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

In Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762), the imaginary Chinese savant Lien Chi Altangi, cast adrift on the treacherous waters of the literary society of Augustan London, discovers that fo...

In the modern Chinese painting world, Feng Jianwu stands out as a highly accomplished and influential artist in the realm of Chinese calligraphy and painting creation in the Bashu region of the 20th century. However, research on him has been scarce, resulting in incomplete historical materials about this great painter and a limited understanding of him among the public. As a modern calligraphy and painting master from the Bashu region, Feng Jianwu’s unique understanding and insight into traditional Chinese painting, as well as his inheritance and exploration of Chinese calligraphy and painting creation, fully demonstrate his comprehensive and profound cultural accumulation and outstanding achievements in the art of calligraphy and painting. His artistic value cannot be underestimated. Throughout his artistic journey, Feng Jianwu displayed his superb artistic attainment and vibrant creativity in various aspects such as ink language, color application, painting schema, and calligraphy and painting style. All these fully reflect his tremendous creativity and innovative consciousness in artistic exploration, thus having positive enlightenment and strong practical significance for today’s artistic creation. In the history of modern Chinese calligraphy and painting art, there has been little research on Feng Jianwu. Comprehensively presenting the characteristics, significance, and value of Feng Jianwu’s calligraphy and painting art can serve as a case study for the history of modern Chinese calligraphy and painting art.

The study substantiates the universal properties of cultural archetypes of Male and Female, characterizing the connection of individual and collective, unconscious manifestations in the products of human creative activity based on the artistic representation of images in Chinese traditional and modern culture. The subject of the study is Chinese realistic painting as a form of culture and worldview, striving to reproduce the authenticity of the image and its external similarity to reality. The object of the research is the artistic representation of cultural archetypes and symbols of the masculine and feminine principles as universals of collective memory. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the archetypal content of the image of "Father" and "Mother" in Chinese fine art, from antiquity to the present in the context of the search for authentic symbols in ancient Chinese traditional painting and painting of the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to examples of the representation of patrimonial archetypal symbols in Chinese painting during the Cultural Revolution and the transformation of masculine images in the "art of scars." Similarly, feminine archetypal symbols are considered, dating back to the ancient beliefs and cults of the "Great Mother", which were embodied not only in ancient Guohua painting, but also in socialist realism painting, as well as in the "art of scars". The methodological basis of the work is a semiotic approach implemented in the concepts of Russian cultural scientists, art historians and Chinese specialists studying gender symbolism in painting. The scientific novelty of the research lies in a meaningful analysis of the archetypal forms of Chinese painting, conducted by the method of comparative description of visual images in the context of traditional visual means, as well as against the background of socio-cultural changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which marked the birth of a national state for China. The conclusions about the similarity of gender symbols in different styles and genres of painting are new, regardless of historical time and socio-cultural context, due to their connection with the primordial, archetypal properties of expressing the image of "Father" and "Mother". The research results and conclusions are based on a culturological understanding of the phenomenon of Chinese realistic painting as a phenomenon of social life and a manifesto of a new type of worldview that retains its connection with the deep structures of the collective unconscious.

Reviewed by: Artisans in Early Imperial China Anne P. Underhill Artisans in Early Imperial China by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Pp. x + 394. $60.00. Barbieri-Low’s engaging book, Artisans in Early Imperial China, tackles an important topic that has not been adequately addressed by historians, art historians, or archaeologists: the people behind the production and distribution of hand-crafted goods during the Qin and Han periods, 221 b.c.e.–c.e. 220. Whereas other scholars often discuss the finely made art objects from this era in isolation, Barbieri-Low breathes life into them, revealing their hidden human dimensions. He argues convincingly that “one cannot truly understand the visual and material cultural remains of early imperial China without understanding something about how they were made, who made them, and under what social and economic circumstances they were fashioned” (p. 26). Barbieri-Low succeeds in demonstrating the effectiveness of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigating ancient artisans and their products. He uses historical texts and inscriptions on objects to uncover information about the lives of artisans and the division of labor in production, art history to analyze the artisans’ creations, and anthropology to analyze the socioeconomic context. His aim is to employ historical, art historical, and anthropological (including archaeological) data in equal measure. He has, moreover, organized the chapters of his study to highlight the lives of artisans from different perspectives; he examines artisans in society (Chapter 2, which covers the topics of social status and social mobility), in the workshop (Chapter 3, which covers production methods, division of labor, work conditions), in the marketplace (Chapter 4, which deals with the organization of official markets and marketing methods), and at court (Chapter 5, which discusses the role of art objects in palaces and the organization of palace workshops). Chapter 6, “Artisans in Irons” examines non-free artisans, such as convicts, who were forced to produce for the state. His analysis of texts and inscriptions especially provides an illuminating view of the lives of artisans and the objects they made during the early imperial era. [End Page 491] Readers should know that anthropologists have long employed a holistic approach to research on craft goods, analyzing goods within systems of production, distribution, and consumption, rather than in isolation. For these scholars (including myself), the focus has always been the people behind the artifacts, revealed through the study of such topics as social identity, labor organization, craft specialization, exchange systems, consumption patterns, and regional economic systems.1 Research projects have included the production, distribution, and use of craft goods (especially ceramics, stone objects, textiles, metal objects) in prehistoric and early historic societies. Relevant publications exist for most world areas, including societies comparable in social complexity and scale with early imperial China such as the Inca empire.2 Considering the anthropological literature on these topics, I offer suggestions here for future research on early China. My intention is not to replace the productive multidisciplinary approach advocated by Barbieri-Low, but to discuss how one might amplify the anthropological component even further to provide more information on the producers and consumers of craft goods in early China. [End Page 492] The bulk of Barbieri-Low’s book treats the term “artisan” as a highly trained and skilled person who makes fine objects by hand. His book thus implies that such beautiful objects, works of art, were produced primarily for elite consumers. While recognizing that objects of beauty can be made for more than one type of consumer, the anthropological literature also distinguishes between various craft goods on the basis of class, status, gender, and ethnicity of the consumers. Researchers investigate how certain kinds of goods may bring prestige or wealth to consumers. They focus on how people actively use different kinds of goods in a social system. Also worthy of future investigation is the impact that consumer demand in early China had on the production of various kinds of craft goods. Consumer demand affects the production of both prestige-bearing goods and the common goods used in daily life. Barbieri-Low provides clues about variation in the social and ideological aspirations of consumers during the Qin and Han...

In Text and Ritual in Early China, leading scholars of ancient Chinese history, literature, religion, and archaeology consider the presence and use of texts in religious and political ritual. Through balanced attention to both the received literary tradition and the wide range of recently excavated artefacts, manuscripts, and inscriptions, their combined efforts reveal the rich and multilayered interplay of textual composition and ritual performance. Drawn across disciplinary boundaries, the resulting picture illuminates two of the defining features of early Chinese culture and advances new insights into their sumptuous complexity. Beginning with a substantial introduction to the conceptual and thematic issues explored in succeeding chapters, Text and Ritual in Early China is anchored by essays on early Chinese cultural history and ritual display (Michael Nylan) and the nature of its textuality (William G. Boltz). This twofold approach sets the stage for studies of the E Jun Qi metal tallies (Lothar von Falkenhausen), the Gongyang commentary to The Spring and Autumn Annals (Joachim Gentz), the early history of The Book of Odes (Martin Kern), moral remonstration in historiography (David Schaberg), the Liming manuscript text unearthed at Mawangdui (Mark Csikszentmihalyi), and Eastern Han commemorative stele inscriptions (K. E. Brashier). The scholarly originality of these essays rests firmly on their authors' control over ancient sources, newly excavated materials, and modern scholarship across all major Sinological languages. The extensive bibliography is in itself a valuable and reliable reference resource. This important work will be required reading for scholars of Chinese history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, art history, and archaeology.

Literati painting in Japan is generally referred to as Bunjinga (literati painting; Ch. Wen ren hua) or Nanga (Southern School painting; Ch. nan zong hua), both terms borrowed from China. Wen ren hua refers to the status of artists who belonged to the scholar-gentleman class. Nan zong hua was coined by the Chinese painter and theorist Dong Qichang (b. 1555–d. 1636), who used it to describe art by literati, ostensibly amateurs, whose paintings were indebted to their mastery of calligraphy, expressed their inner feelings, and sought to capture the spiritual essence of their subjects. He deemed Nan zong hua superior to that of another so-called “school” of painters he invented, the “northern school,” professionals whose work he declared to be superficial and decorative. In relation to Japanese literati painters, however, this distinction between the southern and northern schools is largely irrelevant. The diverse and very large group of artists defined as literati painters were variously amateurs and professionals who worked in styles inspired by a wide range of Chinese pictorial approaches, which the Japanese learned from imported woodblock-printed painting books, actual paintings, and Chinese and Korean artists and calligraphers who visited or emigrated to Japan, including professional painters, Confucian scholars, and Chan (Zen) Buddhist monks. Some Japanese literati painters were samurai, others commoners. Their commonality is a dedication to and deep knowledge of Sinophile literati culture—particularly Chinese poetry—and their use of Chinese literati painting subjects, especially ink landscapes and themes, such as bamboo, in response to the market demands of Japanese consumers fascinated by Chinese culture. Many also brushed polished and colorful bird-and-flower paintings modeled after the work of Chinese professional painters, and their art was also impacted by native styles then in vogue and by naturalistic rendering drawn from exposure to imported Western art. Some literati artists earned their living as Confucian scholars or writers and painted as an avocation; others worked as professional painters, presiding over independent ateliers with legions of disciples. Although the literati painting movement began in the Kyoto region, it was quickly embraced by artists throughout the country who often traveled and shared ideas. The first writings on the subject date to the early 20th century, but the heyday of scholarship occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, and resulted, in the West, in a large number of dissertations, with the majority dating from the late 1970s through early 1990s. Those that were subsequently revised as published monographs have been omitted from this bibliography.

'You always treat the sun as though it were yours.' Lining the frame of a pen-and-ink sketch, these words reflect conditions of possibility particular to the contemporaneity of early post-Mao China. Included in his Visual Diary series from the early 1980s, Qu Leilei's image-text turns inward the heavily socialized forms of visual and political expression from the revolutionary era. As instances of the artist's emerging private practice, such works, including etchings, line drawings, and fragments of prose poetry, are seldom addressed in existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese art. This article takes up a selective examination of Qu's diaristic ephemera from this historical moment following the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to explore how Qu's entries both maintain and transform aspects of revolutionary-era media and visuality. The article further considers the following questions: In what ways does Qu's Visual Diary reconfigure the serial images of revolutionary state-driven practices in the social landscape of still-Maoist Beijing? How do Qu's transfigured image-texts complicate the rejection of Maoist visual vanguardism in cultural practices after the revolution?

This is an original book which is skilfully conceived to interweave theoretical exploration with art-historical writing. The book tackles a big question: what is a (traditional Chinese) painting? Wu Hung rejects either an intrinsic analysis of style and iconography or an extrinsic study of cultural and sociopolitical contexts, which both equate a painting with a pictorial representation. Pursuing an integrative perspective of medium and representation, Wu Hung highlights the missing dimension of painting's physical form by focussing on screen images in Chinese art history. Differing from Western scientific perception, the screen is one of the pictorial signs or formats to structure space in Chinese painting and is thus found as a popular pictorial motif throughout Chinese art history. This comprehensive analysis around screen thus becomes a writing of art history that delineates a line of Chinese art development from the Han to Qing dynasties, a period of about two thousand years (from a time shortly before the Christian Era to the 1800s).By focussing on three famous paintings with screen images from the Southern Tang (AD 937-75), a regime during the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Nations, the book examines the screen's diverse forms and roles by tracing backward and forward the historical development of each specific type of pictorial representation, its unique mode of perception, and its particular configuration of cultural space in Chinese art history. The author first problematizes the traditional reading of Chinese painting by deconstructing Gu Hongzhong's Night Entertainment of Han Xizai. Wu Hung breaks the myth of textual enclosures of both the external (stories and anecdotes) and the internal (colophons) surrounding the famous paintings, which blocks a fresh look at the original work. Instead, he strives to access the visual narrative in the original painting by defining the historicity of the various textual enclosures and investigating the complex relationships between the painted images and life, and between the images of related paintings. Unlike the screen images in Night Entertainment which help construct a spatial/temporal program and regulate the audience's perception in this long handscroll painting, the screen in Wang Qihan's short handscroll Collating Texts plays a different role, around which the author introduces a history of the landscape screen and raises the issue of masculine self-imaging. …

Art and Political Expression in Early China

The engravings and their market taste classicism rhetoric criticism omens materialism conflicts of taste.

FEATURE REVIEWS© 1995 by University ofHawaïi Press Martin J. Powers. Art and Political Expression in Early China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. xiv, 438 pp. Reviewing a book that has already received the Levenson Prize in History, has been critically acclaimed {Asian Studies Newsletter 38, no. 2 [1993]: 3), and has been described as the synthetic study of Han art that we have been waiting for, a study that builds a bridge between archaeological materials and studies of art history (Jonathan Hay, Art Bulletin, March 1993, p. 169), is a task not to be undertaken lightly. Abjuring the usual chronological organization of material, Powers presents a series of essays centered on his theme, the use of figurai imagery as a form of political expression. Han pictorial art is interpreted as a vehicle for criticizing the government of the late Han period. To do this, Powers concentrates on a particular group of Eastern Han (a.d. 25-220) pictorial stones carved in Shandong Province . These works constitute, in Powers' words, the "classical tradition," which he sets in contrast to the earlier "ornamental tradition" and the late Han "descriptive tradition." His discussion moves back and forth, between pictorial gleanings, Han texts, and recent archaeological studies. Powers states his argument as follows: the "art of the Han dynasty records a struggle for political and aesthetic expression by local intellectuals. The people who commissioned such monuments were very much attached to their own social and economic mobility and to fundamental issues ofjustice in human society. They were among the very first in history to utilize visual art as a vehicle of social criticism" (p. 30). These local intellectuals fostered the style that Powers calls "classical," a figurai style employing the motifs offilial piety, frugality, and sacrifice , which he contrasts with the ornamental style, "based on visual expressions of quantity" (p. 92), in the form of elaborately decorated lacquerware, metalwork, and textiles rather than figurai art. Although the title includes the words "Early China," a period that stretches from 2000 b.c. to a.d. 220, Powers states his actual chronological limit on page 2; this book "is not a survey of Han dynasty art. Instead , it seeks to show, by a limited number of examples, how issues ofpolitical expression can be traced in Han pictorial art." Powers' theme, as it develops in the following chapters, appears to be well grounded, logical, and even illuminating. On the basis of the limited number of examples Powers provides, which he uses as a historian would to illustrate textual 2 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 materials, Powers' arguments do appear to be plausible. Writing as a historian, Powers has succeeded. He does make good use of historical material and makes some very interesting and informative comments on the market for tomb and shrine art, and his discussions of the late Han court, the harem, and the eunuchs are lively and entertaining. But Powers tells us this book is about art, so one wonders if it does offer a plausible explanation of the meaning of late Han figurai art. How does Powers treat his visual material? Does the pictorial evidence he presents support his interpretation of it? The problems an art historian encounters in this book arise from the way pictorial evidence is employed. The stringent limits Powers has placed on the selection of illustrations have had the unfortunate effect of eroding away the very foundations of proof he seeks to establish. Art historically speaking, these limits seriously flaw his analytical approach and lead to various difficulties in his discussion. In addition, there are a number of errors that mar his presentation. Difficulties: The Problématique ofPowers' Formulation Art historians have developed a methodological system based on certain fundamental premises. First, in order to establish the meaning of a motif or an iconographie program using various motifs, the entire work must be analyzed within the historical and cultural context of its time. Second, function and use determine the meaning of representational art. Taking a motif, a scene, or a subject out of its context to make it fit into a theoretical structure conceived by the art historian is not acceptable. Third, other comparable...

Art and Political Expression in Early China

Art and Political Expression in Early China.

The paper is an attempt to examine several key works of orientalists of the domestic (Soviet and Russian) schools of the last century, whose activities were aimed at analyzing the theoretical foundations, genre-typological, compositional aspects, and other aspects of both classical Chinese painting as a whole and its cult component, largely expressed by Taoist creativity. The comprehensive growth of interest in the spiritual culture of China, one of the oldest and most distinctive value systems, observed now (2023), as well as the gradual penetration of its basic features into modern life, prompt us to pay increased attention to the question of the degree of development of the relevant issues in the scientific environment of Russia. Undeservedly remaining for a long time on the periphery of the sphere of research of Russian sinologists, Chinese art needed Russian-language publications not only large monographs of a generalizing nature, but also works focusing on narrower issues, including coverage of the Taoist painting tradition. The period covered (1948-2004), the prerequisites of which were laid at the early stage of the existence of the Soviet state (20-30-ies, 20th century), became, despite the trend of long-termism, convincing evidence of the confident pace of development of the art direction of Russian orientalism. The result of the efforts of the authors presented on the pages (O. N. Glukharyova and B. P. Denicke (“A Brief History of Chinese Art”, 1948), E. V. Zavadskaya (“Aesthetic Problems of Painting in Old China”, 1976), N. A. Vinogradova (“Chinese Landscape Painting”, 1972)), which described the significant properties of Chinese art, was the formation of a strong framework, which with the advent of the 21st century allowed to open a new milestone in the field of cultural and historical research of Russian Oriental studies. The quintessence of this phenomenon is the publication in 2004 of a comprehensive manual by M. E. Kravtsova “World Art Culture. History of Chinese Art: Textbook”, which at the same time absorbed all the material accumulated during the 20th century and expanded the previously formed horizons of knowledge. Significant attention on the pages of the work is paid, among other things, to cult creativity as one of the most important engines of the processes of evolution of traditional Chinese painting.

In October 2010, the University of Chicago celebrated the opening of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing by convening an international symposium on “Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting and the History of Art,” a symposium that discussed issues, questions, and expectations about Chinese ink painting from a variety of perspectives. Because the word “contemporary” was placed first for emphasis, Chinese ink painting evinced new cultural meanings and possibilities that elicited interest from both domestic and foreign scholars as they proceeded with their discussions. What kind of art theories and historical discourses should scholars of various cultural backgrounds rely on when they discuss the issue of Chinese ink painting? In particular, what types of Chinese ink painting practices should they consider? The latter question in particular became the basis for discussions at the symposium. If there were no actual, meaningful Chinese ink painting practices, and if we were to rely solely on theoretical models to guide descriptions and demonstrations, then this would be inadequate for fully explaining the issues involved. Only on the basis of current practices of Chinese ink painters can we master a reinterpretation of today’s cultural perspectives and theories. Only then will it be possible to imagine how the development of Chinese ink-wash painting takes place and the kind of cultural relationship that this process has with the whole of contemporary society. After we have accomplished this, it will finally be possible to reveal historical truths about the Chinese ink painting process.