Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency

Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency Author(s): Maggie Bickford Source: Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 53 (2002/2003), pp. 71-104 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press for the Asia Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20111305 . Accessed: 04/10/2011 12:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Hawai'i Press and Asia Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Archives of Asian Art. http://www.jstor.org Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency Maggie Bickford Brown University It is now almost fifty years since Benjamin Rowland, pre paring to address "The Problem of Hui Tsung 4$L^," observed: It appears to the present writer that the study of Chinese painting in the West has progressed to a point where something is needed beyond the familiar rhapsodies on the beauty and mystery o?ch'i y?n. At the same time there certainly is no future in attempting to classify Chinese painting entirely on the basis of Stilgeschichte on a W?lfflinian model.1 Rowland instead proposed that a "judicious combination" of pictorial and literary evidence be brought to bear on the "Problem of Huizong." Since then art historians and sinolo gists have proceeded along those lines. Scholars in East Asia and the West have made notable progress in contextualizing the products of this artist-emperor and his Academy. We have clarified institutional arrangements. We have examined the uses of art to ritual, legitimacy, and power. We have explored relationships between imperially sponsored painting and the emerging art of the scholar-amateurs at the end of the North ern Song.2 But we still have not come to terms with these works of art as works of art. Over time the "Problem of Huizong" has proved far more susceptible to the methods of sinology than to those of formalist art history. Although some of the paintings that I will treat here (Figs. 1-7) regularly appear as canoni cal monuments in general and scholarly accounts of Chi nese art, there is, in fact, no consensus among scholars as to which of these works are the "real" Huizongs.3 On the question of authorship or even period of composition these dazzling paintings of flowers and birds, whose importance for the history of Chinese art is self-evident, have remained stubbornly resistant to traditional Chinese connoisseurship and to Western stylistic analysis. Why should this be so? The connoisseurship of Chinese painting has developed most effectively with reference to ink paint ing, in which the artist reveals himself through his brush work. (Indeed, the Chinese scholars perfected this mono chromatic, brush-centered mode as a legible, visual vehicle for subjective self-expression.) In contrast, painters who worked in the courtly traditions of fine-style flower-and bird painting purposefully distanced themselves from the objective images that they made: the painter made himself Fig. i. Attrib. Emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji, 1082-1135; r. 1101-1125). The Five-Colored Parakeet. Northern Song, datable to inos. Handscroll; ink and color on silk; 53.3 x 125.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 33.364. Maria Antoinette Evans Fund, 1933. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 71 Fig. 2. Emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji, 1082-1135; r. 1101-1125). Cranes of Good Omen. Handscroll; ink and color on silk; 51 x 138.2 cm. Liaoning Pro vincial Museum, Shenyang. From Fu Xinian, ed., Liang Song Huihua, Shang (Northern and Southern Song Paintings, Part 1), vol. 3 of Zhongguo Meishu Quanji: Huihua Bian (Comprehensive Collection of the Arts of China: Painting Section) (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1988), no. 47. to vanish from the completed work so that the painting stands alone. Thus courtly flower-and-bird paintings are more difficult to date and to attribute than are literati ink paintings. Huizong's fine-style paintings are an extreme case in point. They observably partake of a coherent stylis tic system. Yet, because they do not advertise an individual touch, they deprive us of a dependable framework of authentic works by a single artist on which to hang our history.4 Perhaps these are not the most appropriate ave nues of approach to the "Problem of Huizong." Here I propose another analytical angle: I shall consider seven major Huizong attributions as practical objects? images made for certain practical ends. More than generic pictorial development or personal taste and ability, it was their purposes that shaped their distinctive appearance as works of art. The visual features to which I shall point and the textual evidence that I shall invoke have been observed by others before me, but I shall attempt to relate them into more cogent explanations of Huizong's arresting images. I shall argue the following points: First, these paintings (Figs. 1-7) and others like them are, specifically, auspicious images. Three can be identified as auspicious omen paintings (Figs. 1?3), and two (Figs. 4, 5) were likely made as auspicious presentation paintings. I selected these seven paintings from the larger body of Huizong attributions that bear the emperor's inscription and/or cipher because their pictorial or textual content suggested their potential as auspicious images and because I have myself inspected each original work. Scholars have recognized Figures 1?3 and 4?5 as groups because of sim ilar dimensions, formats, and compositions (discussed below). Two further paintings, bearing Huizong's inscrip tion or cipher (Figs. 6, 7), I consider to belong to the cat egory of Huizong-period imperial auspicious images. All of these works were made within a long tradition of aus picious image making.5 Second, more than a general courtly aesthetic, particular functional concerns impelled the making of these objects, and consequently controlled the visual outcomes. That is to say, aesthetics were adapted (or re-formed, or redirect ed) in response to the practical task of embodying auspi cious phenomena or aspirations by means of painting. Third, the stylistic opacity of these paintings?the efface ment of process and of individual touch, or hand?was purposeful. Fourth, in the case of these paintings author ship appropriately is to be distinguished from execution. The goal of the arguments and proposals that I shall develop here is not to deprive Huizong of his paintings? all the available contemporary and slightly later textual and visual evidence indicates that Huizong painted, that he painted many works, and that these were judged impres sively accomplished. Nor am I convinced that no work directly made by Huizong's hand survives. Rather, I wish to exploit the available evidence in new ways that can illu minate "The Problem[s] of Huizong"?i.e., that can help to determine which paintings are "his" and in what sense they may be considered so. SPHERE OF INQUIRY AND OBJECTS OF STUDY What are auspicious images? In part, they are images designed to embody good outcomes, and sometimes to gen 72 Fig. 3. Emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji, 1082-1135; r. 1101-1125). Auspicious Dragon Rock. Handscroll; ink and color on silk; 53.8 x 127.5 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. Courtesy Palace Museum, Beijing. ?rate, attract, confirm, sustain, or prolong these outcomes. In China good outcomes included (male) progeny, longev ity, abundance, wealth; examination honors, bureaucratic advancement, imperial legitimacy, peace. (Of these, all save imperial legitimacy remain desiderata to the present moment.) Auspicious images also include devices that help to avert harm. Auspicious imagery (for which there is no traditional Chinese term) comprehends all the most popular graphic devices in Chinese visual culture.6 A convenient index of the range and ubiquity of auspi cious devices in Chinese ornament and the decorative arts is the repertory of 185 motifs (plus extensive variations) assembled by Nozaki Nobuchika ff^t???? in his Kissh? Zuan Kaidai "?F #S] ^ ?f-ii (Explanatory Notes on Auspi cious Motifs), the essential field guide to auspicious imagery in China. Nozaki's repertory comprises not only the drag ons and phoenixes and bats and peaches familiar from Chi nese ceramics, textiles, and metalwork, but also includes many items from the classical flower-and-bird repertory, such as peony, lotus, camellia, rose, and lily; crane, pea cock, magpie, and mandarin ducks. Moreover, the popular decorative repertory accords major roles to auspicious motifs that are mainstays of the scholar's Iconography of Virtue, for instance, the Three Friends of the Cold Season ?pine, bamboo, and plum?as well as orchid and chry santhemum.7 Some of the many auspicious motifs function primarily as indicators of good fortune (for instance, bats and lingzhi [fungus of immortality]), whereas others, such as the Three Friends, carry multiple associations and have been deployed in many ways among diverse groups of makers and recipi ents. As I have argued elsewhere, popular associations of pine, bamboo, and plum with longevity and with renewal underlay the scholars' special use of the Three Friends as an emblem of the virtuous scholar and the pertinacity of his values. Auspicious associations of the Three Friends in pop ular and elite culture contribute to generating the message of intrepid integrity and hope for integrity's triumph that the Friends convey in the literati canon. The key here is simul taneity of multiple meanings and affect.8 Readers who accept this premise may still wonder at my applying the term "auspicious image" to the works that I treat here. Is every image auspicious? Even a five-colored parakeet (Fig. 1)? The degree of auspicious intention and intensity varies with considerable nuance along a continu ous spectrum from one work to another. It must be estab lished by context, such as the ones that I shall build for the works treated here. These I shall consider under two cate gories: "Auspicious Omen Paintings" and "Auspicious Presentation Paintings"?the former, concentrated images tightly focussed on auspicious visualization and, possibly, efficacy, the latter, more diffuse in articulation and affect, proffering good wishes on auspicious occasions, like the pictures on the greeting cards we send on weddings, anni versaries, and birthdays. (The answer to the second ques tion is "Yes.")9 Taken as a vantage point, auspicious visuality offers new approaches to key questions in the history of Chinese art? in this case, "The Problem of Huizong." Let us now pro ceed from these general premises to study paintings attrib uted to Huizong during and just after the lifetime of the artist-emperor. 73 Fig. 4. Emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji, 1082-1135; r. 1101-1125). Hibiscus and Golden Pheasant. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk; 81.5 x 53.6 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. Courtesy Palace Museum, Beijing. Contemporary and slightly later sources tell us that Emperor Huizong painted and that employees made paint ings at his behest and some of them in his stead. Moreover, they record that members of the court copied Huizong's paintings and sought his inscriptions, seals, or cipher on their copies. As Ch'en Pao-chen observed, "During the last years of the Northern Song, his [Huizong's] works in circulation at Bianjing [the capital] would have included: personally executed paintings, imperially inscribed paintings, substi tute-brush paintings, and copies of these."10 Whichever works the emperor may have actually paint ed, it is not clear to me that any two of the present works ?all of them major "Huizong" candidates?were painted by the same person: not the Five-Colored Parakeet (Fig. 1), not Cranes of Good Omen (Fig. 2), not Auspicious Dragon Rock nor Hibiscus and Golden Pheasant (Figs. 3, 4), not Wax Plum and Birds (Fig. 5), not Flowering Peach Branch and Dove (Fig. 6), not Finches and Bamboo (Fig. 7). This quandary is not mine alone. No one of these paintings has been judged authentic by all specialists who have attempted in print to isolate Huizong's oeuvre from the extant attributed cor pus.11 How can it be that not one of these most familiar, famous, and important works of art stands as an unim peachable exemplar of the art of Huizong? I have pointed out that their characteristic effacement of individualized brushwork obstructs any conclusion by means of visual examination alone. Moreover, the specialized literature on Huizong has not developed through explicit engagements among scholars in print, but rather has unfolded as a series of scholarly monologues, sometimes with due citation of different or opposing ideas and opinions, but typically without articulated debate.12 In the general literature on Chinese art one or more of these images is typically assigned to the Huizong slot in the historical narrative. Individual scholars often assess the authenticity of works in the plausible extant Huizong cor pus, less on sustained visual analysis than on informed spec ulation about the man?his degree of skill, his taste and values, his deployment of exquisite technical finesse or of amateurish expression in ink. For instance, Xu Bangda %fc #pi? argues from the premise of Huizong's amateur status, which, in his view, would have imposed wenren %. A. (lite rati) taste and values along with the technical limitations of a nonprofessional. From this, Xu concludes that most of the extant "Huizong" monochromes and a very few appropriately awkward paintings in color (including our Figure 7) are authentic works from Huizong's hand. The rest were made by Huizong's court painters or are fakes. In making his argument and assessments, Xu draws upon Song textual evidence, and he tersely indicates observable features and comparisons that speak for or against the authenticity of individual works, but he does not subject these works to systematic, detailed scrutiny. The persua siveness of his conclusions depends upon the persuasive ness of a scenario based on his strong sense of "Huizong the Amateur." But "Huizong the Amateur" is purely a hypothesis, and a hypothesis cannot confer authenticity.13 If the nature of Huizong the painter is the ground of authenticity, then our insuperable inability to know the real Huizong intimately and accurately precludes ever determining which paintings are "really" his. The objects, however, are still with us, and offer the following possibilities: (1) all are by Huizong; (2) some are by Huizong; (3) parts of some of the works?some picto rial elements and/or inscription and/or cipher?are by Huizong; (4) none are by Huizong. If here the word by is taken to mean "painted by Huizong" (his fingers grasping the brush that touches the silk), no definitive assessment of these possibilities seems achievable. If we take by to mean 74 "with the authority or sanction of Huizong" or "in the manner of Huizong," we open up other avenues of access to this valuable visual evidence and, consequently, to understanding the art of Huizong as properly construed.14 Examination of the seven paintings under study here suggests more than one hand at work. These paintings required technical skills that suggest specialization, not only in rendering flowers and birds, but also in craft tech niques. Most conspicuously, Cranes of Good Omen (Fig. 2) includes ruled-line architectural painting and shows a command of wax- or paste-resist technique in forming the flying cranes in reserve against the sky-blue ground. In comparable passages among these works, differences of conception and execution suggest to me different hands. For instance, all the flower-and-bird paintings (Figs, l, 4? 7) use a visual system (discussed in detail below) that con veys the qualities "woody," "soft," "smooth," and "sharp," but at the same time some are studiedly flat, oth ers suggest limited volumes and space, and yet others prof fer monochrome brushwork. The woody branches of flowering apricot (Fig. 1), wax-plum (Fig. 5), and peach (Fig. 6) all are approached as outline filled in with color or ink wash. Largely unmodulated strokes outline the apricot branches. No articulation marks the joins of branch to branchlet, branchlet to twig. The color fill ranges from brown at the base to green toward the tips but is uninflect ed within each area. A flat, black triangle indicates the interior of a shredded branch tip. In repeated passes over the silk the painter has pointed up angular branchwork and applied many different kinds of texture dots to roughen the contour and indicate bud scars. The painter of the wax plum branchwork approached his work as a monochrom ist, employing means familiar to us in the painting of trees in ink-landscape painting. Light, nervous, flickering out line strokes define contour and suggest texture. Knots, joints, and breaks in the bark are represented by individual brush strokes, interior washes are stippled. In painting the branches of peach (a close botanical relative of apricot), the painter took pains to model the joints, scars, and the inte rior of shredded twigs. In the lower right part of the paint ing he angled the branches and alternated dark and light to suggest torsion?the left twig pushing clockwise, the right branch pulling counterclockwise. Birds in these paintings are outlined silhouettes filled with color or ink washes. The parakeet's plumage (Fig. 1) is neatly contained within a fine, continuous outline. For its head and red breast, areas of uniform color were then dotted or stippled with contrasting light or dark paint. Its abdomen and upper wing coverts were formed by regular ly patterned, even applications of lighter and darker green wash. Its undertail coverts were painted as repeats of a striped sequence: fine ink stroke, band of light green wash, band of dark green wash (and possibly a narrow band of reserved silk ground). The wild birds perched on the wax Fig. 5. Emperor Huizong (Zhaoji, 1082-1135; r. 1101-1125). Wax-Plum and Birds. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk; 83.3 x 21.0 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Photograph: Palace Museum Photographic Dis tribution, Ann Arbor. SV50. Courtesy National Palace Museum. plum (Fig. 5) have undergone damage and repainting. Nevertheless, it is evident that, like the branchwork, they were conceived as ink paintings, relying on elided, nuanced washes rather than on neatly patterned separations of color. The plumage of the dove (Fig. 6) carefully spreads finely stroked feather tips so as to penetrate the contour line and to feather filaments of one color over the borders of adjacent areas of other colors. Within the olive green and russet areas, tone-on-tone stippling avoids regular pat terns. Like the peach branches, the feet of the dove are modelled; the claws show bright highlights on their hard, reflecting surfaces; the neatly demarcated interstice between wrapped claw and perch clearly separates flesh from wood. 75 Within the flower-and-bird group, Hibiscus and Golden Pheasant (Fig. 4) and Finches and Bamboo (Fig. 7) present fur ther distinctions of conception and execution. Hibiscus and Golden Pheasant exhibits an elegant, emphatic geometry of composition that sets it apart f