I'm grateful to Yale's Council on E. Asian Studies for inviting me to give this year's Hume lecture; it's not only an honor (as one sees immediately in looking over the list of previous Hume lecturers, a daunting lineup) but also a timely opportunity for me to attempt to pull together some themes that have been appearing persistently in recent years in my own work and that of some of my students and colleagues, and to see them as making up a large phenomenon, potentially and ideally a change of direction in Chinese ptg studies, instead of just a cluster of small ones.
Let me begin with a general statement of my argument, which is in a sense scarcely new, since it's based on things we've known all along. We've all known from early on that the version of the history of Chinese painting presented to us in Chinese writings is heavily slanted toward those types practiced by the literati or scholar-amateur artists, since the writers were themselves of that status and persuasion, and that their constructions of quasi-art-historical lineages were designed in large part to support their own positions. We've known that the body of paintings presented as meriting our attention, assembled and passed down to us by collectors, preserved today in museums and serious private collections, recorded in catalogs, published in reproduction books, was made up principally of works judged to be reliably from the hands of a succession of prestigious name artists, whose names and affiliations any traditional account of Chinese painting history will supply-- and they will all supply more or less the same lists. Our own collecting has tended to follow the guidelines laid out in the Chinese writings that we translated and tried to interpret for our readers; we took pride in the acquisition of pieces that would elicit approving nods when we showed them to visiting Chinese connoisseurs. (I recall taking the first official emissary from P.R. China after the thaw, Huang Zhen when he came to Berkeley in the early 1970s, around an exhibition of works by the Yangchou Eccentrics at our University Art Museum, and watching with pleasure as he expressed surprise over our having acquired so many genuine works, including a top-class ink plum ptg by Chin Nung.)
But we have known also that these authentic name-artist works, as we might call them, comprise only a small part of the huge corpus of surviving Chinese paintings. The rest can be divided into at least five overlapping categories--which could, instead, be listed as causes for exclusion or neglect. First, anonymous works, which the Chinese catalog under the term wu-ming chia or "master without a name"; secondly, works by lesser and minor artists, hsiao-ming chia or "small-name masters" in Chinese. Old and fine works in both these categories have been admitted into serious collections, but those from later periods are likely to float about more or less unnoticed, or still worse, to be lost. Third, the copies and forgeries of name masters' works, which on the whole occupy the same art-historical hinterland as forgeries of Rembrandt or van Gogh; these can occasionally be good or even great paintings, like some of the now-deposed Rembrandts, but for the great majority of them, the loss is small when they are shunted off into obscurity. In the old days in Hong Kong or Taipei or Tokyo, one could spend many hours looking through hundreds of these in the shops or apartments of lesser dealers, in the hope of finding one that repaid the search. And no amount of egalitarian rehabilitation effort will make me regret not having bought more of them.
Two other categories are not to be so quickly dismissed, and are the ones with which I am principally concerned today. The fourth is a large category of paintings that did not originate as forgeries at all, but were caught in a particular Chinese trap: too high in quality and pictorial interest to be discarded, but lacking the name identifications that would place them in the ranks of marketable and collectible commodities, they have had their original identifying marks removed and have been fitted out by dealers and owners, over the centuries, with wrong attributions, spurious inscriptions and seals, misleading identifications of subjects--all designed to move them, however dishonestly, out of undesirable authorial and thematic categories and into desirable ones. Paintings of this kind are found in large numbers in old collections, especially those assembled by discerning collectors such as Charles Lang Freer whose eye for quality was not matched--could not be, in their time--with the kind of expertise that would permit sound judgements of date, school, and authorship. Paintings in this group might equally be assigned to the "anonymous" category, and in fact enter it once the misleading markings are stripped away from them. The fifth category--or, since it overlaps the others so much, a fifth reason for exclusion--is made up of paintings that, for a diversity of reasons having to do with their subjects and styles and original functions, were excluded from the range of what was held to be art, or fine art. (And yes, let me simply assert without quibbling over language that Chinese critics and connoisseurs did make a distinction similar enough to ours between art and non-art, as well as good and bad art, that we might as well stop fussing and use the words.) Out of a huge output of pictorial matter, the Chinese arbiters of taste and quality in any period dictated what should be preserved and collected, mounted and remounted as the need arose, appreciated and written about, rescued from the burning house--what should, in short, make up the history of Chinese painting.
S,S. In a paper delivered several months ago I used a large, messy metaphor, seeing the whole of Chinese painting as it was produced over the centuries as a great underground river flowing down through time, with islands or eruptions above the surface for works of the kinds judged to be worth preserving--the visible, so to speak. "My term 'underground,'" I said, "implies a metaphorical surface, somewhat permeable but mostly opaque, separating the visible part of Chinese painting--what critics recognized and valued, what collectors chose to preserve--from the more or less invisible, what was not considered worthy of notice and preservation, and is now mostly unrecoverable. What is below the surface is vastly greater in quantity than what is above." We can sometimes obtain glimpses of the sub-surface regions through chance survivals of types for which the likelihood of transmission was small. We also have occasional windows--the two examples I offered were the bodies of paintings by masters of the Chekiang region in the Sung-Yuan transition, 13th-14th centuries, including what we loosely call Ch'an or Zen Buddhist painting, which through historical accident was preserved in Japan and has come to be incorporated into histories of Chinese painting written outside China; and paintings by 17th century Ch'an monks of the Huang-po or Obaku sect who came from the coastal regions of Fukien to Japan, where they continued to practice their amateurish ink-monochrome painting, and where their works are also preserved in some number. These, by contrast, have not been welcomed into our histories, and probably never will be, except for passing mentions, since the works are mostly amateurish in the most negative sense and do not hold one's interest for long. (Chi-fei, 1666; Mu-an, 1682.)
S --. If we had a similar window into the practice of this kind of painting in temples of the Jiangxi region in the same period, I suggested, we would presumably understand better the origins of Pa-ta Shan-jen's imagery and style. (I assume that for this audience, I don't need to identify Pa-ta Shan-jen, since most of you will have seen the major exhibition of his work organized by Dick Barnhart and Wang Fangyu in 1990.) But the minor monk-amateurs of this period, whether in Jiangxi or Fukien or elsewhere, never achieved the stature of Pa-ta--failed Pa-ta Shan-jens, I termed them--and go unrecorded and forgotten in China, and their works untransmitted. (These are not, of course, Ch'an ptgs, and I put them on only to illustrate the difference between a real amateur and a real painter.)
S,S. Similarly, innumerable paintings by other kinds of amateur artists--literati, officials, merchants, whatever--have disappeared--the great majority of them, we can assume, to no great loss. (Li Chung-lüeh, late 12c scholar-official amateur at left.) And the same is true of the fast, minor, more or less repetitive works turned out in great numbers by skilled artists as well, for repaying small favors and the like, works of the kind that can be called "occasional paintings" by analogy with occasional verse or music (one by a painter in the imperial academy, Ma Shih, at right); they doubtless gave pleasure to their original recipients, but the few that survive today suffice to represent the type--we would feel no great urge to fish any large number of them out of the underground river, even if that were possible. (Throw them back as too small.)
S,S. (Leaf from album of copies of old master ptgs on left, w. Tung C-c insc. proclaiming it a genuine work by 10th cent. Tung Yüan; 1616 ptg by Tung C-c himself at right.) For the purpose of my argument today, I want to propose a different metaphor, one more in keeping with the terrain imagery implied in the "remapping" of my title. In this one, we can think of the whole of Chinese painting as it was produced and partly preserved as an extensive, richly variegated landscape, until Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and his army of believers, along with their predecessors and successors, tramp across it, arranging selected mountains and boulders and trees--artists and paintings-- into neat rows and patterns, uprooting and relocating them much as garden-makers in China would relocate selected natural materials such as rocks and trees and watercourses and arrange these to make a garden, taking care to assign them names as well as locations. The end product is manageable and intelligible, like a garden; one of the main attractions of the established history of Chinese painting is its neatness. What is excluded, left outside the wall, need no longer be looked at. We can admire the garden; but when we turn our gaze beyond it, what we see left behind is a grievously reduced, somewhat denuded landscape, since the army, scorning most of what they found, have allowed it to waste away through neglect, besides erecting tall walls to discourage later people from looking at it. In this they have done nothing other than what we have done, at least until recently, with our own art. But we need not remain bound to Chinese criteria for separating art from non-art, good art from bad.
S,S. In trying to persuade a lecture class some years ago that the art/non-art distinction is not a simple matter of quality and interest, I contrasted--an unlikely pairing--George Price and Jonathan Borovsky. The late George Price, who has always seemed to me our most brilliant social and political cartoonist, our Daumier if you will, created in his late drawings complex and incisive pictorial structures of a high artistic order, quite apart from their trenchant commentary on the problem-ridden relationships of people and objects. But George Price's works would never make it onto our art museum walls (he did not, for one thing, adopt the conventions of modernism as did his contemporary Saul Steinberg, who accordingly makes it onto MOMA walls).
S --. (another George Price, the American Legion, from George Price's Ice Cold War.) Jonathan Borovsky, by contrast, whose large-scale exhibition had just closed at our University Art Museum (spring of 1985) after taking over much of its space--a young artist of limited talent and technique who apparently devoted the time he should have spent practicing drawing to writing numbers, up to several millions, and depositing them, as I recall, in a jar--Jonathan Borovsky (if there are admirers of his in the audience, I apologize to them, I am using him only to make a point) Jonathan Borovsky was not only on the museum walls, but could not easily be got off the museum walls--he had pasted a huge, clumsy figure drawing (similar to the one in the slide at right) to one of our largest concrete surfaces so that it could not be removed without destroying it; and that the museum was reluctant to do. We lived with Borovsky's piece, uncomfortably, for what seemed to me a long time. I have no idea what became of it in the end.
S,S. The analogy is not inappropriate--one can similarly contrast amateurish, even inept Chinese paintings that fall within the Chinese critical category of fine art largely because of their authorship, or through their exhibiting some agreed-on characteristics of high art--the late Ming scholar-artist Li Jih-hua, perhaps, who was represented in the "Ming Scholar's Studio" exhibition of 1988 by the landscape handscroll of 1625 (at left) titled "Rivers and Mountains in My Dream," highly praised in the catalog as a work in which "the landscape serv[es] as a vehicle for the poet-painter to express his desire to rise above the vicissitudes of the mundane world." (cat. p. 43.)--one can contrast this with others of far greater interest and accomplishment that fall outside the pale, because they fail to rise above the mundane world, choosing instead of represent it in loving detail. Since I was putting together an outline of this lecture around New Year's, I chose this New Year's picture, and will speak about it in a bit.
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