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The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/44098 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation

Author: Wenxin Wang Title: A social history of painting inscriptions in Ming China (1368-1644) Issue Date: 2016-10-26 271 Chapter 5 Portrait Inscriptions and Re-Inscriptions: “The Decaying Brushstrokes Are Where Your Spirits Rest”

The word chuan in Xie Chengju’s poem, cited in the introduction to this dissertation, demonstrates that Ming painting inscriptions not only addressed issues of the present, but also issues of the past and the future. This chapter adds the dimension of time to the social history of painting inscriptions, vis-a-vis time that was conceptually and socially meaningful to the Ming people.1 The first part of this chapter focuses on a specific genre of Chinese panting: portraiture. It is concerned with portrait inscriptions as a significant device for mediating portrait inscribers and social interactions and a device enabling the inscribers to reproduce themselves for identity construction. This part also investigates portrait inscriptions as texts that, being independent from the portraits, had their way of multiplication and circulation. The previous discussions on inscriptions in manuscripts and printing books prepared the foundations for understanding portrait inscriptions in this context. Portraiture was not the only situation that frequently invited

Ming people to ponder the relationship between their inscriptions 5 and a changing environment. The second part of this chapter deals with the idea of re-encountering a painting (including a portrait) that one had once painted, viewed, inscribed or owned, or a painting that had carried many inscriptions by people in the past. It is concerned with, in this situation, how inscriptions projected the presence of the inscriber as an extension of his physical existence, so as to intervene with the past, present, and future. These directions of time envision a social history in a time continuum in which events occur in succession. 1 For a conceptual discussion of the Chinese notion of time, see Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644 (London: Reaktion, 2007), 21-26.

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Portrait Inscriptions: The Exploration of a Changing Environment

Attempts to seek parallels between Chinese and Western portraiture are often frustrated.2 Western portraiture is about painting a likeness of an individual based on the artist’s observations. In comparison, Chinese portraiture is lack of chiaroscuro technique, anatomical analysis and interest in individual characteristics. These characteristics often make art historians consider Chinese portraits are mediocre and boring.3 In contrast to the abundant scholarship on Western portraiture, there is a dearth of studies on Chinese portraiture both in and outside China. There has even been great hesitation about including Chinese portraits in the category of “art”.4 A popular scheme is to see the Ming era as a period of “decline and revival.” This scheme attributes the decline to the dominant scholar artists’ ignorance of the genre, and the revival to the introduction of Western techniques to China by early Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.5 Imperial portraiture is closely linked to high court art in general and rulership.6 The educated men’s involvement in portraiture is somehow dismissed. Even their role as patrons is barely discussed. Their portraits are put in the context of Chinese ancestral cult, and the context, in a way of circle reasoning, in

2 Seeking for “individual irregularities of an empirical person” (page 23) from the early history of Chinese portraiture is a main thread of Dietrich Seckel’s essay “The Rise of Portraiture in Chinese Art,” Artibus Asiae, Vol. 53, No. 1/2 (1993): 7-26. 3 For such ideas, see Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 64 (April 1977): 118-36. 4 Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” 118-9; Joan Hornby, “Chinese Ancestral Portraits: Some Late Ming and Ming Style Ancestral Portraits in Scandinavian Museums,” Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities, Vol. 70 (2000): 173-271. 5 A clear demonstration of these views can be found in Eli Lancman, Chinese Portraiture (Tokyo: Rutland, Vermont, 1960), 133-74. 6 For studies on Chinese imperial portraiture, see Wen Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” Art Orientalis, Vol. 25 (1995): 47-58; Dora C. Y. Ching, “Icons of Rulership: Imperial Portraiture during the Ming Dynasty,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011). Sherman E. Lee’s article in note 2 also investigates several portraits from Qing court.

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turn support these portraits being made as iconic reminders of forebears.7 The bias against Chinese portraiture has been reduced in recent decades by the increasing realization that the notion of “portrait” can be different in different societies. Suspending the dispute on artistry, scholarship has discovered more facets of ancient Chinese portraiture: ritual, political, religious, commemorative, as well as a conceptual result of cosmos and human being. But portraits are seldom situated in concrete social circumstances as objects that can be touched, examined, carried, altered, repaired and even destroyed. The importance of such physical interactions with portraits to this present study is that they direct us to investigate the “thingness” of portraits. This thingness, in turn, illuminates the thingness of inscriptions. To some extent, portrait inscriptions encompass many of the topics that have been discussed in the previous chapters: the physicality of inscriptions, personal networking, self-identity, the two ways of preserving and disseminating inscriptions. It should be noted at the outset that the terminology of portraiture in Chinese writings of all periods is extremely inconsistent. More than thirty words refer to this genre of painting.8 The terminological ambivalence reminds us that portraiture is not distinct from figure paintings. This chapter tackles portrait inscriptions for analysis of the social aspect of 5 these inscriptions and paintings. Paintings of imaginary and historical figures are not within the scope of this investigation. Before we begin our exploration of portrait inscriptions, a brief introduction to the general situation of portraiture and portraitists is worthwhile. “Keys to Painting a Portrait” (Xiexiang mijue 寫像祕訣) by a late Yuan scholar named Wang Yi 王繹 is a short guide to the skills necessary for rendering a portrait.

7 Li Chu-tsing and James C. Y. Wyatt, The Chinese Scholar's Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period: An Exhibition from the Shanghai Museum (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 116. 8 For a relatively thorough sorting out of these terms and their historical change, see Dora C. Y. Ching, “Icons of Rulership,” 29-42.

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This essay prefigured a growing interest in producing human portraiture. The growth in demand for the visual instruction of portraiture continued throughout the Ming period. The eagerness for portraiture since the late sixteenth century can be attested to by the larger number of portraits produced in this period, as well as a number of published books. Wang Yi’s essay partially survives by virtue of several printed encyclopaedias of the Ming era, which embraced the essay to instruct their audience.9 A late Ming encyclopaedia, Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms (Sancai tuhui 三才圖會 , 1609), used rich and delicate illustrations to teach the reader about modelling the human face and body with a series of illustrations of faces seen from different angles (fig. 5-1). Perhaps in part because of these kinds of model books, for the first time in Chinese history, Ming portraitists grasped the method of representing human faces frontally.10 Collected

Fig. 5-1 Illustrations of depictions of human faces from different angles, in Wang Qi, Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms, juan renshi 人事 4, 29a-30a. First published in 1607, Huaiyin caotang 槐陰草堂edition. Source: Bayerische StaatsBibliothek.

9 For Wang Yi’s essay and research on it, see Ogawa Yōichi, “Minshin no shōzō ga to ninsōjutsu – Minshin shōsetsu kenkyū no ikkan toshite” 明清の肖像画と 人相術 ―― 明清小説研究の一環として ――, Touhokudaigaku chūgokugo gaku bungaku ronshū 東北大学中国語学文学論集 , No. 4 (1999), accessed December 24, 2015, http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/zhongwen/journal/04/04ogawa.htm. 10 For the development of portraits in this respect, see Wen Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” 47-58.

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Illustrations of the Three Realms also instructs on representing the human body in different postures and scenarios, such as a man playing a zither or a man served by an attendant inscribing on a wall. These teachings would have been very useful for those at that time for those seeking for ready templates for their own creations. Ming clients of portraiture enjoyed a variety of choices. One could hire a professional portraitist to come to his home, or ask a competent friend to paint the picture as a favour, or simply go to portrait studios in person (fig. 5-2). A Record of Ming Painting (Minghua lu 明畫錄), a biographical book of Ming artists completed in 1677, impressively recorded 90 Ming figurative painters. Many of them would have accepted commissions for portraits in their days.11 It has been widely acknowledged that the increase in urban residents and commercialization contributed to the growth of portraiture. Demand for portraiture remained at a high level, especially in cities, from the fifteenth century till the

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Fig. 5-2 Detail of a portraitist working at his own studio upon the client’s visit, from Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, 17th century. 11 There are 74 entries. A painter’s descendant who was also successful at figure painting would appear in the same entry with his ancestor. See Xu Qin, Ming hua lu, 6-7.

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last years of the Ming dynasty.12 A popular witicism summarises the huge contrast in the incomes of painters of different specialities: “ [Painting] portraiture for gold, flowers for silver. Whoever wants to beg will paint hills and rivers. 金臉銀花卉 , 要 討飯畫山水.”13 The high reward for portraiture may well have been particularly salient in commercially prosperous cities like Yangzhou, where this saying was recorded. Those who painted for monetary payment were mostly professional portraitists. For this painter group, apprenticeship was a standard way for a beginner to learn basic skills and for the organisation of a studio. Extant Ming portraits lack inscriptions written by professional portraitists. But this phenomenon does not necessarily mean they were too humble to interact with their clients. Portrait inscriptions occasionally acknowledged their names and native places, such as “Mr. Tang 唐 from Yin 鄞 (a county in Ningbo Prefecture),” “Mr. Sun 孫 from Guangling 廣陵 (modern Yangzhou).”14 When a late Ming official Kang Guoxiang 康國相 found his portraitist in low spirits, he even played instruments to entertain the painter.15 Like the problem outlining the readership of Chinese books, it is not easy to demarcate a high-end and a low-end to portraitists and their market. An official could hire portraitists of various educational levels. A literate but unemployed man could paint for a barely literate merchant. Different combinations of commissioners and portraitists assigned different value to the final portrait works and the inscriptions that accompanied these portraits. It is true that Chinese portraits were much less about the public manifestation of affluence. But they did assume intensive functionalities in the political, social, ritual and ideological

12 For portraiture and the apprenticeship among urban professional portraitists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China, see Yu Hui, “Shiqiba shiji de shimin xiaoxiang hua” 十七、八世紀的市民肖像畫 , Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博物院院刊 , Vol. 95, No. 3 (2001): 38-41. 13 Wang Yun 汪鋆 (b.1816), Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 , XXSKQS, 657. 14 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明人自傳文鈔 (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1977), 285, 93. 15 Ibid., 215.

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domains. The problem is that the highly stylized Chinese portraiture provided the beholder with almost no information about their creation, usage, and reception. In this section, I will show that inscriptions, the majority of which can only be found in the individual collections of the writers, provide us with an avenue to approach the social facet of Chinese portraiture. They illuminate the social circumstances in which portraits were executed and circulated, and assumed social functions on their own.

Genres of Portrait Inscriptions The lack of inscriptions on Ming portraits could be a result of the fact that a considerable proportion of them assumed ritual functions that had little need for any written words. Another possible reason is that some once existing inscriptions might have been removed from the portraits in the course of their distribution and transmission. But we do observe a tendency for Ming educated men to depend on texts to draw information from the portraits they were examining. In turn, from time to time they felt an obligation to provide texts for opaque portraits in order to aid the future viewer’s comprehension. Masaaki Itakura’s study on a late Yuan “small portrait” (xiaoxiang 小像) of Ni Zan by an anonymous painter gives us insight in this regard.16 This portrait 5 handscroll depicts a Ni Zan image sitting before a screen. The picture part is followed by a colophon written by Ni’s close friend Zhang Yu 張雨 (1283-1350), eulogizing Ni’s virtue.17 On a late Ming copy attributed to Qiu Ying, this composition changes. The screen disappears; in the same place above Ni Zan’s head is a text written in rectangular shape (fig. 5-3). The text is an epitaph

16 Masaaki Itakura, “Chōu dai Geisan (Taipei kokyū hakubutsuin) o meguru shomondai” 張雨題『倪瓉像』（台北故宮博物院）をめぐる諸問題 , Bijutsushi ronsō 美術史論叢 , No. 17 (2001): 159-86. 17 For Zhang Yu’s biography, see Chang Kuang-p’in, “Yuan xuanru Zhang Yu shengping ji shufa” 元玄儒張雨生平及書法 , in Zhonghua minguo jianguo bashi nian Zhongguo yishu wenwu taolun hui lunwenji 中華民國建國八十年中國藝術文物 討論會論文集 , Vol. shuhua shang 書畫上 (Taipei: Gugong bowuyuan, 1991), 239- 78.

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Fig. 5-2 Detail of a portraitist working at his own studio upon the client’s visit, from Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival, 17th century.

composed by a scholar named Wang Bin 王賓 (ca.1335-1405), which mentions that Ni Zan gave Zhang Yu a large amount of money after selling some land. Itakura argues that Ming people found this epitaph, which explicit narrates the friendship between Ni and Zhang, a more appropriate text to be inscribed on the copy than Zhang’s colophon. The epitaph was a genre of inscriptions associated with portraits, along with verse genres such as poetry, ci-poetry, sanqu 散曲 (a form of literary lyrics), and non-verse genres such as biography and ji 記 (record). A particularly noteworthy genre is zan 讚 , or eulogy. This early literary genre was developed to describe and comment on people or things. Recent studies believe that writings of this genre were widely used on sacrifice rituals, or when a gift was presented, or when a guest was introduced to the host. Eulogies for paintings, as mentioned in chapter 1, emerged in early ancient China. The eulogies of this kind served to explain visual contents, and to assistant the viewers’ comprehension. These functions met with the needs of Ming people, who were often expected, or requested, to write a literary text for a portrait subject. This form of writing should be solemn. It was normally positive, lavishing praise on the subject’s exploits and merits, and linking these admirable aspects to his or her physiognomic traits

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that can be told by the portrait.18 It is hence not surprising that Chinese Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adopted zan for their inscriptions on images of Jesus and Mary.19 Ming poems on paintings, though criticized for mediocrity in terms of their literary value, nonetheless received some attention from academia. In contrast, portraiture eulogies are seldom studied. Literary specialists tag portrait eulogies as writings with a low level of literariness and therefore see no value in studying these texts. Art historians are also not motivated to study them due to the fact that existing portraiture seldom carries eulogies, or even inscriptions in general. Ogawa Yōichi is one of a very few scholars who shed light on the eulogy genre of portraiture. He terms all sorts of literature generated for or related to portraiture as “portraiture literature” (shōzōga no bungaku 肖像画の文学), ranging from novels, dramas, jokes, to poems (tixiang shi 題 像詩), ci-poems, and eulogies (xiangzan 像讚).20 Ogawa has noticed the existence of a large number of portrait eulogies in literary corpuses of the Ming and Qing periods and believes that these writings, which should be read simultaneously to the appreciation of portraiture, lost this context when they ended up in textual collections.21 I would argue, however, that despite their physical separation from the portraits, eulogies and other genres of inscriptions do not lose their social functions, but continue to 5 18 Many studies have discussed the relationship between Chinese portraiture and physiognomy. See Ogawa Yōichi, “Minshin no shōzō ga to ninsōjutsu.” Richard Vinograd, The Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5-6. For a discussion from a cultural perspective, see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 88-91. 19 Ad Dudink cites five eulogies that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century. Their attribution to Xu Guangqi seems problematic. Another two on Jesus and Mary should not be attributed to Xu but rather to unknown writers of the same time or after. See Ad Dudink, “Chapter Three The Image of Xu Guangqi as Author of Christian Texts (A Bibliographical Appraisal,” in Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), ed. Catherine Jami, Peter Mark Engelfriet, and Gregory Blue (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 99-152. 20 Ogawa Yōichi, Chūgoku no shōzōga no bungaku 中国の肖像画文学 (Tokyo: kenbun shuppan, 2005), 14. 21 Ibid., 130-32.

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spread social meanings. In the following discussion, I will situate the execution and circulation of portrait inscriptions, many of which are eulogies, in an everyday scenario, with the aim of highlighting their social value, something that has largely been ignored in previous studies.

Interactions with Social Identities Portrait inscriptions primarily deal with the sitters as human beings in society. This is particularly true when the portrait depicts a group, in which one subject’s social attribute is illuminated by his or her relations to the others. In the Ming context, one type of inscription for group portraits related to the basic unit of society – a family or a clan. Jiaqing tu 家慶圖 , lit., “picture of the celebration of a clan,” is the term for this kind of portrait. It depicts a clan, mostly of more than two generations, gathering together for festivals or events. This kind of painting helps a clan’s descendants to know their communal ancestors and genealogy. The underlying didactic message was that continuous reproduction represented the endless prosperity of a lineage. It is not surprising that an outsider to the clan, or any remote descendant, who gazes at a group portrait, naturally wants to identify each figure and to work out the various relationships. Inscriptions often assumed this task, devoting space to identifying each figure and describing the entire genealogy. The inscriptions treated the clan as a basic unit, the members of which were closely linked. They were far less concerned with revealing each figure’s individual traits. Readers who relied on the information embodied in these inscriptions could hopefully avoid any confusion about the sitter’s identity, relations, and social standing and, thus, avoid any improper behaviour or remark. The person who presented an inscription for a clan celebration picture could well have been a member of the clan himself. Such an individual would have been literate and, furthermore, be a respected and authoritative figure. It was he

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(seldom she) who supplied the audience of the picture and the inscription with an authoritative narrative of his clan composition and history.22 A late-Ming scholar official Wu Zhongxing 吳中行 (fl.1571-1588) had such an inscription for his lineage created in the record genre. The beginning of the record reads:

I begged for leave in 1585. Until now, the year of 1588, it has been three years. I already exceeded my official time limit, but I am as sick as before. I am unable to return and serve the court. Also I do not dare to submit a memorial to the throne with a request to retire. […] It just happens that Mr. Li Zhishan from Jingxi is good at portraying people, so he has done my portrait. There were many people that painted my portrait before. But none of them was lifelike. [Mr. Li’s portrait] catches my appearance to the extent of fifty or sixty percent. Therefore I told him to add portraits of my sons and grandsons. The accuracy in their figures is eighty to ninety percent, and thereby is the image complete. I thus write some words to make the date.23

Unlike ancestor portraiture, clan-gathering pictures are only painted of living people. Therefore they are emphatically about the moment. The author of the above inscription, Wu Zhongxing, devoted a lot of space in the above record to introducing the 5 names, age, and personalities of his clan members who appeared on the portrait. His elaborate introduction even covered those who were not present on the picture, his daughter and that daughter’s mother “who believed that [as female] their faces should not be exposed to the public.” Wu Zhongxing was the only successful metropolitan graduate of his clan. His source of authority in introducing the clan no doubt rested in this crucial

22 To this end, family portraiture and inscriptions played a similar role like genealogies. For the social production of genealogy in the Qing and Republican periods, see Xu Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin’ Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, 332-67. 23 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 83-84.

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success, which happened in 1571. Wu once had a promising official career. But in 1577, he disputed the decision of Zhang Juzheng 張居正 (1525-1582), the then Grand Secretary, not to relinquish his governmental duty to mourn his father’s death. To supress his argument, he was severely flogged, and almost died for this severe corporal punishment.24 He then lived a semi-retired and semi-exiled life back home.25 Although his career was ruined, Wu became famous nationwide for his courage in opposing the most powerful person in officialdom. But since Zhang Juzheng was the chief examiner in 1571, Wu was also controversial for opposing his teacher. His inscription reveals little about himself and his past: there were no words about the inscriber’s bitter history, except for a few ambiguous remarks that the past was like a big dream that had already blurred. But the inscription did relate to the past of the clan as a whole. Wu expresses regret in the text that his dead parents had not left behind a portrait, by which he can mourn them. At the end of his inscription, Wu doubts if the picture is an object that enables him to transmit his visual appearance to the posterity, and if the picture is whereby his posterity can “rest their remembrance” (suo tuo yi si 所托以思 ) of him.26 His words make it clear that both the portrait and the inscription were intended to be viewed and treasured by the descendants of the Wu clan. These descendants, some of them were even yet to exist when Wu Zhongxing created his record, were closely linked to their ancestors by virtue of Wu’s writing. Like Suzhou literati who employed inscriptions to create a sense of community, Wu employed inscription to unite his clan, the basic cross- generational unit in Ming society. He thus created a bridge between his clan in the moment and the future.

24 For Zhang Juzheng and the uproar caused by his reluctance to leave the office, see Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, The Cambridge History of China Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, Part 1: 1368–1644 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 526-67. 25 For Wu Zhongxing’s biography, see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi 明史 , SKQS edition, juan 299, 10a-11b; DMB, 138. 26 Tu Lianjie ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 84.

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It was not uncommon to ask someone outside the clan, in most cases a distinguished person, to preface or record a clan portrait. Song Lian 宋濂 (1310-1381), a renowned early Ming official and writer, wrote such a record, in which he identified the painted figure with remarkable patience. He carefully pointed out to any potential reader that “[…] five men wearing caps stood behind with a young servant are the grandsons. Two children walking slowly with albums while speaking to themselves are the great grandsons.”27 He also described each sitter’s position in the clan hierarchy. Anyone simultaneously reading his inscription and viewing the portrait is saved from making any mistakes or causing any offence with respect to the senior-junior relationships represented in the portrait. What is more important in Song Lian’s writing is the information it preserves regarding the social aspects of the portrait. According to Song Lian, the painted clan was his town fellows. Among them was a long-lived dowager, who was still a healthy ninety-one-year-old woman. A martial officer of the local county commissioned the portrait in honour of the longevity and harmony of the clan. He then approached Song Lian for an inscription. In terms of social writings, Robert Hymes has argued that the connection between an author and the commissioner continued to exist when the writing was put into the former’s collected writings.28 In this vein, Song’s record enabled the official 5 and the painted clan to establish a connection with him, and the connection persisted by means of entering into his individual collection, or being included in the collection of someone else. The inscription not only addressed issues within a clan, it reached people who had associations with the clan, and probably spoke to all members of a local community. Ming portraits could also depict a group of non-related

27 Song Lian, “Jiaqing tu ji” 家慶圖記 , in Wenzhang bianti huixuan 文章辨體彙選 , comp. He Fuzheng 贺复徵 , juan 584, SKQS edition, 14a-15b. 28 See Robert Hymes, “Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou,” in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000- 1940, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James L. Watson (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 95-136.

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people. Whereas paintings of elegant gatherings situate figures in a vast landscape in order to indicate the intimate interaction between human beings and nature, group portraits have an intrinsically different emphasis on the relations between humans. Venerable Friends (Shangyou tu 尚友圖, fig. 5-4) is one example executed by the late Ming scholar-painter Xiang Shengmo 項圣謨 (1597-1658) in collaboration with a professional portraitist Zhang Qi 張琦 (fl. 17th cent.). Zhang Qi was a student of another popular portraitist Xie Bin 謝彬 (1601-1681). Both men were followers of Zeng Jing 曾鲸 (ca.1564-ca.1667), the most successful late Ming portraitist. Unlike the paintings commemorating “Apricot Garden Gathering” once held in Beijing, Venerable Friends is not a representation of an actual assemblage. It was painted in 1652, by which time most of the figures in the picture had passed away. The portrait is thus a retrospective commemoration of a generation of social elite that Xiang Shengmo had associations and friendships with. Xiang Shengmo who had conceived this portrait project created a lengthy prose inscribed on the upper part of the picture. A noteworthy feature of this inscription is that the author does not dedicate space to praising the social status and achievements of the painted figures. Alternatively, he describes each figure’s clothing in detail. Dong Xichang is pictured wearing “a cap of Jin [Dynasty] style and clothing made of creeping fig.” Chen Jiru has “a Blue horn-cap and brown garment.” Li Rihua wears “a cap of Tang Dynasty style and coarse clothes.” Lu Deizhi has “a [Tao] Yuanming cap, looking like a sick crane,” and Xiang himself is depicted with a “Grand horn-cap and plain garment.” Only Monk Zhixuan’s clothing is not described, since his Buddhist dress is easily recognized. In the late Ming, there was fashion for revitalizing ancient dress style. 29 This portrait and the inscription are a reflection of this fashion. Moreover, the inscription’s

29 For a discussion of the date and nature of Venerable Friends, and comparison of three extant copies, see Chu-tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt ed., The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 143; see also Chu-tsing Li, “Xiang Shengmo de ‘Shangyou tu’”, 55-60.

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5 Fig. 5-4 Xiang Shengmo and Zhang Qi, Venerable Friends, 1652, ink and colour on paper, hanging scroll, 38.1 x 22.5 cm, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Source: Chu-tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt, eds, The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 144.

emphasis on a the unified external appearance and manner of the sitters suggests a shared taste among this small homogeneous community. Thus, the inscription somehow erases the issue of social distinction, which certainly existed among these scholars. Another important point regarding the painstaking descriptions of the costumes is the strong sense of nostalgia, directing the reader to the past, a time when the most eminent scholars in Jiaxing area enjoyed leisurely lives in fashionable clothes. Even

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though the past was inevitably lost due to war and death, the painted figures could live on in the portraits, with their costumes and gestures remaining in a perfect harmony. Xiang Shengmo’s inscription on Venerable Friends offers an example of the enthusiasm for clothing but with no intention of making a social distinction. This indifference to social status was a projected gesture with a specific purpose. The Ming society was sensitive to costume. The founder of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Hongwu, issued over one hundred edicts to regulate clothing during his thirty-year reign.30 The emperor’s goal was to visually distinguish the four basic strata – shi (gentry), farmers, artisans, and merchants – through their dress. The emperor even personally designed costumes for his ministers, costumes that varied according to rank and varied in colours, textile patterns, hats, materials for belts and their tablets (hu 笏 ).31 The emperor’s vision was presumably that from a glimpse of a person on the street, one could quickly identify the individual’s social status, and react properly to the person without violating the behaviour code. Unsurprisingly, to a fifteenth-century viewer, the discrepancy of Wang Zhi’s clothing in the two extant versions of Gathering in the Apricot Garden would have been easily detectable.32 A distinction in clothing was intrinsically a distinction in social status. A well-mannered Ming person should visualize his status through clothing, and use appropriate appellation and social etiquette towards other people whose status was likewise discernible from clothing.33 Ming officials at the top of social hierarchy were particularly eager to visualize their status by having their images in official robes painted. They also exhibited a strong interest in reinforcing this visuality by writing

30 Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua: wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu 品味奢華：晚 明的消費社會與士大夫 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2008), 127-30. 31 Ibid., 123-24. 32 Guo Zhengyu 郭正域 (154-1612), Huang Ming dianli zhi 皇明典禮志 , juan 18, 1613 printed edition, 41a-41b. 33 Robert E. Harrist has raised this question. See “Connoisseurship: Seeing and Believing, ” in Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting, 303.

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inscriptions. A well-known official named Lu Shusheng 陸樹聲 (1509-1605) is an example. It was said that he disliked Zhang Juzheng who was so obsessive about his dress that he changed clothes four times during a meal hosted by Lu.34 Ironically, Lu Shusheng made an exquisite portrait series representing himself in ten different costumes (fig. 5-5). This extant series, painted by a professional Jiaxing portraitist in 1591, carries a colophon written in 1789 by a descendant of Lu. According to the colophon, this series was originally mounted in the Fig. 5-4 Xiang Shengmo and Zhang Qi, form of a handscroll. Due to Venerable Friends, 1652, ink and colour on paper, hanging scroll, 38.1 x 22.5 cm, the silk being severely worn, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Source: Chu- Lu’s eighteenth-century 5 tsing Li and James C.Y. Watt, eds, The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 144. descendants repaired the work by cutting off the portrait images and remounting them into an album. Even though this is not my central topic, it is worth noting here the effect that physical changes like this had on the reception of a painting. In this case, the audience of the original handscroll would have seen ten consecutive images moving from left to right. By comparison, the album format, creates a rather abrupt viewing experience: the

34 For the distinction of clothing and its relation with social distinction in late Imperial China, see Kishimoto Mio, “Minshin jidai no mibun kankaku” 明清時 代の身分感覚 , in Mori Maseo et al., Minshin jidaishi no kihon mondai 明清時代史 の基本問題 (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1997), 403-28.

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viewer does not know what the image on the next leaf will be.35 There is no evidence that Lu Shusheng ever personally inscribed his portrait series. But his individual collection preserves four inscriptions for four portraits of him in, respectively, “coronet costume” (guanfu 冠服 ), “office costume” (gongfu 公服 ), “formal levee costume” (chaofu 朝服), and “out-of-office costume” (yefu 野服 ).36 Given the subjects and contents, it is possible that these four inscriptions were created to match four images in the extant portrait series. Aside from the matched contents, another hint is that both the visuality and the texts adopt a retrospective angle. The portrait series was painted when Lu was aged eighty-four and long retired, but the image shows the sitter in the prime of his life. The inscriptions are also a retrospective narrative of the author’s previous political activities. Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconstruct the way that these inscriptions entered Lu’s individual collection. Nonetheless, they certainly glorify the subject’s life playing various social roles and assuming successive official responsibilities. This honoured life experience inspired later inscribers. When the Qing scholar Weng Fanggang 翁方綱 (1733-1818) was asked by the eighth generation of Lu Shusheng’s clan for a colophon for the portrait series, Weng’s strategy, and perhaps also a natural reaction, was to recount Lu’s life in detail. His inscription skilfully threads the by then remounted portraits – static and isolated – once again into a dynamic personal history of the subject.37 Official costume played an indispensable role in another type of portrait, known as dailou tu 待漏圖 , namely “the picture of awaiting for the hour.” This kind of portrait depicted high officers in their official robes with tablets in hand, waiting for the prestigious levee to meet the emperor. No such painting survives, but there are a few extant inscriptions. Wang Zhi, a powerful 35 Zhu Guozhen 朱國禎 (fl. 1609-1632), Yongzhuang xiaopin 湧幢小品 , juan 10, 1622 printed edition, 11a-11b. 36 For a further discussion of the “abruptness” brought about by turning an album’s pages, see Anne Burkus-Chasson’s essay “Visual Hermeneutics and the Act of Turning the Leaf” (2015). 37 Du Lianzhe, Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 258.

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early Ming official, left a eulogy in his individual collection for a dailou portrait of the father of Emperor Xuanzong’s consort. 38 The eulogy was done under the invitation of the subject’s son (i.e. the consort’s brother), probably after the father’s death in 1453. Wang Zhi’s eulogy notably accentuates the portrait sitter’s noble dressing code and his prestigious status. “What grand clothing he wears,” Wang writes, “What imposing manner he has.” But Wang did not forget to add a dose of reality to his inscription in terms of making clear that the individual who had requested the inscription was fulfilling a social obligation. “The portrait is finished, but does not have a eulogy,” he notes, “[The son] thus asks me to compose one. How can my words sufficiently narrate his virtue (mei 美 ). But his invitation does not allow refuse. Hence I present my eulogy.”39 When he wrote this eulogy, Wang Zhi was the Minister of Personnel and had considerable influence over the high court.40 It seems that Wang’s inscription was desirable, even for a powerful relative of the emperor. The owning and displaying of a portrait carrying his inscription was desired and prestigious. Behind this apparently routine praise, then, was an implied socio-political relationship between the writer and the recipient. An inscription could also personalise the solemn dailou portrait by infusing personal experience and emotion. An official and scholar named Zhi Dalun 支大倫 (1534-1604) euphemistically 5 complains in an inscription on his own dailou portrait: “I read the books that people nowadays do not read, and suffer the toil that people in the past did not suffer.”41 His complaint probably stemmed from the fact that levees were arduous experiences. The event began early, at sunrise. Participants were expected to arrive

38 Weng Fanggang, Fuchu zhai wenji 復初齋文集 , juan 34, 1878 printed edition, 4a-6a. 39 For a biography of the subject Sun Zhong 孫忠 , see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 300, 8a-10b. 40 Wang Zhi, “Huichang hou Sun gong xiangzan” 會昌侯孫公像讚, Yi’an wenhou ji 抑菴文後集 , juan 37, SKQS edition, 12a-13a. 41 For a biography of Wang Zhi, see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 169, 5a-9b.

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at the point when the intensity of illumination was just enough to be able to “tell the colour.”42 The participants had to commute across the capital city regardless of the weather, and despite the extreme cold in Beijing during winter. Any misbehaviour during the levee, such as whispering, spitting or coughing, would result in correction and even discipline.43 Zhi Dalun’s personal and emotional inscription on the dailou portrait is rather subversive as it casts irony over the glorious aura that the image tries to create. This subversion shows the complexity of the role that inscriptions played in mediating portrait images and the reader’s experience. The word tu in Chinese painting taxonomy suggests narrative elements. Huanji tu 宦蹟圖, lit., “official trajectory pictures” is a portrait genre that incorporates narrative to commemorate the most crucial moments in an official’s life.44 The commissioner could be the sitter himself, his descendants, subordinates, or local gentries from the place where the sitter held governmental service. The Palace Museum in Beijing possesses a very rare case in this regard. The commissioner was Xu Xianqing 徐顯卿 (1537-1602), an official hailing from Suzhou.45 Xu Xianqing triumphed in the metropolitan examination in 1568, and then spent many years working at the Hanlin Academy. His career showed promise and the Hanlin Academy was a key personnel reserve of future Cabinet Ministers. In 1587, Xu received two successive promotions, after which he became the Vice Minister of Personnel. However, he was later harshly impeached and forced to resign from office. Perhaps this dishonourable retirement is the reason why Xu Xianqing’s biography is absent from all the 42 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 4. 43 Xu Xueju 徐学聚 (fl. 1583), Guochao dianhui 國朝典彚 , juan 109, 1624 edition, 13b-14a. 44 The regulations regarding which department was responsible for correcting misbehaving officials and when to correct changed slightly throughout the Ming dynasty. See Shen Shixing 申時行 (1535-1614) et al., Daming huidian 大明會典 , juan 44, 1587 edition, 7b-9a. 45 Huanji tu was a term in flux during the Ming time, in addition to which there are several others terms, such as lüli tu 屢歷圖 and xingli tu 行歷圖 , to denote the same type of paintings. See Ma Ya-chen, “Zhanxun yu huanji: Mingdai zhanzheng xiangguan tuxiang yu guanyuan shijue wenhua” 戰勳與宦蹟：明代 戰爭相關圖像與官員視覺文化 , Mingdai yanjiu 明代研究 , Vol. 17 (2011): 60-63.

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Fig. 5-6 Anonymous, Xu Xianqing huanji tu, 1588, album, ink and colour on paper, The Palace Museum, Beijing. major historical records of the Ming era.46 Ironically, the portrait series and the accompanying inscriptions then become the most systematic biographical records of this once prominent official. Xu Xianqing’s official-trajectory portraits were made in 1588 at the climax of Xu’s career. The whole series is mounted in an album of 26 pages. Each recto folio of the album has an image painted with refined brush strokes. Each image represents a challenging moment in the sitter’s life, in this case the death of Xu’s parents in his early years, his brushes with death as a result of severe illness and shipwreck, successive success in the civil examinations, promotions in officialdom, and honours granted by 5 the emperor. Each verso folio has a long inscription, comprising a caption followed by a note of the sitter’s age and when the particular challenge occurred, a prose narrating the depicted event, and, at the end, a long poem (fig. 5-6). All 26 inscriptions follow this format. Their contents praise Xu’s courage, capacity, and fortune, all of which are the traits that Xu believed led him through danger, adversity and challenge. The last folio and

46 The following reconstruction of Xu Xianqing’s life is based on this portrait series and two studies. Yang Lili, “Yiwei Ming dai Hanlin guanyuann de gongzuo lüli – ‘Xu Xianqing huanjitu’ tuxiang jianxi” 一位明代翰林官員的工作 履歷 ——《徐顯卿宦蹟圖》圖像簡析 , Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博物院院 刊 , No. 4 (2005): 42-66+157; Zhu Hong, “ ‘Xu Xianqing huanjitu’ yanjiu” 《徐顯 卿宦蹟圖》研究 , Gugong bowuyuan yuankan, No. 2 (2011): 47-80+159.

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inscription stops at the year 1587, when the emperor conferred his parents titles.. An intriguing point is that Xu’s individual collection preserves the poetic part of all the 26 inscriptions. Furthermore, it includes another four poems, whose narratives continue from the year of 1587, telling of Xu’s successive promotions and his resignation in 1588. It remains unknown whether another four portrait pages representing these four poems ever existed. Or, whether the portrait series we see today is complete, given that Xu Xianqing continued his poetic project for another one and half years.47 It is at least logical to speculate that after his retirement Xu might have shown this exquisite portrait series to guests and friends back in Suzhou. Like many of the above examples, his inscribed poems entered his individual collection. Xu compiled this collection in person and prefaced it in 1599. The inclusion of these 20 poems implied an intention by the author to advertise his personal exploits through books. This intention created a system independent from the portrait series that enabled the multiplication and dissemination of the inscriptions. Both systems, in Xu Xianqing’s case, succeeded in terms of their survival through transmission over the centuries, and, in turn, their ability to address generations of readers.

Interactions with the Deceased and the Living Ming inscriptions were created for portraiture that had a ritual use, though in such cases it was less likely that the inscription is written on the painting’s surface. An important branch of ritual portraiture was for funeral and sacrifice use, painted after the sitter’s death. An episode in The Plum in the Golden Vase portrays the execution and function of this kind of portraiture in the everyday life of an affluent urban family.48 In this episode, the hero Ximen Qing commissions a former court

47 Zhu Hong, “Huanjitu yanjiu,” 48. 48 Yang Lili tends to believe the existence of another four pages, see “Gongzuo lüli,” 44. Zhu Hong holds the opposite view, see “Huanjitu yanjiu,” 53.

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painter for a posthumous portrait of his dead concubine. He asked for two types of portraits: a full-length hanging scroll to be consecrated behind the memorial tablet, and a half-length one for the funeral. The painter was promised a reward of a bolt of satin and ten taels of silver, an impressive and generous payment given that in the same novel 4 taels are enough to prepare a decent banquet, and 3 taels was the monthly salary of Ximen’s secretary.49 Craig Clunas reminds us that the novel’s author is euphemistically sarcastic about Ximen Qing’s arrangement, exposing a dead lady’s visage to a crowd of non-related men.50 Yet another, but less discernible reason that Ximen warrants such sarcasm is his ignorance of the power of words to convey his emotion. He does not show the slightest awareness that he could write a eulogy, or a text in any other proper style, for his deceased beloved and her lifelike portraits. This ignorance marks the vulgarity of this novel’s hero, who strove to join the official class, but whose habits and manners are, in the eyes of the author, intrinsically different. Ximen Qing emphasises the likeness in portraiture. It is arguable whether Chinese people valued the likeness for posthumous portraiture, especially those painted for remote ancestors for ritual use.51 Meanwhile, the lifelikeness was significantly conditioned by the fact that some portraits were based solely on the commissioner’s verbal description of the 5 deceased. It seems that the commissioner’s relation to the sitter was crucial in terms of whether the commission prioritised the likeness issue. An eighteenth century anecdote, for example, tells of a man who was orphaned in childhood and who, after years of practice, elevated his painting skills to a high level. This filial

49 Despite the fact that the setting of this novel is the last decades of the Northern Song dynasty, most scholars agree that it is a literary representation of late Ming society. See Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature Volume 2: From 1375, 107-108. 50 The dominance of silver as a currency, the very economic feature of late Ming, confirms that The Plum of Golden Vase was about the Ming society. Lanling xiaoxiao sheng 蘭陵笑笑生 , Jinping mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話 , the second collation by Mei Jie (Hong Kong: Mengmei guan, 1993), 817-25. 51 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 91-93.

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son then prays to Avalokitesvara, hoping that this merciful deity would send someone who looked like his parents, so that he could paint their faces. 52 Posthumous portraits did not enter Ming people’s art collections. In other words, these portraits were never undertaken from the perspective of connoisseurship. However, the inscriptions that accompanied them were treasured, either for their literariness or their social message. Zhang Bangqi 張邦 奇 (1484-1544) is an example in this regard. This successful mid- Ming official devoted a fascicle of his collection exclusively to 51 portrait eulogies.53 They were written for portraits of people ranging from official colleagues, minor clerks, friends, non-official scholars, to family members and ancestors, non-related women, a eunuch, Buddhist monks and the author himself. Some of the pages are dedicated to posthumous portraits. Zhang’s eulogies attest to a general attitude that educated men in late imperia China were attentive to inscriptions for posthumous portraits. These writings were apparently important enough for them to be painstakingly collected from people outside the family circle. An ancestor portrait, which the owner had already laboriously accumulated some inscriptions for, could be valuable. The above- mentioned filial son carried such a portrait of his parents when he fled from political persecution.54I will return to the actual creation process of these writings. Here, I will briefly outline a picture: in order to collect inscriptions for a posthumous portrait, one could either invite a visiting guest to view the portrait displayed in the mourning hall, and then ask for an inscription, or one could also send the picture to the desired writer. Ming people also had their formal portraits painted from the likeness. Xirong 喜容, or “happy visage,” is the term that specifically denotes these kind of portraits. Xirong portraits often

52 For discussions of Chinese attitudes to likeness, see Eli Lancman, Chinese Portraiture, 38-40. 53 Yu Jiao 俞蛟 (b. 1751), Mengchang zazhu 夢厂雜著 , juan 6, 1828 Jingyi tang 敬 藝堂 edition, 2a-4b. 54 See Zhang Bangqi, Huanbi tang ji 環碧堂集 , juan 15, Ming edition.

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had rich political and social meanings. The xirong portraits of the notorious late Ming eunuch Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568- 1627) sent to his shrines, for instance, were greeted by local officials who knelt in front of them in a ritual to show their reverence.55 However, due to the fact that inscriptions are often written separately or detached from the pictures, the political and social meanings have become difficult for us to ascertain today. Nonetheless, the existing inscriptions allow us to explore the creation and reception of the lost portraits, and the insights gained in this process can be applied to the reconstruction of the social usage of xirong portraiture in general. My exploration of this topic is once again based on Zhang Bangqi’s portrait eulogies. They clearly evidence that portraits of the living – both men and women – could reach people who had a connection with the subject or the subject’s family. The result of this interaction process was frequently an inscription. Zhang Bangqi had 13 eulogies presented on female portraits, and almost the same number for male officials and non-officials. The author did not differentiate between those people deceased and those alive. This is a good indication that a classification of portraits and the writings associated with them were not, at least by the sixteenth century, a matter of concern. It is noticeable that Zhang Bangqi composed eulogies for several non-related women. Even if these female portraits were posthumous creations, his 5 accessibility to them still casts doubts on a widely accepted idea that the image of a Ming woman could only be circulated within her family.56 In other words, the publication of women’s images may be greater than we have hitherto assumed. They may have been sent to an unrelated man; indeed, there was considerable social tolerance of men’s writings dedicated to non-related female images.

55 Yu Jiao, Mengchang zazhu, juan 6, 2a-4b. 56 Wen Bing 文秉 (1609-1669), Xianbo zhishi 先撥志始 , juan xia 下 , Zhi hai 指 海 edition, comp. Qian Xizuo 錢熙祚 , printed between 1875-1908, 35a, 36a; Wu Yingji 吳應箕 (fl. 17th cent.), Qizhen liangchao bofu lu 啓禎兩朝剝復錄 , juan 3, Wushi loushan tang 吳氏樓山堂 edition, 13b.

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Zhang Bangqi did have eulogies for his living male friends, which indicates the circulation of xirong portraits and inscriptions. This is not the whole story of xirong portraits, however. After a sitter’s death, they were usually kept within the family for veneration. For family descendants, these portraits symbolised the deceased ancestors who were “patron saints” protecting them from disaster and decline. Undoubtedly, inscribed portraits of a lineage that could be traced back generations were a treasured legacy. The importance of this kind of family legacy to this study is that it often reveals the vicissitude of the clan. The portraits of successive generations of the Wang clan from Taicang 太倉 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are an exemplary series. The pinnacle of the Wang clan was in the generations of Wang Xijue 王锡爵 (1534-1661), who once held the powerful post of Grand Secretary, his grandson Wang Shimin and Shimin’s grandson Wang Yuanqi. In contrast to the clan’s prestige, the xirong portraits of these clan leaders are restrained and modest. The portraits are all in the hanging scroll format, which, as shown in chapter 2, gives little space for long inscriptions. None of the sitters personally inscribed the paintings. Rather, they invited respected friends to undertake the inscribing work. However, when the Wang clan began to wane in the mid-eighteenth century, this conservative manner changed. A descendant in the 1770s had a portrait of his own made that was very different from the clan’s traditional portraits. This portrait adopted the handscroll format, which could accommodate much more inscriptions. The sitter personally inscribed and re-inscribed many poems on the colophon sheet. He subsequently invited friends to make further contributions of inscriptions. These inscriptions laud the subject’s merits and characteristics. As scholars have suggested, if we view this inscribed scroll in the context of clan vicissitudes, it appears that it is an effort to fight against the decline of the clan and to herald a revival, and a spiritual communication with prominent ancestors.57 Thus, I argue, portrait inscriptions speak to an 57 For a discussion of this idea, see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 91-93.

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audience not only with their contents, but equally importantly, albeit less visibly, with their forms and materials. Moreover, a broader historical context may illuminate the meaning hidden in the physical combination of a portrait and an inscription, meaning that may go unnoticed when researchers only focus on one particular work. It is interesting that sometimes inscriptions competed with portrait images for credibility. Yang Shiqi, for example, wrote a long poem on a portrait of an old friend and colleague who was about to retire. The portrait presented to Yang was apparently not very good. Hence, in a preface to the poem, he reminds future readers that they “do not have to look at the image,” because “appreciating my poem is enough.”58 As for Yang Shiqi, he was confident that his text would be a solid foundation for anybody who wanted to learn the intrinsic traits of his friend. Xirong was often produced for birthday celebrations of senior people. Jan Stuarts infers that “their use in a closed family context rendered identifying inscriptions unnecessary, but encomiums with the subject’s name, rank, birth and death dates, and a career synopsis were desired.”59 This is true for a xirong portrait of a Ming scholar now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait bears a concise and short inscription, stating that its genesis was for the sitter’s eighty-fifth sui birthday.60 Meanwhile, there are examples of xirong portraits bearing long 5 and complicated inscriptions rather than merely “encomiums.” The most well-known is a portrait of Shen Zhou. This lifelike bust-length portrait is not from the hands of Shen Zhou, but

58 Wan Xinhua, “Xiaoxiang, jiazu, rentong – Cong Yu Zhiding ‘Baimiao Wang Yuanqi xiang’ zhou tanqi” 肖像．家族．認同從 —— 禹之鼎《白描王原祁像》 軸談起 , in Xiangying shenquan – Ming Qing renwu xiaoxianghua xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 像應神全 —— 明清人物肖像畫學術研討會論文集 , ed. Lü Lili and Kuongu Hun (Macao: Macao Museum of Art, 2011), 229-234. 59 Yang Shiqi, Dongli xuji 東里續集 juan 56, SKQS supplemented by SKQS Wenji ge 文津閣 edition, 6a-6b. 60 Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington DC: Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, in association with Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 63.

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from an anonymous professional painter (fig. 5-7). In the portrait, Shen Zhou wears a black scholar cap and a simple yet decent robe suitable for an educated man without any scholarly degree. The portrait was made for Shen Zhou’s eighty-sui birthday. The occasion reminds us of a similar one years before the execution of this portrait, the birthday of Shen Zhou’s uncle, Shen Zhen, which I briefly discussed in chapter 2. Yang Jingzhang was the portraitist in that case, and his services were recompensed with a painting by Shen Zhou’s cousin Shen Yun. This reward was given extra value by two inscriptions presented by Shen Zhen and Shen Zhou’s son Shen Pu 沈璞 .61 The birthday portrait of Shen Zhou bears a poem written by the sitter. That the poem is dated 1506 indicates that it was probably written soon after the painting’s completion. The inscription, located exactly above the figure’s head, is in the typically graceful and clean calligraphy of Shen Zhou:

People find fault on his eyes tight-spaced, and also his forehead too narrow, I can neither judge its likeness, nor the distortions. Why bother about the facial appearance; [I am] only afraid of moral defect. Drifting along for eighty years, now I live beside death. I, The old man Shitian, self-inscribed in the first year of the Zhengde Reign [1506] 人謂眼差小 , 又説頤太窄 . 我自不能知 , 亦不知其失 . 面目何足較 , 但恐有失徳 . 苟且八十年 , 今與死隔壁 . 正德改元石田老人自題。

Here, I disagree with some translations that use the first

61 It is debatable whether the portrait was made, as Maxwell Hearn’s label attributes, for “the Artist’s Great-Granduncle” More likely, the subject’s great- grand cousin hired a professional portraitist for the picture and inscribed a short dedication. See Maxwell Hearn, How to Read a Chinese Painting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 130-31.

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Fig. 5-7 Anonymous, Portrait of Shen Zhou, 1506, ink and colour on silk, 5 hanging scroll,71 x 52.5 cm, The Palace Museum, Beijing.

person in the first couplet.62 The pronoun qi 其 , or “its,” in the second couplet clearly indicates that Shen Zhou conceived his image as something alien. I will return to the point about how inscribers referred to themselves in inscriptions on their portraits. In ancient Chinese society, age was a visual phenomenon. The physical deterioration brought about by age made age socially visible.63 Xirong portraits for senior people hence should be

62 Chen Zhenghong, Shen Zhou nianpu, 108-109. 63 See Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 28; Yao Ning, “Commemorating the Deceased”, 11-12.

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viewed in this social context. They not only added to the joyful atmosphere of a celebration, but also visually projected the subject’s age – mostly old age – to all, including the subject himself. Shen Zhou’s remark that he lived beside death was neither rhetorical, nor an exaggeration. A statistic shows that in the late Qing period, when medical conditions were similar to those in the mid-Ming era, the life expectancy of males in the age group 75+ was only 3.7 years and that the probability per thousand of dying within the next five years was 538.64 Shen Zhou no doubt sensed his ageing and the vulnerability to death liability, and adopted a candid gesture. Jerome Silbergeld has argued that the Chinese had two categories of attitudes towards old age: Confucian opinion respects the elderly; Daoism pursues longevity.65 Both attitudes are discernible in the above poem by Shen Zhou. This poem, in an archaic style (guti 古體), above all explores the issue of the similarity between the self in reality and the self in painting, probably the most frequently pursued question in the field of human portraiture. But Shen Zhou’s poem does not problematize the tension between facial appearance (mao 貌 ) and spirit (shen 神 ). Instead, it dichotomizes “facial appearance” and “moral integrity.” In Confucian thought, moral integrity is a life-long process of self-perfection.66 Shen Zhou kept a distance from the civil service system throughout his life, but he never lost his identity as a stalwart upholder of Confucian principles and he obviously values internal merits over external elements. But, in the end, he is not relieved and liberated by age: he already

64 Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness, 188. 65 The statistical data is drawn from James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell’s research on the distribution of life expectancies and mortality in different groups of age, sex, etc., in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries Liaoning. See James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774-1873 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58-82. 66 See Jerome Silbergeld, “Chinese Concepts of Old Age and Their Role in Chinese Painting, Painting Theory and Criticism,” Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 6 (Summer 1987): 103-14.

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anticipates death. It is widely acknowledged that portraiture in China had a unique thread of development at the hands of professional artisans. They were, to some extent, independent from the other painting genres that were discursively in control of the cultural elite.67 But the elite were not completely absent in this domain. In the fourteenth century, xiaoxiang 小像, or “small portrait,” thrived in the circle of educated men. An example of this type of informal portrait is A Small Portrait of Yang Zhuxi (Yang Zhuxi xiaoxiang 楊竹西小像 ) painted in 1363. Sherman Lee regards this portrait as one that is less about life likeness than a projection of the subject’s noble character.68 But the delicate facial details and relatively correct body proportions do point to a certain concern for resemblance with the sitter. The portrait carries an inscription written by Ni Zan, at the left end of the picture surface, in which Ni states that Wang Yi has painted the human figure, and that he, Ni, was responsible for the landscape part. This collaborative scheme is thus clearly stated to any beholder. The collaborative scheme reoccurred in many later productions of informal small portraits. These portraits had no ritual function. They anticipated intimate viewing and circulation among the owner’s small coterie, in the course of which they often accumulated inscriptions. To some extent, small portrait is the genre that most anticipated contemporaneous and future 5 inscriptions. The great portraitist Zeng Jing left a number of portraits like this. Zeng originally hailed from Fujian Province and spent most of his life in the Jiangnan area. There, he established a connections with elite scholars, artists and influential collectors, including Wang Shimin, Xiang Yuanbian, Li Rihua and his son Li Zhaoheng. Through mutual friends, he may also have met Father Mateo Ricci (1552-1610), Li Madou 利瑪竇 in Chinese, and gained

67 For self-perfection in the intellectuals of late imperial China, see Robert H. Hegel, “An Exploration of the Chinese Literary Self,” in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, ed. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 7. 68 Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 29.

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accessed to Western art. That said, the extent to which this contact impacted his art should not be overestimated.69 Zeng Jing’s A Portrait of Mister Pan Qintai (Pan Qintai xiansheng xiang 潘琴臺先生像 ) now in the Michigan Museum of Art, was produced in 1621 for a respected Suzhou scholar named Pan Qintai. In this portrait, similar to Lu Shusheng’s “non- official robe” portrait, Pan is dressed in a simple scholar robe with a bamboo staff in his right hand, a common visual symbol of a reclusive spirit and virtue. What differs significantly from Lu Shusheng’s portrait is the painter’s autographic dedication and seven inscriptions, which surround the painted figure in the centre of the painting surface. The seven inscriptions - four eulogies, two proses and a poem - are all from the hands of Pan’s associates, including the famous mountain man Chen Jiru and the scholar painter Li Liufang.70 It raises the question of whether Zeng Jing had anticipated these inscriptions and whether he had reserved room for them in advance. But it is safe to conclude that the inscribers executed their inscriptions in cooperation. The seven inscriptions are distributed evenly in a balanced composition. The contents of these inscriptions are quite consistent. They praise Pan’s elegant interests in tea, bamboo and the zither as well as his righteous character and his harmonious family. The image and inscriptions thus made an excellent pictorial and literary homage to the subject.71 Inscriptions on a work such as this might have gone beyond the subject’s small coterie into textual dissemination by means of public display, gift- giving, or transaction. It is also possible that they were copied. A copy of Zeng Jing’s original, now in the Shanghai Museum, is an example that not only painstakingly replicated the original image

69 For a short discussion of Wang Yi’s portrait theory and practice, see Sherman E. Lee, “Varieties of Portraiture in Chinese and Japanese Art,” 123. 70 Marshall P.S. Wu, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chinese Painting from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Vol. I Main Catalogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2000), 121. 71 For the inscriptions and English translations, see Peter C. Sturman and Susan Tai eds., The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Munich : Delmonico Books/ Prestel, 2012), 280.

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– even including the water damage caused by an unsuccessful repair – but also all the inscriptions.72

A Source of Self-Knowledge A portrait offers a unique channel for self-image and thereby self-knowledge. When one gazes at his portrait, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s theory of “gaze”, his portrait gazes back. Through this mutual visibility, one becomes aware of his presence as an object exposed to the gaze of the self in the portrait and the gaze of other people. This mutual visibility causes a sense of objectification, which opens a path to subjectivity. How did Ming people react to their portraits? A Ming painting depicting a scholar facing his portrait (fig. 5-8) provides us with insights into this dynamic interaction.73 But visual materials like this are extremely rare and their meanings are enigmatic. Another avenue open to us is Ming people’s habit of commenting on their portraits with inscriptions. The confrontation with one’s image embeds these inscriptions

5

Fig. 5-8 Attributed to Qiu Ying, Imitation after a Song Portrait, ink and colours on silk, album leaf, 29 x 27.8 cm, The Palace Museum, Taipei.

72 Li Chu-tsing and James C.Y. Wyatt, The Chinese Scholar’s Studio, 116. 73 Marshall P.S. Wu, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering,122-23.

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with tension. It should be noted that one’s writing for his portrait does not necessarily reveal a real picture of his mind. A text creates a persona that speaks to the reader that is not identical to the writer. This does not mean that the writing is fictional and the persona not worthy of study. On the contrary, it is the persona intermediated with the self in reality and the self in painting. The meaning of these inscriptions to modern researchers lies in the attitudes and gestures that Ming people intended to make. When Ming inscribers examined their portraits, in addition to their costume, their physical characteristics often caught their attention. Xu Wei composed two eulogies, both of which survived in Xu’s individual collection, perhaps for a portrait of himself, in which he dedicates much attention to his physical appearance.74 In one eulogy, Xu recalls that he was born fat but became much thinner as he grew up. Now, he “put on weight again to the point of obesity”, and he notices that the obesity gave his “foolish looking in this painting.”75 Xu Wei admits a resemblance between the picture and his real look. At the same time, the mutability of his body let him discredit the superficiality of that resemblance. The painted image is merely a static snapshot of the transience of his being. Xu believes it neither offers the beholder a dynamic record of him, nor reveals his intrinsic nature. Therefore, he firmly declares that those who intend to know him from this painting were no different from foolish and lazy people awaiting a windfall and or acting without taking changes in circumstances into account. If the painted self is a fragmentary image, one’s self-conscious is fragmentary as well. Xu Wei doubts the nature of his existence. He speculates that he is actually a series of metamorphoses, of “a dragon, or a pig, or a crane, or a wild duck, or a butterfly, or a butterfly, or Zhuang Zhou 庄周 who dreamt a butterfly.”76 Zhang Zhou and the butterfly allude to a 74 Wu Hung explains this “double-image“ motif as a result deriving from “double-screen” image. See Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 231-36. 75 Xu Wei, Xu Wenchang quanji 徐文長全集 , juan 22, Ming printed edition, 6a- 7a. 76 Ibid., 6b.

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well-known Daoist story in which the philosopher Master Zhang dreamed he was a butterfly, gaily flying around. When Master Zhang woke up, he did not know whether he had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or whether the butterfly was dreaming it was Zhou.77 The story makes one of the most intellectual enquiries in Chinese philosophy about the boundary of one’s existence. Xu Wei employs this story to describe the fluidity of his existence so that any attempt to capture his idiosyncrasy merely from his appearance in the painting is destined to fail. The accentuation of physical features is related to the interest in physiognomy. Essentially, it reflects a curiosity in the self. Viewing self- portraits exposed Ming people to the fact that the self is visible to everybody except oneself. Du Qiong, in a eulogy to his image, elucidates this paradox by lamenting: “Although you appear ceremonious, you cannot see yourself. When others look at you, they can see what lies beneath the appearance.”78 The pronoun “you” here is perplexing. Hajime Nakatani believes that “you,” the likeness, “cannot see itself,” and then the represented, Du Qiong, sees through the superficial appearance. However, I argue that this eulogy should be interpreted in the context of a pervasive anxiety about access to self-knowledge. Du Qiong adopts the same position with his painted self; both are unable to see themselves. I have mentioned in chapter 4 that to ancient Chinese, vision meant knowledge and, thus, power. A eulogy by 5 the mid-Ming official and Confucian thinker Zhan Ruoshui 湛若 水 (1466-1560) also expresses his doubt about the obtainability of true self-knowledge: “Does it mean that my observation (guan 觀 ) of other people is clear-sighted, while my observation of myself is dazzled?”79 Apparently, both Du Qiong and Zhan Ruoshui were

77 Ibid., 6b. 78 For English translation of the story, see The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson annotated (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 49. For discussions of the literary adaptions of the story in various forms, see W.L. Idema, Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 79 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 127. English translation adapted from Hajime Nakatani, “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan),” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 32 (December

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bewildered by the invisibility of the self. When one views his or her image in a portrait, the anxiety of the invisibility of the self is superimposed on the idea of the emptiness of image. Xu Wei’s eulogy pins this untruthfulness on his portrait. Ancient Chinese elite knew that a painted image was per se illusory. The underlying notion was that an illusory image mirrored reality and opposed reality.80 This notion, rooted in Buddhist tradition, conceives of iconography as an approximation to the Buddha, who transcended superficial physical resemblance.81 For those who had absorbed Buddhist ideas, the image’s physical resemblance was not reliable and should be abandoned for a higher level of conception. Whether one could seize the illusory nature of a picture even conceptually became a threshold between the educated and uneducated.82 Early in the Tang era, Bai Juyi already denied the attainability of self-cognition. Down to the Ming period, Shen Zhou disclosed a similar sense of confusion in the above poem for his birthday portrait. He was clearly agnostic: “I can neither judge its likeness, nor its distortion.” Counterviews to agnosticism. Zhan Ruoshui followed a path that he believed might lead to self-knowledge. This involved leaving aside the concrete body form and verbal words for a true understanding of self and other.83 Unlike Zhan Ruoshui who equates the painted self to the real self, Zou Diguang 鄒迪光 (1550-1626), a scholar-official known for skills in literature, painting and gardening,84 puts the painted self in an opposed position. His eulogy for a lost portrait of himself complains: “People envy you and hate you, resent you and ridicule you, deride you and scold you. [This is because] they 2010): 75. 80 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 271. For Zhan Ruoshui’s biography, see DMB, 36-41. Zhan Ruoshui was also once the colleague of Wen Zhengming in the Hanlin Academy. See Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts, 86. 81 For a discussion of the illusory nature of pictorial representation, particularly representation of female, see Wu Hung, The Double Screen, 102-25. 82 Tian Xiaofei, Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Boston: Harvard University Asian Center, 2011), 534. 83 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 120. 84 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 271.

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do not know you. They strictly demand you and come near you, admire you and feel grateful to you, laud you and worship you. [This is because] they do not know you.” 85 If Shen Zhou is an agnostic, then Zou Diguang appears to be a sceptic. He doubts the extent to which one could know himself from an internal perspective. He claims, “You may know yourself, may not know yourself.” The “you” here is the duality of the representation and the represented. Nakatani observes that the pronoun “I” is often abandoned in self-eulogies because of its connotations with a “selfish” self. Not using “I” provides a selfless perspective that untangles one from the circumscribed self.86 Nakatani argues that the hidden “I” and the “you” of the image “dramatize the chasm between the two existential states – what one is and what one ought to be.”87 Zou’s eulogy ends with a nearly schizophrenic description of his numerous facets. These facets shift like colourful fragments spinning in a kaleidoscope, creating limitless patterns. When Zou’s persona declares that his painted self is in an ideal “no content and worry, no anger and joy” state of mind, the self in reality would have experienced something reverse. Another late Ming elite Gu Dashao 顧大韶 (1576-1639) creates a more radical confrontation with his likeness through harsh self-criticism:88

You say you are a Buddhist, but you cannot abstain 5 from meat. You say you are a Daoist, but you cannot spare the essence. You say you are a Confucian, but you cannot get a name. Why on earth are you still industriously studying the classics? [You are] neither a craftsman nor a merchant;

85 For a biography of Zou Diguang, see Zhu Mouyin, Huashi huiyao, juan 4, 56a. For his artistic contacts, see Chu Hui-liang, Zhao Zuo yanjiu, 35-36. Dong Qichang brackets Zou Diguang, Li Rihua and two others as the most eminent painters of the day. See Li Rihua, Weishuixuan riji, juan 4, 369. But Dong’s remark was supposed to be made on certain occasion therefore of less sincerity. See Wan Muchun, Weishuixuan li de xianjuzhe, 75-76. 86 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 325. 87 Hajime Nakatani, “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan),” 76. 88 Ibid., 74.

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neither a soldier nor a farmer. Thanks to your ancestor’s merit, which you are depleting, your physical body can be nourished and sustained.89

Like Zou Diguang, Gu Daishao employed the pronoun “you,” and “I” is completely absent. In reality, Gu Dashao never passed the provincial examination, while his father obtained a high post in Nanjing, and his twin brother was also a jinshi degree holder.90 The family honour contrasted with his own personal frustration, which would have contributed to him subverting his persona in the eulogy as someone who indulged in food and lust. On the other hand, Gu Dashao projects his guilty feeling to his likeness. The latter is then “one who ought not to be.” He was not alone to have painfully fought against excessive desire. “Human desire” (renyu 人欲 ) was a constant topos in late Ming writings, since many of the late Ming social elite indulged in exuberant sensual pleasures. The late Ming writer Zhang Dai 張 岱 (1597-1679) provides a famously long list of things that could prick his desire or catch his attention.91 The elite also knew that desire was inexhaustible, and it always damaged their health. The fear of corporal desire, as Martin Huang shows, along with the pressure of morality, religious teachings, and social convention, cast a dark shadow over unrestrained indulgence.92 For Gu Dashao, his corporal indulgence was a signal of his failure to discipline his body. This failure, moreover, led directly to the loss of self-identity: he had no idea who he really was. The moral adjudication contained in this inscription is located in the context of the new Confucian movement Learning of the Mind (xinxue 心

89 Gu Dashao was the younger brother of Gu Dazhang 顧大章 , a prominent official in the late Ming. For their biographies, see Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 244, 23a-25a. 90 Du Lianzhe ed., Mingren zizhuan wenchao, 409. 91 Zhang Tingyu et al. eds., Ming shi, juan 244, 23a. 92 Zhang Dai, “Zi wei muzhiming” 自為墓誌銘 , in Langhuan wenji 琅環文集 (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985), 199-201. Jonathan Spencer devotes a chapter of his study to describing various activities undertaken by Zhang Dai for sensual pleasure. See Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (New York: Viking, 2007), 13-46.

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學 ), as well as a prevalent anxiety among the cultural elite about their identity in society and an urgent desire to project their identity in response to threats from outsiders.

The Social Patterns of Portrait Inscriptions I have mentioned Wang Zhi earlier in this chapter. This Ming official has 87 eulogies contained in his individual collection, 53 of which were for portraits. All 87 eulogies are arranged in the last fascicle of the collection, followed by 8 funeral writings. This arrangement is an indication of a conceived functional similarity that these eulogies share with funeral writings. Traditional literature of Chinese art history did not draw a clear- cut line between portraits drawn of living people and paintings of historical and imaginary figures.93 The eulogies of Wang Zhi and Zhang Bangqi for their peers were, accordingly, not arranged into an independent unit in their individual collections, but mixed with eulogies of ancient sages, religious immortals, divine monsters, and even other kinds of objects without any specific order. This phenomenon invites reconsideration of the notion of “portrait” in the Ming era. The notion was in flux. By the early eighteenth century and the publication of Categorized Poems, “Portraits of contemporary people” had been put into an independent category. 5 Compared with Zhang Bangqi, Wang Zhi tends to record more detail about the genesis of his writings, which make his eulogies suitable for further analysis with regard to their social information. This subsection conducts an investigation of these writings for portraits not based on the types of portraits, but rather based on their functions and intended audience. My goal is to unravel the synchronic patterns of portrait inscriptions as one kind of literary writings deeply embedded in the social structure,

93 For studies on desire and anxiety in the late Ming and their reflection in textual production, see Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2011), especially the first chapter.

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and the inscriptions’ tactical participation in the social elite’s social life. The majority of Wang Zhi eulogies are for men, while 6 are notably for women, including 2 for the author’s wife. A further 10 eulogies are for clan members, including the author’s brothers, elder sister, the sister’s husband and his brothers, her son-in-law, the author’s son-in-law, and other relatives such as the paternal grandfather of the author’s daughter-in-law. These eulogies indicate that portraiture was primarily displayed or circulated within the subject’s family and clan. This circulating course was one opportunity to engender inscriptions. Wang Zhi also has 16 eulogies, an even larger number than those for his clan, dedicated to friends and colleagues. Social hierarchy played a part in the arrangement of these eulogies. Officials and their family members were placed first, followed by non-official commoners. In chapter 2 of this dissertation, I discussed the enacting role of inscriptions in forming local communities and culture. The locality was significant to the ancient Chinese cultural elite, which ever since the Southern Song period, had emphasized connections with their place of origin.94 Historians believe that this emphasis was not affected by one’s subsequent place of residence. In the Ming era, one’s birthplace retained a dominant importance in the social lives of the elite. Wang Zhi hailed from Taihe 泰和 County in Jiangxi Province. Even though he spent most of his life in Beijing, following his success in the metropolitan examinations at the age of twenty-five, he still maintained close ties with local elite in his hometown. Taihe, though only a small county under the jurisdiction of Ji’an Prefecture, was influential to the entire Ming empire in the early fifteenth century. Anne Gerritsen has carried out a book-length study on the changing pattern of Ji’an literati connecting with their locality. The following discussion has benefited tremendously from her research. Around the Yongle emperor and his successors in the first decades of 1400s, there clustered a number of prominent officials 94 Richard Vinograd has contributed an insightful discussion on this issue. See Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraiture 1600-1900, 6-7.

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who hailed from Taihe. The locality ties certainly played a role in some of them getting promoted. Wang Zhi’s promotion to the post of minister would largely have been as a result of the recommendation of his town fellow Yang Shiqi. The fact that Ji’an fellows occupied several top ranking positions in the bureaucratic system in turn facilitated an increase in successful Ji’an graduates in the civil service examinations. This prefecture produced more metropolitan degree holders than any other Ming prefecture in the dynasty.95 Anne Gerritsen has demonstrated that officials who hailed from Ji’an frequently received requests and invitations for compositions for local religious sites, genealogies, and other cultural institutions. The author’s location in the capital creates a distant relationship with the local temples for which they wrote inscriptions.96 It is clear from Wang’s eulogies that he was quite busy receiving guests who travelled from elsewhere to the capital, especially officials on business trips for personnel transfer, including the triennial rating (kao 考 ), promotion, reinstatement, etc. It is not surprising, then, that after he had assumed the office of the Ministry of Personnel, the number of guests increased. An interesting phenomenon is that some travellers brought their portraits to visit Wang Zhi for inscriptions. (See Appendix I, which marks the eulogies that Wang dedicated to his townsmen.) Though much more portable than oil paintings, portraits painted 5 on silk or paper were much more fragile. What motivated their owners to carry these fragile objects for hundreds of miles in order to obtain an inscription? The question deserves further exploration from a material culture perspective and in relation to Ming people’s travelling habits and conditions, as well as their conception of portrait inscriptions. As discussed in chapter 2, the act of inscribing was meaningful per se, in a context that

95 Robert Hymes, “Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou,” 96. 96 For Ji’an literati in the early 1440s high court and their influence on civil service examination, see Anne Gerritsen, Ji’an Literati and the local in Song-Yuan- Ming China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 127-34.

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the possession of someone’s handwriting suggested a linkage with the writer. From the side of the inscriber, portraits, which can be physically touched and examined, directly connected him in the capital with people miles away in or from his hometown. Different from the requests for writings about local landscape or religious sites, requests for portrait inscriptions did not require him to recall things from memory or even imagine things he was unfamiliar with. The locality ties continued to exert efficacy even when one end of the tie died. “Eulogy for a portrait of Yin Ziyuan” (Yin Ziyuan xiangzan 尹子源像讚 ) is an example.97 This composition is for a deceased friend from Taihe, who Wang Zhi had known for forty years. It was the sitter’s grandson, a Junior Compiler (bianxiu 編修) at the Hanlin Academy, that asked Wang for a eulogy. This also reminds us that Wang Zhi devoted the same attention, if not more, to his colleagues in the central government. A comprehensive case is a eulogy for a portrait of Hu Ying 胡濙 (1375-1463), the Minister of Rites at the time it was written.98 Hu Ying was a powerful figure who successfully kept his ministerial post for over thirty years from 1427. This undated eulogy was probably done between 1438 and 1443 when Wang Zhi worked under Hu Ying, or soon after 1443 when he was promoted to the post of Minister of Personnel. The portrait and the eulogy was commissioned by an abbot, who had been receiving patronage from Hu Ying for years. Thanks to the recommendation of Hu, who was also in charge of the bureaucratic structure over Buddhist and Daoist monasteries nationwide, the monk was promoted to Vice Supervisor (fu dugang 副都綱 ) in Jianning 建寧 Prefecture (in present-day Fujian Province).99 Deeply indebted, the monk commissioned a portrait of Hu and offered the portrait in the reception hall by praying day and night for the patron’s

97 For how distant relationships were established through Ji’an literati’s writings for local religious sites, see Anne Gerritsen, Ji’an Literati and the local in Song-Yuan-Ming China, 130-40. 98 Wang Zhi, Yi’an wenhou ji, juan 37, 26b-27a. 99 Ibid., 17a-18a.

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longevity. It is likely that visitors to the temple would see Hu Ying’s portrait and read Wang’s inscription, in the course of which the abbot’s connections with these two powerful people were witnessed and then reproduced. Apparently, the portrait gave all potential viewers the message of the close patronage relationship between a monk and a high-level official in the remote capital. This example is thus a good manifestation of how a portrait inscription conveyed a gesture of gratitude to an audience from higher social class, while speaking to a broader audience who were also aware of the gesture-making social messages. Sometimes, the requesters who had no direct connection with Wang Zhi had to turn to middlemen. From time to time, the elite composed writings for places they had never visited. In the same way, inscribers occasionally found themselves in a situation where they were asked for inscriptions for people they did not know. In such cases, they were very much dependent on the information that they were provided with. Once again, connections with the locality played a part. “Eulogy for a portrait of Libationer Wu” (Ji Wu jijiu 呉祭酒讚) should have been a case in point. This eulogy for a Libationer (jijiu 祭酒 ) was made possible by a townsman of Wang. Like many other Ming elite, Wang Zhi did not exclude professional painters from his private network. He seems to have 5 been a patron of minor painters from his hometown as well. One of his eulogies was done for a portraitist named Xiao Gongbei 蕭 公北 , who wandered from Taihe to Beijing with a picture of three generations of ancestors from the Xiao clan.100 A Record of Ming Painting records another painter named Xiao Gongbo 蕭公伯, also a competent portraitist from Taihe County, who was active in the same period. It is very likely that Gongbo was a brother, or a clan brother, of Gongbei, but it could also be that this name is

100 This bureaucratic structure withdrew the power of supervision from monasteries. For its establishment in 1380s and loosening after the Yongle Reign, see Timothy Brook, The Chinese State in Ming Society (London: Routledge, 2004), 141-52.

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a mistaken record of Gongbei.101 Wang’s eulogy states that Xiao Gongbei decided to develop a portrait business in the capital. The painter asked for Wang’s inscription probably because he deemed it to be a good advertisement to publicize his skills and reliability among potential clients, some of whom may well have been officials in the capital. Thus, Wang’s portrait eulogy reminds us again of the commercial value of inscriptions. In addition to this minor painter, Wang Zhi also befriended Dai Jin, probably soon after the painter’s second move to Beijing in 1435. Wang Zhi appeared in the painting of “Apricot Garden Gathering” in 1437, and Dai Jin seemed to have participated in the same gathering as an assistant of the court painter Xie Huan.102 A eulogy that Wang composed for Dai’s portrait underpins their friendship, in which Wang praises the Dai’s serene facial expression, and sighs for the painter who “calls on golden gates and jade staircases, associating with celebrities and officials. 登 金門與玉除 , 交名公與列卿 .” 103 Wang certainly was among the officials with whom Dai associated. His friendship was perhaps also an implicit way of providing patronage, since friendship and patronage were not mutually exclusive in ancient Chinese society. A portrait eulogy could certainly be a spontaneous creation. Wang Zhi’s eulogies that fall into this category are mostly for deceased subjects, whose portraits were displayed in public. He seems to have produced more eulogies of this kind after retirement, in a phase when he enjoyed more leisure time and visited old acquaintances. The above-mentioned eulogy for his brother-in-law was probably written during this period, in view of the fact that it was written some fifty years after the final meeting of Wang and the sitter. Wang’s retirement did not bring a halt to requests for portrait inscriptions. In reverse of the time when he was in Beijing and received guests from Taihe, his old colleagues from central government sent servants to his new dwelling place back in Taihe County for his inscriptions. “Eulogy 101 Wang Zhi, Yi’an wenhou ji, juan 37, 46b-47a. 102 Xu Qin, Ming hua lu, 31. 103 Richard Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming, 75.

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for A Painting of Pleasure of Minister Mr. Wei” (Wei shangshu xingle zan 魏尚書行樂讚 ) is such a creation for an old friend and subordinate, with whom Wang once worked in the Ministry of Personnel. Local elite were another group of requesters for inscriptions from this former high official who still maintained his prestige. For example, his “Eulogy for Picture of All Celebrating” (Juqing tu zan 具慶圖讚 ) was composed for a portrait of a senior Taihe couple and their two sons.104 The senior man of the family had been teaching at the local Confucian school for many years, and retired from the head of the county-sponsored school in Shanghai 上海. Like He Fu, who commissioned Paying a Debt, this man taught many local students when they were at the initial stage of learning Confucian classics. His sons were also officials: one followed the father’s footsteps and served in a Confucian school, and the younger one was a Vice magistrate in a sub-prefecture in Yunnan. What is intriguing about the creation of this portrait was that the latter was about to leave office in Yunnan. Wang Zhi reported that the townsmen (xiangren 鄉人), out of respect for this family’s morality and learning, commissioned this portrait from a professional portraitist named Xiao Yuqiao 蕭于喬 (who might be from the same clan as the above-mentioned painter Xiao Gongbei, or even an alternative name for the latter). The younger son then asked Wang Zhi for a eulogy. It is likely that, at 5 that time, Wang Zhi had already retired from central government and had returned to Taihe. He composed a long eulogy and gave the portrait an auspicious title. The portrait was an evident manifestation of local ties that were made possible by collective efforts. Wang Zhi certainly maintained a linkage with relatives back in Taihe, but how close this linkage was is doubtful given the ambivalence projected by some of his inscriptions. To a large extent, a fifteenth-century Chinese man’s social life was highly conditioned by time and space. In a short

104 Wang Zhi, Yi’an wenhou ji, juan 37, 45a.

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eulogy dedicated to the portrait of his deceased bother- in-law, for example, Wang states that he has not seen this relative for fifty years, and now he can only mourn him in front of his portrait hanging in the reception hall. Supposing that he inscribed this eulogy on his relative’s portrait, then he did so in the knowledge that this text would reach other readers through the display and circulation of the painting. The audience would also have included those who read his eulogies from the printed editions of his literary works. Thus, the audience was by no means limited to his town fellows. It would not be surprising for an affluent and well-educated writer to envision that his inscriptions would be scrutinized by different groups of readers. This envisioning of potential and anonymous readers is significant because it might circumscribe the inscriber from the outset when creating a text for a portrait.

Some Reflections on Portraiture Before we continue to explore Ming inscribers’ consciousness of a reading public, I would like to give some reflections on Chinese portraiture , which are drawn from my examinations of portrait inscriptions. In a modern art historical realm, ancient Chinese portraits are treated as static objects. Scholars, especially art historians who rely heavily on visual materials, frequently put the ritual function of portraiture in an overwhelmingly dominant position. They consider the display of portraiture as being limited to a narrow circle of the subject’s close kinsmen and friends.105 The restrained facial expressions and stiff demeanour in the representations further fuel the idea of them as frozen objects, secretly hidden in family shrines. Such preconceptions leave an indelible stain on the portraits, and, consequently, their social function beyond the painted subject’s small circle is underestimated. At the root of this problematic way of dealing with portraiture, I argue, is there are less inscriptions on the

105 Ibid., juan 37, 37a-38b.

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painting surface of portraits. “Less” here primarily means less in quantity, but it also means less readable and artistic. The lack of inscriptions and, indeed, the neglect of inscriptions make the social context difficult to discern. At the same time, the resources that provide this kind of information have been largely bypassed, mainly because of their detachment from the painting bodies that existed in Ming people’s individual collections. The above examinations of portrait inscriptions illuminate some issues surrounding portraiture that have often been taken for granted in previous studies. It is true that the display of portraiture would have been within certain boundaries, but the accessibility of portraiture was somewhat different. As I have shown, Ming portraiture both of men and women was frequently circulated among the educated men for inscription. This flow represents a dynamic social process that engages social agents, such as producers, recipients, middlemen and deliverers. It also fulfils certain needs of social interactions, such as reciprocities, commissions, and patronage. Against common notions that emperors’ visages were only accessible to the high court and the ruling house, there is evidence to suggest that they enjoyed a certain level of distribution, though this level is not comparable to the kinds of circulation seen in contemporary Europe.106 A late Ming reader would possibly know Emperor Hongwu and Yongle’s face (with much less concern with the likeness) 5 from reading encyclopaedias available in the book market. The encyclopaedia Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms even offered its readers an image of Emperor Jiajing whose reign ended in 1567, four decades before the publication of the this encyclopaedia.107 Craig Clunas suggests that underpinning this kind of portraiture was a curiosity about the appearance of famous people.108 But we should also note that the incorporation 106 Ibid., juan 37, 28a. 107 See Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 9; Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors, 38. 108 For such opinions, see Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 9. Craig Clunas has problematized this kind of idea. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 98.

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of these images of emperors in these publishing projects imbued them with commercial hues. Scholars pay little attention to portraiture reproduced in other forms and on other media, such as woodblock printing and stele rubbing. However, thanks to these forms, Ming people were not unfamiliar with images of distinguished local people, who repeatedly appeared on carved steles, in local gazetteers and in family genealogies. The distribution of these resources was perhaps less restrained than modern scholars may believe. When renowned people ask for to view or borrow an ancestral image from a family, say, for a scholarly project, they had a high chance of receiving an affirmative answer. The eminent Ming scholar Wang Shizhen seems to be a case in point. He collected 112 portraits of Suzhou celebrities of the Ming era for his project “Portraits and Eulogies of Suzhou Sages in the Past” (Wuzhong wangzhe xiangzan 吳中往哲像讚 ). As the title indicates, this compilatory project matches each image of a celebrity with a text. 109 Each text begins with a short biography of the subject, detailing his political exploits, or distinguished virtue, or literary achievements. It may proceed to record Wang’s acquisition of the image, and then describes and evaluates the image. Otherwise, it might end with a eulogy extolling the subject and echoing the biographical part at the beginning. With the exception of one entry for Wang Shizhen’s younger brother, none of the others are from his own clan. Wang had various sources for accumulating these images: clan descendants, steles, temples, and family shrines. If there were multiple images of one subject, he was very careful to choose one image for his compilation.110 He might even do scholarly research before he made a decision. For example, he learnt from gazetteers that one subject Yao Guangxiao 姚廣孝 (1335-1418) was unmarried throughout his life and kept his head shaved. He also got an anecdote describing Yao as a fat man. But the portrait Wang saw was of a slim and wrinkled man

109 Wang Qi 王圻 (1530-1615) and Wang Siyi 王思義 (fl. 16th-17th cent.), Sancai tuhui 三才圖會 , juan renwu 人物 3, XXSKQS, 30a. 110 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, 96.

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with white hair. This huge contradiction bewildered Wang. He decided to trust the textual records and alerted his readers to the fact that the portrait copy he provided only “extracts the rough idea (yi 意 ).”111 The texts illustrated the images in Wang Shizhen’s individual collection, which was posthumously published in 1599 by his son. Doubtless, the publication of the collection enabled these texts to reach a much wider public than any text written on a portrait could achieve. Their distribution propagandized the merits of these Suzhou cultural icons, as well as the merits of Wang Shizhen who keenly promoted the local culture of his hometown. The practice of printing portrait images accompanied by introductory and laudatory texts continued to prosper in the next centuries.

Painting Inscriptions as Enduring Objects

A painting, as an object that endures, may be repeatedly examined over time. Ming people from time to time re- encountered the old paintings that they had once created, owned, or seen before, or paintings that had accumulated a considerable number of inscriptions over a long period. This confrontation placed the viewer in a situation that intensified the time gap, a

situation which, for Ming people, was particularly evocative of 5 inscriptions. This section studies the writing of the inscriptions that were imbued with an ontological concern for one’s existence vis-a-vis time. This section first examines a relevant phenomenon of transforming old texts into inscriptions for new paintings, which invites us to reconsider the relationship between texts and images. It then proceeds to three levels of effort to control one’s interaction and projection to the past, present, and future: personal context, environment, and the future. These three levels best illustrate a picture of inscriptions made to be chuan, namely,

111 These eulogies are embodied in Wang Shizhen, Yanzhou shanren sibu xugao 弇州山人四部續稿 , Wenbu 文部 , juan 146-48, edition printed ca. 1599.

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to horizontally spread and vertically transmit. They will deepen the previous section’s investigation of Ming inscriptions that were made for ritual, social, and cultural purposes now and then. Painting inscriptions were not necessarily improvisations. Texts that were enduring partly owed this quality to the constant habit of recycling them. It was common for Ming inscribers to borrow lines from ancient poets, and Tang poems were often the target of these people, who were eager to verbally contribute to a visuality yet found nothing good in their own literary repertoire. In the eyes of Ming people, this was totally acceptable rather than a sign of lack of originality. The combination of a Tang poem with a Ming picture afforded intellectual pleasure, inviting one to search his knowledge to appreciate the poem. A good match could even evoke a sense of transcendence: Ming people shared the same lyrical ideas as people a thousand years ago. Certainly, one could incorporate his old writing to a new image. Jonathan Chaves has shown that Yang Weizhen 楊維楨 (1296-1370), an outstanding Yuan poet, inscribed a poem that he had written before on a mid-fourteenth century hanging scroll entitled Watching a Waterfall, in the process changing the original prose preface into one more appropriate to the painting.112 Ming literati inherited this tradition of matching their old writings with freshly made paintings. The old writings included inscriptions that had already been written on paintings. A short essay by Li Liufang, a Jiading 嘉定 painter and active member of Dong Qichang’s circle,113 provides us with a supporting record. From the summer of 1618 to the tenth month of 1619, Li Liufang had three journeys.114 Twice he travelled within the Jiangnan area by boat. The scenic sights along the way inspired him to gradually finish an album of twelve leaves. When the visuality part was complete, Li Liufang inscribed several quatrains, all painting

112 Wang Shizhen, Yanzhou shanren sibu xugao, juan 148, 11b. 113 Ibid., juan 146, 9a. 114 Jonathan Chaves, The Chinese Painter as Poet (New York: China Institute Gallery, China Institute, 2000), 42-44.

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inscriptions he wrote before.115 The quatrains had the same theme as the new album and thus were appropriate for reuse. One may wonder about the benefits gained from reusing old inscriptions. One reason that is rarely thought about is: high-quality writings, especially poems, always seemed to be inadequate in terms of meeting the needs of new paintings. As far as the late Ming writer Tan Yuanchun was concerned, such recycling was laughable; the recycled literature was like “the humble family’s poor food that appeared on dining table again and again.”116 But Tan Yuanchun could hardly deny that recycling was expedient. In fact, his statement was self-mocking as he had sent a reused poem to his friend. One may be astonished to know that this poem had already been inscribed for several times on a fan, in an album and on letter paper. The reproduction of a painting inscription was hence not a single but a multiple trajectory. This process was open to the introduction of new forms, and highly tolerant of textual variations. Sometimes, one might appropriate an inscription of someone else (perhaps with slight adaption) for his new creation. The above-mentioned 1511 poem by Wen Zhengming on his 1496 scroll with a theme of the lapse of time had presumably inspired his pupil Lu Zhi 陸治 (1496-1576). In 1564, the latter made a re- inscription on a work he had painted seventeen years previously in 1548. Evidently an imitation of his teacher’s, his poem reads: 5 “My ink goes through seventeen years. Grey-headed, I am re- examining it and feeling gloomily. Days and nights pass by like, and [today] is no different from yesterday. I am ashamed for my intelligence faded. 筆墨悠悠十七年 , 白頭重閱已茫然 . 蹉跎 歲月渾如昨 , 慚愧聰明不及前 .”117 Lu Zhi’s poem is surprisingly similar to the 1511 poem by Wen. It seems that Wen’s prototype poem was quite popular. As previously mentioned, Zhang Taijie’s 115 For a study of Li Liufang, see Christina Zhu, “Li Liufang: The Life and Art of a Late Ming Literatus,” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1990). 116 For the relationship between boat-travel, painting creation and connoisseurship Fu Shen, “‘Shuhuachuan’ – Zhongguo wenren de ‘liudong huashi’” ‘ 書畫船 ’—— 中國文人的 ‘ 流動畫室 ,’ in Nanzong zhengmai, 157-75. 117 Li Liufang, Tanyuan ji, juan 12, 5a-5b.

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forged painting catalogue altered some words in it, and probably associated this poetic pseudograph with a forgery painting. In short, inscriptions had various sources. In addition to new improvisations, they could also be one’s prior painting inscriptions, or other kinds of writings. The transplantation of old texts onto new paintings manifests a remarkable flexibility of literary writings to fit with visual representations. This phenomenon challenges a long-held notion that an inscription is always tailor-made to the image in order to achieve an integral harmony.

Controlling the Personal Context A painting carrying an old inscription, especially an old inscription written by the author himself, was often a reminder to the viewer to contemplate his relation with the moment when the inscription was written. James C.Y. Liu insightfully suggests that in Chinese concepts of time, space and self, ego and time could be static or moving. Their combination resulted in four types of matching: a static ego in moving time; a static ego in static time; a moving ego in static time; a moving ego in moving time. One may conceive of time as flowing towards oneself; or, if the individual and the time are in the same direction, the individual can be concurrent with time.118 On the above-cited birthday portrait of Shen Zhou, there is a re-inscription written a year after the first one. In this year, Shen Zhou greeted his eighty-one sui with full anticipation of death. His longevity ironically brought him successive suffering since the 1470s, in the form of the deaths of family members and close friends. This included the deaths of his friends Liu Jue and Xu Youzhen in 1472, his teacher Chen Kuan (for whose birthday he painted the famous Lofty Mount. Lu) in 1473, another close friend Du Qiong in 1474, his father in 1477, his close relative and friend Cheng Meng in 1482, his wife in 1486, and then another three

118 Tan Yuanchun, Tan Yuanchun ji, juan 28, 782.

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friends - Shi Jian 史鑒 , Wen Lin 文林 (Wen Zhengming’s father) and Wu Kuan in, respectively, 1496, 1499 and 1504. The passing away of these cultural elite marked the fading of a generation of Suzhou officials, scholars, and artists. In 1506, Shen Zhou’s mother died at the age of 91, causing tremendous grief to the artist. In the years between 1479 and 1506, he also lost six junior family members. His eldest son’s death in 1502 resulted in a profound psychic shock from which he perhaps never recovered. Compared with an implicit melancholy in the 1506 poem, the 1507 re-inscription projects a transcendent posture. This inscription, signed in his alternative name Shitian, in small characters on the upper right corner, reads:

Like or unlike, true or not true; A shadow on the paper; a person outside the body. Life and death is a dream, a dust between heaven and earth. Up and down, go and stop, I embrace my blossoming. I, Shitian, inscribe again the year next. 似不似 , 真不真 , 紙上影 , 身外人 . 死生一夢 , 天地一塵 . 浮浮休休 , 吾懷自春 . 越年石田又題 .

The inscription turns the senile and weak painted self into a “shadow,” and thus something alien. No matter how life-like a 5 shadow is, it can never equal the real subject. “Dream” is a topos again alluding to Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, and “blossom” conveys a Daoist idea of human being’s nurturing relations with the things of the world. This Daoist tendency may have provided Shen Zhou with solace and helped him cope with his sombre life and foreseeable death. It appears that Shen Zhou’s self in and outside the portrait are static. Even if feeling that existence was a dream, itself always undergoing change, his inner peace remains unaltered.119

119 The painting is Lu Zhi’s Flowers of Four Seasons (Sishi huahui zhenji 四時花 卉真蹟 ), ink and colour on silk, handscroll, 31.8 × 484 cm, The Palace Museum, Taipei.

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The evocativeness of re-encountering a painting may have been much stronger than that in our epoch of mass mediated visual culture and mechanical reproduction. Shen Zhou had another re-inscription, not for a portrait, but for a landscape painting originally inscribed by Chen Kuan and Xu Youzhen. The newly added poem mourned the death of his younger brother Shen Zhao 沈召 (zi Jin’nan 繼男 ), a trauma that was once again evoked by unfolding the scroll (fig. 5-9):

Peach Blossom Study is our family house; My younger brother had been living together with me [here] for forty years. Today I am alone, looking at the flowers; Like a spring dream, [my face is] tear-stained. 桃花書屋我家宅 , 阿弟同居四十年 . 今日看花惟我在 , 一場春夢淚痕邊 .

Following this poem is a short non-verse note, giving the title and the date and the creative motive. It reveals that the scroll was done in 1470, two years before Shen Zhao passed away in 1472. Three years later, in 1475, Shen Zhou re-examined this painting.120 Time stood in-between the moment now and the moment when Shen Zhao was still alive. The three inscriptions made Peach Blossom Study a visual epitome of the forty years that the Shen brothers had lived together, witnessed by his close friends. The visuality was changeless, but the re-inscription introduced dynamic change. It updated the painting space from a space in which Shen Zhou dwelled together with his brother into one in which the painter now “looked at the flower” alone. Two years later in 1474, Shen Zhou happened to unroll Pure and White Veranda (fig. 5-10), a hanging scroll by his friend Liu Jue, who passed away in the same year as Shen Zhao. With deep melancholy, Shen Zhou inscribed a poem, the second couplet of which reads: “The party participants who once enjoyed [the 120 James J.Y. Liu, “Time, Space, and Self in Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 1, No. 2 (July 1979): 137-38.

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pleasure of] poetry and wine now lost master Liu. The people are lonely; the pavilion is deserted. 舊游詩酒少劉公 , 人已寥寥閣已空 .”121 The re- examination of an image that maintained a static space in the past, evoked in Shen Zhou a poignant sense of humans being in constant flux. An old inscription that Liu Jue had written in 1458 might have deepened his sorrow. Liu’s inscription stated that this painting was created during a small banquet when his friends asked him for artistic creations. Liu then executed and inscribed a poem in rhymed dong 東 (shangping: yidong 一東 in “Pingshui Rhymes”). Chinese calligraphy has a mechanism that, as John Hay notes, with 5 lively brushstrokes “mark the psycho-physical trace of Fig. 5-9 Shen Zhou, Peach Blossom Study, 1472, hanging scroll, ink and one’s body, and evoke his/ colour on paper, 74 x 31 cm, Capital her face through the gestalt Museum, Beijing. image of the characters.”122 To Shen Zhou, Liu Jue’s

121 For Shen Zhou’s relation with Daoism, see Yao Ning, 14-15; Lee Chun- yi, “The Daoist Symbolism of Immortality in Shen Zhou’s ʻWatching the Mid- Autumn Moon at Bamboo Villa’,” in Myriad Points of View: New Research on Ming and Qing Paintings in the Roy and Marilyn Papp Collection, ed. Claudia Brown (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2006), 53-54. 122 For Shen Zhao, see Zong Dian, “Shen Zhou xiongdi kao” 沈周兄弟考 , in Shanghai bowu jikan, Vol. 6 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992), 32-35.

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poem inscription, also a piece of calligraphic writing, became a bitter trace of his friend’s body. Shen Zhou’s reaction to this bitterness was that, sixteen years after Liu Jue’s banquet, he picked up the same rhyme and used exactly the same rhyming words (gong 公 , kong 空 , dong 東 ) for a new composition, which he then added to the painting surface. I have shown in Chapter 2 that rhyming was an effective means of social interaction for Ming educated men. This re-inscription shows another efficacy beyond mundane interaction. Inscribing using the same metrical rhyme enabled Shen Zhou to incorporate himself into a joyful gathering of his friends, which he had originally been absent from. In a way, he transcended time and space, joining Liu’s brushwork in the picture and the poem parts. It was perhaps due in part to this efficacy of Fig. 5-10 Liu Jue, Pure and White Veranda, 1458, hanging scroll, inscriptions that Qianlong Emperor ink on paper, 97.2 x 35.4 cm, The exhibited great enthusiasm for Palace Museum, Taipei. inscribing and stamping on artworks in his imperial collection (Pure and White Pavilion was also included). If Shen Zhou could integrate himself into an elegant gathering in the past through a poem, surely the emperor could too?

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Controlling the Social Environment Shen Zhou’s re-inscriptions outline a picture of re- inscriptions as the intellectual consequences of a response to time and death, while others reveal a picture of re-inscriptions as strenuously striving to control the environment one lived in. The social aspect of re-inscriptions may find corroboration in a poem inscription by Wen Zhengming dated 1511. The story starts early in 1496 when Wen executed a small painting following a request by a collector named Huang Yun 黃雲 (zi Yinglong 應 龍 , fig. 5-11). At that time, Wen did not leave any inscription on his creation. The painting remained un-inscribed and in Huang Yun’s private collection. Probably slightly before 1511, Huang first wrote an inscription, and then he asked Wen for another one. His request provided an opportunity for Wen to re-examine a work that he had created sixteen years earlier. Wen’s poem has appeared earlier in this dissertation. Its first line reads: “The painting let me to look back sixteen years ago.”123 It seems that this re-encountering with an old creation immediately directed the painter’s attention to the condition of the work, as his next line reads: “Its remnant red and peeling white pigments remain [as if] the same as in the past.” His reaction might have also been resulted from a tendency shared by Chinese educated men that they appeared to be sensitive to the condition of their writing

surface. The physical condition of this painting – the ink and 5 colour seemed to have been slightly faded and the paper perhaps was slightly worn out – demonstrably invoked Wen Zhengming’s lyrical emotion. What is more important is the social situation shown by the physical condition of this painting. Craig Clunas argues that the painting, which was un-inscribed, was an object that played an “agency” role in sustaining the long standing relationship between Wen and Huang.124 Clunas is right that an uninscribed

123 English translation quoted from Yao Ning, “Commemorating the Deceased,” 20. 124 Jonathan Hay, “The Kangxi Emperor’s Brush-traces,” 313.

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Fig. 5-11 A portrait of Huang Yun, followed by a biography which is ended with a short eulogy, in Gu Yuan 顧沅, Biographies and Eulogies of Suzhou Sages (Wujun mingxian tu zhuanzan 吳郡名賢圖傳讚), juan 7, 1829 edition, 8a-8b. painting in the social context of the Ming era was often seen as an “unfinished” work and open to further modification. The modification, mostly in the way of adding new inscription(s), engaged people and more or less enacted people’s relationships. But his overall assumption confuses which caused which. The sixteen-years relationship between Huang and Wen was not a consequence of the 1511 inscription on the 1496 painting. Rather, the relationship was the cause and the inscribed painting was the result. We know quite a lot about Wen Zhengming, but not a lot about the petty official Huang Yun. Huang’s literary achievement gained him space in Qian Qianyi’s writing about Ming literary history.125 His interests in art collection also gained him a reputation in the Suzhou area. News of a precious piece of his collection being stolen spread locally in the late fourteenth

125 Wen Zhengming, Wenzhengming ji, 224.

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century, in responding to which Shen Zhou sent him a poem in consolation.126 Reports of this incident even entered into Du Mu’s The Implied Message and Zhang Chou’s The Clear Water Pleasure Boat of Painting and Calligraphy.127 Craig Clunas links Huang Yun and Wen Zhengming based on the fact that Wen’s wife and Huang both hailed from Kunshan 昆山 County.128 But a more likely nexus of the two is Shen Zhou. Huang’s age was presumably somewhere in-between Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming. He certainly exchanged poems with the former (fig. 5-12), and initiated most of the interactions with the latter that are known to us.129 The 1496 painting was the earliest one. In 1497, Wen presented a modest poem in response to a laudatory poem earlier presented by Huang.130 In 1505, Huang, then in a minor

5

Fig. 5-12 A letter from Shen Zhou to Huang Yun, measurement unknown, The Palace Museum, Taipei. Web. 31-08-2015. 126 Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts, 64-65. 127 Qian Qianyi, Liechao shiji xiaozhuan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983), 293. 128 Shen Zhou, Shitian shixuan, juan 8, SKQS edition, 34b-35b. 129 Du Mu, Yuyi bian, Qijin zhai congshu 奇晉齋叢書 edition, 2b; Zhang Chou, Qinghe shuhua fang, juan 10-a, SKQS edition, 7b. 130 Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts, 65.

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post in Jiangxi Province, asked Wen for a poem to his literary writings for a local historical site.131 Three years later, Huang “sent a white scroll and commanded [Wen] to write something down” (yi sujuan mingshu 以素卷命書, fig. 5-13), and the final result, known as Cloudy Mountains (Yunshan tu 雲山圖 , fig. 5-14), Fig. 5-13 The image section of Cloudy Mountains, handscroll, ink and light color on gold-flecked paper, 30 ×843 cm. Auctioned by Christie’s Hong Kong on 25 November 2014. Christie. Web. 31-08-2015.

is the only extant one that Wen painted for Huang.132 The two seem to have had closer contacts in 1511. In this year, Wen wrote the re-inscription above, and another lengthy poem appraising a painting in Huang’s collection.133 In all, the writings related to these two persons’ associations are too few for us to draw any certain picture of the real situation. But that little information in itself indicates that Huang was not at the centre of Wen’s social life. Let us not to reconstruct the story behind Wen’s 1511 re- inscription in hindsight. When Wen Zhengming created the 1496 painting, he was only 26 years old. He was increasingly recognized as a budding local novice without much particularity in art. His status in Suzhou’s artistic circles began to rise after Shen Zhou’s death in 1509. A veteran collector and connoisseur, Huang Yun might have noticed this ascent and developed a preoccupation for acquiring Wen’s creations. Cloudy Mountains painted in 1508 was a work that, as Wen frankly stated in his inscription, Huang “commanded” (ming 命 ) him to create. Huang even sent Wen expensive, gold-flecked paper, to show his sincerity and determination. It is tempting to speculate that the 1511 re-inscription for the 1496 painting might also be the result of an attempt to acquire handwritings from a rising calligrapher. Having Wen Zhengming’ inscription on his creation also proclaimed the genuineness of the work and therefore guaranteed the value. Unfortunately, the 1496 painting is lost. 131 Chen Zhenghong, Shenzhou nianpu, 181. 132 Wen Zhengming, Wenzhengming ji, 136. 133 Ibid., 64-65.

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The extant Cloudy Mountains offers a good analogy of how Ming people considered the value of a re-inscribed work from a market perspective, and how they struggled with the fluidity of things in a floating world. When Huang Yun finally obtained Cloudy Mountains executed and inscribed by Wen Zhengming, he added a colophon at the end of the scroll. This colophon implored his posterity to cherish the painting as a family heirloom that should never be sold, no matter how high the bid. Huang would

Fig. 5-14 The end of Wen Zhengming’s colophon on Cloudy Mountains stating the work being commissioned by Huang Yun.

have been fully aware of the monetary value of a Wen painting carrying an authentic inscription. His admonition had grounds. Sixty years later in 1570, the scroll entered into Wang Shizhen’s 王士貞 collection. The previous inscriptions by Wen and Huang revealed the trajectory of the work to Wang Shizhen, the new owner and viewer. Wang must have read Huang’s admonition from the scroll. He executed an inscription reciting Haung’s words, and sighed with emotion how Huang Yun’s grandson had earnestly “left the scroll to me [Wang] for a high price and went away.” Within a sixty-year period, a dream of an heirloom had been crushed. Ultimately, Huang Yun’s painstaking efforts were futile. From this standpoint, Wang Shizhen envisioned the future of this painting and his personal collection of paintings. 5 The end of his colophon bemoaned: “How can I guarantee my descendants in advance”? This array of inscriptions by successive owners thus becomes an epitome of a desire to control the environment in which not only an individual lived, but in which an object endured.

Controlling the Future Ming people felt impotent in confronting time and space due to the limits of their physical existence. Tang Yin once lamented in a confrontation with his portrait, saying: “I cannot

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dispense with you, but you can do without me. As to you and me a hundred years later, you will exist but I will be no more.”134 His preoccupation with the posthumous survival of objects is the epitome of an aspiration to extend one’s existence beyond physical limits. The life span of a human being is, after all, limited. But Ming people also discovered the potential of inscriptions in this respect. They deployed inscriptions with full consciousness that, as objects, inscriptions outlived their corporal existence and, as texts, inscriptions could be transmitted through reproductions. It is true that Chinese paintings are quite fragile, and their preservation and transmission is no easy task. When Li Dongyang recorded the several copies of Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden that he had seen, he was impressed by how well the descendants of the commissioners kept the scrolls. He accredited the survival of these scrolls to the merits and virtues of these clans.135 Ming people frequently noticed that paintings and inscriptions executed or possessed by someone persisted regardless of the condition of that person. The above case of Huang Yun and Wang Shizhen is a good example. Another example comes from Shen Zhou and his friend Sun Yiyuan 孫一 元 (1484-1520). They once inscribed rhyme-matching poems on a folding fan in memory of their pleasure during a night boating trip. Later on, probably upon the invitation of Sun Yiyuan, Tang Yin joined in with his rhymed poem. Even after the death of Sun and his peers, the inscriptions still kept growing. By virtue of the inscriptions, those who were not present at the boating night found a way of attaching themselves. Shih Shou-ch’ien therefore considers this folding fan to be a “sharing carrier” for the Jiangnan elite to anchor their identity and identification of their lifestyle.136 It is noticeable that this “sharing carrier” was made

134 See Richard Edwards, The Art of Wen Cheng-ming: 1470-1559 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 64-66. 135 Wen Zhengming, Wenzhengming ji, 73-74. 136 Hajime Nakatani, “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan),” 81.

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possible by poem-rhyming, which, like its role on Chanting for the Pictures, bound the inscribers tightly through time. Imitation after Miu Yi’s ‘Mountain Path and Spinney’ (Lin Miu Yi shanjing zashu tu 臨繆佚山徑雜樹圖) provides a more complicated example in terms of a longer time span and more reproductions. The painter Ma Yu, a friend of Shen Zhou’s clan, has already been introduced in Chapter 2 of this dissertation. This native of Jiading 嘉定 County successfully set up a network with some of the most eminent literati in Jiangnan area. His Imitation of Miu Yi’s ‘Mountain Path and Spinney’, as the title suggests, is an imitation of a painting by a late Yuan painter Miu Yi 繆佚 (fl. mid-14th century).137 Miu Yi’s work was densely inscribed in his day, including an inscription by the painter himself. No later than 1417, Shen Zhou’s grandfather Shen Cheng in Suzhou acquired this painting.138 Around 1466, Ma Yu borrowed it from his friend Shen Heng and made a copy of it.139 An intriguing fact is that he not only copied the image part, but also all the Yuan inscriptions. From that moment, Miu Yi’s original coexisted with Ma Yu’s imitation in the Jiangnan region. In 1656, a Huizhou antique dealer named Wu Qizhen 吳其貞 (b.1607-after 1678) saw a scroll that is very possibly Ma Yu’s copy. At that time it was still kept in Suzhou city. 140 Ma Yu’s imitation continuously incorporated inscriptions in the following decades. These new inscriptions made the work a 5 bizarre mix of inscriptions from the Yuan and Ming periods. On the present scroll, the poetic inscriptions alone amount to 64.141 Unfortunately, the entire scroll has not been published, which means that its physical condition remains unclear to researchers.

137 Li Dongyang, Huailu tang ji, juan 73, 14a-14b. 138 Shih Shou-ch’ien, “Shanshui suishen,” 22-23. 139 Miu Yi is recorded very briefly in Yu Yi’s 魚翼 (1695-1745) book for Changshu painters entitled A Brief Record of Painters in Haiyu (Haiyu huayuan lue 海虞畫苑略 ), MSCS 3.4, 140. 140 Liu Pu 劉溥 (fl. 1436), Caochuang ji 草窗集 , juan xia 下 , 1480 edition, 105a. 141 Wen Fanggang had a detailed record of this scroll. Fuchu zhai wenji, juan 40, 13a-13b. See also Duan Fang 端方 (1861-1911), Rengyin xiaoxia lu 壬寅銷夏錄 , manuscript written between 1906-1911, 1099a-2000b.

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It is certain that the first group of Ming inscriptions were made soon after the completion of the imitation. Liu Jue was one who contributed a poem. The second couplet of the poem reads: “There are countless gifted poets in Yingzhong; they would ridicule Mr. Liu for coming the last. 郢中無數能詩客 , 應笑劉郎 最後來 .”142 “Yingzhong” is a literary allusion to the Suzhou area, an explicit mark that situates this work in the Suzhou cultural landscape. Later on, during the transition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a Fujian official named Zheng Shanfu 鄭善 夫 (1485-1523) once had access to the imitation.143 He did not let the opportunity of adding a new inscription slip. His poem emphasizes how the spirits of the dead linger in an inscription: “Where is your settled place? The decaying brushstrokes are where your vivid spirits rest. 爾輩安身是何處 , 素毫零落寄豐神 .144 This lament might be largely because by that time, the majority of the first group of inscribers had passed away. Apparently, the poet sensed the possibility that one might, or perhaps could only transcend his fame through writing. His inscription acknowledged the existence of people in the past, while also making his own presence known to the future. Zheng Shanfu’s wish was fulfilled. The scroll continued to survive and circulate. After the dynastic change, it even found another way of circulation. The Qing scholar Weng Fanggang once saw it and selected six rhymes from its poetic inscriptions to create his response poems. The six rhyming poems were also embodied in Weng’s personal anthology, with careful annotations regarding the original poems to be matched.145 The last poem of the six has sighs: “[Shen Zhou’s] poem precedes [Ma Yu’s] picture on the scroll, competing for the comprehension of viewers. The painting once owned by the Shen family now falls into the hands

142 Wu Qizhen, Shuhua ji 書畫記 , juan 4, facsimile reprint of Xie Siku quanshu 寫四庫全書 edition in the Qianlong Reign. XXSKQS, 117. 143 Zhao Suna, Preface to Gugong cang lidai huihua tishi cun 故宮博物院藏歷代繪 畫題詩存 (Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 12. 144 Ibid., 131. 145 For Zheng Shanfu’s biography, see DMB, 211-12. He as a painter is recorded in Zhu Mouyin, Huashi huiyao, juan 4, 51a.

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of someone else. 詩在畫前爭會得, 沈家今更落誰家.”146 This poem line clearly expresses Weng Fanggang’s consciousness that inscriptions and paintings are objects of dynamism in this floating world. They move from one place to another, and the moving is the quintessence that why these objects deserve people’s cherish. In addition to textual books, the inscriptions on Ma Yu’s imitation work also found reproduction on another painting. An eighteenth-century scholar Fang Shishu 方士庶 (1693-1751) painted an imitation of Ma Yu’s imitation but changed the handscroll format into a hanging scroll.147 Fang’s inscription on his own copy testifies that at the time when he saw Ma Yu’s work, it had impressively accumulated more than a hundred inscriptions. Fang transcribed some inscriptions onto the copy by himself. By the first half of the eighteenth century, there existed at least three versions of Mountain Path and Spinney: Miu Yi’s original painted in the mid-fourteenth century, Ma Yu’s imitation dated 1466, and Fang Shishu’s imitation. It is intriguing to see that each version became an independent system for absorbing new inscriptions. Their circulations were parallel with the individual anthologies, and both systems passed the inscriptions down to future generations. Toward this end, we may say that an inscription is a living body that grows with time.

5 Concluding Remarks

This chapter explored Ming inscriptions driven by a desire to interfere in not only the present, but also the past and the future. If painting could be a transcending agency, as noted by Craig Clunas, “to bring about a ‘spiritual communion’ across the ages,”148 inscriptions could play the same role. The understanding of this role was unwritten but tacit.

146 Zheng Shanfu, Shao Guji 少谷集 , juan 8, SKQS edition, 31b-32a. 147 Weng Fanggang, Fuchu zhai shiji, juan 40, 13a-13b. 148 Wen Fanggang had a detailed record of this scroll. Fuchu zhai wenji, juan 40, 13a.

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The first section of this chapter has placed Ming inscriptions for portraits in such a social and cultural context. Ming portraiture comprised various genres and functions. This section has shown that in the eyes of Ming people, a portrait, or a painting they knew, linked them to the image captured in the past, their social identities and obligations in the present, and their descendants and all potential readers in the future. This interactive process with the portrait evoked one’s participation by means of inscribing. This section has also proposed that when the portrait projected the viewer himself, the viewer often construed such a confrontation of self- image to be a path to self-knowledge. Hence, he recorded his thoughts, emotions, and tensions engendered in the course of viewing an inscriptions. Finally, this section has argued that inscriptions provide us insights with which to rethink the display environment, accessibility, and notion of portraiture in Ming society. More than a static and ritural object, some, if not all, Ming portraits were dynamic, enojying circulation within the owners' clan and social circles, and even benefitting from a much wider transmission in the form of wood-block printing.

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