Martin J. Powers' Response to Jean James' Review of Art and Political Expression in Early China

Abstract

RESPONSES AND REPLIES Martin J. Powers' Response to Jean James' Review ofArt and Political Expression in Early China In her review ofArt and Political Expression in Early China (CRI2 [I]: 1-18) , Dr. James raises a number ofissues ofinterest to me and, I hope, to the readers of this journal. These issues are not limited to Han dynasty art but call into question many ofthe assumptions and methods associated with the (once) "new" approaches to art history developed chiefly during the eighties. It is gratifying that the field ofearly Chinese art history has reached a stage ofmaturation where debates over method can take place. I welcome this chance and am grateful to the editors of China Review Internationalfor enabling me to participate. By the same token, my understanding ofthe aims and assumptions ofthe "new" art history differs from that of Dr. James, and I believe that many ofher queries are the consequence of a misperception ofmy methods and claims. Let me begin with some background regarding the book. As is now well known, during the late 1970s and the 1980s many scholars began exploring a more interpretative and contextual approach to the history of art. In fields such as Chinese painting or ancient bronzes, such enterprises had been undertaken in (by now well-known) studies by James Cahill, K. C. Chang, Wai-kam Ho, Chu-tsing Li, Robert Thorp, and others, but relatively little had been published along these lines in the field ofearly pictorial art. I tried to initiate such work by demonstrating the political and rhetorical uses ofomen images at Wu Liang's shrine in a (perhaps not so well-known) article published in 1983. In 1984 I published another paper attempting to establish the potential impact offunerary monuments on a family's reputation, the role ofreputation in a bureaucratic career, and the influence of a "public" on the reputations oflocal scholars. Once this dynamic was understood, it appeared that local scholars very likely had to take into account the response ofthe local, educated "public" when commissioning a monument . It followed that funerary monuments could be utilized as "arguments" promoting religious, personal, or political goals.1 This is one of the points Dr. James objects to in Art and Political Expression in Early China (hereafter AP), so I shall© 1995 by University return to it later. ofHawai'i PressThese two articles were followed by others exploring similar situations. By the late 1980s, Audrey Spiro had applied sociopolitical analysis to the origins of portraiture in the Six Dynasties period. In his Wu Liang Shrine, Wu Hung 368 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 adopted the interpretation of omens I had offered earlier in the decade, accepting also the view that funerary monuments could encode personal, social, or political messages aimed at an educated "public."2 The primary concern ofhis book, however —as I understood it—was how Wu Liang's shrine presented the reigning ideology of the period, that is, those cosmologica! and social tenets accepted by both the court and the scholars. My purpose in APwas to problematize the relationship between Confucian scholars and the imperial court, replacing a linear view ofpolitical and cultural history (Confucian scholars loyally obey the court) with a more dialectical model, in which the discourses adopted at the court and local level could be seen both as in competition and as shaping one another. In other words, rather than accept the traditional model of the flow of authority in Chinese society, I was suggesting that discourses adopted by the court did not always originate with the court and sometimes could be appropriated or even subverted by groups unsympathetic to the court. Having questioned some long-standing paradigms, one could reasonably expect to be challenged. Jean James has taken up the challenge in her China Review International review. Dr. James' criticisms appear to me to fall into four categories : (1) misunderstandings or misreadings ofthe book; (2) issues of method; (3) historiographical issues; and (4) issues ofpresentation. I would like to address one major misconception first, as one ofthe leitmotifs running throughout her essay appears to me to reflect an honest yet major misunderstanding. Misreadings On page 172, Dr. James tells the...