Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850. - book reviews

The Chinese art-historical canon has had a checkered life in this region The field has been from one side dramatic shifts in the paroxysm s of coming into being. Early art historians, for example, slighted literati painting. For Ernest Fenollosa, Chinese art practically extreme pointed after the Song dynasty (960-1279) He abhorred the "amateur" paintings of the posterior periods.(1) Ludwig Bachhofer, Heinrich Wolfflin's scholar dismissed literati painting from the 14th to the 18th centuries as "poor and anemic" productions of the "dilettantes."(2) Even Sherman to leeward initially questioned whether Dong Qichang (1555-1636) was endowed enough to paint, though he later recanted.(3) It took a hardly any generations of art historians to earn over this early bias. on the contrary soon there arose a novel art-historical orthodoxy that clung to the the cross according to Dong Qichang, the towering aesthete and arbiter of taste who one time and for all canonized the unfolding of Chinese art with, to borrow phrases from Fredric Jameson, an "ultimate privileged" "interpretive master code"(4) Underlying Dong's schema are a preoccupation with the learned digests of idiomatic brushworks in the name of the past, spruce disdain toward professional academicism or craftsmanship, increasing reification of landscape as an escapist mental universe in the form of free from moisture abstraction, and, finally, an art-historical lineage with Dong himself as the ultimate extremity of history.

In all fairness, the acceptance of Dong Qichang was a hard-won victory by dint of students of Chinese art in this political division in their effort to overpower some of the earlier prejudices and apparent lack of cultural understanding. It was, after all, no simple task to bring taste around from the visually seductive pictures execut by dint of professionals to the pedantically plodding and deliberately unappealing paintings of "amateurs" who fetishized brushwork at the expenditure of pictorial design. The turnaround was also circumstantially facilitated by dint of the relatively large quantities of available Ming and Qing paintings in this land which allowed art historians easy access to the materials, especially in times of political strain between China and the West. Moreover, the art-historical narrative according to Dong Qichang was, and still remains, valid in supplying us with single logical structure of meaning to encompass otherwise diverse and unordered art-historical phenomena. "All art-historical master narratives," as W J T Mitchell brings it, are a intermix of half-truths and oversimplifications that nevertheless has a certain power to frame the production and reception of art."(5)

The point in dispute is that the master narrative has congealed into an orthodoxy at the cost of alternative versions of history and to the exclusion of paintings that do not fit into it. Richard Barnhart first unbrokened the alarm that "we have been thoroughly brain-washed by a handful of critics" and have buckl below "the imposition of arbitrary intellectual critical mode of buildings like Tung Ch'ich'ang's theory." "It is time," says Barnhart, "to consider their pervasive and destructive influence" and to rethink "our continued utilization of these biases."(6)

Barnhart's call is finally heeded after nearly sum of two units decades. Revisionist art histories are being written. novel years have seen shifts of focus from the elitist canon to unsigned testimonials and from literati aestheticism to sociopolitical contextualism. Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850 appears against this backdrop. The catalogue gathers into individual massive volume eighty-three post-Tang Buddhist pictures from a certain quantity of thirty-three museums and collections, greatest in quantity of them marginalized by the reigning art-historical canon. The authors of the introductory essays are explicit about their revisionist stance. The catalogue, as Marsha Weidner declares in the introduction, is "a challenge" to "a material part of well-established ideas about the exhibition of Buddhism, Buddhist history in China, and Chinese art history" (p 36) Julia Murray in her essay, "The Evolution of Buddhist Narrative Illustration in China after 850" is more specific:

Although a certain number of genteel connoisseurs professed not to value Buddhist narrative illustrations and rarely wrote about them, sheer numbers indicate that there was considerable demand for similar works.... However, our understanding of this market is still limited, largely because the rarefied interests of Dong Qichang and other highly sophisticated critics have shaped later accounts of the art of this period.... Dong Qichang's indifference l us too hastily to attribute narrative illustration to a lowerclass or populist milieu (pp142-44)

This is a well-taken point, admitting Murray may not actually ne to secure from attack the Buddhist narrative scrolls by dint of subscribing to the traditional downplaying of lower-class populism. upon the other hand, that the historical value of the latter wants apology at all in our field is symptomatic enough of the reigning canonic taste whose crushing Murray tries to resist.