.

In eighteenth-century Yangzhou, as elsewhere in urban China, telling ghost stories was a popular pastime among the gentry. There was a vast literature on ghosts, although seldom, except in Buddhist frescoes of the Eighteen Hells, were they actually painted. Luo Ping, who claimed that he had seen them, painted, probably in 1766, a series of eight extraordinary pictures of ghosts — later mounted as a handscroll and now in a private collection in Hong Kong — on which his reputation largely rests. Nothing like these weird creatures had been seen in Chinese art before. Do they have any meaning? Much of what the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou” (of whom Luo Ping was one) did they did to entertain and astonish their wealthy patrons. But Luo Ping’s ghosts seem to be too hauntingly alive to be seen as mere entertainment. Perhaps, as Jonathan Hay suggests in his contribution to this book, Luo Ping’s art “opens up the territory of what we today call the unconscious.” [End Page 550]

Like the great “Individualists” in Chinese art history, Luo Ping had no followers and founded no school. This splendid volume, fully worthy of its subject, makes it clear how rare, and how precious, true originality such as Luo Ping’s was in a pictorial legacy that, while it sustained the vast majority of Chinese artists, also confined them within the bounds of tradition.

Michael Sullivan

Michael Sullivan is Christensen Professor Emeritus of Oriental Art at Stanford University and fellow emeritus of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. His books include The Arts of China; The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy; Symbols of Eternity; Chinese Landscape Painting: In the Sui and Tang Dynasties; The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai; The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art; Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China; and Modern Chinese Art: The Khoan and Michael Sullivan Collection.

...

pdf

Share