Did Photography Win the Contest of Picturing Epigraphic Bronze?

Photography and East Asian Art

Edited by Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell

Art Media Resources, Chicago Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago Copyright © 2021 Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, and the individual authors and image holders. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form, without permission from the publishers.

Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art History, University of Chicago 5540 S. Greenwood Avenue Chicago, IL 60637 http://caea.uchicago.edu

Co-published and distributed by Art Media Resources, Inc. 1029 W. 35th St., Chicago, IL 60609 www.artmediaresources.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wu Hung, 1945- editor. | Foxwell, Chelsea, editor. Title: Photography and East Asian art / edited by Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell. Description: Chicago : Art Media Resources : Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Richly illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs of historical figures, texts, famous sites and masterworks, this volume examines photography’s profound impact on East Asian art and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inspired by the “Photography and the Art of East Asia” symposium held at the University of Chicago in May 2015, co-editors Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell have compiled these scholarly studies into a new book UIBUEFFQFOTVOEFSTUBOEJOHPGUIJTJNQPSUBOUGJFMEPGTUVEZ The essays reexamine existing ideas about photography’s relationship with art history and provide fresh perspectives and newly discovered information”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053197 | ISBN 9781588861597 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Art and photography--East Asia. | Art and society--East Asia--History--19th century. | Art and society--East Asia--History--20th century. Classification: LCC N72.P5 P495 2021 | DDC 701/.03--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053197 2. Did Photography Win the Contest of Picturing Epigraphic Bronze?

Yanfei Zhu

For a Chinese audience passionate about visual arts, the first few decades of the twentieth century were an exciting and promising time, as photographic reproductions of all sorts of works of art, from ancient bronze to the Mona Lisa, flooded the pages of books and magazines that were largely produced in Shanghai and distributed both domestically and abroad.1 These enthusiasts of photomechanical print culture would have fervently applauded Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, together with his argument that photography and film were to triumph not only over painting, but even over the reproductive techniques that had preceded them.2 Focused on material and technological details of photography and traditional processes of image reproduction, this chapter revisits Benjamin’s modernistic claim by scrutinizing the unique case of representing ancient bronze vessels and their epigraphs in early twentieth century Chinese publications. Furthermore, the coexistence of photography and traditional reproductive methods such as xylography, painting, and rubbing is contextualized alongside the radical changes in aesthetics, terminology, and knowledge classification.

Photomechanical Printing Technology Foregrounded Photography’s considerable power in reproducing images of art was ﬁrst realized in the two calotype prints showing the front and proﬁle views of a plaster cast of the Hellenistic marble Bust of Patroclus (Fig. 1) in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844).3 The alliance of photography and mechanical printing was revolutionary in its industrial and economical effectiveness for mass production.4 It would be tempting to assert that photo-reproduction of works of art had by this time replaced traditional techniques of image reproduction such as drawing and engraving to demonstrate a linear history of modern technological advancements. However, photography had not surpassed or replaced older means of image repli-

40 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 1. Two views of Bust of Patroclus, calotype prints, The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), plates V and XVII. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) cation in many publications. As Stephen Bann has shown in his meticulous study on the several ways of replicating and popularizing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in nineteenth-century France, neither was burin engraving eclipsed by the first stirrings of technological modernity, nor was lithography a fleeting interlude between etching and the advent of photography.5 In other words, if we follow a Darwinist logic, the engraved Mona Lisas should have long disappeared by the time lithography came into popularity; and likewise the lithographic versions should have vanished when photography came along. But it did not go that way. The engravings were very much in vogue along with the lithographs and photographs throughout the 1800s, and continued to enable the original painting’s celebrity. One of the first photomechanical reproductions of Mona Lisa (Fig. 2) in Chi- na appeared in the fifteenth issue (1927) of the popular magazine Liangyou 良友 (The Young Companion, 1926–1945), along with the masterpieces by Michelangelo and Raphael, in an installment of the serial Meishu dagang 美術大綱 (An Outline of Fine Art).6 As revealed by its low acutance and indistinct details—the veil on the forehead and the cleavage exposed by the low-cut dress are barely visible—the monochromatic illustration was probably made with the new offset printing process (jiaoban 膠版 or xiangpiban 橡皮版).7 According to the chief editor Liang De- suo 梁得所 (1905–1938), the purpose of this illustrated history of Western art was to photograph and print as many works of art as possible.8 Liang’s evangelism for

41 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 2. Excerpt from Meishu dagang, photoengraved print, Liangyou 15 (May 1927), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.)

European art and imported technologies ensured the magazine’s dominance as an industrial model and cultural icon.9 The next step in perfecting the photo-mechanically reproduced image was the pursuit of polychrome. Liangyou printed a rare color photograph in May 1928, replicating a female nude portrait (Fig. 3) by the English photographer Bertram Park (1883–1972). The production of such “natural color” pictures not only required the equipment of color cameras and film but also a strenuous printing process. The same image must be photographed at least three times using different filters to separate the red, green, and blue hues, resulting in three or more grayscale nega- tives that were then inverted to cyan, magenta, and yellow plates.10 This costly and labor-intensive process must have deterred the full-scale application of color printing at the time, and photo-illustrated periodicals such as Liangyou contained a max- imum of four or five color pictures, including the cover, in each issue. The editors understandably would select the most enticing subjects to represent in color. The meta-picture of a young, female model gazing at another portrait in the book that is framed by her nude body was certainly à la mode and probably meant to raise a few eyebrows among the pictorial’s diverse readership.11 The monthly Meishu shenghuo 美術 (Arts and Life, 1934–1937), a strong competitor of Liangyou in terms of printing technology, placed a heavier emphasis on covering traditional Chinese art. Sponsored by a printing company famous for

42 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 3. “The Model Rests,” natural color photograph (possibly a photoengraved print), Liangyou 26 (May 1928), 16. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) its color printing products, such as calendar posters and cigarette cards,12 Meishu shenghuo consciously emphasized the media and processes of photomechanical printing. The head printing technician, Liu Puqing (1900–1974), was included on the editorial committee, and each issue reserved a few pages for articles on the history and progress of printing and photography, written and translated by Liu and his colleagues. The editorial note of the ﬁrst issue reported that the volume was printed with both photogravure (zhaoxiang aoban 版) and the edgier medium of offset gravure (aoshi pingban 版). Liu made a still life photograph of fruits (Fig. 4) in issue 5 (August 1934) to serve as an example of color offset gravure printing, the colors in which are richer and more saturated because the intaglio plate holds more ink on its indented surface.13 In issue 26 (May 1936), a two-page photomontage shows the operations of the magazine’s pressroom (Fig. 5).14 Noticeably, an image could be modiﬁed at different stages (positive or negative), as well as during the process of retouching the printing plate. Also featured are two photographers at work, one re-photographing pictures (fanshe ) and the other making color-separation photographs (fense sheying ).

The Case of Picturing Epigraphic Bronze If photography imitated and competed with traditional media including etching

43 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 4. “Seasonal fruits,” offset gravure print, Meishu shenghuo 5 (August 1934), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) and lithography in Europe, then there were likely traditional media in China that posed similar challenges. One well-researched case is ink rubbings from sign-bearing objects such as stone steles: not only are its characteristics comparable to those of photography, but the traditional medium is superior in reducing the distance between an object and its image and producing something unique and even original.15 Inspired by and continuing this investigation of historicity and materiality, this chapter focuses on the pictorial representations of ancient bronze vessels, whose varied shapes and molded decorations make it more difficult to transfer to planar surfaces. A great example of using modern technology to revitalize tradition, the offset gravure print of a bronze tripod jue in full color (Fig. 6) occupies the whole page following the cover and editorial in the inaugural issue (April 1934) of Meishu shenghuo. The ritual drinking cup appears magnificent on the oversized page; particularly appealing are the green overall patina and some of the archaic motifs in the middle section. In contrast to an earlier representation of the same cup (Fig. 7) in a 1907 issue of Guocui xuebao (Journal of the National Essence, 1905–1911), the improvements in color and crispness are indeed striking. But it is not without flaws. The shiny reflection blurs part of the motifs. More irritating to connoisseurs and epigraphers would be the disappearance of the four-character inscription in the shadow of the handle, an inscription too important to ignore as it points to the vessel’s probable association with King Tang of the Shang dynasty.16 As a result, a caption and annotation had to be supplemented on the page by the artist Qian Shoutie (1897–1967).

44 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 5. “Glimpses of the printing project,” photogravure print, Meishu shenghuo 26 (May 1936), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.)

Qian Shoutie started the colophon by highlighting the four characters (tang zi zu yi ) veiled by the handle, and then traced the vessel’s provenance to the antiquarians Wu Dacheng 大 (1835–1902) and Ruan Yuan (1764– 1849) of the Qing Dynasty.17 Qian also added two personal seal stamps at the end, just as he would after inscribing on a painting. The same cup and its epigraph are indeed represented in a (late nineteenth-century) handscroll painting recording Wu Dacheng’s rich collection of bronze vessels (Fig. 8). Placed among its ancient cousins, the jue is portrayed with monochromatic black ink, and the four inscribed characters, supposedly rubbed from the bronze itself, appear both next to the script on the top and in part under the handle. The painting exhibits an intriguing mix of naturalism and stylization: the molded patterns on the body, the handle, and the two pillar struts are copied meticulously from the vessel, while other components are depicted with reduced modeling and accuracy. Whether the basic illusionistic techniques were employed as a direct response to photography is up for debate; however, it is for certain that the emphasis on words and motifs came from a rich history of picturing bronze in China, a brief summary of which is necessary here. Chinese connoisseurs and artisans had ventured in multiple ways of reproducing and representing archaic bronze long before the advent of photography. In addition to copying with the same material, replication sometimes resulted in trans-media practices.18 Literati and royal patrons facilitated the process of captur-

45 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 6. “Tangzi Zuyi jue of the Shang dynasty,” offset gravure print, Meishu shenghuo 1 (April 1934), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) ing three-dimensional bronze objects on paper as early as the Northern Song Dy- nasty. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) was the ﬁrst to include both epigraphic rubbings and drawings of bronze vessels in his antiquarian catalogues.19 Monarchical projects soon surpassed individual efforts of collecting and recording antiques. Em- peror Huizong (r. 1100–1126) commissioned Wang Fu (1079–1126) to produce Xuanhe bogu tulu (Illustrated Catalogue of Antiques in the Xuanhe Hall), a 30-volume compendium that records over 800 pieces of bronze from the Shang to Tang Dynasty in the imperial collection at the time.20 All illustrations were printed with woodblocks that were carved with the outline method, including that of a jue cup bearing the inscription “Zuyi” (Fig. 9).21 Such antiquarianism prospered along with the long tradition of woodblock printing and culminated again under the rule of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735– 1796) of the Qing Dynasty. A portion of the emperor’s vast store of bronzes was recorded and depicted in Xiqing gujian (The Ancient Mirror of the Imperial Study). Boasting a collection comparable to that of Emperor Huizong of Song in quantity (if not quality), the catalogue follows the Xuanhe model closely in format (Fig. 10). Each entry starts with a drawing of the object with outlines and details,

46 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 7. “Chinese work of art,” photoengraved print, Guocui xuebao 2 (1908), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) and ends with a text detailing the measurements and other information such as the interpretation of an epigraph, if any. The inscription is prominently reproduced twice after the drawing: once in the form of imitating a rubbing of the seal script in intaglio; the other a transcribing of the inscription in standard script as black words on white paper. At the turn of the twentieth century, the modern technologies of photography and printing were eagerly imported from Europe and Japan and adopted by Shang- hai publishers to compete with indigenous reproductive techniques and xylography. The new technologies were not always triumphant when it came to representing works of art, as demonstrated in the aforementioned black-and-white photo of the Zuyi cup in Guocui xuebao (Fig. 7). Although groundbreaking as a mechanical process, photoengraved prints like the example here are granular and blurry due to the use of halftone screens, and it is the other importation, collotype (keluoban 版, boliban 版), that proved to be the most popular technology in producing high-quality images in early twentieth-century China.

The Synergy of Collotype and Composite Rubbing Commercial collotypes were invented in the late 1860s in Germany and England and introduced to China between 1875 and 1885.22 Shanghai’s Tushanwan printers initially used collotype to reproduce images of the Virgin Mary.23 Chinese publishers quickly mastered collotype printing technology through Japanese instruction.24 The

47 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 8. Ren Xun (1834–1893) and Lu Hui (1851–1920), The Antiquarian Collection of Wu Dacheng , section of a handscroll, ink and color on paper, Shanghai Museum.

reprographic technique is based on photography and has the advantageous capacity to shrink or enlarge an image through making a film negative and therefore produce a printing plate of desired size. Furthermore, collotype plates are coated with a light-sensitive gelatin solution that hardens after being exposed to light through a photographic negative, resulting in a planographic printing medium with micro- scopically fine reticulations.25 Shenzhou guoguang ji (National Glories of Cathay, 1908–1911) was the first collotype-printed periodical in China and one of the earliest Chinese publications dedicated to disseminating the knowledge of Chinese art treasures with photographic illustrations.26 The editorial board of the journal included Deng Shi (1877–1951) and Huang Binhong (1865–1955), both members of the As- sociation for the Preservation of the National Essence (Guoxue baocun- hui) that published Guocui xuebao earlier.27 In a sense, Shenzhou was a continued effort of promoting the national essence (guocui) that might be represented by Chinese antiques.28 Displeased by the fuzzy and grainy reproductions of antiques (Fig. 7) in Guocui xuebao, the Shenzhou editors and publishers adopted the finer collotype to print the black and white photographs of most traditional works of art.29 However, some

48 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 9. “Zuyi jue of the Shang,” woodblock print, Xuanhe bogu tulu, vol. 14 (1603), 15 (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) bronze vessels were not pictured with a camera directly. For instance, the collotype plate of the Da Yu Ding 大 (Fig. 11), a bronze tripod made in 1003 BCE during the Western Zhou Dynasty and now a symbol of national pride, was published in the April 1909 issue as a contemporary ink rubbing.30 The sense of modeling and linear perspective here distinguishes the reproduction from the drawings in Xuan- he bogu tulu and Xiqing gujian (Figs. 9 and 10). Also, it reminds us of the handscroll painting commissioned by Wu Dacheng (Fig. 8), as the surface details are rubbed from the vessel, including the exterior motifs and the engraved script inside. The importance of the epigraph is highlighted again by repeating the same text twice— the white intaglio as direct rubbing on the dark background of the inner wall of the vessel as well as the reversed dark script on white background above the vessel. Such format can be traced back to Xuanhe and Xiqing, but the modern version is enhanced with both rubbing and photographically reversed imaging. This original approach of picturing epigraphic bronze is called quanxingta , translated to “complete shape rubbing” or “composite rubbing” in English.31 It is based on traditional rubbing techniques and is capable of combining rubbings and paintings of the various parts of an object and capturing its three-dimensional form as well as textured surfaces.32 Such manual means of achieving pictorial

49 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 10. “Shi Song ding of the Zhou,” woodblock print, Xiqing gujian, vol. 3 (1749– 1755), 21 (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) illusionism was used to image epigraphic bricks, ink stones, and bronze objects in the mid-1830s,33 precisely when photomechanical technologies came to fruition in forms such as calotype and daguerreotype in England and France. The discrep- ancies between the manual and mechanical processes of reproduction came from disparate worldviews on empiricism, cost, and aesthetics, which Chinese traditionalists were obliged to reconcile in the age of global colonialism. The Shenzhou editors’ decision of reproducing the bronze tripod with composite rubbing and collotype printing was therefore a hybrid response to this transcul- tural negotiation. On the one hand, composite rubbing catered both to the rising, popular interest in naturalistic accuracy and the age-old obsession with engraved words and surface patterns. The faithful copying of motifs and scripts, based on conventional rubbing techniques, not only equaled or outshone photographic precision, but ensured another kind of authenticity, one that was related to tac- tile imagination either of touching the object directly or peeling a “skin” from it.34 What’s more, the new, complex approach of rubbing and copying (or even drawing) was not merely “reproductive.”35 Take the Da Yu Ding image (Fig. 11), for example. The “productive” agency here and its expressive power lie exactly in the slightly awkward foreshortening and shape of the tripod. Such integration of tradition and innovation thus bore qualities of “archaic” (gu) and “elegant” (ya) that could not be imitated by the ﬂedgling tool of photography.36 On the other hand, collotype printing, with its photomechanical “reproductive” process, served as an inconspicuous medium that preserved authenticity of the original and represented the “productive” hand in composite rubbing for the

50 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Figure 11. Composite rubbing of the Da Yu Ding, collotype print, Shenzhou guoguang ji 8 (April 1909), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.) purpose of mass production and distribution. The editors described such capacity of collotype as “second only to the original” (xia zhenpin yideng), espe- cially when referring to the reﬁned ink tonality of the printed reproductions.37 One may argue that there was certain ambiguity in the journal’s presentation of the Da Yu Ding because the original here could be the composite rubbing instead of the physical tripod. The composite rubbing itself was presented much like a hanging scroll painting with a dedication to the recipient (top right), postscript (bottom), and seal stamps (top right and bottom left). And the recipient, a certain Xuelu , deﬁnitely considered the rubbing a work of art in its own right, claiming that this old composite rubbing (jiuta quanxing) was hard to come by since the collector no longer easily lent the vessel for rubbing.38

Categorizing Bronze: From Jinshi to Meishu Nevertheless, the composite rubbing of the Da Yu Ding appeared under the category of jin (metal) in Shenzhou guoguang ji. From April 1909 on, the journal’s table of contents typically started with metal and stone (bronze vessels and stone steles), and calligraphy and painting, and then other forms of art.39 The prominent placement of the arts of metal casting and stone carving was indicative of a renewed interest in jinshixue , literarily “metal and stone study,” shared among the

51 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART

Figure 12. Wu Changshi (1844– 1927), Dingshengtu , 1902, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou. traditionalists on the editorial board, including the philologist and epigrapher Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940).40 The origin of this unique discipline could be traced back to the Northern Song dynasty, when antiquarians studied systematical- ly bronze vessels and stone steles often through the form of rubbing.41 By nature, jinshixue had focused both on the archaic object itself and the script preserved on it.42 The innovation of quanxingta in the nineteenth century facilitated a better integration of the two aspects, object and word, of such study, and likely also allowed collectors to share their treasures (Fig. 8) with friends and visitors “virtually,” not having to move or expose the heavy vessels frequently. The revitalized enthusiasm for jinshixue had a profound impact on traditional artistic practices in the fast modernizing metropolis of late Qing Shanghai. Take Wu Changshi (1844–1927), for example. Particularly charmed by the ancient “stone drum script” (shiguwen), Wu developed a quirky style of calligraphy and seal carving and eventually inserted the epigraphic flavor into his paintings. In a 1902 hanging scroll (Fig. 12) incorporating flower painting and composite rubbing (the one in the foreground is of the Da Yu Ding), for example, he simplified

52 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE? the age-old literati art of calligraphy and painting for the benefit of nouveau riche patrons, who delighted in the brightly colored, auspicious flowers as well as the hint of erudition.43 In addition to appreciating the naïve quality of his gestural writing, the more cultivated audience would eagerly compare the bold and deliberate outlines of the gnarled plum branches and the strong sense of design, balanced by the boneless flowers, to the carving and composing of a stone seal.44 Wu’s painting and the composite rubbing reproduced in Shenzhou belong to the subject of bogu (antiques and collectibles),45 and are comparable to a less prestigious kind of collage-like painting known as bapo (eight brokens) or jin- huidui (piles of brocade ashes) that also gained popularity in the nineteenth century.46 The trompe-l’oeil nature of bapo and the naturalism of quanxingta, as ex- pedient responses to the increasing popularity of pictorial realism, were mere single cruisers in an armada that would fundamentally transform how art was practiced and studied in modern China. Chinese literati writers and artists had remarked on European illusionism since the seventeenth century and often relegated it to the level of professional craftsmanship as a result of the political discourse addressing the polarized aesthetic predilections between the two traditions.47 The clashing of cultural values was intensified due to military conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the weaker economic and political ranks of late Qing and the Republic left few options for the artists and scholars guarding the metaphorical ships of Chinese tradition: whether to run head-on into the “globalizing” armada by rejecting foreign values and let more vessels capsize, to abandon ship and accept wholesale Westernization, or to re-align whatever remained salvageable in the Chi- nese fleet and play by the rules of the dominant armada. History has proven that the third approach, bridging differences and finding common ground, is at once challenging and rewarding, as illustrated by the overlap of the representation of bronze with photomechanical printing and the termino- logical and cognitive metamorphoses of art in early twentieth-century China. The disagreeable image quality of the photoengraved print of the bronze jue (Fig. 7) in Guocui xuebao is symptomatic of the dilemma faced by the traditionalist editors: the “advanced” method of photography produced something far less desirable than a composite rubbing. What’s more awkward is the title given to the bronze cup: Zhongguo meishu pin 美術 or Chinese Work of Fine Art. Given the journal’s dedication to the national essence and exclusion of foreign objects and values, “Chi- nese” almost seems redundant here. But the editors probably felt imperative to use “Chinese” to annotate the highly charged and disputed neologism of meishu or fine art.

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Figure 13. Rubbing and photograph of a bronze yi, photogravure and offset gravure prints, Meishu shenghuo 26 (May 1936), n.p. (Artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the author.)

A Sino-Japanese-European loanword that did not exist in classical Chinese, meishu was transliterated from the same two characters in Japanese (bijutsu) at the end of the nineteenth century and meant to translate the English “fine arts” and the French beaux arts.48 Although the boundaries of the new term were unsettled around the 1910s—ranging from as narrow as calligraphy and painting only to as broad as all expressions of beauty—it was clear that China had art forms and aesthetics distinct from those of Europe and some might not be so fittingly lumped under the neologism. In Wang Guowei’s (1877–1927) enumeration of the forms of art that were uniquely Chinese, the bronzes of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, and rubbings of the Qin and Han were distinct to him because they all reflected the aesthetic concept of guya (antiquity and elegance).49 The aforementioned categorization of traditional art in Shenzhou guoguang ji seems to have followed Wang’s argument. By the 1920s, however, the European model of a tripartite classification of fine arts into painting, sculpture, and architecture had established its strong foothold among the Republican academia and demanded to be reconciled with the extant categories of traditional art. The canonical materials of jinshixue, including the Xuanhe and Xiqing catalogs, were listed under qiwu zhishu (antiquarian objects) of the subcategory pulu lei (material culture and natural studies), instead of yishu lei 術 (calligraphy, painting, music, seal carving, and etc.),50 in the category of zi (Masters) of the eighteenth century Siku quanshu

54 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

(Complete Library of the Four Treasuries), the largest encyclopedia of traditional Chi- nese knowledge.51 The study of metal and stone also constituted a facet of the “ev- idential learning” (kaojuxue or kaozhengxue ) in the Qing dynasty.52 Such convention was maintained by late Qing scholars such as Wang Guowei and Luo Zhenyu, the latter of which endeavored to repackage jinshixue as qiwuxue (study of objects) in alignment with modern archaeology.53 On the other hand, ancient bronzes and epigraphy were researched by art historians to compensate for the monothematic concentration on calligraphy and painting, and treated along with jade carving and ceramics as subcategories of sculpture.54

Conclusion As the study and appreciation of epigraphic bronzes migrated from the traditional knowledge system to a modern one, the early technological experimentation of Guocui and Shenzhou was also discounted as conservative by the May Fourth generation. By the late 1920s, collotype faced strong competition from new, cheaper photomechanical printing processes that produced images of similar or higher quality. The new technologies were adopted by photo-illustrated pictorials such as Liangyou and Meishu shenghuo to carry on the mission of spreading visual literacy to an even wider readership. But all was not lost in the industrious progress of photographic reproduction and mechanical printing. In issue 26 (May 1936) of Meishu shenghuo, a bronze yi of the Zhou dynasty (Fig. 13) is represented in a format that stays popular even today. A high-quality color photographic print of the vessel occupies the lower half of the page as a paste-on; not only the motifs and patina appear vivid under the well-adjusted lighting, but the key patterns are also used to design an elegant, dec- orative border for the print. The upper half page contains the black-and-white reproduction of an inking rubbing of the inscription on the vessel’s interior, ﬂanked by calligraphic transcriptions and red seal stamps. A balance seems to have been struck between the traditional and the modern, honoring both connoisseurship and consumerism. In this chapter, photography has been examined as a reproductive printing medium and its advantages and disadvantages in representing ancient bronze compared against traditional forms of art. The symbiosis of photography and mechanical printing, thanks to its versatility and affordability, had assimilated some functions of traditional media, such as painting and rubbing, but could not fully replace them because these changes were never purely technological. The mechanical processes of photography and printing had to be ﬁne-tuned by the creative hand so as to achieve prime effects. The popularization of this new medium was further

55 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EAST ASIAN ART entangled in the modernist dichotomies of the old and new, the national and cosmopolitan, providing yet another possibility of bringing to the limelight time-hon- ored practices (composite rubbing) and aesthetics (guya). Ultimately, as a product of human creativity, photomechanical printing was destined to prevail in the ﬁeld of imaging, but it too will be succeeded in due course.55

Endnotes 1. I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Wu Hung, Professor Chelsea Foxwell, and Katherine R. Tsiang for their critical feedback and helpful suggestions on the essay. I am also indebted to Tingting Xu and Dr. Boqun Zhou for their timely assistances in finding important information and sources in areas of their expertise. For a panoramic view of the mechanized, commercialized, and ultimately capitalized Chinese print world centered in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, transcribed by Andy Blunden, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed March 22, 2020, www.marxists.org/refer- ence/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. 3. For Talbot’s role as one of the inventors of photography and the significance of The Pencil of Nature as the first photography book, see Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (New York: Rutledge, 2012), 17–41. 4. Helena E. Wright, “Photography in the Printing Press: The Photomechanical Revolution,” in Presenting Pictures, ed. Bernard Finn (London: Science Museum, 2004), 21–42. 5. Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2013), 21–45. 6. The serial was eventually published as a book in 1931. Liang Desuo 梁得所, Xiyang meishu dagang 美術大綱 [An outline of Western fine art] (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1931). 7. Invented in 1875 in England, offset lithography replaced flat presses with rotary cylinders, which increased the speed of printing, and in 1901, clearer and sharper images were attained by printing from rubber rollers instead of metal ones. The highly efficient mechanism arrived at Shanghai’s Commercial Press in 1915 and by the 1920s was widely used in publishing photograph-filled pictorials. Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (Third Edition) (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1988), 146–50; Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005), 140–48; Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 63. 8. Liang Desuo compiled the serial using mainly Sir William Orpen’s The Outline of Art, Solomon Rein- arch’s Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art Throughout the Ages, and Lu ̈ Zheng’s Xiyang meishushi 美術 [Western art history]. Liangyou良友 (The Young Companion) 13, March 1927, 21. 9. A multitude of innovations and cultural ramifications of the magazine are investigated in Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945, ed. Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 10. “Color Printing,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., accessed March 24, 2020, www.britannica.com/technology/color-printing. 11. As early as 1914, nude female models were used for the instruction of figure drawing by Li Shutong (1880–1942) in Hangzhou. Such practice was continued by Liu Haisu (1896–1994) in Shanghai and capitalized on by Liu in a series of lawsuits against him in the 1920s, the controversy of which would still be fresh memories in the mass media in the 1930s. Julia F. Andrews, “Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai: Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy,” Chungguksa Yongu [Journal of Chinese Historical Researches], no. 35 (April 2005): 323–72. 12. The magazine was funded by Jin Youcheng (1886–1988) to promote the high quality production

56 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE? of his K & K (Sanyi ) Printing Company in Shanghai. Its advertisements proclaimed the company was the expert of photomechanical printing in China and its equipment topnotch in East Asia. Founded in 1927 through shares, K & K’s printing workshop was destroyed in 1937 during the Japanese air raids. After the communist takeover, the company went through a series of mergers and eventually became a part of Shang- hai Municipal Art Printing Company 美 in 1978. Song Yuanfang and Sun Yong , eds., Shanghai chuban zhi 版 [Records of publishing in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue yuan chubanshe, 2000), 851. 13. This print should be placed in the lineage of still life photography that Liu Puqing might have referred to, such as Plate XXIV (calotype) in William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844–1846, and the three-color halftone “natural color” print of a still life photography, 1893, Bartlett & Co., New York. “New Fruit in Color, Black & White, and Shades in Between,” accessed March 25, 2020, https://photoseed.com/ blog/2011/08/17/new-fruit-in-color-black-white-and-shades-in-between. 14. For montage aesthetics in literary and visual culture of Republican Shanghai, see Paul W. Ricketts, “Kaleidoscopic Modernisms: Montage Aesthetics in Shanghai and Tokyo Pictorials of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945, ed. Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 15–44; William Schaefer, Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–1937 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 145–79. 15. Wu Hung, “On Rubbings: Their Materiality and Historicity,” in Writing and Materiality in China, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 29–30. 16. First King of the Shang dynasty, Tang is recorded on oracles and in later texts with various names including Tang and Zuyi . Han Jiangsu and Jiang Linchang , Yinbenji dingbu yu Shangshi renwu zheng [Research on Yibenji and the historical figures in the Shang dynasty] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2010), 96, 98. The engraved characters tang zi zu yi (not seen in the Meishu shenghuo photograph) have been rubbed from different bronze jue cups, and three examples can be found in Yinzhou jinwen jicheng [A collection of epigraphs from the Shang and Zhou], ed. Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 所 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 4738. 17. Qian Shoutie’s inscription reads: “所 .” 18. One example is the early Qing rulers’ passion for replicating ancient bronze with porcelain. Two vessels of similar shapes, a late Shang (13th–11th century BCE) bronze gu and an 18th century porcelain gu vase bearing a Qianlong seal mark were sold at Sotheby’s London in 2014 for 242,500 and 362,500 GPB respectively. “Archaic bronze ritual wine vessel and 18th century Qing Dynasty porcelain vase to be offered at Sotheby’s,” posted on October 30, 2014, https://alaintruong2014.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/archaic- bronze-ritual-wine-vessel-and-18th-century-qing-dynasty-porcelain-vase-to-be-offered-at-sothebys/ 19. For the significance of Jigu lu (Records of collecting antiquity) by Ouyang Xiu (1007– 1072) in the early development of Song antiquarianism, see Yunchiahn C. Sena, Bronze and Stone: The Cult of Antiquity in Song Dynasty China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 29–64. 20. The project started in 1107 and completed in 1123. The bronzes are divided into twenty types, the terms of which, including ding , jue , and zhong , are still used today. Each object is illustrated; inscriptions, if any, are rubbed and transcribed; measurements of size, volume, and weight follow, along with a commen- tary on the origin and history of the item. 21. Without Tang , Zuyi alone could also refer to a later Shang king. Han and Jiang, Yinbenji dingbu yu Shangshi renwu zheng, 140. 22. The first commercial collotypes were produced in 1868 in Germany by Josef Albert and in 1869 in England by Ernst Edwards. “Collotype & Pochoir,” University of California at Santa Cruz, University Library, accessed June 5, 2013, library.ucsc.edu/speccoll/collotype-pochoir; Song and Sun, eds., Shanghai chuban zhi, 863; Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 28. 23. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 28.

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24. They were either trained by Japanese technicians in Shanghai or sent to study in Japan. Ibid., 64. 25. “Collotype,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., accessed March 27, 2020, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ topic/125930/collotype. 26. For studies on the journal both in Chinese and English, see Yu-jen Liu , “Zhaoxiang fuzhi nian- daili de Zhongguo meishu: Shenzhou guoguangji de fuzhi taidu yu wenhua biaoshu” 美術: [Chinese art in the age of photographic reproduction: the art periodical Shenzhou guoguangji), Guoli Taiwan Daxue Meishushi Yanjiu jikan 大美術 35 (September 2013): 185–244, 258, and idem, “Second Only to the Original: Rhetoric and Practice in the Photographic Reproduction of Art in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Art History 37, no. 1 (October 2013): 69–95. 27. Between 1911 and 1936, Deng and Huang also collaborated on compiling a collection of Chinese art treatises entitled Meishu congshu 美術 [A compendium of fine art], which still offers the most compre- hensive literature review of Chinese writings on art before the twentieth century. Like Shenzhou guoguang ji, the compendium was also published by the Cathay Art Union . 28. For studies on Guocui xuebao and its contribution to the “national essence” discourse, see Laurence A. Schneider, “National Essence: Conservative Approaches to Cultural Continuity,” in idem, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 33–40; Tze-ki Hon, “National Essence, National Learning, and Culture: Historical Writings in Guocui xuebao, Xueheng, and Guoxue jikan,” in Historiography East and West 2 (2003): 242–86; idem, Revolu- tion as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China’s Path to Modernity, 1905–1911 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 29. It is not to say that collotype solved all the problems, one of which was the problem of capturing the subtlety of brushworks in traditional ink paintings. Yu-jen Liu, “Second Only to the Original,” 77- 81; Yanfei Zhu, “Picturing Meishu: Photomechanical Reproductions of Works of Art in Chinese Peri- odicals before WWII,” Trans Asia Photography Review 10, no. 1 (Fall 2019), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.7977573.0010.102. 30. The significance of bronze ding vessels and their symbolizing the legitimacy and virtue of a ruler can be traced back to the story of the Nine Tripods, mythical bronze vessels casted in the legendary Xia dynasty. Wen Fong, ed., The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), xi. 31. Wu Hung, “On Rubbings,” 53; Qianshen Bai, “Composite Rubbings in Nineteenth-Century China: The Case of Wu Dacheng (1835–1902) and His Friends,” in Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago: Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, 2010), 291–319. 32. The technical details of composite rubbing are elaborated in Wang Yifeng , Guzhuan huagong: Liuzhou yu shijiu shiji de xueshu he yishu 19 [Antique bricks and flower offerings: Liuzhou and nineteenth century scholarship and art] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, 2017), 252–64. 33. Idem, “Guzhuan huagong: Quanxingta yishu jiqi yu Liuzhou zhi guanlian” : [Antique brick and flower offering: the art of Sstereo rubbing and its relevance to Monk Liuzhou], Zhongguo guojia bowuguan guankan [Journal of National Museum of China] 140, no. 3 (March 2015): 108. 34. Wu, “On Rubbings,” 30; Michael J. Hatch, “Epigraphic and Art Historical Responses to Presenting the Tripod, by Wang Xuehao (1803),” Metropolitan Museum Journal 54 (2019): 99. 35. I am borrowing Jonathan Hay’s creative pairing of “reproductive” and “productive” to illustrate the difference between exact copying and innovative re-creation. Jonathan Hay, “The Reproductive Hand,” in Between East and West, Reproductions in Art, ed. Shigetoshi Osano (Cracow: IRSA, 2014), 319–33. 36. Acknowledging the usefulness of photography in recording bronzes and making drafts of paintings, the collector Chen Jieqi (1813–1884) considered the lack of elegance or archaic flavor the weakness of photographic images. Chen Jieqi , Fuzhai chidu , quoted and translated in Bai, “Composite

58 DID PHOTOGRAPHY WIN THE CONTEST OF PICTURING EPIGRAPHIC BRONZE?

Rubbings in Nineteenth-Century China,” 308–09. 37. Liu, “Second Only to the Original,” 79. 38. Xuelu’s note is added to the left of the framed collotype plate and reads, “ 得 .” 39. Cultural relics were categorized according to their medium and then organized chronologically. Begin- ning from issue 8 (April 1909), the table of contents was divided into the subcategories of metal , stone , calligraphy (later changed to ), painting , clay , bricks , tiles , rubbings , coins , jade , ceramics , and miscellaneous artifacts . 40. The first English monograph on the field of jinshi is Shana J. Brown, Pastimes: From Art and Antiquari- anism to Modern Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011). 41. Sena, Bronze and Stone, 29–64. 42. Ma Heng , Zhongguo jinshixue gailun [An introduction to the Chinese study of ancient metals and stones] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2009), “xulun” [Introduction], 2. 43. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–24. 44. Kuiyi Shen, “Traditional Painting in a Transitional Era, 1900–1950,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen et al., A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China (New York: Guggen- heim Museum, 1998), 81. 45. Xue Yongnian , “Jinshi quanxingta yu Foulu boguhua” [Antiquarian composite rubbing and Wu Changshi’s paintings of antiques and collectibles)], in Yugu weitu: Wu Changshi shuhua zhuanke xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 術 [Standing by the ancient: Wu Changshi’s calligraphy, painting, seal carving conference proceedings], ed. Macao Museum of Art (Beijing: Gugong chubanshe, 2015), 68–73. 46. Nancy Berliner, “The ‘Eight Broken’: Chinese Trompe-l’oeil Painting,” Orientations 23 (February 1992): 64. 47. Martin Powers characterizes such discursive positions on both the Chinese and European sides as “Cul- tural Politics.” Martin Powers, “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (June 2013): 312–27. 48. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 305. 49. Wang Guowei , “Guya zhi zai meixue shang zhi weizhi” 美 [The place of antiquity and elegance in aesthetics], Jiaoyu shijie [Education world] 144 (1907): 4; Hui Guo, “Writ- ing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2010), 117. 50. Although yishu is often considered equivalent to meishu in the modern Chinese language, it has a more convoluted etymology. The term had long existed in Chinese literature. Its denotation prior to the late nineteenth century was, however, very different from the modern meaning as art. It was a compound of the characters yi and shu. Yi meant “to plant” and was linked to the idea of liuyi or six arts, including ritual, music, archery, equestrianism, writing, and mathematics. Shu meant “path” and referred to medicine, astrology, prophecy, geomancy, and etc. Therefore, the compound word symbolized all sorts of skills and techniques, only a fraction of which were considered to be culturally refined. Yishu’s connotation was greatly altered at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was used by the Japanese to translate modern European words and then reintroduced into modern Chinese. Ogawa Hiromitsu , “Regarding the Publication of the Meishu Congshu (Fine Arts Series): The Introduction of the European Concept ‘Fine Arts’ and the Japanese Translated Term ‘Bijutsu’,” Universitätsbibliothek der Universität Heidelberg (2003), accessed April 10, 2020, www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/5810; Yu-jen Liu, “Publishing Chinese Art: Issues of Cultural Reproduction in China, 1905–1918” (PhD diss., Trinity College, Oxford, 2010), 126–32; Guo, “Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China,” 114–21. 51. For a balanced account of the compilation project and its significance, see R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s

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Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ien-lung Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 52. Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Antiquarianism in East Asia: A Preliminary Overview,” in World Antiquari- anism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Alain Schnapp (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 54. 53. Cheng-hua Wang, “Luo Zhenyu and the Formation of Qiwu and Qiwuxue in the First Decade of the Republican Era,” in Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture, ed. Chia-Ling Yang and Roderick Whitﬁeld (London: Saffron Books, 2012), 32–57. 54. Such usage and categorization of bronze art can be found in the new art history surveys such as Teng Gu’s (1901-1942) Zhongguo meishu xiaoshi 美術 [A short history of Chinese art, 1926] and Li Puyuan’s Zhongguo yishushi gailun 術 [An outline of Chinese art history, 1931]. Guo, “Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China,” 118-19. 55. Digital media have commanded the ﬁeld of imaging in recent decades. Three-dimensional models, based on digital photography and scanning, have been used to represent ancient Chinese Buddhist caves and sculptures by university and museum researchers. Prominent examples include the Digital Dunhuang project at the Dunhuang Academy in China and the Xiangtangshan Caves project at the University of Chica- go’s Center for the Art of East Asia.