Reading Wen Zhengming: metaphor and Chinese painting

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. – Oliver Goldsmith, Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friends in the East, in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo & Co, n.d.), Letter 32, pp. 225–6. For recent discussions of this text, see Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1998), and David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2001). 2. – Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 232–53. See more generally Porter, Ideographia. 3. – Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue (Albany, 1997); Bao Haiding (Jean‐Paul Reding), ‘Yinyu de yaosu, Zhong Xi gudai zhexue de bijiao fenxi’ (‘The essentials of metaphor, a comparative analysis of Chinese and Western philosophy)’, in Zhongguo gudai siwei moshi yu yin yang wu xing shuo tanyuan (‘The Patterns of Ancient Chinese Thought, and the Origins of Yin–Yang and Five Elements Theory’), ed. Ai Lan (Sarah Allan), Wang Tao and Fan Yuzhou (Nanjing, 1998), pp. 74–100. I am very grateful to Dr Wang Tao for introducing me to this important volume. The term ‘comparative epistemology’, at least as applied to China, may have been first used in E.R. Hughes, ‘Epistemological methods in Chinese philosophy’, in The Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, ed. Charles Moore (Honolulu, 1967), pp. 77–103. 4. – Karl S.Y. Kao, ‘Rhetoric’, in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington, 1986), pp. 121–37. 5. – Kao, ‘Rhetoric’, pp. 121–2. 6. – Kao, ‘Rhetoric’, p. 123. 7. – Philip Stambovsky cites Mark Johnson and Umberto Eco to the effect that ‘most theorists of metaphor are still fundamentally disciples of Aristotle’. Philip Stambovsky, The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience (Amherst, 1988), p. 11. Carl Hausman sees Aristotle as equally ‘seminal’: Carl R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interaction and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (Cambridge, 1989), p. 22. 8. – Developed in I.A. Richards’s 1936 text The Philosophy of Rhetoric, and cited in Eileen Cornell Way, Representation and Metaphor, Studies in Cognitive Systems 7 (Dordrecht, 1991), p. 28. Stambovsky, Depictive Image, 20 sees Richards’s ‘interaction ‘theory of metaphor as a radical break with comparison theories of metaphor, in its insistence that metaphor is a cognitive and not just a linguistic process. 9. – On xing and cognate bi comparisons see Cheng Fuwang, ‘Bi, xing’, in Zhongguo meixue fanchou cidian (‘A Dictionary of Chinese Aesthetic Concepts’), ed. Cheng Fuwang (Beijing, 1995), pp. 552–4. 10. – The Book of Songs, translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley (London, 1969), no. 2, p. 21. 11. – Book of Songs, trans. Waley, no. 249, p. 266. For a stimulating discussion of the way these xing images were portrayed in the court art of the early twelfth century see Julia K. Murray, Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 86–92. 12. – Kao, ‘Rhetoric’, p. 127. 13. – Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton, 1987), p. 201, cited in Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London, 1996), p. 261, n.21. Wu glosses this as different from a Western tradition where ‘the notion of metaphor rests on the distinction between two ontologically distinct realms, one concrete and the other abstract, one sensible and the other inaccessible…’. 14. – David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy (Albany, 1987), p. 13. 15. – Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, pp. 297–8. 16. – Published (among other places) in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery–Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 1980), pp. 220–2, catalogue entry by Kwan‐Shut Wong and Marc F. Wilson. On Wen’s life see Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social art of Wen Zhengming, 1470–1559 (London, 2004). 17. – David Hawkes, A Little Primer of Tu Fu (Oxford, 1967), 156–64. The picture is conventionally titled in English as ‘Old Cypress and Rock’, but this is an unwarranted expansion of a title chosen deliberately by Wen Zhengming to evoke the parallelism with Du Fu’s poem. 18. – My translation, but with acknowledgements to the version by Wong and Wilson in Eight Dynasties, p. 221. 19. – The line of Du Fu could perhaps also be translated in this context as ‘The world is already astonished although you have not yet shown forth your literary talent’, the key concept being that of wenzhang, which can mean both ‘pattern’ and ‘literature’. See Huang Baozhen, ‘Wenzhang’, in Chen Fuwang, pp. 55–9. The term is extensively discussed in Peter K. Bol, ‘This Culture of Ours’: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China, Stanford, 1992. 20. – Wai‐kam Ho, ‘The literary concepts of “picture‐like” (ju‐hua) and ‘picture‐idea’ (hua‐i) in the relationship between poetry and painting’, in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (New York and Princeton, 1991), pp. 359–404. 21. – For the history of this image see François Louis, ‘The genesis of an icon: the Taiji diagram’s early history, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 63 (2003), pp. 145–96. 22. – On ‘reading a painting’ see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London, 1997), pp. 119–20. 23. – Mieke Ball, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition (Cambridge, 1994). 24. – David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, 1998), p. 140. 25. – Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, p. 142. 26. – Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 179–82. 27. – Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar‐Painting Genre (Cambridge, 1996). 28. – Martin Powers, ‘When is a landscape like a body?’, in Landscape, Culture and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen‐hsin Yeh, UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies/Center for Chinese Studies China Research Monographs 49 (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 1–22. One of Powers’s central concepts is that of shi, ‘gesture, disposition’. See his ‘Gesture and character in early Chinese art and criticism’, in Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Chinese Art History: Painting, 2 vols (Taipei, 1992), II, pp. 909–31. Shi is also the central term of François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China (New York, 1995). It is used in the second line of Wen Zhengming’s poem on the old cypress, where its disposition is said to be ‘lofty’. 29. – Wu Hung, The Double Screen, pp. 20–8. Wu deploys Roman Jacobson’s dyad of metaphor/metonymy, a subject too complex in itself to engage with here. 30. – Bao Haiding (Jean‐Paul Reding), ‘Yinyu de yaosu’, p. 74. 31. – Henrietta Moore, ‘Ricoeur: Action, Meaning and Text’, in Reading Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley (Oxford, 1990), pp. 85–120 (113–14). 32. – The burden of James Elkins, Xifang meishushixuezhong de Zhongguo shanshuihua, ‘Chinese landscape painting in Western art history’ (Hangzhou, 1999), not seen by the author, but discussed by Elkins in numerous other places. 33. – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), p. 83. 34. – Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17. 35. – Donald Preziosi, ‘Grasping the world: Conceptualizing ethics after aesthetics’, paper delivered at the GLAADH conference, Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History? Debating Approaches to Curriculum Change in the UK held at Goodenough College, London, September 2003, http://www.glaadh.ac.uk/documents/preziosi_paper.htm, accessed 8 February 2008.