Chinese Painting and Its Audiences by Craig Clunas (review)

No one has done more than Clunas to help us understand the visual and material world of the Ming dynasty. In this urbane book, based on his 2012 Mellon Lectures, he examines the category of “Chinese painting” that came into being after paintings from China started to circulate westward in the sixteenth century. Against it, Clunas sets the visual evidence of Chinese images, from the fifteenth century to the present, that depict Chinese people looking at Chinese paintings or Chinese artists in the act of painting, or that in some other way shed light on Chinese understandings of the category of painting (hua). The book is thus less about Chinese painting and its audiences than about the repeated naming of something as Chinese painting and the relation of such naming to diverse audiences. The thesis, at once negative and celebratory, is that it is impossible to derive from his selection of Chinese images any definition of Chinese painting and that the way forward is to set the category aside. Who could disagree? The argument proceeds thematically and chronologically, and if it becomes increasingly dependent on the secondary literature as it moves on from the Ming, it continues to provide insights and intelligent speculation.

Conspicuous by its omission, though, is any clear statement of the obvious: the history of Chinese painting as a discursive category is the history of viewing Chinese paintings as pictures. In China, the relation between paintings and pictures has a long history in writing about painting. Over the period that Clunas discusses, paintings (hua) and pictures (tu) constitute overlapping categories. The distinction comes down to the types of information conveyed: somatic, sensory, and affective, on the one side; narrative, factual, and ideological, on the other. The categories nonetheless overlap because, at the level of practice, hua and tu are also alternative modes (of painting and picturing, respectively) that an artist can combine in a single work. The hua mode invites the viewer’s empathetic engagement with the formal process and world making of the painting; the tu mode invites visual consumption of the completed picture, including its decoding. The contrast of modes holds good even when discourse about painting avoids the word tu, because the word hua itself points in two directions. In relation to painting, hua has always had divergent implications of either morphogenesis or imaging that were well understood by the rare painters who theorized their practice. In effect, the tu discourse, when applied to painting, served to highlight the imaging dimension of hua. Chinese Painting and Its Audiences makes a virtue of the author’s sympathies and commitments lying with the imaging/picturing side of the painting equation. It is hard to miss that Clunas’s argument embraces the fascination with vision, looking, and the image that accompanies modern consumerism and spectacle. Some readers may thus be left with a question: does the success of the book’s critique of Chinese painting lie in setting the category aside or in giving it a contemporary updating?