OK, well, good morning. And let me start this lecture on painting in China in the introduction to the history of art.
See you. So the introduction looks at a whole kind of broad range of contexts.
And obviously, this is a very large context.
In a way, it's completely insane to attempt to talk about, you know, a several thousand year tradition in 50 minutes.
So obviously, I'm not here to kind of cover the whole field. What I want to do is to sort of situate this material for you.
And talk a little bit about kind of how art history has dealt or might deal with this very large, but this very, very large and this very large topic.
I'm going to throw a lot of images on the screen kind of very rapidly.
Obviously, the thing goes up on loan afterwards. But in a way, it's not not the names and dates and so on that are important.
I want to try and get hold of a few big ideas.
And I want to start with a sort of what's a deliberately provocative idea, which is that this painting,
I would argue, is the right shape for art history, whereas this painting is the wrong shape for art history.
Now, what I mean by that is that the mechanisms that art history has,
the technical mechanisms that we have for showing and looking at the images work quite well with things that are specific shape,
like a European painting from the 17th century. And they don't work so well with some of the things that are of this shape.
So here is here's the whole of this painting. Here's a detail from it.
Junction's beggars and street characters. 16TH century Chinese painting.
But if if I show you the whole of it, you know, it becomes a tiny little strip within the within the slide.
And it's very, very hard. It's very hard to look at.
What you might think and I talked about this in the very first lecture in this
series about the relationship between the tools that we've got and my tools.
I mean, both kind of physical tools like projectors in classrooms.
The relationship between the tools that we've got,
the physical and also intellectual tools and the kinds of material that we're trying to grapple with.
I know I said to one of the big questions is RSX tools, which were designed for this maybe.
Are they going to work for this or do we need a completely different a completely different set of tools?
Now, of course, there are other tools that have developed.
I've talked in the first lecture about slides and the history of slides and where slides come from.
One of our slides are not the only the only tools we've got.
And I've I've just put a link to this University of Chicago Web site,
which is an attempt to use the modern technology of digital images to deal with particular formats of Chinese painting.
And because obviously one of the things that you can do on a screen is squalled.
These things are called schools. Schooling is something that we all do all the time.
We kind of scroll up and down and we scroll from side to side.
So maybe there are new technologies for the technology of the computer that enables us to look at that.
So this is an attempt to kind of. Sure. Chinese paintings in a different way and in particular to capture some of the temporality.
That is the fact that, you know, things might be looked at over a period of time.
Another another example. But I would recommend to you, if you're interested, on the on the Web.
James Cahill now retired from the University of Berkeley, where he was for many years.
Very distinguished professor pastorate. Chinese art has kind of put down on well, not done put down on paper, but put down on video,
a series of eleven hour long lectures about the early history of Chinese painting.
That seems to have changed, beating only about as far as thirteen hundred.
Right. Leaving out the last kind of seven, eight hundred years is what I'm mostly gonna go to talk about.
And you know, I'm not suggesting that anybody should sit down and watch eleven hours of Jim Cahill lecturing on video,
although if you want to know this stuff, this stuff is there,
but it might be worth having just having a look at them to see the ways in which because they they're actually apart from anything else.
A very good you. Of the technology of kind of moving cameras and zooming in and out of details and so on.
In a way which is much harder for me to do here in the kind of in the formats that I thought.
And if I had time, I would show you some bits of the of the actual use of bits of this of this site and untrue.
Some bits of Cahill. But in order to say what I want to say within an hour, I'm not going to do that.
But have a look at this. If if you're interested. So this question of kind of right shape, wrong shape is just a frame.
The issue of, you know, what are the tools that we're using for physical and intellectual?
Now, if I'm going to talk about painting, I'm going.
I'm talking about, you know, a category which is perfectly meaningful within Chinese culture itself.
And I'm going to talk later in this lecture about the distinction between image concepts and Eatock concepts,
concepts within in concepts without culture.
But let me start by saying that, you know, painting and the Chinese word is quar as a carrot for the Chinese word for, you know,
this is this is a a category idea, a discourse, a topic of study kind of within Chinese culture and has been so for a very long time now.
It's often linked with other concepts and in particular in China in the past or even in Chinese language
in the present where you will often see together are two concepts put together in the term Shu Juat,
which usually get translated in English, is painting and calligraphy painting.
The painting was I'm going to talk about and calligraphy being the art of writing with
the brush and that kind of aesthetic social and cultural discourses around writing.
One of the interesting things to note is I think though is a little this is usually translated in English, almost always translated.
English is painting is lengthy. The Chinese puts it the other way around.
The Chinese always as well. Which means calligraphy and painting.
And that represents an idea that calligraphy is, if you like, the senior cultural practise earlier and more important and indeed more highly valued.
Well, I'm talking about painting today.
It's worth bearing in mind that calligraphy, the art of writing is, you know, is seen as the more prestigious and the more important.
It's always expressed in this in this order. And you get that in parts of other compounds, too.
What I'm going to talk later on in this lecture about a fine distinction made at
various points in China between the category of pictures and the category of painting.
Those are not exactly seen as the same thing.
Now, in order to get some kind of a handle on it, I'm not going to talk about everything.
I'm not going to talk about all periods. I'm going to focus in on this period, the period of China's May dynasty from thirteen.
Sixty. Sixteen. Forty four. That is if you think about European history or English history.
We're dealing with a chunk of time from the Black Death to the English Civil War.
So what we're dealing with, that kind of what's often in Europe, what European historians would call part of the early modern period.
And it's one of the kind of interesting distinctions about, you know, our terms like that applicable to China at all.
I'll give you at the end some kind of further reading about this period.
But I just wanted to draw your attention to, you know, the kind of information that's on various Web sites.
So, for example, the Oxford Art Online Web site will have, you know, quite good material on, you know, I mean, anything.
You're going to get a big entry. And you can also look up the kind of names of individual artists on a Web site.
I'm very fond of is the Heilbrunn timeline of our history, which is valuable for all kinds of things, not just Chinese things.
On the Web site of the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
And again, they have some some nice stuff there. So what I want to do is start by talking about the physicality of of Ming painting.
I want to talk and I want to do that by talking up first about the different formats in which paintings exist.
What are paintings in this period as material and physical objects?
And I'm going to talk about them in the order that the formats of Chinese paintings survive.
Fraud. So these are all formats that existed in the main.
But I'm going to start with kind of what what would you think of as possibly earlier formats, a move of one of these kind of coexisted in the main.
The first one to think about is wall painting, the earliest paintings that survived from China in any large quantity.
Now are wall paintings. They're almost all modified.
They are all the ones that survive a religious. They are in the context of principally in the context of Buddhist sites.
And so I'm sure I'm showing a painting that comes from the fifth century. It's on a wall painting.
It's outside of the wall. The more gold caves in China, in the west of China.
It's probably changed colour over the years. But we have kind of large quantities of of of this religious wall painting.
We know from textual sources that they used to be large quantities of secular wall painting as well.
But that doesn't get that doesn't survive.
You know, palaces, homes of the rich were decorated.
The walls were decorated as well. So this is painting on plaster the surface.
The materials support for this painting is painting and plaster.
We've got large quantities of these from an early period from much earlier than the Ming.
But it's but it's both basically all religious.
Now, if we come into the Ming period itself, we have quite a large quantity of wall paintings surviving.
And I'm just showing you an example of wall painting that was painted in the early 16th century on a religious site,
which is a much earlier religious site. This building is 10th, 11th century.
And you've got this wall painting.
You can see this is roll painting that is kind of in this sort of entranceway or portico to this very large temple building.
And so it's sort of half. It's not completely exposed to the elements, but it's sort of largely exposed to the elements.
And as such, it seems kind of appalling condition and you can hardly see it.
Which, of course,
is one of the problems about about wall painting and one of the reasons that it doesn't survive in very large quantities and consequently,
it kind of doesn't get written about very much.
You know, if you get a book called, you know, Ming Painting, it won't mention the wall painting at all.
That's partly because not so much survives,
all because of what survives is in very poor condition and also partly because what there is is entirely religious painting.
And this is often viewed as kind of less interesting, less valuable,
less important than other kinds of painting that I'm going to talk about in a moment that that seemed more kind of important.
So so there's both kind of practical factors and intellectual factors around why, you know.
So if somebody said, I'd like to write an essay on Ming Wall painting, I would say can't be done.
It can't be done because there's not enough writing. There's enough written about it.
There's quite a lot of material, but it's hardly been written about. It's hardly ever been pulled together systematically.
But we have to just keep it in mind as a sort of as a sort of background. So that's one former very early format,
probably existed for a very long time before them in another format of painting that
exists in the main is the format that we call the hand screw or the horizontal score.
No, you know, in Chinese, there are different words for different kinds of paintings or as a specific Chinese word for this,
but it's usually called a hand scrawl in English.
And here I'll show you an example of a hand scroll painting by I mean, the Nisei artist.
So this is a 16th century painting called Old Cypress. And as you can see, it's a roll of material.
This one's painted on paper. There's a roll of material.
And here it's been unveiled. And I'm very proud of this photograph.
I got the Kansas City Universal Museum in Kansas City to make this photograph because I
wanted a photograph or a book that showed that this thing is actually a physical object.
Usually when they get reproduced in books, only with all we see is that they should be free.
Now, Chinese paintings don't have frames in the European sense.
And you thought about freedom as part of as part of our course.
But, you know, this has a framing to that as it has.
It has a physicality. And, of course, it has the possibility of extension there.
Now, this is quite a small hand school in the sense that the pictorial surface of it,
you know, when it's unrolled, it's about that size and it can be looked at as well.
But once hand, schools don't tend to be much bigger than that.
And this picture, you know, gives you some sense of what they like,
sort of physically the actual origins of the hand scroll are probably in very early forms of Chinese text.
The very earliest forms of Chinese text before paper had been invented.
The Chinese that paper they didn't invented until about, you know, time of the Roman Empire, the turn of the Christian era.
And before that, the four forms of writing were on bamboo strips, which were then kind of banded together to make a rule.
So you unrolled it and you've got you've got the whole text.
And this is all of Chinese are at the University of Chicago kind of demonstrating how you're looking at a hand scroll.
And here's me with a bunch of students looking at one of the hand scrolls in the in the collection of the Boldly and Bodleian Library.
Now, you can see from the whole human picture that, you know, especially if you look here,
you know, there's a lot more of it than he's actually looking at. If you go to the Victorian Albert Museum, Chinese painting exhibition,
which I hope you all will cause fabulous exhibitions once in a lifetime chance to see things of this quality altogether in Britain.
The you know, you might see a hand scroll kind of completely unrolled, you know,
and they can be vast lengths in or they can be very, very, very, very long.
But that's not the way they were looked at in China. They were never completely unrolled.
So what happens is you you unroll a bit and you look at that and then you're all
up and then you unroll another bit and you look at that and then your role. Nobody knew that.
So the thing is, never a pictorial field is looked up completely apart from anything else.
You couldn't look at them completely in order to see the whole thing. You know,
you'd have to stand very well back and you'll see in the museum what people
have to do is kind of walk along the case and look at it sort of day by day.
So. So he's you know, he's got these hands.
He's kind of looking at it.
So when I think about the kinds of audiences for pictures like this now, obviously there's a group of people you're looking at one of these things.
But, you know, Weltman roars He I actually see it.
You know, she probably can't see it now. Wow. Yeah.
This is really what this is designed for. This is quite an intimate format.
Quite a small number of people are going to look at this at at any one at any one time.
Doesn't mean that more than one person couldn't. But it's it really, you know, the mechanics of the thing.
And you either have to hold it in your hands or you have to do what I've done here,
which is, you know, the thing is unrolled and then a weight is put on it.
Because, of course, if you want, roll it and let it go. It just goes to you know, it rolls it's it rolls itself up again.
And schools can be painted either on paper or on cell.
Those are the two main surfaces. So it's probably the older an earlier surface.
So the reading of silkworms, because back in China, way, way, way back, you know,
before into the into the BCE millennia was papers invented around about one hundred, know around about 100 A.D. And they both have.
No specific material, properties, papers, much more absorbent, no paper will absorb colour, water, colour, more than ink.
More than more than. Well, those are the two main surfaces.
But in both cases, the actual painted surface is then backed onto paper so that a hard scrawl is out is physically rather complicated object.
It's not just, you know, a roll of paper. That's a piece of a long piece of paper that's been painted on and then rolled up.
It's a piece of paper or in fact, several pieces of paper because of big or sell,
because a big one may have several sections which are then pasted down on a sort of thicker paper which provides the kind of support for it.
And when the thing's rolled up, you know, it may well have wrappers and outsides and so on.
So it hasn't you know, it's quite a complex kind of physical object.
So that's the that's the Hans school. So we've gone wall painting Hans Gold and I want to go overhanging school.
The hanging straw is slightly later.
Format in Chinese history probably came into being in the fifth sixth centuries A.D. and they
may well have their origins in kind of religious banners that were carried in processions.
And the hanging scroll or a vertical scroll, as it's sometimes called view is always, you know, more what higher than it is.
What I wanted the effects of this is that it fits more comfortably onto a screen.
This is the whole picture. This is is a detail of Hansel.
And this is a home school which does fit completely onto the screen or indeed onto the page of the book.
And I think it's arguable that the examples of people choosing books,
the history for writing about the history of Chinese painting tend to go more towards schools than hand
stores for the simple mechanical reason that they are more easily fixable onto the onto the page.
Now, how did people look at the hanging store as its name suggests?
It hangs and it can be hung on a wall.
But more importantly, or in fact, in the main period,
most of the evidence we have for people looking at them in the in the extent of people kind
of that there are lots of paintings to show people looking at paintings like this one.
And you can see here that they're not looking at this painting hanging on a wall.
What's happening is a servant here has a bamboo stick with a small kind of metal fork in it and they're holding the painting up.
And you'll notice that the man who's looking at it and talking about it,
I think this gesture suggests that he's making a point about the man in way about having some kind of interaction, some kind of conversation about it.
You know, that is that he isn't just looking. It's actually holding the thing as well.
He's actually handling it. So there's an engagement with the thing which is not so different.
You know, the hand scroll is the one that you've kind of got to hold. You don't have to hold a hanging scroll.
But the evidence from the period is that people did handle them.
And and that may well have a lot to do with, you know, if you think about the composition of the thing.
Right. So let's let's look at this. If I if I you know, if I said,
where's the middle of the picture and you thought about if you think about drawing a diagonal between those two points, you end up there.
Right. And it wasn't much happening that, you know, this doesn't seem to be the thing.
But if you imagine that instead of that, your you're holding the thing, pulling it kind of up close to you,
then this area where there's a whole lot more visual interest and a whole lot more going on is is what this what you're kind of engaging with.
So we might think they are about the relationship between the kinds of compositions the artists favoured and the and the contexts of viewing,
the contexts of looking in the. So that's the.
So that's, you know, more painting hand scroll hanging score.
Now another format for painting. I mean, the main theory, but one that doesn't survive as such is the painted screen or the screen panel.
We've got some Safire. So a number of important pre made painting.
So this is a this is a 10th or 11th century painting may have originally existed as screen pandan.
So what do I mean by screen panels? Well, let's look at this painting. Here's a light.
15TH century painting of an imperial audience. So you've got an empire is long gone.
And you've got officials kind of standing around talking.
And you'll see that he's seated in front of this large wooden frame and that set into this large wooden frame.
There's a landscape painting. See these mountains here? So there's a large painting behind it.
And this is probably painted on sale on paper, but in one of these wooden frames.
Now, obviously, this is a much more permanent form of display.
The hand scroll and the hanging scroll share the characteristic that when you're not looking at them, they're ruled out.
And actually, they spend most of their lives rolled up because they are all watercolours, you know, and they fade and they're easily damaged.
So there's no tradition of kind of just banging on the wall and going away.
All right. The thing even things that are put on the wall are changed and looked at according to seasons and another kind of temporal constraint.
But these screen panels, obviously, these things are huge and heavy and it's kind of I can't show you an example or rather what I could show you,
but I haven't got a slide on this one of these wooden frames because some of these wooden frames survived from the 16th century.
And museums, we've got some examples of that.
And then we've got very big surviving hand hanging schools, which probably began their life as screen panels, but they don't survive in that format.
So there's no saying that nowhere in the wall. Is there surviving, being screened with its main painting.
And if what you've got is the woodwork survives and some paintings survive and this is an example.
It's a very, very big painting. It's now mounted as a hanging school.
It's probably it's about one types of probably slightly larger than it's appearing on the screen here.
It's physically very large. But this was probably once one of those wooden wooden panels.
So we can't wake up to where we're kind of intuitive.
So we've got wall paintings and scrolls, hanging stalls, screen panels, and then a format that is conventionally called in in English,
the Alba Leaf, which is a small painting which was viewed kind of mantid in a book.
Now, here's a scene of many gentlemen looking at painting and they're looking at now.
And these are probably 90 paintings. These are probably fine paintings.
But again, they're kind of you know, they're looking at it sort of they're looking at it together.
This is a small thing. Yeah.
This is an album leaf version by the artist Sharon Jewel.
His drawings from life. So just like some of the things I've been showing you are very much bigger in reality than they appear on the screen.
This is very much smaller reality. This is about. This is about this size.
In reality, it's got a you know, it's a very, very small. It's it's a very small thing.
Here's another one. This cat, you know, comes from the same album, Drones for Light.
So this is an ERPs. So that's my screen. That's an album leaf.
This is it. Now, this is itself an album leaf. So this picture of a looking album leaf is itself an album leaf.
It's only that size. That's an album leaf. That's an album leaf.
That's an album.
So one of the things that that I think that this comparison that and that me is that you can't say certain styles, school with certain formats.
That just doesn't work because, you know, here's it.
Here's here's a style that is very, you know, very detailed, very meticulous, very highly coloured.
And it's more or less the same date as this one, which obviously is much more sketchy.
It's a monochrome ink. It doesn't have any. It doesn't have any of that kind of detail.
And I have actually going to slide. You know, there's the. There's the two kind of things together.
So same format, very different style. So what you can't say is certain styles are always, you know, go with certain formats.
There are a range of styles in the main period and almost all of the formats can be used for almost all of the stars.
The number of variables is quite complicated. And then there's one last format of painting that I want to show you.
And that's the only format of painting that I'm talking about that was new in the main period.
So all of these formats exist. In the main period, but they had been developed at different periods in the past.
But but all developed. The only real novelty is the fine painting in the sense of the folding van painting.
Now, obviously, this is just the painted surface.
Again, obviously, this blowed up huge compared to is it has the steps that make it into a folding van.
Men and women both carried fans in China.
There are kind of a central part of kind of being being dressed.
And we might want to think about kind of the viewers for that form, because it's a very small scale.
It's almost an intimate format. You know, it's something that you carry with you.
Again, it's something that is not permanently visible because of.
Know are opened and closed. So it's not there all the time.
And so we might want to think about, you know, the kinds of audience for that. Obviously, you know, if you let people or w you will see it,
but it's different from the kinds of concentrated looking where you've got a party of gentlemen looking at things.
I just want to talk a little bit more about kind of looking at things because here's a here's a set of paintings, again,
from about fifteen hundred, which show former activities that are particularly associated in the Ming period with with the gentleman.
These are these are the kind of leisure pursuits that are kind of a gentleman of leisure and elegance and style is supposed to be into.
These are the four things he's supposed to be into and they are called in Chinese kanji for one, which means Zitter chess, calligraphy, painting.
So the first one is playing the zither.
This is a kind of musical instrument called The Chin. That gentleman in particular played Chee.
The Chinese is waitI, we often call it in English by the Japanese name.
Gord's is a game of strategy play with lots of black and white characters.
And here are a group of gentlemen play playing the game and then calligraphy.
And his gentleman kind of goes blank sheet of paper was it's a brush and he's kind of he's writing on it and then painting.
Now there's something distinctive about painting here, isn't that if we look at zither, chess and calligraphy,
what we see is a gentleman doing the activity, playing, playing chess, doing the calligraphy.
These gentlemen are painting, they're looking at painting, and they're engaged in acts of connoisseurship.
They're looking at painting.
And I think significantly, because there's so this is how the thing is kind of conceptualised, that they're looking at painting together.
This is a social activity. It's not a solitary activity. It's a bunch of gentlemen looking at painting, looking at painting together.
And we can see a whole range of the form that says there's a blowing up, a kind of detail of it there.
So we've actually got a range of formats.
We've got a screen panel behind him, maybe screen panel, which is not previously hanging school that he's looking at.
And we've got Hans stools, more homes, schools and albums.
How do I know these are hand schools are not hanging, but when they're rolled up.
The answer is how many stores have these protruding roller ends, whereas Huntsville's don't.
Which is how you can tell when a school is not this still rolled up.
You can tell what kind of a witch of the form it's in.
So this is a painting of gentlemen looking at painting, which itself shows all the possible or almost all of.
Exactly. But almost all the possible formats of painting.
But I think the important point about it is that conceptually, discursively painting this is a picture of the theme of this painting is painting.
And the way that you paint a painting of painting is not to sure somebody doing it, but to show gentlemen looking at it.
So conceptually, the act of looking is very important to to the kind of the idea, the whole experience.
Now, in the time left to me,
I just want to think about some of the kind of ways or materials that we have for thinking about this kind of wider topic of of what painting is.
One of the things that we have to take on board is that as well as a very large number of paintings from China's.
We also have a very large amount of writing from China's past about the theme of painting biographies of artists, theoretical writings.
There's a huge body of painting, writing about painting.
And actually we've got writing about painting from earlier and we've got actual painting.
So some of the kind of most important theoretical writing about painting comes down to us from a period earlier than any painting that we've got.
So just for example, you know, one of the most important kind of statements about what makes a painting good comes from the writing of this man,
Sierre, who lives in the 6th century A.D.
And he says, in order to be good, a painter has to be good at six things.
And these are the six things which the painter all has to be has to be good at.
Now, we don't have any paint.
This is too early for us that we don't have any painting from this early date, with the exception of Buddhist wall painting from from Cave Temple.
So we kind of don't really know how this related to the painting of the day.
But what we do know is that in subsequent centuries, this this is a much repeated,
much discussed, much argued over statement, and it shifts its meaning subtly over the centuries.
So, for example, YAHA starts by saying, you know, an artist got to be good to all of these six things.
All right. Well, then happens is that people start to say, well, this is a hierarchy, right?
There are six things. This is the most important one. And this is the least important.
And then we move to stage where people actually say, well, this is a good thing and this is a bad thing.
What makes painting good is it's kind of capturing of the inner spirit of things and capturing the outer appearance of things.
That's actually a bad thing. Now, he doesn't see this at the beginning, but that.
So what you've got here, rather, has with Europe where, you know, I don't know,
Plato's theory of ideal forms gets chewed over again and again and again and again.
And people kind of change their minds about what it means or use it in different ways.
This kind of theoretical writing. And that's just one example. One has to be aware there is this kind of great.
Or do you feel lots of which is translated into English, by the way.
And it's possible to read now a very large amount of material written by Chinese writers
of the past about the art of painting without ever having to read a word written.
In Chinese, there's a lot of there's a lot of translation.
Another thing that people kind of talk about a lot is the relationship between painting and calligraphy.
That's a big kind of theoretical issue.
Here's a 14th century writer telling us that writing and painting essentially are different, but have a have a common have a common origin.
And certainly it's the case that the same material tools are used, the same kinds of brushes are used for both writing and painting.
And of course, many paintings have inscriptions, have inscriptions on them.
The idea that also about the connexion points in painting.
There is one basic rule in poetry and painting. Natural genius and originality links together.
Those cultural are those cultural practises. And so you've got paintings that have kind of inscriptions on them.
Writing paintings also have seals of authorship, which of course are a form of writing which may be put on at the time by the artist,
but may also be put on by subsequent by subsequent owners.
And then, you know, the royalists or the relationship with calligraphy is very close.
And in a world like this, like little, you know, it's kind of hard to say.
Is this a piece of writing with a picture attached or is it a picture with a piece of writing attached or.
Actually, I think the right answer is that these are this is a thing where the writing and the picture are kind of essentially working together.
And in fact, you can understand what's going on in one, what's going on in one without the other.
Now, I said I would talk about this. I just want to I just want to mention a distinction that I find to help the distinction in thinking about this.
And this is a distinction drawn from the realm of anthropology as anthropologists invented these terms.
You make an edict pertaining to the view from Imake means, pertaining to the view from within,
developed within the mind of an individual or a culture of meanings developed in terms of native categories.
Not happy about that phrasing. Sam Eaton is describing the view of a culture from the perspective of those.
Based on cross cultural generalisations, compare with image.
So these these work together. So Emek Ilic explanations are the explanations and the meanings that a culture itself produces.
Right. So, you know, why is this person behaving this way?
You know, they are possessed by an evil spirit. Right.
Might be an image explanation from 50 that possessed by the devil is the kind of thing that people might say in 15th century England today.
We might say this person is mentally unwell. Right. That's an E tip that those are up.
I mean, obviously, we have our Imake explanations. Now, these are not hierarchy.
Neither is better than the other. It's just a good idea to be kind of clear about what it is, what kind of explanations, what ones use it.
So when one says things like, you know, calligraphy and painting are, you know, have a common origin.
That's a kind of impact statement. I use that kind of thing that people themselves said in in the Ming Dynasty.
But Eatock ones are ones that we might use.
We might use none of developed within an individual culture and also be like,
you know, I mean, this modern Chinese people are not mean Chinese people.
So, you know, they might use modern distinctions.
And it's just a helpful way of keeping kind of straight what's in one's mind.
So I just want to finish by looking at some of the I've shown you a couple of the kind of emek things, you know,
theories that existed within China at the period that I'm talking about,
the issues around the relationship to calligraphy or the relationship to poetry.
But I'd like to finish by talking about some kind of ETEC ways of looking at Chinese painting.
Ah, history has has at its disposal and that I use now.
One of them is what you might call technical art history.
That is. Let's study the thing as far as a material object.
Actually, there hasn't been very much of this. The best book on the Chinese painting as a thing, you know, as a how is it together?
What kind of glue is used? How are pigments made? What kind of pigments do they use?
These kind of, you know, the best book in English books in Chinese, of course, for the best book in English is still Robert Manne,
who led Chinese pictorial authors with Other Kommissar, which was written quite a long time ago now.
This is this picture comes off a website from the National Palace Museum in Taipei and
is a rather good kind of illustration of the different sort of formats of painting.
Really, the only time that technical art history gets applied to Chinese painting,
and this is not completely unique to Chinese painting, is when issues of authenticity are at stake.
So here's a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
which they acquired at the beginning of the law at the very, very end of the last century.
And they attributed to an important 10th century artist.
What do you and James K. held? What the man with the 11 hours of lectures on the on the Web said, no, it's a modern free market tomorrow.
So there's a big row about this big kind of you know, there were had to be a whole conference and all kinds of debates and so on.
And I'm one of the things that they did as part of this was kind of investigate the thing physically.
So that's why I'm able to show you this is this is this is a painting on silk.
So this is the actual silk surface, which, as you can see is, you know, it's it is in lots of great shape.
You know, it's there's a lot of holes in it. And so here it is, as you would see it in the mat mounted,
remounted again on paper and with the missing patches kind of touched in in order to, you know, in order to make the thing viewable.
But that's that's the physical surface that actually survives.
But that's. This is a real case, this kind of investigation.
I can show you lots of pictures of what lots of things look like when they're off the mountings.
This is this is a slightly kind of unique thing. Then we might talk about, you know, one of art history is kind of big clubs.
And that's that's the approach through kind of iconography, you know.
What does this picture mean? Well, obviously, kind of iconography is going to be culturally specific.
So, you know, unless you know that this is the images of kind of fish leaping upstream are
images that relate to wishes for success in the imperial examination system.
You became an official, you know, so it's this kind of sense. A huge effort goes like, no, I'm I'm Freeland's, this is like finals, you know.
Huge leap. Talaat and I turn into a drag it or I talk, I turn into an official.
Right. If you don't know that, it's just a picture of a fish. Right.
So iconography always has to be, you know, always has to be kind of culturally specific.
And you know, something like this one which we looked at before. Again,
is probably a specific historical story about the duty of the righteous ruler to listen to criticism from
his officials on the duty of the righteous official to offer criticism to the to the righteous ruler.
So, you know, there's a specific there's a specific kind of iconography going in which you can't walk out if you don't know it.
You know, you can't work these kind of things out. You know, similarly, you know, if you don't know who the bottle you ordered mortal ball is,
you're not going to have a great deal of a handle on on what's going on in a picture in a picture like this.
And I can orthography might not seem obvious, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any.
So if we take something like this kind of very, very famous 11th century Chinese painting, you know it.
What is it? It's a landscape. You know, it's magic. It's early spring.
However, the people of work, particularly on this, argue that these Keer, the kind of composition is iconography,
that these are paintings which were produced in the environment of the imperial court.
And that, if you like and I mean, this is this is the composition of this is very strongly dominated by the central mountain.
It's a very kind of central composition's name. And that that that is related to ideas about the central city of the emperor.
You know, that this is this is a particular kind of imperial core art, which is about,
you know, the ways in which emperors all that are at the middle of things.
So that can be iconography there.
And even when we even probably kind of don't know about pictures, you know, I can show pictures have a range of functions in in China.
And often we need to know the iconography to know about this. They can record things like this occasion when, you know,
cranes are appearing in front of the above the imperial palace or kind of miraculous things appearing in the sky above a Buddhist temple or,
you know, the way the emperors like to have fun. These are all kind of recordings or a particular trip that that this man,
while he made a pilgrimage to a holy mountain or even just scenes of what the what the imperial capital of Beijing, Beijing looks like.
Now, I said I was going to talk about this distinction to what is a common compound made up of two, a picture of PLA, a painting in the 17th century.
This man Ninefold Goodman, CNN said this in ancient times there were pictures, but no paintings.
Pictures depict objects, portrayed people or transcribe events, ask for paintings.
The same isn't necessarily true for them to insist on.
Some specific subject of the representation of some event is very low class.
And what do you mean by that?
And here's the kind of distinction that might have been made in the Ming Dynasty, is that this is a painting, that this is just a picture.
And this is partly about the social status of the artist.
And this is a gentleman, an educated gentleman, an amateur painter, an educated amateur painter.
And this is a this is an artisan, but it's also about the particular kind of style of the things here.
You know, this is about back to go on CNN.
Know one uses a broad brush and execute you as the thing is in a painting, cloudy hills and misty grows beautiful.
This boulders that maybe figures are no figures to insist on some specific subject eye.
This painting is not about a meticulous transcription of what the secret looks like.
This is very invested in the details of what people are wearing or what the streets
look like and all the details of things for sale in there in the city streets.
So in a sense, in 17th century times, this is a painting. But this is just a picture.
And that's a hierarchical distinction between them. So lots of the things that survive nowadays were not thought of as painting at the time.
Here's an anonymous, again, religious painting from the 15th century, or here's the kind of ritual portraits these were used in, in funerary rites.
You know, after people after people are dying. Very meticulous transcription of, you know, her earrings look like.
Hey, Paul. Looks like. And so on. So, again, this is a this is a picture and not a painting.
That doesn't mean that paintings weren't pictures weren't important,
but it means that they had certain specific functions and that they are somewhat lower than the than the category of painting.
Just chalk this one in really to make the point about the category of of.
I mean, again, this is a picture. It's anonymous. It's a picture that's actually made out of writing.
So it's made out of the characters of a religious text.
Well, what these gentlemen are doing is not this is not pictures.
This is this is painting. And that's a category that has a kind of social role as well.
And one of the things that our history is done more recently is Tom.
And this is, again, a broader art, historical thing. But the study of Chinese paintings is part of this broader trend.
There's a peer bit more attention to what we call what you might call a reception that is not quite so much on not think only about what artists do,
but also think about what audiences see and to think about the social construction
of audiences and what kind of person it is looking in what kind of context.
And that directs our attention towards images like this, but also back towards this set.
And think, well, you know what's good, what's going on here.
So there the thing on reception, that's that's a relatively new kind of trend within art history.
And that's a kind of ETEC approach, I think, because, you know, there is not this was the issue that people kind of engage with at the time,
but it's one that seems more productive for all of history today.