When the barbarians came by sea: hunting and alienism in entangled Sino-Japanese visual cultures, 1550–1750

Abstract

This article places a hunting screen, now in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, in the longue durée of intricate intra-Asian visual entanglements to elaborate on a ‘pathos formula’ that migrated across vast stretches of time and space. It proposes that a wide array of Chinese and Japanese paintings, screens, and porcelain objects produced between 1550 and 1750 followed established formulas of picturing foreign tropes that stereotypically viewed the non-Han and non-Japanese peoples as ‘barbarians.’ Historically, the northern nomadic peoples were depicted as powerful yet savage horse riders skilled in hunting and equestrian sports. To illuminate the afterlives of this shared East Asian visual legacy, key discussions include imitations of Southern Song paintings on hunting and the tragic fate of Wenji (a Chinese woman who returned to the Han empire after being captive for twelve years in the steppe), the Japanese Tartar screens, the gold-painted hunt screens produced in Macau for the galleon trade, and the carved lacquer screens manufactured along China’s southeast coast. Behind the pan-East Asian resurgence of this ‘pathos formula’, as this article suggests, three territorial and geopolitical shifts emerged as stimuli: Japan’s pursuit of overseas conquest, the rise of the Jurchens (and later, the Manchus), and the arrival of the maritime centuries in which the Europeans were predominantly engaged. The article concludes that the Amsterdam hunting screen was much more than a faithful representation of any specific event or collective, and followed a stereotypical view of the ‘Red-haired Barbarians’ (Dutch traders) who approached China by sea as nomads.