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Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Painting

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Week 1 - MATERIAL AND VISUAL CULTURES OF THE NATURAL WORLD IN CHINA

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Week 1 - MATERIAL AND VISUAL CULTURES OF THE NATURAL WORLD IN CHINA

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The main seminar focus for the week was around the Huntington copy of the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Painting.  This comprised of 185 designs and 139 pages of poetry.  The title of the manual refers to The Ten Bamboo Studio publishing house in Nanjing that was founded by Hu Zhengyan.  The manual was organised into eight topics for the literati: orchid, bamboo, rock, plum, ink blossom, feathers, fruit, and calligraphy.  What I found particularly intriguing was its international circulation.  Moreover, the work by the 1760s was in a Japanese collection and the format was altered into three volumes by Cho Tosai in 1764.

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Week 2 - PEACH BLOSSOM AND THE POETIC IDEAL of RECLUSION

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Week 2 - PEACH BLOSSOM AND THE POETIC IDEAL of RECLUSION

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Regarding the seminar readings, I was fascinated by the concepts that Tao Yuanming explores. His writings play on the Chinese philosophical notion of whether to engage with the world or to withdraw from it.  This is evident in his poem Homeward Bound where one can see how a heightened sense of his finite life span inspires his move home.  His texts also clearly influence the visual motifs that constitute Chinese art.  This is evident in such features as: chrysanthemums, Tao himself, Mount Lu, the evergreen pine tree, and the white-robed wine bringer.  Other than the importance of visual motifs, textual analysis is equally important.  This can be seen in the terms of wang or guan, which appear in Tao’s poems.  The term offer a level of abrupt contemplation.  Artists attempted to show this ‘hope for a vision’ by employing physical features that could obscure Tao’s view of South Mountain.  A prime example of this is Shitao’s illustration of the fifth ‘Drinking’ poem, which uses a boulder to obscure the mountain.

Regarding the lectures, it was interesting to reassess China through the lens of our subconscious metageography.  The concept of an Eastern and Western divide based on economic, political, and Eurocentric factors do not lend themselves to be constructive and thus a primary localised study is beneficial before assessing wider reaching areas.  Another thought-provoking reading was the concepts surround the literati, who in the Qing period, developed two hallmarks.  The first being their independence from courtly style and the second being their pretence of amateurism.  The idea that their manuals were meant to reveal their cultivation rather than demonstrate their professional skill, shows their place within a connoisseurial narrative.

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Regarding the seminar readings, The Craft of Gardens by Ji Cheng was particularly thought provoking as a primary source.  The text exhibits an almost ironic paradox between Ji’s role as a professional landscape designer and yet a necessity for the garden to reflect the owner’s inner-self.  It was also interesting to read the prescribed form of these gardens and their construction process.  Moreover, the responsibility of the ‘master,’ as both a site manager and designer (accounting for 9/10ths of the work), far exceeded what I originally imagined as a person who merely possessed the ability to ‘follow and borrow’ from scenery.

Having discussed dynastic approaches to Chinese history in lecture two, the Garden Art reading provided a similar view that Chinese gardens traversed periods of change or dynastic lines, akin to economic and social factors.  The key things to note in lieu of garden evolution can be reduced to the following: their service as a threshold between the world of mortals and immortals, to their position as places to study and refuge from political oppression, to the rise of the ‘natural’ as an important concept providing literati opposition to aristocratic taste, and to the emergence of garden-making as an art in the 15th century.

A term that stood out for me, in the Clunas lecture reading, was a process that Ivan Gaskell entitles as ‘historical retrieval.’  This attempt to interpret material as it might have been when it was first made seems vital to Chinese landscape study.  In removing one’s Eurocentric self-definition of Asian art and by utilising this device, it should offer up interpretations of Chinese art that go beyond the representational and delve into its cultural, visual signifiers.

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Week 4 - ELEGANT GATHERINGS: LANDSCAPE, GARDENS AND THE GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR

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Week 4 - ELEGANT GATHERINGS: LANDSCAPE, GARDENS AND THE GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR

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The seminar reading The Gentleman by Craig Clunas was compelling in introducing the concept of the four status pastimes of qin qi shu hua or zither, chess, painting and calligraphy.  Aside from being the main staples of Confucian learning and culture, what initially stood out for me was the role of painting within these quadruple arts.  ‘Painting’ wasn’t visually depicted as an active process but as a connoisseurial one, in which focused looking constituted knowledge and status.  This leads onto another interesting concept in which scrolls, screens and reflections contribute towards the construction of a meta-picture.  Their presence re-establishes the painting's medium and provides a functionality that interacts with other pictorial motifs as well as the paintings themselves.  Finally, this culminated in the introduction of the blank scroll, which showed a regression of painting-within-a-painting and a preference for imagined space.

In terms of the lectures, I was particularly interested in the continuation of study in the interaction of artists with their landscapes. This was initially seen last week, in the Four Masters of the Yuan, 1271-1368, which engaged with individualist, biographical, or proprietal concepts. Portraiture also assumed this role, providing political insight via a range of visual techniques.  The first being through its colour palette and this was highlighted in the Xiang Shergmo’s Self Portrait, which utilised red to show Ming loyalism on the verge of a Qing invasion.  Portraiture also aided the displays of gentility by establishing the elegant gatherings genre.

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Lacquer ewers. Beijing Palace workshops, Qianlong mark and period, 1736–1795.

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For my object I have picked an elegant pair of lacquer ewers.  What struck me about the pair was their material dialogue with the vast quantity of bowls and crockery made from the same material.  Lacquer is a substance that originates from the sap of a lacquer tree that is native to China.  The technique of carving this substance consisted of a time-consuming process of diaoqi.  This process saw a deep carving into the thick layers of lacquer and the technique probably originated in 12th century.  Whilst most surviving examples are from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the main subject matters originated from the Song.

The ewers were commissioned by the Qing dynasty court, and this is reinforced in the iconography of the imperial dragons.  The other patterns that are exhibited are a complex lattice of geometric patterning, which would have possessed mythical and auspicious value.  In terms of their use, the jugs were made to serve Tibetan butter tea and this is reinforced in their mirroring of the traditional Tibetan, tubular form.  Whilst the Tibetan examples were mainly made out of copper and wood, the lacquer pair display further visual consistencies in the inclusion of the mythical creature, makara, biting the base of the spout.

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Section of the Chen Mei, Sun Hu, Jin Fun, Dai Hong, and Chen Zhidao - Qingming shanghe, 1737

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Week 7 - QINGMING SHANGHE TU AND THE URBAN IDEAL

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Week 7 - QINGMING SHANGHE TU AND THE URBAN IDEAL

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My entry this week will revolve around our seminar topic and the 1737 Taipei hand-scroll entitled Up the River during Qingming.  The work offers a complex material history and I was particularly surprised by the active role that the emperor Qianlong played in not only patronage, but the selection of artists irrelevant of their individual styles.

The scroll possesses a tripartite structure consisting of countryside , suburbia and then lastly a more overt urban scene.  While one would assume that these contrasting metaphysical spaces would be too diverse to depict within one work, the arched bridge and the dominance of the river facilitate and consolidate a cohesive composition.

The terms attached to the streetscape, laid out in the Wang Cheng-hua reading, were also novel to me.  The author utilised 'theatricality' to refer to the localised dramatic effects within the painting and 'spectatorship' as a means of establishing the city as a stage.  The combination of these two factors further establish the painting's visual quality.

Whilst we have seen auspiciousness presented throughout Chinese landscapes, through the blue-green colour palette or literary references embodied in the physical, the scroll's use of European architecture as both a spatial indication and a device to trigger a sense of wonder seemed a novel technique.  Overall, the lineage established by this work, which tied Qianlong to Kangxi, sheds light on one dimension of antiquarianism and the desire of the emperor to establish a tradition of grand pictorial enterprise that mirrored that of the past.

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Illustration of Du Liniang drawing her self-portrait, from a Jiuwotang Hall imprint of The Peony Pavilion, Ming dynasty

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Week 8 - GENDERED SPACES: THEATRE, PUBLISHING AND GARDENS OF THE LATE MING

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Week 8 - GENDERED SPACES: THEATRE, PUBLISHING AND GARDENS OF THE LATE MING

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The seminar readings for week 8 interestingly introduced gender paradigms that were widespread within theatre, politics and commercial printing.  In terms of the former, the theatre observed a revival of ci, which saw poetic emotional intensity assume more widespread popularity.  Furthermore, plays equally saw a dominance of romantic drama (wenxi) over the heroic genre (wuxi).  The gendering of space was further evident in the assumption of femininity.  This was supported by Li Yu, who stated that natural femininity became attached to young boys rather than women.

In terms of gendered politics, the Zuyan Zhou reading highlighted the complex dynamic between the active literati and the passivity of the ruling elite.  Zhou suggested that the rulers didn’t posses the yang spirit that was required and that their advisers, who were eunuchs, led to the effeminisation of Ming politics.  While this contradicts the later point regarding the literati’s alignment with disenfranchised women, it nonetheless illuminates the duality of political gender and its binary encapsulation within the yin and yang.

Lastly, in regard to commercial printing, the Dorothy Ko reading, showed that in the late 16th century there were a large amount of women managing to publish their writings within their lifetime.  This situated the female reader into larger cultural factors such as the commerciality of reading and the trans-urban culture created by book merchants. Ming women saw books as an outlet to enjoy de facto freedoms and opportunities without overtly challenging the ideal order.  Moreover, this forged a new relationship between women and learning, as family publishing facilitated a new perceived female intellectualism.