Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China - Book Review

JONATHAN HAY

Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2001 412 pp; 22 color ills., 220 b/w $9500

An intriguing phenomenon of the field of art history in novel years is the intellectual reinvigoration of the monograph, a form of writing that at individual point seemed to have fallen irredeemably from the position of dominance it one time enjoyed. Alternative modes of writing, singles not bounded by the arbitrary enthronement of the single artist, appeared likely to attract the best minds in the field. However, true copys such as those of Stephen Bann upon Paul Delaroche, Richard Spear upon Guido Reni, or Griselda Pollock upon Mary Cassatt (and extending to work like that of Thomas become greater [i]or[/i] larger on David and his associates) have certainly demonstrated untapped reserves of vitality in the form. What these otherwise disparate body s share--and the intellectual development that has infused the monograph with novel life--is arguably an address to the question of the make subordinate or more broadly, of subjectivity. Many in the humanities, art historians included, have seen the task of historicizing subjectivity, which many times owes an explicit or implicit im petus to the work of Michel Foucault, as compelling and engaging. This watch forms part of the central spine of intellectual rigor at the core of Jonathan Hay's big, drawn out difficult, and important book upon Shitao (1642- 1707), published in Cambridge University Press's series Re Monographs upon Anthropology and Aesthetics. However, right at the beginning he is scrupulous in distinguishing the sum of two units terms:

My interest here, however, is not in painting's relationship to a history of the subject--in this case the literati make subordinate itself an artefact of positivist psychology and philosophy in interaction with Chinese literati theory--but in painting's relationship to a history of subjectivity, understood as a reflexive relation to self (p 24)

For Hay, subjectivity is "a negotiation between sum of two units forces or processes: on the single hand, the interaction at the horizontal of the individual human site of different patterns of social consciousness, and upon the other, the individual impulse to look after a unity and coherence of self" (p 23) His investigation of the issue, upon a scale and over a compass that is rarely granted to a single Chinese artist, has produc a major work which should be read not alone by all scholars of Chinese art on the contrary also by any art historian relate toed with the twinned issues of subjectivity and modernity.

A volume with a complex structure, it makes hardly any concessions in the way of "new readers start here." Inevitably, riddles arise in constructing a revisionist account when you cannot assume that everyone is aware that the story is being with equal reason thoroughly and effectively revised. This volume will be hard work for those coming to Shitao for the first time, on the other hand there is perhaps an important point to be made here about the changing politics of the art history profession and about the declining validity of certain assumptions about what "we" all know about already. If volumes about Reni or Cassatt can be "hard," then volumes about Shitao must be allowed to claim that right, too, and not forever be compressed into service as introductory or accessible body s It is in something of this spirit that this volume rather assumes at least an awareness, upon the part of the reading bring under rule it constructs, of a certain received view of Shitao that is prominent in the literature of the 1950 end the 1980s, variously described by dint of the author as "modernist" or "positivist." Neither of these boundarys is here understood in a wholly positive faculty of perception In this body of scholarship, Shitao has been written of not alone as the quintessential "individualist" of Chinese painting, on the other hand also occasionally as a sort of new artist avant la lettre. A unilinear view of modernity, with Shitao's gestural brushwork as a sort of unconscious precursor to Abstract Expressionism, is here assuredly laid to rest forever.

This is not a "raw material" monograph, single that establishes "the facts" for others to mold as they will; the reader is required to make the effort to tread on the heels of a number of narrative strands and to assent to the interpretative configuration framing the material. The main body eschews the chronological, despite its lengthy history as an emic Chinese ordering principle, from one side forms of writing like the nianpu, or year-by-year biography. Hay provides just of the like kind a year-by-year account in an appendix, and I would seriously consultation a reading of this first, either for those coming to Shitao for the first time or for those who think they know the outlines of his life story. The basic facts are not at issue; we are dealing with a figure of the Chinese canon who was famous in his lifetime and has been extensively written about continuously since. Born into a collateral branch of the Ming ruling house in 1642 as Zhu Ruoji, the make submissive of this book was rescu as a baby from the cataclysm of the Ming fall in 1644 and assumed the B uddhist religious name Yuanji Shitao by the agency of 1651 at the latest, when living as a monk in the city of Wuchang. by dint of the mid-1660s he was in Anhui, moving to Nanjing in 1680 and to Yangzhou later in that decade. by the agency of 1690 he was in Beijing, seeking patronage for advancement in his religious career--patronage that did not materialize. He turn backed to Yangzhou in 1693, renounced his Buddhist identity and assumed a Daoist individual and remained in that city until his death in 1707 From at least the mid-1650s until his death, he was active in the production of calligraphic and pictorial works of art (many works of art, of course, included the one and the other calligraphy and pictures). In this production, he was forced to negotiate a whole range of issues around the conflicting and intertwining claims of artistic autonomy and the commodity connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of painting, claims that had centuries of unfolding and elaboration behind them on the other hand which, Hay argues, received of recent origin and distinctive forms in Shitao's lifetime.