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Painting Inscriptions As Enduring Objects

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Painting Inscriptions As Enduring Objects Cover Page 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. 8. chapter 5.indd 1 27/09/16 10:53 272 / Chapter 5 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. 8. chapter 5.indd 2 27/09/16 10:53 273 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. 8. chapter 5.indd 3 27/09/16 10:53 274 / Chapter 5 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. 8. chapter 5.indd 4 27/09/16 10:53 275 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 5 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.
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