The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-Nin D. Lee (review)

The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time is a monograph on the handscroll in the Palace Museum, Beijing, entitled The Night Banquet of Han Xizai (Han Xizai yeyan tu 韓熙載夜宴圖; aka the Night Revels or Night Entertainments) and attributed to Gu Hongzhong 顧閎中 (937-75), a painter to Li Yu 李煜 (Houzhu 後主; r. 761-75), notorious as the "last ruler" of the Southern Tang Dynasty (937-75). Mounted within the handscroll, a colourful narrative painting in five scenes, which is probably a copy and—most researchers agree—probably dates to the Southern Song period, chronicles events at a lively party hosted by the controversial statesman and sometime hedonist Han Xizai (b. 902), a spicy subject that clearly appeals to modern audiences for its own sake if not also for providing an unlikely contrast with the pervasive sobriety of late imperial Confucian culture. Not surprisingly, the scroll has been a popular topic of research in art history, viz., studies by, among others, Michael Sullivan (The Night Entertainment, 2008), Wu Hung 巫鴻 (The Double Screen, 1996), and Osvald Sirén (in Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, 1956). The work of Wu Hung was an important source for this book. Also, as Katharine P. Burnett notes in her review of Sullivan's volume, "the painting has been thoroughly reproduced with transcriptions of all colophons and relevant entries in collectors' catalogues in Chinese in Zhongguo lidai huihua: Gugong bowuyuan canghuaji 中國歷代繪畫: 故宮博物院藏畫集 (Chinese paintings of successive dynasties: The Collection of the Palace Museum) (1978)." In addition she notes that a careful discussion of the scroll and its date (to c. 1195-1264) has been provided by Yu Hui 余輝.¹

The author of this new study from the University of Washington Press is De-Nin D. Lee, who in 2003 completed a doctoral thesis at Stanford University on the topic of "Lives of Handscroll Paintings from the Southern Tang Dynasty, 937-75" and has published related articles on colophons and cultural biography and, in this journal, on the reconstruction of the history of Southern Tang painting.² Lee's approach to the study of art history has much in common with work on collecting and connoisseurship records compiled by members of the southern Chinese elite, including research by Ankeney Weitz (on Zhou Mi's 周密 Yunyan guoyan lu 雲煙過眼錄) and Diana Chou (on Tang Hou's 湯垕 Hua jian 畫鑑). The question Lee poses in this study of the "historical encounters between this painting [The Night Banquet] and its audiences" (p. 8) is a general one conceived, one may suppose, for the general, non-specialist reader: What is the role of art in a society?

It is, however, not so much this question or indeed the painting itself that is studied with focused and sustained intensity in this book but the textual frame (comprising the title-piece, colophons, and seal legends) to be found on and around the artwork within the scroll mounting and in documentary primary sources elsewhere. Over the course of an introduction, a chapter on historical positioning and analytical method, four chapters tracing provenance, and an epilogue, Lee presents an anthropology-inspired "cultural biography" of the scroll based on meticulous readings of these textual accretions. She tracks the movements of the scroll from its likely Southern Song manufacture after a possible tenth-century original, to the context of mid-Yuan politics, to the polity of the Ming-Qing transition, to the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor's (r. 1736-95) collection, and finally into the collection of the modern painter Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899-1983) and ultimately to its present home in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Each phase of the scroll's reception is keyed to the "period eye" of connoisseurs in that particular moment, so that the reader is introduced to a series of receptive gazes: the Confucian gaze and the voyeuristic gaze in the Southern Song (ch. 2), the Confucian gaze again in the mid-Yuan (ch. 3), the "connousseurial gaze" in late Ming to high...