london review of books
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 23 dated 1 December 2005

At the Royal Academy
Craig Clunas

The emperors in question in the exhibition China: The Three Emperors
1662-1795 (at the Royal Academy until next April) are Kangxi (ruled
1662-1722), Yongzheng (1723-35) and Qianlong (1736-95). The
hard-to-pronounce imperial names were avoided in the exhibition’s title,
but the show has a Chinese title which is prominently displayed in the
publicity material. Sheng shi hua zhang is a sonorous and vaguely
archaic-sounding phrase which means something like ‘Splendours of an Age
of Prosperity’, apt for the Qing era when the Chinese emperors ruled the
largest and most populous empire on the globe. It is also a term with
contemporary resonances, widely used to describe such phenomena as a new
motorway bridge over the Yangtze River, or swanky golfing parties in
Shanghai hotels. It was the title of a dance festival, compered by
People’s Liberation Army choreographers, ‘offered’ to the Communist
Party in celebration of its 80th anniversary in 2001.

It would be too easy to see this exhibition, which has obtained from the
Palace Museum in Beijing an unprecedented group of works of art
(paintings, textiles, porcelain, even a great rock from the imperial
gardens), as the tribute of one age of prosperity to another. It would
be easy, too, to see some contemporary parallels: the high Qing was an
era of the firmest possible central control over the lands of Islamic
Central Asia and Tibet; its emperors eagerly accepted advanced
technology from European Jesuits at their court while affirming China’s
enduring cultural values; they instituted rigorous ideological control
while encouraging their subjects to prosper materially; new millenarian
religious sects were vigorously suppressed. On the other hand, Qianlong
would certainly have been baffled by the notion that art and politics
don’t mix, so why should we affect to be surprised if the modern Chinese
state deploys its curatorship of past cultural treasures to send
subliminal messages?

It is inevitable that this contemporary relevance will be gestured at by
anyone trying to make the exhibition ‘meaningful’. But this is the old
Orientalist/Sinological trap, whereby anything Chinese stands for
‘China’ as a whole, and everything is connected to everything else. The
objects and images on display at the Royal Academy were made to address
their own audiences and needs, and it is patronising to make them serve
ours too blatantly. Few of those who go down the road to see Rubens at
the National Gallery will tease out the parallels between Rubens’s
diplomatic career and the European Union. His work does not have to bear
that load. As well as learning to pronounce their names properly, we
have to let the Qing be the Qing.

One way to do that is to see the objects and images here on their own
terms. Many of them are very big, even colossal, confounding popular
expectations of delicacy and miniaturism. Many of them are also
ravishingly beautiful, from a simple green teapot, not previously
exhibited, which had hardened curators sighing with delight at the press
view, to a much reproduced if hardly ever seen set of paintings of 12
courtly beauties passing the time in various states of nervy languor.
But even the huge equestrian portrait of Qianlong, done by the court
Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, partly on the model of Titian’s portrait of
Charles V, invites a nose-to-the-glass viewing that rewards you with a
sumptuous visual surface of horse and silk and armour.

Many of the scrolls produced in the milieu of court culture are like the
miniatures which proved so beguiling in the recent Turks exhibition at
the Royal Academy, but on a massive scale. They invite questions about
how such pictures were used in their original context; we are not
dealing here with Holbein’s great icons of Henry VIII, or the monumental
portraits of rulers which were the stock-in-trade of court artists in
Europe from Velásquez to David. As the near pristine condition of many
of them implies, portraits of the Qing imperial court were not designed
for permanent hanging (they are watercolours).

At what events were they originally viewed, and by whom? The imperial
image was not disseminated to a wide audience in Qing China any more
than in earlier periods; it did not appear on coins and was not
reproduced in printed form, even though the technology existed. The
picturing of imperial grandeur was intended for a very restricted gaze,
perhaps only for the sitter himself. This is especially true of a set of
miniature album leaves of Yongzheng, for example, which depicts him in
14 contexts of fantastic masquerade, rich in hermetic meanings for a man
who was one of the most chronically suspicious and private of imperial
personalities. As a Daoist monk, he conjures a dragon from roiling
waves; as a moustachioed simulacrum of Louis XIV, in imported European
finery, he spears a small tiger which appears baffled by this
transcultural apparition.

Masquerade emerges from this show as one of the intriguing modes of Qing
court culture, a ludic but not humorous probing of appearance and
reality through dressing-up and posing, most clearly seen in a scroll in
which Qianlong seems about to replicate himself pictorially to infinity,
and where the emperor’s own inscription explicitly poses the question:
‘Is it/is he/am I one or two?’ There are objects as well as images here
which seem to bring us close to the imperial individual: the wooden
blocks, for example, that Kangxi used to affect an interest in the
principles of Euclidean geometry – was this, too, a form of masquerade?
One of the show’s great successes is that it manages to give a proper
place to the Jesuit savants and artists at court, without becoming
overexcited to the point at which they, and not their imperial
employers, become the main story.

Possibly the most innovative section of the exhibition is the collection
of mostly monochrome images produced away from court for the delectation
of a cultured elite. The set of ten album leaves of Insects, Birds and
Beasts painted in 1774 by Luo Ping takes to an extreme an aesthetic of
less is more: on one leaf, two spiders huddle in the top-left corner of
the otherwise blank sheet. The extent to which such work is a conscious
refusal and critique of the aesthetic of the imperial court is only one
issue raised by a careful reading of the pictures. And here ‘reading’ is
not a fashionable linguistic metaphor. Educated Qing men and women would
themselves have used the term du hua, ‘reading the painting’, for the
close and prolonged scrutiny which can be hard to achieve when visiting
an exhibition, but which here will be well worth the effort. They would
have applied it to images they considered to be ‘paintings’, hua, but
not to all the images displayed here, some of which might have been
relegated to the broader and less discriminating category of ‘pictures’,
tu, shading off into mere illustration. The distinction between tu and
hua was important in Qing aesthetics, as was that between two other
categories much on display here: gong, ‘craft’ or ‘intricacy’, and zhuo,
literally ‘clumsiness’, but in aesthetic terms meaning something like
‘sincerity’. The achievements of gong were never higher in China than
during the 17th and 18th centuries, and this exhibition puts on view a
grouping of its masterpieces which is unlikely to be seen here again.

It is exactly 70 years since a major Chinese show at Burlington House
last displayed such work: it failed to enchant Modernist sensibilities
which, in the manner of Roger Fry, were excited by Chinese art of a much
earlier period. Also, the Qing dynasty was then within living memory,
and occupied an uncomfortable place in Chinese modernity, which was
founded on its overthrow. Now perhaps both Chinese and Western audiences
are ready to see both craft and sincerity. In London, we won’t get a
better chance.

Craig Clunas is head of the department of art and archaeology at SOAS.
His most recent book is Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming
1470-1559.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n23/print/clun01_.html

 

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

__________________________________________

An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is
available at:
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html
For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to:
http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm