The Beauty's Face in Later Chinese Painting
One of familiar truths abt Chinese ptgs is that while the faces of men in them are permitted to exhibit particular traits that give the effect, at least, of revealing indiv. character, women's faces are simply depicted according to some type of beauty, and within a given period and school of indiv. style are more or less uniform, indistinguishable. But, like most familiar truths, this one has its limits, isn't universally applicable. The kinds of ptg about which we make this point are works such as these: Ku Hung-chung, Ch'iu Ying.
The faces will of course differ by period, and according to individual style--as Ch'iu Ying's differ from his contemporary T'ang Yin's (his "Beauties of Shu") in ways that any good connoisseur can define. Within a particular period and school and individual style, however, they tend to be more or less uniform. But not always. What I want to do today is explore briefly the exceptions, types of differentiation in depictions of women's faces, concentrating on the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of my current interest. First, I will look briefly into the phenomenon of how the somewhat blurred and permeable line that divides portraits of women from generic pictures of beautiful women permits crossovers, both real and fictional.
I will also argue that there is a period from late Ming through mid-18th century or so--which is the period in which most interesting ptgs of women are done, the ones on which my study concentrates--when even the generic depictions of beautiful women, the genre called in Chinese mei-jen hua, exhibit subtle but significant differentiations, nuances that can signify or at least suggest distinctions of mood, situation, social class, and so forth It is true that the social identities and roles of the mei-jen depicted are usually left largely unspecified, so as to leave more room for the construction of male fantasies around them. But mostly they can be thought of as belonging to the broad class of concubines and courtesans, who in this period could be presented in literature and painting as objects of romantic love and sexual desire, as proper wives ordinarily weren't. (Exceptions, of course.) And the possibility of romantic encounters and liaisons is exactly what most of the pictures are meant to conjure up.
When the period of my main concern is over, that is by late 18th-early 19c, what remains are the familiar winsome, simpering beauties that any traditional Chinese painting specialist or collector will immediately think of if you say shih-nü hua, the all-embracing term for pictures of women. (Fei Tan-hsü 1821, Ku Lo a bit later.) When I tell them I am interested in late-period pictures of beautiful women, I sometimes have to spend the next hour looking at these, without much enthusiasm. This is another category that my talk tonight, like my larger study, will mostly leave out as relatively uninteresting. They are the "respectable" side of beautiful-women painting--decorous, associated with particular name-artists--where the ones I will show are mostly not respectable objects for collecting.
In narrative painting of all periods, the roles and situations of the women may sometimes require that the artist alter their usually impassive expressions, as here in the Sou-shan t'u (Clearing Out the Mountain) scenes in which the demon-women are attacked by fierce birds and beasts. (Details from the late Sung example in the Palace Museum, Beijing.) But these are special cases, exceptions that lie somewhat outside our subject.
Turning to one of our central problems, the ambiguities or cross-genre slippages that permitted portraits to be read as mei-jen and vice-versa, we can begin by noting several cases in which generic beautiful-woman pictures have been misrepresented as portraits of particular women--the well-known example at the right furnished with an interpolated inscription claiming it as a portrait of Liu Ju-shih, the courtesan-poet of the Ming-Qing transition; the one at left, in the British Museum, cataloged and published as "Portrait of a Lady." These are deceptions fairly easy to detect--the settings and postures and attributes of the figures belong to the conventions of mei-jen, chosen to present them as sexually inviting and accessible, and are quite unsuitable for portraits, even of women who had emerged, as Liu Ju-shih had, from the world of the bordellos. (The setting of the so-called Liu Ju-shih portrait has been cut away, but can be reconstructed from another version of the composition, known through an old publication.) These indicators of accessibility would not have been tolerated, I have argued, in their portraits by the subjects themselves. The pictures have in fact been "upgraded," that is to say falsified, in later times by dealers or other owners to make them more respectable and saleable.
In a similar way, a set of twelve paintings of beautiful palace ladies in their chambers, done as panels of a screen in the late K'ang-hsi period, were misidentified as portraits of the "Twelve Consorts of the Yung-cheng Emperor" and published and exhibited as that, until their true character was clarified through the discovery of a document revealing their true origin.
I would like to be able to say, then, that distinguishing portraits from pin-ups presents no real problem, if only one understands the codes of signification for the two genres that were familiar to the artists and their audiences. And for these examples, that should be true, I think. But the matter is not so simple. The very fact that the deceptions went undetected for so long testifies, at least, that the codes had been largely forgotten by the time the pictures were transformed, moved from an uncollectible category to a collectible one.
Recent writings by Judith Zeitlin have presented cases in Ming-Ch'ing fiction and drama in which the crossovers between generic beauty and portrait are crucial to the story. This might sometimes, we can speculate, have been a literary device for praising the woman's beauty: she was so lovely that a true portrait of her was indistinguishable from a beautiful-woman painting. I am inclined to believe, in any case, that for the painters and their immediate clientele, cases of confusion would have been rare and exceptional. When the artist portrays the woman ambiguously, as sometimes happens, it is for a deliberate purpose.
The face of the woman who appears in the portrait of Ho T'ien-chang by Ch'en Hung-shou, for instance, although she is presumably to be identified as Ho's wife or a favorite concubine, appears to belong to an ideal type rather than to a particular person--this in contrast to the face of Ho T'ien-chang himself, which asserts an individual identity.
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