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The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937

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The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937 The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937 Elizabeth Lawrence Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 1 © 2014 Elizabeth Lawrence All rights reserved 2 ABSTRACT The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937 Elizabeth Lawrence Seals are hand-held printing blocks inscribed with some pattern, generally text. They were objects of immense power and prestige in imperial China. This dissertation examines the modern afterlife of inscribed seals against the backdrop of the decline and collapse of an imperial era order of knowledge and social status, the rise of modern consumer markets and mass culture, and the local accommodation of modern disciplines that promoted new ways of classifying and engaging the material world. In late imperial China (ca. 1600s-1800s), seals legitimized the rule of the emperor and his civil servants and marked the taste and erudition of the literati elite. As hand-held printing blocks that replicated in ink small textual signs, they produced authorizing marks of personhood and office and attracted elite collectors as calligraphic compositions of antiquarian interest. In modern China, seals proliferated within the cosmopolitan material culture of cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai. As the seal was transformed following the disintegration the imperial system, its multifaceted meanings and functions were increasingly subsumed under a monolithic category of “Chinese seal” as art object. The making of the “Chinese seal” as a representative fine art and marker of a distinctive Chinese culture evolved out of the diverse ways in which the carvers, consumers, scholars, and users of seals defined the object’s significance in a modern world. This dissertation is thus structured around the new social venues in which the seal emerged in the first four decades of the twentieth century, from the final years of imperial rule through the period of the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). 3 The seal in premodern China was not an unchanging part of a traditional material culture. Its uses and significance had already undergone dramatic, historically contingent, transformations before the twentieth century. Chapter one broadly examines the multifaceted functions of the seal through Chinese history, and explains the emergence of the seal as an object of literati fascination in the late imperial period. The relationship between seal carving and the literati way of life would have to be at least partially displaced for seal carving to survive China’s transition to a more mass- oriented society. Chapter two demonstrates how members of the Xiling Seal Society (founded 1904), the first-ever specialized institution devoted to seal carving and inscriptions celebrated literati values of amateurism and exclusivity while simultaneously contributing to the commodification, public visibility, and transformation of literati seal carving. The Xiling Seal Society, as a modern heritage institution based in Hangzhou, had a commercial counterpart in Shanghai with a national and international consumer base. Chapter three uses catalogues of this business and its offshoots as evidence of the crucial role of the market in transmitting and modifying seal carving and related aspects of elite material culture after the collapse of the imperial order. While the Shanghai Xiling Seal Society positioned itself against a vulgarization of seal carving in contemporary society, it incrementally detached the seal from a broader framework of imperial era knowledge production and ultimately marketed it as a customizable commodity suitable to the needs of the modern consumer. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the emerging categorization of the seal as a fine art object. Through an examination of how-to manuals published during the Republican period, chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which practitioners characterized their expertise 4 and how their practical instruction aimed at a general reader marked a transformation of the concept of amateurism. Chapter 5 looks at the seal’s incorporation into state- sponsored national exhibitions of fine art held in 1929 and 1937 and the tensions produced by the collision of connoisseurship culture with the mass pedagogy of “aesthetic education.” The categorization of seal carving as fine art can be understood as the grafting of an exogenous classification system onto a local practice. But this new categorization did not only transform the seal, it also transformed the very category of “fine arts” as it was understood in China. The final chapter examines the seal as an object of scholarly inquiry and the relationship between seals, seal carving, and an indigenous field of metal and stone inscription study (jinshi). The second director of the Xiling Seal Society, a scholar named Ma Heng, incorporated seals into his vision of metal and stone inscription study as a sub- discipline of modern historical scholarship. Ma Heng judged seal carving not by the aesthetics of the seal composition, but by the integrity of the archaic text as an accurately rendered play upon epigraphic models. His insistence that seal carving be understood as an expression of scholarship serves as a reminder of how awkwardly imperial era practices of connoisseurship and knowledge production mapped onto a modern field of disciplines, with their hardened boundaries between the arts and the sciences. Today, the Chinese government promotes seal carving as a representative part of an ancient and enduring Chinese culture. As examined in the dissertation’s epilogue, the People’s Republic of China has succeeded in having “the art of Chinese seal engraving” inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The seal has now come into the purview of the contemporary state’s heritage politics. This has only 5 been possible because the seal proved useful, significant, and accessible to people in the early twentieth century even after the imperial system that had accounted for the object’s former prestige was torn asunder. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Illustrations ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 1. The Multi-Faceted Seal 15 2. A Place for Literati Culture in the Modern World: The Hangzhou Xiling Seal Society 46 3. Books, Art, Ink, Seals: From Heritage Preservation to Customizable Commodities 95 4. One Knife and One Stone: Seal Carving Manuals and the Transformation of Amateurism 150 5. Connoisseurship and Aesthetic Education in Republican China’s State Sponsored Fine Arts Exhibitions, 1929 and 1937 182 6. Producing Knowledge, Making Things: Seals, Antiquarianism and the Scientific Study of the Past 231 Epilogue: From Literati Culture to the Heritage of Humanity 281 Bibliography 288 i ILLUSTRATIONS List of Figures 1. Six-sided seal of Ding Jing 39 2. Rubbing of the Han San Lao stele with Ding Bing colophon 52 3. Imprint of seal carved by Wu Zhenping, “Xiling Han stone” 西泠漢石 54 4. Statue of Ding Jing at the Hangzhou Xiling Seal Society 58 5. Ding Ren and Wu Yin enjoying seals 80 6. Photograph of Xiling Seal Society members 80 7. Xiang Shengmo and Zhang Qi, Venerable Friends, 1652 80 8. Hall of Taking Pleasure in Viewing stele rubbing 83 9. Stele rubbing from Wu Changshuo, “Xiling yinshe ji” 84 10. Ding Jing side inscription rubbing and seal imprint, “Young Liang” 小梁 86 11. Imprint of seal by Wu Yin, “Wu Yin, Shiquan, fifty years old in bingchen year [1916] changes his style name to Qianquan” 吳隱石潛五十更號潛泉 102 12. Xiling Seal Society Catalogue of Metal and Stone, Seal Albums, Rubbings, and Collected Books 西泠印社金石印譜法帖藏書 title page 108 13. Xiling Seal Society trademark 128 14. Seal composition style illustration pages 139 15. Seal composition style illustration page with reproduced seal imprints of “Collected Book of Antian” 安田藏書 and “Seal of Han Yunjie” 漢雲階印 140 16. Seal imprints with unorthodox scripts 145 17. Han Dynasty name seal imprints reproduced in Kong Yunbai’s how-to manual 170 18. How to hold and move the knife correctly, illustrated in Kong Yunbai’s how-to manual 175 ii 19. Practicing the composition 176 20. Carving Squares 178 21. Meizhan exhibition broadsheet with Cai Yuanpei calligraphy and seal 196 22. Feng Zikai, “Useless Painting” 207 23. Rubbings from intact clay seals 257 24. Rubbings from damaged clay seals 258 25. Rubbings and photographs from clay seals in Ma Heng’s album 262 26. Stratigraphic Map of Anyang excavation site 266 27. Dong Zuobin’s hand-drawn illustrations of oracle bones 267 28. Evolution of the character “ji” as presented by Dong Zuobin 270 List of Tables 1. Seal albums marketed by the Xiling Seal Society, 1916 116-118 2. Content outline of a Xiling Seal Society catalogue, 1929 125-126 3. Bao Kai’s learning stages, The Art of Making Seals 171 4. Organization of displays, First National Fine Arts Exhibition (1929) 200 5. Categories of items lent by the Chinese government to the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London 218 6. Organization of displays, Second National Fine Arts Exhibition (1937) 226 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I arrived at Columbia University as an MA student, I was fortunate to take a number of classes with outstanding faculty members who later became the core of my dissertation committee. Eugenia Lean has supported me every step of the way. This dissertation could not have been written without her. Dorothy Ko is a muse. Madeleine Zelin is generous with her time, direct in her feedback, and inspiring in her depth of historical knowledge. Pamela Smith proves that the academic work of the historian is consistent with curiosity, passion, and innovation. Shang Wei, who joined my dissertation committee after hearing a mock job talk based on one of the chapters, gave me a much-needed jolt of enthusiasm in the final months of writing. I also received guidance and inspiration from Kim Brandt, Gray Tuttle, Carol Gluck, Lydia Liu, and Robert E. Harrist Jr. At Columbia, my brilliant classmates, included Dan Asen, Adam Bronson, Sayaka Chatani, Anatoly Detwyler, Arunabh Ghosh, Gal Gvili, Meha Priyadarshini, Chelsea Schieder, Brian Tsui, Stacey Van Vleet, Tim Yang, and Zhong Yurou.
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