Figuring the Social Body: Painting Manuals in Late Imperial China
Lisa Claypool
Project Summary
In Figuring the Social Body: Painting Manuals in Late Imperial China, I will study how learning to paint pictures of the human figure was a critical means of configuring social identity in war- and strife-torn nineteenth-century China. While the scholarship on painting practice offers anecdotal surveys and fragmented translations of texts on painting, this will be the first book-length study to examine what it meant socially, culturally, and politically to pick up the brush --at a time when nothing seemed certain . Figuring the Social Body explores the ways in which figure painting—making it, looking at it, sharing it—mattered profoundly within the massive circulation of people and things throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century, in which negotiations between the past and present, fact and fiction, elite and popular, China and the “West” were constantly in play. At the heart of this social history of art are the first two figure painting manuals published and marketed as such in China, both, e Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual, Fourth Edition ( Jieziyuan huazhuan siji ). The first was published in Yangzhou at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the second in Shanghai at the end. The manuals bookend a period of dramatic urban and cultural transformation, as the once flourishing commercial entrepot of Yangzhou fell into decline and semi-colonial Shanghai became the “Paris of the East.” They are rich sources for understanding struggles over defining family, city, and nation, directly addressed in instructions to student painters about capturing character with brush and ink; in editorial politics; and in figural paintings by local artists. The project has numerous points of contact with work being done on the history of the book, vision and visuality, and urban studies; this should make it of interest to scholars inside and outside the field of Chinese art history.
The project both expands and refocuses the research I conducted for my dissertation (Stanford, 2001). There, I searched for evidence that the schematic diagrams and figural paintings in the manuals embodied conceptual understanding of the human body. Whereas the dissertation primarily reflects my thinking about body imagery and ways to look at it, the book manuscript is more deeply devoted to the political and social function of figural pictures in the manuals, and to the different kinds of cultural performances of seeing and painting the human figure that the manuals demand. My present publications on exhibition culture in early 20 th century also emphasize the ways in which spaces for display of pictures, things, and even people require peculiar responses from those who visit them, and in some sense actually produce the visitors to them through engaging and shaping eye and body.
With grants from the Luce and Freeman Foundations, I have been able, since 2001, to conduct research across the States, in Tokyo, and in Beijing. By June, 2010, I plan to complete the manuscript, in which the University of Hawaii Press has expressed interest.
Project Description
In a preface to the first figure painting manual published and marketed as part of the famous Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual series in China, the professional portrait painter Ding Gao (fl. 1752-77) writes of high-placed friends, the drawing of character, and the way of painting--its visualities and secrets, its rules and regulations. In his account of the genesis of the manual, he describes how the son of a Hanlin academician admonished him. He pressed Ding Gao, asking why portraiture had no standardized past, then immediately suggested that it was precisely because up till the present there had been no need for it: acuity of vision among painters precluded such need. But now the question of ability and standardization, of regulation, had become critical, for at times painters simply could not see . To draw character meant to see character and the eye simply failed at this task. And so Ding's preface suggests to the manual's readers that it is blindness—a peculiar kind of social blindness--that drove his family to create and eventually publish the fourth edition of the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual ( Jieziyuan huazhuan siji ) in 1818 , setting the stage for a second manual of the same title, although almost entirely different in scope, content, and format, and published under the editorship of Chao Xun (1852-1917) in Shanghai roughly two generations later, in 1897.
The prefatory passage concisely enunciates much of what will be explored in Figuring the Social Body : figure painting as discourse, as social practice, and as a tool to distinguish between fact and fiction, and thereby position self and other in visual and cultural epistemologies. Figuring the Social Body argues that during the long nineteenth century painting the human form was an important means for amateur and professional artists and their patrons in the Yangzi delta to negotiate their own identity in individual terms, as a group, and increasingly, in the face of mid-century European and American military and colonial incursions, culturally and politically as well. It argues that it was particularly suited to such a task because representing the human body and face was a means of making clear identity and character. Portraiture, interestingly considered by the manual editors to belong to the genre of figural painting ( renwu hua ), constantly demanded encounters between self and other, a cathecting of heavy, fleshy, somatic reality and its transformation into a two-dimensional image. Sometimes it required producing an even more complexly social and public representation: depictions of mythical characters and historical individuals long dead.
Painting the human figure in the nineteenth century was also highly responsive to non-artistic cultural imperatives. It intersected with a broad range of social phenomena: evidential research studies, book collecting, museum display, fortune telling, fiction illustration. Further, changes to imagining human form were introduced by Europeans and Americans, while others developed from Chinese intellectual traditions. What constituted a clearly seen and seeable figure was ever put under pressure by shifting political, socio-economic, and aesthetic demands of urban everyday life. There was not one but multiple figural identities, which the manual editors tried to make visible to their readers.
Figuring the Social Body explores the ways in which figure painting—making it, looking at it, sharing it—mattered profoundly within the massive circulation of people and things throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century, in which negotiations between the past and present, fact and fiction, elite and popular, China and the “West” were constantly in play. While current scholarship offers anecdotal histories of painting practice and scattered translations of texts on painting, I seek to offer a detailed case study of the interactions of painting figural image and both visualizing and producing social identity in two of the most prominent and complex urban landscapes of south central China, localizing the manuals within their respective and distinctive cultural, economic, and political cityscapes. This social history of art, informed by urban studies and histories of the book, as well as theories about vision and visuality, will contribute to the field of art and architectural history as well as to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Chinese Studies.
Chapter Outlines
I. Chapter One. Manual as Biography
This chapter analyzes the Ding family's editorial attempts in the early 1818 manual to craft family reputation by weaving their recent genealogy together with a history of the city of Yangzhou. It explores how portrait imagery figured in the coproduction of familial and urban biography.
II. Chapter Two. Manual as Performance
In contrast to the Ding family's Yangzhou manual, Chao Xun eschewed the nostalgic look at the past in the 1897 Shanghai manual he edited, insisting on “the right now,” as he put it: the modern moment in late nineteenth-century Shanghai. Published in a city of sojourners, by a sojourner, this manual is one of the earliest iterations of a cohesive Shanghai visual culture. It raises questions about the performative and spectacular nature of printed figural pictures within a semi-colonial context.
III. Chapter Three. Manual as Object Lesson
Chapter Three locates the 1818 Yangzhou manual within the practice of divination and fortune-telling, comparing it with physiognomic treatises from which its diagrams were borrowed, and considering the morphology of the manual as part of its object lesson on reading faces.
IV. Chapter Four. Manual as Fiction
This final chapter explores the 1897 Shanghai manual as one means by which traditional modes of social seeing were discarded, and a modern vision and identity emerged. I plot a gradual loss of faith in the eye to read faces and an attendant shift in understanding new economies of character that emerged at the end of the century, situating the manual within fiction illustration, in particular.