Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 by Jeehee Hong (review)

Tomb mania has swept the field of Chinese art history in the United States. At the time of the writing of this review, major exhibitions on Qin- and Handynasty tombs are being held concurrently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the China Institute Gallery in New York. This burgeoning subfield now sees the frequent publication of articles and dissertations, as well as the occasional monograph. Given archaeologists' focus on the excavation of early materials, it is perhaps inevitable that the lion's share of English-language scholarly attention has been devoted to tombs of the Tang and before. Separating itself from this tendency, Jeehee Hong's Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 represents an important foray into later tomb spaces. Moreover, Hong's concise volume constitutes an admirable attempt to bring tomb history into dialogue with a wide range of theoretical frameworks for engaging the visual arts, particularly perspectives informed by social history, theater studies, and semiotics. It is a tome that speaks compellingly to Chinese art history's potential to make significant contributions both to multiple subfields of Chinese studies and to the broader discipline of art history.

Building on Hong's dissertation (completed at the University of Chicago in 2008) and her extensive series of publications in the intervening years, Theater of the Dead investigates the curious emergence of a new form of visual culture in northern Chinese tombs of the Song through Yuan dynasties—namely, depictions of actors and of theatrical culture more generally. As is well known, it was precisely in this "middle period" that theater rose to society-wide popularity, being performed on street corners, in commercial theaters, temple stages, and private households, and attracting audiences ranging from the imperial family to paupers and monks. Divided into four chapters, a prelude, and a postlude, the book treats a series of chronologically arranged case studies of tombs in Henan and Shanxi Provinces; each exemplifies a different aspect of the theatrical obsessions of tomb-makers and -dwellers during the middle period. An appendix listing all known theatrical images excavated from middle period tombs completes the main text of the tome. Given the unprecedented popularity of theater in the world of the living, as well as its strikingly frequent appearance in the spaces of the dead, Hong argues that a "distinctive mode of visual theatricality mediated [these] disparate realms" (p. 3). Informed by the social experiences of the living, the visual theatricality that structured middle period tombs "subsumed the idea of the afterworld within the frame of living society" (p. 140).

Hong's prelude uses a striking Northern Song brick relief of a named actress to launch her inquiry into the postmortem appeal of depictions of contemporaneous theater culture. Defining the scope of the volume's inquiry, the prelude notes that the tombs under examination were all sponsored by members of what Hong, drawing on Dieter Kuhn's scholarship, terms the "local elite"—wealthy, but not office-holding, members of society who had the means and interest to visually represent their cultural passions. Arguably unconstrained by Confucian injunctions against lavish burials or by the precedents of earlier periods, such elites seem to have felt free to develop their own heterodox funerary rites and tomb designs; in both, they drew particularly on their enthusiasm for contemporary theater. Hong also provides a useful survey of depictions of entertainment and performance in earlier tombs and suggests that middle period tomb designers developed new modes of representing such themes—one narrative, the other "theatrical" (in terms of "modality" rather than mere content) (p. 15).

Chapter 1 investigates the narrative mode through a close analysis of Zhu Sanweng's 1096 sarcophagus, excavated in Xingyang, Henan. The two sides...