"Painting Manuals and Gendered Modernity in Republican-era Shanghai"  

In the paper, I ask:   how did shinü hua ("gentlewomen painting") become a modern genre? Why did it need rescuing in 1925? And what does this process tell us about the ways in which gender was worked out through representations of beautiful women and by learning how to paint them?   I start with a genealogy of the shinü hua genre written by book publisher and editor Ye Jiuru in 1925.   His genealogy appears in the introduction to a volume devoted to shinü hua that was part of a set of the Hall of Three Rarities ( Sanxitang ) painting manuals. Weaving together names of master artists such as Wu Daozi and Zhou Fang with titles of texts such as Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women ( Lienü zhuan) , Ye locates what was real and authentic about such paintings in the deep past.   He then provides a short scientistic how-to guide for both novice and professional painter, presenting first depictions of palatial architecture in which gentlewomen would presumably dwell, followed by compendia of eyebrows, eyes, ears, noses, lips, hands, hairstyles and positions of the head, drapery, and then extensive copies of paintings in the genre from the ages. In my paper, I investigate the resulting dreamscape of beautiful women, all vaguely alike, and the attendant sense of loss surrounding them in the manual. I index the Hall of Three Rarities manual to the earlier fourth, fifth, and sixth figure-painting editions of the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual ( Jieziyuan huazhuan, 1897, 1916, 1922), one primary means, arguably, through which the genre was consumed and entered into the burgeoning print culture of late imperial and early Republican-era Shanghai.   I also raise questions about the ways in which the genre was employed to publicly represent exemplary women, the pressures put on it by newly conceived images of modern women to found in modernist painting manuals such as the Compendium of new-style art, classified pictures ( Xinpai meishu fenlei tuhua daquan , 1922), and how such new representations made the exoticism and allegorical meaning of the genre real, and complicated its "timelessness."