CORE UA-700 EXPRESSIVE CULTURE

CHINESE PAINTINGS: LOOKING AND SEEING

Professor: Jonathan Hay TR 8.00-9.15 (SILV_520)
Recitation Instructor: Vivi Fupeng Xie F 8.00-9.15 (SILV_404); 9.30-10.45
(SILV_508)
Recitation Instructor: Zhilong Deng F 11.00-12.15 (BOBST_LL11); 12.30-1.45
(SILV_409)

SYLLABUS

In Expressive Culture, students explore the complexities of artistic expression in various

media: sounds, images, words, performance, or film. In this course, the artistic medium
is Chinese ink painting. Each Expressive Culture course introduces requisite historical,
formal, and critical vocabularies; examines fundamental issues associated with
interpretation of the arts that make use of these media; and investigates the complex
relations between artistic activity and other facets of social organization. The courses
also draw, whenever possible, on the rich cultural resources of New York City. For this
course, we will make particular use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a large
collection of Chinese ink paintings displayed in several large galleries.

To look at a Chinese ink painting is easy enough, but how much are you actually seeing
in terms of meaning, significance, and sense? Knowing something about a painting's
historical context is helpful, yet the knowledge by no means guarantees that you can see
it effectively. As is true of any artwork, a Chinese ink painting generates a world of its
own. Today, like time-travelers, we have the possibility of entering ink-painting worlds
which originally responded to the specific historical contexts in which they were created.
But in order to enter these worlds more fully and see something of what historical
viewers saw, we need to acquire historically appropriate skills of looking. This course on
premodern Chinese ink painting explores how skills of looking changed over some
fifteen hundred years in response to changes in the ways paintings were produced and
the purposes for which they were made. In the process, we will spend time on many of
the most famous paintings in Chinese history, reverse-engineering the process of their
production and briefly entering their worlds. However, the greatest benefit of the course
may have nothing to do with China. The more actively you engage with the course, the
more basic (and transferable) skills of looking and seeing you will learn. The three
required visits to the Metropolitan Museum and the associated writing assignments are
designed to give you opportunities to practice skills of looking, seeing, and writing. As
NYU students, your admission to the Museum is free. Take the Lexington Avenue 6 line
to 77th St. The Museum is located on Fifth Avenue at 81st St.

Because no appropriate general history of Chinese ink painting is available at present,

there is no textbook for this course. In fact, the course lectures will become the basis of
a one-volume history of Chinese ink painting that is intended to be accessible and
engaging to students like yourselves. Please note that the assigned readings do not
generally duplicate material in the lectures. they are intended to expand your knowledge
of the topic and also introduce you to a range of approaches that art historians use. All
the assigned readings are available through Brightspace.

Except for three general lectures at different points in the course, the presentation will
proceed chronologically overall, with a gradually increasing degree of thematic detail

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(and class time) for the successive periods. Both the lecture texts and the ppts of each
lecture will be posted on Brightspace for you to review. During class, therefore, you
won’t need to keep detailed notes. Instead, I would encourage you to make analytic
notes that you can refer to in the Friday recitation meetings.

These recitation meetings have a particular purpose. Like the course as a whole, they
aim to teach you take-away skills that you can use in other courses and even in
professional life. In this case, you will principally be learning skills of reading and
listening. I know from long experience that even graduate students do not always know
how to listen to lectures or read assigned texts effectively, i.e. analytically. Teachers
often talk about the importance of thinking critically; critical thinking depends in turn on
being able to read analytically. If you invest yourself in this course, then by the end of
this semester analytic reading should become automatic for you. Here are some of the
questions your recitation instructors will be asking in each discussion of a lecture or
assigned reading:
What is the structure of the argument? Why is it constructed this particular way? Is
the argument logically coherent? What are the underlying assumptions? Has the
lecturer/author made these assumptions clear or not? Is the order (sequence) in
which the lecturer/author introduces information effective for the argument? Has the
lecturer/author presented enough evidence to make the case? Has the lecturer/author
used rhetoric anywhere to paper over a logical leap? Has the lecturer/author
addressed potential objections? Could the lecture or reading have been edited to
make it more effective?
Make sure you are prepared for each recitation discussion and make a rule for yourself
to contribute proactively to every third discussion at a minimum. Note that Zhilong and
Vivi may call directly on you.

CLASS PROTOCOL

Laptops and ipads are permitted. Smartphones must be turned off. The lectures will
require your full concentration. Don’t be misled by the fact that the lecture texts and the
ppts of each lecture will be made available to you to review. I am making them available
because the lectures will be quite challenging. I also request that you do not talk among
yourselves, simply because it will break my concentration and then the lecture will be
less engaging and interesting for everyone. Thank you in advance for your cooperation!

REQUIREMENTS

--Attend class on Tuesday and Thursday morning and attend the recitation on Friday.
--Read all the assigned readings, since you will be discussing them with your recitation
instructor. Please note that art history publications have lots of illustrations, so the
readings are not as long as the page references make them look.
--When a pair of classes is devoted to a single theme, study that theme’s assigned
readings in advance of the first of the theme’s two classes, which may fall on either a
Tuesday or a Thursday. The Class Schedule below lists the assigned readings for each
theme.
--Fulfill all class writing assignments. See the Schedule of Exams and Assignments
below.
--Take mid-term and final exams. See the Schedule of Exams and Assignments below.

ASSIGNMENTS AND EXAMS

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Assignment 1: Description (due 2/6) 8% of the grade
One of the advantages of being in New York is that we don’t have to restrict ourselves to
looking at images on a screen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a superb collection
of Chinese ink paintings which it displays in several large galleries. Choose a painting in
the Chinese painting galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. (Please note that the
painting galleries will not re-open until 2/3) In 1200 words, describe how the painting
demonstrates the historical commitments discussed in Lecture 2. Be as specific as
possible. For this assignment you should both go to the Metropolitan Museum to study
the painting and consult the images of the painting available on the Museum’s website.
Upload the paper electronically to Brightspace (we will give instructions), and at the
same time send a selfie taken in front of the painting to your recitation instructor.

Assignment 2: Slow Looking (due 2/15) 8% of the grade

Choose a different painting in the Chinese painting galleries at the Metropolitan Museum
and study it continuously for 30 minutes, keeping a log of what you notice about the
painting. Take a selfie in front of the painting when you are ready to start and send it
there and then to your recitation leader. Take another selfie in front of the painting when
you finish and send it there and then to your recitation instructor. Then write up the log
and upload it to Brightspace (we will give instructions). The log should be organized like
this: “At minute 3, I noticed …..; At minute 27, I discovered ….; etc.”

Assignment 3: Analysis (due 2/27) 8% of the grade

Select a scholarly article on Chinese painting of any period (including the modern period)
that has been published in the journal Archives of Asian Art (available electronically
through Bobst) and which is not one of the assigned readings. In 1200 words write an
analysis of the argument using the skills you have learned from recitation discussions of
assigned readings. Submit the paper electronically to your recitation instructor.

Mid-Term Exam (3/5) 20% of the grade

The mid-term exam will last 75 minutes and will be in two parts: a) answers to three
successive questions, each one about a painting which will be projected on the screen
for 15 minutes; b) an essay taking 30 minutes, for which you will be given a prompt one
week in advance.

Assignment 4: Analysis (due 3/26) 8% of the grade

Choose a third painting in the Chinese painting galleries at the Metropolitan Museum.
Using the skills you have learned from the lectures and recitations, in 1200 words
describe the structure of the painting, distinguishing between the overall structure and
the structure at lower levels, down to the level of the detail. Your description should aim
to characterize the internal logic of the pictorial structure. Submit the paper
electronically, together with a selfie taken in front of the painting, to your recitation
instructor.

Assignment 5: Analysis (due 4/9) 8% of the grade

In 1200 words, take an interpretive method used in any of the readings assigned so far,
or in any of the lectures, and apply it to up to three of the paintings in the Metropolitan
Museum collection (individual album leaves count as single paintings). If you wish, you
can choose a painting from the website that is not currently on exhibition. First
characterize the interpretive method that you are borrowing; then apply the method to
your chosen painting. Submit the paper electronically to your recitation instructor.

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Final Exam (TBA) 20% of the grade
The final exam will follow the same format as the mid-term. But since University rules
say that the final exam should last 110 minutes, you may use the extra 35 minutes to
revise or expand your answers as necessary.

GRADING
The mid-term and final exam together account for 40% of the grade. The five writing
assignments (total of approximately 5,500 words) account for 40% of the grade.
Participation (class and recitation attendance and participation) accounts for 20% of the
grade. You should expect to do about 8 hours per week of class-related study and/or
writing.

PROGRESS REPORT CATEGORIES (MIDTERM PROGRESS REPORTS WILL BE

POSTED ON 3/18)
Strong progress: In addition to fulfilling all the requirements, your written work and
exam clearly demonstrate your efforts to learn about the art of the past and to grapple
with unfamiliar ways of thinking.
Satisfactory progress: You have fulfilled all the requirements, but your written work
and exam do not demonstrate any special effort to learn about the art of the past or to
grapple with unfamiliar ways of thinking.
Concerns about progress: Disengagement during the recitation sessions, non-
attendance of classes or recitation sessions, written work that is inattentive to the
guidelines for the assignment, and written exams that show a lack of preparation are all
cause for concern.

CLASS SCHEDULE

1/23 LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION (first of a pair of lectures)

Most students in the class are likely to be unfamiliar with art history as a discipline, so
we will begin in the first lecture with an introduction to what art historians usually do and
how they have approached the history of Chinese ink painting. We will also consider
how we can think about the art of the past in a contemporary way appropriate to our
twenty-first century smartphone world. This discussion will help prepare you for my
lectures, which take precisely such a contemporary approach.

Readings:
Clunas, Craig, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2017): 5-36.

1/25 LECTURE 2: COMMITMENTS OF THE INK PAINTING TRADITION (second of a

pair of lectures)
What are the historical commitments that enabled the medium of ink painting to become
an enduring tradition? The commitments were both ethical and technological. The ethical
commitment was to the visual pursuit of "rightness." The technological commitments
were multiple: to the use of ink as its most fundamental medium and the sharp-tipped
brush as its fundamental tool; to formats that restate the concept of a wall surface; to the
primacy of movement in representational structure; to the depiction of experience of the
world (rather than the world as something separate from us); and to openness to writing
and text.

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Reading:
Zhang, Hongxing, “Inscriptions and Seal Marks,” in Masterpieces of Chinese Painting,
700-1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2013): 53-63.

1/30 LECTURE 3: THE PRE-HISTORY OF INK PAINTING'S ATTENTIONAL

CONTINUUM (first of a pair of lectures)
The historical emergence of a medium of ink painting in China was anything but
inevitable. Without millennia of prior innovations, extending back into a period when the
very concept of China did not exist, ink painting would not have been able to emerge as
an independent medium in the fourth century CE. This lecture traces out that long
historical process.

Reading:
Wu Hung, “The Origins of Chinese Painting (Palaeolithic Period to Tang Dynasty),” in
Richard M. Barnhart, et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1997): 15-34.

2/1 LECTURE 4: THE AUTHORITY OF THE BRUSHTRACE: A NEW KIND OF

PICTORIAL ART, 350-550 (second of a pair of lectures)
The ink painting tradition emerged from a larger field of pictorial art. During its first two
centuries, ink painting combined epistemological assumptions inherited from the Han
dynasty with articulation of the new needs and aspirations of the post-Han period when
the experiences of break-up of the Han empire and the arrival of Inner Asian powers on
former Han territory generated many new ideas. The lecture is centered on "The
Admonitions of the Instructress," a rare surviving fifth-century CE handscroll today in the
British Museum. From this masterpiece, we can see much of the achievement of ink
painting during its first two centuries of development, when the controlled brushtrace
was still restricted to a revelatory role.

Reading:
Thorp, Robert L., and Richard E. Vinograd, “Age of the Dharma: The Period of
Disunion,” in Chinese Art and Culture (New York: Abrams, 2001): 150-183.

2/6 LECTURE 5: THE INTERCONNECTIVE BRUSHTRACE, 550-750: PARATAXIS,

MANIFESTATION, AND TANGIBILITY (first of a pair of lectures)
From the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth century, ink painting created a coherent vision of
discontinuous hierarchy that served the purposes of a dominant aristocracy and of
institutional Buddhism, initially in the competing states of a still fragmented China and
later in the reunified empires of the Sui and Tang dynasties. This lecture maps out three
of the pictorial procedures used in pursuit of that vision, all of which depended on the
controlled brushtrace taking on an interconnective role in addition to its original function
of revelation.

Reading:
Wu Hung, “Rethinking Liu Sahe: The Creation of a Buddhist Saint and the Invention of a
‘Miraculous Image’,” Orientations, Vol. 27, No. 10 (November 1996): 32-43.

2/8 LECTURE 6: THE INTERCONNECTIVE BRUSHTRACE, 550-750: ENACTIVE

DEPICTION AND PICTORIAL ENGINEERING (second of a pair of
lectures)

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This lecture introduces two more pictorial procedures characteristic of the 550-750
period. In discussing them, it also addresses the difficulties that Modern viewers have in
interpreting the paratactic construction of medieval Chinese paintings and seeing the
paintings as they were meant to be seen.

Reading:
Wu Hung, “The Origins of Chinese Painting (Palaeolithic Period to Tang Dynasty),” in
Richard M. Barnhart, et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1997): 35-85.

2/13 LECTURE 7: THE TRADITION RECONFIGURES ITSELF, 765-975: TAKING

DISTANCE FROM THE PAST (first of a pair of lectures)
This is the first of two lectures that explore the slow reconfiguration of the ink painting
tradition that started in the late eighth century. In the wake of a major mid-century
rebellion, the Tang state lost authority and its associated system of hierarchical thinking
gradually unraveled. Even as the tradition continued the early Tang approach, albeit in
new ways, it also gradually disentangled itself from the earlier approach in order to
visualize new social interests and possibilities. The lecture is prefaced by a reflection on
the division of the artistic past into historical periods, or periodization for short.

Reading:
Hay, Jonathan, “Travellers in Snow-Covered Mountains,” Orientations, Vol. 39, No. 7 (October,
2008): 85-91.

2/15 LECTURE 8: THE TRADITION RECONFIGURES ITSELF, 765-975: THE

INCORPORATION OF THE IN-BETWEEN, THE HYBRID, AND
THE MARGINAL (second of a pair of lectures)
As a new social order started to emerge in the interstices of the Tang aristocratic
system, painters began to depict the transitions between representational units that had
previously been elided. They also began to combine styles and iconographies that had
previously been kept separate. Simultaneously, they also turned their attention
increasingly to previously unrepresented subjects. These moves toward continuity and
integration continuum created a space for enacting the values of the emergent social
order.

Readings:
Wen C. Fong, “Riverbank,” in Along the Riverbank: Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family
Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012): 2-57.

2/20 LECTURE 9: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 970-1070: PERCEPTUAL

CONTINUUM (first of a pair of lectures)
By the 970s, there was a general embrace of the assumption that cosmological and
moral order could now be visualized as a space-time continuum of experience. For a
brief moment of some ninety years until the 1060s, early Song artists collectively created
an immersive realist vision of a relationally ordered world structured by dynamic
bipolarities. The most famous of these bipolarities is shanshui, “mountains-and-waters,”
often misleadingly translated as “landscape.” The immersive attentional continuum of
this period’s painting translated the value system of the early Song elite into pictorial
terms.

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Reading:
Liu, Heping, “The Water Mill and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce,
and Science,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 4 (2002): 566-595.

2/22 LECTURE 10: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 970-1070: COGNITIVE

OPENNESS AND SOCIOMORAL VISION (second of a pair of
lectures)
This lecture discusses two more features of this period's immersive attentional
continuum. On the one hand, it demonstrates the period's unusual openness to cognitive
discovery; on the other, it also embodies the period's redefinition of "rightness,"
particularly in neo-Confucian terms. The early Song was a period in which a more self-
conscious practice of painting as a Way (i.e. a path to understanding and self-
understanding) emerged.

Reading:
Barnhart, Richard M., “Figures in Landscape,” Archives of Asian Art, 42 (1989): 62-70.

2/27 LECTURE 11: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325: RHETORICAL

STAGINGS OF LANDSCAPE (first of a pair of lectures)
By the 1070s, the cognitive coherence of the early Song pictorial vision had come to be
taken for granted. Taking that coherence as their horizon, ink painters turned to
exploiting the different possibilities that the perceptual continuum offered. We will use six
lectures to explore three of these possibilities. This week's pair of lectures will discuss
the fact that many ink painters specializing in nature genres now chose to focus on the
artifice that had underpinned early Song painting, using it in new ways to explore
possibilities of rhetoric, affect, and self-consciousness. These rhetorical explorations
continued until the early fourteenth century, outliving the Song dynasty itself. Lecture 11
focuses on two corresponding strategies: scenography and particularism.

Reading:
Peter Sturman, “Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong,”
Ars Orientalis 20 (1990): 33-68.

2/29 LECTURE 12: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325: EXPANDED

MOMENTS AND INDETERMINATE SCALE (second of a pair of
lectures)
This lecture introduces two more strategies that painters used to exploit the artifice
underpinning the perceptual continuum: expansion of a single experiential moment to
pervade the entire painting, and the construction of landscape images in which scale is
indeterminate.

Reading:
Lee, Hui-shu, “Empress Yang and the Art of Expression,” in Empresses, Art, and Agency
in Song Dynasty China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010):
160-218.

3/5 MID-TERM

3/7 LECTURE 13: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325: MORAL

SPECTACLE (first of a pair of lectures)

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Contemporary with the rhetorical approach taken by painters working in nature genres,
painters of figure subjects developed theatrical modes of painting for temples, tombs,
and palaces that they practiced in both murals and portable formats. After the fall of the
Northern Song in 1126, this desire to engage with a popular audience through
contributions to the common culture impacted figure painting everywhere until the
fourteenth century: under the Song in the south, under the Liao and then Jin in the north,
and finally under the Yuan throughout the country.

Reading:
Hong, Jee-hee, “Theatricalizing Death and Society in The Skeletons’ Illusory
Performance by Li Song, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 1 (2011): 60-78.

3/12 LECTURE 14: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325: MORAL

STAKES OF SELF-CONTROL (second of a pair of lectures)
Social interaction in elite society was governed by normative expectations of decorum.
Embodying self control as a moral value, decorum was considered to be the grounding
of civilized behavior. A person could also harness self control for the purposes of self-
realization, and deities of all religions illustrated how self-realization could pass over into
a state of freedom. Much of the figure painting of the period depicts exemplary instances
of decorum or self-realization.

Reading:
Jennifer Purtle, “The Pictorial Form of a Zoomorphic Ecology: Dragons and Their
Painters in Song and Southern Song China,” in The Zoomorphic Imagination in
Chinese Art and Culture, edited by Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Y. Wang
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016): 253-288.

3/14 LECTURE 15: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325: ENACTMENT

OF THE MORAL SELF (first of a pair of lectures)
Contemporary with the previous two developments, literati artists developed a form of
painting that reinterpreted the archive of the Chinese ink painting tradition in line with
their own intellectual values. From the time of the late eleventh-century pioneers, Su Shi,
Mi Fu, and Li Gonglin, to Zhao Mengfu who was active either side of 1300, these artists
consistently drew upon their experience as collectors, critics, poets, and calligraphers.
Two forms of meta-painting resulted. The first was a practice of self-enactment by
pictorial means, in which the controlled brushtrace was used to generate self-referential
images.

Reading:
McCausland, Shane, “The Ends of Representation: Old Trees, Bamboos and Rocks,” in
Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2011): 265-322.

3/15 Midterm Results to be posted

3/18 Midterm Progress Reports to be posted

3/26 LECTURE 16: THE INTEGRATIVE BRUSHTRACE, 1070-1325:

ARTICULATIONS OF SINCERITY (second of a pair of lectures)

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The second form of meta-painting articulated a moral stance of sincerity, understood as
a wholehearted devotion to humaneness, seen in a commitment to virtuous ends. The
paintings in question articulate sincerity either in relation to an artist's personal destiny or
as a commentary on state governance. References to moral exemplars of the past and
to contemporary or historical events are common.

Reading:
Barnhart, Richard M., “Li Kung-lin’s Use of Past Styles,” in Artists and Traditions: Uses
of the Past in Chinese Culture, ed. Murck, Christian F. (Princeton: The Art Museum,
Princeton University, 1976): 51-71.

3/28 LECTURE 17: THE POST-SONG RECONFIGURATION,1280-1550: SPLENDOR

AND BRAVURA (first of a pair of lectures)
Workshop-trained artists of the Yuan and early- to mid-Ming periods (ca. 1280-ca.1530),
the most accomplished of whom often spent part of their careers as court artists,
contributed to a new common culture, initially for the Mongol Yuan empire and later for a
restored Chinese empire under the Ming. Their pictorial vision made no bones about the
use of rhetorical artifice. Most deployed skills of performance and artful composition in
the service of state ideology and spectacle. But some independent artists in the cities of
Suzhou and Nanjing made a contrasting use of the approach in order to affirm the
values of urban culture as a space of relative freedom from social norms.

Reading:
Clunas, Craig, “Dark Warriors: Cultures of Violence,” in Empire of Great Brightness:
Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (1368-1644) (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2007): 160-187.

4/2 LECTURE 18: THE POST-SONG RECONFIGURATION, 1280-1550: ALLIANCES

WITH DECORATIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE ARTS (second of a
pair of lectures)
The workshop-trained artists of this post-Song period also brought painting into a closer
dialogue with architecture and decorative arts, perhaps reflecting increased mobility
between different artistic specializations. This development is visible in explorations of
architectonics and sensuous surface in both court and urban painting.

Reading:
Vinograd, Richard, “Brightness and Shadows: The Politics of Painting at the Ming Court,”
in He Li and Michael Knight, ed., Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming
Dynasty (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2008): 183-201.

4/4 LECTURE 19: THE POST-SONG RECONFIGURATION, 1325-1550: THE

TRANSMEDIAL CONTINUUM OF LITERATI PAINTING (first of a
pair of lectures)
From the second quarter of the fourteenth century onwards, some literati painters in the
Jiangnan region in southeast China developed and exploited a radically new form of
painting that was no longer dominated by the pictorial image. Instead, painting, text
(usually poetry), and calligraphy together created a single transmedial space of
operation within the boundaries of the picture surface. This innovation was closely
associated with alienation from imperial power on the one hand and with self-definition
against the common culture on the other. As late as the first quarter of the sixteenth

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century, Jiangnan scholar painters, particularly in and around the city of Suzhou,
continued to exploit this heritage in the interests of self-fashioning.

Reading:
Birgitta Augustin, “Sparse Trees and Pavilion, a Painting by Wang Meng (ca. 1308-
1385),” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 45 (2010): 83-90.

4/9 LECTURE 20: THE POST-SONG RECONFIGURATION, 1325-1550: REGION,

LOCALITY, AND SITE IN LITERATI PAINTINGS (second of a pair
of lectures)
In addition to self-fashioning, Yuan and Ming dynasty artists exploited the transmedial
possibilities that literati painting offered to locate themselves in the world. Not only did
the painters explore the significance of specific geographic places that they experienced,
but they also staged the paintings themselves as sites of social and cultural action
involving friends and acquaintances, who contributed inscriptions and colophons. Since
colophons continued to be added over decades and even centuries, literati paintings
sometimes became part of the ongoing history of specific cities and communities.

Reading:
Vinograd, Richard, “Private Art and Public Knowledge in Later Chinese Painting,” in
Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, edited by Susanne
Küchler and Walter Melion (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991):
176-201

4/11 LECTURE 21: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1550-1850: A NEW ECONOMICS OF

ATTENTION
The final historical period covered in this course extends from 1550 to 1850. These three
centuries saw China's integration into the global economy and the adoption of imported
silver as standard currency. The economic and demographic boom that ensued included
a dramatic and largely continuous expansion of the ranks of painters, who serviced a
vastly expanded market for paintings of all kinds. A new horizon of attitude informed their
practice, which can be broadly characterized as entrepreneurial. This stand-alone
lecture sets the stage for the in-depth treatment of the1550-1850 period in the final six
lectures by demonstrating how the economic logic of silver currency transformed the
specifically visual economy of painting, instituting a new system in which the exchange
value of pictorial images (the image as pictorial "currency") became more important than
the moral claims embodied in the controlled brush trace that had determined value ever
since the inception of the ink painting tradition. The great advantage of the image over
the controlled brushtrace as a generative principle lay in the density of allusions,
borrowings, citations, and resonances that it made possible. From the late sixteenth
century on, the fact that there is always more to a painting than first meets the eye
became the basis of a painting's value.

Reading:
To be announced.

4/16 LECTURE 22: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1550-1700: SHAPED DESIGN

The new horizon of entrepreneurial attitude took form in painting along three pathways,
the first of which was shaped design. In this approach, painters used shape as a way of
organizing paintings according to a logic of the pictorial image rather than the controlled

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brushtrace. One of the advantages of shaped design was that it lent itself to the
visualization of contingency and disjunction, which were fundamental to urban social
experience from the late Ming dynasty onwards.

Reading:
Hay, Jonathan, “The Suspension of Dynastic Time,” in Boundaries in China, edited by
John Hay (London: Reaktion Books, 1994): 171-197.

4/18 LECTURE 23: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1550-1700: THE IMPROVISATORY

MARK
During this period, improvisatory markmaking became a second established pathway for
entrepreneurial attitude. The form-generating brushtrace had been based on the
presumption of control by an artist who had internalized socially normative principles of
rightness. By contrast, improvisatory markmaking embraced risk and self-authorized
claims to rightness, which were diagnostic features of urban life from the late Ming
dynasty onwards

Reading:
Ryor, Kathleen M. "Fleshly Desires and Bodily Deprivations: The Somatic Dimensions of
Xu Wei’s Flower Paintings." Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture. Harvard
University Asia Center, 2005. 119-145

4/23 LECTURE 24: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1550-1700: PROJECTED WORLDS

During this period, the third pathway for entrepreneurial attitude was fictionality. During
this period, Chinese painters embraced the idea that entirely invented stories and worlds
could be a means of articulating rightness. Fictionality allowed painters to explore
aspects of social experience for which there were no established conventions: sexual
desire, corruption, power relations, etc. Painters also created fantastic worlds that
contradicted real-life experience, sometimes in order to express dissatisfaction with the
current political situation.

Reading:
Jennifer Purtle, “Scopic Frames: Devices for Seeing China c. 1640," Art History, 33, no.
1 (February 2010): 54-73.

4/25 LECTURE 25: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1700-1850: SHAPED DESIGN

During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, artists
continues to exploit shaped design for both decorative and critical purposes. The
demand was for anti-hierarchical compositions that would show that social experience
was organized contingently, relationally, situationally. Shape was the principle of pictorial
construction that made such compositions possible. On the critical side, painters used
disjunctive modes of shaped design to explore the fissures of the Qing social order.

Reading:
Koon, Yeewan, “Su Renshan: Art in the Delta Hinterlands,” in A Defiant Brush: Su
Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Early 19th Century Guangdong (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2014): 69-108.

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4/30 LECTURE 26: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1700-1850: THE IMPROVISATORY
MARK
After 1700, the improvisatory mark increasingly opened the practice of ink painting to
associations with imagery and techniques that fell outside the ink painting tradition. The
new importance of allusions to popular culture, decorative arts, traditions of female
artmaking, and non-Chinese artistic traditions relativized the importance of the canonical
ink painting tradition as a point of reference. Even painters who claimed to be continuing
to employ the controlled brushtrace and conspicuously refused to allow any associations
with non-canonical imagery inflected their practice in the direction of the improvisatory
mark.

Reading:
Hay, Jonathan, "Luo Ping: The Encounter with the Interior Beyond," In Eccentric Visions:
The Worlds of Luo Ping, ed. Kim Karlsson (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2009): 102-
111.

5/2 LECTURE 27: THE DENSIFIED IMAGE, 1700-1850: PROJECTED WORLDS

At the eighteenth-century Chinese court, fictionality was brought under strict control. On
the one hand, it was introduced into paintings documenting Qing imperial activities to
give them rhetorical force; on the other, it became a vehicle for the visualization of
alternative realities that could be ideologically useful to the Qing state. Outside the court,
meanwhile, a plethora of urban microcultures developed in which painters similarly made
use of fictionality to make documentary paintings rhetorically convincing, while also
exploring fictive moods and alternative realities. However, urban explorations of
fictionality delineated a space of imagination and thought outside, and often opposed to,
that of the Qing state.

Reading:
Kristina Kleutghen, “One or Two, Repictured,” Archives of Asian Art, 62 (2012): 25-46.

TBA FINAL EXAM

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