Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties

Chapter 1. Replication and Deception in Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties Period

Chapter 1 •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Replication and Deception in Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties Period Robert E. Harrist Jr. It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality. The epigram that introduces this essay comes from Hillel Schwartz’s freewheeling survey of the history of duplication in all its forms, The Culture of the Copy.1 His memorable expression, “an exuberant world of copies,” refers to contemporary life in the West; it could apply as well to the history of calligraphy in China during the Six Dynasties period, when copies and their disreputable kin, forgeries, proliferated as never before, changing the way people viewed, collected, marketed, and wrote about the visual arts. A vivid account of how one notable figure of the fourth century responded to a copy appears in Yu He’s (fl. ca. 470) Lunshu biao (Memorial on Calligraphy): “[Wang] Xizhi (303–361) himself wrote a memorial to Emperor Mu (r. 344–361). The emperor had Zhang Yi make a copy of it, which differed not by a single hair. He then wrote an answer after [the copied memorial and returned it to Wang]. At first, Xizhi did not recognize [that it was a copy]. He examined it more closely, then sighed and said: ‘This fellow almost confounded the real (zhen )!’”2 31 One of the consequences of Emperor Mu’s little joke was to make Wang Xizhi, later enshrined as the “Sage of Calligraphy,” the first person in Chinese history known to have been fooled by a copy of his own handwriting.3 But this amusing story has other, more significant art historical and philosophical implications. Wang’s indignant statement attributes nefarious motives to the copyist, Zhang Yi, but Zhang did more than simply play a trick on a famous contemporary. In the logic of the story, which Schwartz’s insights help us to grasp, Zhang’s act of replication changed the status of Wang’s memorial: by making a copy, Zhang transformed the document written by Wang into an original. Within a few decades of Wang Xizhi’s death, so many copies of his calligraphy were in circulation that it became increasingly difficult for collectors and connoisseurs to tell the difference between these replicas and works from Wang’s own brush. By the early sixth century, it was no longer possible for a well-informed viewer to look at a piece of calligraphy attributed to Wang Xizhi without asking the question that to this day bedevils so much of the study of Chinese art: Is it real? Focusing on the case of Wang Xizhi, this essay attempts to study ideas about early copies of calligraphy and to consider how these artifacts functioned as objects of aesthetic and economic value. It will address also the seemingly paradoxical truth that calligraphy, valued for its capacity to embody in brushwork the mind and character of the individual artist, was more amenable to accurate and efficient replication than any other form of art. Finally, I will offer the suggestion that one of the reasons why calligraphy became such an important art in China was because it could be copied with startling faithfulness. True or False? The historical process through which calligraphy became the most revered of the visual arts began in the Eastern Han (25–220).4 During this period individuals such as Zhang Zhi (d. ca. 192) and Cai Yong (132–192) began to win fame for their superb handwriting; at the same time, pieces of calligraphy began to be collected not for their literary content but for their visual qualities. The first theoretical treatise on calligraphy, Zhao Yi’s (fl. ca. 192) famous diatribe against cursive script, Fei caoshu (Against Cursive Script), also dates from the late Han. These phenomena—the emergence of calligra32 ROBERT E. HARRIST JR. phers as notable figures, the formation of collections, and the writing of theoretical and critical treatises—continued during the Wei (220–265) and Western Jin (265–317) dynasties, which witnessed the careers of the master calligrapher Zhong You (151–230) and the theorist of script types Wei Heng (d. 291). Following the removal of the Jin court to the south in 317, there took place what can reasonably be called a calligraphy boom. The Eastern Jin (317–420) was the era of Wang Xizhi, his almost equally famous son, Wang Xianzhi (344–388), and a galaxy of other aristocratic calligraphers living in southern...