Deviance and Disorder: The Naked Body in Chinese Art

Gabrielle Steiger Levine The Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal August 2008

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial requirement of the degree of Master of Arts © Gabrielle Steiger Levine 2008 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

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1+1 Canada Contents

List of Illustrations 3 Acknowledgments 4 Abstract 5

Preface 7

Chapter 1: The Body in Art and Though 13

Chapter 2: Representing Deviance: The Penitent in Purgatory 35

Chapter 3: The Foreign Body: Demons in Representations of Zhong Kui...64

Chapter 4: Nakedness as Disorder: Zhou Chen's Beggars and Street Characters 92

Concluding Remarks 110

Works Cited 127

2 List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Attributed to Gu Kaizhi, Admonitions of the Palace Instructress to the Palace Ladies (detail). Tang copy of a 4th to 5th (?) century work 33

Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Portrait ofNiZan, c. 1340 ....33

Figure 1.3 Anonymous, Portrait of the Ming Hongzhi Emperor, 16th century ....34

Figure 2.1 Anonymous, Hell Scenes, fragment of a wall painting from Bezeklik, 9th century 58

Figure 2.2 Anonymous, seventh illustration to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, 10th century 59

Figure 2.3 Anonymous, fifth illustration to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, 10th century 59

Figure 2.4 Workshops of Lu Xinzhong, The Seventh King, 13l century 60

Figure 2.5 Anonymous, Zhangyi Empress Li, Consort of Emperor Zhenzong, first half of the 11th century 61

Figure 2.6 Anonymous, Eighteen Scholars in a Garden, 15l century 62

Figure 2.7 Workshops of Lu Xinzhong, The Seventh King (detail), 13th century ...63

Figure 3.1 a-d Yan Hui, The New Year's Eve Excursion ofZhong Kui, early 14' 89-90

Figure 3.2 Zhou Chen, Zhong Kui Expelling Demons, mid-Ming Dynasty 91

Figure 4.1 a-I and figure 4.2 a-d Zhou Chen, Beggars and Street Characters, 1516 112-125

Figure 4.3 Zhu Yu, Street Scenes in Peace Time, mid-14th century 126

3 Acknowledgments

While writing this thesis I have received help and support from a number of individuals and institutions without which I would not have seen the completion of this work. I am particularly grateful to the Department of Art History and

Communication Studies at McGill University for giving me the opportunity to pursue my studies at the Master's level and for providing an environment of rich interdisciplinary studies and critical historical and theoretical research.

Particularly, I am grateful to Professor Angela Vanhaelen and Professor Bronwen

Wilson who were both extremely supportive of my work at the Master's level. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada for the Master's scholarship I received in 2006. This scholarship afforded me the opportunity to continue my studies at McGill University. My supervisor,

Professor Hajime Nakatani, has provided immeasurable support throughout the writing process of this thesis. This thesis must, in part, be attributed to the many hours he dedicated to it through personalized independent studies, during the writing process, and throughout the stages of revision. I could not have hoped to study under a more dedicated scholar.

My friends and family have supported me throughout some of the most challenging moments of the writing process. To Arlene Steiger, David Levine,

Benjamin Steiger Levine, Jessica Steiger Levine, Rose Plotek, Nick Schirmer and

Alexandra Stevenson, I am eternally grateful.

4 Abstract

This thesis concerns the representation of nakedness in traditional Chinese art. Its

objects of inquiry are representations of demons in images of Zhong Kui, the

penitent in purgatory in images of the ten kings based on The Scripture on the Ten

Kings, and the representation of beggars and street characters. This thesis provides

initial inquiry into a motif which has not garnered much scholarly attention. It

argues that the naked body signified various forms of deviance from the

normative social and moral order which defined traditional China and its

inhabitants such as the foreign, the marginal, and the subaltern. As such, the representation of nakedness functioned to highlight order within the imperial

realm by displaying what the Chinese center and its inhabitants were not. It could

also serve, however, and by virtue of the naked body's deviance from the

normative human being, to suggest potential disorder within the imperial realm.

Cette these a pour sujet la nudite dans Tart Chinois traditionnel. Les sujets d'analyse traitent de la representation des demons dans l'imagerie de Zhong Kui,

des penitents au purgatoire dans l'iconographie des dix rois basees sur le texte

« The Scripture of the Ten Kings », ainsi que la representation des mendiants et

les artistes de la rue. Cette these se penchera pour la premiere fois sur un theme qui n'a pas encore suscite l'interet de la communaute academique; celui de la nudite vue sous forme de non-conformisme, de non-appartenance a l'ordre moral et social qui definissait la Chine traditionnelle et ses habitants. Lorsque presente la nudite peut a la fois mettre en evidence l'ordre au sein de l'empire en affichant

5 l'image contraire de ses sujets, mais egalment demontrer le desordre potentiellement present. Preface

This thesis concerns the representation of nakedness in traditional Chinese art.

The objects of my analysis are representations of the penitent in purgatory,

demons, beggars and street characters. My study investigates the use of the naked

and semi-naked body to signify deviance from, and non-belonging to, normal

society. As such, the collection and representation of nakedness, I argue, served

two primary functions in traditional Chinese art. In certain pictorial genres, the

naked body functioned to highlight order within the imperial realm by displaying

what the normative human being and the Chinese cultural center were not. In

other genres, the naked body, by virtue of its deviance, served as sign of disorder

within the imperial center.

Over the last few decades scholars concerned with the representation and

conceptualization of the body in China have consistently examined not the

reasons for the body's presence but the reasons for the body's overwhelming

absence in the history of Chinese figurative representation. John Hay, for

example, in an article written just over a decade ago, posited a question whose

answer continues to define recent scholarship on the representation of the human body in Chinese art. In an influential essay, he asks, is "the body invisible in

Chinese art?"1 Hay answers that what is absent in depictions of the human figure

is "a particular kind of body."2 In his article, Hay contrasts the Western

conceptualization of the body with its Chinese counterpart. He argues that the

1 John Hay, "The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?" in Body Subject and Power in China, eds. Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, 42-77 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 42. 2 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 43.

7 paucity of representations of the human body in Chinese figurative painting is the consequence of the lack of a body understood as it is in the West. Hay argues that in the West the body is predominantly conceptualized "as a solid and well-shaped entity whose shapeliness is supported by the structure of a skeleton and defined in the exteriority of swelling muscle and enclosing flesh." This "particular kind of body," Hay argues, did not exist in China.

Following Hay's initial inquiry, scholars have generally explained the absence of the naked body in Chinese figurative representation as a consequence of two dominant ontological frameworks which structured an understanding of the body that was vastly different from the body understood, as it often is in the West, as an anatomical object, geometrically demarcated in space and differentiated from all other objects. The first framework defined the body as existing in relation to external as well as internal phenomena and functioning analogously to larger patterns of change and transformation within the cosmos. The second follows logically from a fundamental understanding of what it meant to be Chinese. "The idea of China" as Hay explains, was "fundamentally cultural rather than ethnic" .

To be Chinese meant to be civilized and, in China, "to be civilized" meant the correct performance of //" (ritual or propriety). Angela Zito aptly describes //' as hegemonic and argues that it "include[ed] everything from how to dress to how to venerate ancestors."5 Proper performance of // therefore defined who was or was

3 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 51. 4 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 63. 5 Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 14.

8 not Chinese. Personhood was consequently understood as process, evolving in relation to the proper articulation of//.

Given these two frameworks, the overwhelming presence of sartorial attributes in figurative representation has been understood within recent scholarship as central, in China, to the representation of the human being.

Sartorial attributes, scholars agree, functioned to define one's position within the

Chinese hierarchical and ritual system and also one's essential relation to both internal and external phenomena. Consequently, scholars whose work considers the place of the body in Chinese art generally argue that the naked body, the ritually un-marked or un-coded body (i.e. lacking sartorial attributes) offered no code to signify one's position within the larger social or cosmological world. It was, therefore, meaningless and consequently never represented. While this argument was meant to account for the paucity of the depiction of the body as corporeal entity in Chinese art, it also obscures and fails to account for the naked bodies which do find representation therein.

To date, no study has undertaken an examination of the naked body in

Chinese art. These naked bodies, I argue, are present within the pictorial history of Chinese figurative representation and have particular force and function - precisely because they cannot be accounted for within the dominant logic which defined the human being in traditional China. I argue that when the naked body entered the domain of pictorial representation it functioned as a kind of floating signifier, often used to define beings that existed outside the hierarchies and ritual

9 systems which defined the Chinese body, but whose specific power and meaning varied according to different contexts.

In this thesis, chapter one provides a more in depth introduction to the theoretical frameworks which have functioned to structure conceptualizations of the body in China. Specifically, the chapter examines the ways in which correlative cosmology and a fundamentally cultural rather than ethnically defined

China structured certain conventions for representing the human body. The chapter also explores the ways in which these central concepts have structured contemporary inquiries into the representation of the human body in China. I argue that recent scholarship has taken these central concepts as dictating specific modes of representing the body in China which exclude the possibility of representing nakedness. I argue that it may be more useful to examine the ways in which these frameworks also provide important insight on the nakedness that does occur therein. For these frameworks imply that nakedness would necessarily signify one's non-belonging to normal society.

In chapter two I explore the conception and pictorial representation of the penitent in purgatory. Specifically, I examine tenth to thirteenth century images based on the Chinese-Buddhist apocryphal text The Scripture on the Ten Kings. I argue that in these images nakedness signified the penitent's deviance from, and non-belonging to, the normative social and moral scale which defined the human being in traditional China. As such, nakedness in representations of purgatory, I argue, functioned to mark an Other against which the normative Chinese individual was defined.

10 In chapter three, I examine the conception and pictorial representation of demons, specifically, those demons depicted in images of Zhong Kui that are associated with the New Year's exorcism in China. I argue that demons, in the history of Chinese thought, were consistently defined as non-human and consequently associated with regions beyond the periphery of the civilized center.

Nakedness in images of Zhong Kui, I argue, functioned to define the non-human body and designated beings that existed beyond the boundaries of civilized society. As such, representations of demons, I argue, ultimately functioned to define the Chinese center and its inhabitants by displaying what they were not.

In chapter four I examine an album entitled Beggars and Street Characters painted in 1516 by Zhou Chen. I argue that Zhou appropriates the semi-naked and deformed body -once reserved solely for the representation of foreign or otherworldly beings in images of purgatory and Zhong Kui -to depict those actually inhabiting an imperial center. As such, the beggars and street characters represented in Zhou's album may be understood as depicting anomalous beings since they represent, through the use of the naked body to depict human beings, the transgression of the boundaries, once affirmed in images of purgatory and

Zhong Kui, between human and non-human, us and them. In this chapter, I argue that by referencing the tradition of reading the anomalous as sign or omen of disorder, Zhou's collection of anomalous beings may be understood as a form of social criticism. This possibility exists insofar as the album presents the transgression of the boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' 'center' and 'periphery,'

'human' and 'non-human' as sign or omen of disorder.

11 My investigation into the significance of the naked body in Chinese art stands as an initial inquiry into a motif which has not garnered much scholarly attention. While aware that its findings will inevitably be subject to revision, I stand in the hope that this thesis will go some way to laying the foundations for further research concerning the naked body in Chinese art.

12 Chapter 1

The Body in Chinese Art and Thought

One of the major problems with which we must contend when writing about conceptualizations of the body in traditional China is the lack of a Chinese term which connotes anything resembling our English term 'body'. Charlotte Furth explains that "the term shen (the closest approximation to our English word

"body") sometimes referred, on the one hand, to the physical form of the human being, which could be weighed, measured, or covered with clothing, and sometimes referred, on the other hand, to the "self as a sentient person with a lived history and subjective consciousness."6 The term itself often referred simultaneously to both connotations of the word.7

The lack of a Chinese term which designates a body abstracted from lived experience and distinct from mind and spirit, scholars agree, places us within a tradition vastly different from dominant Western understandings of the body. It is clear from the outset then that any "attempt at disentangling Chinese representations of the body" would have to adopt a set of analytical tools and acknowledge an underlying set of assumptions entirely separate from those common to Western discourses on the body. This chapter outlines two dominant ontological frameworks which were central to traditional Chinese understandings

6 Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 (Berkley and London: University of California Pres, 1999), 19. Furth also notes that "Shenti, the biological body, is a modern neologism." See Furth, A Flourishing Yin, 19 no. 1. 7 Mark Elvin suggests that the term may be understood as body/ person. See Mark Elvin, "Tales of ' Shen and Xin: Body- Person and Heart- Mind in China during the Last 150 Years," in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, eds. Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, 213-291 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). 8 Hay, "The body Invisible," 63.

13 of the body.9 Specifically, I examine the ways in which a correlative cosmology and a fundamentally cultural rather than ethnically defined China structured conceptualizations of the normative individual as well as certain conventions for representing the human body. I explore these central concepts in order to situate representations of the naked or semi-naked body against this background as informed by, reacting to or functioning outside these dominant ontological frameworks.

I begin by examining the basic tenets of correlative cosmology, a scientific discourse central to traditional Chinese understandings of the body. Correlative cosmology, may defined as a comprehensive worldview "grounded in the belief in the organic nature of the cosmos in which the individual, society and the natural world were subject to homologous cycles of change and mutation."10 Correlative cosmology was formulated early in the history of traditional China and, although elaborated and re-articulated throughout its history, remained relatively stable over two millennia.11

To adequately understand correlative cosmology we must first examine the Chinese concept of qi which was central to its later formulations. Most often translated into English as energy, qi in fact refers to a much broader and more complex "concept of energetics" which underlies and forms the essential core of

9 Throughout my thesis 1 use the term body as shorthand to stand for the much more complex term, shen. 10 von Glahn. The Sinister Way, 14. Furth explains that from the Han dynasty (221 B.C.E. -C.E. 220) onward correlative cosmology dominated as a world view which explained all the transformations and changes of Heaven, Earth and Man. See Furth, 21. " For more on the relative stability of correlative cosmology see Hay, "The Body Invisible," 65. Also see Richard von Glahn. The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 2004), 14. 12 von Glahn, 36.

14 all phenomena of heaven, earth and man. Qi is often understood as a primordial or unitary one and is conceived as proceeding all differentiation or materialization in the phenomenal world.14 Differentiation in the world does not imply, however, a separation from this primordial one. Instead, in differentiation it is qi itself that materializes. This materialization occurs through a process of transformation within a system of polarities.

The most common set of terms which represents this system of polarities isyin andyang}5 Yin andyang are understood as the primal or most basic polarity and force of change and may be conceptualized as two extremes of a single continuum where one extreme continually influences the other. As such, yin and yang are conceived as forces which guide the differentiation and continual mutations of all other phenomena in the world. According to this logic, any single phenomenon unfolds in binary relation to or in resonance with some other correlated category of reality. Put more simply, every phenomenon is the materialization and one extreme of a single continuum (qi) and is thus intimately linked to all other phenomena through holistic relationships of correspondence between correlative categories. Correlated categories included correspondences

13 Hay, "The Human Body as Microcosmic Source of Macrocosmic Values in Calligraphy" in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, eds. Susan Bush and Christian Murck, 179-211 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 191; Pokert discusses the complexity of translating and understanding qi. He argues that qi cannot "correspond perfectly to one of our modern universal concepts. Nevertheless the term ch'i [qi] comes as close as possible to constituting a generic designation equivalent to our word energy." Manfred Pokert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1974), 167- 168. l4Furth,21. 15 For more on Yin and Yang see Pokert, 9. 16Most scholars argue that it was with Dong Zhongshu's theories of ganying that correlative cosmology gained its most systematic articulation. Ganying has been defined by Von Glahn as "a fundamental belief in 'resonance'...that mediated between different orders of reality." von Glahn, 14. See also, Angela Zito, "Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries," in Body Subject and Power in

15 between Heaven (tiari) and the imperial order, human life and cosmic change.

Within this cosmos, the body is conceived as fundamentally linked, through correlative relations, to both internal and external, social and cosmological, phenomena.

The second ontological framework which structured traditional Chinese conceptions of the body follows logically from a specifically Chinese understanding of what it meant to be human. Scholars have generally agreed, as

Hay argues, that "the idea of China was fundamentally cultural rather than ethnic."17 Consequently, they argue, that in order to be considered human and also

Chinese the individual had to be civilized. In China, to be civilized meant to follow, understand, and perform correct li ('ritual' or 'propriety'). In her work on

18th century grand sacrifice, Angela Zito aptly argues that //not only "bridges material and thoughtful life by embodying[...]certain philosophical propositions about humanity and its cosmos" but also summarized "the way of being human that was necessary to the cosmos as well as its embedded social order."19 Li thus structured a vast spectrum of activities and thought including an understanding of the body as irreducibly social.

In traditional China a correlative cosmology and a fundamentally cultural rather than ethnic definition of the individual structured a conception of the body vastly different from that dominant in the West. Specifically, an approach to

China, eds. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, 103-130 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 109. Manfred Pokert explains that within this cosmos an inductive logic explains the relationship between all phenomena. See Pokert, 3. 17 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 63. 18 Zito, "Silk and Skin," 105. 19 Zito, Of Body and Brush, 14. 20 See Zito, Of Body and Brush, 14 and 58.

16 observing the body as object became available in the West but not in China. One way in which the body has been viewed as object is reflected in Linda Nead's analysis of the conceptualization of the body in Western philosophy. In her work on the Nude in Western art, Nead agues that in the West there has been "a passion for binary opposition." According to this dualistic framework, Nead argues, "the two terms in a pairing are isolated and mutually exclusive; if the mind represents the domain of the conceptual and is capable of abstraction and reason, then the body is reduced to a physical object, defined in terms of its extension through or occupation of space."22 A consequence of this dualistic framework has been a body conceptualized within the West as object, distinct from mind and spirit.

While it is important to recognize that there exists a diversity of approaches that punctuate Western understandings of the body and that this

"passion for binary opposition" does not represent the modern Western attitude toward the body, it does reflect one way in which the body came to be understood, in the West, as object.23 This understanding of the body was not available in

China.

Roger T. Ames, for example, in his work on the body in Chinese philosophy, argues that in contrast to the dualistic model predominant in the West, a polar model might better explain the relationship between mind and body in

Chinese metaphysics. Ames defines polarism as "a symbiosis: the unity of two organismic processes which require each other as a necessary condition for being

Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14. 22 Nead, 14. 2j Some later twentieth century scholars have, for example, been concerned with exposing the constructed nature of dualistic and binary distinctions.

17 what they are." Ames argues that in traditional China and according to a

correlative worldview, mind and body, human intellect and physical form, were

not conceptualized as exclusive opposites; instead, they formed polar

relationships. The body, he argues, was never conceived as material object but

rather as a lived organism existing in relation to what is often referred to in the

West as internal phenomena. Shen, Ames argues, thus designated a body

conceived as process, continually resonating with internal psychological and

intellectual phenomena.25

Internal psychological and intellectual processes were not, Ames argues,

distinct from the material body but understood as manifest and readable on the

body's surface. Ames argues that in classical Chinese philosophy, physical form

was "frequently portrayed as a disclosure of some intellectual condition."26 In the

Guanzi, for example, one passage reads:

"Where a person is able to be correct and tranquil, His skin will be ample, His sense will be keen, He will have protruding muscles And strong bones. He will be able to bear up the circular firmament And walk on the square earth."27

The body was therefore never understood as material object, isolated from

psychological or intellectual phenomena. Instead, the body's outer form was

24 Roger T. Ames, "The Meaning of Body in Classical Chinese Philosophy," in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, eds. Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, 157- 177 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 159. 25 Ames argues that in "Chinese philosophy 'person' is properly regarded as a "psychosomatic process." Ames, 158. 26 Ames, 167. 27 Guanzi (Sibu beiyao, ed) 16.4, quoted in Ames, 167.

18 conceived as existing in continual relation and resonance with internal phenomena.

Other scholars, while in agreement with Ames, have noted that correlative cosmology also dictated a conceptualization of the body as fundamentally linked to external phenomena. According to correlative cosmology, all phenomena were conceived as materializing from a unitary oneness and also intimately linked to each other through holistic relationships of correspondence between correlative categories. Hay argues that although differentiation between nei (inner) and wai

(outer), or zhi (substance) and wen (accomplishment) did exist in China, these states were never understood as isolated opposites but as "two different states of being, expressed in the need for a dynamic balance." Within this conceptualization the body was never understood as object differentiated from the external social, cultural and natural environment. Instead, the body was understood as evolving through a dynamic process of continual resonance with internal and external phenomena.

The Chinese conceptualization of the individual as irreducibly social also structured an understanding of the body as fundamentally connected to external phenomena. Again, this conceptualization of the body was vastly different from that common to the West. In the West, for example, and as Angela Zito argues, certain ontological frameworks such as Cartesian dualism functioned to structure an understanding of the self as an 'enunciating ego' who "exists in tension with external society, and then opposes the social order to the natural."29 Within this

28 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 63. 29 Zito, "Silk and Skin," 104.

19 framework, the un-socialized or un-coded body (in this case, lacking clothing or other sartorial attributes) is conceived as the "natural" body. This conception is reflected in the Christian notion of the innocent body of Eve before the fall, and in the eighteenth-century construction of the "savage" as noble.

In Chinese thought, however, an opposition between the social and natural order did not exist. Consequently, the distinction between a 'social' and a

'natural' body never arose. Hay points out that "while most of us today would probably consider our connection with society to be an external system that our selves must somehow come to terms with, in traditional Chinese norms they were felt to be the structuring of the self itself."30 Hay, for example, argues that the body, "in the very act of being acknowledged, was a social body" and "must have varied according to social norms and structure."31 Other scholars agree with Hay and similarly argue that in traditional China to be Chinese and also human meant to be civilized.32

Given these two frameworks, the un-coded or unclothed body, scholars agree, did not signal, as it often did in the west, an innocent or natural body/self existing prior to socialization but a body that had no meaning within the Chinese understanding of personhood. As Hay explains, the completely "uncoded body would have been felt to be "not human, and the naked body not or not yet

30 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 65. 31 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 63. 32 See Zito, Of Body and Brush; James L. Watson, "The structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance," in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, 3-19 (Berkley, London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Evelyn S. Rawski, "A Historical Approach to Chinese Death Ritual," in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, 20-34 (Berkley, London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

20 Chinese." This was so, scholars argue, because the human body was understood as existing within a correlative cosmology and as fundamentally articulated through society.

Angela Zito, for example, has explored the importance of surface, whether that of textural or visual representation, clothing or skin, as a site which signifies the fundamental connection between internal and external phenomena. She explains that in China the body was not primarily understood, as it is in the West, as container, but "as boundary between interior and exterior and as sign-bearing surface." 34 Within China, she argues, the surface of the body and the clothing which surrounds it could be understood as a mediate third which marks the fundamental relationship between internal and external phenomena.

Similarly, Mark Elvin has examined the body's connection to both internal and external phenomena, and argues that the body in traditional China is best understood as "peg-doll whose role is to be a carrier of corporeal and/ or sartorial attributes."35 Elvin explains that while corporal attributes were conceived as the external expressions of xin (heart-mind), defined as the intellect or "psychological field of force that is attempting to control the body," sartorial attributes could be understood as markers of one's status and place within the hierarchies and networks of relations that formed the human being m China.

,3 Hay, "The body Invisible," 63. 34 Zito, "Silk and Skin," 106. 35 Elvin, 267. 36 Elvin, 267. 37 In certain cases sartorial attributes, specifically the movement or wind blown appearance of clothing in figurative representation, could also function to express emotion or psychological tension.

21 Art historians have likewise viewed correlative cosmology and a

fundamentally cultural understanding of what it meant to be human as central

determinants of the ways in which the human figure was represented in traditional

Chinese painting. They argue that certain material signs, which include clothing,

topoi, and external objects, were central to the representation of the human figure

since they functioned to mark the fundamental connection between self and

environment, body and internal states.

Hay, for example, looks specifically at the importance of clothing in

Chinese figurative representation. He argues that the drapery, floating ribbons and

"fundamental tendency to represent people through their garments" 38 could be

explained as the most effective analogue to "the physical substratum of linearly

evolving patterns" of energy (qi)," the internal psychological qualities of the

particular person, and the person's external relation to cosmological change and

transformation.

As an example of the centrality of clothing in Chinese figurative painting

Hay cites an illustration, attributed to Gu Kaizhi (figure 1.1), from a seventh

century copy of the manual Admonitions of the Palace Instructress written by

Chang Hua in 232 to 300 A.D. The image illustrates a portion of the text which

describes the correct conduct of palace ladies. The passage reads:

"Favor must not be abused, and love must not be exclusive. Exclusive love breeds coyness and extreme passion is fickle. All that was waxed must also wane, and this

38 Hay "The Body Invisible," 60. 39 Hay "The Body Invisible," 67.

22 Principle is sure. Admire your own beauty if you will, but that brings Misfortune. Seeking to please with a seductive face, you will be despised by honorable men."40

The image depicts the incorrect conduct of the palace lady described in this portion of the text. In the image a man, presumably the emperor, stands before a woman. The man's hand is raised, indicating his rejection of the palace lady's advances. Although the woman faces the emperor, the ribbons of her robe flow forcefully away from him. Hay argues that the former favorite's rejection by the emperor and her own emotional state are represented through her garments. Hay explains that "[i]n the materializing movement from inner to outer polarity, the physical and psychological qualities of a particular organism are embodied in a structure of transformation" visible here and physically manifest in the garments of the former favourite. In other words, the former favourite's rejection by the emperor and her consequent inner emotional state materialize in the external

"blown back"42 appearance of the drapery and ribbons of her robe.

In his analysis of early Chinese figure painting, Hay also argues that the linearity of the brush strokes used to depict drapery could also be understood as expressions of underlying "linearly evolving patterns"43 of energy. Hay argues that calligraphy itself was analyzed in China according "to the imagery of

40 translated by Shih Hsio-yen, in "Poetry Illustrations and the Works of Ku K'ai-chih," Renditions 6 (1976): 12, quoted in John Hay, "Values and History in Chinese Painting, I: Hsieh Ho revisited" Res 6 (Fall 1983): 95. 41 Hay, "Values and History," 104. 42 Hay, "Values and History," 95. 43 Hay, "The Body lnvisible,"67.

23 organism" and physiology. Brush strokes were conceptualized as having arteries and bones while characters had "'skeleton' and 'sinew.'"45 Brushstrokes themselves were understood as a transformation and configuration of energy and by extension the brush line could also be understood, Zito summarizes, as "a vein, wo, of ink that pulses in the rhythm of the painter's own 'arteries' (also mo), an extension of the painter's real body."46 In this sense, the brushstrokes of the drapery in this image could be understood as extensions of the artery pulse or underlying energy pattern of both the subject represented and the painter himself.47 Hay thus argues that in Chinese art "the human body was far from invisible. It was dispersed through metaphors locating it in the natural world by transformational resonance and brushwork that embodied the cosmic-human reality of qi, or energy."48

This dispersal was not, however, confined to brushstrokes. Steven

Goldberg has argued, for example, that subjects in traditional Chinese art were also constituted in reference to the topoi in which they are situated. Steven

Goldberg grounds his analysis in the ancient concept of ganlei which was central to correlative cosmology. Goldberg defines ganlei as "responding according to categorical correlations."49 According to Goldberg, the subject's identity is constituted in its essential "relatedness and situatedness"5 with specific topoi. In

44 Hay, "The Human Body," 179. 45 Hay, "The Human Body," 179. 46 Zito, "Silk and Skin," 112. 471 use the pronoun "himself consciously since most painters in traditional China were male. 48 Hay, "The Body Invisible," 44. 49 Stephen J. Goldberg, "Figures of identity: Topoi and the Gendered Subject in Chinese Art," in Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, eds. Roger T. Ames, Thomas P. Kasulis and Wimal Dissanayake, 33-58 (Albany: State University of New York press, 1998), 35. 50 Goldberg, 35.

24 other words, the subject's identity is constituted through the relation between figure and context. James Cahill has made similar observations. Cahill argues that in Chinese portraiture it was common to reference the 'inner life' of the sitter through the objects that surround him or her and the environment in which he or she is situated.51 An example commonly cited in art historical texts as representative of this exteriorization of inner traits is the anonymous portrait of the Yuan dynasty artist Ni Zan (figure 1.2). In the image Ni Zan sits on a raised platform in front of a landscape. In his right hand Ni Zan holds a brush and in his left a hand scroll. On the table to his left are displayed antiques, including a tripod vessel and a miniature rock. He is tended to by two servants, a woman to his right, and a boy or young male to his left. From these external signs we may read that

Ni Zan was a cultured man, surrounded by the signs of a wenren (literati): painting, ink, brush, album and scroll, and also a man of means, attended to by two servants and surrounded by antiques. James Cahill has also suggested that Ni

Zan's reputed obsession with cleanliness is revealed in the image. The antiques are meticulously arranged on the table, the room is sparse and the servant holds a broom. As such, the external attributes depicted in the painting may be read as an exteriorization of the sitter's inner traits.

In his work on the significance of the screen in Chinese painting Wu

Hung, similarly, describes the Portrait of Ni Zan as depicting "two halves of a whole,"52 the physical likeness of Ni Zan as well as his mind. The painting

51 James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Centuiy Chinese Painting (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 115. 52 Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170.

25 achieves this goal by representing Ni Zan "as though he were thinking about composing a painting." The figure of Ni Zan holds a brush in one hand and a scroll in the other. Ni Zan has a vacant and distant gaze which, Wu Hung writes, suggests that the painter's "mind has been transported to a place beyond the mundane world." 54 This place Hung argues is "reflected on the screen behind him"55 which is depicted in Ni Zan's own painting style.56 Wu Hung concludes that the screen, "juxtaposed with Ni Zan's physical likeness...reveals Ni Zan's inner more essential essence."57 In the painting, it is not the singular figure who is bearer of identity but the relationship between figure and environment which define the individual. According to both Cahill and Wu Hung the interior self of the figure is not distinct and isolated from its external environment; instead, the self may be understood as turned inside out and dispersed across the surface of the painting. In the Portrait ofNi Zan, both agree, outward signs signal inward traits.

In his analysis of a portrait of the Hongzhi emperor (reigned 1499-1506)

(figure 1.3) Wen C. Fong similarly highlights the importance of sartorial attributes and topoi in defining the individual in Chinese figurative representation. Wen C.

Fong argues that by the sixteenth century the emperor had "become a ritual

CO vessel; devoid of personality...the ultimate embodiment of absolute state." The use of the term ritual vessel to describe the emperor is a fitting analogy since the

53 Wu Hung, 170. 54 Wu Hung, 170. 55 Wu Hung, 170. 56 Wu Hung, 170. 57 Wu Hung, 170. 58 Wen C. Fong, "Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods," Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 58, quoted in Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 88.

26 ritual vessel was not conceived in traditional China merely as container but as interfacing membrane which marked the absence of a distinction between inside and out or, in this case, the absence of a dualistic separation between the organic body and the body politic. In the Ming dynasty portrait the emperor's body is, in fact, almost invisible beneath his highly ornamented robe while the robe itself is almost indistinguishable from the environment in which he is situated. If, as Zito argues, surfaces such as clothing functioned as mediate third which marked the interaction between inside and out, then, the disappearance of the emperor's body beneath his clothing may signal the absence of a separation between the individual or historical body of the emperor and the body politic.

In the image, the symbols and colour of the emperor's robe are specific references to the imperial body. Yellow, for example, was the name of one of

China's most legendary rulers and was, as early as the sixth century, symbolically linked to the imperial throne. In fact, only emperors were permitted to wear clothing in this colour. The Hongzhi emperor's predominantly yellow garment visually links him to a lineage of rulers and the institution of imperial authority.

The symbols depicted on the robe, similarly, link the emperor to the imperial body. On the emperor's robe, for example, are nine roundels depicting dragons with five claws. These are symbolic references to male vigor, fertility and imperial rule. Also depicted on the emperor's robe are four peasants, a symbolic reference to the empress, and ten of the twelve imperial insignia. Running along the front of the robe are "two sacrificial vessels, one decorated with a representation of a monkey, the other with a representation of a tiger, water plant,

27 flames, rice, axe and fu pattern (symbolizing the distinction between right and wrong)." The twelve insignia function as sign of the emperor's power and ritual obligation, as well as the emperor's role as intermediary between heaven and earth. Just as the emperor functions as intermediary between heaven and earth, the surface of his clothing can also be understood as intermediary that marks the fundamental relationship between the emperor as individual and the "institution itself-the eternal throne."60

Similar signs of the emperor's status and identity are depicted in the environment in which he is situated. Wu Hung, who has also examined the image, argues, for example, that the emperor's "unique status as Son of Heaven is demonstrated not by the figure itself but by the lavish furnishings"61 which surround the figure. The emperor is framed, for example, by a three-paneled screen. On each panel is a five clawed dragon. The same motif is repeated in the carpet below the emperor's throne. Dragons, Wu Hung points out, were a primary symbol in the Ming dynasty of sovereignty. The cushions that support the emperor are also decorated with motifs which symbolize the emperor's power and ritual obligation, specifically, the monkey and tiger in vase motif. These external signs, like the emperor's clothing, signal the connection between the individual and the body politic. The subject's identity is therefore also represented through the relationship between figure and topoi.

59 Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. (Washington: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 428. 60 Levenson, 428. 61 Wu Hung, 13. 62 Wu Hung, 13.

28 Owing to later twentieth century deconstructivist and poststructuralist criticism, we have come to recognize that art "in fact, produces that which it purports merely to represent."63 In his work on the connection between representation and royal power in early modern Europe Louis Marin argues that representation may be understood to function in two ways. First, Marin argues, that "the prefix re- introduces into the term the value of substitution."64 In this sense, the absence of a thing or a person, whether in time or space, is presented anew and substitutes for the absent other. Second, Marin notes that to "represent" also implies citing one's credentials, for example, to "'represent' one's license, one's passport, one's birth certificate."65 This second meaning no longer introduces a substitute but represents one's "legitimate presence by the sign or title that authorizes or permits, not to say compels, his presence."66 In other words, the second type of representation legitimizes the subject's existence and identity by citing his or her "qualifications, justifications and titles".67 Following this logic, the portrait of the Hongzhi emperor may be understood as displaying and legitimizing the emperor's authority and power by representing and also producing, through specific symbolic motifs, the merger of the emperor's individual body with the body politic. The representation itself thus functions as marker of the fundamental relationship between the emperor as individual and the imperial throne.

63 Goldberg, 35. 64 Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 65 Marin, Portrait of the King, 5 66 Marin, Portrait of the King, 5 67 Marin, Portrait of the King, 5

29 If identity is understood not as a pre-existing attribute of the subject but as produced and also legitimized within representation, then we must also recognize that there exist certain conventions, as Goldberg suggests, "of figuration that govern the culturally intelligible representation of a subject's identity in its coherence and continuity." In traditional China, these conventions were rooted in a correlative worldview and the fundamental belief in a culturally rather than ethnically defined human being. Given these frameworks, the body in China, as we have seen, was never defined as geometric solid separate from the world outside its frame nor was it conceptualized according to the Western dualistic binaries which function to construct mind and body, self and other, as distinct and isolated entities. Instead, we find a body defined as a complex materialization of energy (qi), which evolves in relation to both inside and out and in resonance with larger patterns of transformation and change.

Given this definition of the body, contemporary scholars have generally agreed that the body's fundamental connection to both internal and external states as well as the belief in a fundamentally cultural rather than ethnically defined human being dictated certain pictorial conventions for representing the individual and the body in traditional Chinese art. This understanding of the human being, scholars argue, was constituted in representation through the relationship between figure, clothing, and environment. Stephen Goldberg argues, for example, that in figurative painting the identity of the subject was represented through the figure's relation to the objects and environment that surrounded him or her.69 John Hay

68 Goldberg, 35. 69 Goldberg, 33-58.

30 argues that the tendency to depict figures through the linear brushwork of their drapery can be read as an extension of both the subject's and the artist's internal artery pulse or as an external manifestation of the figure's psychological state.70

Wen C. Fong argues that clothing marked the subject's positional identity within the ritually defined, bureaucratic and hierarchical society of traditional China.71

Given the importance of the environment and clothing in depicting identity, scholars have generally argued that the un-coded body (the naked body) had no meaning in China, since it offered no code to signify one's position within the larger social or cosmological world. Nakedness, they argue, had no place within

Chinese figurative representation.

This claim, however, points to a conceptual trap to which many scholars have fallen pray. Scholars have failed to look beyond the logical frameworks they seek to explain. Within these frameworks the possibility of a body unarticulated, or un-coded, according to its correlative relation to internal and external phenomena as well as its subject's status and participation in Chinese civilization, did not exist. These un-coded bodies, did, however, find representation in Chinese pictorial art.

In the following chapters I argue that representations of the naked or semi- naked body do find representation in Chinese pictorial art and have particular power precisely because they cannot be accounted for within Chinese conceptions of what it meant to be human. I argue that although this body could not be

70 Hay, "The Human Body," 179-221; John Hay, "Values and History," 101-136. Wen C. Fong, "Imperial Portraiture of the Ming Dynasty," Possessing the Past: Treasure from the Nation Palace Museum (Taipei and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 331- 332. 72 See Hay, "The body Invisible."

31 understood within the Chinese logic which served to define the human being neither did it signify, as it often has in the West, a "natural" or innocent body existing in opposition and prior to the external environment. In the following chapters I argue that although used in vastly different contexts, each with their own specific signification, the naked or semi-naked body had particular force precisely because it was a powerful marker of transgression and difference from a normative understanding of the civilized center and its inhabitants.

32 *fc *. * *• ^ct f. $& J** i "5 ***• C -*; s% n r Si.

**»* p* 1 1 I t .t. If ^ t h. i ir m I 3 t t ~ w -. *r»

Figure 1.1 Attrib. Gu Kaizhi, Admonition of the Instructress to the Palace Ladies (detail), Tang copy of a 4th-or 5th (?) century work, handscroll, ink and colours on silk. British Museum, London. Reprinted from Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64-65

Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Portrait of Ni Zan, ca. 1340, 28.2 x 60.9cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei. Reprinted from Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 180.

33 figure 1.3 Anonymous, Portrait of the Ming Hongzhi Emperor, Ming dynasty, 16th century, 209.7 x 155.2 cm, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, National Palace Museum, Taipei. Reprinted from Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits. (Washington: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), fig. 3.11.

34 Chapter 2

Representing Deviance: The Penitent in Purgatory

The semi-naked body, while fairly rare in the history of Chinese art, did find consistent representation in one genre—images of purgatory that date from the tenth century onward. In these representations the semi-naked body was consistently drawn upon to depict those undergoing torture in purgatory as retribution for earthly sins. In this chapter, I examine the use of the naked or semi- naked body to define the penitent in representations of purgatory based on the

Chinese-Buddhist apocryphal text The Scripture on the Ten Kings. I argue that the semi-naked body functions to define the socially and morally deviant being and communicates that beings status as Other to the normative Chinese individual.

Images of purgatory also function, as Teiser points out, "to illuminate two particular facets of Chinese religion, the placing of the dead and the bureaucratization of the other world." Both, Teiser argues, may have been a means to make known and also control a subject, the deviant bodies of the dead, and a world, the afterlife, long feared in Chinese religion.74 Images of the afterlife serve this purpose in two ways. First, they define the workings and the space of purgatory by representing it in the image of the terrestrial, hierarchical and bureaucratic systems which formed the basic building blocks of the Chinese world order. In so doing, they function to domesticate the otherwise foreign or unknown realm of the afterlife. Second, images of the afterlife address long standing fears

73 Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 14. 74 Teiser, The Scripture, 14.

35 of the dead by representing a space, purgatory, to which the deceased were

relegated, and an order through which their fate could be known. As such,

representations of purgatory provided a site where the socially and morally

deviant being could be represented, defined as Other to the normative Chinese

individual, and yet safely relegated to a space, purgatory, existing beyond the

terrestrial world.

In this chapter, I examine illustrations of the ten kings based on the

Chinese-Buddhist notion of purgatory developed most comprehensively in The

Scripture on the Ten Kings. 5 Although the origin of the concept of purgatory

developed in the text probably dates as far back as the seventh century, the earliest

extant copy of The Scripture on the Ten Kings is dated to the ninth.76 The

Scripture on the Ten Kings was reproduced in several formats, including scrolls

and booklets, and existed in several different versions.77

The text purports to be one of the last sermons given by the historical

Buddha, Sakyamuni. Present at the sermon are characters from both Chinese and

75 The text is sometimes referred to as The Scripture Spoken by the Buddha to the Four Orders on the Prophecy Given to King Yarna Concerning the Sevens of Life to be Cultivated in Preparation for Rebirth in the Pure Land. Shorter titles included The Scripture on the Prophecy Given to King Yama and The Scripture on the Ten Kings. See Teiser, The Scripture, 7.1 adopt the shorter title for convenience throughout the text. See also Masako Watanabe, An Iconographic Study of "Ten Kings" Paintings (Master thesis, University of British Columbia, 1984), 3, 30-35. 75 Although the earliest surviving version of the scripture is dated 908 C.E. it was probably first written before that date some time after 720 C.E. Prior to 1469, with the first woodblock printing of the text, manuscripts were copied by hand. The scripture was not granted canonicity until 1912. See Teiser, The Scripture, 8-9. 77 Teiser has identified three main versions of The Scripture on the Ten Kings found at Dunhuang and dated to the tenth century. He describes these as the long, medium and short recension, the longest includes illustrations, prefatory prayer, the name, and place of residence of the author, a formal title, hymns, the narrative, as well as "[a]n abbreviated title at the end" Teiser, The Scripture, 8. Shorter versions lack illustrations or hymns and some contain slightly shorter narratives.

36 Indian indigenous belief. For example, both the magistrate of Mount Tai, an indigenous Chinese personality believed to rule over the netherworld located beneath Mount Tai, and Yama, the Buddhist lord of death and hell are present.79

The text is primarily concerned with the deceased's passage through purgatory and describes the intermediary stage "beginning at death and lasting until one is reborn in another form."80 During this intermediary stage, the individual occupies a liminal position, continually struggling to attain rebirth in a more settled form.

From the moment of death till rebirth, the deceased passes through a series of ten courts. At each court, the deceased faces a different judge and a judicial procedure similar to that of the terrestrial world. Each judge reviews the good and bad, moral and immoral deeds of the individual, which have been meticulously recorded by a host of spirit-like beings or officials of the underworld, and passes judgment. The severity of each sentence is based on the individual's past deeds as well as offerings made by the individual or by the mourning family to the king.

Once the king passes judgment the deceased undergoes punishment for his or her sins and then moves to the next court. The time at which the deceased faces each of the ten kings is fixed. The individual faces a new judge every seven days for forty nine days, on the one hundredth day after death, during the twelfth month

O I after death and finally, in the third year after death. After the tenth trial, the deceased is reborn into one of the six paths of rebirth. Those who have led moral

78 Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850-1850. Marsha Weidner ed. (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art and University of Kansas; Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1994)277. 79 Teiser, The Scripture, 2-3. 80Teiser, The Scripture, 23. 81 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 164.

37 lives are reborn into higher paths, either as god, titan-like being or human. Those who have lead immoral lives face the consequence of being reborn as animal, hungry ghost, or denizen of hell.

Teiser argues that The Scripture on the Ten Kings "is one of the most obvious signs of the birth of a new concept of the afterlife in medieval Chinese

Buddhism."82 This new conception reflects Chinese concerns with the proper placement and control of the dead. The Scripture on the Ten Kings, for example, evidences a shift of attention away from the six paths of rebirth to the period between death and rebirth, purgatory. It also shows signs of the adaptation of the

Indian-Buddhist concept of the afterlife, "typified by the word samsara, a nearly eternal round of rebirth and death driven by the effects of people deeds,"83 to earlier Chinese understanding of the afterlife and the fate of the dead. In The

Scripture on the Ten Kings the Buddhist underworld was re-imagined in the image of Chinese social and bureaucratic hierarchies, while the fate of the dead was re-ordered and conceived according to Chinese notions of filial piety, ancestor worship and a morally infused correlative cosmology.

Buddhist notions of karma and karmic law, for example, complemented an already established conception of tian (heaven) and the fate of the dead based on a morally infused correlative cosmology. Robert Campany explains that a morally infused correlative cosmology meant the adaptation of the notions of bao

(reciprocity) and baoying (reciprocating response) to a correlative worldview.

82 Teiser. The Scripture, 1. Teiser, The Scripture 3. 84 For more on the changing conception of the relationship between tian and di see von Glah, 45- 75.

38 These terms, he explains, refer to the "restoration of moral and ritual

equilibrium"85 and implied that one's actions on earth necessitated a "resonant

response" from either a human agent or Heaven itself. Buddhist notions of karma

and karmic law did not therefore eclipse Chinese views but added to an already

morally infused correlative cosmology an "explicit, universal, and immutable

law."0O In this way, Buddhist notions of karma and karmic law functioned as one

more means to order and make known the fate of the dead.

The Buddhist conception of retribution for earthly sins also underwent

significant change. The Buddhist concept of karmic destiny, for example, was

re-conceptualized according to Chinese notions of ancestor worship and filial

piety. Cycles of rebirth were no longer determined solely on the basis of the

individual's actions during life but were redefined as also dependent on the

actions and rituals conducted by the individual's living kin on behalf of the

deceased.88 In this way, Buddhism did not compete with filial piety but introduced

a new means of displaying reverence to the deceased's family members. Again,

this functioned as one more means to make known and also control the fate of the

dead and their movement through purgatory.

The introduction of the Buddhist notion of the ten kings put forward in The

Scripture on the Ten Kings also complemented an already established Chinese

conception of the afterlife as governed in the manner of terrestrial systems of judicial order. By at least the Han dynasty, for example, the power to determine

85Robert Ford Campany. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 368. Interestingly, when the term karma was first introduced into Chinese thought it was translated as baoying. Campany, 368. 86Teiser, The Scripture, 15. 87vonGlahn, 135. 88 Latter Days of the Law. 275-276.

39 the fate of the dead was commonly attributed to the Lord of Mount Tai (also

conceived of as Huangdi or the Celestial Thearch), chief and superior to a host of

officials who, similarly to magistrates of the terrestrial judicial system, reviewed

and recorded, in the registers of life and death,89 the life span as well as the good

and bad deeds of each individual under their jurisdiction. After death the deceased

passed under the judgment of the Lord of Mount Tai. The Lord of Mount Tai then

reviewed the records collected by his officials and sentenced the deceased

accordingly either to paradise or to the netherworld prison beneath Mount Tai. 90

Prior to the introduction of the Buddhist notions of purgatory into China, the

afterlife was thus already conceived as a celestial bureaucracy that functioned

similarly to terrestrial judicial systems.

The introduction of the Buddhist notion of purgatory into Chinese belief did

not therefore eclipse earlier Chinese views of the afterlife; instead, it

complemented the "system of judgment after death that had been in place for

centuries." Purgatory, as described in The Scripture on the Ten Kings, merely

added to an already bureaucratic and hierarchical system of judgment, ten kings or judges, an array of courtly magistrates as well as yaksas and ogres who dispensed

89 von Glahn, 53. 90 von Glahn, 53. 91 Mortuary documents discovered in Han tombs provide us with evidence of the conceptualization of the afterlife organized in the image of the Chinese judicial system. From the first century CE onward, for example, mortuary documents often took the form and style of Han dynasty legal plaints and address concerns with the proper sentencing of the dead. Most often addressed to Huangdi or the Celestial Thearch (gods whose reign and power were often conceived as interchangeable with the Lord of Mount Tai), the documents plead to the magistrates of the afterlife to verify that all documents have been reviewed and that no mistakes have been made in the recording of worldly deeds so that sentences may be fairly dispensed. These petitions corroborate our reading of early Chinese conceptualizations of the afterlife as a judicial system organized similarly to that of the terrestrial realm, and evidence Chinese concerns with the proper sentencing of the deceased. See von Glahn, 54-56 92 Teiser, The Scripture, 115.

40 punishment to sinners passing through each of the ten courts. The Scripture on

the Ten Kings thus rendered an already bureaucratic and hierarchical system more

complex.

Recent scholarship on the Buddhist-Chinese conception of purgatory has

focused almost exclusively on the bureaucratization of the afterlife. Scholars

agree that with the crystallization of the notion of purgatory conceived according to the ten kings, the netherworld became increasingly bureaucratized.94 They

argue that the bureaucratization of the underworld functioned as a means to make known and also control the mysterious realm of the afterlife and the fate of the dead within it.

Art historians have likewise examined images of the ten kings as illustrating the increasingly bureaucratic and hierarchical ordering of the concept of purgatory. Wen C. Fong, for example, examines tenth century illustrations of The

Scripture on the Ten Kings and argues that each scene was conceived in the image of "a typical Chinese magistrate's courtroom."95 Lothar Ledderose expands this argument and proposes a hypothetical reconstruction of the iconography of ten kings' images. He argues that representations of purgatory evidence the increasing bureaucratization of the concept of purgatory. Specifically, he argues that in representations of the ten kings from the tenth to the thirteenth century

9j These courtly magistrates include, as Ledderose points out, "judicial investigators (pingshi), legal auxiliaries (fashi), and assistants (cheng)" Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 184. 94 Important works written on the bureaucratization of the afterlife include, Von Glahn, Teiser, The Scipture; Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 163-185; Lothar Ledderose, "A Kings of Hell," in Suzuki Kei sensei kanreki kinen Chugoku kaigashi ronshu (Festschrift for Professor Suzuki Kei: Collected Articles on the History of Chinese Painting), 31-42 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1981); Jean Levis, Les fonctionnaires divins: politique, despotisme et mystique en Chine ancienne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, cl989) and Watanabe. 95 Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, $h-l4'h Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, c!992), 342.

41 each king is progressively "equipped with the paraphernalia of a Chinese magistrate official, such as brush and ink, documents and desk, and little by little they are given staff consisting of messengers, judicial assistants, officials, standard-bearers and constable."96 Ledderose concludes that "[t]he

07 bureaucratization of the underworld proceed[ed] with remarkable consistency."

And yet, while most scholars have acknowledged the bureaucratization and hierarchical reordering of the Buddhist conception of the underworld, none have closely examined the connection between the bodies used to represent the penitent in purgatory, their status as social and moral deviants and their relation to the bureaucratic staff of the underworld.

In what follows, I argue that the semi-naked and deformed body used to represent the penitent in purgatory functions as a visual motif which marks the penitent's moral and social deviance as well as his or her status as Other to the normative human being. I argue that by drawing on a pictorial vocabulary that deviates from the dominant aesthetic forms used to represent the normative human body in China (see chapter 1), the semi-naked and deformed body functions to define a type Other to the normative human being. Stripped of the clothing which usually serves to define, in art and in life, one's situatedness within the traditional Chinese social, moral and cosmological order, the semi- naked bodies of the penitent in representations of purgatory, I argue, function to make manifest the difference between the living and the dead, moral and immoral, human and non-human.

96 Ledderose, "A King of Hell," 40. 97 Ledderose, "A King of Hell," 40.

42 I begin by examining one of the earliest extant images of Hell, a ninth century wall painting from Bezeklik (figure 2.1). I am interested in this image for while it does not represent purgatory proper, the figures depicted within it nonetheless have significant similarities to later representations of the penitent in purgatory. In this image, nakedness, I argue, functions to visually communicate one's social and moral deviance as well as one's non-human status.

The upper portion of the Bezeklik painting represents the Bodhisattva

Ksitigarbha,98 whose image is now destroyed, surrounded by six wave-like bands.

Each band represents a different realm of rebirth. Only three of the six bands remain intact. They represent humans, animals and emaciated ghosts. The lower half of the painting depicts seven halls of hell. In each hall, sinners are depicted undergoing different types of torture.

In the image, human figures are differentiated from non-human figures through clothing, posture, and placement within specific spatial zones. The human figures, for example, are confined to one location, the upper wave-like band at the top right of the image. The band itself functions as visual aid in identifying the four figures represented therein. Since each band represents one of the six paths of rebirth, the band functions to reinforce our reading of the four figures as human.

Each human is depicted wearing a form of dress often linked to ones status as

Chinese literatus. Each wears a long robe tied by a sash and each wears a cap. The three completely visible humans stand in an upright position with hands clasped

The Bodhisattva is a being who has reached enlightenment but refuses Buddhahood to remain on earth in order to guide others toward salvation. In Chinese the name Ksitigarbha is translated to Ti Tsang.

43- in reverence of the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, whose image is now destroyed. They are also represented one following the other in an orderly line.

In contrast, the hungry ghosts, depicted within the band facing that representing the human path of rebirth, wear neither robe nor cap. They are naked.

The hungry ghosts are also emaciated. They are depicted with long slim limbs and ribs that protrude from their chests. Unlike the calm and composed posture of the human beings, the hungry ghosts are depicted in dynamic movement, some run with legs spread while others scream in agony with hands raised and mouths open.

Likewise, the damned in hell are represented semi-naked. In the lower left- hand corner of the Bezeklik painting, for example, the damned is depicted semi- naked with bare torso and legs. The figure is also depicted undergoing tortures as a consequence of his past misdeeds. His head is pulled back by a demon constable whose duty it is to mete out punishment in hell. The demon pours a liquid, probably molten lead, down the deceased's throat. This may represent the punishment for having told lies which is described in the Nikayas and functions to visually communicate the penitent's status as social or moral deviant."

In the image clothing plays a central role in differentiating human beings from hungry ghosts and hell dwellers. The centrality of clothing as marker of one's status was, in fact, common to figurative representation from as early as the

Han dynasty. For example, in his list of the paintings contained in the Lingguang

Palace, Wang Yanshou (c.a. 124-148 C.E.) describes that "clothing distinguishes

99 Stephen F. Teiser, "'Having Once Died and Returned to Life': Representations of Hell in Medieval China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 48 no. 2 (December 1988): 435.

44 officials...from commoners". In Wang's description, it is not merely clothing but the contrast between elaborately patterned robes and plain garments that visually define one figure as lower in rank or social status from the other.

In traditional China clothing functioned, as we have seen, as marker of belonging to and status within the moral and social scale which served to define the human being. Consequently, the nakedness of the hungry ghosts, beings defined because of their misdeeds in a past life to a state of continual hunger and existence in a body that is not quite human,101 and the nakedness of the damned, beings consigned because of their past misdeed to rebirth in hell, may be read as visually manifesting the penitent's social and moral deviance. Nakedness marks the penitent's non-belonging to the social and moral scale which defined the human being in China*

Similarly, nakedness in tenth century illustrations to The Scripture on the

Ten Kings serves as visual marker of one's social and moral deviance.

Illustrations to the Scripture on the Ten Kings dated to the tenth century typically contain fourteen illustrations. The first illustration depicts the setting in which the scripture was preached. In most representations, Sakyamuni sits between two

Audrey G. Spiro, Contemplating the Ancients: Aesthetic and Social Issues in Early Chinese portraiture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 22. 101 Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 221. 102 Teiser briefly discusses other artistic medium, including sculpture and wall painting, in which the ten kings are represented. See Teiser, The Scripture, 39-40. Teiser argues that early representation of the ten kings may be categorized, for convenience sake, into two types, based on format and subject matter. The first type includes hanging scrolls, which depict Ti Tsang Bodhisattva (Ksitigarbha in Sanskrit) and the ten kings. These representations have been defined by Teiser as iconic images. Teiser defines them as such because they are hierarchically organized around the central figure of Ti Tsang Boddhisatva. The logic, Teiser explains, "is spatial....[t]he figures...are ranked according to their distance from the center." Teiser, The Scripture, 42. The second type, and those that 1 discuss in this chapter, are illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten Kings.

45 disciples under a canopy suspended between two Sala trees. Below the Buddha are depicted the ten kings as well as the monk Tao ming and a golden lion (two figures often associated with Ti Tsang in Chinese folklore). Behind the Buddha and above the ten kings are four magistrates. The second illustration depicts the six bodhisattvas listed in the text. The third illustration, as Teiser argues, may be regarded as the first in a sequence of narrative illustrations.104 The image depicts a messenger dressed in black, holding a black flag and riding a black horse. The text describes that the messenger is sent by Yama to the house of the deceased in order to make sure proper offerings have been made.1 5 The following ten illustrations each depict one of the ten courts of purgatory through which the deceased must pass. The connection between the world of the living and the progress of the dead is represented not only through the depiction of the messenger in the third illustration, but by documents, spread on each king's desk, which record the offerings as well as the past deeds of the deceased. According to the laws of karma or baoyingXhe deceased's sentence corresponds proportionately to his or her past deeds. The final scene usually depicts sinners outside the walls of purgatory, no longer bound by cangues and with hands clasped in positions of

... 106 submission.

Each illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, "was conceived," Wen

C. Fong describes, as "a typical Chinese magistrate's courtroom"107 populated by

103 These motifs Teiser argues "locate[s] the scene in the city of Kusinagara as specified in the text." Teiser, The Scripture, 171. 104 On the narrative mode of representation see Teiser, The Scripture, 42. 105 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 179; Teiser, The Scripture, 172-173. 106 See Teiser, The Scripture, 171 -179 for the most in depth discussion of these illustrations to date. 107 Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation, 342.

46 figures which include the king, the twin boys of good and evil, assistants, virtuous persons, defendants, and sinners. The seventh illustration to The Scripture on the

Ten Kings (figure 2.2), for example, depicts the king behind his desk reviewing the records of the dead. To his left is an assistant and to his right are three donors, one offering reverence, the second a statue, and the third, a scroll. In front of the king is the scale of karma used to measure the good versus bad deeds of the individual. On each side of the scale are the twin boys of good and evil, whose job it is to record the good and bad deeds of each human being during his or her lifetime and to deliver those records to the ten kings after death. At the forefront of the image are two sinners, wearing loincloths and bound by cangues.

Beside them stands their guard and torturer. The illustration thus depicts purgatory as a judicial courtroom populated by judge, assistants and defendants, as well as the virtuous and those deemed guilty of earthly sins.

Illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten Kings not only function as visual aids in recounting the narrative of the text but also function to define the space to which the bodies of the dead were relegated and the judicial system through which their fate was governed. Illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten Kings also serve to picture the consequences of socially and morally deviant behaviour. In illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten Kings nakedness defines the social and moral deviant.

In an illustration of the second court (figure 2.3), for example, there is a clear differentiation between moral and immoral persons. The illustration depicts

108 Ledderose explains that the twins of good and evil are "recognizable by the circular pigtails behind their ears." Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 178.

47 a judge or king surveying the deceased's passage over the River Nai. According to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, all those passing through purgatory must cross the river. The river, as Teiser points out, marks a point of no return when the

"dead despair of turning back."109 During this phase, those deemed virtuous pass over the river by bridge. Those deemed immoral must cross through the treacherous waters of the river. The means of passage over the river therefore marks a differentiation between moral and immoral persons.

In the representation, moral status is also defined through the figure's sartorial attributes. Those deemed immoral are represented semi-naked while those deemed virtuous are represented wearing elaborate costumes. The virtuous women represented in the image are identifiable, for example, "by their lovely clothing, upright posture, and among women their hairpins and rouge."110 In the image the virtuous woman, who passes over the bridge, stands upright with hands clasped; she wears jewellery in her hair and is clothed in a robe of several different layers. In contrast, and much like the earlier representations of hell proper, the penitent depicted crossing through the river at the bottom of the image are pictured wearing only loin cloths. In the illustration, differentiation between the virtuous and the penitent is visually represented through sartorial attributes or lack thereof.

The importance of clothing in defining one's proper social and moral status is similarly reflected in the motif of the tree depicted at the right of the river. On the tree's branches hang clothing. Although no Chinese texts describe the purpose

109 Teiser, The Scripture, 173-174. '10 Teiser, The Scripture, 32.

48 of the tree we may infer from Medieval Japanese texts that the tree functions as "a scale...that measures the worth of people's past actions."111 Once measured, the sinners are deemed unworthy and are henceforth stripped of the clothing which had served to signal their position within the social and moral scale which defined the human being in China. As such, illustrations to The Scripture on the Ten

Kings reference a proper social and moral order to which the penitent do not belong. Since nakedness signals non-belonging to the proper Chinese social and moral order, the semi-naked bodies of the penitent may consequently be read as visually manifesting their deviance from the normative human being.

Later images of purgatory based on the notion of the ten kings developed in

The Scripture on the Ten Kings from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced in the workshops of Ningbo (located in present day Zhejiang) draw increasingly on terrestrial motifs to define purgatory as a site organized in the image of the terrestrial judicial system and designed to govern the fate of the dead. These terrestrial motifs also function, however, as comparative reference against which to read the significance of the semi-naked bodies represented in the Ningbo scrolls. These motifs function to reference a system of proper social, moral and cosmological order against which one may read the nakedness of the penitent in purgatory as sign of deviance from, and non-belonging to, the normative Chinese social and .moral order.

The Ningbo scrolls were produced in sets often for sale on the market. Each hanging scroll depicts one court scene. The upper portion of each scroll illustrates a scene of judgment populated by figures that include the king, his officials and

111 Teiser, The Scripture, 33.

49 assistants. The lower portion of each scroll illustrates a scene of suffering and punishment. In the lower section of each scroll the penitent are depicted undergoing tortures as a consequence of their past misdeeds.

In his analysis of the Ningbo scrolls, Lothar Ledderose argues that "the painters transformed the otherworldly Buddhist hells into courtrooms and the kings into bureaucrats by taking certain motifs and figure types from secular subjects and incorporating them into the depiction of hell."1 In addition to the skirted desk, elaborate dress, scrolls, pen and ink, represented in earlier tenth century images of purgatory, motifs such as an armchair with silk backing, a painted screen and a balustrade are, Ledderorse argues, borrowed from the terrestrial realm. They function to represent purgatory in the image of the terrestrial judicial system.

In a representation of the seventh king from the workshop of Lu Xinzhong executed in Ningbo in the thirteenth century (figure 2.4), the king is, for example, depicted as a Chinese magistrate. He wears a pastel blue robe with red patterned detailing, his skin is light and his fingernails long. He is also accompanied by two assistances. The two assistants hold scrolls which record the good and bad deeds of the defendant. The kings legitimacy is marked not only through the character wang (king) on his crown but also, and as Ledderose explains, through the representation of "[fjhe boy behind his chair [who] holds a square box covered by

112 Wantanabe argues that these sets were the first to include "full hell scenes." See Wantanabe, An Iconographic Study, 4, 37'. 113 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 163. Ledderose refers to these representations as images of Hell. It is more accurate to describe them as representations of the ten kings of purgatory.

50 a cloth, in which the seal of office that guarantees the king's legitimacy is kept."114

The king also sits on an armchair draped with a patterned cloth. Ledderose points out that this motif was similarly used in depictions of members of the imperial family. He cites as an example the painting Zhangyi Empress Li, Consort of Emperor Zhenzong (r.998-1022) (figure 2.5). In the painting the emperor's consort sits in a high armchair on which an elaborately patterned cloth is draped.115 The armchair, like a throne, frames the consort and visually communicates her status as a member of the imperial family. In the Ningbo painting, the armchair motif is borrowed and re-contextualized. The armchair functions here to signal the authority and power of the king.

In the representation of the seventh court, the king also sits in front of a screen depicting trees and mountains. According to Ledderose the screen, like the armchair, "serve[s] to frame a sitter and to augment his or her stature."116 In his book The Double Screen (1996) Wu Hung looks specifically at the function of the screen in Chinese painting and imperial ritual. He argues that the screen

117

"transforms spaces into places that are definable, manageable, and obtainable."

Consequently, the figure in front of the screen, Wu argues, occupies a privileged position of authority, the authority to survey the place defined by the screen. Wu

Hung explains that within imperial ritual the screen "secures a hierarchic relationship between the emperor within the frame and his subjects beyond the

11 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 165. 115 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 180. 116 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things,] 81. 117 Wu Hung, 11.

51 I |J> frame." Similarly, the screen functions in the representation of the seventh king to impose a hierarchic relationship between the king in front of it and the figures beyond its frame. Within the Ningbo scroll the screen thus serves two primary functions. First, the screen functions to define the king, like the Chinese emperor, as highest ranking and most authoritative within the underworld court. Second, the screen confers to the king the power to survey both the place defined by the screen and those within it.

In the hanging scroll, the balustrade painted in the background of the image also defines a specific space. Ledderose suggests that the balustrade motif was often used in traditional Chinese painting to define an aristocratic setting, often the enclosed garden next to a mansion. Similarly, the balustrade depicted in the scroll functions to link the space around the king to the respected interiors of aristocratic or imperial homes and gardens. The balustrade therefore also functions to visually link the king to an upper social class, specifically, government officials. Ledderose in fact argues that "the entire ambiance of the scenes is modeled on what was appropriate for government officials." For example, in a fifteenth century image, Eighteen Scholars in a Garden (figure 2.6), motifs such as the desk, writing utensils, screen and balustrade are used as external attributes which define the individuals' status as scholar official.

Similarly, the king's authority is defined through the motifs of desk, scroll,

1,5 Wu Hung, 13. 119 For more on the significance of screens in Chinese representations see Wu Hung's book on the subject. 120 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 181.

52 armchair, screen and balustrade which accompany each king in the depiction of the ten courts.

In China, the transition between life and death (the period during which the individual is transformed from living being to ancestor or, according to the

Buddhist faith, a period between life and rebirth)121 was continuously conceptualized in time and location as a liminal and often dangerous zone since it existed beyond the world of proper order, somewhere between death and rebirth.

By representing purgatory in the image of terrestrial hierarchical and bureaucratic systems the Ningbo scrolls function to domesticate the otherwise foreign or unknown realm of the afterlife. They do so by borrowing terrestrial motifs which serve to define the afterlife and its inhabitants as organized according understandable forms of order making. The kings and their assistants were conceived as similar to judges and magistrate of the terrestrial world while the fate of the dead and their movement through purgatory was represented as organized according to a system similar to that of the Chinese judicial system.

While the upper portion of the Ningbo scrolls function to make known the means by which the dead were judged and their movement through purgatory organized they also provide, through their depiction of terrestrial motifs, a comparative reference against which to read the significance of the semi-naked bodies represented therein.

In the Ningbo scrolls figures are hierarchically ranked according to their status within the underworld bureaucracy. The kings and their assistants occupy the upper register of the pictorial space, defendants are pictured in the middle

121 Teiser, The Ghost Festival, 220.

53 ground of the painting and sinners are represented at the bottom of the image.

Their status is marked not only through their position within the handscroll but also, and as we have seen, through their clothing and the attributes that surround them. In the representation of the seventh king, for example, the king is depicted in the top register of the painting reviewing the deeds of a woman's past life before writing down his final verdict. He wears an elaborately detailed robe and sits behind a desk, pen in hand, surrounded by attributes such as armchair, screen, and balustrade. These attributes, as we have seen, were associated to scholar officials, their studios and gardens, and served in Chinese figurative painting to represent the individual's situatedness within the social order which defined the human being. The king is defined as highest ranking within the hierarchical order of the afterlife.

The woman about to face judgment by the seventh king is depicted lower within the pictorial space. She is represented in the middle register of the hanging scroll. She is dragged before the king by a demon that pulls her by the handle of the cangue around her neck. Behind her, a baby tugs at her skirt. Her status is reflected not only by her relative position within the handscroll but also through attributes such as the cangue in which she is bound and the clothing she wears. In contrast to the elaborately dressed king, his office boys, and even the demons who wear patterned shirts, and sometimes pants, the woman is robed in a simple garment and bound by a cangue.122 Her simple robe, the cangue, as well as her

122 The cangue as a form of punishment "[is] specified in Tang and Song codes of penal law." Teiser, The Scripture, 34.

54 position at the center of the scroll define her position as defendant within the hierarchical scale of the afterlife.

The figures depicted lowest in the pictorial space are those sinners who acted outside the laws and social norms of their society and who must therefore face punishment at each of the ten courts for their earthly sins. They are emaciated, bloody and semi-naked. In the illustration to the seventh court, for example, the two male sinners wear only loincloths revealing their naked chests and legs. The female sinner is depicted with bare torso. As punishment for their earthly sins, all three are bound by their feet to a pole while their hands and arms are nailed to the floor with daggers. On the right, the two male sinners are depicted with blood pouring from their mouths. Each has wounds on his buttocks and arms. To the left, the woman, similarly bound, is held back by a demon that stabs at her body. Her shirt has been torn to reveal both of her breasts. Blood pours from the side of her chest as well as the side of her face, (figure 2.7) The sinner's nakedness and their relegation to the lower register of the scroll marks their difference from the kings and their assistants represented above.

As we have seen, the upper portion of the Ningbo scrolls, in their reference to the sartorial, bureaucratic and hierarchical terrestrial systems, may be taken as a reflection of the Chinese conception of proper order. In China that order defined what it meant to be Chinese and also human. The sartorial conventions drawn upon to depict the kings and their assistants seem to form a contrast, however, with the nakedness of the figures depicted lowest in the pictorial space. This contrast defines the penitent's difference from the kings and their assistants.

Moreover, if the king's attributes serve to reference the normative social and

55 moral order, then the penitents' nakedness, which marks their difference from the kings, may also be read as marking their difference from the normative human body. As such, nakedness, in images of purgatory, may be said to reflect one's non-belonging to the normative social and moral order and one's status as Other to the human being in China.

The penitent's status as Other to the normative human being is also hinted at through a specific mode of viewing which structures an identification between the viewer outside the scroll and the king represented within it. Earlier I made reference to the screen depicted behind the king. Drawing on Wu Hung's analysis,

I argued that as a framing device the screen functions to "transforms spaces into places that are definable, manageable, and obtainable,"123 and delineates a given position from which to survey the place defined by the screen. The screen thus structures a vantage point from which the scene should be viewed and therefore also functions, I would like to add, to define a point of identification between the viewer outside the image and the emperor who watches over the sinners in purgatory. Given the hierarchical organization of the Ningbo scrolls, and the clearly defined differentiation based on sartorial attributes and placement within the hierarchical composition between king and penitent, the viewer's identification with the Emperor also implies his or her differentiation from the sinners depicted at the bottom of the screen. This differentiation functions to highlight the difference between the penitent in purgatory and the viewer, in other words, social deviant and human being.

Wu Hung, 11.

56 In images of purgatory based on The Scripture of the Ten Kings produced between the tenth and the thirteenth century, nakedness defines the socially and morally deviant body. These images also function, however, to visually structure a differentiation between the deviant bodies of the penitent and the human body.

In so doing, they picture the social and moral deviant as Other to the normative human being. Images of purgatory also function to represent purgatory in the image of terrestrial forms of order making as a means to structure and control those deviant bodies. Images based on The Scripture on the Ten Kings, therefore, provide a site, purgatory, where deviant beings could be represented and yet safely ordered in and relegated to a world defined as existing beyond terrestrial realities. As such, Images of purgatory function to represent the social and moral deviant while not directly threatening a vision of the terrestrial world and its inhabitants as properly ordered.

57 :• r K:;

Figure 2.1 Anonymous, Hell Scenes, fragment of a wall painting from Bezelik, 9th century CE, 175 x 100cm. Museum fur Indische Kunst, Berlin. Reprinted in Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 176.

58 Figure 2.2 Anonymous, seventh illustration to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, the fourth king, 10th century. Reprinted from Stephen Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 186.

Figure 2.3 Anonymous, fifth illustration to The Scripture on the Ten Kings, the second king, 10th century. Reprinted from Teiser, The Scripture, 185.

59 Figure 2.4 Workshops of Lu Xinzhong, The Seventh King, 13 century, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 85 x 50.5 cm. Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin. Reprinted from Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 168.

60 Figure 2.5 Anonymous, Zhangyi Empress Li, Consort of Emperor Zhenzong (r. 998-1022), first half of the lll century, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 177 x 120.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Reprinted from Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 180.

61 :'3*: IQto?

?••'; •

Figure 2.6 Anonymous, Eighteen Scholars in a Garden, fifteenth century (?) copy of Song-dynasty composition, hanging scroll (from set of four), ink and colour on silk, 173.7 x 103.5 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Reprinted from Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 182.

62 Figure 2.7 Workshop of Lu Xinzhong, The Seventh King (Detail), 13 century, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 85 x 50.5 cm. Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin. Reprinted from Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 168.

63 Chapters

Nakedness and the Foreign Body: Demons in Representations

ofZhong Kui

This chapter examines the conception and pictorial representation of demons. I argue that demons, in the history of Chinese thought, were consistently defined as non-human and consequently associated with regions beyond the periphery of the civilized center. Specifically, I examine the representation of demons in images of

Zhong Kui that are associated to the New Year's exorcism in China. I argue that deformity and semi-nakedness references an anomalous body as a means to designate beings that exist, or were supposed to exist, on the periphery of civilized society.

Throughout the history of Chinese religion, and common to vernacular and folk belief, demons were generally associated with one pole of a set of conceptual opposites.1 These conceptual opposites include: demon vs. human, barbarian vs. civilized, periphery vs. center, wilderness vs. civilization, non-Han vs. Han

Chinese. These distinctions, formulated early in the history of China, influenced conceptualizations of the empire, its inhabitants, as well as relations with

'barbarians' and foreigners throughout the imperial age.

These opposites also coincided with a conceptualization of space, dominant in imperial China from at least the Qin dynasty (221 BC-206 BC).125 In this conception, space was organized into bounded units according to a concentric

124 Robin S. Yates, "Boundary Creation and Control Mechanisms in Early China," in Boundaries in China, ed. John Hay, 56-80 (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 59. 125 On boundary creation and space in the Qin dynasty see Yates, 59-64.

64 hierarchy emanating outward from the exemplary center, the imperial capital.

Although this organization, as Yates argues, "existed on the ideal level" it nonetheless functioned to inform conceptualizations of the inhabitants of peripheral regions. The imperial center was conceived as civilized and populated by Han-Chinese while peripheral zones were conceived as wild and populated by foreign or barbarian peoples. Demons were often associated with foreigners and barbarians and were consequently conceived as properly inhabiting regions peripheral to the Chinese center.

This ideal characterization of space was, early on, represented in the foundation myths of China, the most famous of which surround the ancient sage

Yu. In the Yugong, a chapter of the Classic of Documents}21 Yu is described as having formed the nine continents said to comprise the known and habitable world. Through the draining of flood waters, the establishment of set paths for rivers, the fixing of frontiers, and the implementation of tribute systems between

'barbarian' groups and the emperor, Yu created a world habitable for humans.

Robert Campany has aptly explained that these myths and "[t]he verbs describing

Yu's labors read like a lexicon of the creation of order from disorder: he regulates, adjusts, lays out, measures, fixes."128 Yu therefore created order in the world. He made each region habitable, and he also fixed a system of relations between the imperial center and peripheral zones.

126 Yates, 62. In general scholars agree that these concentric zones where conceptualized as square. Campany, 105, no. 10. 127 The original text now forms a part of the Shujing {Classic of Documents). Although some scholars have dated the Shujing to the third millennium, most scholars agree that the text is much more recent. It is now dated between the fifth and the third centuries BCE. On the dating of the Shujing see Campany, 104-105 no. 7. 128 Campany, 105.

65 The text also classifies different geographic zones within a hierarchy dependent on distance from the imperial center. In the text, people's proximity to the capital, or center, also designated one's "degree of culture (including agriculture)."129 Within this conceptualization, not only the world but the people who inhabited the different concentric zones were, therefore, defined in relation to distance from the imperial and cultural center.

From at least the Han dynasty, Yu was also identified as the ruler who ordered the forging of the famous nine metal cauldrons. These cauldrons symbolize not only the virtue of the ruler but his dominion over the known world since, as Campany points out, "their number symbolizjes] the totality of the known habitable world." In the myths, people inhabiting each of the nine continents were said to have paid tribute to Yu by presenting him with raw metals as well as representations of the flora, fauna, and anomalous creatures inhabiting each region. Yu is said to have cast nine bronze cauldrons made from the metal collected in each continent, which depicted the strange and distinctive creatures inhabiting each specific region. The myth is described in the Zuozhuan. It reads:

"Formerly, when the Xia dynasty had reached the height of its virtue, [people in] the [nine] distant regions made pictures of the strange beings [in their respective areas] and presented metal as tribute to the nine governors. With the metal, [the ruler Yu] caused cauldrons to be cast on which these beings were represented; [images of] the hundred strange beings were prepared. In this way people were made to recognize [all] spirits and evil influences, so that, when they traveled over rivers and marshes and through mountains and forest, they would encounter no adversities... By these means concord reigned between those above^ and those below, and the people received the favor of Heaven" ' '

™ Campany, 106. 130 Campany, 104. 131 Chunqiu zuozhuan zhengyi, 21(368, year 3) quoted in Campany, 103.

66 Robert Campany argues that within centrist ideologies, attempts to control the periphery are often manifest through "cosmographic discourse -as well as by other means, decidedly more overt and violent means -to 'encompass,'

'domesticate,' or somehow 'cope with' the periphery and thus subsume anomaly under order." Yu's act of forming the nine provinces and casting the nine cauldrons may thus be understood as a form of cosmographic collection. In cosmographic collection, Campany explains, "the writing down of what was collected played a key role."133 "[Wjriting -verbal as well as pictorial representation," he explains, "served an apotropaic function because it fixed and displayed the otherwise shifting and hidden forms of spiritual beings...especially those anomalous beings hovering at the periphery of 'normal'."134 The act of representing the hundred strange beings on the nine cauldrons thus functioned as a means to order anomaly by making it known or domesticating it through representation. Yu's act of casting the nine cauldrons affirmed, as von Glahn argues, "his dominion over the entire world, including regions beyond his own ken, and all of its creatures."

The nine cauldrons legend also highlights an attempt to order anomaly by dividing anomaly "into parts and assigning these parts to distinct places in some hierarchical and taxonomic scheme." This act of emplacement, Campany argues, may generally be understood as another mode of collection "informed by

132 Campany, 9. 133 Campany, 122. 134 Campany, 122. 135 von Glahn, 80. 136 Campany, 9.

67 'a structure of desire,' of both temporally closing and ultimately preserving the gap between center and periphery." The collection thus functions to order and ultimately to make "manifest the difference between the royal center and its periphery."138 In the nine cauldrons legend the peripheral is associated with uncultured lands, strange spirits and evil influences.

These legends therefore reflected and also functioned to reinforce and structure Chinese conceptualizations of space and the proper habitation of those spaces. Early in the history of Chinese thought, space was thus organized into bounded units defined through distance from the imperial center. Persons within these zones were defined within hierarchical relations of lord/subject, father/son, ruler/minister139 while the relationship between these zones was defined according to a hierarchy based on distinctions between center/periphery, cultured/cultureless, civilized/ barbarian. Demons and evil spirits came to occupy, much like barbarians and foreigners, spaces on the periphery of the civilized center.140

IJ7 Campany, 9. 138 Campany. 103-104. Similar distinctions were put forward in texts concerning the Chinese tribute system. For example, Pan Hu, in his history of the Han dynasty, outlined a theory of imperial foreign relations founded on the conception of hierarchical relations based on distance from the civilized center. According to Pan Ku, Han Chinese should be understood as inner (net) peoples and barbarians as outer (yvai) peoples. Once fixed, this spatial categorization structured relations between those inhabiting inner and outer zones. According to Pan Hu this included, for example, tributary relations based on distance from the inner and central Chinese empire. See Wang Gungwu, "Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia: A Background Essay," in The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations, John K. Fairbank, ed. 34-62 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 40-41. 139 Angela Zito argues that in China /;' (ritual) functioned as "finely differentiated practices that created a network of relationships within which situated subjectivities came into being." For a list of these 'situated subjectivities see Zito, "Silk and Skin," 106. 140 Geographical knowledge, the bounding and mapping of space and the collection of tribute, served to name zones, define relations and order the universe and its inhabitants. This omniscience, von Glahn points out, "conferred power [to the ruler, or the center] over not only the mortal realm, but also the unseen realm of gods, ghosts, and demons", von Glahn, 79. von Glahn argues that "the sage-kings tamed the natural world, rendering it fit for human habitation; they

68 Yet demons continually threatened, at least in the imagination of the

Chinese, to cross these boundaries and disturb proper order. For example, demons or evil spirits known as Shanxiao were described as continually threatening to cross the boundary between their proper habitat, in the mountains and forests outside the imperial center, and the urban centers and cultivated fields of the empire.141 Illness too was often associated, in traditional China, to the presence of demonic or malefic forces in the body. This understanding of illness demonstrates one more way in which disorder was conceptually linked to the transgression of demonic forces beyond their proper habitat.

In the late Han dynasty, Cai Yong (132-192), for example, described the primary function of the Great Exorcism, a ritual conducted at the Midwinter La festival just before the New Year, as means to expel plague demons from the palace in order to recreate order within the cultivated center of the empire.

According to another late Han text, Ode to the Eastern Capital by Zhang Heng, the ritual involved a shaman like exorcist known as fangxiang who performed "a series of purgations aimed at eradicating twelve classes of demons."143 While palace attendants masqueraded as demons, in costumes of fur, feathers and horns, the fangxiang called on deities to help exorcise demons. The fangxiang performed a shamanistic role, impersonating and allowing others to visualize the demons they sought to exorcise.144 These rituals were not only performed in such official

instilled discipline and harmony in the human community by devising codes of social conduct; and they brought order to the cosmos by establishing boundaries that separated heaven from earth, human from beast; and civilization from barbarism." von Glahn, 27. 141 On Shanxiao see Richard von Glahn, 78-97. 142 For more on Cai Yong and the New Years exorcism see von Galhn, 104. 143 For a more detailed description of this ritual see von Glahn, 104. 144 von Glahn, 105.

69 settings. Certain rituals, called Nuo, were also performed in individual households

on New Years Eve to purge sickness and pestilence from the home. During the

later Tang dynasty, no mention is made in texts of the fangxiang exorcist of

earlier times; however, texts do continue to describe the Nuo ritual. Tang texts

also describe the purpose of the ritual, not to exterminate demons and evil spirits

but to expel them, in von Glahn's words, "beyond the frontier, at a safe remove

from the community."145 Interestingly, this expulsion to a space beyond the

civilized community speaks to the conceptualization of a proper habitat for

demons in zones peripheral to the Chinese empire. The Nuo rituals therefore

functioned to define the anomalous and also to recreate order within the imperial

center through the expulsion of those anomalous beings who threaten to disturb

the 'normal', civilized order.

Nuo rites in the Tang dynasty typically called upon the Demon Queller,

Zhong Kui, to "drive away malicious spirits".146 In this chapter I examine

representations of Zhong Kui directly related to the exorcism of demons.147 Since

the 1970s, several scholars have researched depictions of Zhong Kui in

conjunction with the theme of expelling demons. To date, however, no scholar

has examined the representation of Zhong Kui and demons in connection to

concepts of the body, sartorial attributes and identity in China. In this chapter, I

M5vonGlahn, 105. 146vonGlahn, 106. 147 Stephen Little and Fong in their respective works on Zhong Kui have traced the development of Zhong Kui through both literary and visual records dating from the Tang to the Ming dynasty. They have shown that variations on the theme proliferated including, amongst others, depictions of Zhong Kui dancing, Zhong Kui playing the weiqi, Zhong Kui with his family, Zhong Kui in a wintry grove and Zhong Kui carrying off demons, see Stephen Little, "The Demon Queller and the Art of Qiu Ying (Ch'iu Ying)," Artibus Asiae 46, no. 1/ 2 (1985); 5-128 and Mary H. Fong, "A Probable Second: 'Chung K'uei' by emperor Shun-chih of the Ch'ing Dynasty," Oriental Art 23, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 423-437.

70 argue that sartorial attributes play a central role in defining identity in these depictions; more specifically, one's belonging or non-belonging to normal society.

The origins of the legend of Zhong Kui, the Demon Queller, and the history of his representation are traditionally said to date to the Tang dynasty and the dream experience of the emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-55).148 Although there is evidence to suggest that the origins of Zhong Kui stretch further back,1 it was during the Tang dynasty that the name Zhong Kui was invariably associated to the demon queller and the exorcism of demons and evil spirits on the eve of the New

Year. Mary H. Fong and others have identified a record of the emperor's encounter with Zhong Kui from the 16th century anthology of popular beliefs and practices, entitled Tianzhorig ji (1589), as the closest extant record to the original

Tang legend.150 The anecdote reads:

One afternoon in the Kaiyuan era (713-742), Minghuang [the emperor Xuanzong], feeling ill after he had returned from a round of bow-and-arrow practice at Li Shan, fell asleep. He soon saw in a dream a small-size demon, wearing only knee-length trousers and one shoe —the other being tied at his waist -and holding a bamboo fan, in the act of stealing his favorite consort's

148 For more information on the origins of the Tang legend see von Glahn, 123; Little, "The Demon Queller" 22-23; for an amalgamation of earlier and later versions of the myth see E.T.C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (New York: The Julian Press, 1961), 99-100. 149 As early as the Han dynasty, for example, a weapon used for exorcism, also called Zhong Kui, is recorded in the lyric's of Ma Rong when describing the Great Exorcism. Though the characters used to name the weapon differ from those used in the name of the Demon Queller von Glahn argues that "it is possible that the spirit's unusual name derived from these magical hammers." See von Glahn, 123. This association was also noted by scholars of the Ming dynasty, particularly Gu Yanwu who in his Ri zhi lu argues that "Zhong Kui the demon slayer originated from its homophone zhong kui, a mallet which ancient Chinese used as a weapon for expelling evil spirits." See Stephen Little, "The Demon Quellor, 24 no. 94. Mary H. Fong also notes that two Song texts record the name Zhong Kui on a stone stele and a stone epitaph dated from the six dynasties. See Mary H. Fong, "A Probable Second 'Chung K'uei,'" 127. 150 Fong, "A Probable Second" 'Chung K'uei,'" 427; Little, "The Demon Queller," 22-23; von Glahn, 123-124; Sherman E. Lee, "Yen Hui, The Lantern Night Excursion of Chung K'uei" The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 49 (February 1962): 38.

71 embroidered perfume-bag and his own jade flute. Then, instead of escaping, the strange being began frolicking around the palace grounds with the loot. Minghuang therefore approached him and demanded an explanation. The demon respectfully replied that his name was Xu Hao and explained that 'Xu' stood for 'stealing indiscriminately for the sake of fun' and 'Hao' for 'replacing man's joy with sorrows'. Hearing this, the emperor became angry and wanted to call for his body guards. But at that very moment, a large size demon, wearing a tattered hat, blue robe, horn waist-belt and black boots appeared and nabbed the thief. Immediately afterwards, he proceeded first to gouge out the victim's eyes, then tore him up into pieces and finally ate him. When the emperor asked him who he was, the Demon Queller introduced himself as Zhong Kui, a jinshi from Zhongnan, who ashamed at having failed the next higher degree of examination during the Wude era (618- 627), had committed suicide by dashing his head against the palace steps. He further mentioned that because Emperor Gaozu awarded him an honorable burial of a court official of the green-robe rank, he had vowed to rid the world of mischievous demons like Xu Hao. At these words, Minghuang awoke and found himself fully recovered. Without delay he summoned Wu Daozi and requested him to paint a portrait of the Demon Quelller as he had seen in his dream. When it was finished, the emperor examined it carefully and said, 'You and 1 must have had a similar vision!' And he awarded Wu one hundred taels of gold."151

The history of the representation of Zhong Kui is thus said to begin with the

8th century work by Wu Daozi. The painting, now lost, is described in the Tu hua jianwen zhi. The text reads:

"Of old, Wu Tao-tzu [Wu Daozi] painted a Chung K'uei [Zhong Kui] dressed in a blue robe, wearing [only] one shoe, and with a squint eye. He had a ceremonial tablet at his waist and a cap on his disheveled head; in his left hand he was clutching a demon, while with his right he gouged out its eye. The brush strokes had an intense forcefulness, and the work really was a supreme masterpiece of painting."152

151 Chen Wenzhu's tanzhongji (1589), reprint, Taipei, 1964, 118. quoted in Stephen Little, The Demon Queller, ll-l'i from a translation by Fong. "A Probable Second 'Chung K'uei'," 427-428. 152 Kuo Jo-Hsu Experience in Painting (T'u-Hua Chien-Wen Chih): An Eleventh Century History of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in Facsimile, trans. Alexander C. Soper (Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951), 100. Although there are no extant Wu Daozi paintings, most scholars refer to a rubbing of the stone relief at Dongyue Temple, Quyang, Hebei as exemplary of his style. Fong and Lee also argue that a wall painting at Foguang

72 In both texts Zhong Kui is defined as a figure that rids the world of mischievous demons to repay the Emperor Gaozu for the "honorable burial as court official of the green-robe rank." And yet, Zhong Kui is described as both a scholar and a demon. His sartorial and corporeal attributes reflect this ambiguous position. For example, he is described as "a large size demon," with squint eye and dishevelled hair that appears suddenly and rids the world of mischievous demons, but also as scholar-official with sartorial attributes that include a hat, blue robe and ceremonial tablet. As both scholar official and demon, Zhong Kui occupies an ambivalent position hovering somewhere between the identity of human and non-human, literati and demon. As a figure who embodies these two identities Zhong Kui was understood as a kind of bridge between the world of the cultivated center and the world of demons. This may be why Zhong Kui, from at least the Tang dynasty, was symbolically positioned to enact the ritual function of expelling demons to restore order in the imperial center.

In fact, images of Zhong Kui, by at least the Tang dynasty, had gained a clear apotropaic function. In the Tang dynasty, for example, it was common practice for the emperor to commission images of Zhong Kui from artists in the

Hanlin academy to be given as gifts to his courtiers around the New Year. By

Temple at Wutaishan, Shanxi, is exemplary of his style. See Sherman E. Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui, Demons and the New Year" Artibus Asiae 53, no. 1 / 2 (1993): 212; for copies of both representations see, Mary H. Fong, "Wu Daozi's Legacy in the Popular Door Gods (Menshen) Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong," Archives of Asian Art 42 (1989): 10-11. 153 Still extant are letters of thanks for the receipt of these images, see Mary H. Fong, "A Probable second 'Chung K'uei," 428. In Huang Xiufu's Yizhou munghua lu it is recorded that by the tenth century "each year, at the Winter's end, those in the Hanlin Academy who were skilled in painting ghosts and spirits customarily presented paintings of Zhong Kui to the court" quoted from Huang Xiufu, Yizhou minghu lu (Record of Famous Painters of Yizhou [Sichuan]. 1006. reprinted in

73 the Song dynasty, these evil expelling images were mass produced in painted or printed form, sold or given as gifts in the market at the New Year, and hung as door guardians to protect each home from demonic invasion.154

The images I examine in this chapter are those directly related to the exorcism of demons meted out by Zhong Kui. They date from the Yuan and Ming dynasties. I limit myself here to an analysis of two handscrolls, one from the Yuan dynasty painted by Yan Hui (active late thirteenth - early fourteenth century)

(Figure 3.1a-d),155 and another from the mid-Ming dynasty painted by Zhou Chen

(figure 3.2).

The handscroll by Yan Hui represents a procession of demons and Zhong

Kui. A colophon on a painting cited in Bian Yongyu's Shigutang shuhua huikao

(completed 1682) by Yu He and dated 1389 describes the painting by Yan Hui perfectly.156 One section of the colophon reads:

"One warm day this summer, Yen-te [Yan de] came to show me a handscroll, saying 'This is Chung K'uei's [Zhong Kui's] Lantern Night excursion by Yen Ch'iu-yueh' [Yan Hui]. Unrolling the scroll, I saw a small platoon of demons leading a procession. One is beating a drum; one is lifting a large rock; one is standing [on his head] up-side down and trying to drink; one walks while balancing a jar on his elbow; one is wielding a spear; one is brandishing a sword; one is dancing with a buckler [offensive shied]; one is busy with a large chopper; one holds a wine bottle, while the other is about to present a drink, one carries a chair, the other a ch'in [zither], books brush and ink stone. Following this is Zhong Kui himself, carried by three demons. Several demons walk behind as

Huashi congshu (Collected Texts on the history of Painting), vol. 2; 1375-1432 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1974), 2:21b-22a. in Stephen Little and Swan Eichman, Taoism and the Arts of China (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 272. 154 von Glahn, 123-125, Mary H. Fong, ""Wu Daozi's Legacy," 8; Little, "The Demon Queller," 30. 155 If the colophon describes the painting by Yan Hui it has since been removed from the painting. See Lee, "Yen Hui: The Lantern Night Excursion of Chung K'uei,"41 no. 2.

74 retainers; one holds a canopy, while the others beat a drum, play a flute, and sound musical clappers. The bizarre appearance of these demons is indeed the ultimate of form and gesture."

The demon procession, depicted in Yan Hui's scroll, is quite similar to that

I CO described in the colophon. The procession begins with a demon holding a gong, followed by a demon displaying a feat of strength by lifting a large rock.

Next, two demons perform acrobatic feats: one a handstand, the other, a balancing act, he carries a large vase on his elbow. Following these two demons are four others, displaying martial manoeuvres with weapons in hand. Next, a demon carries a bundle covered by some kind of material, perhaps an animal skin, and supported on a wooden frame, another carries objects usually attributed to the scholar-official including ink, brush and a bundle of silk or paper. They may be carrying Zhong Kui's luggage. In front of Zhong Kui stands a demon holding a wine jug and a ragged official holding up a plate and cup as offering to Zhong

Kui. Zhong Kui is depicted in official robe and cap carried by three demons.

Behind him are four demons, one holding a banana leaf umbrella, the others playing instruments including a drum, flute and a musical clapper.

Sherman E. Lee argues that the handscroll, originally titled The Lantern

Night Excursion of Zhong Kui after the colophon by Yu He, might be better described as "The New Year's Eve excursion of Zhong Kui" since it depicts 157 Quoted in Lee, "Yen Hui: The Lantern Night Excursion," 36. The complete colophon is quoted in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art; Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1980), 111. 1581 use the term procession for several reasons. First, it is used in the translation of the colophon. Second, procession describes "a long succession of people lined up one after the other." see Louis Marin, On Representation, trans., Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 39. Finally, procession has been linked to the "symbolic structure of ritual." See Marin, On Representation, 41.

75 elements common to that celebration. The Mengliang Lu, a thirteenth century record of the practices of Hangzhou during the New Years celebration, provides interesting parallels to Yan Hui's representation and serves, for Lee, as proof that

Yan Hui's representation was informed by contemporary practices surrounding the ritual expulsion of demons around the New Year. 159 The Mengliang Lu text reads:

"On the twenty-fourth day (of the twelfth lunar month) regardless of poverty or wealth, all prepare vegetarian food and sweet dishes to sacrifice to Zao ("the Stove God")...On the market streets are poor beggars, three to five men in a company, costumed as the figures of such as spirits and demons, Pan Guan, Zhong Kui and his younger sister. Beating gongs and striking drums from house to house they beg for money...The end of the twelfth month, popularly called 'the day the month is over and year is done' -is termed chuye (the eve of change). The official and commoner families, whether of great or small households, prepare wine, sweep the gates and beams, remove the dust and dirt, clean the halls and doors, change the door guardians, and hang (pictures of) Zhong Kui...In the forbidden Interior (of the Imperial Palace) a great exorcism is carried out and a demon expelling ceremony... Face masks are placed on the head, and clothes and costumes with multicolored embroidered designs are worn. Hands grasp golden spears, silver halberds, painted wooden knives and swords, multi- hued dragons and phoenixes, and many colored flags and pennons, and for amusement the musicians are costumed as...Pan Guan, Zhong Kui...Zao Jun...etc From the Forbidden Interior the drumming and blowing begin, and the exorcism of evil spirits proceeds out the Donghua Gate and around Dragon Bay"160

The Mengliang Lu's description of the New Years festival in Hangzhou has significant similarities with the demon procession depicted in Yan Hui's scroll. I will address these similarities later in this chapter but first, I examine another interesting association. The text, I believe, also invites association with the

Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 211. Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 211.

76 carnival or more broadly, ritual spectacle. Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of ritual, while primarily concerned with the function of ritual within Medieval European folk culture, is helpful as methodological tool and comparative reference against which to elaborate the particularities of the Chinese New Years festival as described in the text. In brief, Bakhtin argues that the ritual spectacle or carnival is primarily a period which marks a "breaking point in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man"161 and which constitutes a moment of change, revival and renewal. The carnival itself, Bakhtin explains, forms "a second world and second life" that exists outside officialdom, its rules and regulations. It involves all people regardless of the "barriers of caste, property, profession and age" and is a time when the usual laws of decorum and order are inverted. The carnival might in fact be considered an inversion of the extra-carnival life, in Bakhtin's words "a world inside out". Although Bakhtin's understanding of carnival life cannot be transplanted directly into the Chinese context, there do seem to be several similarities between the carnival and the New Years festival which help structure a reading of the New Years festival as a process of change and renewal.

First, the New Year's festival, like the medieval European carnival, included all people "regardless of poverty or wealth." Second, the festival marked a moment of disorder when the usual divisions between human and demon were suspended. The literal masquerading as demons or the Demon Queller performed by both beggars and officials of the court functioned to make visible the

161 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelias and His World, tans.. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 9. 162 Bakhtin, 10. 163 Bakhtin, 10.

77 transgression of the otherwise hidden spirits and evil demons into the space of the city. Third, the New Year's festival marked, like the medieval ritual spectacle, a period of change but also renewal. The night of the festival was termed chuye (the eve of change) and its ultimate purpose, the text claims, was to rid the world of evil spirits and demons in order to renew and revive proper order within the empire.

Louis Marin, in a chapter entitled "Establishing a Signification for Social

Space: Demonstration, Cortege, Parade, Procession (Semiotic Notes)" argues, similarly to Bakhtin, that fundamental to the structure of ritual is "the dual aspects of transgression and restoration of order,"164 primarily allowing for a "revaluation of the system, 'founding' it anew, practically and concretely."165 In his work,

Marin looks specifically at procession as a ritual form.166 According to Marin, one of the functions of the procession is to define a specific space. The Mengliang Lu text similarly highlights the procession as an important part of the New Year

Festival. Within the Chinese New Year's ritual, the anomalous body is made visible through the masquerading as demons and evil spirits by beggars and officials of the court. Once the anomalous body is made visible, the space into which the anomalous body has transgressed is also defined. In Hangzhou, for example, the New Year's procession functioned to delineate a site that stretched from the Forbidden Interior out the Donghua Gate and around Dragon Bay. This

Marin, On Representation, 48. 155Marin, On Representation, 47'. 156 Marin argues that the procession "stem[s] from the domain of rites and ritual ceremonies." Marin, On Representation, 41.

78 site marked the space beyond which demons were to be expelled. The New

Year's procession therefore functioned to define a specific and bounded space as the cultivated Chinese center. It also functioned as reenactment of the ruler's power to create order within the imperial center through the expulsion of beings who had transgressed the boundaries between their accepted habitats and the civilized center.

The New Year's festival is therefore comprised of three fundamental steps.

First, it serves a function similar to that of the collection. As we have seen, the collection serves to make known and control the anomalous by fixing and displaying it and thereby subsuming it under order. During the New Years festival this is achieved through the literal masquerading as demons and evil spirits by officials and beggars. Second, the procession defines the space of the civilized center and in so doing, also defines a space to which demons and evil spirits do not belong. Third, the festival marks a moment of change and renewal. The civilized center is purged of foreign demons and evil influences. As such, proper order is restored to the imperial center.

Although Yan Hui's representation is dated later than the Mengliang Lu's text, Lee argues that there is a high possibility that Yan Hui, an artist active in

Hangzhou, experienced similar celebrations. Lee also suggests that, at the time, there did exist images of Zhong Kui and his demon procession from Hangzhou.

These images were similar to that of Yan Hui's and may have served as

This space is described in the Mengliang lu cited in Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 211.

79 "typological and stylistic precedent^]" for the later Yan Hui work. Given the long history of the association between Zhong Kui and the New Years and the fact that Yan Hui depicts his demons in a procession, it is likely that Yan Hui's image does depict Zhong Kui on a New Year's night excursion.

In her analysis of strange tale collections, Sing-chen Lydia Chiang has shown that "textual representations of erotic, grotesque, fantastic, transforming, and evanescent bodies... produce semiotic and hermeneutic contexts from which the author's selves derive their own 'normality.'"169 In the Yan Hui scroll the visual representation of demons serves a similar function. Representations of the anomalous body serve to define the cultural center and normality by displaying

"what they are not."170 In Yan Hui's scroll, the demons's anomalous status is primarily defined through the semi-naked body. This nakedness does not merely mark the body stripped of sartorial attributes; nudity here is equated with a specific kind of body -the deviant and the anti-normative.

Interestingly, scholars have consistently recognized stylistic similarities between the demons depicted in images of Zhong Kui and those represented in the ten kings of hell produced in the workshops of Ningbo from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.171 Both Sherman E. Lee and Lothar Ledderose have identified a stylistic distinction between the upper and lower halves of the ten

168 Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 213. On early representations of Zhong Kui from Hongzhou see Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 212-213. 169 Sing-chen Lydia Chiang, Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 9. 170 Campany, 8. 171 Sherman E. Lee and Wai-Kam Ho, Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty (1279- 1368) (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1968), 34-35. Lee, "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 217.

80 kings scrolls.172 Lee points out that the shading technique used in the lower half of the Ningbo scrolls is "done in ink and models the musculature [of the demons] by forcing ink washes to the edges of the forms and plane." He argues that this technique differs from the straight and linear lines used to represent the scroll's upper half of judgment. Lee argues that the shading technique used in the lower half of the scrolls may derive from a "less classically Chinese mode of T'ang

[Tang] origin." This Tang technique ultimately derives, however, from "Western, or at least Central Asian styles involving relatively realistic modeling of grotesque musculature by means of light and shade".174 Lee and others argue that similar stylistic techniques were used to depict demons in images of Zhong Kui. In his analysis of the techniques used to represent demons, Lee links the techniques used to a conceptual association in China between demons and foreigners. He writes,

"[s]ince the demons populated the hells and paintings of the imported faith, Buddhism, and since foreigners, as any in-group knows, resemble demons; what could be more normal than their representation by the strange, barbarian methods of modeling rather than by the orthodox brush-line technique?"175

In opposition to the linear brush stokes and broad ink washes used in traditional Chinese figurative painting, concern for the representation of solid form and modeling, Lee argues, defines this foreign style and is used, he argues, to represent beings foreign to the civilized centers of the empire. Lee thus seems to argue that the representation of musculature as such falls outside the confines of pictorial civility and serves to define an anti-normative body or the foreign

172 Lothar Ledderose, "A King of Hell," 33-34; Sherman E. Lee and Wai-Kam Ho, 34-35. Lee, "YanHui, Zhong Kui," 217. 173 Lee and Wai-Kam Ho, 34. 174 Lee and Wai-Kam Ho, 39. 175 Lee, "Yen Hui: The Lantern Night Excursion," 39. see also Lee ""Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 217.

81 demons in both the ten kings scrolls and Zhong Kui images. In the following example, I argue that the semi-naked, overtly muscular and deformed body defines the demonic and delineates its difference from the normative human body.

Let us take the first demon depicted in the handscroll as a focus of analysis.

The figure is a gong beater. He holds a drum in his left hand and a drum stick in his right. He wears nothing but short, torn trousers. He has pierced ears and his hair is dishevelled. The demon's muscles are, as described by Lee, depicted using a specific shading technique. Ink is pushed toward the edges of each plane to form volumes defined by areas of shade and light. The demon's body seems almost realistically three dimensional against the blank background of the handscroll.

The demon's musculature highlights both his nakedness and his bodily deformity.

The demon's body is depicted with a jarring mixture of musculature and emaciation ultimately representing exaggerated bodily forms. The demon's facial features are likewise exaggerated, almost bestial; he has a broad flat nose, exaggerated brow and chin, while the corners of his mouth stretch as far back as the center of his cheeks. Interestingly, Robin S. Yates points out that the deformed body was, as early as the Qin dynasty, associated with one's status as not-human.

As early as the Qin dynasty, for example, there is evidence of laws which permit the infanticide of children born with deformities. These laws, Yates argues, were founded on the conception of the deformed body as sign of abnormality and consequent status as not human.

The demon's difference from the normative human being is visually communicated within the scroll through specific reference to the normative

176 Yates, 307 no. 84.

82 system which functioned to define the human being in China. The figure of Zhong

Kui references this normative system. Mary H. Fong, for example, has pointed out that Zhong Kui is represented "as a highly respectable court official who is accompanied by an impressive entourage of demon retainers."177 In the image,

Zhong Kui is depicted in an official Tang dynasty court robe and cap and is surrounded by demons that carry objects usually attributed to scholar-officials.

These include ink, brush and a bundle of silk or paper.178 As such, the representation offers a humorous reference to the sartorial system which functioned to define ones rank within the Chinese social order. And yet, the figure of Zhong Kui is also pictured as a hideous being, with protruding eyes, bushy beard and demonic retinue.

Within one image, then, there are two references - one to the Chinese bureaucratic and ritual order, and one to a body that falls outside that order. Both are embodied in the figure of Zhong Kui. Zhong Kui's sartorial attributes reference the normative Chinese order while Zhong Kui's hideous face and the demons that surround him delineate the supernatural and demonic side of his dichotomous identity. This dichotomous identity, as I have suggested, served to position Zhong Kui as a marginal figure, hovering somewhere between the identities of human and demon. As such, Zhong Kui may be understood as a figure that bridged the gap between the realm of the demonic and the civilized center. The representation of Zhong Kui serves, then, as visual reference to the

177 Fong, "A Probable Second 'Chung K 'uei'," 431. 178 Fong, "A Probable Second 'Chung K 'uei'," 431. 179 Later Ming dynasty images picture Zhong Kui as estranged scholar official. By the Ming dynasty Zhong Kui was often taken as patron deity of the scholar. See Lee "Yan Hui, Zhong Kui," 213 and also Little, "The Demon Queller," 40.

83 normative system to which demons do not belong, and functions to highlight the difference between the demonic or foreign and civilized body.

The semi-naked and deformed bodies of the demons in Yan Hui's painting therefore function to visually define a body anomalous to the normative Chinese individual. As an image which also depicts the New Year's excursion of Zhong

Kui, the anomalous bodies also reference those deviant beings that were to be expelled from the civilized center at the New Year. The semi-naked, muscular and deformed body therefore functions to pictorially link the demons in Yan Hui's scroll to those beings who existed, like 'barbarians', outside of the central and civilized Chinese zone, or in the wild and uncultivated forests and mountains at the center's periphery.

Although few representations from the Ming dynasty survive, literary records suggest that the subject of Zhong Kui remained popular throughout the dynasty.180 One surviving representation and my second and last example of the

Zhong Kui theme is a representation of Zhong Kui and his sister, parting ways before her marriage, by the artist Zhou Chen (figure 3.2). In the image Zhong Kui rides an ox and his sister, a horse. Both are accompanied by a procession of demons. On the painting there is a colophon written by Tang Yin, Zhou Chen's student. It reads in part:

"When his sister was to marry and the way parted them, His following accompanied her and then went into the netherworld .. .The God of heaven takes compassion on the living beings, And repeatedly orders the demons to be hunted. ...Inspecting this painting with its depiction of the supernatural, I bow in deep felt admiration And recall how Master Zhou

180 Fong, "A Probable Second 'Chung K'uei'," 423-437; Little, "The Demon Queller," 5-128.

84 Harmonizes his colors and masters the pure and white His wide mind embraces the vastness of the universe His painting gains power from a deep understanding of the netherworld. In this painting of Zhong Kui he has depicted The peace of earth and heaven when evil demons are expelled.181

The colophon presents us with a contemporary reading of the work and provides us with an analysis that mirrors some of the associations I have argued existed in traditional China between demons, foreigners and disorder. First, Tang

Yin associates demons to depictions of the supernatural and the netherworld. He writes that Zhou Chen depicts the supernatural and shows a great understanding of the netherworld. Implicit in this association is a link between demons and the foreign or non-human bodies which populate the netherworld. This association consequently implies the demons' non-belonging to the human world. Second,

Tang Yin also associates demons with disorder. Tang Yin writes that peace and order are restored only when evil demons are expelled. Tan Yin's statement therefore hints to an understanding of the normative or proper social order, which exists between heaven and earth, and also to the disorder that reigns when demons transgress the boundary between the human and non-human worlds. The colophon thus reflects a mid-Ming understanding of demons as foreign beings whose transgression into the civilized center creates disorder between heaven and earth.

'8I quoted in Mette Siggstedt, "Zhou Chen: The Life and Painting of a Ming Professional Artist," The Museum of Eastern Antiquities Bulletin (Stockholm) 54 (1982): 112-113. For a different translation of the same text see Little, "The Demon Queller," 39. The colophon makes reference to Zhong Kui's sister and her marriage. Mette Siggestedt describes that after his death Zhong Kui is said to have married off his sister to his friend Du Ping. Siggstedt, 159 no. 138

85 In Zhou Chen's painting, the demon's non-belonging to normal or Chinese society is depicted through the representation of the semi-naked body and the exaggeration of bodily and facial features. The demons' semi-naked bodies function to define their non-human or anti-normative status since, as we have seen, the naked body could not be accounted for within the sartorial system which functioned to define the human being in China. The demons' exaggerated bodily and facial features similarly functioned to define the demons' non-human status since such deformities, as we have seen, were often taken as sign of one's non- human status.

Let us take as an example the three demons pushing the ox on which Zhong

Kui sits. Interestingly, Zhong Kui functions in this image, as he did in Yan Hui's, to reference the system of order to which the bodies of the demons do not belong.

While Zhong Kui rides an ox, and wears a scholars robe and cap, which define his position within the Chinese social and moral order, all three demons are depicted with torn and tattered clothing and without cap. Two of the demons wear tattered shawl-like garments while the third is bare-chested. All three demons are balding and have dishevelled hair. The demons' lack of significant sartorial attributes signals their difference from the normative Chinese individual. The demons' non- human status is also signified through bodily and facial deformity. All three demons have misshapen heads. For example, one demon's head dips inward forming a concave shape, the second demon has horn like protrusions at the top of his hairline, while the third has a dramatically flattened forehead. Each demon has extremely low set ears, a flat broad nose and a protruding chin. The demon's semi-naked bodies as well as their bodily and facial deformities are constant

86 elements in images of Zhong Kui and function to reference the demon's

anomalous and foreign status.

Zhou's representation also includes reference to the demons' non-belonging

to the civilized centers of the empire. Like Yan Hui's representation of the Zhong

Kui theme, Zhou depicts the demons in his scroll in two processional lines. One

demon procession, including Zhong Kui, moves in the direction of the forest, r while the other, which includes Zhong Kui's sister, moves along a different path.

The procession, by this time a common feature in images of Zhong Kui,182 would

have recalled images of Zhong Kui and the New Year's excursion as well as the

ritual expulsion of demons from the city on the eve of the New Year. However,

unlike Yan Hui's depiction, Zhou sets the demon procession within a defined

space. The demons and Zhong Kui are now depicted in a snowy landscape, far

from the urban center of the empire. This may be why Tang Yin writes that the

painting depicts "[t]he peace of earth and heaven when evil demons are

- expelled."183 Interestingly, the animals Zhong Kui and his sister ride may, in fact,

be specific references to heaven and earth. Mette Siggstedt points out that from

the Song dynasty onward the "ox [was] [a] symbol [] of earth, as the horse was a

symbol of heaven."1 4 If we recall the ambiguous position Zhong Kui held as both

scholar official and demon, we may read Zhou's use of the horse and ox motif as

reference to Zhong Kui's ability to move between the human and demonic worlds

182 Other representations of Zhong Kui depict a similar demon procession the most famous of which is Gong Kai's (1222-1304), Zhong Kui Traveling. See Little, "The Demon Queller," fig 26. Also see Thomas Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1973)142-149. 183 Quoted from Tan Yin's colophon on Zhou Chen's Zhong Kui Expelling Demons cited and translated in Siggstedt, 112-113 184 Siggstedt, 48.

87 in order to ultimately restore, as Tang Yin writes, the peace "of heaven and earth".

Tang Yin's colophon implicitly hints to an understanding of a normative or proper social order to which demons do not belong. In images of Zhong Kui it is the semi-naked and deformed body which defines those bodies that fall outside the norms and proper order of Chinese society. As such, the semi-naked and deformed body in images of Zhong Kui define the demons' foreign status; specifically their non-belonging to the civilized center. By referencing the New

Year's night exorcism, images of Zhong Kui also define proper order. They do so by referencing the disorder which ensues when foreign bodies transgress the boundaries between their proper habitats and the civilized center. By representing the demonic body as foreign to the imperial center, images of Zhong Kui define the civilized center and the normative individual by displaying what they were not.

88 »• V c T# 4 •> •5* ^ it 44 ^ •. * '

T J>? i • n

Figure 3.1 a

Figures 3.1 a-d Yan Hui (active before 1298-afterl324), The New Year's Eve Excursion of Zhong Kui, early 14th century, handcroll, ink and slight colour on silk. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William Martlatt Fund. Reprinted From Sherman E. Lee "Yan hui, Zong Kui, Demons and the New Year" Artibus Asiae 53, no. 1 / 2 (1993): 222-223.

fesi r^pj » " %^i~>*~:*'- ^

Figure 3.1 b

89 <©- *& > * ** *+f f fo»4 \ ? " * ' i ft h 1'^ ' . * "• & .ff »k V* *" *_ •. * 1 j* 1* •f * * * .-; *

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90 -*•%•* \;:3f V»N ,;V •>•: -' a^"***.

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Figure 3.2 Zhou Chen, Zhong Kui Expelling Demons, mid-Ming Dynasty, 27.9 77.9, ink on paper, collection unknown. Reprinted from Mette Siggstedt, "Zhou Chen: The Life and Painting of a Ming Professional Artist," The Museum of Eastern Antiquities Bulletin (Stockholm) 54 (1982): 227.

91 Chapter 4

Nakedness as Disorder in Zhou Chen's Beggars an Street Character

In 1516 Zhou Chen, a professional artist from Suzhou, painted a twenty-four leaf album entitled Beggars and Street Characters (figures 4.1 a-1 and 4.24 a-d). The album opened with a colophon written by the painter. Zhou writes:

In the autumn of the Bingzi year of the Zhengde era [1516], seventh month, I was idling by a window without purpose when I began to recall the beggars I commonly see in the market streets in all of their varieties and attitudes. Taking advantage of brush and inkstone nearby, I spontaneously sketched their pictures. There is nothing worth looking at, but perhaps they can serve as a warning and admonition to the world.

The colophon, placed at the beginning of the album anticipates the subject of the painting, "the beggars [Zhou] commonly s[aw] in the market streets in all of their varieties and attitudes." Now divided and mounted as two separate handscrolls, 186 the album originally contained twelve-double page openings each representing one figure against a blank background facing another on the opposite page. Save for the first four figures in the album,187 the twenty other figures are depicted semi-naked and most are deformed with either facial or bodily abnormalities. One figure (figure 4.1 j), wearing only a loin cloth, is so emaciated that his ribs and shoulder bones protrude. His bones are depicted on the surface of his muted grey skin by jagged and heavy black lines. A female figure (figure 4.2

Translated by Wai-Kam in Eight Dynasties, 159, no. 160. 185 The first half of the handscroll belongs to the Honolulu Academy of Art. The second half, including all attached colophons, belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art. See Eight Dynasties, 159. 187 The first four figures of the original album include a storyteller, a Buddhist monk with alms bowl, and two simply dressed women carrying bags.

92 b), holding a skeletal and undernourished baby, and supporting herself with a staff, is physically deformed. She has a goitre and an edematous lower leg.

Another beggar (figure 4.2 a), again wearing only a loincloth seems to be in the act of pounding a rock against his head. A fourth (figure 4.2 d), and my final example for the moment, probably represents a knick-knack peddler. The peddler wears ragged clothing and, as Carlos Hugo Espinel describes, has a facial deformity. The peddler has cleft pallet.188 Zhou's Beggars thus provides a rare example in the history of Chinese figurative representation of the use of the semi- naked and deformed body to depict beings, defined in the colophon, as inhabiting an urban center of the empire, Suzhou.

The colophon also structures a reading of the signification of the semi- naked and deformed bodies represented in the album. Zhou's claim that the album serves as "a warning and admonition to the world" implicitly hints to the tradition of reading the strange or anomalous as omen and sign of disorder. In this chapter,

I argue that Zhou appropriates the semi-naked and deformed body, used to represent the penitent in purgatory and demons, to depict the beggars and street characters of Suzhou. The semi-naked and deformed body, as we have seen, defines the anti-normative, social and moral deviant. Prior to Zhou's representation of beggars and street characters, however, this body was only used to depict foreign or otherworldly beings in order to highlight, by reaffirming the distance between 'self and 'other', 'center' and 'periphery', order within the imperial realm. Zhou's album, in contrast, functions as a collection of anti-

188 Carlos Hugo Espinel, "Chou Ch'en's street character: facial deformity in the art of the Ming Dynasty," The Lancet 348 (December, 1996): 1715.

93 normative bodies taken from within the imperial realm. As such, the beggars' and street character' naked or semi-naked bodies imply a confusion of the boundaries, once maintained in images of purgatory and Zhong Kui, between 'human' and

'non-human,' 'us' and 'them', Chinese and foreign. These bodies, I argue, function within the album to define an anomalous being since, as Campany argues, the anomalous is "that which is taken... as crossing some boundary."189 In this chapter, I argue that Zhou's act of collecting the anomalous body may consequently be read as both a means to control the anomalous Other, and as a form of social criticism. This latter possibility exists by virtue of Zhou's depiction of the semi-naked and deformed body taken from within the imperial center and by virtue of his reference to the tradition of reading the strange or anomalous as omen or sign of disorder.

Zhou's unidealized representation of beggars and street characters as a brutalized class, emaciated, semi-clothed, and often deformed is, as Robert L.

Thorp and Richard Ellis Vinograd point out, "anomalous both within his own career and for Chinese painting in general.1 James Cahill has in fact suggested that the absence of reference to Zhou's Beggars in catalogues, as well as its completely unrecorded history until the twentieth century, may be a consequence of what he terms its "vulgar" subject matter.1 ' Cahill explains that the term vulgar was used by critics at the time to refer to the "unidealized portrayals of

189 Campany, 2. 190 Robert L. Thorp and Richard Ellis Vinograd, Chinese Art and Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 311. 191 Even in the twentieth century scholarly work on Zhou Chen's Beggars and Street Characters remains scarce and relatively superficial. Most references include short entries in catalogues.

94 subjects on a lower social stratum than their own." Zhou's unidealized portrayal of beggars and street characters was not only unique within the history of Chinese figurative painting but, Cahill argues, would suggest "uncomfortably that the poor were not really so contented and picturesque as they [people of higher social status or class] preferred to believe".193

Sherman E. Lee has made similar observations and argues that Zhou was aware of his departure from the tradition of the idealized portrayal of the lower classes. He argues that "the artist's self-abnegation 'It may not be worthy of serious enjoyment...' is a recognition that his subject matter is nonstandard by professional as well as wen ren criteria, as well as emotionally disquieting."194

The emotionally disquieting effect of Zhou's Beggars hinges on its contrast to the traditional idealized depiction of the lower classes. These idealized representations may be understood as participating in something similar to the

"pastoral myths of Europe" that construct, as Cahill observes, a world "that exits only in the collective imagination of sophisticated, urban people who cherish romantic longings for a naive state of being and who are unconcerned with the realities of [the lower classes]."195 In China, these idealized representations of the lower classes served as a good omen and as a sign of prosperity in the imperial realm. The title of a fourteenth century handscroll by Zhu Yu, Street Scenes in

1 James Cahill, Parting at the Shore: Chinese Painting of the early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1580 (New York: Weatherhill, 1978), 191. 193 James Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 191. 194 Sherman E. Lee, "Zhou Chen," Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration ed. Jay A Levenson (Washington: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1991), 445. 195 James Cahill. Parting at the Shore, 103.

95 Peace Time (fig. 4.25), is representative of the association between idealized street scenes and prosperity or peace within the imperial realm.

Zhu's handscroll also serves well as an example of the idealized depiction of street characters and forms an obvious contrast to the figures depicted in

Zhou's Beggars. Let us take as example a section of Zhu's scroll which depicts the entertainments of a monkey trainer. Several elements contribute to our consignment of the representation to the genre of idealized street scene. In the representation, the monkey trainer is depicted as one element amidst the bustling life of the city. As Mette Sigstedt describes, he is depicted "amidst the folk masses." The monkey trainer, accompanied by an assistant depicted at the lower end of the group to the left, is surrounded by well-dressed city dwellers appreciating the entertainment. The monkey trainer is depicted in a calm standing position, neatly dressed and wearing a cap. Although lower in social status than the other figures, there are no significant attributes which function to draw a clear differentiation between the monkey trainer and the figures that surround him. Zhu therefore depicts an image of a well-clothed and well-nourished street character embedded in the lively street life of the city in order to present an image of the city and its inhabitants as harmonious and prosperous. This idealized depiction of a street character ultimately functions as sign of peace, as the title suggests, within the imperial realm.

Siggstedt, 101

96 In contrast, Zhou's Beggars may be said to represent far more closely the actual realities and status of street characters within mid-Ming society. The monkey trainer in Zhou's Beggars (figure 4.2 a), unlike the one represented by

Zhu, is bent forward supporting the weight of his beggar's bag. His ankles are swollen from the weight of standing. His face is weathered. The beggar has visible crow's feet and dark shadows under his eyes. His trousers are ripped and his cap is deformed with age. Zhou's representation of the monkey trainer differs from the more idealized genre of street character in its emphasis on the deformed and semi-naked body.

Although unique to the history of the representation of lower classes,

Zhou's 'vulgar' representation of beggars does find iconographic precedents in other figural types. James Cahill, for example, has identified precedents in representations of Zhong Kui and his demon retinue. This association is highly probable since, as we have seen, Zhou himself painted a picture of Zhong Kui and demons. If we compare the bodies of the demons in Zhou's image of Zhong Kui

(figure 3.2) and the figure of the street sweeper in Zhou's Beggars (4.2 a) we find some significant similarities. In Zhou's Zhong Kui Expelling Demons, for example, Zhou depicts the demons dressed in tattered upper garments and mid length trousers. These tattered garments reveal the demons' partially nude torsos, lower legs and arms. The demons do not wear shoes. They are also depicted with deformed faces and heads. The upper part of each demon's skull is bald and

197 On the status of beggars see T'ung-Tsu Ch'ii, "Chinese Class Structure and its Ideology," Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank, 235-250 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 249. 198 Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 193.

97 concave in shape. Their faces have a bestial quality; each demon is depicted with flat nose, broad grin and protruding chin. The street sweeper in Zhou's Beggars also wears tattered clothing revealing his emaciated torso, legs and arms.

Similarly to the depiction of the demons, he does not wear shoes, he is balding, and he has messy hair. The street sweeper's nose is flat, his mouth is broad, and his chin protrudes. These pictorial similarities suggest that Zhou borrowed motifs from the depiction of demons to represent his beggars and street characters.

Several other scholars have also identified iconographic similarities between the figures in Zhou's Beggars and the penitent in Chinese-Buddhist representations of purgatory. Sherman E. Lee, for example, has argued that in

Zhou's Beggars, the cripple on all fours recalls "the naked and penitent damned of the Buddhist hell."199 Lee emphasizes nakedness and bodily position as points of iconographic intersection. Zhou, therefore, seems to borrow the iconography of the semi-naked and deformed body from representations of the penitent and demons to depict his beggars and street characters.

In previous chapters, I have examined the use of the semi-naked and deformed body as a recursive strategy that serves to define the demonic, social or moral deviant as Other to the normative human being. In representations of the penitent in purgatory, for example, the semi-naked and deformed body not only visually defines a socially and morally deviant body but one that is taken to be not-fully human. In turn, representations of the penitent serve to reaffirm Chinese-

Buddhist moral and social values by representing the moral and social deviant as

199 Sherman E. Lee, "Literati and Professionals: Four Ming Painters," The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53 (1966): 22.

98 Other to and different from the normative human being. Representations of Zhong

Kui, similarly function to define the semi-naked and deformed body as a foreign body against which the Chinese center and its inhabitants derive their own normality. By referencing the New Year's exorcism, through the representation of the apotropaic figure of Zhong Kui and the demon procession, the images implicitly hint to the demons' non-belonging to normal society and their proper habitation at the boundaries or on the periphery of the civilized center. In both genres then, the semi-naked and deformed body is used to define the figure's non- belonging to the normative social and moral order. These images also function through the use of symbols and the paraphernalia that surround the semi-naked and deformed body, to relegate those bodies to a safe distance form the imperial center. In the Zhong Kui images demons are represented as properly belonging beyond the boundaries of the civilized center and in images of the afterlife the penitent are relegated to the otherworldly depth of purgatory.

By representing the semi-naked and deformed body as Other to the normative human being and also foreign to the terrestrial world or the cultivated centers of the empire, both genres support what Jonathan Z. Smith has termed a locative worldview. Robert Campany aptly summarizes the definition of a locative worldview and writes that,

"In a locative worldview, the chief preoccupation is the control of reality by means of boundaries. The sacred center is an enclave to be marked off and defended against outsiders...Harmony with cosmic order is paramount; rebellion

99 against cosmic order is a barbaric -and futile -act serving only to highlight order more clearly."200

Consequently, Campany argues that the collection of the "anomalous fact or object,"201 by which he means "the varieties of ways in which anomalies are domesticated and represented in the interest of, and from the point of view of, the center"202 is fundamental to the maintenance of a locative worldview. This is so because the collection of anomalies is "essentially an attempt to control reality"203 by recording and fixing the anomalous within "a stable format, a determinative taxonomic place."204 The enterprise of collecting then, serves within the locative cosmographic discourse as a means to domesticate the other, order it, and make it known. Its fundamental purpose, however, is to highlight the "anomalous fact or object's foreignness" and, in turn, reaffirm proper order within the imperial center by displaying "the difference between the center and the periphery,"206 us and them. The collection of anomalies thus indirectly functions to define the cultural center or human communities by "displaying what they are not."207

However, the collection and representation of anomaly also has the potential for challenging the distance between 'us' and 'them,' 'center' and

'periphery,' 'order' and 'disorder.' When this happens, the representation of anomalies gains critical potential since they display disorder through the transgression of the supposedly fixed boundaries between 'us' and 'them,'

200 Campany, 12. 201 Campany, 12. 202 Campany, 9. 203 Campany, 12 204 Campany, 12^ 205 Campany, 12. 205 Campany, 10 207 Campany, 8.

100 'center' and 'periphery.' This form of collection does not necessitate an anti- locative worldview where the difference between 'center' and 'periphery,' 'order' and 'disorder' ceases entirely. Instead, the collection of anomalies can function within a locative-worldview to display the transgression of the supposedly fixed boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' 'center' and 'periphery,' as a sign of disorder.

The semi-naked and deformed body, as we have seen, defines an anti- normative being. It is used to represent the penitent in images of purgatory, the demons in images of Zhong Kui and as well as the beggars and street characters in

Zhou's album. In each genre the semi-naked and deformed body defines a being positioned outside the sartorial system which serves, as we have discussed, to define one's proper position within the Chinese bureaucratic and hierarchical order. As such, they represent a general "deviation from the common order."208

However, the use of the semi-naked and deformed body in Zhou's representation serves a different function from that in images of Zhong Kui and purgatory. In images of the ten kings and Zhong Kui the anti-normative body is represented in order to highlight order within the imperial realm by pictorially relegating the deviant Other beyond the boundaries of the imperial center. Zhou's album similarly functions as a collection of anti-normative bodies. Zhou's collection, however, does not highlight order within the imperial realm. Instead, it represents the transgression of the boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' 'center' and 'other' as a sign of disorder within the imperial center.

208 Campany, 2.

101 In Zhou's album each figure is depicted with a deformed or emaciated

body and each wears tattered clothing. Take for example, the beggar depicted in

figure 4.2 j. The figure holds a broken bowl in his left hand and carries a bag of

wood on his back. The figure is bare foot and wears only a tattered lower garment

held together by a rope. His torso, legs and arms show signs of extreme

emaciation. The bones of his legs and arms, including the joints where they meet,

are clearly visible beneath the beggar's muted grey skin. The figure's ribs

protrude. They are depicted through heavy black lines painted in a row down the

beggar's side. The figure's concave chest, exaggerated shoulders bones, and

skeletal looking feet similarly function as signs of emaciation. The figure has

dishevelled hair, large protruding eyes, nose and chin.

As we have seen, this body, the semi-naked and deformed body, functions

. in images of Zhong Kui and purgatory to define the anti-normative, socially or

morally deviant being. It also marks a being that could not be accounted for

within the social and moral order which defined the traditional Chinese center and

its inhabitants. In Zhou's album this deviant body is, however, appropriated to

depict those inhabiting an imperial center. In his colophon to the painting, Zhou

himself identifies those represented within the album as "the beggars and street

characters whom I often saw in the streets and markets."209 Colophons written by

Zhou are rarely found on his works and may therefore be considered as a

conscious and self-aware addition to the painting. By placing the colophon at the

beginning of the album, preceding the representation of the beggars, Zhou

209 This translation is by Mette Siggstedt and differs from the early translation by Wai-Kam Ho. See Siggstedt, 97.

102 identifies his figures as inhabitants of Suzhou. As such, the figures depicted in the album reference both inhabitants of the imperial center and a body previously linked to non-human or foreign beings. The semi-naked and deformed bodies, used to represent the beggars and street characters in Zhou's album, therefore define an anomalous being since they reference the transgression of the proper boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' 'human being' and 'Other.'

Zhou's colophon also structures a reading of the anomalous body as sign of disorder within the imperial realm. It does so by referencing the tradition of reading the anomalous as a sign or omen of disorder. Zhou's claim that the album may be taken "as warning and admonition to the world" places the collection firmly within this tradition. This tradition, as Campany explains, "simply continues the familiar worldview underlying divination and more specifically, the locative-cosmology developed by Dong Zhongshu and many others, in which every untoward occurrence, in principle, means something." Central to Dong's articulation of correlative cosmology was the notion of ganying defined by von

Glahn as "a fundamental belief in 'resonance'...that mediated between different orders of reality."211 According to this tradition anomalous events were

"considered portents and were frequently invested with political and moral import." For example, in the Huainanzi (second century B.C.E.) one passage states: "The spirit of the ruler of the people is associated with the heaven above.

Therefore, when he collects taxes relentlessly and beyond reason, tornados

zw Campany, 345 211 Von Glah, 14. For more on the concept of ganying see Zito, "Silk and Skin," 109. 212 Chiang, 34.

103 result.'"'J In this passage the tornado, a disruption of the natural order, is taken as the corresponding effect to the misrule through over taxation by the ruler. In this passage the ruler's individual actions have a corresponding effect, not merely on the lives of over taxed people, but at the cosmic level as well.

Within a locative worldview, then, anomalies may be taken as

"inauspicious portents [which] signal the need for 'correction' in the center,"214 and yet, "their deviance from the norm [may simultaneously be]...taken as instructive for the ruler, the privileged basis for historians' remonstrances."215 The collection and representation of anomaly, then, also has critical potential. The three authors of the colophons attached to Zhou's painting seem convinced of the critical undertones of the work. The colophons attached to the painting, as Lee points out, each "place the work within China's very sparse tradition of social protest." In this chapter, I examine the first two colophons because they serve to further our reading of the image as social criticism and offer important records of the ways in which Zhou's Beggars was understood in the decades following its production. The first colophon written in 1564 by Huang Jishui (1509-1574) reads:

"This album depicts the appearances of all the different kinds of beggars [Zhou Chen] observed in the streets of the city, capturing perfectly the special aspects of each. Looking at the pictures, one can't help sighing deeply. Nowadays people come around on dark

213 Kiyohiko Munakata, "Concept of Lei and Kan-lei in Early Chinese Art Theory," in Bush and Murck, eds. Theories of Arts in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 108. cited in Goldberg, "Figures of identity," 36. 214 Campany, Strange Writing, 127. 215 Campany, 126-127 216 Lee, "Zhou Chen," 444. 2,7 The third colophon is quoted at length in Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 192. It was written in 1577 by Wen Jia (1501-1583) and suggests that both Huang's and Zhang's readings of the image have merit.

104 nights [covertly], begging and wailing in their desires for riches and high position -if only we could bring back Mr. [Zhou] to portray them! The summoned scholar Woyun brought out this album to show me, and I wrote this impromptu inscription at the end."

In the colophon Huang takes "the beggars metaphorically as unworthy office-seekers." His reading thus hints to the contemporary disruption of order within society when those who, although undeserving, seek higher social status.

The second colophon is by Zhang Fengyi (1527-1613). It reads:

"This album presents us with the many aspects of misery -hunger and cold, homeless destitution, infirmity and emaciation, deformity and sickness. Anyone who can look at this and not be wounded to the heart by compassion is not a human person. The [bingzi] year of the [Zhengde] era... was only a few years after the seditious [Liu Jin] spread his poison; this was the height of [Jiang Bin's] and [Wan, or Qian?] Ning's exercising of their brutality. I imagine also that the officials and nobles were seldom able to nurture and succor the common people. Thus this work by [Zhou Chen] has the same intent as [Zheng Xia's] "Destitute People": it was meant as an aid to government and is not a shallow thing -one can't dismiss it as a'play with ink'"220

The second colophon makes two important associations. First, Zhang argues that the destitution of the people may have been caused by "the seditious [Liu

Jin]." In the early Sixteenth Century, court eunuchs usurped the power of the young Wu-tsung emperor. The eunuchs, led by Liu [Jin], "drained the country through excessive taxation and corruption."221 Zhang therefore takes Zhou's

218 Translated by Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 192 quoted in Lee, "Zhou Chen," 444. 219 Lee, "Zhou Chen," 444. 220 Translated by Cahill in Parting at the Shore, 192 and quoted in Jay A. Levenson ed., 444. 221 Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 191. Contemporary records, similarly, suggest an association between Liu Jin and the destitution of the people. The local gazetteer from Wujiang (Suzhou prefecture) of the mid-Ming Dynasty, for example, records the rule of Liu Jin, as well as floods, as the cause of the increasing number of poor during the mid-Ming Dynasty. The gazetteer states:

105 beggars as a pictorial protest since it portrays the "effects on the lives of common

people" of the misrule and over taxation by the eunuchs. Second, Zhang argues

that Zhou's Beggars is similar in intent to Zheng Xia's Liumin tu {Painting of the

Homeless People or Destitute People). Zheng Xia was an eleventh century

scholar official and artist who, during the famine of 1073-74, depicted those

starving in the streets and presented the work to the emperor. Cahill writes that

this was "a nearly unique case of a politically motivated Chinese painting: [Zheng

Xia's] real target was the Prime Minister Wang [Anshih] (1019-86), whose

radical reforms he blamed for the famine."224 Zhang reads the intent of Zhou's

Beggars as similar to that of Zheng Xia's and argue that "it was meant as an aid to

government."

While Huang and Zhang seem to display clearly divergent understandings

of the basic significance of the street characters- either as figurative representation

of office seekers or as representations of misery that serve as warning against bad

rulers -both readily understood Zhou's Beggars as participating in the tradition

of reading deformity and the strange as omen. Both authors take Zhou's beggars

as critical in intent and read the semi-naked and deformed bodies represented therein as a sign of disorder within the imperial realm.

"Zhengde, 5lh year [1510]: Great flood. Only a few inches of the long bridges were visible above the water level. It was the greatest catastrophe of the century. In this year there were frequent epidemics. Half of those [infected] died. Besides, the immoral Liu Jin dictated the policy of the nation. The exploitation of the people was far too heavy. Magistrates of prefectures and counties struggled to fulfill his orders, and those unsuited to office managed to establish themselves. Never before had the people of Wu been poorer." quoted in Siggstedt, 100. 222 Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 191. 223 While Siggstedt translates the title of Zheng Xia's paining into English as Painting of the Homeless People, others have translated the title as Destitute People. See Siggstedt, 101. For an example of the second translation see Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 192. 224 Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 192.

106 Given this context, Zhou's collection may be read simultaneously as an attempt to collect and 'correct' the anomalous but also as a basis for criticism.

Zhou's representation of twenty-four street characters, each depicted with stereotyped characteristics, against a blank background, and bound together in an album, clearly takes part in the project of collecting anomalies. It does so not only by gathering within one album images of all the varieties of street characters and beggars of Suzhou but also, by presenting the collection as comprehensive in scope. Zhou himself defines the album as containing "the beggars I commonly see in the market streets in all of their varieties and attitudes"225 [my italics]. In the album, each character is depicted full length, in three quarter view and isolated against an undifferentiated background. On each page of the album one character is depicted facing another on the opposite page. Zhou must have been aware of the comparative potential of this format since each figure is turned to face the one depicted on the opposite page. This mode of juxtaposition creates a dialogue between the two figures and functions to highlight their individual characteristics.

As such, each character may be taken as representative of one stereotype of a beggar or street character which include the cripple, the blind man with stick or animal, the hungry skeletal-looking mother, the actor, the monkey trainer and the snake charmer. In the album images of these figures are collected, bound together and presented as inclusive of all beggars and street characters.

Zhou's collection of beggars and street characters may be read as his attempt to collect and control a body which could not be accounted for within the normative Chinese order. First, Zhou's album may be understood as a form of

225 Eight Dynasties, 159 no. 160.

107 collection with the intent Qf grouping together within a central enclave a body that should not have existed within the imperial center. As such, it functions as a means to make known and "cope with" the anomalous. Second, Zhou's isolation of each figure against an undifferentiated background may be taken as his attempt to visually relocate the beggars and street characters to a space other than that of the imperial realm.

Although collected and represented against an undifferentiated background as a means of correction, Zhou's album may simultaneously be understood as a form of pictorial criticism. The colophon, placed at the beginning of the album, provides enough pretext to understand the significance of the semi-naked and deformed body without reference to an explicit frame of symbolic or iconographic reference. Given Zhou's claim that the image may "be taken as a warning and admonition to the world,"226 we may take Zhou's album as participating in the tradition of reading the anomalous as sign or omen of disorder. As such, we may also read Zhou's album as a mode of collecting anomalies as criticism. By appropriating the semi-naked and deformed body -once reserved solely for the representation of foreign or otherworldly beings in images of purgatory and

Zhong Kui -to depict beggars and street characters collected from within the imperial realm, Zhou's Beggars functions to represent the transgression of the boundaries between 'self and 'other,' 'human' and 'non-human' as a sign of disorder.

As such, we may also read Zhou's Beggars as converting the fundamental meaning of the genre of beggars and street characters from praise to critique.

226 Cahill, Parting at the Shore, 191.

108 Zhou depicts his beggars and street characters semi-naked and deformed. In so doing, Zhou disrupts the traditional use of beggars and street characters as a sign of prosperity and order within the imperial realm. Zhou's vulgar or unidealized representation of beggars and street characters may be read, in opposition to their idealized representation, as critical in intent and as sign or omen of disorder in the imperial realm. In other words, the representation of the semi-naked body that had once functioned, in representations of purgatory and Zhong Kui, to depict beings that exist on the boundaries of society is, in Zhou's representation, transplanted into the "real" world and used as a tool to make visible the realities of social disorder as "warning and admonition to the world."

109 Concluding Remarks

My research intervenes in an already established discourse on the body in Chinese representation. Recent scholars agree that the Chinese conceptualiztaion of the body was rooted in a correlative world view and a fundamentally cultural rather than ethnically defined China. Within art historical discourse, these frameworks have been drawn upon to explain the overwhelming presence of sartorial attributes in Chinese art. For these art historians nakedness has stood as an enigma, precisely because it could not be accounted for within the culturally intelligible signs which defined the human being. In this thesis I have argued that these frameworks do, however, provide important insight on the nakedness that does occur in Chinese figurative representation. It is, in fact, within the context of these dominant frameworks that nakedness emerges as a powerful signifier of trangression and difference from the civilized center and its inhabitants.

In the preceding chapters, I have compiled what may be understood as three separate case studies which examine the use of the naked and semi-naked body in Chinese art. Although these case studies span both geographic space and historical time, nakedness remains a consistent marker of deviance from, and non- belonging to, the normative social order which defined the human being. In representations of purgatory and Zhong Kui nakedness is relegated to the margins of order, and is used to define the socially and morally deviant or demonic figure as foreign to the civilized centers of the empire. As such, nakedness is used in these representations to highlight order within the imperial realm through juxtaposition; that is, by showing what the cultural center is not. When

110 represented as a body taken from within the cultural center, however, nakedness gains critical potential for it implies the transgression of the supposedly fixed boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' 'center' and 'periphery,' and as such emerges as a sign of disorder within the imperial realm. In Zhou's album of beggars and street characters, for example, nakedness serves as symbol of transgression as well as a pictorial form of criticism in its reference to the social realities of disorder.

These case studies provide an initial theoretical language through which the particularities of the representation of nakedness may be elucidated. What lies ahead, then, is an exploration of nakedness within specific historical periods and through incongruous and varied contexts. Does nakedness ever truly get unmoored from the margins of order? Does nakedness remain fixed within a logic which defines 'us' against 'them'? If not, the scope for a change in direction in scholarly research may be drastically increased, in terms of considering the extent to which implications of nakedness as a symbol of social disorder can be understood. Is it not conceivable, for instance, that nakedness, removed from this

'us' against 'them' logic, could transcend its potential as a symbol of disorder and go on to highlight the meaninglessness of the social markings that define the human being in China? While these are, naturally, questions which will remain unanswered until further historical research has been conducted, the importance of establishing a contextual backdrop for such questions is clear. What nakedness does represent is a body which falls beyond the logic which defined the human being and, as such, it remains a highly powerful symbol, fundamental to the very meaning of what it was to be human within China.

Ill Figure 4.1 a

Figure 4.1 a-1 Zhou Chen, Beggars and Street Characters, 1516, 31.9 x 244.5cm album leaves mounted as two separate handscrolls, ink and light colour in paper. Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts.

112 Figure 4.1 b

113 Figure 4.1 c

114 r / i. A/ /OW f v

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115 V

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116 A ' 1M

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117 Figure 4.1 g

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123 Figure 4.2 a

Figure 4.2 a-d Zhou Chen, Beggars and Street Characters, 1516, 31.9 x 244.5cm album leaves mounted as two separate handscrolls, ink and light colour in paper. Kansas: Clevland Museum of Art. Figures 4.2 a,c and d reprinted from Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art: Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1980), 296; Figure 4.2b reprinted in Sherman E. Lee "Zhou Chen," Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration ed. Jay A Levenson (Washington: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1991), 444.

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