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From the P Icture Gallery of C Hina

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From the P Icture Gallery of C Hina * 13 Yu Yusen HINA FROM THE PICTURE GALLERY OF CHINA: C A GLIMPSE INTO THE PERSIANATE COLLECTING OF CHINESE RELIGIOUS PAINTING IN THE LATE 14TH TO 15TH CENTURIES In his reflective study on the collection of early Chinese painting in Japan, James Cahill contended that ‘any full account of the survival of Chinese paintings should include a chapter titled In Praise of Bad Taste’, for many of the paintings deemed as ‘bad’ by the orthodox Chinese criteria of literati connoisseurs were instead favoured by collectors outside China,1 early in Japan, and then Europe and America. Without these collectors and their collections the history of Chinese painting would be far less interesting. A well-known example is the collection of Japanese Sōgenga (literally, Song-Yuan painting) amassed during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (12th-16th centuries). In many if not all cases, these Chinese paintings, collected by Japanese monks, shoguns or others, reflect Japanese preferences such as their obsession with paintings of Chan eccentrics or wandering saints like Hanshan, Shide, Fenggan and Budai, which were not contemporaneously treasured in China.2 Consequently, and intriguingly, today the largest surviving corpus of such paintings is in Japan, as are numerous Japanese imitations of varying qualities. ICTURE GALLERY OF P In recent decades, the migration of these Chinese ‘peripheral’ paintings within the East Asian cultural sphere has become the subject of serious study and a growing public enthusiasm. What is less studied – and therefore not so widely known – is that in addition to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Chinese paintings also travelled westward to Central Asia and Iran, to the Persianate Islamic societies, in the same periods. This essay therefore seeks to guide readers to ‘look through a tube at a leopard’3 and focus on three interesting representations of Chinese wandering saints from the Persian collection of Chinese paintings that I am currently studying. These copies were made by Persian court painters ROM THE after Chinese models (figs. 1-3), which were brought to Central Asia F and Iran during the Mongol and Post-Mongol periods, in particular, the Timurid dynasty (ca. 1370-1507) of Turkic–Mongol origin named after the founder Timur (Tamerlane). The period of Timurid rule was renowned for its vibrant flourishing of artistic and intellectual life in Central Asia and Iran, in which album (muraqqa) making in the codex form started to emerge in the Persianate courtly milieu. During the 15th and 16th centuries Chinese paintings and their Persian copies were cut up or dismantled, and then pasted in different folios as parts of the albums. The three paintings under discussion are from albums currently housed in Istanbul and Berlin. They include two paintings, pasted on different album folios: one is an image of the Daoist deities Li Tieguai and Liu Haichan (fig. 2); the other shows the eccentric Buddhist sage poets Hanshan and Shide (fig. 1), which, according to the recent reconstruction by 14 Fig. 1 Two Daoist deities Li Tieguai and Liu Haichan, album leaf, ink and gold on paper, 30 x 36.1 cm, Central Asia or Iran, ca. 1400- 1500, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preus- sischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, ms. Diez A, fol. 73, p. 55 Ching-Ling Wang, originally constituted a totality that was cut in two during the album-making;4 and a separate painting of Liu Haichan and Li Tieguai (fig. 3). Hanshan, perhaps the most widely known Chinese Chan eccentric in the West who became an icon of the hippie movement in 1960s, and his helper Shide – two Tang-dynasty (618-907) monks from the Guoqing Temple in Zhejiang province – were the most popular subject in Chan painting of the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming dynasties (1368-1644). While Liu Haichan, with a three-legged toad on his back as his familiar, and Li Tieguai, whose soul inhabited the dead body of a crippled beggar, were chronologically later Daoist deities, the trend of combining saints, eccentrics and immortals of Chan and Daoist backgrounds, separately as well as in groups, already began in pre-Ming periods, and in particular, flourished during the Ming.5 It is therefore safe to date the two paintings in the Persian albums to as late as the 14th or 15th century. .
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