Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China 9789004427631

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Hua Yan (1682–1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China

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Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel In co-operation with P.K. Bol, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, W.L. Idema, H.T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 148

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl

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Hua Yan (1682–1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China

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By

Kristen Loring Chiem

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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iv Cover illustration: Zhang Sijiao, Portrait of Xinluo Shanren, dated 1767. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 63.6 × 53 cm. Tianjin Museum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chiem, Kristen L., author. Title: Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the making of the artist in early modern China / by Kristen Loring Chiem. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: Sinica leidensia, 0169-9563 ; vol.148 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020012216 (print) | LCCN 2020012217 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004427631 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004429468 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hua, Yan, 1682-1756--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC ND1049.H77 C45 2020 (print) | LCC ND1049.H77 (ebook) | DDC 759.951--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012216 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012217

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9563 isbn 978-90-04-42763-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-42946-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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For my children

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Contents Contents

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Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Figures xi Introduction 1 1 Seeing Hua Yan 4 2 Painting in Early Modern China 15 1 The Mountain Man of Xinluo 18 1 Portraiture and Persona 21 2 The Zhe School Poets 29 3 The Sojourning Artist 39 2 Lyricism in Words and Images 57 1 On Transformation 58 2 Artist and Patron 63 3 The Human Experience 70 4 Singing of the Object 78 3 Painting the Garden from Life 89 1 The Art of Social Distinction 91 2 Hua Yan’s Circle, 1740s and 1750s 98 3 Garden and Society 106 4 Picturing People, Past and Present 133 1 Literary Gatherings as Aspirational Subjects 134 2 Gender and the Garden 145 3 Borders, Travel, and Empire 153 4 Seasons of Life 159 5 The Xinluo School 163 1 The Zhejiang Legacy in Yangzhou 164 2 Defining the Xinluo School 176 3 The Shanghai School 181 Epilogue: Lives of Jiangnan Artists, 1700–1900 193 Bibliography 199 Index 214

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Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Paintings of birds and flowers, as it turns out, are not always a pretty subject. In the world in which I write, the politics of nation, academia, family, and friends exist alongside the birds, flowers, and other creatures that inhabit their own impure worlds. They, too, are sometimes beautiful, but mostly irreverent. Without them, I would not see as clearly the humanity of Hua Yan and his world. This project evolved over many years, inspired by mentors who imparted levity and gravity in equal measure. I owe special thanks to Hui-shu Lee, Peter Sturman, and Ronald Egan, who challenged me to think deeply about the paintings and poems that formed the basis of this study. Lothar von Falkenhausen, Burglind Jungmann, and Richard von Glahn helped to refine the methodology of this study in its early stages. Eugene Wang and Bai Qianshen offered inspiration and techniques for making sense of even the most obscure sources. I am especially grateful for the support of John Berninghausen and Cynthia Packert, who have honored me with their friendship for over two decades. The research and writing of this book could not have been achieved without the generous support of several grants and institutions. While at UCLA, I received support from the Andrew Mellon Fellowship, Title VI National Resource Fellowship, Edward A. Dickinson History of Art Fellowship, and Dissertation Year Fellowship. A Fulbright-IIE Fellowship supported my research in Taiwan and provided innumerable avenues for developing the concepts and materials used in this study. Support from Pepperdine University, including the Dean’s Research Grant, Seaver Research Council, Fine Arts Endowed Fellowship, and Center for Women in Leadership Fellowship supported my travel and various research needs. Many friends and colleagues in Taiwan, mainland China, and Japan, including Chen Yunru, Lin Lina, Itakura Masaaki, and Gigi Zhang, provided introductions that made possible this research and its publication. I also thank my students, Hannah Fleming, Tang Yiwen, Deborah Dunkel, Ella Gonzalez, Amy Kahng, Kristin Brisbois, and Matt Finley, whose research assistance and enthusiasm helped move this project swiftly to completion. My colleagues and editors at Brill, especially Patricia Radder, Anne Holmes, Inge Klompmakers, and an anonymous reader, offered astute suggestions and guidance as the manuscript neared its final stages. I thank my friends, colleagues, and editors, for their wisdom and grace. With sharp pencils and discerning eyes, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, Amanda Herring, Kim Richter, Lisa Boutin Vitela, Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Bryan Givens, and Elisa Mandell each offered valuable insights at various stages of this project.

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The advice and good humor of Phat Chiem, Yui Suzuki, Melia Belli Bose, Lara Blanchard, Zoe Kwok, Peng Ying-chen, Hao Sheng, Joe Scheier-Dolberg, Evan Dawley, Jiyeon Kim, Julia Orell, Rebecca Hall, and Michelle Bailey kept my work moving forward in new and often unexpected directions. Vanessa Cuellár, Linda Loring, and Christina Wagner reminded me when it was time to come up for air. Most of all, I thank my family for their unwavering love and patience. I completed this manuscript beside my husband and best friend, who witnessed the beginning of this journey nearly three decades ago and championed me always. My parents deserve my deepest gratitude. Without my father, my mother wrung her hands as I traveled afar in pursuit of knowledge, perspective, and other impractical things. She encouraged me through the start of my career and the arrival of my son, mere days after filing my dissertation. Although she did not live to meet my daughter, or see this book in print, I know that she would be its most avid reader. She would insist that I dedicate this book not to her, but to my children. For their courageous and inquisitive hearts, I wish them a lifetime full of wonder.

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FiguresFigures

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Figures 1 2

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Zhang Sijiao, Portrait of Xinluo Shanren, dated 1767. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 63.6 × 53 cm. Tianjin Museum. 3 Lan Ying, Red Friend, 16th–mid-17th c. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 148.9 × 47.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ex Coll: C.C. Wang Family, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Morse, In Honor of Douglas Dillon, 1979.26. 8 Hua Yan and Wei Shijie, Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall: Portrait of Hua Yan as a Young Man, 1705. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 130 × 47.2 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of Various Donors by Exchange, 2001.120. 22 Dai Jin, The Hermit Xu You Resting by a Stream, 1400s. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk, 138 × 75 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. John L. Severance Fund, 1974.45. 24 Hua Yan, Self Portrait, 1727. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 130 × 51 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 24 Hua Yan, Portrait of Wu Shicang, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 107 × 50.1 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 34 Chen Hongshou, Self-Portrait, 1635. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 202.1 × 97.8 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 35 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 8. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20h. 41 Lan Ying, Landscapes After Song and Yuan Masters, 1642. Leaf L. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 31.6 × 24.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Sackler Fund, 1970.2-2L. 42 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 14. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20n. 43 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 5. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20e. 44 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 1. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20a. 46 Hua Yan, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, 1730. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 179 × 67.9 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum Purchase, The Arthur M. Sackler Collection, Y1969–75. 50

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Figures Hua Yan, Conversation in Autumn, 1732. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper, 115.3 × 39.7 cm (overall 281.5 × 71.7 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art. John L. Severance Fund, 1954.263. 55 Hua Yan, Giant Peng, ca. 1732–1738. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 176.1 × 88.6 cm. Sumitomo Collection, Sen-Oku Hakuko-Kan, Kyoto. 59 Hua Yan, Giant Peng, ca. 1732–1738. Detail. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 176.1 × 88.6 cm. Sumitomo Collection, Sen-Oku Hakuko-Kan, Kyoto. 60 Bada Shanren, Flying Fish, 1693. Album leaf, ink on paper, 24.4 × 23 cm. Shanghai Museum. 62 Hua Yan, Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peaches, 1742. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 271.5 × 137 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 65 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 1. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 71 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 5. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 72 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 6. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 74 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, ca. 1745. Leaf 1. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.7 × 27.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 76 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, ca. 1745. Leaf 2. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.7 × 27.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 77 Hua Yan, Red and White Herbaceous Peonies, 1731. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 94 × 97.3 cm. National Art Museum of China, Beijing. 80 Yun Shouping, “Peonies,” in Album of Flowers and Landscapes, 1672. Leaf 2. Album of 12 leaves, ink and colors on paper, 28.5 × 43.0 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 83 Shitao, “Peonies,” in Album of Flowers and Portrait of Shitao, 1698. Leaf D. Album of 9 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.6 × 34.5 cm. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Gift of Arthur M. Sackler, S1987.207.4. 85 Hua Yan, White Peony and Rocks, 1752. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 127.6 × 57.2cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 13.220.119. 87 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 3. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum. 93 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 8. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum. 94 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 7. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum. 97

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Li Shan, Flowers and Birds, 1731. Leaf E. Album leaf, ink and pale colors on paper. 28.6 × 38.8 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of John B. Elliott, Class of 1951, Y1976—L.42E. 102 Jin Nong, Plum Blossoms, 1757. Leaf D. Album of 12 leaves, ink on paper. 25.4 × 29.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Edward Elliott Family Collection, Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1986.495d. 105 Hua Yan, “Thrush on a Bamboo Branch,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 109 Hua Yan, “Mantis Stalking a Cicada,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 6. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 109 Hua Yan, “Kingfisher Holding a Fish,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 5. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.1 × 25.5 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 111 Hua Yan, “Plants and Insects,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 12. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.3 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 111 Hua Yan, “Frogs Fighting,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 8. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 113 Hua Yan, “Wildfire,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 2. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 113 Hua Yan, “Bee and Tiger,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.1 × 25.5 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 115 Hua Yan, “Squirrel on a Branch,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 10. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 115 Hua Yan, “Turtle,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 11. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 116 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 3. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 26 × 16.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 117 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 10. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 118 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 7. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 120

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xiv 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Figures Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 12. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 122 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 6. Album of 10 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 123 Li Di, The Contentment and Delight of an Abundant Harvest, 12th–13th c. Album leaf, ink and color on silk, 24.2 × 24.2 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 125 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 6. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum. 126 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 4. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum. 127 Shitao, Vegetables, 17th–18th c. Album of 4 leaves, ink and color on paper, 28.0 × 21.5 cm. Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection. 129 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 2, album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum. 130 Hua Yan, Banquet on a Spring Evening in the Garden of Peaches and Plums, 1748. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 180.2 × 95.5 cm. Tianjin Museum. 137 Hua Yan, Golden Valley Garden, 1732. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 178.9 × 94.1 cm. Shanghai Museum. 140 Hua Yan, Elegant Gathering, 1746. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 180.7 x 94.8 cm. Shanghai Museum. 142 Chen Hongshou, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, 1725. Detail. Handscroll, ink and slight colors on paper, 41.6 × 431.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 143 Hua Yan, Lady and Willow Tree, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 130.6 × 54.8 cm. Tianjin Museum. 146 Attributed to Tang Yin, Lady with a Fan in the Autumn Breeze, undated. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 77.1 × 39.3 cm. Shanghai Museum. 147 Hua Yan, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, 1737. Leaf 6. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 19.5 × 16.1 cm. Shanghai Museum. 150 Hua Yan, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, 1737. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 19.5 × 16.1 cm. Shanghai Museum. 151 Hua Yan, Snow on Mount Tian, 1755. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper, 159.1 × 52.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 155 Hua Yan, Camel in Snow, 1746. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 139.7 × 58.4 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 157 Hua Yan, “Bodhidharma” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 1. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 158

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Hua Yan, Sounds of Autumn, 1755. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 94.0 × 113.5 cm. Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. 160 Luo Ping, Portrait of Mr. Dongxin ( Jin Nong), undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 113.7 × 59.3 cm. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou. 168 Luo Ping, Portrait of Mr. Ding Jingshen (Ding Jing), undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 108.1 × 60.7 cm. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou. 169 Luo Ping, Portrait of Yuan Mei. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 158.5 × 66.7 cm. Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto. AK790. 170 Ren Xiong (1823–1857), Self Portrait. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 177.4 × 78.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. 171 Luo Ping, Portrait of the Poets Wang Shizhen and Zhu Yizun, 1773. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 167.5 × 56.6 cm. © Trustees of The British Museum, London. 172 Luo Ping, Poetic Concepts, inspired by the poems of Jiang Kui, 1774. Leaf 10. Album of 11 leaves, ink and color on paper, 24.1 × 30.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1964.5j 173 Luo Ping, Drinking in the Bamboo Garden, dated 1773. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 80 × 54.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913.220.34 175 Wang Su, Bringing the Message of Victory to Tung-shan, dated 1862. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 143.5 × 80.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, In Memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986.267.26. 178 Wang Su, Children Engaged in the Games of the Four Seasons, not dated. Leaf L. Album of 20 leaves, ink and color on paper, 21.5 × 16 cm. Dr. S. Y. Yip Collection, Hong Kong. 179 Wang Su, Children Engaged in the Games of the Four Seasons, not dated. Leaf 9. Album of 20 leaves, ink and color on paper, 21.5 × 16 cm. Dr. S. Y. Yip Collection, Hong Kong. 179 Li Yu, Landscapes, Birds, and Insects, 1901. Leaf G. Album of twelve leaves, ink and color on paper, 14.7 × 21.7 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection. 180 Li Yu, Landscapes, Birds, and Insects, 1901. Leaf I. Album of twelve leaves, ink and color on paper, 14.7 × 21.7 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection. 181 Ren Bonian, Figures in a Landscape, 1881. Scroll 1 in set of 4 hanging scrolls, ink and color on paper, 149 × 39.7 cm. Richard Fabian Collection. 183 Ni Tian, Garden of the Golden Valley, 1888. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 179.3 × 93.4 cm. Shanghai Museum. 184

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Figures Yu Li, Studying on an Autumn Night, late 19th–early 20th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 145.2 × 78.2 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection. 186 Wang Li, Peonies and Birds, 1877. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 127.8 × 63.7 cm. Shanghai Museum. 187 Zhu Cheng, Album of Birds and Flowers, 19th century. Leaf 5. Album leaf, ink and color on paper, 24.3 × 40.3 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei. 188 Xugu, “White Cat Looking for Prey,” in Miscellaneous Album, 1895. Leaf 7. Album of 10 leaves, ink and color on paper, 34.7 × 40.6 cm. Shanghai Museum. 189 Wang Li, Cat, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 120.3 × 39.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, In Memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986.267.61. 190 Xugu, “Squirrel Looking for Food,” in Miscellaneous Album, 1895. Leaf 8. Album of 10 leaves, ink and color on paper, 34.7 × 40.6 cm. Shanghai Museum. 191 Pan Tianshou, Red Lotus, 1963. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper. 125 × 65.5 cm. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum, Hangzhou. 196

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Introduction Introduction

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Introduction In the inscription on his posthumous painting entitled Portrait of Xinluo Shanren from 1767, the Yangzhou artist Zhang Sijiao 張四教 (active 1723–after 1765) recalled visiting Hua Yan around 1738 (Fig. 1). At that time, Hua Yan, a pivotal Jiangnan artist, was in his mid-fifties and struggling to be recognized as an artist in Yangzhou. Hua Yan shared two significant insights with his disciple Zhang Sijiao, which Zhang later recounted in his inscription: Although painting is an art, art can be looked down upon, thus one must first establish its value, so that [one’s art] will not be looked down upon. It is by studying that one can convey one’s learning, and it is by nourishing oneself that one may rectify one’s virtue. My painting principle is as simple as this. 雖然，畫，藝也；藝成則賤，必先有以立乎其貴者，乃賤之而不得． 是在讀書以傳其識，修已以端其品，吾之畫法如是而已．1

Hua Yan remarked that art, as in a craft or skill, had lost its privileged place in society.2 This might seem surprising, for it is well known that artists flocked to sell their work in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, where salt merchants famously made and spent their fortunes. Paintings that visualized literary heritage, garden motifs, and lifestyles of leisure adorned the walls of grand estates, lending color to their grey tiles and white walls. However, while paintings revealed the wealth and status of their patrons, the art was not the foremost objective behind their purchases. In eighteenth-century Yangzhou social positions were drawn along the lines of the literary, rather than the visual field. Artists and patrons negotiated their positions in this field by wielding their social, economic, and cultural capital according to its particular rules.3 Working in the city, Hua Yan perceived that painting did not achieve the esteemed status of 1 Zhang Sijiao, noting Hua Yan’s advice to him circa 1738. Zhang Sijiao, Portrait of Xinluo Shanren, dated 1767. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 63.6 × 53 cm. Tianjin Museum of Art. For further discussion of this painting, see Chapter Five. 2 Aida Yuen Wong has noted that the term meishu 美術, or “fine art,” did not come into use until the 1910s as a translation of the Japanese term, bijutsu 美術, mirroring the Western concept of fine arts. Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 35–6. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101.

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poetry, which inspired literary circles and garden gatherings that deepened ties between its social elite. Unlike in Hangzhou, where Hua Yan began his career as a poet and painter, in Yangzhou he found that the material manifestations of wealth and social status often trumped the values of restraint and austerity so celebrated by men of letters throughout history. Thus, while the field of painting in eighteenthcentury Yangzhou established a set of circumstances to which artists were forced to adapt, it also created opportunities for struggle. Compelled in part by his own ideals as well as the need to support himself as an artist, Hua Yan redefined aspects of this field by visually revealing the structures otherwise accepted as self-evident in his contemporary moment. His approach recalls what Pierre Bourdieu has described as two inseparable fields of positions and position-taking, such that a new literary or artistic group can transform the universe of possible options, modifying or displacing the dominant productions. As Bourdieu noted, “The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces.”4 Through his painting, Hua Yan challenged a cultural field centered on poetry, providing insight into the forces that shaped it and shifting its direction in the century that followed. In his memorable exchange with Zhang Sijiao, Hua Yan revealed that the making of art in eighteenth-century Jiangnan was not simply a matter of bringing artistic skills to a vibrant economy. By mastering literary history, carefully observing form, and critically reflecting on society, Hua Yan positioned himself as Xinluo shanren 新羅山人, the “mountain man of Xinluo,” an artist who vacillated between his aspirations to be recognized as a professional poet-painter and his expressed desire to remain detached from contemporary social ills. His self-conscious reflections in words and pictures highlight the visuality of artists in Yangzhou society, who worked in a place where art could be looked down upon. His paintings and poetry provide insight into how artists saw themselves, how society perceived artists, and how artists engaged with history and their contemporary moment. Hua Yan’s advice, so clearly reflected in his works, revealed his belief in the making of the artist whose crafting of things expressed his world poetically and visually. Moreover, Hua Yan’s suggestion that painting could be looked down upon in Yangzhou—and visual culture, more broadly—led to his second comment on the value of art. While seemingly offering his student encouragement, he emphasized that the value of his art resulted from his diligent learning and 4 Pierre Bourdeiu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30.

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Figure 1

Zhang Sijiao, Portrait of Xinluo Shanren, dated 1767. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 63.6 × 53 cm. Tianjin Museum.

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cultivated virtues. As we shall see, an artist who reflected these cultural ideals in both his visual works and social persona could successfully establish the value of his art in Yangzhou and beyond. In this social climate, such a figure ideally would reside in Yangzhou as a tutor for the most prominent families, gaining invitations to exclusive literary gatherings at their garden estates, where his name or visage may be recorded for posterity. Indeed, later records confirm that poets were among the most respected figures in Yangzhou circles, their social positions determined by their literary works and their presence at garden gatherings.5 Artists followed poets, often embodying similar qualities of learning and self-cultivation that garnered prestige in the city. They modelled cultural ideals and asserted a place in history that had been called into question in this early modern era. Understanding the making of the artist in early modern China through the work of Hua Yan is the intent of this book. Active in the Jiangnan region during a critical turning point in eighteenth-century society, Hua Yan used garden subjects, such as birds and flowers, to evoke the social and political hierarchies of his world. His paintings and poems made visible social anxieties about wealth and status, as well as tensions between Manchu and Han Chinese cultural identities that shaped histories of China during the Qing dynasty (1644– 1911). By investigating Hua Yan’s struggle as a marginalized artist—both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art—this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen in early modern China. 1

Seeing Hua Yan

Working as a professional painter while embracing the life of a poet-recluse, Hua Yan seems unremarkable: an artist whose biography failed to distinguish him from generations of artists, and whose paintings followed a conventional track from landscapes to flower-and-bird subjects and figures. And yet, his paintings are infused with dynamism and criticality; they wage a playful assault on the boundaries of his world. This incongruity is significant in the history of early modern art more broadly, for it lends insight into the discourse on social change in China and beyond. As Martin Powers has explained, cultural practices can only develop under specific conditions, and so are diagnostic of

5 For records concerning culture and society in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, see: Li Dou 李斗 (active 1764–1795), Yangzhou huafang lu 揚州畫舫錄 (Record of the Painted Boats of Yangzhou) [1795] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001).

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specific types of social change.6 By identifying the complex forces of his world—be they pressures to transform or conserve—Hua Yan illuminated social conditions that parallel other art worlds abroad. In contemporary Europe, for instance, Marriage-a-la Mode (1743–1745) by William Hogarth (1697–1764), Los Caprichos (1797, 1798) by Francisco Goya (1746–1828), The Shepherds (c. 1716) by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), and sculptures by Franz Messerschmidt (1736–1783) each demonstrated social satire through witty depictions of humans and nature.7 Similarly, Hua Yan’s humor and irreverence—his deliberate critique of conventions—signals the artist’s role in social change, one that defines the relationship between his local art world and the broader early modern context. Recent studies of Qing art and society reveal the need for focused attention to the artists on the margins: those who traveled between major cities or produced works for lesser-known patrons. While catalogues and museum exhibitions have investigated individual artists active in the Qing dynasty, less attention has been addressed to artists like Hua Yan whose works circulated among broader audiences.8 Additionally, studies of eighteenth-century art have focused on the artistic patronage of wealthy merchants in the city of Yangzhou and imperial patronage at the court in Beijing, two dominant circles that excluded Hua Yan during his life.9 Historians similarly emphasize visual and material culture (including architecture and painting) as a method for unveiling the social networks of patrons, yet their accounts often are limited to historical accounts and artistic commissions by the elite.10 Moving beyond elite patronage, Roberta Wue’s investigation of art consumption in the port city of nineteenth-century Shanghai advances a framework for studying

6 7 8 9 10

Martin Powers, “Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China,” in Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800, ed. David L. Porter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 217. For more on the subject of satire in the eighteenth century, see Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone, eds., Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013). Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michele Matteini, eds., Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733–1799) (Zürich: Museum Rietberg Zürich, 2009). Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-century Yangchow (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Kristina Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). Tobie S. Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Yulian Wu, Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017).

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diverse art worlds in the modern era, further highlighting the need for broadened understandings of artists in early modern contexts.11 Expanding upon the above discourse, this book addresses the need for concentrated studies on individual artists amid the art worlds of eighteenthcentury Jiangnan. Through analysis of an artist whose works inspired later generations, especially those active in modern Shanghai, this study probes the making of the artist in eighteenth-century Jiangnan, the cultural region that lies “south of the river.” Arranged as an investigation of Hua Yan’s work in its shifting Jiangnan contexts, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally its nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai, to explore the relationship between the artist, local society, and artistic practice. 1.1  The Mountain Man of Xinluo Chapter One details Hua Yan’s construction of his artistic persona as “the mountain man of Xinluo” after he arrived in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in his twenties from a rural area of western Fujian province historically known as Xinluo. His poems and paintings from this era tell of his ventures into the wilderness and his camaraderie with fellow poets, portraying an idealized life of rustic pleasures and carefree existence. In Hangzhou, he made the acquaintance of several Zhejiang poets, known as the Zhe School, and started a family. As his works suggest, his persona mirrored those of his closest acquaintances, many of whom were members of the Zhe School poetry circle, such as the poets Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752) and Jin Nong 金農 (1687–1763). Together, they sang poetry together, traveled through the wilderness and scenic sites of Hangzhou, and studied local history—especially that of the Southern Song dynasty (1127– 1276), of which Hangzhou was the capital. Hua Yan’s pursuits, deeply inflected with Ming loyalism, served to solidify his ties to the Zhejiang social context and position him as a cultural authority in the eyes of Han intellectuals.12 As an interpreter of Jiangnan cultural history, Hua Yan’s work offered a counterpoint to the European gaze of the Manchu court, where artists produced paintings, ceramics, and architecture incorporating elements introduced by the Jesuits. Drawing on his self-portraits and landscape paintings, many of which date to his early years as an artist and poet, this chapter illuminates Hua Yan’s 11 12

Roberta Wue, Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press and University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015). For more on loyalism and painting at the Qing court, see Kristen Chiem, “Painting, Peonies, and Ming Loyalism in Qing-Dynasty China, 1644–1795,” Archives of Asian Art 67, no. 1 (2017): 83–109, Kristen L. Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers, and Other Things at the Qing Court,” Word & Image 34, no. 4 (2018): 388–406.

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self-conception as an erudite poet and painter in Hangzhou. In the early eighteenth century, the artistic climate of the city could be described in terms of its legacy of late-Ming and early-Qing luminaries active in the city, such as Lan Ying 藍瑛 (1585–1664), Yun Shouping 惲壽平 (1633–1690), and Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (Laolian 老蓮, 1599–1652). Each of these artists, whether painting in the landscape, figure, or flower-and-bird genre, endured the fall of the Ming dynasty by embracing Zhejiang history and critically probing conventional subjects. Like Hua Yan, each navigated the challenges of working as professional artists in the heartland of Han intellectual culture. Works such as Lan Ying’s Red Friend engaged the sentiments of their world through the permanence of the rock, an icon of the Jiangnan garden, with the red hue as a reference to the fallen Ming (Fig. 2). Encoded in the visual language of Han loyalism, works like Lan Ying’s Red Friend emphasize the role of Zhejiang artists as interpreters of local discourses, one that Hua Yan stewarded into the eighteenth century. Hua Yan identified with this lineage of Zhejiang artists by taking part in the revival of local pictorial and poetic histories. His works in Hangzhou similarly emphasized the conventional myth of reclusion in the mountains, which in the early eighteenth century served to position him as inheritor to a legacy of “mountain men,” thereby allying himself with poets and painters who strove to distance themselves from the commercial aspects of their intellectual pursuits and from the Manchu court.13 Works in this chapter include landscapes from his sojourns, which he created amid the pressures of finding patronage as a young artist and poet, and self-portraits that attempt to define his position in the art worlds of early eighteenth-century Jiangnan. Like his peers, Hua Yan struggled to maintain his artistic livelihood in Hangzhou and ultimately departed for Beijing and Yangzhou in search of patronage. Nonetheless, the close association with the Zhe School poets that Hua Yan enjoyed in Hangzhou extended to his work in Yangzhou. To their hosts and patrons in Yangzhou, Hua Yan and the Zhejiang poets embodied cultural and intellectual ideals that seemed endangered amid the wealth, commerce, and political ties that constituted the fabric of the city in its march toward the modern era. 1.2  Lyricism in Words and Images Building on Hua Yan’s reclusive ideals and poetic inclinations in Hangzhou, Chapter Two turns to Hua Yan’s development of a lyrical approach to flower13

For discussion of the fashionable nature of the term shanren in the late Ming as an elegant reference to unrecognized literati, see J.P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 22.

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Figure 2 Lan Ying, Red Friend, 16th–mid-17th c. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 148.9 × 47.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ex Coll: C.C. Wang Family, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Morse, In Honor of Douglas Dillon, 1979.26

and-bird paintings, most of which he created in the initial decade following his move to Yangzhou. As an expressive mode, lyrical imagery drew on indirect comparisons, such as the sensual features of an object (e.g., a bird, flower) or the experience of a place (e.g., a landscape) to evoke feelings through words and images.14 James Cahill alternately has described this visual mode as “po14

For more on lyricism and Chinese painting, see: Wen C. Fong, “Words and Images in Late Ming and Early Ch’ing Painting,” in Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong, eds., Words and

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etic painting,” which engages both artist and viewer in a disembodied, contemplative act.15 Lyricism thus not only offered a way to express one’s ideals, but also to deepen and nuance one’s social relations, as Hua Yan discovered in Yangzhou. Active in the city from the late 1720s to the early 1750s, Hua Yan preceded the waves of poets and artists from Zhejiang who significantly shaped the picture of eighteenth-century Yangzhou art that we know today. After several sojourns throughout the Jiangnan region and up the Grand Canal, Hua Yan gained an invitation to reside as a tutor with the Yun family of Yangzhou in the early 1730s, a relationship that shaped his artistic trajectory in Yangzhou over the following two decades. Lyricism, and in particular his use of lyrical poems of the subgenre yongwu ci 咏物詞, literally “singing of the thing,” lent itself to thoughtful introspection and the sharing of intimate sentiments between artist and patron. Sensual and alluring, Hua Yan’s flower-and-bird subjects conveyed melancholy philosophical musings as well as charming, poignant evocations that reflected the graces and foibles of humanity. These works visually reflect core Zhe School interests in reviving lyricism from its pinnacle in Southern Song dynasty Hangzhou, which in part responded to broader concerns about Han identity in eighteenth-century Jiangnan. While the term Han often is used loosely to describe an ethnic group comprised of Central Plains dwellers and their descendents, it is more specifically an expression of social difference between those of the Central Plains and the people living to the north—enveloping intellectual and political boundaries that became notably fraught in the Qing dynasty.16 Hua Yan’s lyrical portrayals visually engaged the ideals, tensions, and identities of his social circle with subtlety and wit. Whether picturing landscapes of his sojourns, metaphorical flowerand-bird images, or legendary figures, Hua Yan self-consciously evoked the nature of what could be described as professional literati—artists who created community through their poetry and painting, yet depended upon these very connections and their artistic products to secure their livelihood.17 With characteristic charm and immediacy, Hua Yan’s subjects announced his

15 16 17

Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 501–12. James Cahill, The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), 9. Mark C. Elliott, “Hushuo: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese,” in Thomas Mullaney, et al., eds., Critical Han Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 173–190. J. P. Park similarly has described the broadening of literati culture, or what he terms the literacy and cultural skills necessary for becoming a “part-time literatus,” in the late Ming dynasty. Park, Art by the Book, 16.

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identification as a mountain man—one who idealized disengagement from society, immersed himself in the study of nature, and yet whose very stance as a recluse was an invitation to commune with like-minded individuals.18 Lyrical imagery, in concert with his social connections, thus defined his role as an artist in the vastly shifting world of mid-Qing Jiangnan. This moment in history, one often defined by its patchwork ascent toward notions of modern China, is particularly significant for Chinese art. Though scholars often regard the eighteenth century as a moment of national prosperity and global power, its foundations were wrought from vast social and political changes. Following the Qing conquest of 1644, new patterns of patronage emerged in reconstructed cities such as Yangzhou.19 As salt merchants and officials rebuilt the city in the early eighteenth century, they upended traditional distinctions of wealth and social status by associating themselves with its luminous literary history, especially through their patronage of Zhe School poets. However, while eighteenth-century Yangzhou gradually was resurrected as a flourishing site of publishing and locus for literary culture, the city was nonetheless steeped in a history of trauma and loyalism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, simmering tensions between the Han Chinese and Manchu court prompted the emperor to unleash literary inquisitions that reverberated from Beijing deep into the Jiangnan region, the heartland of Hua Yan and his circle. Like his predecessor, Shitao 石濤 (Zhu Ruoji 朱若極, 1642–1707), Hua Yan’s experience of creating art in Yangzhou thus defines the city as a crossroads, where social connections bound together networks that extended far beyond Yangzhou. 1.3  Painting the Garden from Life Chapter Three turns to the lyrical potential of Hua Yan’s flower-and-bird paintings as a method for social critique and political commentary. Vibrant and playful in color and composition, yet witty and insightful in their poetic idea, the flower-and-bird paintings considered here illuminate the artist’s awareness of his subjectivity in Yangzhou society. Like his peers, Hua Yan positioned himself as an arbiter of taste, adapting his works to preserve his own self-image as a recluse amid the opulence and frivolity of mid-Qing Yangzhou. Focusing on humorous portrayals of common garden subjects rendered in the intimate format of album leaves, this chapter shows how Hua Yan’s public identity as a 18 19

Peter C. Sturman, “The Art of Reclusion,” in The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China, eds. Peter C. Sturman and Susan S. Tai (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Munich, Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2012), 15. Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou, 128.

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professional artist emerged from his private relationships and shaped his work during the 1740s and 1750s. Mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou was cosmopolitan, constantly changing, and deeply connected to other cities throughout the empire. As the seat of the salt administration, Yangzhou hosted a steady stream of visitors as they traveled north toward Beijing or south toward Hangzhou; its location on the Grand Canal determined its centrality in the Qing empire.20 While Yangzhou lacked the lush rolling hills and tea plantations typical of Jiangnan cities, it had in its urban infrastructure of canals, gardens, and man-made lakes, such as Shouxihu 瘦西湖, or “Slender West Lake,” a name recalling the famous West Lake of Hangzhou. As the poet and essayist Wei Xi 魏禧 (1624–1681) wrote, “Yangzhou has been acclaimed as a scenic spot since ancient times, yet the place itself has very little of the beauties of mountain forests or hills and ravines.”21 Rather, Yangzhou was characterized by its rivers and lakes as early as the third century, giving rise to speculation on its character, yang 揚, meaning “to hoist” or “to wave,” as a place that arouses the senses and is full of vigor and life.22 Later sources suggest that its name refers to the willow and poplar trees, which are written with a similar character yang 楊, for they are densely clustered throughout the moist environment—and also a euphemism for the beautiful women who rode on Yangzhou’s painted barges.23 Today, scholars regard eighteenth-century Yangzhou as a place where artists passed through but often did not originate; it was a place where they fashioned identities and fabricated legacies. Consequently, painting in Yangzhou often is defined by a group of diverse artists active in the mid-eighteenth century, primarily during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–1796). A loose conception of a “Yangzhou School” emerged from comments by Wang Yun 王鋆 (1816–?), who mentioned in his Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 (Record of the Painting Gardens of Yangzhou), that there were eight eccentric painters in Yangzhou. Only two of these artists he named: Li Shan 李鱓 (1686–1756), who sojourned in Yangzhou 20 21 22

23

Antonia Finnane, “Yangzhou: A Central Place in the Qing Empire,” in Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China, ed. Linda Cooke Johnson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 117–49. Stephen Owen, trans. and ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 634. Jiangnan was called Yangzhou… Jiangnan had the energy of restless movement, its spirit frivolously arousing (江南曰楊州。。。 江南其氣躁勁，厥性輕揚。) Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324), Erya zhu shu 爾雅注疏 (Commentary on the Erya), juan 7, in Erya zhushu ji buzheng: fujing xueshi 爾雅注疏及補正附經學史, comp. Xing Bingshu 邢昺疏 and Ruan Yuan 阮元 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 2012), 5. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 13:295.

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only briefly,24 and the Anhui poet and painter, Li Mian 李葂 (1705–1755), who remains little known today.25 Wang Yun’s account stimulated numerous debates throughout the twentieth century about what qualified as eccentric, what constituted Yangzhou identity, and who may have comprised that elusive list of eight famous artists between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.26 Noting that the artists active in eighteenth-century Yangzhou did not necessarily share a common style, artistic lineage, or even the same time and place, Chou Ju-hsi has appropriately suggested that one might conceive of the plurality of the art scene as “waves” of artists throughout the century.27 While Hua Yan’s biography situates him among an early wave of artists active in Yangzhou, his works specifically take aim at his artistic and social context and so complicate notions of a huazong 畫宗, or “school,” of Yangzhou painting. By exposing the foibles and frictions of the natural world as an allegory of human hierarchies, Hua Yan adopted a stance both inside and outside of Yangzhou society. Consequently, his work did not appeal to patrons possessing social and economic capital in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and so falls outside of traditional canonizations of the Yangzhou School. Katharine P. Burnett has described a similar phenomenon in the criticism of late Ming painting, in which recent investigation into discursive strategies and socioeconomic practices has lent new insight into terms such as “eccentric” and the relative status of artists in their own time.28 Attesting to the struggles of working as an artist in this city, Hua Yan’s work similarly exposes the great myths that often dominate historical accounts of Yangzhou and nuances our understanding of its many disparate art worlds.

24 25

26 27 28

Chuang Su-o 莊素娥, “Li Shan de shengping he huafeng 李鱓的生平和畫風 (Li Shan’s biography and painting style),” Meishu xue 美術學 3 (1989): 49–77. Wang Yun 王鋆 (1816–after 1883), Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 (Record of the painting garden of Yangzhou), Preface dated 1883, in Qingdai difang renwu zhuanji congkan 清代地方人物傳記叢刊 (Collected records of people and places of the Qing dynasty), comp. Jiang Qingbo 江慶柏 (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2007), 2:393. Ju-hsi Chou, “Rubric and Art History: The Case of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou,” Phoebus 6/2 (1988): 329–51. Ju-hsi Chou, introduction to The Elegant Brush: Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor, 1735–1795, eds. Ju-hsi Chou and Claudia Brown (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1985), 8. Katharine P. Burnett, “A Discourse of Originality in Late Ming Chinese Painting Criticism,” Art History 23, no. 4 (2000): 522–58.

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1.4  Picturing People, Past and Present Though scholars have associated Hua Yan with the Yangzhou School due to his position as a professional artist in the city, later artists drew inspiration from the idiomatic nature of his paintings. They identified his ability to engage human sentiments through garden imagery, as well as his use of figural subjects that range from seemingly mundane genre scenes to enlivened historical gatherings. Pivoting away from flower-and-bird subjects, Chapter Four positions Hua Yan’s figure paintings as innovative and insightful through his vivid brushwork and references to ancient sources. This vast category includes pictures of beautiful women, popular legends and folk figures, frontier paintings, genre paintings, and gathering paintings. Like his flower-and-bird paintings, Hua Yan’s figure paintings use gesture and composition to provide enlivened reflections upon their subjects, often invoking the past to comment upon the contemporary context. These animated portrayals reveal Hua Yan’s voyeuristic role as an artist in Yangzhou, one who aptly located the viewer in this early modern moment. Although Hua Yan’s work is decisively situated amid local audiences—his Zhe School acquaintances in Hangzhou, his host and patron Yun Guotang 員果堂 (d. 1743) and later the market of Yangzhou—it also reflects his awareness of a shifting and increasingly interconnected world. Hua Yan’s works— and those of his contemporaries—appear to show little regard for the court in Beijing and its extensive cultural exchanges with the international community.29 However, the absence of attention to global currents in Hua Yan’s work, such as the baroque styles and Western techniques so readily adopted by the court, also marks a deliberate stance not only against the Manchu court, but against the international art world so closely linked to commerce between Yangzhou and Beijing. The international style of the baroque was in full flourish at the Manchu court, and though Hua Yan and several of his peers had traveled to Beijing and found themselves surrounded by new fashions in Yangzhou,30 he and his contemporaries visually opposed the Manchu world. They met the need for Han cultural identity with pictures that inspired nostalgia and perpetuated classical ideals. Moreover, while Hua Yan and his Jiangnan contemporaries desired to live as idealized Jiangnan poet-painters, the Qing literary inquisition of the mid-eighteenth-century threatened modes of communication traditionally 29 30

For more on aesthetic preferences at the Qing court, see Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions. Antonia Finnane, “Yangzhou’s Mondernity: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Positions 11, no. 2 (2003): 395–425.

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associated with Han literati. Pictures became even more imperative in this context, for they conveyed the sentiments that words could not. Therefore, it was not for lack of global awareness that Hua Yan rendered traditional subjects and themes in Jiangnan society, but rather a specific response to his position in this early modern art world. 1.5  The Xinluo School Chapter Five defines the Xinluo pai 新羅派, or Xinluo School, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Jiangnan, focusing on its significance for later artists in Shanghai. Hua Yan, whose visually appealing works often evoked the social tensions of his era, offered a valuable model for later artists addressing the challenges of modernity. Looking to the compositions, brushwork, and inscriptions that characterize works after Hua Yan, this chapter confronts the methodological concerns of school-based lineages in later Chinese painting. Specifically, it nuances our understanding of eighteenth-century Yangzhou by identifying the language of later artists, who referred not to Hua Yan of Yangzhou, but rather the mountain man of Xinluo. This moniker, which encompasses Hua Yan’s work in Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and beyond, reveals the nature of artists’ work in early modern China and highlights the complexity of local lineages. Moreover, this chapter considers the relevance of Hua Yan’s work in the late Qing historical context, as shaped by the Qing literary inquisitions, the Taiping Rebellion, and foreign imperialism. Although he was only marginally associated with the most luminous patrons of Yangzhou, and so elicits infrequent mention in historical records, Hua Yan became one of the most frequently cited painters by artists working in later eras. Positioned as an erudite poet-painter at the fringes of an upwardly mobile society, Hua Yan’s fresh vision appealed to later painters who pursued historically literati ideals of making art while navigating the shifting demands of their artistic livelihood. After fortunes waned as the salt trade shifted away from Yangzhou during the late eighteenth century, and prominent garden owners and poets passed away, later artists recognized Hua Yan as one whose lyrical portrayals illuminated the social worlds of early modern Jiangnan. Later artists active in Yangzhou, such as Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733–1799), immortalized Hua Yan’s work after his death. Nineteenth-century critics defined their work as the basis for the Xinluo School, while inscriptions by later artists including Wang Su 王素 (1794–1877), Ni Tian 倪田 (1855–1919), Xugu 虛谷 (1824–1896), and Ren Bonian 任伯年 (Ren Yi 任頤, 1840–1896) further charted a lineage of sojourning artists between eighteenth-century Yangzhou and nineteenth-century Shanghai. As the mountain man of Xinluo, residing

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both outside society and within, the expressive qualities of Hua Yan’s work inspired these professional painters in the modern era. 2

Painting in Early Modern China

In tracing the inspiration of Hua Yan’s work for later artists who traveled throughout the Jiangnan region and specifically to Shanghai, the Xinluo School offers valuable insights into the hazy terrain between early modern and modern Chinese painting. Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that while imprecise, terms such as “early modern” (ca. 1400/50–1800/50) do call attention to a general set of phenomena that we might expect to become more prominent during a particular period.31 A conflation of factors, among those the institutions of capitalism and urbanism, and social traits such as individualism and romantic love, have been used to describe modernity in China and in world histories more broadly.32 Such factors may be found in both local and transregional contexts, as Pomeranz has argued, such that an early modern efflorescence in Yangzhou or Beijing could lead to a world with radically different material possibilities.33 Though defined within the Jiangnan region, the relationship between the Yangzhou School and Shanghai School, in which Hua Yan and the Xinluo School play a pivotal role, illuminate certain features of modernity that emerged amid and engaged with transregional currents. Perhaps the most apparent structural indication of modernity lies in the area of patronage, for Hua Yan’s combination of living as resident tutor (the traditional way) and selling art in the market (clients without a personal relationship) appears to push the boundaries of an early modern art market system. Like many artists active in Yangzhou, Hua Yan created paintings that were visually accessible, selling the illusion that those who desired cultural capital could consume the literati lifestyle of poetry, gatherings, and painting.34 At the same time, artists who sojourned in Jiangnan and throughout the Grand Canal 31 32

33 34

Kenneth Pomeranz, “Putting Modernity in Its Place(s): Reflections on Jack Goody’s The Theft of History,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 45. On defining early modern China, see: R. Bin Wong, “Did China’s Late Empire Have an Early Modern Era?” in Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ed. David Porter, 206–7; R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–8. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Areas, Networks, and the Search for ‘Early Modern’ East Asia,” in Comparative Early Modernities, 246. See also Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19.

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most likely found Hua Yan’s work inspiring as it displayed historical consciousness in the choice of subject matter and transgressed social status through humor and satire. While Hua Yan’s use of lyricism gestured to an intimate world of poets and artists, the formal qualities of his works appealed to a broader audience, thereby offering insight into how the shifting nature of patrons and social circles in Yangzhou and Shanghai issued new demands on artists and transformed the making of art in China. Works by Hua Yan thus provide an avenue for conceptualizing modernity in the art of late imperial Jiangnan. While engaging with contemporary social and political issues through his art, Hua Yan exposed the roles of artists beyond established avenues for patronage. Amid the literary inquisitions, and on the eve of dynastic turmoil that invigorated nationwide discourse about modern China, Hua Yan’s work offered a fresh, incisive approach to the relationship between Chinese art and society. Later artists brought recognition to what Hua Yan himself could not achieve during his life, for the combination of factors that left Hua Yan poor and destitute in eighteenth-century Yangzhou became precisely the features that later artists found relevant in nineteenth-century Shanghai. Taking a critical view of former methodologies that privilege a linear progression of genre, biography, and lineage, this study aims to raise new questions about the connections between art and identity in China, which as Wang Cheng-hua has argued, are crucially underrepresented in current discourses on global art history.35 It avoids positioning Hua Yan’s art solely as a product of biography or lineage, which we might liken to the monumental impact of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists on the canon of Italian art, for its favor of certain artists, styles, and techniques resulted in the exclusion of others from history.36 Rather, this study views critically the role of canonizing practices in the conceptualization of Chinese art. Its focus on Hua Yan allows us to study the weight of the canon for artists on their lives and the reception of their work by later artists in the modern era. Put simply, this study asks how and why the genres, biographies, and lineages mattered to the writers and artists who engaged them, and to what end they shape our histories today. In doing so, this study aims to reconcile Hua Yan’s experience of making art with the challenges of the broader, increasingly global context of early modern China. Though scholars often regard the eighteenth century as a moment of 35 36

Wang Cheng-hua, “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth-Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 392. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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national prosperity and global power under the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty, this book attends to the fact that its foundations were wrought from vast social and political changes. By making visible the anxieties and resistance of subordinate groups, Hua Yan’s works nuance our understandings of the art worlds of eighteenth-century China and uncover the roles—and myths—of artists in the early modern era.

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Chapter 1

The Mountain Man of Xinluo Food and clothing are necessities of life; mountains and streams are what human nature takes pleasure in. Now, I have abandoned the burden of such necessities and have embraced my human nature, which enjoys such pleasures.1 Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433), Preface to Travels to Famous Mountains

⸪ Hua Yan departed rural Fujian province for Hangzhou in his early twenties, and soon came to be regarded among local poets and artists as the mountain man of Xinluo. The sobriquet came to define his social persona, characterizing both the artist and his work within the lofty aims of eremitism—rustic, erudite, and intimate, as Xie Lingyun historically set forth in the Six Dynasties (220–589). Having left behind a life of poverty and his family of craftspeople, Hua Yan traveled to Zhejiang province as a self-taught poet, painter, and practitioner of the martial arts. Hangzhou attracted poets and artists like Hua Yan with its iconic West Lake surrounded by lush, rolling hills dotted by medieval pagodas and tea-growing plantations. Its sites commemorated the city’s rich history as the capital of the Southern Song dynasty (1279–1368), the heartland of Chan Buddhism and Han culture. Functioning as topoi, or both as a locus and a topic, Hangzhou’s landmarks marked a public and rhetorical commonplace textualized throughout writings over time.2 As poets and painters related to sites through their works, they intimately connected topoi to their social persona, both individually and collectively correlating the idealized self with the topos or place in which it dwelled. As Stephen Goldberg has explained, a pictorial or poetic image drew forth a comparison between the topos and the identity of the individual based on their similar nature, based on the principle that similar natures or kinds 1 Translation from Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 30. 2 Eugene Y. Wang, “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, eds. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu with Ellen Widmer. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 58 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center for Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2003), 488–552.

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(lei 類) mutually influence or respond to each other.3 Hua Yan’s portraits characterize him as a mountain man while his landscapes capture his sojourns in the wilderness, and so define his relationship to both the natural environment and his moment in history. As an epicenter of Qing antiquarian scholarship and the former capital of the Southern Song dynasty, Hangzhou represented a cultural heritage from which Hua Yan’s circle of poets and artists perceived themselves as descendants. Luminaries including the poet, calligrapher, painter, scholar, and statesman Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) resided in Hangzhou as a magistrate, while Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) sojourned in the city and composed numerous poems evoking the seasons and activities of West Lake. After the fall of the Northern Song to the Jurchen Jin, artists in Hangzhou such as Xia Gui 夏珪 (fl. 1195–1224) and Ma Yuan 馬遠 (act. ca. 1190– after 1225) introduced a lyrical mode of painting by coupling evocative poems with meticulous renderings of floral subjects or secluded, ethereal landscapes.4 Hangzhou naturally became the realm of the displaced, loyalist scholars of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368),5 giving rise to the Zhe School of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded by artists active in the area around Hangzhou, including Dai Jin 戴進 (1388–1462), who expanded upon the brushwork idioms of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui.6 In the late Ming, Zhejiang artists Chen Hongshou and Lan Ying investigated this local heritage through their figure and landscape paintings. Although Lan Ying often is referred to as the last Zhe School painter,7 Hua Yan’s works suggest that Zhe School principles in both painting and poetry retained their currency into the Qing dynasty. Hua Yan’s portraits and landscapes, especially those composed in Hangzhou, embrace ideals of reclusion through

3 Stephen J. Goldberg, “Figures of Identity: Topoi and the Gendered Subject in Chinese Art,” in Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Roger T. Ames with Thomas P. Kasulis and Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 36. 4 For Southern Song art, see Hui-shu Lee, Exquisite Moments: West Lake & Southern Song Art (New York: China Institute, 2001); Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 5 On artistic responses to the fall of Southern Song Hangzhou to the Mongol Yuan, see Peter Charles Sturman, “Confronting Dynastic Change: Painting after Mongol Reunification of North and South China,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 35 (1999.1): 142–69. 6 For more on the Zhe School, see Richard M. Barnhart, Painters of the Great Ming: The Imperial Court and the Zhe School (Dallas: The Dallas Museum of Art, 1993), 2; Chen Jie-jin 陳階晉 and Lai Yu-chih 賴毓芝, eds., Zhuisuo Zhepai 追索浙派 (Tracing the Che School in Chinese Painting) (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2008). 7 James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644 (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1982), 181.

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their studied nostalgia and engagement of longstanding social conventions.8 In addition to painting, early in his career Hua Yan developed friendships with Hangzhou poets who engaged the history of this site as both a literary topic through their writings and physical locus of their shared activities and outings, thus sculpting their own individual and social identities around local history. In Hangzhou, Hua Yan began writing poetry that was compiled later as an anthology, Ligou ji 離垢集, which could be translated as either “leaving” or “encountering” the impure.9 Xue Yongnian has suggested that the title may be drawn from Hua Yan’s frequent travels into the wilderness during his early years and his view of nature as a spiritual environment through which he defined himself as a hermit aloof from the filth of the world.10 Hua Yan was also a practicing Chan Buddhist, like many of his peers, and so his choice of Ligou ji as a title also connotes the Buddhist concept of transformation by departing from the filth to become pure. Additionally, this title may reference the classical poem by the legendary patriot Qu Yuan 屈原 (c. 340–278 bce) entitled Li Sao 離騷, often translated as “Encountering Sorrow.”11 This double meaning, both of leaving and encountering the impure, self-consciously evokes the paradox of being a sojourning artist in the Qing dynasty. Moreover, it closely aligns with the concerns of Hua Yan’s social circle in Zhejiang whose poetry and paintings, following Yun Shouping and Shitao, often referenced the ideals of patriotism and moral duty that remained topics of discourse among men of letters in the Jiangnan region. The Jiangnan region, with Zhejiang province at its heart, was a refuge for Ming loyalists at the establishment of the Manchu Qing. Early Qing artists Wang Hui 王翬 (1632–1717), Yun Shouping 惲壽平 (1633–1690), and Shitao 石濤 (Zhu Ruoji 朱若極, 1642–1707) were faced with the question of charting their artistic livelihood in this new context. They attended their internal conflicts—to serve the Manchu or retreat to the company of like-minded peers— often through balancing their ideals with necessities. Both painters and poets 8 9

10 11

On reclusion and art in the early Qing dynasty, see Sturman and Tai, eds., The Artful Recluse. Hua Yan 華嵓 (1682–1756), Ligou ji 離垢集 (Leaving the impure), ed. Xu Fengji 徐逢吉 (1655–1740) (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1974), Preface dated 1731. Additional writings and inscriptions are recorded in its supplement: Hua Yan, Ligou ji buchao 離垢集補鈔 (Supplement to “Leaving the Impure”) (Shanghai: Shanghai juzhen fangsong yinshu guan, 1917). Xue Yongnian 薛永年, “Hua Yan tonglun 華喦通論 (Introduction to Hua Yan),” in Hua Yan yanjiu 華喦研究 (Studies on Hua Yan), ed. Lu Fusheng (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2003), 38. I am grateful to Hui-shu Lee for pointing out this reference. See also Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 162–75.

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traveled extensively along the Grand Canal, seeking patronage in Beijing as well as the cities of Yangzhou, Changzhou, Suzhou, and others that dotted the waterways to the north of Hangzhou. Unlike Zhe School artists of the previous dynasty, they sought a more tangible, personal and lifelike form of expression—an emotional connection between artist and subject, whether place or thing, a sensitive awareness of oneself and one’s moment in history. In subtle defiance of the reigning Qing, Hua Yan and his generation of poets and painters furthered the concerns of their predecessors through their studied revival of Zhejiang culture and aesthetics. 1

Portraiture and Persona

Although the majority of Hua Yan’s extant works date to his years working in Yangzhou, his early portraits and landscapes projected a vision of his social persona that was intimately linked to his home of Hangzhou. Hua Yan was not a native of Hangzhou; he came to the city in his early twenties from the village of Baisha 白沙 in Shanghang 上杭, historically known as Xinluo 新羅, western Fujian province. In Hangzhou, he married, started a family, and formed lifelong friendships with Zhejiang poets and artists. Portraits of and by Hua Yan in Hangzhou functioned as social documents framed within literary and pictorial conventions, as they drew on likenesses between the individual and their environment, nature and society. His self portraits may be viewed as an autobiographical statement of the artist to his intended audience, one that Richard Brilliant describes as the manifesto of an artist’s introspection.12 Similarly, Richard Vinograd has noted that portraits often act as a self-projection that challenges the very nature of representation itself—in this case, the myth of the artist.13 Portraits of Hua Yan index a network of artistic practices, aspirations, and ideals of both Hua Yan and his contemporaries, often quite overtly, and therefore illuminate the artist’s awareness of his stance toward history. Despite their social import, emblematic portraits of artists, scholars, and others with public roles could be quite informal, often with the subject in the guise of a conventional type, such as the erudite poet roaming amid the wilderness. Such is the case in a collaborative work by Hua Yan and Wei Shijie 魏士傑 (1667–after 1747) in Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall: Portrait of Hua Yan as a Young Man, dated 1705 (Fig. 3). The first of three known portraits of Hua 12 13

Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2002), 158. Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12; 100–6.

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Figure 3 Hua Yan and Wei Shijie, Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall: Portrait of Hua Yan as a Young Man, 1705. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 130 × 47.2 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of Various Donors by Exchange, 2001.120.

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Yan, this painting depicts the young artist around the age of twenty-three, not long after his arrival in Hangzhou. According to Hua Yan’s colophon, Wei Shijie pictured Hua Yan standing upon a rugged mountain trail, facing frontally, with his arm resting upon a rock as if captured in a moment of rest. He carries a sword, which protrudes from behind his robes, denoting his prowess in the martial arts. In his inscription, Wei Shijie noted that Hua Yan was far superior in composing pictures, stating, “abundant [in talent], you hide the sword in the shield 豐誠劍且韜,” in recognition of his friend’s emerging talents. He ends with the rhetorical question, “can we hear the tides of Guangling? 如聽廣 陵濤,” apparently foreshadowing Hua Yan’s later move to Guangling (modern Yangzhou) to pursue his career as a painter. Although Wei Shijie rendered Hua Yan as a confident, well-appointed young man, Hua Yan’s inscription seems to counter Wei Shijie’s praise. Hua Yan described himself as an aimless wanderer frustrated about his life’s accomplishments, “Lamentably, half my life I have traveled far and wide, and have become a lost sheep! 嗟乎，半生岐途，未免亡羊.” Perhaps Hua Yan had aimed to temper Wei Shijie’s compliments with a customary note of humility, but the anxiety that characterized his response seems to conflict with the confident young man pictured striding through the landscape with a sword on his back. In grappling with the conventions of image and response, these two close friends inevitably unveiled the constructed nature of representation. Pictures of poet-recluses in landscapes have a distinctive history in the Jiangnan region, and in particular in Hangzhou for its history as the capital of the Southern Song dynasty. Here, the landscape and figural conceits of Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall specifically position the work within the Zhe School aesthetic. The landscape, painted by Hua Yan, is arranged along the right side of the composition, with axe-cut texture strokes on the boulders and twisted juniper dripping with moss, set against a hazy atmospheric treatment of a distant waterfall along the left side. The asymmetrical composition and rich tonal contrasts evoke the pictorial style of the Hangzhou native Dai Jin, who is commonly recognized as the founder of the Zhe School. In The Hermit Xu You Resting by a Stream, Dai Jin followed the Southern Song court painter Ma Lin 馬麟 (ca. 1180–after 1256), in presenting the recluse Xu You 許由 (fl. 23rd century bce) in a casual posture and a setting of untamed wilderness (Fig. 4).14 Xu You is pictured seated on the ground wearing loosely tied robes and with one leg raised in a relaxed posture. His walking staff rests on the ground near his legs, and he is positioned beside a stream and pine tree, rocky 14

Cf. Ma Lin, Listening to the Wind in the Pines, 1246. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Figure 4

Dai Jin, The Hermit Xu You Resting by a Stream, 1400s. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk, 138 × 75 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. John L. Severance Fund, 1974.45.

Figure 5

Hua Yan, Self Portrait, 1727. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 130 × 51 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

embankments and untamed foliage. Formerly a scholar, Xu You’s virtues had attracted the attention of Emperor Yao (traditionally circa 2356–2255 bce), who decided to abdicate his throne so that Xu You could reign.15 Xu You de15

Wendy Swartz, “Rewriting a Recluse: The Early Biographers’ Construction of Tao Yuanming,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), 26 (2004): 87.

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clined the offer, and immediately washed his ears in the Ying River and lived the remainder of his life as a recluse. Perhaps more significant than the painting’s stylistic conventions is its function as a social record, one that positions Hua Yan amid Hangzhou poets and men of letters, such as Wei Shijie, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Portraits such as Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall were not intended to be appreciated for their aptitude in rendering figures or landscapes, or even to faithfully represent the subject, but rather to enhance connections between Hua Yan and his social circle. Such is the case with Self Portrait, dated 1727, in which Hua Yan portrayed himself seated on the ground in an informal pose akin to the Buddhist posture of royal ease (Sanskrit: maharajalilasana) seen in Song-dynasty images of the bodhisattva Guanyin, with one arm relaxed over a rock and a raised knee, amidst the backdrop of a natural environment (Fig. 5).16 He appears in a carefree pose in front of textured, craggy rocks covered with dots of moss and grass while wavy lines convey the ripples of a bubbling creek. Foliage appears untamed, and rocks extend from tilting mountain forms. The entire composition evokes a playful sensibility, with Hua Yan opting for sketchy brushstrokes that imbue the image with an amateur flavor. Although the terse brushwork seen in Self Portrait departs from the rich tonal contrasts of Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall, Hua Yan’s portrait nonetheless makes a profound impact on the viewer due to the awkward angles of the boulders and penetrating, frontal gaze of the figure. This gaze implies the subject’s awareness of the artifice of the portrait; it marks the subject as a likeness that draws a comparison to others of its type.17 Here, Self Portrait both constructs Hua Yan’s image as the mountain man of Xinluo, as well as positions him in the guise of many notable scholar-recluses, which is in this case not Xu You, but rather Tao Qian 陶潛 (365?–427). Hua Yan’s extensive inscription celebrates his fondness for the remote wilderness as a site of inspiration, appropriately referencing the poetry of Tao Qian, who wrote of his love of the rustic wilderness and reclusion from worldly matters.18 Hua Yan wrote:

16 17 18

Aleth Lorne, Petra Rösch, and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, “The Chinese Wooden Sculpture of Guanyin: New Technical and Art Historical Insights,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 50, no. 3 (2002): 369–70. For more on artifice in portraits, see Richard Vinograd, “Figure, Fiction, and Figment in Eighteenth-century Chinese Painting,” in Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor, eds. Ju-hsi Chou and Claudia Brown, Phoebus 6, no. 2 (1991): 212. Yim-tze Kwong, “Naturalness and Authenticity: The Poetry of Tao Qian,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 11 (Dec., 1989): 35–77.

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How laughable it is that I, a fellow of inquisitive mind, By nature am fond of the remote wilderness. Every time I enter a deep valley, I indulge in the rivulets and rocks. Or when I chance upon curious-looking peaks and ravines, I walk so eagerly to explore that the heels of my sandals break apart. I flutter among layers of mists and clouds, As if a pair of wings grew out of my shoulders. For forty years this has been my passion, Looking back I especially lamented [the end of this experience]. Lately my muscles and bones have become old, [My strength] is no longer what it was in former times. Leaning for a moment against a lonely pine tree and chanting [poetry], Or staying confined in my abode among the rushes. Into the emptiness, peering out of my tiny window, Quiet and solitary, my mind floats through the void. The scorching wind is like a huge fire being fanned, The sky is high and the burning heat is unbearable. I wearily lay down on my bamboo bed, My streaming sweat drenches my pillow and mat. How I wish to tread on a layer of ice, To loosen my hair and lean on the face of a cliff! I arose to wield my brush and ink stone, And drew my seven chi figure.19 My feeble appearance is like a meager crane, While my strange and angular frame is comparable to a frosty cypress. I aspire to live far from the dusty world, My mornings and evenings are never spent in haste. The green grass enriches the vast expanse in spring, The patterns of the moss embellish the surfaces of the rocks. Old wisterias link together wandering plants, Icy water soaks the deep emerald green. May this tranquil little world, Be a blessed land without calamity.20

19 20

One chi is ten cun 寸 (inch), so seventy inches is five feet and ten inches (177 cm). Translation modified from: Ka Bo Tsang, “Portraits of Hua Yan and the Problem of Chronology,” Oriental Art 28, no. 1 (1982): 69.

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The Mountain Man of Xinluo 嗤余好事從，性耽山野僻． 每入深谷中，貪玩泉與石． 或遇奇岳壑，雙飛折齒屐． 翩翩排烟雲，如翅生兩腋． 此興四十年，追思殊可惜． 邇來筋骨老，迥不及畴昔． 聊倚孤松吟，閉之蒿間宅． 洞然窺小牖，寥蕭浮虛白． 炎風扇大火，高天若燔炙． 倦臥竹筐床，清汗溫枕席． 那得踏层冰，散發傾崖側． 起坐捉筆硯，寫我軀七尺． 羸形似鶴臞，峭兀比霜柏． 俯仰絕塵境，晨昏不相迫． 草色榮空春，苔文華石壁． 古藤結游青，寒水浸僵碧． 悠悠小乾坤，福地無災厄．21

In his narrative, Hua Yan not only described the wilderness in visual terms, but also explained his delight in exploring its curious-looking peaks and ravines. This poetic visualization of the artist, with sandals breaking apart and fluttering about as if wings had grown out of his shoulders, further embellishes this image of Hua Yan seated comfortably in the landscape. He continued on to describe his age and weariness in his inscription, following in the landscape poetry of the fifth-century poet Xie Lingyun, who described looking out his window to the towering cliffs and grasses of spring while contemplating his weak and ailing condition.22 At this time, Hua Yan was in his mid-forties and had yet to achieve notoriety as a painter or poet beyond Hangzhou. He expressed his solitary nature by relating an image of himself singing poetry and leaning against a pine, a poetic image clearly associated with the portraiture convention demonstrated in the The Hermit Xu You by Dai Jin. Moreover, the image of a “lonely pine tree” recalls Tao Qian’s poem entitled, “The Return,” in which he wrote, “As the sun’s rays grow dim and disappear from view/ I walk around a lonely pine tree, stroking

21 22

See also Hua Yan, “Zi xie xiaojing bing ti 自寫小影并題 (Inscription on a small self-portrait)” in: Hua Yan, Ligou ji buchao, 18–9. Stephen Owen, ed. An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 321.

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it. 景翳翳以將入，撫孤松而盤桓.”23 Writing in the spirit of Tao Qian, Hua Yan also honored his many predecessors who shunned government service in times of corruption and calamity, a practice that continued among his Hangzhou contemporaries. Hangzhou, after all, remained a site of reclusion throughout the ages, whether the Southern Song during the conquest of the Jurchen Jin, or the Yuan dynasty under Mongol rule, or the Manchu conquest of the early Qing that took place less than a decade prior to Hua Yan’s painting. Although the themes of reclusion in painting or poetry often occurred under political strife, the associated values of loyalism, virtue, and erudition were nonetheless relevant in times of peace and remained essential facets of scholarly integrity. Unhinged from the social mores of the previous collaborative portrait, Hua Yan’s painting visualizes him as enjoying the enviable life of a mountain man, while his inscription situates him in a reputable lineage of poet-recluses. Hua Yan signed Self Portrait, “An ink play done by the mountain man of Xinluo while sitting in Jiangsheng shushe 講聲書舍 (Discussing the Sounds Studio) in the dingwei year (1727) of the Yongzheng era 雍正丁未長夏，新羅山人 坐講聲書舍戲墨。 ” The “sounds” mentioned in the name of Hua Yan’s Hangzhou studio may reference the sound of Buddhist chanting or, alternatively, the sound of chanting poetry. Indeed, Hua Yan was both a Chan Buddhist and a self-taught poet, two traits he shared with many of his contemporaries in Hangzhou. In his 1731 preface to Hua Yan’s poetry collection, the poet Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752) affectionately described an image of Hua Yan chanting poetry from his rustic, thatched hut and climbing amid the landscape in all seasons. Li E wrote: I adore Qiuyue [Autumn Peak],24 He is like a lonely crane standing out amid the mists. He built a square-lined hut,25 And loudly chanted poetry of the wandering immortal [genre]. 23 24 25

Translation by J.R. Hightower in John Minford and Joseph S.M. Lau, eds., Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (3 vols.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1:518. A sobriquet of Hua Yan. Fangliu 方溜 is a category for the arenas for Daoist practice. The fourth-century Daoist, Xu Mi 許謐 (303–373) wrote: “As for what is considered to be a serene house, the first [type] is a grass shed, the second [type] is a square-lined hut, and the third is a walled space…. This method [is used] in the wild and uninhabited marshes and famous mountains, it is not suitable for people 所謂靜室者，一曰茅屋，二曰方溜室，三曰環 堵。 …… 此法在名山大澤無人之野，不宜人間 .” Tao Hongjing 陶宏景, comp. Zhen gao 真诰, vol.18, in Wenyuange Siku quanshu neilian wangban 文淵閣四庫全書內聯

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The cloud wall allows one’s ascent, The winds and springs of four seasons have no end. 我愛秋岳子，蕭寥烟鶴姿 ． 自開方溜室 ，高咏游仙詩 ． 雲壁可一往 ，風泉無四時．26

In this image of Hua Yan chanting poetry and wandering amid the landscape, Li E described him as a “lonely crane standing out amid the mists,” evoking Hua Yan’s self-representation as a meager crane in his inscription on Self Portrait. Moreover, it highlights his interest in the subgenre of youxian shi 游仙詩 (poems on roaming immortals), which also closely relate to the poetic subgenre of zhaoyin shi 招隱詩, or “summoning the recluse.”27 Portraits both affirmed Hua Yan’s persona as a nature-loving recluse and defined the values of the artists and poets with whom he associated. His works solidified a social lineage that was intimately connected to Hangzhou and its history through pictorial style and poetic allusions, and the act of producing these works reasserted values shared among his circle. In this way, Hua Yan became regarded as the mountain man of Xinluo—a poet and painter who traveled from a Fujian village to hone his craft in Hangzhou. Moreover, while Hua Yan defined his image as the mountain man of Xinluo at this pivotal juncture in his career, the “mountain man” moniker became a critical term for later artists (discussed in Chapter Five) who aimed to position Hua Yan in the eighteenth century. 2

The Zhe School Poets

As Wei Shijie’s portrait and Li E’s poem about Hua Yan suggest, poetry defined Hua Yan’s social disposition as well as his painting practice. Moreover, the friendships he fostered in Hangzhou during the first quarter of the eighteenth century with poets regarded as the Zhe School later formed the core of his social circle in Yangzhou.

26 27

網版 (Internet version of the complete library of the Four Treasuries) (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua chubanyouxian gongsi, 1999). Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752), Preface to Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2. Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 254; 118; 264–5. See also Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 12–56.

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A quote by the eminent poet Xu Fengji 徐逢吉 (1655–1740)28 in his 1731 preface to Hua Yan’s anthology highlights the lifelong connection between the artist and the Zhe School poets: I recall that between the renwu and guiwei years [1702 and 1703], Mister Hua came to Zhejiang from Min [Fujian]. I immediately became friends with him, and till now it has been thirty years. 憶壬午癸未間，華君由閩來浙．佘即與之友，迄今三十載。29

Li E and Xu Fengji are considered among the second generation of the lyric poetry movement known as Zhexi cipai 浙西詞派 (Lyrical school of West [Lake], Zhejiang). Centered in Zhejiang province, this was the dominant poetry movement of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties with the eminent poets Zhu Yizun 朱彞尊 (1629–1709) and Zha Shenxing 渣慎行 (1650–1727) as its figureheads.30 The Zhexi cipai renewed interest in ci poetry (lyrics sung to a tune) that saw its apex during the Southern Song dynasty.31 Ci poetry is regarded as a highly sophisticated form of poetry, for poems are rhymed and sung to a particular title that determines the pattern which the poem is to follow. Ci poems are particularly evocative and imagistic, enabling the poet to express his sentiments through subtle allusions, a topic explored in depth throughout the following chapters. Instrumental in the revival of Song dynasty lyric poetry, Li E was named by Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1797) as the figurehead of the Zhe School in eighteenthcentury Hangzhou. He wrote: As for poetry in my town, there is the Zhe School. There are many names for the school as it began with the Song poets and became established by Li Fanxie (Li E). 28

29 30

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For Xu Fengji’s poetry, see Xu Fengji 徐逢吉 (1655–1740), Qingbo xiaozhi 清波小志 (Short history of the pure waves), (Taipei: Yiwen, 1968). For his biography, see Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯, ed. Qing shi ji shi 清詩紀事 (Records of Qing Poets), (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1987), 7:4029–30. Xu Fengji, Preface to Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1. Huo Youming 霍有明, Qingdai shige fazhan shi 清代詩歌發展史 (History of the development of Qing poetry) (Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1994), 282–3. See also Grace S. Fong, “Inscribing Desire: Zhu Yizun’s Love Lyrics in Jingzhiju qinqu,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 2 (1994): 437–60. Zhang Zhongmou 張仲謀, Qingdai wenhua yu Zhepai shi 清代文化與浙派詩 (Qing dynasty culture and Zhe School Poetry) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1997), 23–5.

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The Mountain Man of Xinluo 吾鄉詩有浙派，好有替代字，盖始于宋人而成于厲樊榭。32

As Yuan Mei indicated, the “Zhe School” was a loose term for Hangzhou societies such as the Xiling pai 西泠派, or “Xiling School,” and Nanping shishe 南屏 詩社, or “Nanping Poetry Society.”33 These poets gathered on either a regular and irregular basis over several generations, and their activities included singing poetry, calligraphy, drinking tea, and sightseeing around Hangzhou. Although Hua Yan himself was not a named member of these poetry circles, the relationships that he cultivated with core members such as Li E, Xu Fengji, and Jin Nong 金農 (1687–1763) often centered upon the production of poetry and art. Li E was perhaps the most notable among Hua Yan’s Zhejiang milieu.34 A scholar of Southern Song literature and art, he compiled a book of anecdotes on Song poetry, as well as a record of the court painters of the Southern Song imperial academy.35 Hua Yan shared Li E’s interest in Southern Song poetry and incorporated many of its sophisticated aesthetic principles and literary allusions into his paintings. Moreover, their friendship is recorded in numerous correspondences between the dates of 1721 and 1750, which suggests that their friendship spanned their entire adult lives.36 Although both Li E and Hua Yan spent many years sojourning afar, most notably in Yangzhou, their poems often referenced their shared outings and gatherings in Hangzhou. In an inscription on a self-portrait of Hua Yan playing the qin, Li E wrote a lyric to a Southern Song tune, Gao yangtai 高陽台 (Lofty terrace). Also known as Xihu chun gan 西湖春感 (Sentiments of spring at West Lake), Gao yangtai is a ci tune that originated with the eminent Southern Song poet Zhang Yan 張炎 (1248–1320) about West Lake in the springtime.37 Zhang 32 33 34

35

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Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1797), Suiyuan shihua 隨園詩話 (Poetry talks of Harmony Garden) (Beijing: Renming chubanshe, 1982), 9:1. Huo Youming, Qingdai shige fazhan shi, 282–3. For Li E’s biography, see Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 6:3523–3533; Lu Qianzhi 陸謙祉, Li Fanxie nianpu 厲樊榭年譜 (Biography of Li Fanxie) (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1936). For his poetry, see Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752), Fanxie shanfang quanji 樊榭山房 全集 (Complete collection from the studio of Fanxie), Preface dated 1739 (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1978). Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752), Song shi jishi 宋詩紀事 (Anecdotes on Song poetry), ed. Yang Jialuo 楊家駱 (Taibei: Dingwen shuju, 1971); Li E 厲鶚 (1692–1752), Nan Song yuanhua lu 南宋院畫錄 (Record of the Southern Song Painting Academy) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, 2016). See, for example, an entry that Hua Yan wrote to Li E in circa 1738; see Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:76. He Xinhui 贺新辉, ed. Song ci jianshang cidian 宋詞鑒賞辭典 (Dictionary for the study of Song poetry) (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1987), 1152–4.

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Yan’s original poem to this tune described famous sites around Hangzhou and contributed to the springtime rituals of later Hangzhou luminaries. In following the original lyric, Li E reminisced about going to the Dike of Su Shi with Hua Yan to ride a boat, gather duckweed, and laugh together without thoughts or concerns. He wrote: Where can we come together, When can I meet with you, To go to the Su Dike and gather duckweed, [To ride] a small boat into the mists, To laugh at our life and forget our minds’ intentions, Companions together to sleep with the gulls? 何處成連，幾時與子，蘇堤去采蘋花． 小艇衝烟，笑平生忘了機心，合伴鷗眠 ．38

Li E portrayed the pleasures of his friendship with Hua Yan through close attention to the iconic sites of Hangzhou, namely the dike that spans the western side of the West Lake. Moreover, in referencing Zhang Yan, Li E positioned his poem within a local corpus of poetry about enjoying the seasons on the West Lake. His poem also touches on their shared ideals of upholding an unfettered existence. The last line of Li E’s lyric alludes to a passage from the Daoist philosophical text, Liezi, attributed to Liezi 列子 (Lie Yukou 列禦寇, flourished circa 400 bce).39 The passage describes a boy who loved the seagulls that naturally flocked around him on the beach. However, when his father asked for him to call the seagulls down from the sky, they would not come.40 Thus, the passage offers a metaphor for the free will of nature and the consequences of human intentions. While Li E and Hua Yan favored the construction of a rustic lifestyle, other poets in Li E and Hua Yan’s circle were scholars, some of which pursued government appointments. For instance, Jin Zhizhang 金志章 (act. ca. 1722) was

38 39 40

Li E, “Gaoyang tai: ti Hua Qiuyue heng qin xiaoxiang 高陽臺：題華秋岳橫琴小像 (Inscription for Hua Qiuyue’s self-portrait playing the qin)” in Li E, Fanxie shanfang quanji, 9:347. A.C. Graham has questioned the historicity of Liezi and suggested that he was a figure created by Zhuangzi. Angus Charles Graham, The Book of Lieh-tzǔ: A Classic of the Tao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 45–6; 216–282. Graham, The Book of Lieh- tzǔ, 45.

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an official-poet from Hangzhou who became a juren in 1723.41 Hua Yan wrote two poems for Jin Zhizhang between 1720 and 1729.42 Another important member of the prior generation of Zhe School poets was Wu Shicang 吳石倉 (1656–1729), for whom Hua Yan wrote poems between 1713 and 1717.43 Wu Shicang did not pursue a government route yet published extensively, also becoming known as a calligrapher and antiquarian. The title of his poetry anthology, Wulin qijiu ji 武林耆舊集 (Compilation of a Later Generation from Wulin), references the Song dynasty scholar and connoisseur, Zhou Mi 周密 (1232–1298), who wrote a famous account of the customs around West Lake.44 In an undated hanging scroll, Portrait of Wu Shicang, Hua Yan composed a commemorative representation of the eminent Zhejiang poet. Hua Yan pictured his friend seated with a detailed frontal gaze and conventional compositional scheme similar to his self-portraits, one loosely based on Zhe School approaches in the Ming dynasty (Fig. 6). Positioned centrally along an embankment, Wu Shicang is pictured between two stylized pine trees with thick, circular brushstrokes comprising their trunks, interspersed with two angular boulders. He sits on the ground with one raised knee, characterized by his white hair, upright posture, and a detailed frontal gaze; it is a pose that conveys honesty and dignity. A blank scroll is laid open behind the master while a servant kneels down as if to obtain water from the stream. Although the portrait is undated, Hua Yan’s inscription indicates that he pictured Wu Shicang “with white hair at the age of seventy 七十白髮,” suggesting that he may have painted the work shortly after the poet’s death in 1729. Hua Yan and Li E, whose paintings and poems drew on Song dynasty aesthetics, follow Zhejiang artists of the late Ming such as the loyalist Chen Hongshou, who works could be described as both witty and unsettling given the tragic fall of the dynasty to the Manchu Qing. In his well-known Self Portrait, dated 1635, Chen Hongshou pictured himself facing frontally beside a stylized pine tree, similar to Portrait of Wu Shicang (Fig. 7). Though mannered in its brushwork and conventional in its subject, the painting exudes an unvarnished 41 42 43 44

His poetry is collected in Jin Zhizhang 金志章 (act. ca. 1722), Jiangsheng caotang shiji 江聲草堂詩集 (Collected writings from Jiangsheng’s thatched pavilion), 8 vols., (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1997). For his biography, see Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 7:4306–7. Hua Yan, “Liuyi tingyu, tong Jin Jiangsheng zuo 六宜樓聽雨，同金江聲作 (Listening to the rain in the Liuyi Tower, composing with Jin Jiangsheng),” and “Ji Jin Jiangsheng 寄金 江聲 (For Jin Jiangsheng)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:33; 38. Hua Yan, “Zeng Wu Shicang 贈吳石倉 (For Wu Shicang)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:15. Zhou Mi 周密 (1232–1298), Wulin jiushi 武林舊事 (Old anecdotes from Wulin), in Yuan Shao 袁韶, comp. Wulin zhanggu congbian 武林掌故叢編 (Collected anecdotes of Wulin) (Shanghai: Gushu liutong chu, 1921). For his biography, see Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 7:4090–4091.

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Figure 6 Hua Yan, Portrait of Wu Shicang, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 107 × 50.1 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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Figure 7 Chen Hongshou, Self-Portrait, 1635. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 202.1 × 97.8 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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image that laid bare the crisis between the artist’s social identity and portraiture conventions.45 Hua Yan’s portraits similarly question the role of the individual artist in the historical present, showing that conventional portrayals were in fact anything but conventional and almost always ideological. Hua Yan’s adoption of a visual approach comparable to Chen Hongshou was not merely studied nostalgia through form and style, but also a position of dissent with contemporary politics. His works are just as important for their local, inward-looking stance than for what they are not—embracing the global visual trends in portraiture at the Manchu court, such as realism and perspective that emerged alongside interests in science and math.46 They represent a distinct lineage, a stance aimed at reinvigorating historical ideals of learning and selfcultivation through conscious investigation of the past. Through the end of their lives, Hua Yan’s coterie wrote ci poetry to one another, traveled together to famous mountain peaks, and continued to cultivate their network with their poems and paintings. One notable poem by Li E recalled a moment spent drinking local Tianmu tea and singing poetry with Xu Fengji and the poet Jiang Xueqiao 蔣雪樵 (1656–1729).47 Tianmu tea is a green tea grown on Tianmu Mountain to the northwest of Hangzhou, and so related their activities of tea-drinking, singing lyrics, and nature walks to their identities as Zhejiang poets. Li E also wrote a preface for Jiang Xueqiao’s poems and he is frequently referenced throughout Li E’s writings.48 Similarly, Hua Yan wrote a poem in 1729 reminiscing about viewing autumn colors with four old friends, among them Jiang Xueqiao who passed away that same year.49 And upon Xu Fengji’s passing in 1740, Hua Yan lauded his friend’s poetry, indicating that it was a ci lyric due to its rhymed verse, “I clap to the rhyme and exclaim [that the poem is] extraordinary; I praise aloud the passage of time 擊節叫奇, 嘴賞移時.”50 Indeed, Hua Yan and the Zhe poets poetically and pictorially recorded moments spent together throughout their lives and commemorated one another after their deaths. 45 46 47 48 49 50

Richard Vinograd, “Composite Identities: Portraits,” in Repentant Monk: Illusion and Disillusion in the Art of Chen Hongshou, ed. Julia M. White (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 57–8. On portraiture at the Qing court, see Kristina Kleutghen, “One or Two, Repictured,” Archives of Asian Art 62 (2012): 25–46. Li E, “Shi Tianmu cha ge tong Jiang Xueqiao, Xu Zishan zuo 試天目茶歌同蔣丈雪 樵， 徐丈紫山作 (Written upon drinking Tianmu tea and singing [poetry] with Jiang Xueqiao and Xu Zishan)” in Li E, Fanxie shanfang quanji, 2:91. See Li E, Fanxie shanfang quanji, vol. 2, 3, 7. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:44. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:76.

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As such, Hua Yan and the Zhe School poets positioned themselves as heirs to a Zhejiang lineage through the revival of lyric poetry, diligent scholarship, and leisure rituals at local sites. They shared interests in the study of lyric poetry and ancient texts, as well as the practice of Chan Buddhism, both of which arose from a deep affinity for their hometown of Hangzhou. They not only participated in the movement to revive Song poetry, but also engaged in collecting and appreciating antiquities through recording ancient inscriptions and studying script types. Their scholarship naturally led to innovations in calligraphy and seal carving; for instance, Jin Nong studied and collected antiquities long before he began calligraphy and, even later, painting.51 As a collector and scholar of stone rubbings, Jin Nong shared interests in epigraphy with Zhe School poets,52 who engaged in the study of metal and stone antiquities, such as the eminent poet and seal carver Ding Jing 丁敬 (1695–1765),53 Hang Shijun 杭世駿 (1695–1772),54 and Quan Zuwang 全租望 (1705–1755). Some studied scripts derived from the calligraphy carved on ancient metal or stone objects (jinshixue 金石學), such as Ding Jing and Jin Nong. Several figures also were engaged in evidential research (kaozhengxue 考證學), or the textual criticism and philological studies of ancient works for which scholars in Hangzhou were especially known.55 As Benjamin Elman has pointed out, the evidential research of the Zhe School poets Quan Zuwang and Hang Shijun in particular set the stage for the philological studies of Han Learning that became especially popular in this region.56 Moreover, the evidential research and artistic explorations of the Zhe School poets came to define more broadly the aesthetic 51

52 53

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Huang Dun, “Two Schools of Calligraphy Join Hands: Tiepai and Beipai in the Qing Dynasty,” in Ouyang Zhongshi, et al., Chinese Calligraphy, trans. and ed. Wang Youfen (New Haven: Yale University Press; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2008), 351–3; Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 8:4749–65. Huang Dun, “Two Schools of Calligraphy Join Hands,” 351–53. On Ding Jing’s seals, calligraphy, and social circle, see Chak Kwong Lau, Ding Jing (1695– 1765) and the Foundation of the Xiling Identity in Hangzhou, Ph.D. dissertation (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006), 6; 68–80. For Ding Jing’s biography as a poet, see Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 8:4777–84. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 4:93. See also Chen Wanting 陳琬婷, Hang Shijun nianpu 杭世駿年譜 (Biography of Hang Shijun) (Ph.D. diss., National Sun Yatsen University, 2007). Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 65. See also Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), 186–9. Benjamin A. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): xxv– xxvi.

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interests of their circle, including Hua Yan, who often embellished his works with titles written in seal script and portrayed classical figures and themes. Hua Yan’s art clearly emerged from his poetry and social practices in Zhejiang, a path similar to that of the luminary, Jin Nong. Both were poets who later turned to painting as a profession in Yangzhou, and also appear to have shared many years of friendship.57 In one entry, Jin Nong discussed his gradual transition to painting professionally around 1750 with two friends, Xu Bin 許濱 (act. mid-eighteenth century) and Hua Yan.58 Jin Nong recalled: Xu Bin, sobriquet Jiangmen, from Danyang, is excellent at painting weathered rocks and narcissus59 amid crackling ice and melting snow, and [his work] is timeless and charming. He has truly grasped Zhao Zigu’s [Zhao Mengjian 趙孟堅 (1199–1295)] ninety-three methods for painting stems. Hua Yan, sobriquet Qiuyue, from Tingzhou,60 has moved to my hometown [Hangzhou]. Together we have watched each other’s hair turn white. Within the time it took to prepare a meal, he was able to paint orchids on a scroll measuring five zhang.61 The painting was pure but not alluring. It was as though a subtle fragrance pervaded the empty valley. Every time these two elderly gentlemen met in the old forest and chatted over tea, each boastfully showed the other his works. I felt frustrated for my inability to follow suit. In the sixth month of this year, I painted a few bamboo stalks on the spur of the moment. The bamboo was not quite bad, so it was praised by the two elderly gentlemen… 丹陽許濱江門，善畫窠石水仙薄水殘雪，時見嫣然。趙子固九十三莖 畫法，江門深得之。汀洲華喦秋岳僑居吾鄉，相對皆白首矣。嘗畫蘭 草紙卷，卷有長五丈者，一炊飯頃便了能事。清而不媚，恍聞幽香散 空谷中。二老每遇古林茶話，各出所制夸示。予恨不能踵其後塵也。 今年六月，予忽爾畫竹。竹亦不惡，頗為二老嘆賞。。。62

57 58 59 60 61 62

See, for example, Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:138. Wang Yun, Yangzhou huayuan lu, 3:23. This subject matter often was painted in the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, with the weathered rock and narcissus offering a variation on the “friends of winter” theme that typically includes bamboo, plum, and pine. Tingzhou (modern Changting) is in Longyan prefecture, western Fujian province. A zhang is the length of ten feet. Jin Nong 金農 (1687–1763), Dongxin xiansheng tihua ji 冬心先生題畫記 (Record of inscriptions on paintings by Master Dongxin) (Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1986), 19. Translation modified from: Tsang (1983), 93, n. 163.

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In this passage, Jin Nong expressed the years of friendship spent “watching each other’s hair turn white” over painting and drinking tea. He noted that Hua Yan could quickly compose elegant works, while he himself had only just begun painting at this time. Moreover, although the Zhe School poets located their ideals of eremitism, archaism, and lyricism in Hangzhou, poets and artists including Hua Yan, Li E, Jin Nong, and several others later found a hearty reception in Yangzhou, where poetry circles often led to patronage. 3

The Sojourning Artist

Journeys, and the poems and paintings that they inspired, often evoked deep reflection and reminiscence that comprised a significant facet of Hua Yan’s works, especially during his travels in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. The act of visiting natural sites not only drew a likeness between the artist and topoi, but also enlivened a historical discourse on the practice of artistic pilgrimage. Late Ming and early Qing artists such as Lan Ying, Yun Shouping, and Shitao also traveled widely within Jiangnan and beyond, and registered their sojourns in word and image. Historically, artists undertook these journeys for reasons of creative or spiritual inspiration as well as the practical concern of finding patronage, which often necessitated extensive travel. Hua Yan’s landscapes exude a fresh experience of traveling through the wilderness, finding inspiration in nature and exercising the techniques of earlier artists, while also positioning his work within a lineage of sojourning Jiangnan artists. Hua Yan traveled to Beijing, throughout Jiangnan, and frequently sojourned in Yangzhou prior to the arrival of his Zhe School peers. His travels thus provided poignant moments of farewells, seasonal passages, hardships, reminiscences, homecomings—all of which became fodder for his lyrical renditions in painting and poetry. Hua Yan recorded journeys to Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang to view the autumn colors with his friends, the Zhe School poets Wu Shicang and Xu Fengji.63 At other times, Hua Yan bid farewell to his friends and family for the purpose of carving out an artistic livelihood, whether moving from his village in Fujian to Hangzhou, or from Hangzhou to Beijing, or from Hangzhou to Yangzhou. Biographical factors such as the death of his first wife,

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Hua Yan, “Tong Xu Zishan Wu Shicang Shisun feng kan qiuse 同徐紫山吳石倉石筍峰看 秋色 (Looking at the autumn colors on Shisun Peak with Xu Zishan and Wu Shicang),” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:16.

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Jiang Yan 蔣妍, around 1715,64 also coincided with periods of travel, when Hua Yan ventured up the Grand Canal to Beijing around 1718 in an unsuccessful effort to attain patronage, after which he wrote of visiting famous pilgrimage sites along the route back to Jiangnan.65 He journeyed to his hometown in Fujian province and sites around the Jiangnan region, and traveled along the Grand Canal in 1723, sojourning briefly in Yangzhou. The Yangzhou artist Zhang Sijiao 張四教 (b. ca. 1718), recorded Hua Yan’s visit to Yangzhou in his inscription to his painting, Posthumous Portrait of Hua Yan, dated 1767, upon which he noted, “Mister Hua Qiuyue from Hangzhou came to Yangzhou in the first year of the Yongzheng era [1723] 雍正初，余杭華秋岳先生來揚州 ” (Fig. 1). As Hua Yan later moved to Yangzhou for a longer period of residence, it appears that the travels that inspired his landscape paintings were couched within deep uncertainty about his life’s work. An album by Hua Yan entitled, Landscapes, dated 1729, recalls the artist’s journeys in Jiangnan with a fresh and inspiring tone, as if celebrating the act of nature travel as much as the history of paintings on nature travel.66 One leaf of this sixteen-leaf album depicts a solitary figure that is pictured from behind, garbed in robes, and carrying a walking staff (Fig. 8). He is positioned upon an embankment at a river’s edge. Angular trees with tiny white buds loom over the figure as he appears to gaze toward a distant bridge and a wash of mountains. The pink, blue, and green hues appear vivid and fresh, enlivening the composition with the first tastes of spring—the moment the traveler arrives at a breathtaking vista. The inscription reads, “[In the] fragrant grotto, the heavenly universe begins 香巖天界開,” further conveying the awe of this enchanting scene. With the rocky overhangs and angular branches of the grotto framing the lone traveler, Hua Yan’s painting falls in line with Zhejiang tastes for evocative landscape compositions. The Hangzhou luminary, Lan Ying, similarly 64

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Hua Yan mourned the death of his first wife in a poem written around 1715, “Chunchou shi 春愁詩 (Spring sorrow),” in which he wrote, “Half of the silk quilt bedcover will not be warm, one lantern eternally facing the sunset 半幅羅衾不肯溫，一燈常自對黃昏.” In another poem from this period, “Zhuiyi Jiang Yan nei zi zuo shi dang ku 追憶蔣妍內子作 詩當哭 (Remembering Jiang Yan, my wife, writing a poem and sobbing),” he reminisced about his wife and bemoaned her passing. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:18; 24. He remarried in 1721 and then had two sons, Hua Li and Hua Jun. Hua Yan, “Dingyou jiu yue ke dumen si qin jian huai kundi zuo 丁酉九月客都門 思親兼懷昆弟作 (In the ninth month of the dingyou year as a guest in the capital, written while thinking of my parents and elder brother)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:25. There is a duplicate of this album in the Guangdong Art Museum. Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Album, ink and color on paper, 24 × 16.4 cm, Guangdong Art Museum.

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Figure 8 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 8. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20h.

composed a Jiangnan landscape in his Landscapes after Song and Yuan Masters, dated 1642. A leaf pictures a man facing a bubbling mountain creek where it meets a river (Fig. 9). The man is framed within a grouping of leafless trees, with one that is just beginning to deliver the pink hues of spring blossoms. As in the leaf by Hua Yan, a cliff rises along the right of the composition, contrasting with the unpainted void in the upper left corner. Lan Ying’s work, though abiding by Song and Yuan precedents of asymmetrical compositions, is presented here with fresh color scheme and crisp brushwork. Throughout the album, contrasts between fluid and dry strokes characterize his calligraphic brushwork, while pale blue-green color washes add an archaic flavor. Other images from Hua Yan’s Landscapes album similarly portray the Jiangnan waterways, such as one leaf that depicts a miniscule boatman on a skiff beneath a rocky ledge (Fig. 10). Soft, dry strokes lend texture to the boulders

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Figure 9

Lan Ying, Landscapes After Song and Yuan Masters, 1642. Leaf L. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 31.6 × 24.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Sackler Fund, 1970.2-2L.

and rich contour lines detail the trees, while the rocks are touched with pale pink washes. Hua Yan painted the steep cliff looming along the right side, with the skiff pictured beneath a tiny tree on a rocky outcropping at the base of the peak. Across the expanse of water, dry brushstrokes shape a ridge of mountains touched with a pale blue wash. Hua Yan’s inscribed quatrain offers metaphysical remarks on the landscape: In the heart of the clouds is the meaning of the mountain, two unseen worlds. One only has to ask to see the mountain man and quietly listen.

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Figure 10 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 14. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20n.

Hearing of mists dispersing on river islets in colors pure, At last now one can see the reason the mountain is blue. 雲心峰意兩冥冥。 只許看山人靜聽。 聽到烟銷渚色淨， 於今終見故山青。

Both poem and painting not only describe the appearance of the mountain and its mysterious features, but point to the practice of landscape sojourns as a lyrical experience. Travel poetry, as opposed to historical accounts, was generally lyrical in nature. Richard Strassberg has described it as an autobiographical act, in which

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Figure 11 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 5. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20e.

the poet used highly imagistic language to draw an intimate relationship between his inner sentiments and the sensual qualities of scenes.67 Like landscape painting, travel poetry has a luminous history in Zhejiang. The Zhejiang native Xie Lingyun is regarded as the founder of “landscape poetry,” or shanshui shi 山水詩, both for his self-image of the solitary traveler and for the structural pattern of the journey that he used in his poems.68 Throughout his writings, Xie Lingyun constructed the poetic persona of the traveler as one who appreciates an austere life amid nature, as later referenced in Hua Yan’s Self Portrait. By the eighteenth century, such personas were commonly associated with Zhejiang poets, such as the eminent poet from Hangzhou, Yuan Mei, who set forth the concept of xingling 性靈, or “nature and inspiration.”69 Yuan Mei’s careful study of nature evoked the sentiments that he expressed in his poetry, just as Hua Yan’s sensitive observations of the natural world in poetry and painting characterized him as an erudite mountain man. 67 68 69

Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 12. Ibid., 29. J.D. Schmidt, Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716– 1798) (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 227.

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Throughout the Landscapes album, Hua Yan intimately responded to fabled sites, such as the Xiang River (Fig. 11). The Xiang River, which feeds Lake Dongting, is frequently referenced in Song dynasty poems and paintings as a place of exile and banishment.70 Hua Yan responded to that tradition through his image of the site, capturing the chill of his evening spent beside the river. In this leaf, a man is pictured at the center of the composition, standing on a river embankment, holding a staff, and facing the river. Painted with a dry application of ink is a boulder looming beside him, as well as two tall trees. The stark, dry ink contrasts with the vibrant washes of color rendering pink blossoms on the trees and blue silhouettes of mountains in the distance. The inscription reads: The wind blows over the river for three li, five li, A bright moon before the bay, after the bay. The rustling sound of frost arrives at my pillow, On the Xiang River the evening stains the autumn mountains. 江風三里五里, 明月前湾后湾。 瑟瑟霜声到枕， 湘天夜染秋山。

Both desolate and luminous, Hua Yan’s impression of the Xiang River captures its extensive history, rendering it both fresh and intimate. In other leafs in the album, Hua Yan offers philosophical reflections in response to the Jiangnan landscape. One leaf pictures the silhouette of a promontory, with the tall mast of a ship protruding above a hill and the rooftop of a pavilion (Fig. 12). Along the shore, three figures appear to pull ropes, toiling to draw a boat up the river. The landscape is almost entirely composed washes of red, green, and blue hues, with only the details of the figures, boats, and foliage sparsely rendered in ink. Hua Yan inscribed the poem: How could things ever compete? The great void is prone to anger. Startled, I doubted the shaking tiles, the boiling earth strangely issuing its breath. Powerful yet not flowing over cliffs and ships, Restraining its force, it is not the Great Kun. At the end of the day, the river avoids being straight, Bitter from fighting the dust. 70

Murck, The Subtle Art of Dissent, 73–99.

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Figure 12 Hua Yan, Landscapes, 1729. Leaf 1. Album of 16 leaves, ink and color on paper. 23.4 × 15.8 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1955.20a.

與物曾何競，太空偏怒嗔。 驚心疑震瓦，沸地怪吹唇， 威莫傾崖艦，力留負大鲲， 江天终辟立，苦自战埃塵。

Describing the nature of the universe through his observations of the river, this leaf emphasizes Hua Yan’s personal sentiments. The reference to the Great Kun, or the fish that transformed into the Giant Peng bird in the Daoist classic, Nanhua jing 南華經, and further discussed in Chapter Two, characterizes the river as a controlled entity destined to follow its course in life. In the end, the river avoids being straight, only to remain bitter about its limitations. Such an evocative poem, in contrast to the other leaves documenting the awe and majesty Hua Yan perceived of the landscape, suggests that he also viewed his travels and his painting practice as an avenue for personal reflection. On another leaf, the inscription positions the artist near Lake Tai, in the region of Suzhou, with a lengthy inscription about traveling amid the rain and clouds, ending with the comment that “When the rain tapers off, I come begging for poems

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雨闌時來乞詩.” With such comments, Hua Yan conveyed both his reverence

for the wilderness and the anxieties of his artistic livelihood. Altogether, the album weaves together Hua Yan’s reality, positioning him in relationship to certain sites and addressing the idealized life and internal conflicts of the sojourning artist. As a lyrical evocation of Hua Yan’s sojourns, Landscapes recalls the work of the early Qing painter and poet, Shitao. Shitao, too, journeyed extensively along the Grand Canal, cultivating his persona as a solitary traveler, monk, poet, and painter, while building a thriving social network in Yangzhou and throughout the Jiangnan region. His landscape albums captured his intimate relationship with sites through undulating contour lines and pale pink and blue washes. Painting decades later, Hua Yan similarly opted for a subtle pictorial style coupled with the profundity of his personal expression. In the early eighteenth century, sites themselves were part of diverse histories, being visited by artists, religious figures, and even emperors. In one such example, Hua Yan wrote a series of poems upon mountain sites that he visited along the route between Beijing and Jiangnan, including his impressions of the five sacred peaks of Songshan, Huashan, Hengshan, Hengshan, and Taishan.71 These mountains have been known as the Wuyue 五岳 (Five peaks) since the Warring States period (475–221 bce), representing the five cardinal directions of east (Tai 泰), west (Hua 華), north (Heng 恒), south (Heng 衡), and center (Song 嵩).72 They are especially significant in Daoism, for sacred mountains were understood as axis mundi connecting heaven and earth, an abode of gods and immortals encircled by life-breath, or qi 氣. Mount Tai also received imperial pilgrimages, for emperors visited the site to perform Heaven-worshipping ceremonies and so obtain the Mandate of Heaven, or the right to rule. Not long before Hua Yan’s travels to the peak, the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662–1722) took his first extensive southern tour with the intent of performing these ceremonies at Mount Tai; the offerings were successful and a new reign era was proclaimed.73 Artists including the Ming loyalist Shitao celebrated Emperor Kangxi’s imperial pilgrimage to Mount Tai in both poetry and painting.74 Following his second imperial tour, the Jiangnan 71 72 73

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Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:25–28. Tracy Kleeman, “Mountain Deities in China: The Domestication of the Mountain God and the Subjugation of the Margins,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 114, no. 2 (1994): 226–38. Maxwell K. Hearn, “Art Creates History: Wang Hui and The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour,” in Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632–1717), ed. Maxwell K. Hearn (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), 130–1. Hay, Shitao, 102–3.

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artist Wang Hui famously pictured Mount Tai in the third of twelve scrolls comprising The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, datable to 1698.75 Having never visited the site himself, Wang Hui depicted the landscape of Mount Tai with careful reference to cartographic features recorded in contemporary maps of Shandong province, but pictured its peaks in an extraordinary scale that suggests the sacred nature of the mountain. Wang Hui rendered the site in an archaic blue-green palette, portraying it as both majestic and otherworldly, suggesting the legitimacy of the new emperor and the Manchu claim to the Mandate of Heaven. Artists often traveled to famous landscape sites in an act of pilgrimage or, chao shan 朝山, “to pay respect to the mountain.”76 Undoubtedly aware of the history of pilgrimages to the site, Hua Yan paid respect to Mount Tai in 1719 on his way back home to Hangzhou from an unsuccessful attempt at finding patronage in the capital. Located in modern-day Shandong province, the iconic landscape of Mount Tai still is recognized by its monolithic, rounded peak and misty ravines, as Hua Yan described in a poem: The Palace of Rosy Clouds77 leans against the jagged peaks, Winding footpaths and floating ladders circle [the mountain] eighteen times. Disordered cliffs and lotus blossoms encircle the seat of Gods, Parting a hole in the clouds is a ray of immortal palaces. Rain passes between the pines, dampening dragon scales, Moss covers towering rocks, like broken bird script. In the middle of the night a chicken calls out the break of dawn, Looking down to the deep blue sea, it is but one glass wide. 碧霞宮殿倚巉岏， 曲磴飛梯十八盤。 亂削蓮華圍帝座， 別開雲洞列仙官。 松門雨過龍鱗濕， 75 76 77

Wang Hui (1632–1717) and assistants, The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour: Scroll Three: Ji’nan to Mount Tai, datable to 1698. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 67.9 × 1393.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. James Cahill, “Huang Shan Paintings as Pilgrimage Pictures,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, ed. Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 246–92. Likely the name of a Daoist temple between Ningbo and Hangzhou.

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The Mountain Man of Xinluo 石碣苔封鳥篆殘。 夜半雞鳴初日上， 俯看滄海一杯寬。78

In his poem, Hua Yan carefully noted the mountain’s jagged peaks, winding footpaths and floating ladders, disordered cliffs and pine trees. The poem highlights Hua Yan’s exceptional ability to perceive the mysteries of these natural phenomena through the subtle intricacies of sites. In so doing, Hua Yan was likening himself to earlier poets who similarly had visited and written about this site. However, his interest in the site also acts as a counterpoint to the mountain’s contemporary politicization by the Manchu court. His painting thus reinstates Han cultural identity through the practice of artistic pilgrimage and its subsequent poetic and pictorial records. Hua Yan’s hanging scroll, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, dated to the third day of the eighth month of 1730, visually depicts the mountain in a bold and spontaneous style (Fig. 13).79 The artist portrayed the mountain’s iconic form through thick contour lines depicting mists and clouds, a lack of ground lines, and layered applications of rich, wet ink dots that animate the mountain with a sense of pulsating energy. The peaks of the mountain echo through the composition, the first of which is positioned at the center and shaped by mottled ink dots rather than contour lines, in the manner of the Northern Song dynasty painter, Mi Fu 米黻 (1051–1107). The second peak is offset to the upper right corner to portray the distant mountains, which are rendered in a light ink wash in the upper left corner. The painting relates Hua Yan’s ethereal vision of the mountain, looming above the mists and clouds, and to his identification with its otherworldly nature and philosophical significance. Hua Yan inscribed this work over a decade after his visit to the site, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, which he wrote along the right side of the composition in the archaic script also seen on Self Portrait (1727). In the first part of his inscription on the painting, he remembered the cloud formations of Mount Tai as rumbling, billowing, zoomorphic forms and laid forth the stylistic precedents for his painting. He began his inscription with the following recollection: 78 79

Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:27–8. A duplicate of this painting exists in the Changzhou Museum, though it does not bear Hua Yan’s title in seal script along the right side of the composition. Hua Yan, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, dated 1730. Hanging scroll, ink on paper. 170 × 67.8 cm. Changzhou Museum. Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu 中國古代書畫圖目 (Illustrated Catalog of Selected Works of Ancient Chinese Painting and Calligraphy), 24 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2000), 6:299, 15–29.

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Figure 13 Hua Yan, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, 1730. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 179 × 67.9 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum Purchase, The Arthur M. Sackler Collection, Y1969–75.

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A fellow traveler said: ‘Ding Nanyu [Yunpeng] painted the Cloud Sea of Mount Huang [Anwei] and Yun Nantian [Shouping] the Cloud Sea of Mount Tianmu [Zhejiang].80 Thus, Mount Huang is strange and treacherous, while Mount Tianmu is secluded and mysterious, and when clouds and vapors gather, there are endless transformations, so these gentlemen [Ding and Yun] have each exercised their imagination, and they have grasped the secret flavor [of the mountains].’ I once traveled to Mount Tai [Tai’an district, Shandong province], and saw the clouds issuing from between the Lotus and Sun-sight Peaks. In their beginning, they were like dragons, like horses, like a phoenix soaring or a monstrous bird taking flight. They seemed to build thunderously like circling chariots. All of a sudden, they filled the emptiness with succeeding billows that spread into a vast sea. Now working after Ding and Yun and the three cloud seas they painted, and the cloud seas that I have seen, each of these three have unique differences. Why have I alone gone to this degree of difficulty to release this expansive force in my chest, to reveal the face of this magical mountain? I suddenly marvel at the mountain chilled to the bone, Its myriad fissures awash with billowing crests. Playfully patterning myself after Lie Yukou [Liezi], I float on emptiness and the whistling wind. [Signed] The woodcutter of Nanyang Mountain, [Hua] Yan.81 客言丁南羽有黃山雲海圖，惲南田有天目雲海圖。然黃山奇險，天目 幽奧，雲嵐聚合，變態無常而其君各運機杼，皆能掇其祕趣。余曩時 客遊泰岱，見雲出蓮華日觀两峰之間。其始也，或如龍如馬如鳳翔鵬 起。蓋旋車翻翔若虺虺有聲。須臾，彌空疊浪汪洋海矣。今擬丁惲二 子所畫之雲海，与余所觀之雲海，三者則當有別焉。余獨何艱乎排胸 中浩蕩之氣，一洗山靈面目也哉。 忽訝山骨泠， 萬竅濯靈濤。 戲仿列禦寇， 憑虛風颭颭。 南陽山中樵客喦。 80 81

The subject, “Cloud Sea at Mount Tai,” does not appear among titles of extant works by Ding Yunpeng and Yun Shouping. Translation modified from: Marilyn and Shen Fu, Studies in Connoisseurship: Chinese Paintings from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection in New York and Princeton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 322.

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Described in terms of stunning immediacy, Hua Yan’s inscription conveys his memory of its echoing mountain peaks and clouds issuing forth between the looming peaks. Then, in mentioning the artists Yun Shouping and Ding Yunpeng 丁雲鵬 (c. 1547–1628), Hua Yan also positioned his painting within a specifically Jiangnan context. Ding Yunpeng was an artist from Anhui who traveled to Buddhist temples along the Grand Canal and became active in the vibrant center of Songjiang, Jiangsu province, during the seventeenth century.82 Yun Shouping, a long-time resident of Hangzhou, had a talent for calligraphy and landscapes in addition to the flower paintings he often is recognized for today.83 In an inscription on an album of paintings by Yun Shouping, Hua Yan underscored his predecessor’s use of the brush to create a fresh and clean aesthetic. He wrote: [Yun Shouping] uses the tip of the brush to sweep away the dusts of the world, He was able to give the river and mountain a new look. I, too, to lower my head and carefully study his craft, Between the mists and evening glow is a spring like no other. 筆尖刷卻世間塵 ， 能使江山面目新 。 我亦低頭經意匠 ， 烟霞先後不同春。84

Of Yun Shouping, Hua Yan valued both the ephemeral nature of his landscapes and his careful study of ancient pictorial modes. In fact, the poet Xu Fengji compared Yun Shouping to Hua Yan in his preface to Hua Yan’s anthology. Lauding his friend, he wrote: 82

83

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For Ding Yunpeng’s landscapes, see James Cahill, The Distant Mountains, 217–21. For Ding Yunpeng’s Buddhist subjects, see: Richard K. Kent, “Ding Yunpeng’s ‘Baimiao Luohans’: A Reflection of Late Ming Lay Buddhism,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 63 (2004): 63–89. For Ding Yunpeng’s Daoist subjects, see Mary H. Fong, “The Iconography of the Popular Gods of Happiness, Emolument, and Longevity (Fu Lu Shou),” Artibus Asiae, 44, 2/3 (1983): 159–99, esp. 184. Julia K. Murray, “An Album of Paintings by Yun Shou-p’ing, the Recluse of Nan-t’ien,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 37, no. 1 (1978): 5. See also Ginger Tong, “Yun Shou-P’ing (1633–1690) and His Landscape Art,” (Ph.D dissertation, Stanford University, 1983). Hua Yan, “Ti Yun Nantian huace 題惲南田畫冊 (Inscribing an album of paintings by Yun Nantian)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:40–41. This passage dates prior to 1729.

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Mister Hua also excelled in calligraphy and paintings, and they were as extraordinary as his poetry. Formerly, Yun Nantian of Piling85 excelled in the Three Perfections and was famous in the country. [Hua Yan] resembles [Yun Shouping] yet is not inferior to him. 華君復工書畫 。 書畫之妙 ，亦如其詩 。 昔畢陵惲南田擅三絕，名於 海內 。 斯人彷彿又當無恧焉 。86

Here, Xu Fengji highlighted the fundamental elements of Hua Yan’s painting: his careful study of ancient models, precise brushwork, and versatility in subject matter. His reverence for Yun Shouping is significant because it attests to his popularity in eighteenth-century Jiangnan, a notable departure from later characterizations of Yun Shouping’s work as one of six painters at the Qing court comprising the Orthodox School.87 The second part of Hua Yan’s inscription on Cloud Sea at Mount Tai draws a thematic connection with Self Portrait (1727), again constructing his persona as a recluse.88 Here, he referenced the Daoist sage Liezi, who is mentioned in the first chapter of the Nanhua jing. In Xiaoyao you 逍遙游 (Free and Easy Wandering), Liezi is described as a sage who rode about on the wind without a worldly thought or care: Liezi could ride the wind and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to the earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around. If he had only mounted on the truth of Heaven and Earth, ridden the changes of the six breaths, and thus wandered through the boundless, then what would he have had to depend on?

85 86 87 88

Modern day Changzhou; Yun Shouping’s bird-and-flower mode is associated with the Changzhou School. See Saehyang P. Chung, “An Introduction to the Changzhou School of Painting- II,” Oriental Art 31, no. 3 (1985): 293–308. Xu Fengji, Preface to Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1. Grove Art Online, s.v. “Orthodox School,” by James Cahill (2003), accessed October 25, 2018, . Cf. Hua Yan, Liezi Riding the Wind, dated 1727. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 128.5 × 45.3 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.

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Chapter 1 夫列子御風而行，泠然善也，旬有五日而後反。彼於致福者，未數數 然也。此雖免乎行，猶有所待者也。若夫乘天地之正，而御六氣之 辯，以遊無窮者，彼且惡乎待哉？89

The Daoist-recluse archetype of Liezi also may have contributed to Hua Yan’s depiction in Self Portrait, for he described in his inscription his ventures amid the wilderness as “fluttering among layers of clouds and mist.” Just as Liezi “soars about on the wind with cool and breezy skill,” without a worry for good fortune, Hua Yan depicted himself in Self Portrait in a carefree state of roaming through the mountains. On Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, he signed his inscription, “the woodcutter of Nanyang Mountain,” a reference to the preface to Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring,” which mentioned a hermit named Liu Ziji 劉子驥 from Nanyang (present-day Henan province) who set out to locate the peaceful village hidden past a river of peach blossoms.90 In associating himself with the hermit of Nanyang in his signature on Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, Hua Yan likened this image with his persona as a utopia-seeking recluse. Although artists and poets frequently wrote in the trope of travel writing that emphasized themes of carefree wandering, austerity, and erudite ideals, certainly there were practical purposes behind their sojourns. Though they scorned the pursuit of commercial profit, at least publicly, artists and poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within a network of social obligations, friendly favors, and informal opportunities to create what appeared, or purported to be, a modest livelihood. Fashioning themselves as recluses and mountain men through landscapes and portraits, artists like Hua Yan defined a community of like-minded individuals in part facilitated by the genre of landscape sojourns that, like its sister travel writing, was typically lyrical in nature; it was understood that images represented a connection between the observer and the site at a specific moment. This immediacy, captured in Hua Yan’s Landscapes album and Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, embodied both the artist’s self-representation and reflected the historical consciousness of his circle. 89 90

Lü Huiqing 呂惠卿 (1032–1111), comp. Zhuangzi yi jijiao 莊子義集校 (Assembled Collations on Zhuangzi) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 6. Translation from: Burton Watson, trans. Zhuangzi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 26. Translated by J. R. Hightower in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, 515–7. On Liu Ziji and other hermits of Tao Yuanming’s hometown, see: Kang-i Sun Chang, “The Unmasking of Tao Qian and the Indeterminacy of Interpretation,” in Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, Zong-qi Cai, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 173.

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Figure 14 Hua Yan, Conversation in Autumn, 1732. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper, 115.3 × 39.7 cm (overall 281.5 × 71.7 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art. John L. Severance Fund, 1954.263.

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Drawing together the poet-recluse sentiments seen in his portraits and landscapes, Hua Yan’s painting, Conversation in Autumn, dated 1732, highlights the social dimensions of his practice (Fig. 14). Two figures sit in a thatched cottage nestled deep in a valley, and a servant looks on from a nearby corridor. The cottage perches upon contorted boulders rising above the wavy lines of a bubbling creek. Rendered in sketchy lines and pale pink washes, the mountains above the cottage appear as exaggerated representations of the looming peaks seen along Jiangnan waterways. Trees and bamboo frame the cottage, with wet dots of foliage and thin sprigs of fresh growth, contrasting with one leafless trunk that echoes the sharp twists and angles of the rocks and mountains. The stark composition and subtle color washes deepens the sense of intimacy and reclusion, as Hua Yan inscribed: My guest came to sit from beyond the dust, In a narrow room, we discussed the sounds of autumn. 客來塵外坐，窄屋講秋聲。

Set apart from the world, the figures seem immersed in the quiet and cold of autumn. While they enjoy this intimate moment, the rough brushstrokes lend a raw sensibility that is lacking formality—exuding a truthfulness that comes to characterize Hua Yan’s works.  Conversation in Autumn reveals that at the heart of Hua Yan’s portraits and landscapes is a lyrical approach that drew a likeness between self and topoi, and self and others, past and present. This humble painting, which surmounts the challenges of self-positioning in the portraits above, defines Hua Yan’s position as unprivileged, unpolished, and real; it summons others like him and defies expectations of a professional painter through his pursuit of tangible, sensual, and deeply personal expression. His early interests in nature and poetry, coupled with a preference for bold and unencumbered brushwork, served to visualize the ideals of his poetry circle in Zhejiang. As we shall see, throughout his life Hua Yan drew heavily on the relationship between self and subject, giving a lyrical voice to his poetry and painting that defined him as a Zhejiang artist. Just as Hua Yan’s landscapes and portraits drew close the artist with nature and society, the following chapter expands upon his social world through exploration of flower-and-bird subjects.

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Lyricism in Words and Images

Chapter 2

Lyricism in Words and Images After many sojourns between Hangzhou and Yangzhou, Hua Yan left his family and settled in Yangzhou around the year 1732. His work in Yangzhou saw the development of his distinctive lyrical approach, most notably in the flowerand-bird genre. Whether in painting or poetry, lyricism allowed poets or painters to express their concerns in a socially acceptable form.1 For Hua Yan, this entailed lodging his sentiments in natural sites, as in the landscapes discussed in Chapter One, or in animate things, such as flowers and birds. His lyrical treatment of subjects not only brought images to life, but also brought Hua Yan’s interior and exterior worlds into dialogue. As a medium of communication between Hua Yan and his acquaintances in Hangzhou, most notably Li E, and later his host in Yangzhou, Yun Guotang, lyrical imagery could be understood as central to defining these intimate relationships. A single painting and poem could convey simultaneously the artist’s sensitive observations of form and subject matter, his relationship to another individual or even his broader perspective on politics or society. This chapter focuses on lyricism as a core feature of Hua Yan’s works, looking to its utility in linking objects with the artist, his circle, and their contemporary ideologies. The majority of the works discussed in this chapter were composed in the 1730s, when Hua Yan first resided in Yangzhou with the family of Yun Guotang. Aside from Hua Yan’s host, he mentioned few friends, patrons, or fellow artists in Yangzhou until the mid-1740s. Rather, many of the friends that Hua Yan recorded in his writings in the 1730s can be traced to time spent in Hangzhou. They were connected to Zhejiang poetry circles, including the Hangzhou poets Li E, Jiang Xueqiao, Jin Nong, Xu Fengji, and several of these figures later sojourned in Yangzhou. His only mention of a Yangzhou painter, Gao Xiang 高翔 (1688–1753), occurred in 1738.2 Since Gao Xiang was well acquainted with both Li E and Jin Nong (who did not begin painting until around 1750), Hua Yan’s connection to these figures was likely shaped by his poetry circle in Hangzhou rather than a network of painters in Yangzhou. For instance, Hua Yan wrote two poems for the Hangzhou poet Jiang Xueqiao while 1 For lyricism in poetry, see Xiao Chi, The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of the Story of the Stone (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001). For lyricism in painting, see Cahill, The Lyric Journey. 2 Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 78.

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he was recovering from illness on a trip back to Hangzhou around 1741, and he wrote poems for Li E and Xu Fengji around this time as well.3 He also composed two poems for Jin Nong in 1742 while the poet was briefly passing through Yangzhou.4 Although several poets of his Hangzhou circle eventually sojourned in Yangzhou, such as Li E and Jin Nong, Hua Yan’s paintings and poems from the 1730s suggest that he maintained connections with his Hangzhou circle through his periodic visits home, and the lyricism seen in his works emerged from his close relationships with Zhejiang poets. Although Hua Yan’s lyrical imagery originated in his poetry and associations with poets, it remained the most salient aspect of his works throughout his life. He sung of his love of the mountains and literature, using lyricism to define his social persona in Hangzhou and Yangzhou. He used flowers and birds to articulate concerns such as personal transformation, or to evoke sentiments of loss and longing. Through his words and images, Hua Yan poignantly evoked themes of transformation, disenchantment, and loss, just as he favored common subjects as suitable symbols for allegorical treatment. At a time when Hua Yan’s practice shifted from poetry to painting, and flower-and-bird paintings eclipsed landscapes and portraits, his use of lyricism articulates his transformation into a professional painter in Yangzhou. 1

On Transformation

Picturing a bird in flight amid a landscape of clouds, Hua Yan’s undated hanging scroll, Giant Peng, can be considered a transitional work between his earlier landscapes and his flower-and-bird paintings in Yangzhou (Fig. 15). The painting likely dates to the period between 1732 and 1738, around Hua Yan’s move to Yangzhou, based the record of the inscription in his anthology.5 The powerful image of the soaring black bird is not only unusual in the history of Chinese painting, but it is also intimately tied to the challenges Hua Yan perceived at this moment in his life. Though the subject is a bird, the work remains grounded in Hua Yan’s earlier approach to landscapes, here illuminating Daoist concepts in a vivid, 3 For Jiang Xueqiao, see Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:95–7; for Li E, see: Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:76; for Xu Fengji, see: Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:86. 4 Hua Yan, “Zeng Jin Shoumen shi ke Guangling jiang gui guli 贈金壽門時客廣陵將歸故里 (Poem for Jin Shoumen while sojourning in Guangling and about to return home)”; Hua Yan, “Huan he yin ma tu ti zeng Jin Dongxin 環河飲馬圖題贈金冬心 (Inscribed for the painting ‘Drinking a Horse Along the River’ for Jin Nong).” Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:133–4; 138. 5 Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:66.

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Figure 15 Hua Yan, Giant Peng, ca. 1732–1738. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 176.1 × 88.6 cm. Sumitomo Collection, Sen-Oku Hakuko-Kan, Kyoto.

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Figure 16 Hua Yan, Giant Peng, ca. 1732–1738. Detail. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 176.1 × 88.6 cm. Sumitomo Collection, Sen-Oku Hakuko-Kan, Kyoto.

self-referential fashion. Rendered in light color and ink, the striking representation of a giant black bird in a landscape of clouds evokes a sense of immediacy and intrigue, rugged fortitude and determination. With outstretched wings and talons curled under its body, the bird is pictured at the center of the composition as if soaring in mid-air. Though the relatively large painting first appears to be composed in a swift manner, closer investigation shows careful, detailed strokes of ink and subtle touches of pink hues that invest the bird with an indomitable expression (Fig. 16). The giant black bird, set amid a sea of ink washes and clouds rendered in loose contour lines, compares with Hua Yan’s earlier painting, Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, dated 1730, with its dramatic contrasts between wet and dry brushwork and tonal variations of the ink (Fig. 13). Similar Cloud Sea at Mount Tai, Hua Yan positioned the giant bird at the center of the hanging scroll, formatted in large dimensions that not only frame the bird in flight, but also seem to visually proclaim Hua Yan’s grand ambitions through likeness to his subject. His inscription highlights the pictorial features of the powerful bird with extended wings and mouth agape. He wrote: In the morning it inhales the clouds of the southern mountains, In the dusk it bathes in the waters of the northern sea. When it extends its wings it stirs up a wind that blows afar, With one flight it covers ninety thousand li. 朝吸南山雲，暮浴北海水。 展翅鼓長風，一舉九萬里。6

The text references “Free and Easy Wandering” from Nanhua jing, which describes the “Giant Peng” as a mythical bird of enormous size that has transformed from the mythical Kun fish and has the ability to fly high and far upon its expansive wings: 6 This inscription is recorded in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:66.

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In the bald and barren north, there is a dark sea, the Lake of Heaven. In it is a fish that is several thousand li across, and no one knows how long. His name is Kun. There is also a bird there, named Peng, with a back like Mount Tai and wings like clouds filling the sky. He beats the whirlwind, leaps into the air, and rises up ninety thousand li, cutting through the clouds and mist, shouldering the blue sky, and then he turns his eyes south and prepares to journey into the southern darkness.7 窮髮之北有冥海者，天池也。有魚焉，其廣數千里，未有知其脩者， 其名為鯤。有鳥焉，其名為鵬，背若泰山，翼若垂天之雲，摶扶搖羊 角而上者九萬里，絕雲氣，負青天，然後圖南，且適南冥也。8

In referencing the Nanhua jing, Hua Yan also drew a comparison between Cloud Sea at Mount Tai and Giant Peng. He noted in his inscription that the looming, rounded form of the Peng has a “back like Mount Tai 背若泰山.” Further, he stated that it has “wings like clouds filling the sky 翼若垂天之雲,” referring to the billowing clouds around the bird, which are also seen surrounding the mountain in Cloud Sea at Mount Tai. Hua Yan’s image of the Peng in flight evokes his own transformation as he forged his course as a painter and poet in Hangzhou to a professional artist in Yangzhou. His choice of this particular passage concerns the relativity of experience; it pertains to the limitations of one’s knowledge in comparison to the unlimited nature of knowledge itself. Zhuangzi explains that the Peng bird can soar at great heights and cover long distances, but the little quail finds it perfectly suitable to fly around the brambles and weeds, stating, “The little quail laughs at [the Peng], saying, ‘Where does he think he’s going? I give a great leap and fly up, but I never get more than ten or twelve yards before I come fluttering among the weeds and brambles. And that’s the best kind of flying anyway! Where does he think he’s going?’ Such is the difference between big and little.”9 Thus, the Peng bird is recognized as a symbol of the fortitude and accomplishment of a sage, while the quail remains limited by his relatively smaller range. As such, the Peng’s great achievements cannot be understood by a smaller or less cultivated being.10 Moreover, it suggests that although one may perceive vast differences in opportunities and experiences, one cannot necessarily understand or desire what lies beyond one’s circumstances. 7 8 9 10

Translation adapted from Watson, trans. Zhuangzi, 25. Lü Huiqing, Zhuangzi yi jijiao, 5. Translation from Watson, 25. See also Bryan W. Van Norden, “Competing Interpretations of the Inner Chapters of the ‘Zhuangzi,’” Philosophy East and West 46, no. 2 (April, 1996): 252–6.

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Figure 17 Bada Shanren, Flying Fish, 1693. Album leaf, ink on paper, 24.4 × 23 cm. Shanghai Museum.

Hua Yan’s bold brushwork and Daoist allusions recall the works of Bada Shanren 八大山人 (1626–1705), who rendered images of birds, flowers, fish, and other creatures hovering amid stark compositions. In Flying Fish, an album leaf by Bada Shanren, dated 1693, the fish is portrayed with a sophisticated gesture of an upraised tail that directs the viewer to the artist’s signature (Fig. 17). As Hui-shu Lee has pointed out, Bada Shanren personally identified with the fish as a symbol through a complex interplay of words and images, per Zhuangzi’s description of the transformation of the Kun fish into the Peng bird in the Nanhua jing.11 Viewed allegorically, Bada Shanren’s depictions of fish could be seen in light of his thwarted transformation, marking his resignation to the tragedy of the fall of the Ming. Although the sentiments expressed through Bada Shanren’s words and images specifically concern his early Qing 11

Hui-shu Lee, “Bada Shanren’s Bird-and-Fish Painting and the Art of Transformation,” Archives of Asian Art 44 (1991): 6–26.

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context, Hua Yan’s Giant Peng conveys a similar chord of frustration and discontent. Drawing on the intimate connection between artist and subject, Giant Peng seems to suggest that one’s potential for greatness may not be valued by ordinary minds, much as Hua Yan continued to vie for mid-life recognition. With Giant Peng, what may have begun as Hua Yan’s personal musings also expressed universal sentiments. Interestingly, the second inscription on the painting was added by Ge Kunhua 戈鯤化 (1836–1882), a scholar from Anhui province whose name literally means “Transformed Kun,” suggesting that this painting may have been a gifted to him, perhaps at a time of transition. After residing in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, for a decade, Ge Kunhua departed for Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1879 and became the first Chinese language instructor at Harvard University.12 By coupling personified subjects with Daoist references, works like Giant Peng uniquely represented Hua Yan’s own transformation as an artist as well as universal experiences such as life transitions. 2

Artist and Patron

In the paintings that followed Giant Peng, Hua Yan continued to personify his subject matter through lifelike depictions of flowers and birds that gestured to his own disposition and outlook. As in the poems between Hua Yan and fellow artists discussed in Chapter One, words and images also pointed to his most intimate relationships in Yangzhou. Hua Yan often inscribed these images with evocative poems and references to his patron and host, Yun Guotang, a merchant who he first befriended around 1730. Two years later, Hua Yan took up residence at the Yun estate as the family tutor, dedicating much of his time to painting and poetry. Yun Guotang appears to have shared Hua Yan’s vision of an idealized lifestyle of quiet study and mundane surroundings. In an inscription for a painting recorded in Ligou ji around 1738, Hua Yan described visiting Yun Guotang’s study. He wrote, “Cracked walls and the healthy sound of books, swallows building a nest and chatting pleasantly 破壁書聲健，營巢燕語溫.”13 This idyllic portrayal of Yun Guotang in his study emphasized his understated values and interest in literature and the arts, and so characterized him as cultivated scholar. However, while Yun Guotang valued the arts and classical 12 13

Fang Guanglu 方光祿, “Ge Kunhua shengnian, liji wenti kaozheng 戈鯤化生年，里籍 問題考證 (Textual research on Ge Kunhua’s birth and nationality),” Journal of Huangshan University 2 (2004): 21–2. Hua Yan, “Ti Guotang du shu tu 題果堂讀書圖 (Inscribing the painting, ‘Yun Guotang Studying’)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:72.

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education, he was not necessarily a prominent cultural figure in Yangzhou. Moreover, the family’s wealth appears to have been in decline during Hua Yan’s two decades of residence in Yangzhou, which necessitated relocation to a more modest estate on the east side of the city.14 It seems that while both Hua Yan and Yun Guotang aspired to an elegant and literary lifestyle, in reality they both struggled to make ends meet. Painted at the Yun family studio, Hua Yan’s Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peach Blossoms, dated 1742, likely functioned as a decorative work as well as a statement of his shared values with his patron, Yun Guotang (Fig. 18). In contrast to the bold lines and stark composition of Giant Peng, the slender, fluid lines of Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peach Blossoms recall the delicate garden imagery of the Song and Yuan dynasties prized by his Zhejiang peers. A single duck is positioned at the center of the expansive composition, framed by trees with red blossoms and a rocky embankment that extends along the lower left corner of the composition. The wavy lines suggest ripples on water, indicating that the duck is swimming, and two long strands of wispy vines hang down on its either side. In his inscription, Hua Yan used subtle, self-referential allusions, beginning with a description of the spiritual transcendence that precedes his experience of painting. Preludes like this are often seen in poetry, wherein the poet describes the process of clearing his mind in order to grasp nature and engage in the creative act of writing. Pauline Yu has suggested that preludes facilitate the goal of the poet, which was conceived of as “the literal reaction of the poet to the world around him and of which he is an integral part.”15 After the prelude to his poetic inscription, Hua Yan turns to a description of the duck as it swims about the peach blossoms: I set out the white silk in accordance with the forest of ink, Modest and tranquil to clearly examine the abstruse. In the darkness I knock, it is vast without limit, Pursuing the principle, my spirit is moved. Dispensing with silence I draw upon the spring of movement, Opening to brightness I grasp in my hands the darkness. Floating peach blossoms swirl on the surface [of the pond], Radiant and flowery they are dense and brilliant. The arrangement [of flowers] cannot be separated, 14 15

Zhang Sijiao noted their move to the east side of the city in his inscription on Posthumous Portrait of Hua Yan, dated 1767. See fig. 1. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 35–6.

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Figure 18 Hua Yan, Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peaches, 1742. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 271.5 × 137 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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The splendid fragrance is concentrated. The feathered [duck] swims and is delighted by the pure pool, Its appearance complements the ripples of the water. The pure emerald of the waters attracts its impulse to swim, At one moment delighted and at another taking in the scene. Sunlit earth is warmed by shimmering rays, The setting sun draws near the western hills. True understanding prizes cosmic enlightenment, Its beautiful appearance removes all impediments [to understanding]. 偃素循墨林，巽寂澂洞覽。 幽叩緲無垠，剖靜汲動機。 趣理神可感，披輝曁掬闇。 洪桃其屈盤，炫燁乎鬱燄。 布護靡閒疎，丽芬欲紊歛。 羽泛悅清渊，貌象媚瀲灔。 純碧繫游情，爰嬉亦爰攬。 晴坰盪流溫，靈照薄西崦。 真會崇優明，修榮憓翳奄。

Hua Yan’s use of phrases including “radiant and flowery” and “dense and brilliant” arrangements of flowers may be associated generally with Buddhist visual culture, made more personal by Hua Yan’s use of visual imagery. Imagery such as cliffs of flowers, shimmering reflections, and fragrant trees, typically adorn sites of enlightenment according to imagery written in the Buddhist “Flower Garland Sutra.” In this sutra, sites of enlightenment are adorned with flowers that represent the multitudes of things and spiritual powers.16 Specifically, the “Flower Garland Sutra,” and the “Flower Bank World” are described as a place of freedom for the enlightened or those who expound the words of the Buddha.17 As Hua Yan states, the beauty of the natural world is symbolized by his depiction of the duck and flowers, whose “beautiful appearance removes all impediments [to understanding],” thereby conceptualizing beauty as a means to finding enlightenment. Moreover, the rich visual imagery of flowers may also reflect a personal connection to Hua Yan’s name, which translates as “Cliff of Blossoms,” a homophone of the Huayan jing 華嚴經, the Avatamsaka Sutra or “Flower Garland Sutra.” This is the text of the Huayan sect of 16 17

Thomas Cleary, The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1993), 141. See Cleary, 206.

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Buddhism, which was popular in the Lower Yangzi region, along with Chan, Pure Land, Tiantai, and Weishi. It contains thirty-nine chapters of highly ornate language relating the abstract truths of the universe and includes rich details of flowers and adornments that also may have inspired Hua Yan’s imagery. In addition to spiritual meanings, the painting may have personal significance to Hua Yan. Traditionally, red peach blossoms suggest spring, the season during which this painting was inscribed and, therefore, they also are related to love and romance. They may also represent utopia, as in Tao Qian’s “Preface to the Peach Blossom Spring,” which describes an immortal’s paradise drawn from a history of Daoist writings surrounding the Queen Mother of the West.18 However, mandarin ducks are typically represented in pairs to represent everlasting love and companionship. By portraying a single duck rather than the typical pair swimming under peach blossoms, Hua Yan may be suggesting that the creature is detached from worldly attachments and free of suffering. Thus, the poetic and pictorial imagery gesture to concepts of worldly attachment and immortality. Whereas Giant Peng offers a bold comment on personal transformation, Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peach Blossoms lends itself to a more subtle spiritual statement. Hua Yan’s inscription notes that he painted the work at Yun Guotang’s studio in early spring of 1742. Created for his aging patron after a decade of friendship, this painting suggests as much about the artist as it does his relationship to Yun Guotang, who may have valued its aesthetics as much as its spiritual messages. The composition and subject matter are presented in a style that is vivid yet intriguing, one that offers a fresh treatment of its classical underpinnings. The painting also may be viewed in light of the other works that Hua Yan shared with Yun Guotang during this same year, of which there are several recorded in his anthology. In a poem also written in 1742, Hua Yan noted that Yun Guotang similarly delighted in the singing of poetry. Then, after a poem inscribed on a painting entitled, Inscribing Plum, Bamboo, and Pine, Hua Yan recorded a second inscription dated to New Year’s Eve in 1742, when he and Yun Guotang exchanged poems on the last chilly day of the year. He wrote: In the renxu year [1742] I was a guest at Yun Guotang’s with Yun Xunzhi and made this. On New Year’s Eve, we sung poems to one another. On the last day of the year, there was cold wind and snow, and everyone was 18

Susan E. Nelson, “On through to the Beyond: The Peach Blossom Spring as a Paradise,” Archives of Asian Art 39 (1986): 25–8.

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concerned with worldly matters. It is only I and Guotang facing each other in our chilly robes and giving expression, our quiet excitement being different from that of everyone else. Our difference with others, is it not only a matter of a thousand li? 壬戌歲客果堂除日同員巽之作．時撫釐兆 ，互為吟贈． 歲暮之日， 風雪淒，然羣為塵務所牽．唯余與果堂獨以寒襟相對噫， 靜躁不同． 豈止懸阻千里也截．19

In this entry, Hua Yan describes how these two friends distanced themselves from worldly cares, a sentiment equally present in Ducks Bathing. It also emphasizes the dual use of lyrical poetry to express one’s concerns and bind one’s intimate relationships. Although the above paintings and poems convey the deep friendship between Hua Yan and Yun Guotang, their relationship still was defined as one between a patron and artist. In other records, Hua Yan described his financial dependency on Yun Guotang. In a passage dated 1741, he recalled an experience in the year 1732, when he had to return home to Hangzhou but fell gravely ill along the way. On what he believed to be his deathbed, he wrote to Yun Guotang, asking him to care for his family in the event he passed on. He wrote: In 1732, I returned to Hangzhou from Yangzhou. When crossing the Yangzi, it was bitterly cold… I soon caught a cold, and when I arrived at my home [in Hangzhou] I was confined to bed for three months. I sought to cure the illness but did not recover, and I figured there was no hope for me, so leaning on my pillow I wrote a letter to Yun Guotang, entrusting him with my wife and children. My written sentiments were of sadness and concern, for my misery could not be articulated. 歲壬子僕自邗江返錢塘，道過揚子時，屆嚴冬，朔風凜烈．．．遂冒 寒得病，抵家一臥三越月．求治弗瘳，自度必無生理，伏枕作書，遺 員子果堂，以妻孥相托，詞意悲恻，慘不成文．20

In expressing his reliance on Yun Guotang, Hua Yan revealed his dire economic straits as well as his close relationship with the Yun family, to whom he entrusted his wife and children. Over the years, Hua Yan appears to have enjoyed 19 20

Hua Yan, Preface to “Ti mei zhu song 題梅竹松 (Inscribing Plum, Bamboo, and Pine)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:137–8. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:93–5.

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his acquaintance with Yun Guotang’s family despite the lengthy separation from his family. He noted his gratitude for gifts, “In the ten years of our friendship, on this New Year’s Eve I am grateful for some cash,” and noted, “Guotang generously gave me three hundred in copper cash as a New Year’s gift 十年交 有道，此夕感分金。。。果堂以青銅三百文寭余壓歲.”21 Thus, although their friendship emerged over many years of painting and poetry, the relationship between Hua Yan and Yun Guotang nonetheless shouldered the needs and obligations of a professional artist. Hua Yan inscribed the majority of his paintings from the 1730s and early 1740s at the Yun family studio, Yuanya tang 淵雅堂, or “Hall of Profound Elegance,” where he also appears to have taught members of the Yun family.22 Over the two decades that Hua Yan sojourned in Yangzhou, he frequently noted Yun family members in his pictorial and poetic inscriptions. Members of the Yun family mentioned by Hua Yan in his poetry and pictorial inscriptions include: Yun Guotang (Yun Jiu 員九, or “Yun the Ninth”), Yun Qingqu 員青衢, Yun Shuangwu 員雙屋, Yun Shangting 員裳亭, Yun Ailin 員艾林, and Yun Zhounan 員周南 (Yun Dun 員燉, also referred to as Yun Shi’er 員十二, or “Yun the Twelfth”). It appears that there were at least twelve brothers in the Yun family, and that Yun Guotang was likely the ninth brother. Hua Yan wrote of the youngest son, Yun Zhounan (1712– 1785), who was only twenty years old at the time that Hua Yan recorded his admiration in his writings. In inscription between entries dated 1732 and 1738, Hua Yan wrote: Mister Yun Zhounan [Dun] is extremely fond of my writing and painting. Every time he looks at my clumsy work, he has a peaceful spirit and calm demeanor, as if tasting the pure charm of gushing springs. 員子周南酷愛僕書畫。每觀拙構則氣靜神凝，清致泉涌咀味。23

21

22

23

Hua Yan, “Gengshen suike Weiyang Guotang jia chuxi mancheng wu yan er lu 庚申歲客維 楊果堂家除夕漫成五言二律 (On New Year’s Eve of the gengshen year [1740] as a guest of [Yun] Guotang in Weiyang [Yangzhou], casually composing two poems of five-character lines)” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:85–6. Numerous inscriptions on paintings bear this studio name along with dedications to Yun Guotang, for example, Hua Yan, “Ti Yun Guotang motie tu 題員果堂摹帖圖 (Inscribing a copy of a painting for Yun Guotang),” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:69. This inscription also appears in comments by the younger Yun brother, Yun Zhounan 員周南 (Yun Dun 員燉), discussed below. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:66. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:66.

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This inscription reveals that Hua Yan also developed a close master-pupil relationship with Yun Dun, who admired his works for their ability to provoke contemplation. As Yun Dun was in his twenties and thirties during the time that Hua Yan was residing at the Yun family estate, he may have benefitted from Hua Yan’s connections to Zhejiang poets. He later became acquainted with the eminent Hangzhou poet Yuan Mei, who wrote a brief biography of Yun Dun.24 Yuan Mei noted that Yun Dun was a scholar from a poor family who had denounced the civil examinations. After the Yun family riches were exhausted, Yun Dun became a tutor in a wealthy household, but remained poor throughout his life. Yuan Mei wrote: [Yun Dun] was short in stature and had a beard and round face. He was a buyi (plain-clothed person) his whole life and his family did not have one measure of grain,25 but his demeanor was full and satisfied, unlike the poor class of people. 身短而髯圆面。終身布衣，家無擔石，氣象充充然，不類貧者。26

Yuan Mei’s account further suggests that the Yun family was not among the wealthy families in Yangzhou at the time that Hua Yan was in residence. Nonetheless, the family valued literary education and study of the arts and did not assume the social persona of the poor. Perhaps due to their literary and artistic interests, Hua Yan and the Yun family, and particularly Yun Dun, continued to cultivate relationships with the eminent Zhejiang poets who became increasingly active in the city in the late 1740s. However, for the decade spanning his arrival in the city until Yun Guotang’s death in 1743, Hua Yan’s artistic production in Yangzhou concentrated on their relationship through numerous pictures and verses that gave shape to the intimate rapport between artist and patron. 3

The Human Experience

Although one may associate lyricism with interiority, Hua Yan’s works also reached broader audiences for their ability to express universal concerns. 24 25 26

Yuan Mei 袁枚, Yuan Mei shiwen xuanyi 袁枚詩文選譯 (Compilation of the poetry and writings of Yuan Mei), eds. Li Lingnian 李靈年 and Li Zeping 李澤平 (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 1990), 258–64. A picul or stone; the dry measure for grain that amounts to about 120 catties (jin 斤), or 73 kilograms. Yuan Mei, Yuan Mei shiwen xuanyi, 261.

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Figure 19 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 1. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

Utilizing the drawing-from-life approach associated with the Song imperial academy, Hua Yan created lifelike compositions of flowers and birds through precise brushwork and naturalistic gestures. While his inscriptions on the works in this section often did not specify a recipient, both subject matter and style suggest that Hua Yan was painting for a general viewer rather than to share an intimate reflection with a specific individual. Through vivid and amusing garden images, personification of objects, and literary allusions, these works aim for clarity in form and meaning. Unlike Hua Yan’s other works, they operated within a realm of exteriority by identifying a range of human emotions and experiences. Hua Yan’s Flower and Bird Album, dated 1743, contains eight leaves depicting birds engaged in typical activities. One leaf pictures a kingfisher from beneath as it dives into a clump of reeds, rendered in fine lines and vibrant red and blue hues (Fig. 19). Its talons are curled tightly beneath its body, one wing extends up into the air, and its beak points toward the foliage below. It is a glimpse of a bird in flight, a pictorial study of the lifelike movements and natural habitat of the kingfisher. Hua Yan’s accompanying poem further enlivens the riverbank scene:

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Figure 20 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 5. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

Patterned bird in the spring wind, Misty grass and green waves. Drizzling [rain] along the southern bank, What could be more hidden than this? 春風文鳥，煙艸綠波。 濛濛南浦，幽如之何。

Hidden amid the drizzling rain along the riverbank, the bird is a part of a subtle, springtime world. In portraying this ephemeral moment, Hua Yan acts as an acute observer of the hidden pleasures of nature. His painting recognizes the kingfisher, while his words characterize its subtlety as a virtue. In another painting from this album, Hua Yan painted four tiny brown birds at the center of the composition, huddled on the top of a thin, upright branch (Fig. 20). Puddled ink at the bottom of the composition suggests that they are sitting on a branch above a tall tree. Each bird is painted with a different expression: one seems to puff out its chest and glance away, while the three other

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birds face one another. Their lifelike gestures suggest the cacophony of the huddle. Complementing the image, Hua Yan transcribed a poem entitled, Homing Birds, by the poet Tao Qian, who renounced a political career in pursuit of a rural life: Smoothly fly the homing birds, With folded feathers [they sit] on the cold branch. Their wanderings do not lead beyond the grove, Nights they do not seek the topmost branch. The morning wind starts up afresh, Their lovely voices call back and forth. Where is the fowler who would shoot? Their weariness is over, they rest from their labor.27 翼翼歸鳥，戢羽寒條。 游不曠林，宿則森標。 晨風清興， 好音時交。 矰繳溪施，已卷安勞。

In picturing Tao Qian’s poetic image of homing birds atop a cold branch, Hua Yan similarly conveyed a sense of austerity and simplicity. Moreover, Tao Qian’s lines, “Their wanderings do not lead beyond the grove/ Nights they do not seek the topmost branch,” relates to the Nanhua jing. This chapter concerns the relativity of experience by contrasting simple garden birds with the impressive Peng bird, which Hua Yan also referenced in his painting, Giant Peng (Fig. 15). As Zhuangzi suggested, the garden birds were content to fly around their grove and need not travel the great distances to which a bird such as the Peng may soar. Thus, Hua Yan’s depiction of the garden birds is further illuminated by Tao Qian’s poem, which celebrates their simple existence and humble acceptance of their circumstances. While such works certainly may reference Hua Yan’s own sentiments, their meaning is not conveyed through oblique poetic allusions or visual references. Rather, these paintings match a complete poem with an easily discernable picture rendered in a clear and detailed style, one that may have originated in illustrated encyclopedias such as the Sancai tuhui 三蔡圖會 (Collected 27

Translation modified from “Homing Birds” #4” from The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien, trans. James Hightower (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). See also Yim-tze Kwong, “Naturalness and Authenticity: The Poetry of Tao Qian,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 11 (Dec., 1989): 56.

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Figure 21 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, 1743. Leaf 6. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 46.5 × 31.3 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

Illustrations of the Three Realms), published ca. 1610.28 A patron’s acquisition of such works would reflect their appreciation for a classical flavor of painting and poetry, as well as the erudite values suggested by one’s familiarity with the subject. However, Hua Yan presented these values in an easy-to-understand, visually alluring format—classical painting for the novice, so to speak. While accessible in its iconography and style, the album also contains leaves that specifically emphasize Hua Yan’s role as a cultivated artist, poet, and observer. In another leaf, Hua Yan portrayed a thrush poised upon a branch above a rock, its tightly clenched talons gripping the branch (Fig. 21). Its open beak points upward and exposes the bird’s pink tongue as if it is singing. Hua Yan inscribed: In the midst of the thrush’s song, I listen to spring rain, Studiously reading two or three chapters of the Nanhua. 畫眉聲裏聽春雨，熟讀南華三兩篇。 28

Ka Bo Tsang, “A Case Study: The Influence of Book Illustration on Painting as Viewed in the Work of Hua Yan,” Oriental Art 33/2 (1987): 150–64.

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This inscription not only underscores Hua Yan’s enduring interest in the Nanhua jing, but also it imparts an image of the artist himself listening to the thrush’s song while studying the writings of Zhuangzi amid spring rain. Never far from the object, Hua Yan represented the scholar, observer, and interpreter behind his lifelike imagery. Clarity in presentation, or rather lack of ambiguity, seemed to predetermine the kind of viewer for which this album may have been intended—one who identified technical skill, viewed poetry and art as a form of leisure, and generally took delight in garden subjects. Hua Yan’s Bird and Flower Album, painted circa 1745, similarly demonstrates his transformation of a subtle, self-referential use of words and images toward an approach designed to appeal to a broader audience. The album portrays scenes of garden birds in natural environments, such as birds perched atop branches or fluttering over their nests. Unlike the prior album, several images suggest auspicious themes of partnership and family, such as birds calling out for a mate or tending to their young, and all are pleasing renditions of common garden subjects. In this album, Hua Yan used detailed depictions of gestures and movements to heighten the drama and animation of the scenes, while his inscriptions explored the popular potential of garden imagery. In a leaf from this album, Hua Yan painted a crab apple branch extending down from the upper left corner of the composition and ending in an array of blossoms at the center (Fig. 22). A turtledove is pictured clutching the tilted branch with tiny talons and partially outstretched wings, as though it had just landed on the branch.29 Its wide eyes glance toward an insect on the end of the branch. Between the sparrow and the insect, there is a pink crab apple blossom and one red bud hanging down from the branch. Hua Yan utilized conventional symbols within the cultural lexicon to suggest multiple layers of meanings. With blossoms appearing in early spring, the pink color of the crab apple alludes to the feminine nature.30 Additionally, the second character of the crab apple, tang 棠, is a pun for tang 堂, “hall,” in reference to the center of a traditional Chinese home. In his poem, Hua Yan drew upon these connotations to describe the moment of early spring:

29

30

For identification of birds, see National Palace Museum, Taipei 國立故宮博物院, Huali zhenqin: zhijuan shang de niaolei shijie 畫裡珍禽：紙絹上的鳥類世界 (A Treasured Aviary: Birds in Chinese Paintings Through the Ages), (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2001), 22. See also National Palace Museum, Taipei 國立故宮博物院, Gugong niaopu 故宮鳥譜 (The Manual of Birds), 4 vols. (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1997). Terese Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art (San Francisco: The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2006), 137.

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Figure 22 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, ca. 1745. Leaf 1. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.7 × 27.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

A bit of spring sentiments start to stir in one’s heart, When the crab apple first blooms and the bird arrives. 一點春心欲搖蕩，海棠初放鳥來時．

Here, while the crab apple blossoms into its pink flowers of early spring, the bird eyes the bug at the end of the drooping branch. It seems unconcerned about the crab apple and eager to capture the bug, thereby drawing a parallel between the pursuit of the bug and the blossom. These may be interpreted to symbolize two competing attractions: one of wealth and one of romance. Here, Hua Yan evoked the regenerative nature of spring and its ripe potential for love, while subtly likening romantic desire to the attraction of fortune. Thus, while the image is visually enticing, it playfully underscores popular associations of garden imagery with extravagance. Hua Yan’s contemporary, Li Shan 李鱓 (c. 1686–1762), also created flowerand-bird subjects during the 1730s. His works demonstrate the close social and artistic connection between Hua Yan and Li Shan, perhaps one that mutually inspired their approaches to flower-and-bird paintings. Although Li Shan is perhaps best known for his intense, calligraphic renderings of scholarly icons,

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Figure 23 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird album, ca. 1745. Leaf 2. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 23.7 × 27.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

such as Five Pine Trees, his portrayals of garden subjects may have appealed to patrons in Yangzhou while he sojourned in the city during the 1730s.31 Attesting to their friendship, Hua Yan inscribed a painting by Li Shan, Pine, Lilies, and Melon, dated to the fifth month of 1732.32 However, Li Shan and Hua Yan appear to have departed stylistically from this point on; rather than the rigorous brushwork and bold compositions that characterize Li Shan’s later works, Hua Yan used a delicate hand and sparse applications of color and line to convey the evocative nature of garden objects. In the following decade, Hua Yan similarly reworked his modest, lyrical approach to tease out humor and narrative from words and pictures. Rather than using garden objects to articulate his innermost sentiments and cultivated virtues, he used them to portray mundane moments from the animal world that prompt smiles and chuckles. Another leaf in Hua Yan’s album bears the theme of romance or, more specifically, a soulful search for a companion (Fig. 23). A magpie is depicted in profile on top of a rock at the center of the 31 32

Chuang Su-o 莊素娥, “Li Shan de shengping he huafeng,” 49–77; Chuang Su-o, Li Shan de Wu Song Tu 李鱓的五松圖 (Five Pines Paintings by Li Shan), Yishu pinglun 10 (1992): 90. Tianjin Art Museum 天津藝術博物館, Yangzhou bajia huaxuan 揚州八家畫選 (Catalogue of Eight Yangzhou Painters) (Tianjin: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1982), pl. 14.

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composition, its body contorted into an awkward u-shaped posture. It is not an elegant portrayal of the bird; rather, its black and white feathers are rendered in rough, dry brushstrokes and its beak appears to be emitting a shrill call from the depths of its tiny frame. Hua Yan inscribed: Climbing high in search of a companion, It expresses its thoughts in song. 登高索侶，排思流聲。

Magpies commonly are pictured in pairs because their name, xique 喜鵲, includes the character for happiness. They are also mythological subjects with romantic associations, as they are said to form a bridge for two lovers to meet in heaven once a year on the seventh night.33 In this leaf, Hua Yan imbues the common symbol of the magpie with humor, visually characterizing the single magpie in a desperate call for a mate. With this witty take on conventional iconography, Hua Yan veered away from erudite references in favor of common appeal. By situating objects within webs of relationships, Hua Yan’s works complicate simple symbols and metaphors. They may evoke the interior world of a poet, reveal the nature of a friendship, or make playful characterizations of humanity. As the following section suggests, they may also illuminate one’s political stance or social disposition through subtle choices in words and images. 4

Singing of the Object

Hua Yan often paired his pictures with poems described as yongwu, literally “singing of the thing,” a subgenre of lyrical poetry that had experienced a major revival in the seventeenth century under the Zhejiang poets Zhu Yizun and Zha Shenxing, who were followed by Li E and Yuan Mei in the eighteenth century. In “singing of the object,” poets make close observations of the innate qualities of an object, such as a flower or bird, as a basis for forming multiple layers of meaning ranging from conventional associations to the most intimate meditations.34 Kang-i Sun Chang has explained that in a yongwu poem, the 33 34

Wilt L. Idema, Filial Piety and Its Divine Rewards: The Legend of Dong Yong and Weaving Maiden, with Related Texts (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009), 87. Grace S. Fong, Wu Wenying and the Art of Southern Song Ci Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 84–104; Lin Shuen-fu, The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical

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connection between symbol (or word) and object-referent is based upon associations of feeling, describing it as an ideal form of indirect expression that allowed the poets to express themselves not directly, but symbolically and allegorically. In a yongwu poem, according to Chang, “every allusion works primarily as an image, which is intimately linked to the aesthetic presence of the dominant symbol (e.g., the white lotus), that in turn becomes a metaphor of the poet’s self. It is through the process of internalization that the poet gives allusion an imagistic and symbolic value in this type of poetry.”35 In this way, the author’s private feelings can be concealed through the use of symbolism in the yongwu poem. In the thirteenth century, the Song loyalist Qian Xuan 錢選 (1235–1305) often inscribed yongwu poems upon his paintings of flowers in order to express his disenchantment following the Mongol conquest.36 His works reveal that in moments of dissent or oppression, yongwu poems offered a vehicle for the artist to communicate one’s sentiments to like-minded individuals. Whether represented in words or pictures, the image is grounded in a detailed study of the object, yet refers to another object or idea altogether. Thus, Hua Yan’s use of this particular mode of lyricism in his words and images deepened his ties to Zhe School poets as well as the lineage they charted from the Song and Yuan dynasties, and thereby illuminated the politics of nation and identity in eighteenth-century Jiangnan. In Red and White Herbaceous Peonies, dated 1731, Hua Yan used the yongwu mode to address both the preferred aesthetics and ideologies of his peers (Fig. 24). The painting depicts two bunches of herbaceous peonies in a lifelike manner often associated with Song and Yuan paintings. Two blossoming red peonies and one unopened bulb are nestled amid slender, dark-green leaves in the upper right of the composition, while the white peonies pictured in the bottom left. Their stalks taper to faint lines of green, leaving the blossoms to come into full view. One stem of the red peony arcs in a graceful semicircle, its leaf nearly touching a white blossom at the center of the composition. The white peony, its blossoms slightly turned toward the red peony, has several leaves that follow along by bending and twisting with the rotation of the stems toward the upper right. Hua Yan’s positioning of the red peony in the upperright quadrant of the painting, hovering over the white peony in the lower left,

35 36

Tradition: Chiang K’uei and the Southern Sung Tz’u Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 9–13. Kang-i Sun Chang, “Symbolic and Allegorical Meanings in the Yüeh-fu pu-t’i Poem Series,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (1986): 354; 363. Robert E. Harrist, “Chien Hsüan’s Pear Blossoms: The Tradition of Flower Painting and Poetry from Sung to Yüan,” The Metropolitan Museum Journal 22 (1987): 53–70. See also Sturman, “Confronting Dynastic Change,” 149–53.

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Figure 24 Hua Yan, Red and White Herbaceous Peonies, 1731. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 94 × 97.3 cm. National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

sets forth a comparison between the two colors and lends itself to poetic treatment. Peonies symbolized feminine charm, wealth, and resilience, with their many colors and varieties being the focus of discussion throughout literature. Dubbed the “King of Flowers,” the peony was referred to as fugui hua 富貴花, or “flower of wealth and honor.”37 They also occupied a privileged position in Song dynasty scholarship, such as Wang Guan’s 王觀 (fl. 1075) treatise, Yangzhou shaoyao pu 揚州芍藥譜 (The Herbaceous Peonies of Yangzhou).38 As early as the Song dynasty, connoisseurs described their cultivation in the gardens of 37 38

Wang Xiangjin 王象晉 (jinshi 1604), ed., Guangqun fangpu 廣群芳譜 (Record of all fragrant [flowers]) (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1968), vols. 32–4, esp. 34:814. See also Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 252. Wang Guan 王觀 (fl. 1075), Yangzhou shaoyao pu 揚州芍藥譜 (Treatise on herbaceous peonies of Yangzhou), in Wenyuange Siku quanshu dianzi ban.

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Yangzhou, and debated the merits of Jiangnan varietals. Hua Yan’s pictorial depiction of red and white peonies similarly accorded with Zhe School interests in reviving Jiangnan cultural identity through its history of art and literature.39 The two poems inscribed upon the painting gesture to additional significance of the subject matter through a comparison between the red and white hues. In the upper left corner Hua Yan inscribed a Yuan dynasty poem entitled “Peony,” by Ma Zuchang 馬祖常 (1279–1338), who was instrumental in beginning the tradition of “bamboo-branch lyrics” that matured under Yang Weizhen 楊維楨 (1296–1370) at the end of the Yuan dynasty.40 Yang Weizhen famously argued that the Song dynasty was the only historically legitimate rule in the period preceding the Yuan, which was under Mongol rule.41 He composed the “Xihu zhuzhi ge” 西湖竹枝歌 (Bamboo Branch Songs of West Lake), preface dated 1348, and retired to Hangzhou after his bureaucratic career.42 His lyrics contributed to later understandings of Hangzhou as a loyalist haven. Hua Yan likely was also familiar with Yang Weizhen, who was more eminent than Ma Zuchang, and appears to have identified with the history and sentiments reflected in the poetry of both poet-patriots. The poem reads: Yellow powder comes from the makeup box, dazzling and bright, Fashioned by the Lord of Heaven, to match the springtime sun. Colored silks lie like folds of a thousand layers of clouds, A precious vessel of ice and fat, honey is half as fragrant. Double stamens appear before the steps, Winding stems support the lovely blossoms, facing the sun they open the jeweled bag. Poets need not celebrate the Yangzhou Purple, This ever surpasses the King of Flowers. 鸎粉分奩, 艷有光， 天工巧製, 殿春陽。 霞缯襞積, 雲千叠， 寶盂冰脂, 蜜半香。 并蒂尝當, 階盤， 綬帶金芭, 向日剖珠囊。 39 40 41 42

Chiem, “Painting, Peonies, and Ming Loyalism,” 94–8. Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature: To 1375 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 595–601. Richard L. Davis, “Historiography as Politics in Yang Wei-chen’s ‘Polemic on Legitimate Succession,’” T’oung Pao 69, no. 1 (1983): 51–72. Yang Weizhen 楊維楨 (1296–1370), Xihu zhuzhi ji 西湖竹枝集 (Collection of Bamboo Branch [Songs] of West Lake) (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2003).

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Chapter 2 詩人莫詠揚州紫， 便與花王可頡頏。

In this poem, Ma Zuchang likened the peony to a courtly woman clothed in layers of silk, a fragrant “precious vessel.” He describes their feminine bodies as “lovely blossoms” atop slender, “winding stems.” The final lines of the poem compare these feminine blossoms with the “Yangzhou Purple,” an herbaceous peony (shaoyao 芍藥, Paeonia lactiflora) of Yangzhou that competes with the tree peony (mudan 牡丹, Paeonia suffruticosa) of Luoyang. He concludes with a declaration that even the King of Flowers cannot compare with this image of adorned ladies. Although the poem likens women to peonies, Hua Yan’s picture suggests a further layer of meaning. Facing Ma Zuchang’s poem is the head of the red peony and its S-shaped stem, its blossom in visual dialogue with Ma Zuchang’s poem and the object of his last line. Here, the King of Flowers may have been understood as a reference to the emperor, while the red color could be associated with the Ming dynasty, for the surname of the Ming royal family was zhu 朱 (vermillion). In coupling the image of a red peony and Ma Zuchang’s poem, Hua Yan seems to suggest that “This [red peony] ever surpasses the King of Flowers”—or, as the Ming dynasty ever surpasses the Qing.43 In addition to Ma Zuchang’s poem, Hua Yan added his own seven-syllable quatrain to the right of the white peony, which follows Ma Zuchang in likening the peony to a well-kept young woman: Streaked powder faintly carries splashes of red, It emits subtle fragrance in the light mist. A perfect match for a fine girl deeply sequestered in her room, With a natural ease and elegance in facing the spring wind. 粉痕微帶, 一些紅， 吐納幽香, 薄霧中。 正侶深閨, 好女子， 自然閒雅, 對春風。

Hua Yan described a young woman who is deeply sequestered in her quarters, the words facing a white peony, the color of death. These symbols embody a range of messages—Ming confronting Qing, the red peony competing with the white, and a woman facing loss. 43

For more on the use of red peonies in reference to the Ming dynasty, please see Chiem, “Painting, Peonies, and Ming Loyalism,” esp. pp. 83; 88; 94–98; Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers,” esp. pp. 393; 397.

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Figure 25 Yun Shouping, “Peonies,” in Album of Flowers and Landscapes, 1672. Leaf 2. Album of 12 leaves, ink and colors on paper, 28.5 × 43.0 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

One may wonder why the Recluse of Xinluo, painting in 1731 on the eve of what has been referred to as the “Golden Age” of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1711– 1795),44 revived a subject that appears to be laden with loyalist sentiments. One reason may be that the loyalism associated with the previous generation of artists, such as Yun Shouping and Shitao, emerged from their life experiences as “remnant subjects,” or yimin 移民, who Hua Yan and his peers diligently studied as models for their own work. One need only compare Hua Yan’s Red and White Herbaceous Peonies with Yun Shouping’s renderings of peonies, or read his laudatory remarks about his predecessor, to understand Hua Yan’s deep admiration for Yun Shouping.45 For instance, Yun Shouping’s “Peonies,” the second album leaf within the collaborative Album of Flowers and Landscapes by Wang Hui 王翬 (1632–1717) and Yun Shouping, dated 1672, depicts three peony blossoms of red, purple, and white that extend from the bottom right corner of the composition (Fig. 25). The red peony emerges from the group; it is pictured in a victorious arc across the center of the composition and 44 45

Ding Meng and Mae Anna Pang, A Golden Age of China: Qianlong Emperor, 1736–1795 (Melbourne, Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2015). E.g., Hua Yan, “Ti Yun Shouping huace 提惲壽平畫冊 (Inscribing an album of paintings by Yun Nantian),” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 1:40–1.

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facing Wang Hui’s inscription along the left side. In contrast, the stem of the white peony appears to droop, its underside exposed and leaves hanging limp from its stem. Like Hua Yan’s Red and White Herbaceous Peonies, Yun Shouping’s rendering appears to draw a subtle comparison to the glory of the Ming dynasty through its visual properties. Wang Hui’s inscription attends to the significance of Yun Shouping’s approach by pointing out the Song dynasty precedents for his use of the mogu 沒骨, or “boneless” method of ink painting. He attributes the boneless mode to the Northern Song artist Xu Chongsi 徐崇嗣 (fl. second half of 10th c.), whose technique involved applying layers of washes directly to the composition, then adding colors to form the veins and outlines.46 The naturalistic gradations of color and formal details suited Yun Shouping’s “drawing from life,” or xiesheng 寫生, which Hua Yan diligently employed in his later painting. Both pictures of peonies by Hua Yan and Yun Shouping reveal that close attention to the object, coupled with a revival of archaic modes, could convey a sense of nostalgia and discontent in the historical moment. In addition to Yun Shouping, Hua Yan closely followed the work of Shitao, who born into a family of Ming princes and associated with Yun Shouping’s circle as he traveled throughout Jiangnan. Hua Yan shared his interest in Shitao with the Yangzhou painter, Gao Xiang, for whom he recorded a poem commemorating his fiftieth birthday.47 Active in Yangzhou between 1700 and 1730, Gao Xiang was a friend and disciple of Shitao, reportedly sweeping his grave after his passing.48 In a poem written about five years later, Hua Yan responded to Gao Xiang’s concern for his well-being after Yun Guotang’s passing and so revealed the depth of their friendship.49 Both Hua Yan and Gao Xiang advanced the lyrical approaches of Yun Shouping and Shitao, who both created evocative portrayals of their loyalist sentiments and whose work was extremely significant for later Jiangnan artists. Shitao’s Album of Flowers and Portrait of Shitao, circa 1698, portrayed the peony as a symbol of unrequited love, while discreetly comparing its beauty to 46 47 48 49

Qiu Xinxian 邱馨賢, “Wei hua chuan shenyun: Yun Shouping de mogu huahui 為花傳神 韻：惲壽平的沒骨花卉 (For conveying the charm of the flower: the boneless flowers of Yun Shouping),” Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 337, no. 4 (2011): 58–67. Hua Yan, “Gao Xitang wushi shi yi zeng zhi 高犀堂五十詩以贈之 (Poem presented to Gao Xitang on his fiftieth birthday),” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:78. For more on Gao Xiang, see Chuang Su-o 莊素娥, “Gao Xiang he ta de shanshui hua 高翔 和他的山水畫 (Gao Xiang and his landscape paintings),” Yishu pinlun 藝術評論 (Arts Review) 10, no. 1 (1989): 125–42. Hua Yan, “Gao Xitang jianhuai wu lu yi shoubu qi yuanyun fengda 高犀堂見懷五律一首 步其原韻奉答 (A Response to Gao Xitang thinking of me in one poem of five-character verses set to its original rhyme).” Ibid., 3:148–9.

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Figure 26 Shitao, “Peonies,” in Album of Flowers and Portrait of Shitao, 1698. Leaf D. Album of 9 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.6 × 34.5 cm. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Gift of Arthur M. Sackler, S1987.207.4.

the downfall of an empire (Fig. 26). One leaf pictures two peony blossoms in vibrant washes of pink and green, with the blunt edges of their stems indicating that they were freshly snipped from the plant. As Hui-shu Lee has noted of paintings by Xie Yuan 謝元 (13th c.), academy painters of the Southern Song often utilized the “broken branch” (zhezhi 折枝) style, a term that originally described any close-up portrayal of a plant or tree.50 In the early Yuan dynasty, artists used the “broken branch” to evoke a sense of the trauma that accompanied Mongol rule. Shitao similarly adopted this Southern Song convention in his portrayal of peonies, coupling it with a lush application of water and vibrant color to evoke the erotic nature of the blossoms wet with spring rain.51 50 51

Lee, Exquisite Moments, 112–13. See also Richard M. Barnhart, Peach Blossom Spring: Gardens and Flowers in Chinese Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), 96; Hay, Shitao, 296. One might note that the Chinese word for color, se 色, also carried other meanings, such as beauty, lust, and desire. Jerome Silbergeld and Amy McNair, introduction to Chinese Painting Colors, by Yu Feian (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), ix.

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Shitao’s poem likens the elusive nature of feminine beauty to the peony, which like Hua Yan’s rendering of red and white peonies could convey additional meanings. In singing of the peony, Shitao described its beauty as qingguo se 傾國色, literally “downfall of the national color,” pointedly likening the red stain of the feminized peony to the fallen Ming. The poem ends in a plea for order over chaos, as the peonies, bees, and butterflies contest for their future. The image of the red peonies, while its fragrance may be alluring to bees and butterflies, could also symbolize the reigning Ming defending their land to swarms of bees and butterflies in search of nectar, a reference to Manchu aggression. In addition to his reverence for the works of the loyalists Yun Shouping and Shitao, another reason for the loyalism evident in Hua Yan’s works is that the trauma of the dynastic transition did not end with the figures that lived through it. The Jiangnan region, and in particular Hangzhou and Yangzhou, was among the last regions to fall to the Manchu conquest. Jiangnan literati remained sources of great anxiety for the Qianlong emperor, prompting the emperor to launch his infamous literary inquisitions that continued throughout the eighteenth century.52 This initiative deepened the tensions between Jiangnan and Beijing, and came to threaten the poets who had been subtly voicing their dissent through the allusive lyrical tradition. Although Hua Yan and Gao Xiang were not among the first generation of Ming loyalists, they drew heavily from these seventeenth-century sources to formulate their works and identities as Jiangnan poet-artists. By the mid-eighteenth century, Ming loyalism had come to represent the preservation of Han culture under a foreign regime. Artists like Hua Yan and Gao Xiang, in line with the Zhe School poets, self-identified as heirs to Jiangnan tradition and defined their social dispositions as recluses, monks, connoisseurs, and so on, while their works investigated the traditions of poets and artists who had thrived under inhospitable conditions. Hua Yan’s identity as a Zhejiang painter and poet became a cornerstone of his artistic production throughout his life, as seen in his late hanging scroll, 52

For more on the literary inquisitions, see Luther Carrington Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966), 171; Palace Museum, Beijing 國立北平故宮博物院, Qingdai wenzi yu dang 清代文字獄檔 (Archives concerning the Qing literary inquisition) (Beiping: Beiping gugong bowuyuan wenxian guan, 1934), 123–35; Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 320–1, 645–6; Timothy Brook, The Chinese State in Ming Society (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 128–9; Schmidt, Harmony Garden, 370; Timothy Brook, “Censorship in Eighteenth-Century China: A View from the Book Trade,” Canadian Journal of History 22 (1988): 182–3; Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2001).

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Figure 27 Hua Yan, White Peony and Rocks, 1752. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 127.6 × 57.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 13.220.119.

White Peony, dated 1752 (Fig. 27). This painting features two white blossoms and their leafy stems at the center of the composition, rendered in fine brushstrokes similar to his treatment of the flowers in Red and White Herbaceous Peonies of 1731. Mirroring the verticality of the peonies, a large rock appears to rise along the right side of the composition and is balanced by two tiny rocks to the left of the peony. In stark contrast with the detailed brushwork on the peonies, the rocks are composed of thick, wet strokes of ink. In every sense, it is a harmony of opposites: the delicate and the solid, the ephemeral and the eternal. The inscription reads: I study Ma Yuan in chopping lean rocks, And follow Xu Xi in plucking delicate blossoms. The two masters have their sweet and bitter aspects; Together they enhance my taste of tea on the first chilly day of autumn.53 53

Translation adapted from “White Peony and Rocks,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed July 3, 2018. .

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Chapter 2 愚學馬遠砍瘦石，復做徐熙折嫩華。 兩家風味有甜苦，堪趁襯溧左品茶。

In his inscription, Hua Yan positioned his work after two artists active in the Jiangnan region, the Southern Song painter Ma Yuan and the Southern Tang (937–76) painter, Xu Xi 徐熙 (act. 10th century), who was the grandfather of Xu Chongsi. Incidentally, the Southern Tang was later known as Jiangnan 江南, comprised of modern-day Fujian, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces. However, the poem is not necessarily about form or lineage. Rather, in picturing springtime flowers on the first chilly day of autumn, Hua Yan conveyed a sense of loss and melancholy upon the passage of time—revealing his uncanny ability to stimulate senses and weave them into universal sentiments through words and images. At the same time, Hua Yan’s lyricism located his works in his historical moment, serving to construct his social persona as the mountain man of Xinluo while engaging with his Jiangnan peers through their collective nostalgia. Though an artist by profession, his work had become the medium that defined his life and friendships.

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Painting the Garden from Life I do not envy other’s prosperity and fame, Nor do I criticize their spirit and intelligence. Rather I compose a few sprays of flowers, In hopes of sustaining one day of work. 無慕人榮華，無損自神智。 聊譜數枝花，庶持一日事。1

Hua Yan, “Inscribing Miscellaneous Flowers”

⸪ Having resided in Yangzhou since the early 1730s, Hua Yan continued to market his paintings after the passing of his patron and friend, Yun Guotang, until his return home to Hangzhou around 1752.2 This was an exhilarating moment to be in Yangzhou, for during the 1740s and 1750s, Yangzhou’s wealthiest figures built and restored garden estates. They hosted literary gatherings that attracted luminaries from throughout the empire, fostering an exclusive cultural circuit that gave rise to enviable positions in Yangzhou society. With their underwriting by wealthy and powerful salt merchants from Huizhou, many of Yangzhou’s most eminent gardens had been built by the mid-1740s and reached their zenith around the time of the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours (1751–84). Antonia Finnane has pointed out that no Yangzhou natives are featured among garden owners of the eighteenth century; rather, garden owners were, with hardly an exception, salt merchants on extended sojourns in the city.3 Although these patrons had established their wealth through the salt trade, among them the Ma brothers (Ma Yueguan 馬曰琯 (1688–1755) and Ma Yuelu 馬曰璐 (1697–after 1766) and Cheng Mengxing 程夢星 (1679–1755), they were eager to engage in the cultivated pursuit of literature and, consequently, of the 1 Hua Yan, “Ti zahua 題雜花 (Inscribing Miscellaneous Flowers),” in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 4:190. This poem was composed around 1748. 2 Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:148; 150. 3 Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 172–3; 188–203.

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arts.4 They became core members of local literary societies such as the Han River Poetry Society, Hanjiang shishe 韓江詩社, and sought to expand their circles and their prestige by inviting poets, especially those of the Zhe School, to participate in literary gatherings in their garden retreats. Drawing on years of friendship from his time in Hangzhou, Hua Yan worked in close proximity to the artists and poets who arrived in the city and shaped the local garden culture. If the Yangzhou garden could be described as a space created by and for those with wealth, fame, and prestige, then the visual features of garden culture translated into social capital in the art market. While literary gatherings continued to shape Yangzhou garden culture through the mid-eighteenth century, the new figures that emerged amid the social landscape of Yangzhou gave rise to class anxieties and social discourses on wealth and culture. Artists and patrons fragmented into new social circles, characterized by literary discourse framed around distinctions between the vulgar and elegant, the ostentatious and refined. Though some were highly regarded for their education and literary pursuits, such as the Hanlin scholar and official Cheng Mengxing, others were described as extravagant and frivolous.5 One such example was the salt commissioner, Lu Jianzeng 廬見曾 (1690–1768), known for hosting an extravagant garden gathering for seven thousand guests in 1757.6 He was sentenced to death in 1768 for lack of reporting profits.7 However, despite their perceived inelegant behavior and excessive consumption habits, these new patrons contributed to a diverse market that embraced a wide range of artistic styles and approaches. The expression of fine taste and social distinction, however, remained elusive—and it was precisely the work of the artist to embody and reflect these qualities. Prosperity and fame may have seemed at odds with the rustic ideals constructed by Hua Yan and his circle, and indeed his paintings often took a definitive stance against such base pleasures. Subtle commentaries highlighted his subjectivity, ensuring that he—as an artist—remained distant from the colorful theatrics that unfolded in his images. Like his peers, he positioned himself as an arbiter of taste, adapting his works to preserve his own self-image as a recluse amid the opulence and frivolity of mid-Qing Yangzhou. At the same time, the vivid colors and animated subjects in his paintings offered humor and sparked curiosity among a wide range of viewers. Such works, when 4 5 6 7

Wu, Luxurious Networks, 7–8. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 4:50; 6:148. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 10:228–9. Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou, 126.

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paired with references to Daoist classics or folk legends, could manifest social critique and also highlight ideologies shared among Hua Yan’s circle. Moreover, the visual reflexitivity of these works reveals Hua Yan’s unique role as a voyeur, or more specifically as an artist seeking to visualize the truths of humanity amid the natural world, which further legitimized his work in Yangzhou. Through his lifelike treatments of flower-and-bird subjects, Hua Yan’s works pivot between addressing the interior world of his social relationships and satiating the visual desires of new patrons in the diverse cultural landscape of Yangzhou as discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter explores the lyrical potential of Hua Yan’s flower-and-bird paintings for social critique and political commentary. Garden subjects such as flowers, birds, and insects likely appealed to Hua Yan as innocuous but dynamic members of the garden hierarchy, such that close attention to their forms and gestures could subtly reference human behavior. Works considered here illuminate the artist’s awareness of his subjectivity in Yangzhou society, often humorously, by characterizing his stance toward aesthetic and cultural conventions. Focusing on the intimate format of album leaves, this chapter shows how Hua Yan’s identity as a professional artist emerged from his private relationships and defined his work in Yangzhou during the 1740s and 1750s. 1

The Art of Social Distinction

Exhibiting a wide range of styles and subjects, Hua Yan’s works are born of the versatility demanded of a professional artist in a saturated market. Nonetheless, his works often share several distinguishing traits. Brushwork, for instance, is marked by deliberate contrasts. Sparse, dry ink applications often appear alongside rich, undulating lines. Such thoughtful use of brushwork serves to enliven Hua Yan’s subjects, which are animated by stark gestures and detailed facial expressions. A vibrant palette of bright hues and color washes typically characterize his compositions, which often include abbreviated, descriptive phrases or short poems. The expressive nature of his subjects drew on these poetic sentiments to express the ideals of a mountain man, while their vivid colors and animation spark a range of human emotions, such as humor, fear, or melancholy. Hua Yan often personified his garden subjects, which fosters interest in contrasts between relationships, such as the elegant or vulgar, oppressor and oppressed, or interior and exterior worlds. Altogether, they address social anxieties through the artist’s subjectivity, providing insight into the occupation of making art in Yangzhou during the mid-eighteenth century.

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Hua Yan’s Flower and Bird Album in the Shanghai Museum illuminates the method in which Hua Yan packaged the ideals of an erudite recluse into a relatable product with broad appeal. The album originally appears to have included twelve leaves, more than the eight it contains today, based on a list of inscriptions on paintings in Hua Yan’s poetry anthology, Ligou ji.8 Although the album does not bear a date, it is recorded between inscriptions dated to 1742. The poems on the album are listed in his anthology beside flower-andbird poems and paintings dedicated to Yun Guotang, as well as his friend from Hangzhou, the poet Jin Nong.9 Jin Nong was sojourning in Yangzhou briefly and soon heading back to Hangzhou, and Hua Yan inscribed a poem for him upon his departure.10 Consequently, one can surmise that the work was created at a time when Hua Yan was sharing poetry and painting with close friends who he had known for decades of his life. Rendered in sparse compositions with detailed, boneless brushwork punctuated by vibrant hues, Hua Yan’s flower-and-bird imagery naturally lent itself to lyricism. In one leaf, a chrysanthemum is portrayed in a bright vermillion hue at the center of the composition (Fig. 28). A single branch extends from below the composition, its stalk bowing to the left resulting in a full blossom in profile. Directly below the sprawled petals of the open blossom, deep green leaves appear to steady the heavy blossom as it swivels to face the poem along the right side of the composition. Another bulb points directly upright, poised to blossom. Coupled with Hua Yan’s poem, this chrysanthemum emphasizes Hua Yan’s interest in sharing his values and philosophical musings with like-minded friends. The poem reads: The nature of things is not all [the same], Warm and cold may each be appreciated I cherish the autumn sentiment of this [plant], And would like to be able to discuss it with a wise man.

8

9 10

Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:130–2. Only six of Hua Yan’s twelve inscriptions are included among the eight leaves of the Shanghai Museum album, while another was recorded separately in his anthology. The inscription on one of the leaves does not appear in his list of twelve poems. The missing leaves and mismatched inscriptions suggest that the album was likely reconstituted over the years. Hua Yan, Song zhu huamei ticeng Yun Guotang 松竹畫眉題贈員果堂 (Inscribing Pine, Bamboo, and Thrush for Yun Guotang), in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:131. Hua Yan, Zeng Jin Shoumen shike Guangling jiang guli 增金壽門時客廣陵將故里 (A poem composed for Jin Shoumen [Jin Nong] on his return home from being a guest in Guangling [Yangzhou]), in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:132.

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Figure 28 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 3. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum.

物性秉非一，暑寒各所欣， 懷此九秋意， 願獲智者論。

The chrysanthemum, an autumnal flower, exists perilously amid the change of seasons from the warmth of fall to the cold of winter. While Hua Yan’s painting prompts one to contemplate the visual form of the plant, his poem is a call to discuss its ephemeral nature. In short, it is a conversation piece intended to share with a knowledgeable viewer. The implicit suggestion is that only a wise man would appreciate Hua Yan’s work—a bold statement about both artist and viewer, one that amplified its selling point as an object of cultural sophistication. In another leaf from the album, Hua Yan depicted a tiny green bird on the tip of a thin branch, hovering precariously above a Lake Tai rock at center (Fig. 29). With its beak parted and head tilting up, the bird appears to be singing atop the branch. Touches of a reddish hue on its beak and talons are echoed below in a sprig of bamboo, in contrast with the blue-grey wash on the rock. The tiny bird, strangely shaped rock, and bamboo are all features associated

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Figure 29 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 8. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum.

with private, urban gardens of Jiangnan. Commonly installed in garden landscapes, scholars and connoisseurs prized the Lake Tai rock for its bizarre form, while bamboo is a conventional symbol of scholarly integrity.11 However, this bamboo is neither green, as it would be in real life, nor black, as it is often portrayed in mo zhu 墨竹, or “ink bamboo,” paintings. Rather, the red bamboo may be an allusion to an anecdote about the poet Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), who ran out of black ink and so decided to use red ink to paint bamboo. When others inquired as to where red bamboo grows, his retort was, “[Those who] discuss painting as form-likeness, [show] the insight of a child 畫論以形似， 見與兒 童鄰.”12 With this famous phrase, Su Shi highlighted a key misconception about “drawing from life,” namely, that its goal is not to portray a mimetic 11

12

The bamboo is an element of the si junzi 四君子, or “four gentlemen,” in addition to the plum blossom, chrysanthemum, and orchid. It is a symbol of integrity due to its upright and pliant nature, and jie 節, the word for its joints, is the same word used for “moral integrity.” Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings, 60. Alternatively translated in Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101)

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representation, but rather to capture certain endearing qualities of the object and thereby prompt an emotional response to the image. Moreover, Hua Yan’s reference to Su Shi emphasized his knowledge and sophistication as a poet, suggesting that his pictures were not intended solely for visual stimulation but also to convey intellectual ideas. Hua Yan’s image of the red bamboo highlights the contrast between outward appearances versus innate nature, as he also suggested in his poem on the painting. Identifying the bird as a sparrow, Hua Yan noted the freshness of its fur and plumage to suggest its fine and delicate nature. He wrote: The patterned sparrow, the finest and most delicate of all birds, How beautiful and fresh its fur and plumage! Disdaining the birds with long beaks, Whose vile songs are dispelled before us. 文雀最微細，毛翮何妍鮮。 嗤鄙長嘴鳥，惡聲消人前。

By contrasting the fine and delicate garden sparrow with the fanciful birds with vile songs, Hua Yan further personified the birds and associated them with aesthetic ideals. As such, the birds act as symbols that may also have allegorical meanings. As Bo Liu has pointed out, sparrows often represent the common taxpayer; their plight on a frigid branch so became a metaphor for the suffering of poor people.13 Here, Hua Yan seems to be drawing a contrast between the humble virtues of the sparrow, which he describes as wen 文 (patterned or cultured), and the vulgarity of the long-beaked birds. The contrast that Hua Yan has drawn is also one of internal virtue versus external adornment, as he similarly suggested through his depiction of red bamboo. Thus, one may associate these distinctions with types of people: the inwardly pure versus the externally opulent. In identifying himself as one who valued quiet study and proper conduct, or the internal refinement as symbolized by the sparrow, we also may understand the long-beaked birds as a critique of ostentatious behavior and lack of moral cultivation. Hua Yan frequently used the sparrow as a motif in his painting and poetry from this period. In a poem dated 1742, following Hua Yan’s inscription on a

13

to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1971), 32. Bo Liu, “Deciphering the Cold Sparrow: Political Criticism in Song Poetry and Painting,” Ars Orientalis 40 (2011): 108–140.

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painting for Yun Guotang, Hua Yan described the sparrow as a symbol of being beyond worldly matters or the “dust of the world.” He wrote: In the shade of the bamboo, I speak slowly, and savor the tall trees, Aloof matters are our concern, we share the same heart. The net of the world does not ensnare the sparrow that is beyond the dust of the world, Note after note of its song comes to you conveying good tidings. 竹陰款語味脩林，冷事相關共此心。 世網弗羅塵外雀，聲聲詣子報佳。14

Here, the sparrow represents the concept of being “beyond the dust of the world” to recall Tao Qian, whose garden retreat represents an ideal world away from politics or social demands.15 In the same line, Hua Yan also noted that the sparrow is beyond the “net of the world,” a concept that may refer to the Buddhist term for nets or traps of social obligations.16 It also could reference the Daodejing metaphor for divine justice, “Heaven’s net is vast, though widemeshed, it misses nothing 天網恢恢，疏而不失.”17 Hua Yan’s repeated contextualization of the bird amid flowers and his description of its nature as pure and refined characterize the bird as a being that delights in the depths and mysteries of the world. It visually emphasizes the value of being modest and unpretentious, and so critiques the attachments and desires of the dusty world. These sentiments are echoed in other leaves of Hua Yan’s Flower and Bird Album. In another picture, Hua Yan painted a brown bird perched on a branch (Fig. 30). Against the brown color scheme and pale ink washes, the bird’s bright red tuft of fur on its head causes it to stand out amid otherwise rustic surroundings. Its beak points to the lower right corner of the composition, where there is large circle that indicates the rising moon. The earthen hues and bird peering down at dusk suggest a somber feeling that is further elaborated upon

14 15 16 17

Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:137–8. For the iconography of Tao Qian and its popularity in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, see Susan E. Nelson, “Revisiting the Eastern Fence: Tao Qian’s Chrysanthemums,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (Sept., 2001): 437–60. William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms: With Sanskrit and English Equivalents and a Sanskrit-Pali Index (London: K. Paul and Trench, Trubner, & Co., Ltd., 1937), 427. Translated by Michael Carr, “The 天網 Heaven’s Net Metaphor,” The Review of Liberal Arts 人文研究 73 (1987): 39–74.

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Figure 30 Hua Yan, Flower and Bird Album, undated. Leaf 7. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.5 × 27.5 cm. Shanghai Museum.

through Hua Yan’s poem, which describes the bird’s feathers as radiant like jade as it casts its reflection. He wrote: Its firm feathers take on the radiance of jade, Casting its reflection it pities its refined nature. The rustic field does not lack grain, Nets and traps are dense and spread all over. 堅振當環璟，傾影淑自憐。 野田匪乏粟，网罟密且襟。

As in Hua Yan’s other album leaves, the poem draws a contrast between the subject matter and an external object. The bird’s feathers, firm and radiant like jade, suggest inner strength and refinement. Positioned atop a branch, it appears to be lamenting its unnoticed virtue, beauty, and talent in life. In contrast, the field seems to symbolize the uncultivated environment that surrounds him and reflects his desire to remain aloof as a bird with a refined nature. The

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dreary landscape, which Hua Yan described as full of grain but ridden with nets and traps, seems to represent a threat to the integrity of the bird. As such, the image raises the theme of recognition amid a perilous landscape, and so may reflect Hua Yan’s own sentiments. These sentiments also illuminate the artist’s subjectivity, as can be seen in a poem, entitled “Roosting Bird.” Although the poem is not represented in the Shanghai Museum album, it appears among the twelve inscriptions listed in Hua Yan’s anthology pertaining to the work.18 Hua Yan wrote: Weary bird only having [a nest] to trust, What would he have to rely on? My thoughts collect and sink in my inner heart, I should put to sleep my strategies. 倦鳥聿有託，勞子獨何依。 結念沉衷腑，吾當寢吾機。19

In describing the bird as dependent upon its nest and having nothing to rely on, Hua Yan’s lyrical image suggests that his artistic strategies have been fruitless. Whether Hua Yan was writing with the humility of a literatus or the resentment of an impoverished artist, garden subjects such as flowers and birds unveiled Hua Yan’s anxieties about social distinction in Yangzhou. For artists from Hangzhou like Hua Yan, the careful study of form, measured articulation of senses, and literary allusions offered an approach to defining the value of his art in the social landscape of Yangzhou. 2

Hua Yan’s Circle, 1740s and 1750s

In 1742, Hua Yan had been painting in Yangzhou for nearly a decade and continued to reside with the Yun family. His wife and children remained in Hangzhou, and Yun Guotang was nearing his final days. As Antonia Finnane has pointed out, in the mid-eighteenth century the owners of Yangzhou’s mansions and gardens primarily resided in the southeastern quarter of the city,20 while Hua Yan lived with the Yun family in the crowded and socially mixed 18 19 20

The poem is also inscribed on a hanging scroll by Hua Yan in the Beijing Fine Art Academy. Hua Yan, Feathers Rustling atop Branches, dated 1742. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 124.5 × 29.5 cm. Beijing Fine Art Academy. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:130–2. Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou, 176–86.

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northeastern quarters, where the occasional patron may have come by to request a painting on their way to or from the markets or parade grounds.21 At the modest residence of the Yun family, Hua Yan not only presented works to his close friends, but also reached out to the occasional patron by depicting objects associated with the idealized lifestyle of Yangzhou garden culture. After his patron Yun Guotang passed away in 1743, Hua Yan gradually enlarged his social circle in Yangzhou. Yun Guotang, though he appreciated Hua Yan’s painting and poetry, did not appear to have possessed the means to introduce Hua Yan to the most eminent patrons in Yangzhou. However, in the 1740s and 1750s, the Zhejiang poets grew active in the Yangzhou gardens and literary scene, which undoubtedly expanded Hua Yan’s artistic circle. The Han River Poetry Society, for instance, included several wealthy owners of Yangzhou gardens who often hosted gatherings in their lavish garden estates and welcomed prominent poets and artists from around the empire.22 Hua Yan’s lifelong friend, Li E, was one such poet who sojourned in Yangzhou during the 1740s and participated in these exclusive gatherings. Li E, along with other Zhe School poets such as Quan Zuwang 全祖望 and Chen Zhang 陳章 (b. 1695; active 1730s–1750s), contributed to the prestige of Yangzhou circles. Several colophons and portraits place them alongside Yangzhou garden owners.23 In fact, Yang Yuanzheng has suggested that at one notable gathering at the Ma brothers’ estate in 1743, rendered pictorially as The Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden, Li E spearheaded the reformulation of the poems of Jiang Kui 姜夔 (ca. 1155–1235).24 His work in defining the veiled, indirect aesthetic of Southern Song lyrical poetry as ya 雅 (elegant), and therefore shifting the literary canon, ultimately defined the Zhe School poets as the aspiring men of culture in Yangzhou society. These records suggest that Hua Yan forged an indirect connection to Yangzhou luminaries via his social ties to the Zhejiang circle and consequently expressed those ties through his garden 21 22 23

24

As noted in Zhang Sijiao’s inscription on Portrait of Xinluo Shanren (1767), fig. 1. For more on the Han River Poetry Society of Yangzhou, see Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls, 41–9. See, for example, Hua Yan, Boating under the Autumn Moon. Handscroll, ink on paper, 24.2 × 112.8 cm. Wan-go Weng Collection, New Hampshire. Fang Shishu 方士庶 (1692– 1752) and Ye Fanglin 葉芳林 (Zhenchu 震初), The Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden, dated 1743. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 31.7 × 201 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. For more on these paintings, see Kristen Chiem, “Picturing Common Ground: Painting and Poetic Exchange beyond Eighteenth-Century Yangzhou,” Artibus Asiae 73, no. 1 (2013): 181–218. Yuanzheng Yang, “Reformulating Jiang Kui’s Lyric Oeuvre: The Canonization of Southern Song Dynasty Song Lyrics (ci) in the Qing Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 135, no. 4 (2015): 727–30.

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imagery, which could be said to have emerged within the social politics of these prominent literary circles in the Jiangnan region. Coinciding with these literary circles, Hua Yan also cultivated relationships with several artists working in Yangzhou during this period, including Gao Xiang, Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686–1759), Li Fangying 李方膺 (1695–1755), Li Shan, Jin Nong, and Zheng Xie 鄭燮 (Banqiao 板橋, 1693–1765), all who had ties to the Zhejiang circle and who shared interests in classical studies. Altogether, these figures could be considered professional literati who contributed to literary and artistic circles while depending on the craft of painting and poetry as their livelihood.25 Like Hua Yan, these artists approached poetry and painting in lyrical fashion, using the arts to shape their social identities. Emphasizing a likeness to their subjects through images and poems, they evoked the refined ideals of their peers and competed for positions of privilege and status among the Yangzhou social milieu. As one of Hua Yan’s closest friends in Yangzhou, Gao Xiang’s friendship with Hua Yan dates to his arrival in the city during the early 1730s and continued until Gao Xiang’s death in 1753. Like Hua Yan, Gao Xiang examined the complex and symbolic nature of subject matter as a valuable extension of his social role amid the Yangzhou milieu. In A Thinly Leafed Paulownia, one leaf from the collection of Ten Verses by a Frosted Window, circa 1739 to 1743, Gao Xiang described the onset of autumn in contrast with the arrival of spring. Though the painting depicts the lush, ovular leaves of the paulownia, Gao Xiang’s poem refers to the phoenix bird as a symbol of perseverance through allusion to his sobriquet Fenggang 鳳岡 or “phoenix crest.”26 As Gao Xiang wrote, it is in the early spring when, “The burden of dew and frost may deepen/ And the moon may not always be bright,” that he takes respite in his abode.27 Calling out across the courtyard, Gao Xiang likened himself to the little phoenix who forges ahead in early spring—an image likely to be savored among friends. Another leaf in Gao Xiang’s Ten Verses album specifically addresses his social circle, noting the name of Wang Shishen’s new residence and poetry collection, “Blue Fir Literary Studio,” the subject of the leaf.28 Active primarily as a poet in Yangzhou in the early eighteenth century, Wang Shishen came to the 25 26 27 28

See also Ka Bo Tsang, “The Relationships of Hua Yan and Some Leading Yangzhou Painters as Viewed from Literary and Pictorial Evidence,” Journal of Oriental Studies 23, no. 1 (1985): 1–28. Gao Xiang, A Thinly Leafed Paulownia, Leaf B in Ten Verses by a Frosted Window, album of 10 leaves, ink on paper, 13.8 × 12.3 cm, each leaf. Bei Shan Tang collection. Chou and Claudia Brown, The Elegant Brush, 151. Translated by Chou, The Elegant Brush, 151. Chou, The Elegant Brush, 155.

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city from Anhui province and enjoyed close connections to the Zhe School poets, Gao Xiang, and the Ma brothers.29 He also added a poetic colophon to a later painting by Hua Yan, Boating under the Autumn Moon, dated 1748, which connects him to both Zhejiang and Yangzhou literary circles in the late 1740s through early 1750s.30 Like Hua Yan, Wang Shishen was known for rendering floral subjects in delicate applications of ink and color in the manner of Yun Shouping, often pairing them with lyrical poems. Moreover, Wang Shishen, like Gao Xiang and later Jin Nong, was especially known for his paintings of plum blossoms, ever a symbol of springtime promise presented in a form that privileges a calligraphic handling of the brush. Sojourning artists, such as Li Fangying 李方膺 (1696–1755), who became active in Yangzhou in the 1740s after a magisterial career, also became a friend of Hua Yan who specialized in garden imagery. Li Fangying passed through Yangzhou in 1746 amid travels to Beijing and Anhui province.31 Hua Yan inscribed a poem for Li Fangying around 1751, noting “Who can recognize a hero in plain clothes? 誰識英雄在布衣 ” in reference to Li Fangying’s modest nature, a desirable social persona repeatedly invoked among this circle.32 Li Fangying’s depictions of blossoming plums similarly evoke the lyricism and stylized approach seen in the works of his peers. Li Fangying associated with core members of the Zhejiang circle, as demonstrated by Yuan Mei’s poem about Li Fangying, Song of Li Fangying, the White-Robed Mountain Man, painting plums, presented to the artist. The poem, like his paintings, conflated his depictions of plum blossoms with the artist’s personal attributes and, perhaps more obviously, with his surname. Yuan Mei wrote, “Li, the Mountain Man, loves to put on robes of white/ Even his clothes imitate the color of the plums he paints.”33 Yuan Mei recognized the white plum blossoms in Li Fangying’s paintings as a symbol of purity and related them to the artist’s pure white robes, thus 29

30

31 32 33

Ma Yueguan 馬曰琯 (1688–1755), Shahe yilao xiaogao 沙河逸老小稿 (Manuscript by the Untrammeled Old Fellow of the Sandy River) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 2:27. See also Jin Nong 金農 (1687–1763), Dongxin xiansheng ji 冬心先生集 (Collected works of Mr. Dongxin) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), 2:549, 4:568. Around the same time (between 1744 and 1751), Wang Shishen also compiled his anthology of 490 poems. Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686–1759), Chaolin ji 巢林集 (Collected Works of Chaolin) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2009). See also Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 2:42. See Li Fangying’s inscription on Pair of Fish, 1746, in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Chuang Su-o 莊素娥, “Li Fangying de shengping he jiashi 李方膺的生平和家世 (The lifestyle and family of Li Fangying),” Gugong xueshu li kan 4, no. 1 (1986): 75. Hua Yan, Ti Li Jingqiu rangong 題李靖虬髯公 (Inscribed for the bearded gentleman Li Qingqiu [Fangying]) in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 5:238. Schmidt, Harmony Garden, 463–5.

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Figure 31 Li Shan, Flowers and Birds, 1731. Leaf E. Album leaf, ink and pale colors on paper. 28.6 × 38.8 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of John B. Elliott, Class of 1951, Y1976—L.42E.

conveying the notion that Li Fangying’s social persona was as pure as the plums he painted. Hua Yan also circulated among artists like Li Shan, who traveled between magisterial appointments in Beijing, Yangzhou, and his home in Xinghua, Jiangsu province. Li Shan similarly looked to the Yangzhou luminary Shitao, and forged a friendship with Gao Qipei 高其佩 (1660–1734) during his time in Beijing, an artist who was known for his scratchy, sparse, ink plays. Like Hua Yan, Li Shan sojourned in Yangzhou for brief periods of the 1720s and 1730s but spent increasing time in the city from around 1745 through 1755. As two contemporaries active in Yangzhou throughout the 1730s through the 1750s, Li Shan and Hua Yan appear to have shared both social circles and artistic strategies, as seen in the album by Li Shan, Flowers and Birds, dated 1731, which depicts three sparrows on a flowering plum blossom branch (Fig. 31). Each appears animated and active, with gestures that suggest lifelike movements and interactions between the birds. Two appear to glance toward each other, while a third is pictured with its mouth agape as if delighted by the plum blossom before it. Unlike Hua Yan’s thin, fluid lines and meticulous application of color,

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Li Shan rendered his subjects in thick brushstrokes and lush applications of color. However, both Hua Yan and Li Shan used vibrant colors, lifelike gestures, and dynamic compositions to emphasize the charm of their garden subjects. Moreover, Li Shan added a witty quatrain that marries romantic associations of the plum blossoms and garden sparrow: In the rain, feathers are never completely full, Its mate faces the sky, boasting of its unusual beauty. It comes to the garden to look at the flowers, but cannot fly inside. As always there is the mansion, with its branches in winter. 雨毛曾否既豐時，偶向天衢逞異姿。 上苑看花飛不入。依然樓定歲寒枝。

By ascribing human attributes of desire and pride to these garden sparrows, Li Shan evoked an endearing narrative beyond the image that could be compared to Hua Yan’s image of a turtledove on a crabapple branch (Fig. 22). Hungry for sustenance (or love?) in the cold of the winter, the sparrows ultimately resign themselves to the branches of the mansion where plum blossoms announce the arrival of spring. This work demonstrates the close social and artistic connection between Hua Yan and Li Shan, perhaps one that mutually inspired their approaches to bird-and-flower paintings.34 However, the social personas of Li Shan and Hua Yan differed quite dramatically. Known for his ostentatious lifestyle, Li Shan also befriended Wang Shishen, Zheng Xie, and Huang Shen 黃慎 (1687–after 1768), who were acquainted with Jin Nong, Gao Xiang, and others listed among Hua Yan’s records. Both Li Shan and Hua Yan were acquainted with Li Fangying, who had several ties to the Zhejiang circle.35 The friendship between Li Shan, Zheng Xie and Huang Shen can be dated to as early as 1728, when they gathered at Yangzhou’s Tianning Temple to sing poetry and discuss painting.36 And in 1747, Li Shan, Wang Shishen, Li Fangying, and Zheng Xie collaborated on a flower painting.37 Clearly, these artists shared a long history of crossing paths in Yangzhou, and their friendships appear to have played a significant role in creating the vibrant

34 35 36 37

Hua Yan inscribed a painting by Li Shan, Pine, Lilies, and Melon, dated to the 5th month of 1732. Yangzhou bajia huaxuan (Tianjin: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1982), pl. 14. Chuang Su-o 莊素娥, “Li Fangying he Li Shan de guanxi 李方膺和李鱓的關係 (The relationship between Li Fangying and Li Shan),” Gugong xueshu jikan 故宮學術季刊 8, no. 2 (1991): 111–36. Chuang Su-o, “Li Shan de shengping he huafeng,” 54. Chuang Su-o, “Li Shan de shengping he huafeng,” 60.

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environment of the mid-1740s—one in which Hua Yan did not necessarily partake. From the mid-1740s to mid-1750s, the Yangzhou arts scene expanded along literary lines. As Hua Yan’s Zhejiang circle began to include additional artists and poets in Yangzhou, including Gao Xiang, Wang Shishen, and Li Fangying, their works came to harbor a certain aesthetic of inclusion. This aesthetic was drawn from the core literary values of the group, such as their studied archaism and investigation of pictorial approaches to garden subjects throughout history. Additionally, the emphasis on lyricism that dominated the poetry of the Zhejiang circle attained visual form in the works of its most sympathetic artists, who embraced iconography as a way of characterizing one’s personal attributes. Their works, and perhaps also their social personas, were intended to embody the aesthetic of sparse elegance coupled with an eccentricity that suited the flamboyant tastes of mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou. This experimental spirit seen in works of the 1740s laid a foundation for works by Jin Nong and Zheng Xie, who grew active in the Yangzhou arts scene in the 1750s. Most closely linked to Hua Yan is Jin Nong, a core member of the Zhe School poetry circle. As a poet, antiquarian, and scholar from Hangzhou, Jin Nong was regularly included among Yangzhou literary circles. His contribution of both the calligraphic frontispiece and a poetic colophon to Boating under the Autumn Moon reveal that by the early 1750s, he was regarded among his peers for both his calligraphy and evidential research, which made for a natural transition to painting. Whereas Li E was clearly regarded as a poet in Yangzhou and Hua Yan a painter, Jin Nong coupled his interests in evidential research and his skills in calligraphy to support himself in Yangzhou. Like Hua Yan, Jin Nong struggled to find patronage in Yangzhou and so looked to painting as a viable source of income. He, too, created garden subjects imbued with an archaic flavor and robust sentiments, so as to express his scholarly values while charming potential patrons. Initially favoring bamboo and later plum blossoms, Jin Nong exploited the formal properties of these subjects as a reference to his facility with the written word. An album of twelve leaves, Plum Blossoms, dated 1757, demonstrates that Jin Nong developed the graphic qualities of the plum blossom into a bold new style, much as he did with his calligraphy (Fig. 32).38 The work was painted during a six-week stay at the home of his disciple in Yangzhou, Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733–1799), and likely was intended to be shared with his younger host and 38

Jin Nong, Plum Blossoms, 1757. Album of twelve leaves, ink on paper, 25.4 × 29.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In Karlsson, et al., Luo Ping: Eccentric Visions, 242–5.

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Figure 32 Jin Nong, Plum Blossoms, 1757. Leaf D. Album of 12 leaves, ink on paper. 25.4 × 29.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Edward Elliott Family Collection, Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1986.495d.

disciple. It exemplifies the kinds of innovations that arose from exchanges between artists in Yangzhou and reveals their quest for social distinction. As a subject, plum blossoms point to Jin Nong’s socially respected origins in Hangzhou, where this particular subject enjoyed favor during the Southern Song dynasty. Like the peony, the plum blossom embodied feminine nature.39 In periods of melancholy, its blossoms offered the promise of spring as the first to blossom at the end of a cold winter. Jin Nong’s inscribed quatrain personifies the old plum, noting that cultivating one’s mind supersedes the limitations of one’s physical body. The luminosity of the plum blossoms under the moon can thus be understood as character traits shining through cold and advanced age. 39

Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17; Maggie Bickford, Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice—The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1985), 32–9.

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Interestingly, the album is dated to the tenth day of the tenth month, deep within autumn when the plum has yet to bloom. It appears that Jin Nong abandoned the conventional seasonality of garden imagery in favor of his artistic and personal agendas. Yet, while this departure severs the link between nature and humanity that often lies at the heart of garden imagery, it is a reminder of how Jin Nong, Hua Yan, and others of this era mastered conventions only to rework them into evocative new styles and multi-layered, self-referential meanings. Jin Nong was closely associated with his contemporary, Zheng Xie, a scholar who had returned to Yangzhou in the mid- and late-1750s. Through his acquaintance with Jin Nong, Hua Yan also appears to have been acquainted with Zheng Xie. Hua Yan inscribed a collaborative work, Bamboo, Rock, and Chrysanthemums, dated 1746, noting that Zheng Xie added the ink bamboo.40 Compared to the cool reserve of Gao Xiang, Jin Nong and Zheng Xie approached garden subjects with the dynamism and effortlessness of Hua Yan’s pictorial style. Moreover, while their emphasis on brushwork and individual creativity recalled Yuan dynasty literati such as Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1301–1374) and Wu Zhen 吳鎮 (1280–1354), they also aimed for a high level of entertainment more often associated with academy and professional masters.41 Both Jin Nong and Zheng Xie rendered bamboo, rocks, and orchids in stark tonal contrasts and deployed ink in bold forms that disarm conventional expectations of the subject matter. Building on the complicated relationship between the pictorial object and style, Jin Nong and Zheng Xie took risks that resulted in works that were graphic, subversive, and extravagant. Meanwhile, Hua Yan opted for a more restrained approach, using both words and pictures to distinguish himself as an erudite artist amidst a sea of “long-beaked birds” that dispel vile songs, and so expanded the Yangzhou repertoire in the areas of garden flora and animate creatures. 3

Garden and Society

Set within the artistic and social milieu of mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, Hua Yan’s treatment of flowers and birds achieved a recognizable quality conducive not only to distinguishing himself among his peers, but also to creating social metaphor. They follow the xiesheng 寫生, or “drawing from life,” manner in their portrayals of garden creatures and plants, the principle of which 40 41

Tsang, “The Relationships of Hua Yan and Some Leading Yangzhou Painters,” 21. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, 14.

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involves close, detailed study of the object as a basis for its metaphorical potential. Within the drawing-from-life mode, Hua Yan’s works simultaneously draw on two distinct brushwork approaches: gongbi 公筆, or “working brush,” and xieyi 寫意, or “sketching the idea.” Though there has been much debate about the features of each term, the former is generally characterized by meticulous attention to form executed with precise lines and color, and the latter by sparse compositions with varying lines and applications of color that express a sense of inspired spontaneity.42 These approaches historically have inspired assumptions about the social status of the artist: gongbi reflected the skill required of academy painters and professionals; xieyi expressed the sentiments of literati artists who painted for the purposes of self-cultivation and social obligation. Exercising both approaches, Hua Yan’s works transgress these assumptions about the relationship between artist and style, and therefore complicate the understanding of what it means to be an artist in mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Themes of wealth, social status, social ills, and class tensions appear throughout his flower-and-bird albums, suggesting the artist’s voyeuristic stance and the intimate role between his art and Yangzhou society. His enlivened images raise questions about possible referents: might conflicts between the personified forms allude to his internal struggles, Yangzhou society, or the nation more broadly? Like his predecessors, Hua Yan did not approach garden imagery simply as a decorative motif, but rather he drew from it an aesthetic vocabulary that reflected values specific to Yangzhou culture. The following albums reveal Hua Yan’s bold, graphic, and versatile stylistic approaches; qualities also seen in the works of his contemporaries, such as Li Shan and Jin Nong. While many of Hua Yan’s works appear to be purely charming or entertaining, his flower-and-bird and miscellaneous albums offer deeper insights into his experience of the urban gardens of Yangzhou. Due to their relatively small format, they are necessarily more private in their viewership, and the sheer number of leaves facilitates the recognition of subtle themes throughout each album. Three albums, in particular—one each in The National Palace Museum, Taipei, Palace Museum, Beijing, and Shanghai Museum—demonstrate Hua Yan’s use of animate subjects as metaphors for fame and fortune. Hua Yan’s undated Miscellaneous Album contains twenty-four leaves in two volumes that vividly depict a variety of creatures, including birds, elephants, a tiger, horses, insects, squirrels, frogs, fish, and figures. Each of the animals and 42

Eugene Y. Wang, “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency,” Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, eds. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 103.

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figures are portrayed with facial expressions and animated with brilliant colors and recognizable gestures. The leaf, “Thrush on a Bamboo Branch,” in the first volume, is a conventional subject that Hua Yan frequently portrayed in his paintings and poems, yet it reveals the artist’s skilled brushwork, with the feathers of the bird alternating from detailed strokes to soft washes (Fig. 33). Alongside common subjects such as the thrush, throughout the album he also depicted rivalries within the natural world as if indicating the dangers of the pursuit of fortune and perhaps to draw a parallel to his own world. He not only forged these parallels by alluding to Daoist passages, but also by personifying his creatures with gestures and expressions that highlight aspects of human nature. In “Mantis Stalking a Cicada,” Hua Yan pictured a cicada and a praying mantis, using wet ink to depict two branches of a tree along with thin lines and rich colors to animate the insects (Fig. 34). Perched atop one leafy branch, the mantis swivels its antennae toward the other branch, where a cicada is facing a beetle. The mantis prepares to strike the cicada as the cicada reaches toward the beetle. The mantis and the cicada are described in the Zhuangzi passage, “The Mountain Tree,” in which Zhuangzi cautioned against fixing one’s sights on material things and outward adornment through the symbolic use of insects and birds. The original passage describes a scene from the natural world: [Zhuangzi] spied a cicada that had found a lovely spot of shade and had forgotten all about [the possibility of danger to] its body. Behind it, a praying mantis, raising its feelers and about to strike the cicada; it too had forgotten about its own form as it eyed the prize. A peculiar magpie was close behind, ready to make off with the praying mantis, forgetting its own true self as it fixed its eyes on the prospect of gain. Zhuang Zhou [Zhuangzi], shuddering at the sight, said, ‘Ah! Things do nothing but make trouble for each other—one creature calling down disaster on another!’43 睹一蟬方得美蔭而忘其身；螳蜋執翳而搏之，見得而忘其形；異鵲從 而利之，見利而忘其真。莊周怵然曰：噫！物固相累，二類相召 也。44

43 44

Translation adapted from Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 219. Liu Wendian 劉文典, ed. Zhuangzi buzheng 莊子補正 (The Annotated Zhuangzi) (Hefei: Anhui daxue chubanshe, 1999), 2:612–3. See also E.N. Anderson and Lisa Raphals, “Daoism and Animals,” in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and

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Figure 33 Hua Yan, “Thrush on a Bamboo Branch,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Figure 34 Hua Yan, “Mantis Stalking a Cicada,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 6. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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In direct reference to Zhuangzi, Hua Yan quoted on the album leaf, “Raising its feelers and about to strike 執翳而搏,” thereby highlighting the moment in which the praying mantis prepares to attack the cicada. Looking to Hua Yan’s painting, one finds that as the mantis appears to peer over a leaf at the cicada, the cicada appears entirely unaware of the danger lurking above. Rather, the cicada poises its spiny arms as if to grasp the tiny beetle that has walked across the bottom of the branch. In the passage, the creatures had become so intent upon the prospect of gain that they forgot their true selves and no longer perceived the imminent dangers around them. Although the praying mantis may appear to be the victor of this scene, Zhuangzi cautions that each predator would became another creature’s prey, and it would be only a matter of time before a voracious magpie would arrive and call down disaster upon it. Although Hua Yan depicted moments of the natural world through detailed expressions of the creatures, vibrant colors, and dynamic compositions, he also used words and images to illuminate his anxieties about the pursuit of wealth and material gain. The garden creatures in his album leaves demonstrated the prospect of gain by preying upon other creatures, and they often endangered themselves by losing sight of their true selves and clinging to such pursuits. As Zhuangzi pointed out later in this passage, it was their nature to act in accordance with prevailing norms of their group. He remarked, “When you go among the vulgar, follow their rules 入其俗，從其令.”45 Thus, rather than use symbols from Zhuangzi to express the sentiments of his own transformation seen in prior works such as Giant Peng (Fig. 15), in these flower-andbird albums painted in Yangzhou, Hua Yan ruminated upon the dangers of losing oneself amid the vulgar pursuit of wealth and success. Several additional leaves demonstrate Hua Yan’s skilled handling of the brush and his interest in revealing naturalistic moments from life. In “Kingfisher Holding a Fish,” the brilliant red, blue, and green hues of the kingfisher are rendered in delicate brushwork, while its wide, round eyes and talons clenched around a lotus stalk gesture to the delight of the bird as it proceeds to swallow a fish (Fig. 35). It is not an idealized study of the bird, but rather an image that portrays a moment of action with rawness and reality. The leaf, “Plants and Insects,” portrays a similarly evocative moment, in which a dragonfly swallows a wasp (Fig. 36). The detail comes as a surprise amid the bustling garden scene—a snail hangs from beneath the leaf of a plant, a salamander

45

Ethics, eds. Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 275–92. Liu Wendian, Zhuangzi buzheng, 2:612. Translation from Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 219.

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Figure 35 Hua Yan, “Kingfisher Holding a Fish,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 5. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.1 × 25.5 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Figure 36 Hua Yan, “Plants and Insects,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 12. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.3 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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emerges from a rock, and a moth hovers above ripening fruits, its delicate wings pictured pulling its body up against the wind. The wild abandonment of the dragonfly, with its eyes bulging and the legs and wings of the wasp grasped within its mouth, seems at odds with the calm sweetness of the scene. Like many of Hua Yan’s paintings, the visual effect is drawn of contrasts between fine lines and terse washes, pictorial conventions and charming surprises to capture the immediacy and chance of the natural world. The facial expressions and gestures of Hua Yan’s creatures are especially striking, which lends them to metaphor. In another leaf, Hua Yan pictured five toads with their mouths open and arms outstretched in an animated expression of a chaotic dispute, and labeled the scene, wa zhan 蛙戰, or “Frogs Fighting” (Fig. 37). He depicted the toads with the long web-like fingers and pooled green ink to suggest their amphibious skin and used thin lines to detail their wide-eyed expressions. Here, the toads vie with one another, as might vulgar characters rival one another in the human realm. The toads invoke the legend of Liu Hai 劉海, a tenth-century minister and Daoist who kept a three-legged toad.46 The toad became a symbol of money making, for whenever it escaped Liu Hai would lure the creature back with a string of gold coins. However, another version of the story describes the toad as a poisonous creature residing at the bottom of a deep pool. Using a string of gold cash, Liu Hai hooked the venomous creature and drew it to its death. Thus, the legend of Liu Hai and the toad suggests that money is the fatal attraction that lures men to their ruin. In his painting, Hua Yan similarly portrayed the toads as symbols of greed by picturing them sparring with one another as if in a rivalry for wealth and fortune. By concealing the conventional underpinnings of his paintings as mere representations of garden life, he presented an original, vivacious, and ephemeral glimpse of garden subjects that could serve as a metaphor for the human condition. The animal’s expressions suggest human emotions such as fear and anxiety throughout the album. In leaf two of album one, “Wildfire” depicts a scene of peril as two foxes flee a brushfire (Fig. 38). The head of a rabbit emerges from the tall grasses behind them, as red washes of fire and black strokes of smoke threaten to engulf the animals. This is an unusual subject for a painting, especially set within an album comprised primarily of garden creatures and figures. Like other leaves in the album, the work could be understood as an image that evokes feeling—terror, in this case—in response to other images of fear and 46

Charles Alfred Speed Williams, Chinese Symbolism & Art Motifs: A Comprehensive Handbook on Symbolism in Chinese Art through the Ages (Rutland, Vt: Tuttle Publishing, 2006), 402–3.

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Figure 37 Hua Yan, “Frogs Fighting,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 8. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Figure 38 Hua Yan, “Wildfire,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 2. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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anxiety seen throughout the album. Conversely, “Bee and Tiger” seems to reveal the weakness of a fearful tiger that raises a paw to his face as he gazes back toward a bee on a branch (Fig. 39). His plush, orange fur is rendered in thin, detailed strokes while soft, black washes constitute his stripes. Round yellow washes outlined in black contour strokes convey fear in the tiger’s eyes as he lowers his head in a gesture of submission. The extraordinary detail of the tiger, in contrast with the quick strokes of the grasses and branches, seem especially poignant as he is offset with the tiny bee in the upper right corner of the composition. One instantly identifies the psychological plight of the tiger, a mighty beast rendered here in a cowering pose. Since the word for bee, feng 蜂, is a homophone of the term referring to a rise in nobility or officialdom, feng 封, Hua Yan’s rendering may suggest that the formidable, mountain-dwelling tiger struggles to adapt to its new environment of the grasslands, shying away from the challenge of a rise in rank. Anxieties around transitions, whether retreat from wildfire or descent from the mountains, may have contributed to Hua Yan’s self-image as a recluse and his perceptions of social mobility in Yangzhou, more generally. Other leaves reveal Hua Yan’s contemplative nature. “Squirrel on a Branch” demonstrates his sensitive observation of a squirrel rendered in fine lines, the thick, voluminous curves of its body mirrored by its s-shaped tail (Fig. 40). The meticulous portrayal of the squirrel contrasts with the thick strokes of light ink washes that shape the branch and vines, which mimic the curves of the creature and reinforce its weighty form and inquisitive personality. Equally probing is the leaf, “Turtle,” which pictures the underside of a turtle with its feet alternating between bent and extended positions as if it is swimming in water (Fig. 41). Its head is turned toward the inscription, which reads: Rising into the cavernous sky, Descending to the level ground. One breath a thousand springs, Spirits transmitting their mysteries. 上穹象天，下平法地。 一息千春，神靈通祕。

Underscoring Hua Yan’s ethereal rendering, the inscription describes the turtle as if it is floating amid the spirit world. Set amid album leaves depicting a variety of creatures exhibiting a range of emotions, from the playful to the spiritual, his depiction of a turtle appears fresh and innovative, yet gestures to a profound awareness of nature and man.

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Figure 39 Hua Yan, “Bee and Tiger,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.1 × 25.5 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Figure 40 Hua Yan, “Squirrel on a Branch,” in Miscellaneous Album 1, undated. Leaf 10. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Figure 41 Hua Yan, “Turtle,” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 11. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20.2 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Simple yet evocative, each leaf of the album demonstrates Hua Yan’s versatility as a professional artist, while offering insights into his observations as an artist in Yangzhou. The judicious applications of ink and color, wet brushwork, and sinewy lines of The National Palace Museum album resemble two dated albums, Miscellaneous Album (1749) and Birds and Insects from Life (1750), suggesting that The National Palace Museum album likely dates to the early 1750s, during Hua Yan’s last decade of work in Yangzhou. In these other two albums, Hua Yan similarly evoked the dangers of pursuing fame and fortune through reference to the writings of Zhuangzi, using humor and animation to characterize his subjects in a drawing-from-life mode. However, each of the following dated albums utilizes a different stylistic approach: the spontaneous xieyi and the meticulous gongbi approaches, which together form the style of fine lines and animated forms seen in the above, undated album. In Miscellaneous Album, dated 1749, Hua Yan used lush applications of ink and color and dynamic compositional arrangements to personify garden imagery and metaphorically represent the human condition. The album contains twelve leaves, six of which depict landscapes and six of which portray garden creatures such as birds, insects, and reptiles. The six landscapes picture figures seated around large stone tables or relaxing amid the pavilions and bridges of private garden estates (Fig. 42). Yet although they share a garden theme, Hua Yan’s six paintings of garden creatures contrast with the landscapes of leisure

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Figure 42 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 3. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 26 × 16.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

amid the garden. Throughout the leaves portraying garden creatures (flowerand-bird, insect, and miscellaneous), Hua Yan incorporated themes such as the predatory and the preyed, a metaphor for the pursuit of wealth or personal gain, through the colorful depictions of six landscapes of garden scenes and six portrayals of garden flora and fauna. In one leaf, Hua Yan builds upon Zhuangzi’s ideas on the pursuit of gain through his depiction of creatures preying upon other creatures from the natural world (Fig. 43). In this leaf, Hua Yan painted five cormorants pursuing and capturing a fish. He used pale grey colors to suggest an underwater scene at center, where he portrayed three of the cormorants diving into the water after a fish. Wavy grey lines indicate their rapid downward plunge, where the

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Figure 43 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 10. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

cormorants appear to yank at the fish’s fins with their beaks. Above, in the upper right corner, a tail hangs out of one cormorant’s open beak, showing that it has swallowed a fish. Hua Yan wrote: Rancid feathers hunting in a cold stream, Causing chaos in the pool of jade. 腥羽獵寒溪，攪亂一潭玉。

Cormorants prey upon fish and are able to hunt in water. Hua Yan’s inscription explains that the cormorants are hunting in a cold stream, which he likens to

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a pool of jade for its pure quality. Swimming amid these translucent waters are fish, which commonly symbolize abundance because fish, or yu 魚, is a homophone for plenty or excess (yu 餘). In this scene, Hua Yan depicted the cormorants preying upon the fish and disrupting the pure and cool, jade-like waters. As Zhuangzi remarked in observing creatures that single-mindedly focused on the prospect of gain, “Things do nothing but make trouble for each other—one creature calling down disaster on another!”47 By conveying aggressive acts and pursuits of gain in the garden, Hua Yan also may have been commenting on human nature and the misguided values that he perceived to shape Yangzhou society. Like Zhuangzi, his observations of garden life described the relentless pursuit of fame and fortune that drove humanity to fixate on material gain, causing one to forget one’s true self. Another leaf from this album similarly demonstrates the theme of seeking the prospect of gain by preying upon others. Here, the tendrils and yellow flowers of a melon vine extend across the composition, where Hua Yan positioned a green praying mantis (Fig. 44). Its antennae circles over the right side of its head as if it just swiveled its head downward to notice a red dragonfly poised on the melon in the bottom left of the composition. Hua Yan wrote: Arching high above are the antennae of the praying mantis, About to strike the wings of the dragonfly. 高鼓螳螂鬚，欲擊蜻蜓翅。

Although this couplet clearly describes the imminent attack of the praying mantis upon the dragonfly, the image suggests additional meanings. The dragonfly, or qingting 蜻蜓, is an auspicious symbol, for the first character of its name is a homophone for qing 清, meaning clear or pure. Here, however, it may be a reference to the Qing dynasty. In Hua Yan’s painting, the dragonfly appears oblivious to the covetous gaze of the praying mantis, a strong and stealth predator. Here, the pure dragonfly is endangered by the ruthless praying mantis, just as the praying mantis momentarily forgot its own form and poised to attack the cicada in Zhuangzi’s passage. In so doing, the predator compromises its own position and is soon in danger of falling prey to another, larger predator like the magpie. Thus, as the pursuit of fortune prompts a vicious cycle in the natural world, its dangers mark a parallel with the human world. Such conflict-ridden subjects may be contextualized within a history of dissent. Themes of anxiety and discontent between species often allegorized 47

Translation adapted from Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 219.

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Figure 44 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 7. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

loyalism and disenchantment with the nation, especially in Yangzhou, where Ming loyalists including Shitao became active in the city. Artists continued to convey loyalist sentiments through their painting and poetry through the end of the seventeenth century, creating landscapes of reclusion and metaphorical flower-and-bird subjects, as discussed in Chapter One. In the early eighteenth century, loyalist themes emerged in works by poets and painters in Jiangnan and formed aspects of their social identities, as discussed in Chapter Two. Anti-Manchu sentiments, whether real or fashionable, ultimately attracted the concern of the emperor, who launched literary inquisitions aimed to uproot sources of dissent (especially in Jiangnan) throughout the eighteenth century. However, the visual realm remained notoriously difficult to police, with works

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like Hua Yan’s Red and White Herbaceous Peonies, which could be viewed through a purely aesthetic lens, but also highlighted the relationship between gender and foreign conquest (Fig. 24). Hua Yan’s insects and birds, similarly, could be understood as mere subjects in an animated stylistic approach that appealed to his patrons, or they may suggest social or political commentary through the unusual themes of conflict and anxiety that may have operated as political metaphors among his social circle. Garden creatures appear in compromised positions quite frequently in the works of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jiangnan artists. Later portrayals by Luo Ping, a disciple of Hua Yan’s close friend from Hangzhou, Jin Nong, reveal a similar use of Daoist metaphors for engaging political commentary.48 Luo Ping painted a variety of subjects, such as figures, landscapes, and garden subjects, continuing a small but vibrant tradition of insect painting associated with the Ming loyalist painter, Bada Shanren. Bada Shanren painted fragile creatures in works that embodied the vulnerability of Chinese lives under the Manchu regime (Fig. 17). Like Bada Shanren, garden creatures by Hua Yan and Luo Ping similarly related to numerous stories in the literary world, such as stories on greed, predation, and one’s fate in a hostile world. Consequently, Hua Yan personified miscellaneous creatures to further evoke the pursuit of wealth and to caution against its hazards. He depicted a brown snake wrapped around a large rock with its long tongue extending downward toward the ground, where a toad appears crouched beside the wavy lines of a stream (Fig. 45).49 The crowded landscape setting of rocks, leaves, and riverside grasses frames the interaction between the two creatures. The toad is rendered in thin outlines and color to detail its expressive gestures. It has enlarged eyes and an open mouth; its arms are poised on either side of a tiny snail shell. The meticulous detail that Hua Yan used to create the gestures and expression of the toad implies that it is the primary narrative element of the composition. The toad can be compared to Hua Yan’s painting of “Frogs Fighting,” in the undated album discussed above that portrays green toads contesting brown toads in a high-energy dispute. Here, the toad is about to eat a snail (and possibly be eaten by a snake), and is pictured at the moment in which the snake appears about to descend upon the toad, just as the toad prepares to grasp the snail. In portraying the snake’s imminent capture of the toad, Hua Yan again suggested that the toad, too, had fallen into the pursuit of its own gain and all 48 49

For example, see Luo Ping, Insects, Birds, and Beasts, 1774. Ten album leaves, ink on paper, each 20.8 × 27.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing. China: The Three Emperors, 1662–1795, eds. Evelyn S. Rawski and Jessica Rawson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), pl. 263. Cf. Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, undated. “Snake.” Album 2, leaf 9. Album leaf, ink and colors on paper. 20.2 × 25.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Figure 45 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 12. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

had become endangered in this cycle. If not merely a general comment on wealth and Yangzhou society, the work also could be a veiled commentary on the Manchu Qing. When the Ming dynasty was nearing civil war, it was taken not by the rebel army of Li Zicheng 李自成 (1606–1645) who had hoped to establish a new dynasty, but rather by a third party, the Manchus. In this work, like so many others in Hua Yan’s albums, the third party (the snake) is poised to capture the frog that believes it is capturing a snail. In the upper-right corner, Hua Yan inscribed the date along with a suggestive remark that relates his observations of the natural world to his perspective. He wrote, “In the jiyi year [1749], the mountain man of Xinluo wrote in the deepest and highest tower 己已正月，新羅山人寫於最高深處樓中.” Referring to himself as a mountain

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Figure 46 Hua Yan, Miscellaneous Album, 1749. Leaf 6. Album of 10 leaves, ink and color on paper, 25.5 × 16.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

man above and away from society, Hua Yan positioned himself as a voyeur, thereby conveying his own reflections on society and perhaps also an undertone of political dissent. Hua Yan’s vivid critiques may have emerged amid the imperial inquisitions of the eighteenth century in part due to their Song-dynasty visual conventions. Their familiar imagery likely appealed to local tastes, which Hua Yan made further enticing through personification and animation. A leaf from this album depicts three brown tree sparrows perched upon stalks of wheat in dynamic poses with detailed, wet applications of color and ink (Fig. 46). Their feathers, gestures, and expressions are carefully articulated through brushwork and color. One sparrow clutches a stalk of wheat and tips forward, exposing its entire

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underside. Another is pictured burying its head under a wing, while the other seems to blankly stare forward with its beak slightly agape. Through depicting their gestures and movements as they balance atop stalks of grain, Hua Yan conveyed the tiny sparrows’ thoughtless delight as they fluttered about the harvest. In his inscription, Hua Yan emphasized the cavorting and chirping of the sparrows in the rain and described the embroidered appearance of wheat in the wind. He wrote: Cavorting about in the wind of embroidered wheat, Altogether they chirp in the rain on the high plane. 踏翻繡麥風，團嘯高原雨。

His work may follow in the convention established by the Southern Song artist, Li Di 李迪 (active ca. 1113–after 1197). An album leaf attributed to Li Di bears the same subject matter, entitled The Contentment and Delight of an Abundant Harvest (Fig. 47). Here, three sparrows are pictured pecking at grain and one fluttering above the wheat stalks. Both works share a similar compositional organization with the thin lines of the wheat stalks sprouting from the lower left corner and the sparrows arranged at center. Both are conventional in their portrayal of auspicious meanings through the pairing of the sparrow and the wheat. The sparrow, or que 雀, is a homophone for jue 爵, meaning high rank or nobility.50 As Bai Qianshen has explained, the rebus aspects of such images function like words,51 here suggesting the honor of high rank. Additionally, the single stalk of wheat may symbolize the five grains, or wugu 五榖 (rice, millet, sorghum, wheat, and beans), signifying the peace and abundance that is brought by a large grain crop or bumper harvest.52 Together, these two images convey a blessing of nobility and abundance, yet Hua Yan’s whimsical characterization of the birds’ blank expressions and clumsy movements clearly departs from the elegance of the Song dynasty composition. While his paintings in this 1749 album are developed from the drawing-from-life mode of depicting birds and flowers seen in Southern Song album leaves, an approach likely adopted from the study of woodblock print manuals, they appear to satirize the conventional use of auspicious imagery through enlivened subject matter and vivid brushwork. 50 51 52

Ellen Johnston Laing, “Auspicious Motifs in Ninth- to Thirteenth-Century Chinese Tombs,” Ars Orientalis 33 (2003): 51. Qianshen Bai, “Image as Word: A Study of Rebus Play in Song Painting (960–1279),” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 34 (1999): 57. Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings, 246.

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Figure 47 Li Di, The Contentment and Delight of an Abundant Harvest, 12th–13th c. Album leaf, ink and color on silk, 24.2 × 24.2 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

An album in the Shanghai Museum, Birds and Insects from Life, dated 1750, demonstrates Hua Yan’s use of meticulous brushwork as he presented garden subjects in animated scenes. In the album, Hua Yan painted eight leaves of garden subjects including birds, flowers, insects, cats and dogs in animated scenarios. He drew on the elegance of fine, gongbi or “working brush” lines to create detailed creatures, posed in lively and attractive garden scenes that also seem to be infused with the spontaneity and stark compositions typically associated with xieyi, or “sketching the idea.” Each painting presents an amusing moment or perplexing observation of the natural world, many of which relate to subject matter seen in the previous two albums. A leaf pictures a cicada atop a falling leaf, which attracts the attention of a salamander and bee (Fig. 48). The creatures each are rendered in fine lines and delicate washes of reds and blues give an autumnal sensibility to the curving, crisp leaves of fall. Rather

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Figure 48 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 6. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum.

than an elegant or precious flavor, however, the scene evokes curiosity as the salamander and bee gesture toward the cicada, which appears to cling motionless to the falling leaf. As in the two previous albums, witty, intriguing scenes also may inspire comparison with the artist himself. In leaf four, Hua Yan depicted a ripe orange bitter melon with red pith, or kugua 苦瓜, its vines crawling over a sprig of bamboo (Fig. 49). Bamboo is conventionally regarded for its ability to weather changes and remain upright; for this reason, it is a scholarly symbol associated with purity and dignity. However, the climbing tendrils of the bitter melon have overtaken the bamboo, causing it to bend under the weight of the insects

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Figure 49 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 4. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum.

savoring the ripe fruit. A praying mantis stands near the end of the bamboo branch, gazing down toward the ripe bitter melon that lies open with its exposed red seeds. Its flesh appears to have attracted three grasshoppers that scramble to devour it but appear not to notice the cunning praying mantis peering down from above. Hua Yan wrote: Sweet melon hangs from the bitter vines, Grass insects eat and become intoxicated by its fragrance. 甜瓜懸苦藤，艸蟲口香醉。

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As in the prior album leaves, this painting again relates to Zhuangzi’s passage in that creatures may forget their true selves in the pursuit of gain and suffer as a result. In addition, Hua Yan appears to have referenced a common Chan passage in order to comment upon the values of bitterness and sweetness. The passage reads: Bitter gourd is bitter even to its roots, Sweet melon is sweet through to its vines. 苦瓠連根苦，甜瓜徹帶甜。53

This passage indicates that the bitter gourd and sweet melon each have absolute values and cannot be confused; one is purely bitter, one is thoroughly sweet. However, although each melon has its own true character, one’s perceptions of each may change, as Hua Yan suggested in his painting and poetry. When Hua Yan drew upon this passage in the poem on his painting, he conflated the two values (bitterness and sweetness) by describing a melon with sweetness hanging from bitter vines. As for the insects, they had grown intoxicated by the fragrance of the bitter melon and competed for a taste, here finding sweetness despite its bitter nature. Chan Buddhist texts frequently contrast the difference between absolute and relative values through the contrast of bitter and sweet melons. Shitao, Hua Yan’s predecessor in Yangzhou, also highlighted the Chan associations of the bitter melon when taking the name, “Monk Bitter Melon 苦瓜和尚,” which he also employed in the title for his theoretical writings, entitled Recorded Remarks on Painting by Monk Bitter Melon 苦瓜和尚畫語錄.54 This name emphasized Shitao’s pure and austere demeanor, for it is believed that since the bitter melon is bitter to its roots, its nature is pure and absolute. In addition, Chan Buddhists often embraced an oppositional stance toward society and the Vinaya, or Buddhist monastic code, one often visualized as the eccentricity embodied by sansheng 散聖, or scattered sages.55 An album leaf by Shitao from the undated, four-leaf album, Vegetables, pictures a bitter melon in heavy, bluegreen washes touched with black ink (Fig. 50). The corresponding poem employs the melon as a metaphor for the artist himself. 53 54 55

Puji 普濟 (1178–1253), Wudeng huiyuan 五燈會元 (Compendium of Five Lamps), in Wenyuange Siku quanshu neilian wangban, 9:37. Hay, Shitao, 208. For instance, see Anonymous, Master Clam Catches a Shrimp, Southern Song, mid-thirteenth century. Hanging scroll mounted on panel, ink on paper, 746 × 27.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. F1964.9.

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Figure 50 Shitao, Vegetables, 17th–18th c. Album of 4 leaves, ink and color on paper, 28.0 × 21.5 cm. Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection.

Building on Shitao’s image of the bitter melon, Hua Yan animated his composition with insects to reflect his view of competition, artistic integrity, and professional recognition in Yangzhou. As the creatures prey upon one another atop the bitter melon and the weight of the melon bends the stalk of bamboo, the work pictorially conveys the loss of integrity and upright behavior for which the bamboo is known. Bent and weighed down after years of competing for recognition and profit in Yangzhou, and still tasting the bitterness of his own situation, the image refers to Hua Yan’s anxieties about making art in Yangzhou, while further positioning the artist within a lineage of Yangzhou painters. Another leaf in this album suggests Hua Yan’s perception of the tastes of his upwardly-mobile Yangzhou audience by highlighting a theme of rivalry between two different species. The painting depicts one tan-colored dog curled

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Figure 51 Hua Yan, Birds and Insects from Life, 1750. Leaf 2. Album of 8 leaves, ink and color on paper, 36.0 × 26.7 cm. Shanghai Museum.

up beneath a rock and flowers, while another tiny black dog is pictured beside the thatched fence of an enclosed garden. A branch of bamboo hangs over the rock, where a white cat appears to be curled up and gazing down with a smug expression toward the dogs, one of which leaps up on its back legs as if barking at the cat (Fig. 51). This simple interaction conveys a delightful vision of mundane life in the garden. In his inscription, Hua Yan identified the image and noted that it is after the Song style. He wrote: Flowers shade the puppies, In imitation of the brushwork of Song masters.

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華陰乳犬， 倣宋人點筆 ．

By noting that his brushwork followed Song precedents, Hua Yan indicated that classical styles and imagery may have appealed to his audience.56 His mention of flowers shading the puppies, coupled with the image of a puppy barking at a cat safely perched on the rock above while another puppy lays below, also evokes a rhyme popular in the Song dynasty entitled, “Counting the Nines” (shu jiu 數九 or jiu jiu ge 九九歌), which describes the set of nine, nineday periods following the winter solstice. In the version recorded by Hua Yan’s contemporary, Li E, the eighth nine describes cats and dogs seeking a shady spot 貓狗尋陰地.57 Maggie Bickford has pointed out that the agricultural subject matter of this rhyme was considered auspicious from the Song through the Qing dynasties, and so was referenced in a tapestry for the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) in 1782, yet she also notes that it employed colloquial language and rural themes often considered to be vulgar in flavor.58 Thus, Hua Yan’s selection of this theme was auspicious in its subject matter and Song-inspired in its style, yet also tended toward the vulgar in its popular application of literary allusions. Not only did Hua Yan’s animated style appear to cross boundaries in the history of eighteenth-century Chinese painting, but also his subjects appear to relate to several contexts—they reflect the artist himself, respond to popular tastes, and provide social commentary. Albums often included subjects that could be rendered as charming or auspicious, positioned among potentially profound or metaphorical subjects. Such works cleverly transgressed both elegant and vulgar sensibilities. For patrons unaffiliated with poetry circles, or not wealthy enough to create their own garden estates, these paintings of garden imagery could be bought as a taste of this local culture. To those familiar with the conventions invoked by Hua Yan, his works may have appeared witty

56

57 58

This painting may be compared with an album leaf attributed to the Song dynasty artist, Li Di (ca. 1110–1197), entitled Hibiscus and Rocks, in the album “Paintings by Song Artists 宋人集繪.” Album leaf, ink and color on silk, 26 × 25.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Li E, Song shi jishi 宋詩紀事 (Anecdotes on Song Poetry) in Wenyuange Siku quanshu neilian wangban, 1:24. Maggie Bickford, “Three Rams and Three Friends: The Working Lives of Chinese Auspicious Motifs,” Asia Major XII, Part I (2000): 136. See also: Maggie Bickford, “The Seasonal Round in House and Palace: Counting the Nines in Traditional China,” in Ronald Knapp, ed. House Home Family: Living and Being Chinese (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 349–71.

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and satirical. As such, Hua Yan shaped what was once a subtle and intimate artistic statement into a popular approach to garden imagery. As for the artists who became increasingly active in Yangzhou throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, they were both friends and competitors, inspired and challenged to create their reputations in a saturated market. Artists, especially those without a consistent patron during this period, such as Hua Yan and Jin Nong, were challenged to become extraordinarily versatile in their strategies for the growing art market of Yangzhou. Although Hua Yan attempted to appeal to influential Yangzhou patrons—the garden owners who were at the center of local literary circles and actively engaged with Zhejiang poets—there is only one known work linking Hua Yan to the prominent Ma family of Yangzhou. In his anthology, Hua Yan recorded a work for the salt merchant, Ma Yuelu 馬曰璐 (1697–after 1766), to whom he presented a fan with a portrait for Ma Yuelu’s fiftieth birthday in 1743. He entitled his entry, “A Portrait on a Fan with a Poem to Celebrate Ma Yangzha on his Fiftieth Birthday 馬羊查 五十初度擬其逸致容寫之扇頭并製詩為祝.”59 This entry, written upon a nonextant fan that was likely commissioned by a friend or family member as a gift, suggests that Hua Yan was considered a painter for hire rather than a guest or participant in the festivities. Unlike Jin Nong, Li E, or Wang Shishen, Hua Yan was not recognized as a Zhejiang poet, but primarily as a painter, and did not gain the professional recognition that others received from contemporary patrons. It is precisely these circumstances that cast Hua Yan as a voyeur in mideighteenth-century Yangzhou. In his poem inscribed on a painting of miscellaneous flowers, dated 1748, Hua Yan suggested that he was content to paint garden imagery for income despite his reservations about the integrity of others, stating in the above epigraph, “I do not envy other’s prosperity and fame/ Nor do I criticize their spirit and intelligence/ Rather I compose a few sprays of flowers/ In hopes of sustaining one day of work.”60 After nearly two decades in Yangzhou, Hua Yan readily acknowledged the social circumstances that supported the production of his paintings. His distinctive approach to garden imagery not only offered a vocabulary to appeal to his own circle but also to distinguish himself in Yangzhou society as the mountain man of Xinluo. 59 60

Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:156–7. Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 4:190.

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Picturing People, Past and Present Pictures of people, past and present, offer a way to visualize oneself in history. Specifically, pictures of historical individuals could contextualize and legitimize one’s social position in the present, thus representing “a social power over time,” as described by Pierre Bourdieu.1 Possessing such images reflected one’s cultural knowledge and positioned one as an inheritor to a history or lineage. Built on this principle, Hua Yan’s figure paintings reflected his role as an artist whose position on the fringes of society allowed him to vividly represent—and satirize—the illusory nature of life in Yangzhou. For their ability to bridge the historical and the personal, his figure paintings challenge expectations of conventional subject matter. At the same time, they reveal fresh insights into Han identity in eighteenth-century Jiangnan, which was often colored by themes of loss coupled with reverence for local history. Through dynamic gestures and vivid expressions, Hua Yan’s pictures brought to life the delights of literary gatherings, sufferings of beautiful women, hardened journeys of pilgrims and travelers, and reminiscences by the poets who shaped life in mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Figure paintings occupied much of Hua Yan’s interest in the 1740s and 1750s, when he composed a variety of popular subjects with uncommon sensitivity. Enigmatic and lifelike, Hua Yan’s pictures of figures illuminated the riches and excesses of society, as well as the subtle disharmonies beneath an otherwise luminous image of life in Yangzhou. Figures often illustrated well-known legends and cultural customs, yet his sensitive renderings of these subjects highlighted pivotal aspects of social class, gender, wealth, and social behavior in the 1740s and 1750s. As mentioned in Chapter Three, these two decades saw waves of artists and poets passing through Yangzhou, many of which Hua Yan knew from Hangzhou. Literary societies thrived and garden culture flourished, while what were once modest lifestyles often gave way to conspicuous consumption. In the decades that followed, Hua Yan’s figure paintings inspired the next generation of artists who studied the raw energy, naturalistic movements, and unassuming subjects associated with works by the mountain man of Xinluo.

1 Bourdieu, Distinction, 71–2.

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Literary Gatherings as Aspirational Subjects

Literary gatherings, so intimately contextualized within the garden, represented a favored subject in Yangzhou. At this time, Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 (ca. 1715– 1763) novel, Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), also known as the Story of the Stone, framed the Jiangnan garden as a cultural construct, one that tested the bounds between reality and illusion. Famously inscribed upon the stone archway of “The Land of Illusion” read the couplet, “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction is true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal is real.”2 In Yangzhou, things were not what they seemed; it was a time of social reversals and the upturning of time-honored ideals. In this context, literary gatherings of ancient luminaries lent order to the present. Wealthy owners of Yangzhou garden estates, the majority of which had made their fortunes in the salt trade, regularly hosted literary gatherings in their gardens in accordance with literati tradition.3 Such gatherings marked their participation in local poetry societies such as the Han River Poetry Society, and hosts often commissioned visual and textual records of the events to document these literary gatherings for posterity and prestige. The difference, of course, was that the Yangzhou garden owners who hosted such gatherings often were merchants, for which any perceived discrepancies in education or pedigree could be compensated by drawing relationships to those with social capital—the poets and artists, who supplied the images that framed their activities in history. As David Ake Sensabaugh has pointed out, in the mid-fourteenth century the concept of a cultured man of letters, or wenren 文人, expanded from one who excelled in a particular specialty to one who exhibited a wide array of literary and artistic interests, which he often displayed at elegant gatherings.4 Consequently, Yangzhou garden owners obliged artists to depict their gatherings while local poets contributed poems, thereby increasing their prestige and representing it through what was acknowledged as the manner of the ancients. Richard Vinograd has suggested that the intent of those works was directed foremostly to the self-esteem and abilities of the viewer, rather than as an expression of the artist’s style or

2 Translation adapted from Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, trans. David Hawkes (London: Penguin, 1973), 55. 3 For the gardens used for literary gatherings in mid eighteenth-century Yangzhou and description of their owners, see Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou, 194. 4 David Ake Sensabaugh, “Fashioning Identities in Yuan-Dynasty Painting: Images of the Men of Culture,” Ars Orientalis 37 (2009): 134.

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historical erudition.5 As such, pictorial representations of literary gatherings legitimized the patron or host’s cultural aspirations, recorded the connections between him and his contemporaries, and conveyed the pleasure and excitement of a fleeting moment in time. Gathering paintings by Hua Yan similarly picture lifestyles of eminent historical figures in leisurely, lifelike moments that captured the contemporary appeal of garden culture in Yangzhou. Images typified the wealthy garden owner through details that exude privacy, comfort, and exclusivity. Although there is little evidence that Hua Yan attended literary gatherings hosted by the most prominent figures in Yangzhou, such as the Ma brothers, they were well known to many of the Zhe School poets, as discussed below. Those who were not garden-owning merchants or members of poetry societies could purchase portrayals of “ideal” gatherings from professional artists like Hua Yan. As defined by Ellen Johnston Laing, “real” gatherings took place in the contemporary moment and documented the participants through pictorial and poetic records, whereas ideal gatherings memorialized legendary (and often mythical) gatherings of cultural luminaries.6 Whether real or ideal, gathering paintings followed similar pictorial conventions; specifically, the artist portrayed gathering participants amid a garden scene of idyllic leisure activities and ephemeral, seasonal features.7 Figures may be pictured engaged in a variety of activities, including banqueting and the arts. Chen Yunru has traced the genre of gathering paintings to banquet scenes in the Tang dynasty (618–907), although it was in the Song dynasty that literary gatherings came to be depicted in enclosed, garden spaces.8 Images of literary gatherings grew in popularity throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties along with the rise of urban garden culture, and the culture of literary gatherings among Yangzhou’s wealthiest garden owners likely heightened local interest in the subject. Thus, ideal gatherings became lucrative subjects for professional artists like Hua Yan who catered to midrange patrons in Yangzhou. 5 Richard Vinograd, “Situation and Response in Traditional Chinese Scholar Painting,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 3 (1988): 368–9. 6 Ellen Johnston Laing, “Real or Ideal: The Problem of the ‘Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden’ in Chinese Historical and Art Historical Records,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88, no. 3 (1968): 419–35. 7 The conventions of literary gathering paintings can be traced to Wang Xizhi’s 王羲之 (303– 361) preface to the “Orchid Pavilion Poems” that was written upon a Spring Purification gathering in 353. Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 283–4. 8 Chen Yunru, “At the Emperor’s Invitation: Literary Gathering and the Emergence of Imperial Garden Space in Northern Song Painting,” trans. Donald E. Brix, Orientations 38 (2007): 58. See also Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 237–45.

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In Banquet on a Spring Evening at the Garden of Peaches and Plums, dated 1748, Hua Yan rendered figures with animated gestures and naturalistic forms, and inscribed a detailed narrative to orient the viewer (Fig. 52). The subject draws from the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai’s 李白 (701–762) poem, “Preface for the Poetry from a Spring Evening Party for My Cousins in a Peach Blossom Garden.”9 A subject known to the Ming artist Chen Hongshou, Hua Yan’s version of this painting highlights guests engaging in conversation and relaxing after a lavish feast detailed in Li Bai’s poem.10 This gathering was set amid a grove of peach and plum trees in early spring, with the poet and his family members composing poems and drinking in order to celebrate their time together and to honor the coming of spring. In the painting, Hua Yan depicted the host, presumably Li Bai, seated at the head of a table with his arm slung back over his chair, while others look on or linger about the garden. Although Hua Yan pictured the event within a private garden, enclosed by a railing, rockery, and foliage, it exudes a casual atmosphere due to the leisurely gestures and naturalistic renderings of the figures. Servants wait upon the guests and hoist lanterns, signifying that night has fallen. On the table are writing implements and several vessels for food and drink, suggesting that writing is the central activity of the gathering. Hua Yan transcribed Li Bai’s poem in the upper left corner: This Heaven and Earth are the hostel for Creation’s ten thousand forms, where light and darkness have passed as guests for a hundred ages. But our floating lives are like a dream; how many moments do we have for joy? When the ancients took out candles for nighttime revels, they had the right idea. And we the more, when warm spring summons us with misted scenes and the Great Lump of Earth lends us patterned decoration.  Assembled in this garden perfumed by flowering peaches and plums, we shared the happiness of those whom Heaven has related. My young brothers were all as talented as the poet Xie Huilian, though my own songs could only shame me before Lingyun, his elder cousin.11 Yet our quiet enjoyment had not reached an end when the wit of our conversation grew more refined. We spread carnelian mats to sit beneath the flowers, let fly our winged cups and got drunk with the moon. 9 10 11

There is a duplicate of this work. Hua Yan, Spring Banquet, 1748. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 144 × 60.5 cm. Guangdong Provincial Art Museum. Chen Hongshou, Li Bai’s Literary Gathering in the Peach and Plum Garden, dated 1650. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 155.2 × 72.9 cm. Wan-go Weng Collection. Xie Huilian 謝惠連 (394–430) was a talented man of letters and cousin of the renowned landscape poet, Xie Lingyun, who is also known as the Duke of Kangle 康樂公.

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Figure 52 Hua Yan, Banquet on a Spring Evening in the Garden of Peaches and Plums, 1748. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 180.2 × 95.5 cm. Tianjin Museum.

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 But if there were no handsome verse, how could you express exquisite feelings? When the poems did not succeed, we exacted forfeits in jars of wine as they did in the Garden of the Golden Valley.12 夫天地者，萬物之逆旅 ; 光陰者, 百代之過客 ．而浮生若夢，為歡幾 何．古人秉燭夜遊，良有以也．况陽春召我以煙景，大塊假我以文 章．會桃李之芳園，序天倫之樂事 ．群季俊秀，皆為惠連，吾人詠 歌， 獨慚康樂．幽赏未已，高談轉清．開 瓊 筵 以坐花，飛羽觞而 醉 月．不有佳作，何伸雅懷．如詩不成，罰依金谷酒數．13

As Li Bai’s poem details, the atmosphere of this literary gathering is one of comfort, leisure, and pleasure on a warm springtime evening. The poet and his friends enjoyed a sumptuous banquet, let fly their winged cups, and created poems in a garden perfumed by flowering peaches. Like several of his gathering paintings, Hua Yan created Banquet on a Spring Evening in his Hangzhou studio, Jietaoguan 解弢館, or “Unsheathing the Sword Studio,” where he often prepared works for sale during his later years in Yangzhou. This moniker described Hua Yan as a wuxia 武俠, or martial arts hero, in keeping with the interests of his social circle. He inscribed the painting as the mountain man of Xinluo in the second month of spring in 1748. Together, the poem and picture capture the feeling of the springtime evening, yet the lively portrayal also captured the social ideals of contemporary garden culture in Yangzhou. Hua Yan, whose works in the previous chapter offered subtle critiques of wealth and social ills through vivid portrayals of garden flora and fauna, similarly wove themes of extravagance into his depictions of literary gatherings. Li Bai’s poem states that when a guest could not complete a poem, glasses of wine would be filled as in the Garden of the Golden Valley, which was a luxurious villa in Luoyang built by a local official Shi Chong 石崇 (249–300) of the Western Jin dynasty (265–317). The History of the Jin Dynasty (ed. 644–46) explains that the wealthy Shi Chong lived in a vast and elegant mansion that held fine musicians and hundreds of women, who were “richly clad in silk and

12 13

Translation adapted from Elling Eide in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, 1:723. Li Bai 李白 (701–762), Chunye yanzhu zongdi taohuayuan cun 春夜宴諸從弟桃花園序 (Preface to ‘Banquet on a Spring Evening with My Cousins in the Peach Blossom Garden’), in An Qi 安旗, et. al., Xinban Li Bo quanji biannian zhushi 新版李白全集編年注釋 (New Edition of Commentary on the Complete Works of Li Bo) (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 2000), 1690.

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embroidery, laden with ear ornaments of gold and jade.”14 At his Golden Valley villa, Shi Chong held lavish poetry gatherings that included feasting, playing music, and composing poetry; it is said that guests who could not complete a poem would have to drink three measures of wine. However, Shi Chong’s wealth and extravagance also brought his ruin: when the Prince of Zhao sent a messenger to the Golden Valley for Shi Chong’s favorite concubine, the dazzling flutist Green Pearl, he would not give her up. In resistance, she threw herself from the terrace to her death, and Shi Chong and his family were put to death. Thus, although Shi Chong may have led the ideal, pleasure-seeking lifestyle characterized by poetry gatherings, decadent banquets, and beautiful women, his death came as a result of his material desires. An earlier painting by Hua Yan, Golden Valley Garden, dated 1732, offers a psychologically probing image of the legendary figure, Shi Chong, and his romance with Green Pearl (Fig. 53). Encircled by rockery and foliage with the faint red lines of a railing lending privacy to the scene, Shi Chong and three servants look on as Green Pearl plays the flute, her two attendants standing beside her. The circular arrangement of the figures and garden features concentrates attention on Shi Chong, who is pictured at the center of the composition in enlarged proportions. Gazing at his beloved concubine, his demeanor commands power and authority. Ellen Johnston Laing has noted that although few paintings of the Golden Valley Garden are extant today, later sources indicate that Shi Chong was honored as a Living Wealth God and also one of the Flower Spirits of the Twelve Months, both of which were associated with prosperity and wealth.15 These popular associations may have contributed to the recognition of Hua Yan’s subject in Yangzhou. As hanging scrolls, these paintings would have been purchased as showpieces suitable for public display, rather than offering the more private experience of a handscroll. To visualize the complex narrative of a literary gathering on a single hanging scroll, Hua Yan arranged figural groupings and added extensive inscriptions to articulate the subject, often quoting the original poem or legend. In another gathering painting, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, dated 1746, Hua Yan similarly signed the painting as the mountain man of Xinluo and noted that he composed the work at his Hangzhou studio, 14 15

Translation by Helmut Wilhelm in Minford and Lau, Anthology of Classical Chinese Literature, 1:477. Ellen Johnston Laing, “The Posthumous Careers of Wang Zhaojun, of Mencius’ Mother, of Shi Chong and His Concubine Lüzhu (Green Pearl) in the Painting and Popular Print Tradition,” in On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture, eds. Shane McCausland and Yin Hwang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), 252–7.

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Figure 53 Hua Yan, Golden Valley Garden, 1732. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 178.9 × 94.1 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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“Unsheathing the Sword,” where he often prepared works for sale in Yangzhou (Fig. 54). In this work, Hua Yan rendered the legendary gathering attributed to the Northern Song dynasty scholar-painter Li Gonglin 李公麟 (1049–1106) with a complete transcription of the record and poem attributed to Mi Fu 米黻 (1051–1107).16 The inscription describes sixteen gathering participants, all twelfth-century luminaries, in a garden landscape structured by rockery, bamboo, and furniture. Clothing, such as black hats for scholars and caped robes for religious figures, identify each participant as they engage in activities of conversation, art, music, and composing poetry. The value of the image, as a symbol of cultural knowledge and social status, could be summarized by the last line of the inscription, “As for later observers, not only can they view these paintings, but it is as if these figures are present 後之覽者，不獨圖畫之可 觀，亦足仿佛其人耳.” While Hua Yan presented the figures and landscape according to textual and pictorial conventions, it was his lifelike portrayals of the figures and visual clarity that likely captivated his potential clients. Hua Yan’s depictions of literary gatherings capitalize on earlier Jiangnan artists’ vivid renderings by transferring the subject to a hanging scroll format. Shitao once rendered the same subject with fine-lined figural portraits and pale blue and pink washes in his handscroll, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden.17 In contrast, Hua Yan compressed this complex narrative into a hanging scroll, and thereby eliminating atmospheric qualities in favor of a simplified composition. Although Hua Yan likely had not seen Shitao’s painting, he inscribed a gathering painting on the same subject that he believed to be by the hand of Chen Hongshou (Laolian) (Fig. 55). He indicated in his inscription that the work had been left incomplete at the end of Chen Hongshou’s life. This handscroll features the stylized figural portrayals and mannered landscape elements associated with Chen Hongshou’s pictorial style.18 However, it also features pale washes of color typically not seen in Chen Hongshou’s gathering paintings, which suggests that Hua Yan may have added these features in order 16

17 18

The original “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden” supposedly took place in 1087 at Wang Shen’s 王詵 (Jinqing 晉卿, ca. 1048–ca. 1103) garden in Kaifeng with the scholars Li Gonglin and Mi Fu in attendance. The event is now regarded as a spurious construction of later writers, yet the pictorial conventions of the Elegant Gathering, have been popularly rendered for centuries. Laing, “Real or Ideal,” 429. There is also a handscroll by the same title in the Shanghai Museum: Hua Yan, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, 1732. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 184.7 × 100.8 cm. Shanghai Museum. Shitao, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 36.4 × 328 cm. Shanghai Museum. Cf. Chen Hongshou, An Elegant Gathering, c. 1646–47. Handscroll, ink on paper, 29.8 × 298.4 cm. Shanghai Museum. Julia M. White, ed. Repentant Monk: Illusion and Disillusion in the Art of Chen Hongshou (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 122–3.

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Figure 54 Hua Yan, Elegant Gathering, 1746. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 180.7 x 94.8 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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Figure 55 Chen Hongshou, Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, 1725. Detail. Handscroll, ink and slight colors on paper, 41.6 × 431.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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to complete the work. In his inscription dated to 1725, while residing in Hangzhou, Hua Yan wrote: In the summer of the yiyi year of the Yongzheng reign [1725], I happened to stroll past the master of Sounds of Autumn Pavilion, who brought out from his collection ten or so exquisitely painted scrolls to indulge my thoughts and study thoroughly; it was as exhilarating like traveling through a clear and cool boundary (nirvana)!19 Among the paintings was one scroll by Chen Laolian entitled, “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden,” but when he got to the composition of the solitary pine entwined in foliage, Laolian was already severely ill, and could not finish the whole painting. It was such a pity! This scroll came into the marketplace, and Mister Fu came by and acquired it by chance, and so he begged me to finish the elegant work, and I gladly consented to do so. Since the ink was of the highest grade, I felt humbled by my predecessor, for if I set out to reveal its elegance, its beauty would still rival anything above or below it, and I did not dare to disturb it. The mountain man of Xinluo, Yan. 雍正乙已夏，偶散步至秋聲館主人出所蔵名公妙染數十餘軸，縱思飽 觀，爽爽如游清涼境也！中有陳老蓮西園雅集圖一卷，方構至孤松盤 郁處，時老蓮已病篤，不克寫完其圖矣．惜哉！此卷流于廛市，而符 子邂逅求得之，因乞余續成以全雅事，余亦欣然樂為之也．但墨本精 良，有愧前人，若開生劈秀，當与頡頏高下，則吾又未敢竟然也．新 羅山人筆喦識．20

As Hua Yan indicated in the passage above, Chen Hongshou had completed the first section that ends with a solitary pine tree and represents approximately one quarter of the entire scroll. Hua Yan appears to have supplemented all of 19

20

A “clear and cool” boundary or pool is a reference to nirvana. Soothill and Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, 357. In an allusion to the Song dynasty poet from Hangzhou, Teng Maoshi 滕茂實 (d. 1128), Li E explained that his gravestone notes that he “always dreamed of traveling through a clear and cool boundary (nirvana) 嘗夢遊清涼 境界.” Li E, Song shi jishi, 39:19. Recorded in Zeng Jun 曾君, “Chen Hongshou hua Hua Yan bu Xiyuan yaji tu juan pingxi 陳洪綬畫華喦補 ‘ 西園雅集圖卷評析 ’ (Analysis of the handscroll, “Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden,” painted by Chen Hongshou and supplemented by Hua Yan),” in Nan Chen bei Cui: Gugong bowuyuan Shanghai bowuguan cang Chen Hongzhou Cui Zizhong shuhua ji 南陳北崔：故宮博物院上海博物館蔵陳洪綬崔子忠書畫集 (Painting and Calligraphy of Chen Hongshou and Cui Zizhong from the Palace Museum and the Shanghai Museum) (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2008), 13–18; 158.

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the remaining sections.21 His meticulous attention to detail, undoubtedly inspired by Chen Hongshou, appears to have contributed to his lifelike portrayals of figures and brought an element of the “real” to idealized, legendary gatherings. Unlike his Yangzhou contemporaries, Hua Yan’s gathering paintings typically do not contain references to Yangzhou garden owners, nor did they use specific Yangzhou gardens as a setting. Rather than functioning as a commemoration of actual contemporary gatherings, Hua Yan’s works conveyed—and perhaps even mocked—the exclusive nature of literary gatherings for their intimate connection to wealth, social status, and posterity. His paintings likely appealed to those who aspired to the occasions hosted by wealthy Yangzhou garden owners during the 1740s and 1750s. Through images of literary gatherings of the past, Hua Yan visually contributed to the nostalgia shared among local poetry circles and made it possible to possess these idealized subjects through the appreciation of his works. 2

Gender and the Garden

By visualizing the lives of ancient poets ensconced in garden gatherings, Hua Yan characterized the appeal of the Yangzhou garden, a lyrical enclave steeped in its associations with wealth and social status. At the same time, vernacular literature, such as Cao Xueqin’s popular novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, also drew attention to the gendered dimensions of the garden. Themes of love and longing in garden settings appeared in paintings as early as the Song dynasty, with seasonal changes believed to parallel the human life span and so evoke the transience of youth and beauty.22 While Hua Yan’s pictures of literary gatherings concentrated on the bonds between men, romantic themes, such as his portrayal of Shi Chong and Green Pearl, also figured prominently among his pictures of historical figures in garden settings. More specifically, Hua Yan rendered psychologically probing pictures of women in the garden, such as the abandoned woman archetype, which also pertained to local interest in historical figures, Han erudition, and themes of loss and nostalgia. An undated hanging scroll by Hua Yan, Lady and Willow Tree, appears to render the classic tragedy of fading beauty in its portrayal of an abandoned

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Zeng Jun, Chen Hongshou hua Hua Yan bu “Xiyuan yaji tu” juan pingxi, 14. Lara C. W. Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018), 222.

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Figure 56 Hua Yan, Lady and Willow Tree, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 130.6 × 54.8 cm. Tianjin Museum.

woman beside a willow tree (Fig. 56).23 The scroll pictures her figure dressed in robes with long sleeves and a sash with a slight brush of red. In her right hand, 23

Kristen L. Chiem, “Beauty under the Willow Tree: Picturing Virtuous Women in Nineteenth-Century China,” in Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries, edited by Lara C. W. Blanchard and Kristen L. Chiem (Brill, 2017), 79–110.

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Figure 57 Attributed to Tang Yin, Lady with a Fan in the Autumn Breeze, undated. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 77.1 × 39.3 cm. Shanghai Museum.

she holds the fan that identifies her with the virtuous Lady Ban 班婕妤 (48 bce–6 bce) archetype, an erudite palace lady from the Western Han dynasty (206 bce–23 ce). In her left hand, she holds a tissue beneath her chin. Her body is bent forward slightly, and she gestures as if wiping tears from her face. She appears fragile and small in robes that hang several sizes too large on her slight frame. Standing alone beside a garden railing and rockery, her figure is framed by a willow tree, its tendrils devoid of leaves. The emotional gravity and lack of adornment that characterize Hua Yan’s rendering of this abandoned woman notably depart from earlier portrayals of Lady Ban. An undated hanging scroll, Lady Holding a Fan in the Autumn Breeze, attributed to the Ming dynasty painter, Tang Yin 唐寅 (1470–1524), similarly pictures Lady Ban holding her fan (Fig. 57). Here, fine brushwork attends to the ornate features of her robe, meticulously detailing its floral brocade and voluminous sashes. In contrast, Hua Yan’s fluid brushstrokes emphasize the withered frame of the woman, framed by the sparse tendrils of the willow tree.

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Unlike Hua Yan’s emotionally charged portrayal, the earlier work instead emphasizes the wealth and social status of the palace lady. Elegant and poised, she is pictured roaming through the garden, which is characterized only by a rock and bamboo rather than a willow tree. Hua Yan’s pairing of the abandoned woman with a willow tree further attests to interests in local literary history that defined his circles in mid-eighteenth century Yangzhou. Willow trees often were paired with images of courtesans in paintings and poetry, suggesting a visual comparison between their slender frames and subtle feminine charms. The Ming loyalist Kong Shangren 孔尚任 (1648–1718) specifically likened women to willows in his poem about Yangzhou’s Red Bridge while praising Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711), the eminent Yangzhou poet, loyalist, and official.24 Commonly featured in Jiangnan gardens and along waterways, perhaps most impressively surrounding Hangzhou’s West Lake and Yangzhou’s Slender West Lake, willow trees mature rapidly in a comparably short lifespan: a metaphor for the transience of beauty. Their close connection to literary history also may have raised subversive messages in Qing dynasty Yangzhou as artists sought to define Han cultural identity distinct from the Manchu court. As James Cahill has noted, although official policies forbade consorting with Han Chinese women, the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors all had a particular affinity for Yangzhou women and specifically recruited them for court service.25 Meanwhile, court artists frequently pictured them as exotic curiosities, distinguished by their Han dress that was forbidden to women of the Manchu court.26 Manchu possession of Yangzhou women thus remained a delicate issue well into the eighteenth century. In Hua Yan’s painting, the willow tree and the woman’s lack of adornments served to liken her to Yangzhou beauties in particular, distancing her from the Manchu court in Beijing. Not only a reference to a willowy feminine shape, the willow tree also symbolized the deserted beauty, since the character for willow, liu 柳, is a homophone for the word liu 留, to detain or stay. In Hua Yan’s Lady 24

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Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Making a Place for Meaning in Early Qing Yangzhou,” Late Imperial China 20, no. 1 (1999): 49–79, esp. 77. See also Li Hsiao-t’i, “Pleasures of a Man of Letters: Wang Shizhen in Yangzhou, 1660–1665,” in Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, eds. Lucie B. Olivová, and Vibeke Børdahl (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 131–48. James Cahill, “The Three Zhangs, Yangzhou Beauties, and the Manchu Court,” Orientations 27, no. 9 (1996): 62. Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 216–7; Shan Guoqiang, “Gentlewomen Paintings of the Qing Palace Ateliers,” Orientations 26, no. 7 (1995): 58–9.

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and Willow Tree, the pain and sacrifice of the abandoned woman reverberates through the garden. The sparse environment, the forlorn woman, and the willow tree emphasize the loneliness of her desertion, perhaps an allegory of the loss of the Ming. Broken and left to wander the garden aimlessly, her deep sense of loss is reiterated by the desolate landscape, the willows now a constant reminder of springtime memories. Artists and writers took a new interest in the psychological plight of women at this time, especially in the urban gardens of the Jiangnan region.27 Perhaps most notably, gendered themes of Dream of the Red Chamber unfold in the “Grand View Garden” of the Jia family estate when the garden owner Jia Zheng 賈政 makes an inspection tour of the recently constructed garden in preparation for the arrival of the Imperial Consort Jia Yuanchun 賈元春. Upon naming the pavilion Qinfang ting 沁芳亭 (Pavilion of Seeping Fragrance), Jia Zheng prompted his son, Baoyu 賈寶玉, to compose a seven-character couplet that reads: Willows on the dyke lend their verdancy to three punts; Flowers on the far shore spare a breath of fragrance.28 繞堤柳借三篙翠，隔岸花分一脉香。29

Following convention, the verdant willow trees and fragrance of flowers along the banks were intended to delight the Imperial Consort, while they also revealed the Jia family’s expectations of her beauty and charm. However, the Grand View Garden soon played host to the doomed romance between the novel’s protagonists, Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 and Jia Baoyu—one that offers insight into the fate of the deserted woman. In her “Zanghua ci 葬花詞 (Burying Flowers Song),” Lin Daiyu compares fallen flowers to her fading future and buries them in the garden to preserve their purity.30 In the realm of the garden, she bid farewell to a chance for true love, her act of burying the flowers portending 27

28 29 30

Haiyan Lee, “Love or Lust? The Sentimental Self in Honglou Meng,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 19 (December 1997): 85. See also Mariam Epstein, “Reflections of Desire: The Poetics of Gender in Dream of the Red Chamber,” Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China 1, no. 1 (1999): 64–106. Translation adapted from Cao Xueqin, A Dream of Red Mansions, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1978), 1:231. Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (ca. 1715–1763), Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), ed. Gao E 高颚 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1997), 117. Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng, 201. See also Louise Edwards, “Women in Honglou meng: Prescriptions of Purity in the Femininity of Qing Dynasty China,” Modern China 16, no. 4 (October 1990): 407–29.

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Figure 58 Hua Yan, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, 1737. Leaf 6. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 19.5 × 16.1 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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Figure 59 Hua Yan, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, 1737. Leaf 4. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 19.5 × 16.1 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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the demise of traditional values. Romantic love, the consequence of which was death to Lin Daiyu, thus gained traction in the face of neo-Confucian ideals that positioned loyalty and moral duty above all else. As in the casual atmosphere portrayed in Hua Yan’s paintings of literary gatherings, a subtext of social commentary pervades his picture of a woman afflicted with emotional angst. Rather than to portray the abandoned woman as a moral exemplar, a view that may have seemed fragile and antiquated in the eighteenth century, Hua Yan’s painting accords insight into the woman’s emotional plight and parallels popular literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. Moreover, the representation of a tortured woman beside a willow tree also may have symbolized sentiments of nation and loss central to Han identity in Qing dynasty Jiangnan. Altogether, such paintings specifically appealed to Yangzhou tastes and concerns, made visible by Hua Yan’s knowledge of literary history and sensitive rendering of the abandoned woman. One might extend Hua Yan’s sympathetic depiction of women to his interest in uncommon subjects, such as children, which also could be viewed as a social critique. Hua Yan’s album, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, dated 1737, depicts scenes of children engaged in various activities, such as staging bird contests in the garden (Fig. 58). Both vivid and humorous, each scene takes the modest subject of children as they play, often mimicking the activities of adults. To foster the dynamism of the scene, Hua Yan arranged the figures in a circular formation surrounded by a wooden gate, with a trellis of melon vines indicating their location in the vegetable garden. The children’s pointed fingers and gestures convey their excitement as they peer into the rounded birdcages. The album demonstrates Hua Yan’s exceptional ability to breathe life into mundane subjects, engaging the viewer to connect more deeply with a range of people and activities of everyday life. In another leaf, young boys are positioned around a table inside a garden pavilion (Fig. 59). While one is poised to wield his brush, others peer into the books spread open in front of them. Hua Yan pictured the smallest of the children from the back, hardly able to reach the table, imbuing the seriousness of study with the playfulness of human subjectivity. The hierarchical arrangement mirrors that of literate men in their studies, surrounded by the elegant trappings of hand-carved wooden doors and sculpted garden rockery. However, Hua Yan’s substitution of children casts doubt on studious pursuits and subtly mocks the scholarly ideals so often associated with social prestige. Thus, while Hua Yan painted figural subjects such as beautiful women and erudite scholars, he also subverted conventional approaches to gender and status to wage a fresh critique on societal norms.

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Borders, Travel, and Empire

Beyond the garden, Hua Yan developed an interest in portraying subjects from the frontier in painting and poetry, or biansai wenxue 邊塞文學, during his later years in Yangzhou.31 His interest undoubtedly responded to Qing imperial expansion along the northern and western frontier regions that unfolded between the 1680s and continued past his death in the 1750s, resulting in war with Central Asia and the submission of Xinjiang and the Kazakhs to the empire. Hua Yan’s works should be seen as a counterpoint to court paintings that document Qianlong’s expansionary efforts by visualizing the exchange of tribute and portraiture.32 Distinctive among his social circle, and especially significant for later artists in Shanghai, Hua Yan’s frontier paintings instead engaged politics of identity that parallel his pictures of beautiful women and flower-and-bird subjects.33 His vivid portrayals of people—often individuals and their mounts—drew on Song dynasty precedents to offer sensitive interpretations of frontier peoples as relatable, humorous, and mundane. As Irene Leung has observed, artists in the Song dynasty similarly pictured foreign people, or fanzu 番族, with visual conventions that neutralized perceptions of them as threatening or hostile.34 In showcasing the humanity of foreign peoples, Hua Yan brought attention to their plight as common people who were also subject to the Qing imperial enterprise. In his hanging scroll, Snow on Tianshan, dated 1755, Hua Yan offered an intimate glimpse of a traveler and camel passing through a mountain range a dramatic landscape along the borderlands (Fig. 60). Three elements are arranged in a triangular composition: a looming mountain, a traveling figure, and a camel. Both the traveler and camel look up at the sky toward a bird. The snowcapped mountain peak, portrayed on the composition as a void outlined by the dark sky, suggests that the traveler is at a high elevation, traversing a mountain pass. The rounded, triangular void of the mountain form contrasts with Hua Yan’s careful attention to the figure leading the camel, with its humped back and upturned nose that echo the shape of the mountain. Pictured with one leg 31 32 33 34

As also recorded in his anthology, see for example Hua Yan, Bian ye xue jing 邊夜雪 (Snow scene on the frontier at night) in Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 4:178. Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers, and Other Things at the Qing Court,” 390–1. For more on frontier paintings in nineteenth-century Shanghai, see: Lai Yu-chih, “Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian’s Frontier Paintings and Urban Life in 1880s Shanghai,” The Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (2004): 550–72. Irene S. Leung, “Felt yurts neatly arrayed, large tents huddle close: Visualizing the frontier in the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127),” in Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries, and Human Geographies in Chinese History, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (London: Routledge, 2003), 194.

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raised as if in mid-stride, the camel also gazes upward with its wrinkled nose, bulbous eyes, and woolly mane. The figure further echoes the rounded shape of the camel and the mountain with a red cape that covers his head and body. Peering out from beneath the cape, he, too, has bulbous eyes, shaggy hair, and a thick moustache. As Marc Abramson has observed, the representation of frontier people as an ambiguous ethnic identity could be understood as a casual stereotype, one that prompted the artist and viewer to come to terms with their own often ambiguous, ethnic and cultural identities.35 The image is strikingly simple, yet evokes the cold desolation of the mountain pass, the muffled sound of a traveler passing through the snow, and the silence of perceiving a lone bird flying above. By capturing the senses experienced by foreign peoples while distancing them from contemporary politics and court rhetoric, Hua Yan’s image prompts empathy and contemplation. Unlike his earlier landscape paintings, such as Cloud Sea at Mount Tai (Fig. 13), in which Hua Yan drew upon its echoing peaks and billowing clouds, Snow on Tianshan is a genre scene—a distant landscape brought to life through his vivid portrayal of the traveler and his camel. As Hua Yan indicated in his inscription, the mountain is Tianshan 天山, or “Heavenly Mountains,” referring to the mountain range that extends out from Xinjiang into Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, looming above the northern route of the Silk Road and the Taklamakan Desert. Buddhist pilgrims, merchants, and travelers surmounted this pass between China and India throughout history. There is no evidence that Hua Yan visited this site, which is over twenty-five hundred miles from the Jiangnan region, but instead constructed the composition—the camel, the foreigner, the looming mountain peak—from themes and iconography featured in vernacular literature that circulated in the Jiangnan region during the eighteenth century. This pilgrimage scene relates to both early Qing vernacular fiction and Buddhist lore. Tianshan is a well-known site in Chinese cultural history, for the monk Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664) journeyed through a pass in this mountain range to obtain Buddhist scriptures in India in 629 CE.36 For completing the sixteen year- journey from China to India, monk Xuanzang has been considered a legendary hero whose journey was later dramatized in the popular epic novel by Wu Cheng’en, entitled Xiyou ji 西遊記 (Journey to the West), and its sequel, Xiyou bu 西遊補 (Supplement to Journey to the West), published in 35 36

Marc S. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 18. Sally Hovey Wriggins, The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), 19–35.

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Figure 60 Hua Yan, Snow on Mount Tian, 1755. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper, 159.1 × 52.8 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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Hangzhou throughout the seventeenth century.37 In the novel, the protagonist Sun Wukong, “the Monkey King,” was a disciple of Xuanzang who journeyed to India through this mountain range, also known as Huoyan shan 火焰山, or the “Flaming Mountains,” to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. However, perhaps more significant than the lore of Tianshan is the humor and satire with which Xiyou ji is presented, for Hua Yan similarly fostered interest in frontier imagery through unidealized portrayals that emphasize the humanity of frontier peoples. While literary legends may have contributed to Hua Yan’s depictions of the frontier, his lifelike depictions of figures and animals lent an informal air to each scene. As Ginger Hsü has pointed out, camels often were associated with the Central Asian region; they were portrayed in the Sancai tuhui encyclopedia and could also be seen around the capital.38 Hua Yan may have personally observed or sketched the camel’s features while in Beijing during the 1720s. Nonetheless, other paintings, such as Camel in Snow, dated to 1746, similarly reveal how Hua Yan transformed formulaic elements of the frontier into convincing scenes of intrigue (Fig. 61). In this painting, a figure peers out from within a yurt beneath a tree as a tethered camel, pictured from behind, grazes on the snow-patched ground. Behind them, mountains loom against an inkwashed sky, punctuated only by the moon and single bird. As with Snow on Tianshan, the traveler and his camel share a unique bond—whether they both are captivated by a bird flying above, or pausing for a moment of rest at the end of a day—each serves to mirror and exhibit the behavior of the other. Hua Yan’s unique ability to represent likeness through relationships thus fosters new ways of thinking about the subject: here, a picture of the frontier at peace. A closer look at the figures’ facial features and dress further reveals a likeness to other figures of particular significance in Jiangnan, such as the Chan patriarch Bodhidharma. In both Snow on Tianshan and Camel in Snow, Hua Yan portrayed the figures with Central Asian features suggested by a bulbous nose, large eyes, and facial hair. The iconic red robe of the figure suggests that both images may refer to Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth Indian Patriarch of Buddhism and the first Chan Patriarch in China who traveled to China from the Central Asian region. Hua Yan painted an image of Bodhidharma with the 37

38

Robert E. Hegel, “Picturing the Monkey King: Illustrations of the 1641 Novel Xiyou bu,” in The Art of the Book in China: Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia Held June 13th-15th, 2005, no. 23 (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 2006), 175–88. See also Ellen Widmer, “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Publishing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, no. 1 (June 1996): 77–122. Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü, “Traveling to the Frontier: Hua Yan’s Camel in Snow,” in Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, 347–75.

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Figure 61 Hua Yan, Camel in Snow, 1746. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 139.7 × 58.4 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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Figure 62 Hua Yan, “Bodhidharma” in Miscellaneous Album 2, undated. Leaf 1. Album of 12 leaves, ink and color on paper, 20 × 25.4 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

iconography of thick hair and round, penetrating eyes peering out from under his robe in a leaf from his undated Miscellaneous Album (Fig. 62).39 Significantly, he pictured Bodhidharma in a slouched position, seated on a reed mat with all his limbs enshrouded by billowing robes. These features may have informed Hua Yan’s portrayals, in which he draws similarities between the soft, rounded forms of each element, and then punctuates his composition with the brilliant, billowing red robes of the figure. In both Snow on Tianshan and Camel in Snow, the pilgrim Bodhidharma similarly could be envisioned as a common traveler, as he trudges through the snow, observes the natural environment, and watches after his mount. As the culture of Hua Yan and many in his circle included the practice of Chan Buddhism and the reading of vernacular fiction such as Xiyou ji, they likely formed impressions of Central Asia that markedly contrasted with the Qing conquest of the frontier. Hua Yan signed Snow on Tianshan as the mountain man of Xinluo at Jiangsheng shushe 講聲書舍, or “Discussing the Sounds 39

For the iconography of Bodhidharma, see Helen B. Chapin, “Three Early Portraits of Bodhidharma,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 1 (1945/1946): 66–98.

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Studio,” another studio name associated with his home in Hangzhou, at the age of seventy-four. Significantly, his lifelong friend, Jin Zhizhang (discussed in Chapter One), had returned home to Hangzhou from the borderlands around the time that Hua Yan painted Snow on Tianshan. When Jin Zhizhang passed the juren in 1723, he was stationed in the borderland area of Koubei 口北.40 After decades of separation while each traveled for work, Hua Yan recorded an inscription on a painting for Jin Zhizhang around 1752 or 1753, noting, “I have reserved [this painting] for the old academic Jiangsheng, who I invite over to eat bamboo and come by my thatched hut 曾訂江聲老學士，邀依吃笋過 茅庵.”41 Hua Yan’s portrayals of the frontier undoubtedly coincided with conversations he had with friends returning home from the frontier to Hangzhou, further nuancing his position as amenable, rather than adversarial, toward the peoples and cultures of the frontier. 4

Seasons of Life

As in Snow on Tianshan, Hua Yan’s figure paintings from the 1740s and 1750s highlight his connections to both Hangzhou and Yangzhou by offering fresh, creative renditions of literary themes and lifelike portrayals of popular subjects. Although his works supported his livelihood as a painter and were generally intended for sale, they also communicated the ideals of his Zhejiang social circle and reflected his own observations. Around 1752, Hua Yan returned permanently to Hangzhou, where he continued to paint works that melded popular interests with personal ruminations. In Sounds of Autumn, dated 1755, Hua Yan pictured the Song dynasty poet Ouyang Xiu in a poetic expression of his retirement (Fig. 63). Oriented with broader horizontal than vertical dimensions ideal for framing a narrative, the painting renders Ouyang Xiu’s “Rhapsody on the Sounds of Autumn” amid a landscape of mountains and trees framing a rustic mountain retreat, its many halls nestled amid variegated foliage.42 An ink wash indicates that night has fallen on the surrounding mountains, beneath the sliver of a moon. At the center of the composition, Hua Yan pictured a hut, where a gentleman wearing a scholar’s cap sits inside, facing out to the landscape. His books lay open in front 40

41 42

A border region part of the three prefectures of Zhili 直隸 ; Koubei was a strategic location for Beijing for it contained a mountain pass that led into Mongolia. The area spans modern Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei. Jin Zhizhang 金志章 (act. ca. 1722), Koubei santingzhi 口 北三聽志 (Three records of Koubei) (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1968). Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 5: 247–48. Ouyang Xiu, “Rhapsody on the Sounds of Autumn,” in Ronald C. Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 128–9.

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Figure 63 Hua Yan, Sounds of Autumn, 1755. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 94.0 × 113.5 cm. Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts.

of him on his desk and a candle burns at his side. There is a servant who stands outside the hut and turns his head back toward the scholar, as if awaiting orders. The trees bend, as if swaying in the wind, and their leaves fly into the air. The sky is the gray hue of a crisp and cool evening. Ouyang Xiu’s poem, which Hua Yan inscribed in its entirety at the top of the composition, describes the moment in which the poet was reading at night, and he heard a clamorous sound approaching from the southwest. Sending his servant out for a look, the boy reported back that the moon and stars were shining brightly, but that there were no people about. Ouyang Xiu described the colors of autumn as sad and pale, with clear and cold air that dispersed the mists and clouds. The mood is lonely and withered, for the majestic force of autumn causes the lofty trees to shed their leaves. With its lyrical tone, the poem expresses the sounds of autumn as the majestic force of nature’s seasons

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and so prompts Ouyang Xiu to reminisce on his life.43 Identifying with Ouyang Xiu, Hua Yan added only a brief signature at the end of his inscription, simply mentioning that it was winter and he, the mountain man of Xinluo, was the age of seventy-four. Painted at the end of Hua Yan’s life and with his elderly friends far away or deceased, this work also may be understood as a reflection upon his own life’s work. Literary classics of the Song dynasty not only inspired Hua Yan’s works in Yangzhou and characterized his identity as the mountain man of Xinluo, but they also associated him with the social circle of Zhe School poets active in Yangzhou. A painting by Hua Yan, Boating under the Autumn Moon, dated 1748, indicates that this group continued to share an interest in the study of Song poetry through their final years of life.44 Charged with providing a pictorial image for Li E’s lyric that inspired the scroll, Hua Yan created an image of a quintessential Jiangnan landscape with a sparse composition representing the waterways and rolling hills surrounding Hangzhou and Yangzhou. A frontispiece inscribed by Jin Nong in his distinctive “lacquered” calligraphy (qi shu 漆書) precedes Hua Yan’s painting, thus framing the following paintings and poems along the lines of Zhe School interests in evidential research.45 Painted on the back of sutra paper, Jin Nong’s frontispiece pointed to his practice as a Chan Buddhist, an identity he further embraced through his painting practice in Yangzhou during the 1750s. Following Jin Nong’s frontispiece and Hua Yan’s painting are fifteen colophons dated as late as 1752 by poets active in several cities along the Grand Canal. The colophons include entries by eminent Zhejiang poets as well as Yangzhou garden owners and poets. Each of the contributors to this scroll can be traced to Hangzhou or Yangzhou during the 1740s and early 1750s, and often both sites, through their association with local poetry circles including the Zhe School of Hangzhou and the Han River Poetry Society of Yangzhou. 43

44

45

James Liu describes this poem as an example of the prose-poetry genre, or wenfu 文賦, developed by Ouyang Xiu and other Song poets. The genre is known for this blend of both expository and narrative elements, as well as occasional rhyme, parallelism, and a lyric tone. James T.C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu: An Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 139. Hua Yan, Boating under the Autumn Moon, dated 1748. Handscroll, ink on paper, 24.2 × 112.8 cm. Wan-go Weng Collection, New Hampshire. For detailed discussion of the paintings, poems, and contributors to this handscroll, see Chiem, “Picturing Common Ground,” 181–218. This script type has flattened strokes and square ends that emulate the look of thick lacquer applied with a bamboo stylus. For Jin Nong’s calligraphy, see: Ouyang Zhongshi, et al. Chinese Calligraphy, 351–3. For his biography as a poet, see Qian Zhonglian, Qing shi ji shi, 8:4749–65.

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Despite Hua Yan’s social connections to the Zhejiang poets, he did not add a colophon to Boating under the Autumn Moon, likely in part due to his recognition as an artist rather than a poet after several decades of work in Yangzhou. In this sense, the handscroll represents an imagined gathering of old friends, one that marked the end of an era—a final season of life.46 By the end of the 1750s, many of the core members of the Zhe School and Han River Poetry Society had since moved or passed away, including Li E, Quan Zuwang, Chen Zhang, Cheng Mengxing, and Ma Yueguan, and many of the eminent gardens of Yangzhou slipped into decline. Hua Yan, too, had returned to Hangzhou and passed away around 1756, as had Fang Shishu, Gao Xiang, Wang Shishen, and Li Fangying. By the end of the 1750s, the world that Hua Yan had inhabited in Yangzhou was shifting once again. A few figures, such as Jin Nong and Zheng Xie, remained active in Yangzhou at this moment when conspicuous wealth had come to dominate the cultural activities of the city. There may be no better example of Yangzhou’s extravagances than the famous gathering at Rainbow (Red) Bridge hosted by the salt commissioner, Lu Jianzeng, in 1757. Modeled after a purification ceremony by the eminent early Qing poet Wang Shizhen held in 1665 at the garden of the Ming loyalist, Mao Pijiang 冒辟疆 (1611–1693), Lu Jianzeng’s gathering far surpassed that of his predecessor.47 Rather than the intimate, exclusive gatherings hosted by the Ma brothers in the decade prior, Lu Jianzeng’s gathering solicited the poems of over seven thousand people.48 Wealth had come to result in spectacle, with grandiose displays of social capital visually competing with values of austerity and restraint. Although Hua Yan was active in Yangzhou at this critical moment—from the early years of his painting career in Yangzhou during the 1730s, through the wave of literary activities that brought his Zhejiang contemporaries to the city during the 1740s—his art never achieved the recognition that it would after his death. 46 47

48

For instance, Hua Yan wrote to Li E in circa 1738; see Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 2:76. He wrote to Jin Nong in circa 1742; see Hua Yan, Ligou ji, 3:138. For Wang Shizhen’s works, see Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711), Yuyang jinghua lu jishi 漁洋精華錄集釋 (The Essential Works of Yuyang, with Collected Annotations) [1700], Li Yufu 李毓芙 et al., eds., vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), 478–85; Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou, 74; Li Hsiao-t’i, “Pleasures of a Man of Letters,” 136. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 228–9.

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The Xinluo School In the eighteenth century, Hua Yan forged a fresh and authentic approach to Chinese painting, one that tracked the social transformations in his locality. Followers found his works endearing for their ability to infuse classical subjects with real-life observations and a sense of immediacy, as seen in paintings by later Yangzhou artists Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping. These artists not only drew upon Hua Yan’s style, but perhaps more significantly, associated him with the Zhejiang poets through the use of portraiture. Thus, Hua Yan’s association with Zhejiang poets became the basis for his legacy in Yangzhou, from which emerged a notion of the Xinluo School. The Xinluo School offers a framework for conceptualizing Hua Yan’s significance for Jiangnan artists between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hua Yan’s interest in intimate portrayals of the human and natural world became a cornerstone of painting in the early nineteenth century, a moment when artists participated in exclusive artistic societies just as they sought broader audiences through print, advertising, and mass media. Although Roberta Wue rightfully has cautioned against the use of lineage-based categorizations of art in nineteenth-century Shanghai, seeing them as retrospective or predetermined positions that result in negative appraisals of painting in the city, it is important to note that the artists themselves still invoked these lineages in their inscriptions and written histories.1 Perhaps we should ask: how did artists associate their paintings with the Xinluo School? Why did artists’ references to Hua Yan matter, and to whom? While stylistic and textual references certainly cannot reveal a complete picture of any person or place, nor can broader contextualizations unveil the textures and nuances that made Shanghai a paradoxical realm of new and old. For instance, the vivid, evocative works of Hua Yan, whose paintings enlivened historical subjects as well as common scenes in everyday life, certainly exemplify the immediacy and “nowness” that Wue describes as a general characteristic of art in nineteenth-century Shanghai. It is clear that works by Hua Yan and his followers, who we may regard as the Xinluo School, held a distinct value for painters, writers, and patrons in this forward-looking city. Later chroniclers expressly defined the Xinluo School in concert with artists’ interest in Hua Yan’s works. Li Dou’s Yangzhou huafang lu 揚州畫舫錄 (Record 1 Wue, Art Worlds, 6.

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of the painted boats of Yangzhou), followed by the artist and connoisseur Wang Yun’s Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 (Record of the painting garden of Yangzhou), describe Hua Yan’s significance for Yangzhou artists of the late eighteenth century, such as Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping, as well as later followers, such as Wang Su 王素 (1794–1877). In praising Hua Yan, as Ju-hsi Chou has pointed out, Wang Yun effectively reconceptualized Yangzhou’s most famous artists, a reversal that would be echoed in other works by his contemporaries.2 As early sources to document Hua Yan’s legacy, these authors not only traced the path of artists from Yangzhou to Shanghai, but also formulated a narrative that would be repeated in later sources in Shanghai, such as Molin jinhua 墨林 今话 (Current comments on the forest of ink).3 Such writings by Wang Yun and others accorded Hua Yan high status and fame unmatched during his lifetime and set forth a definition of the Xinluo School for the modern era. This chapter charts the Xinluo School as a link between early modern and modern Chinese painting. It begins with portraits of Hua Yan and the Zhejiang circle by later artists, followed by notable references to Hua Yan by painters and critics from the nineteenth through twentieth centuries. As these sources suggest, Hua Yan’s initial appeal lay in his buyi 布衣, or “plain-clothes” persona, as well as the charm of his subjects, especially his figure paintings and flowerand-bird works. However, later paintings by Shanghai artists reveal less of a concern with Hua Yan’s biography. Their works extend Hua Yan’s use of common subjects and lifelike gestures, thereby adopting his brushwork and subject matter in a measure of artistic ingenuity and social positioning. Therefore, to speak of Hua Yan’s legacy as the Xinluo School is also to highlight the mechanisms of making artists in modern Jiangnan. 1

The Zhejiang Legacy in Yangzhou

Hua Yan met Zhang Sijiao, his only recognized disciple, during an early sojourn to Yangzhou in 1723. As a neighbor of the Yun family, Zhang Sijiao developed a close relationship with Hua Yan that spanned four decades. In the late eighteenth century, Li Dou noted that Zhang Sijiao “was skilled at painting and 2 Chou, “Rubric and Art History,” 329–51. See also Michele Matteini, “Place and Personality: Ling Xia’s ‘Song of the Eight Eccentrics’ (Yangzhou ba guai ge, ca. 1897),” in Yangzhou, a Place in Literature: The Local in Chinese Cultural History, eds. Roland Altenburger, Margaret B. Wan, and Vibeke Børdahl (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), 273–81. 3 Jiang Baoling 蒋宝龄 (1718–1841), comp., Molin jinhua 墨林今话 (Current comments on the forest of ink) [1852] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2015).

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studied the mountain man of Xinluo.”4 Several decades later, Wang Yun recorded that his method of Yangzhou painting drew upon the pai 派, or school of Hua Qiuyue [Yan].5 From these entries emerges the concept of the Xinluo School of painting, one supported by Zhang Sijiao’s mythologizing portrayal of Hua Yan that visually associated the artist with his Zhejiang circle and established his legacy in Yangzhou. Over a decade after Hua Yan’s passing in 1752, Zhang Sijiao painted the commemorative portrait of his master, Portrait of Xinluo Shanren, dated 1767 (Fig. 1).6 In his portrait, Zhang Sijiao emphasized Hua Yan’s advanced age and humble demeanor by emphasizing his mature physical features and portraying him in a casual posture, resting atop a rock. Both of his hands grasp his right bent knee, while his back appears hunched over and his neck protrudes from below his shoulders. The thick, black contour lines add shape to the bluegrey color of Hua Yan’s robe, which appears darkest in the sleeves and bottom of the robe to emphasize its loose and draping nature on his thin frame. Hua Yan’s face, which cranes out from the voluminous robes, is defined by shading, lines, and dark, closely-set eyes. With his mouth shaped into a slight, toothless grin and his head covered in a thin layer of white hair, Zhang Sijiao took especial care to highlight Hua Yan’s elderly state as a matter of posthumous respect. From the artist’s title and extensive writing along the left side of the composition, one learns that the portrait was based on Zhang Sijiao’s recollection of visiting Hua Yan when he was living with the Yun family. The Yun family was a neighbor of the Zhang family from around 1730 until 1738, until their relocation to the eastern corner of the city. At that time, Hua Yan was already in his midfifties. Describing a moment when Hua Yan had fallen ill after their move, Zhang Sijiao recounted in his inscription: One day, in the snow, I visited [Hua Yan] when he was sick, at that time my father was stationed at Yuzhang [Jiangxi], and Mister Yun had moved to the east side of the city. Mister Hua said with a sigh, ‘It used to be that people lined up to seek my paintings, but today at the close of a year and on such cold days, nobody comes by to see me. It is only you who pities me and comes from afar, out of heartfelt generosity. In the twenty years since I came to Yangzhou, of my old friends only Wang Xuexuan came by at times to deliver medicine, and among the young [friends] there was 4 Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu, 357. 5 Wang Yun, Yangzhou huayuan lu, 3:408. 6 See also: Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, pl. 11. Image also published in: Tianjin Art Museum 天津藝術博物館, Tianjin yishu bowuguan canghua ji 天津藝術博物館藏畫集 (Collection of paintings from Tianjin Art Museum) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe, 1982), 92.

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only you who unceasingly inquired [after me]. Of those who can be my friends in Yangzhou, there are only you two.’7 一日，雪中問先生之疾，時先君客豫章，員氏移居城之東偏．先生慨 然曰：平時索吾畫者踵相接也，今天寒歲暮，闃無人至．子獨憫我遠 來，用心良厚．吾前後至揚州二十年，老友惟汪學軒時來調葯，少年 中惟子問訊不絕．揚之可交者，兩人而已．8

In this passage, Zhang Sijiao describes that Hua Yan expressed gratitude for his visit and noted his lack of visitors in Yangzhou, thereby presenting himself as the sole disciple of an unrecognized master. His sentiments reflect the close relationship between master and pupil, wherein Zhang Sijiao came from afar to visit him on a snowy day. Moreover, Zhang Sijiao recalls that Hua Yan mentioned only one other friend, Wang Xuexuan, who cared for him when he was ill by delivering medicine. Zhang Sijiao further noted that, although it had been twelve years since he last saw Hua Yan, who had left Yangzhou and returned to Hangzhou in 1752 in his seventies, his last encounter with Hua Yan was in the final years of the master’s life. He related an anecdote that revealed Hua Yan’s bleak outlook on making art: Although painting is an art, art can be looked down upon, thus one must first establish its value, so that [one’s art] will not be looked down upon. It is by studying that one can convey one’s learning, and it is by nourishing oneself that one may rectify one’s virtue. My painting principle is as simple as this.9 雖然，畫，藝也；藝成則賤，必先有以立乎其貴者，乃賤之而不得． 是在讀書以傳其識，修已以端其品，吾之畫法如是而已．10

Painting in Yangzhou in 1767, Zhang Sijiao remembered Hua Yan in light of the ideals the artist expressed in his early years in Hangzhou, when he diligently studied poetry, delighted in nature, and lived a modest existence. This anecdote highlights the lack of recognition Hua Yan struggled with as an artist throughout his life, and especially in Yangzhou, where he disdained the flamboyant social mannerisms adopted by many of his contemporaries and, 7 8 9 10

Author’s translation in consultation with Tsang, “Portraits of Hua Yan,” 71. Inscription also recorded in Xu Bangda 徐邦達, “Hua Yan shengping buding 華喦生平補 訂 (Supplement to Hua Yan’s Biography),” in Hua Yan yanjiu, 222–3. Alternatively translated in Tsang, “Portraits of Hua Yan,” 71. Also recorded in Xu Bangda, “Hua Yan shengping buding,” 222–3.

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instead, seemed to have preferred sharing his art with like-minded friends and patrons. Zhang Sijiao reminds us that rather than to pursue wealth or fame like many of the professional painters of his time, Hua Yan chose to emphasize his pursuit of learning and cultivation. As he explained to Zhang Sijiao, by studying “one can transmit one’s learning,” and by nourishing oneself “one may rectify one’s virtue,” a reference to the Confucian text, Daxue 大學 (The Great Learning) from Li ji 禮記 (Classic of Rites). However, although Hua Yan strove to make visible the social ideals of learning and cultivation, his efforts paled in comparison to the fame and prestige that Zhe School poets enjoyed in mid eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Hua Yan, a painter who did not participate in literary gatherings, gained recognition after his death as indicated by Zhang Sijiao’s portrait and Wang Yun’s writings. Zhang Sijiao’s commemorative portrait accorded with other portraits of Zhe School poets in Yangzhou, thereby positioning Hua Yan and the Xinluo School among the luminaries of eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733– 1799), the young pupil of Hua Yan’s friend Jin Nong, similarly demonstrated his close link to the Zhe School circle in his undated portrait of Hua Yan’s contemporary, Portrait of Mr. Dongxin [ Jin Nong] (Fig. 64). Like Zhang Sijiao’s portrait of Hua Yan, Luo Ping depicted Jin Nong in a three-quarter pose that makes full use of the compositional plane. Thick, undulating contour lines define the loose, billowing robes of the figure. As Kim Karlsson has pointed out, the elderly postures and wrinkled faces of the two masters resemble Buddhist luohans 羅漢, the pictorial prototypes for which can be found on Buddhist temples in Hangzhou.11 As Hua Yan and his Hangzhou circle were practicing Chan Buddhists, both their self-portraits and commemorative portraits by later disciples reflected this aspect of their social personas. Moreover, their plain dress and exaggerated facial features affirm the deep respect that disciples Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping had for their masters, shown humbly unadorned in their advanced ages. By further noting their Hangzhou origins in both of their inscriptions, Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping highlighted the legacy of the Zhejiang circle in late eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Luo Ping created several portraits of Zhejiang poets in a manner comparable to Zhang Sijiao’s portrait of Hua Yan, which visually associated Hua Yan with the Zhejiang circle and so posthumously raised his status as an artist. Luo Ping’s undated, posthumous portrait of the poet Ding Jing 丁敬 (1695–1765), Portrait of Mr. Jingshen [Ding Jing], similarly portrayed the artist as a wise elder, 11

Kim Karlsson, Eccentric Visions, 160. See also: T. Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf, “On the Ritual Use of Chan Portraiture in Medieval China,” in Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context, ed. Bernard Faure (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 74–150.

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Figure 64 Luo Ping, Portrait of Mr. Dongxin ( Jin Nong), undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 113.7 × 59.3 cm. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou.

seated on a rock and resting both hands on his bamboo cane (Fig. 65). Luo Ping also depicted the Zhejiang poet, Yuan Mei, in the likeness of the poet Tao Qian holding the chrysanthemum flowers that symbolize his retreat from society (Fig. 66). Like the portraits of Hua Yan and Jin Nong, these figures occupy the majority of compositional space, lack landscape pairings, and are composed with fine-lined detail on the faces and thick, black contour lines on the robes of their bodies. Each of these images emphasizes the ideals central to Hua

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Figure 65 Luo Ping, Portrait of Mr. Ding Jingshen (Ding Jing), undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 108.1 × 60.7 cm. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou.

Yan’s social persona—rustic, aloof, erudite, and eccentric—and shapes them into a myth of Hua Yan and his peers as in eighteenth-century Yangzhou. Significantly, later artists in Shanghai such as Ren Xiong 任熊 (1823–1857) embraced this pictorial mode as a way to convey the awe-inspiring and legendary nature of the artist, as seen in his well-known Self-Portrait (Fig. 67).12 12

James Cahill, “Ren Xiong and His Self-Portrait,” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 119–32.

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Figure 66 Luo Ping, Portrait of Yuan Mei. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 158.5 × 66.7 cm. Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto. AK790.

Other portraits by Luo Ping mythologize Zhejiang poets and artists through a subtle, fine-lined portraiture mode associated with Southern Song Hangzhou. In Portrait of the Poets Wang Shizhen and Zhu Yizun, dated 1773, Luo Ping specifically addressed the subject of the Zhe School lineage, highlighting its impact beyond the Jiangnan region (Fig. 68). The painting depicts Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711), the eminent early Qing poet from Shandong province, and Zhu Yizun, figurehead of the Zhexi cipai (discussed in Chapter One),

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Figure 67 Ren Xiong (1823–1857), Self Portrait. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 177.4 × 78.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

strolling beneath a pine and a moss-covered juniper tree beside a riverbank. Both are robed in casual gowns and woven hats. The sparse application of ink on the composition lends a characterization of the subjects as nature-loving poets, recalling Hua Yan and Wei Shijie’s Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall: Portrait of Hua Yan as a Young Man of 1705 (Fig. 3). Here, however, Luo Ping associated Wang Shizhen with the noble pine tree at the center of the composition, while he positioned Zhu Yizun slightly to the left of center. This arrangement likely corresponds to the tastes of the patron of the painting, the scholar Dong Yuandu 董元度 (fl. 1752), who also resided in Shandong province. Significantly, the discourse recorded throughout the painting’s many colophons reiterates the importance of historical lineages to local society, specifically

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Figure 68 Luo Ping, Portrait of the Poets Wang Shizhen and Zhu Yizun, 1773. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 167.5 × 56.6 cm. © Trustees of The British Museum, London.

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Figure 69 Luo Ping, Poetic Concepts, inspired by the poems of Jiang Kui, 1774. Leaf 10 in album of 11 leaves, ink and color on paper, 24.1 × 30.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1964.5j.

reflecting the contributions of Zhejiang poets to the cultural fabric of Yangzhou. In addition to portraiture, later followers also responded to Hua Yan’s vivid imagery in their own works. Although little of Zhang Sijiao’s work is extant, Luo Ping’s paintings show his regard for Hua Yan’s lyricism, lifelike animation, and unconventional subject matter. One leaf from Luo Ping’s album, Poetic Concepts, inspired by the poems of Jiang Kui (ca. 1155–1235) of 1774, derives directly from Hua Yan’s unusual depiction of animals fleeing wildfire seen in his Miscellaneous album of 1749 (Fig. 69, cf. Fig. 38). Like Hua Yan, Luo Ping depicted animals fleeing a brush fire, its brilliant red flames and grey smoke rendered in broad washes at the center of each composition. This image of terror, with brush afire and animals fleeing their homes, incites feelings of panic and fear not commonly seen in Chinese paintings. Although the subject of wildfire is unusual in Qing-dynasty painting, it is likely designed to engage the trauma of the Qing conquest by drawing on the cathartic expression of Jiang

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Kui’s verses. Jiang Kui 姜虁, who moved south to Hangzhou after the fall of the Northern Song dynasty, wrote lyric poetry often marked by veiled visual imagery and candid lamentations of loss.13 As Yang Yuanzheng has noted, his works represented to later poets, “a manifesto for the tribulations of literati shackled by dynastic change.”14 Apparently motivated by the political and psychological effects of the Qing conquest, the Zhejiang poets Zhu Yizun and later Li E, as discussed in Chapter Three, revived Jiang Kui’s poetry and recast his position in the canon. Thus, the album demonstrates the charge that Luo Ping carried to extend Zhe School ideology through the end of the eighteenth century, here through reference to Hua Yan’s distinctive style and subject matter. In other paintings, Luo Ping captured Hua Yan’s unconventional approach to rendering figures in gardens. In Drinking in the Bamboo Garden, dated 1773, Luo Ping pictured a moment from a gathering of five men around a table, drinking as the night wears on (Fig. 70). Like Hua Yan’s Sounds of Autumn of 1755, the garden is rendered in pale hues amid pavilions and corridors, and the full moon is hardly decipherable in the haze above beside a leafless tree (Fig. 63). There is a similar sense of seasonality through these atmospheric qualities; the moon is low on the horizon and there appears to be a chill in the air. Figures are bundled in robes and servants carry food and candles. There appears to be a pause in conversation as four of the figures gaze out to the garden, an informal yet evocative portrayal of their gathering. The tone is melancholy, a bittersweet recognition of the ephemeral moment when friends are gathered in the garden. Luo Ping clearly drew on the atmospheric and narrative qualities of Hua Yan’s work in picturing the famous Yangzhou estate of Cheng Mengxing, who as discussed in Chapters Three and Four, was a key figure in local poetry circles. Although Cheng Mengxing passed away in 1755 and the garden had since changed hands, it is likely that Luo Ping had visited the garden with his mentor Jin Nong. Like Hua Yan’s intimate portrayals of figures in gardens, the painting captures not only a glimpse of Yangzhou culture, but also comments on the passage of time. The above paintings by later Yangzhou artists consolidate Hua Yan as a figure who exemplified the rustic, unconventional, and erudite nature of the Zhe School poets—an informal, personalized expression of Southern Song aesthetic principles. Hua Yan, while more of a painter than a poet, positioned his works in light of these values during his life and so created a path for later artists such as Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping. However, by the end of the century the literary atmosphere of Yangzhou had faded with the passing of its key figures, 13 14

Lin, The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical Tradition, 48–61. Yang Yuanzheng, “Reformulating Jiang Kui’s Lyric Ouevre,” 711.

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Figure 70 Luo Ping, Drinking in the Bamboo Garden, dated 1773. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 80 × 54.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913.220.34

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the poets and garden owners. Gardens such as the Ma brothers’ Temporary Retreat (Xing’an 行庵) and Cheng Mengxing’s Bamboo Garden (Xiao yuan 篠園), no longer havens of patronage for the poets and painters, fell into disrepair. Moreover, as the salt trade shifted away from the Grand Canal and toward sea routes, the wealth in the city gradually slipped away. Poets and painters took to traveling broadly throughout Jiangnan, especially to the port city of Shanghai, where the Zhejiang legacy informed understandings of Hua Yan and the Xinluo School. 2

Defining the Xinluo School

The concept of a Xinluo School, or the artists who followed Hua Yan, gives shape to the art worlds of late-eighteenth-century Yangzhou and nineteenthcentury Shanghai. “Xinluo School” is a loose term, defined first in texts and then traceable through artists’ inscriptions and visual references. Entries in Molin jinhua emphasize that Hua Yan followed the luminaries of Hangzhou yet sojourned longest in Yangzhou, noting that he excelled at reciting poetry, and “his grass clothes and straw sandals freely overcame the likes of the vulgar.”15 Such values continued to appeal to later generations, when faced with the novelties and vast social changes of late imperial Jiangnan. The fresh and forthright spirit that pervaded his works also distinguished Hua Yan from earlier artists. In Molin jinhua, Hua Yan is positioned after several Ming artists, especially Yun Shouping, and described as “a great master of figure paintings, which offered new stylistic possibilities. His style was followed by Li Yu and Wang Su, who transmitted the charm of Xinluo.”16 With the work of Wang Su and Li Yu 李育 (1843–after 1904), the Xinluo School emerged as a lineage in later literature and art. Writers of the late nineteenth century, such as Wang Yun, likely knew these artists personally and reflected their preferences for Hua Yan’s work. In his biographical entry on the Yangzhou artist Wang Su, Wang Yun noted that Wang Su’s teacher required that he imitate the mountain man of Xinluo’s paintings over and over again, until his figure paintings, bird and flower paintings, and animal, insects and fish paintings all were excellent.17 Wang Su’s figure paintings capture the principle features of Hua Yan’s works, specifically in their unidealized portrayals of subject matter, animated gestures, subtle color schemes, and combination of detailed and sketchy brushstrokes. In Bringing the Message of Victory to 15 16 17

Jiang Baoling, comp., Molin jinhua, 2:23–4. Ibid. Wang Yun, Yangzhou huayuan lu, 3:389.

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Dongshan, dated 1862, Wang Su adapted Hua Yan’s pale peach-and-blue landscapes and expressive gestures to a historical narrative (Fig. 71). The picture recounts the tale of the Jin dynasty (265–420) statesman Xie An 謝安 (320– 385), who despite repeated rejections of governmental commissions, led the dynasty to victory over the Former Qin (351–394). Wang Su pictured a moment from the eighth month of 383, when Xie An learned of his troops’ victory. Upon hearing the momentous news, Xie An reportedly responded with notable stoicism. Wang Su pictured this pivotal moment by rendering Xie An as a hermit, as he was popularly known, glancing up from a game of Go with a guest in his garden pavilion. A messenger, as indicated by his feathered cap, kneels as he appears to deliver the news of victory to Xie An, while a wide-eyed horse with a smiling horseman race alongside his garden gate. The animated enthusiasm of the messengers, in contrast with the calm demeanor of Xie An at the center of the composition, recall Hua Yan’s Golden Valley Garden (1732), in which the historical figure Shi Chong gazes intently at Green Pearl, the figure’s expressions evoking a sense of an intimate evening spent in the garden (Fig. 53). By yielding insights into subjects not commonly rendered in the highly erudite medium of ink painting, Hua Yan accorded new interest to mundane subjects and everyday life—a quality that Wang Su acquired through his copies of Hua Yan’s work. One such painting is modeled after Hua Yan’s album, Children’s Games in Four Seasons, dated 1737 (Figs. 58, 59). Wang Su’s album duplicated every element of Hua Yan’s album, with only minor adjustments in the inscriptions that identify the artist and patron (Figs. 72, 73).18 Although each scene was rendered with faithful precision, Hua Yan often used thicker, rounded brushstrokes with less ink, while Wang Su used thinner, fluid strokes that exude a more polished appearance. Nonetheless, Wang Su’s copy marks an important connection between Hua Yan and his later followers, for Wang Su’s disciple, Ni Tian 倪田 (1855–1919), similarly created pictures of children at play.19 Later biographers such as the Yangzhou poet Dong Yushu 董玉書 (1869– 1952) specifically placed Wang Su in the lineage of Hua Yan, using the term huazong Xinluo 畫宗新羅, the painting lineage of Xinluo.20 His definition of the Xinluo School also may have been motivated by a general desire to 18 19 20

Anthology of Chinese Art: Min Chiu Society Silver Jubilee Exhibition (Hong Kong: The Urban Council, 1985), 107–10. Anita Wong, ed. Anthology of Ink: Ancient Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from The Dr. S.Y. Yip Collection (The University of Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery, 2004), 105–11. Dong Yushu 董玉書 (1869–1952), Wucheng huaijiu lu 芜城怀旧录 (Wucheng Nostalgic Record) [1946] (Nanjing: Jiangsu Ancient Works Publishing House, 2001), 2:108.

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Figure 71 Wang Su, Bringing the Message of Victory to Tung-shan, dated 1862. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 143.5 × 80.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, In Memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986.267.26.

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Figure 72 Wang Su, Children Engaged in the Games of the Four Seasons, not dated. Leaf L. Album of 20 leaves, ink and color on paper, 21.5 × 16 cm. Dr. S. Y. Yip Collection, Hong Kong.

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Figure 73 Wang Su, Children Engaged in the Games of the Four Seasons, not dated. Leaf 9. Album of 20 leaves, ink and color on paper, 21.5 × 16 cm. Dr. S. Y. Yip Collection, Hong Kong.

document and preserve the culture of Yangzhou. Writing in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Dong Yushu may have viewed Yangzhou, which he referred to by its historical name, Wucheng 芜城, with great nostalgia amid the destruction of war. To him, Hua Yan and Wang Su represented a significant link between the luminous history of eighteenth-century Yangzhou and his hometown of twentieth-century Yangzhou. Although Wang Su may have been the most significant of Hua Yan’s followers in the nineteenth century, he was by no means the only one. In addition to Wang Su, Wang Yun also described the artist Li Yu’s figures as charming, his flowers, birds, and plants as beautiful, and his insects and fish as vivid, similar to works by the mountain man of Xinluo.21 Li Yu, who also was active in Yangzhou, similarly created subtle renderings of garden creatures with sparse 21

Wang Yun, Yangzhou huayuan lu, 2:388.

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Figure 74 Li Yu, Landscapes, Birds, and Insects, 1901. Leaf G. Album of twelve leaves, ink and color on paper, 14.7 × 21.7 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection.

compositions and vibrant subjects, such as Landscapes, Birds, and Insects album, dated 1901. One leaf pictures a cicada on a willow branch, its rounded body clinging to a thin branch (Fig. 74), which could be compared with the depictions of cicadas that Hua Yan often paired with references to Zhuangzi (Fig. 48). Another leaf depicts a frog poised to capture his next meal of winged bugs that swarm beneath a rainbow—an unusual addition perhaps drawn from Hua Yan’s interest in light and atmospheric qualities (Fig. 75). In this instance, the rainbow may convey the feeling of hope that follows a storm; in converse, it may represent an opportunity that the frog will capitalize upon. In Hua Yan’s works, frogs often reflect hierarchies, competition, and fate in nature (Figs. 37, 45). However, although Li Yu’s works capture the vivid compositions and subjects seen in Hua Yan’s works, they depart from the pensive, self-referential qualities that motivated Hua Yan’s original designs. Hua Yan’s works inspired the artists Wang Su and Li Yu to look more carefully at common subjects, and to probe the boundaries of representation through their brushwork. Although Hua Yan developed his lyrical approach for personal expression, later artists drew upon his ability to illuminate human sentiments through evocative portrayals of animate objects. Their works, later acknowledged as the Xinluo School, were central to creating Hua Yan’s legacy

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Figure 75 Li Yu, Landscapes, Birds, and Insects, 1901. Leaf I. Album of twelve leaves, ink and color on paper, 14.7 × 21.7 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection.

in Yangzhou throughout the nineteenth century and to generating interest in his works in nearby Shanghai. 3

The Shanghai School

A working knowledge of the Xinluo School reveals connections between nineteenth-century Yangzhou and Shanghai, where several artists explored Hua Yan’s noticeably irreverent stance toward conventional styles and subjects. A figurehead of the Shanghai School, Zhejiang artist Ren Bonian 任伯年 (Ren Yi 任頤, 1840–1896), took Hua Yan as an inspiration, while Wang Su’s disciple Ni Tian moved from Yangzhou to Shanghai, bringing with him his master’s preferences. While stylistic lineages still dominated contemporary accounts, the paintings reveal that later artists’ interest in Hua Yan extended beyond style to reflect their positions toward the past and future of Chinese art. When the economic focus of the Lower Yangzi region shifted toward Shanghai and away from Yangzhou in the nineteenth century, artists faced vast changes in society that redefined relationships between art, place, and identity. Hangzhou and Yangzhou, once linked by the oldest segment of the Grand

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Canal, were no longer easily connected in the early nineteenth century due to the construction of new railways and opening of sea routes. The opening of Shanghai as a treaty port in 1842 further signaled the decline of the Canal.22 Yangzhou, no longer dominated by wealthy families with close ties to Beijing, grew isolated while Shanghai swelled to absorb thousands of disenfranchised boatmen just as it sheltered Jiangnan refugees fleeing the destruction of the Taiping Rebellion (1840–1864). Although eighteenth-century Yangzhou witnessed new extremes of wealth that colored its social and artistic fabric, the urban environment of nineteenth-century Shanghai lacked the dominating presence of the court and the predictability of traditional social hierarchies. Certain traditions continued; for instance, literary and painting societies such as the Pinghuashe 萍花社, or Duckweed Society, founded in 1851 by the Hangzhou calligrapher Wu Zonglin 吳宗麟, met in the old city and attracted poets and artists whose shared interests shaped local aesthetic tastes—especially their preferences for Hua Yan. However, as Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen have noted, the opening of Shanghai as a treaty port shifted such informal cultural gatherings toward professional societies, issuing new avenues for cultivating one’s artistic livelihood.23 In the face of such changes, coupled by new patterns of consumption, an increasingly global landscape, and political instability, Hua Yan’s works took on greater significance. While inscribed references to the artist signified nostalgia for the cherished Han lyrical tradition, they were paired with a refreshingly humanistic aesthetic that reflected common sensibilities. To nineteenth-century artists, Hua Yan’s paintings appeared pivotal, transformative, and even modern. Although recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of Hua Yan’s garden imagery for later artists, the sensitivity to human nature, psychological traits, and narrative elements seen in Hua Yan’s figure paintings also may have unleashed new possibilities for later artists, such as Ren Bonian. Referencing the mountain man of Xinluo in his inscription, Ren Bonian composed one of four scrolls, Figures in a Landscape, with the pale pink and blue hues and exposed, calligraphic lines seen in Hua Yan’s paintings (Fig. 76). He positioned 22

23

Yao Hanyuan 姚漢源, Jing Hang yunhe shi 京杭运河史 (A History of the Grand Canal) (Beijing: Zhongguo shuili shuidian chubanshe, 1998); Zhu Zhenghai 朱正海, Da yunhe yu Yangzhou 大运河与扬州 (The Grand Canal and Yangzhou) (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2007), 262–71. Julia Frances Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 51. See also Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s, ed. Jason C. Kuo (Washington, D.C.: New Academic Publishing, 2007), 79–93.

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Figure 76 Ren Bonian, Figures in a Landscape, 1881. Scroll 1 in set of 4 hanging scrolls, ink and color on paper, 149 × 39.7 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection.

a figure, his hair gathered into the hat of a scholar, in profile at the center of the composition with an attendant looking on. His arms echo the billowing shapes of the rocks he leans upon, with a stone bridge and bamboo framing his pensive posture. The composition, heavily weighted to the bottom right, captures the contemplative mood and aura of refinement seen in works such as Hua Yan’s Garden of the Golden Valley (1732) (Fig. 53). Thus, while his inscribed reference to Hua Yan may draw a likeness through subject matter and fluid brushwork, it is Ren Bonian’s interest in revealing the humanity of his figures—whether in the garden or on the frontier—that evokes the work of Hua Yan.

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Figure 77 Ni Tian, Garden of the Golden Valley, 1888. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 179.3 × 93.4 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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Wang Su’s disciple, Ni Tian, left Yangzhou for Shanghai, where he was impressed by the works of Ren Bonian and continued to study the work of Hua Yan.24 His hanging scroll, Garden of the Golden Valley, dated 1888, similarly captures Hua Yan’s interest in using contrasting brushwork and narrative elements to convey a specific, emotionally charged moment in time (Fig. 77).25 In this work, Ni Tian positioned Shi Chong at the center of the composition, yet reduced details of the garden in favor of increased focus on the figures. The figures, moreover, are rendered in fluid lines and careful detail, such as the addition of Shi Chong’s shoes to the side of his leopard-skin rug. Rather than picturing Green Pearl with her flute, Ni Tian opted to paint her holding a fan beside two attendants who hold a zither. Clearly, Ni Tian’s concern was not to create a convincing portrayal of this well-known legend through the iconography of the figures and garden. Rather, his interest tended toward the dramatic effects of brushwork and compositional techniques that engage the psychological interactions between the figures. The artist Yu Li 俞禮 (1862–1922) from Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, also adopted Hua Yan’s informal, witty approach to traditionally dignified, scholarly subjects. In Studying on an Autumn Night, Yu Li depicted a scholar and his pupil through the window of a study framed by a tangle of red, autumnal maple leaves (Fig. 78). A white wall bisects the composition, offering an intimate view into their private lives. As the orange flame of a candlewick lays burning along the side of the lamp, the scholar gazes over his book, his head raised in an alert expression while his pupil rests his head, slumbering in the billowing sleeves of his robe. The bold, thick lines of the surrounding foliage heighten Yu Li’s evocative rendering of the two figures in fluid detail—an unidealized view of a classical ideal. Referencing [the mountain man of] Xinluo in his inscription, Yu Li so invoked Hua Yan’s satirical stance toward society through figures humanized by recognizable gestures and commonplace expressions. As in Ren Yi and Ni Tian’s paintings, Yu Li’s painting further focused on figures rather than the garden environs or literary allusions, which were so central to life and society in eighteenth-century Yangzhou. In nineteenth-century Shanghai, contrastingly, Hua Yan’s paintings inspired artists to explore drama and emotions through intimate portrayals of figures. In addition to figures, bold arrangements of flora and fauna evoked the literal and figurative distance between Yangzhou garden culture and urban 24 25

Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire 1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992), 202. Ren Bonian also made at least four versions of Hua Yan’s 1732 painting. Roberta Wue, “Deliberate Looks: Ren Bonian’s 1888 Album of Women,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 58.

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Figure 78 Yu Li, Studying on an Autumn Night, late 19th–early 20th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 145.2 × 78.2 cm. The Richard Fabian Collection.

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Figure 79 Wang Li, Peonies and Birds, 1877. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 127.8 × 63.7 cm. Shanghai Museum.

Shanghai. Wang Li 王禮 (1813–1879), who frequently referenced Hua Yan in his inscriptions, drew on Hua Yan’s animated subjects and dynamic compositions in the hanging scroll, Peonies and Birds, dated 1877 (Fig. 79). The rocks and tree frame a void at the center of the composition, focusing attention on the lively interaction between two myna birds on a rock beside pink peonies—a favorite subject of Hua Yan’s, and one derived from the works of Yun Shouping. The contrast between the rich, black brushstrokes and angular shape of the birds and the rounded forms and delicate washes of the peonies demonstrate Wang Li’s concern for the graphic qualities of form and color, building on Hua Yan’s interest in the lifelike modeling of his subjects. Wang Li’s student, Zhu Cheng 朱偁 (Menglu 夢盧, 1826–ca. 1900), also adapted Hua Yan’s works to modern interests in pictorial form. Zhang Mingke 张鸣珂 (1829–1908) pointed out in Hansong ge tanyi suolu 寒松阁谈艺琐录 (Trivial records from discussing art in the Studio of the Cold Pine) that Zhu Cheng imitated the mountain man of Xinluo in his paintings of birds and flowers, capturing not only their appearance but also their spirit.26 Despite this rather conventional entry, Zhu Cheng indeed highlighted the immediacy of 26

Zhang Mingke 张鸣珂 (1829–1908), Hansong ge tanyi suolu 寒松阁谈艺琐录 (Record of

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Figure 80 Zhu Cheng, Album of Birds and Flowers, leaf 5. Album leaf, ink and color on paper, 24.3 × 40.3 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Hua Yan’s images in his album of birds and flowers. One leaf portrays a sparrow, one of Hua Yan’s favored subjects, with its wings expanded and mouth agape as it nears the lavender petals of a wisteria branch (Fig. 80). A concept that Hua Yan explored in the novel Giant Peng (Fig. 16) as well as in album leaves (Fig. 19), Zhu Cheng’s image of a bird in flight expresses the dynamism of the simple garden sparrow, while the wisteria offer a breath of fragrance and nostalgia. Hua Yan’s work not only acted as an object of study for later artists, but also as a mark of social inclusion. Upholding classical scholarly ideals, Wang Li collaborated with the artists Qian Hui’an 錢慧安 (1833–1911) and Bao Dong 包棟 (active 19th century) to paint the scroll, Elegant Gathering at the Pinghua Society, depicting the twenty-four original members.27 Although that scroll is now lost, it is clear that several members of the society shared an interest in Hua Yan’s work, often referencing him in inscriptions or as noted by contemporary chroniclers. Significantly, while the records of literary circles shaped accounts of eighteenth-century art in Yangzhou, and often marginalized artists including Hua Yan who were not associated with prominent patrons, the

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discussions on art from the Cold Pine Pavilion) [1908], 6 vols. (Taipei: Mingwen shuju, 1985), 4:148. Brown and Chou, Transcending Turmoil, 133.

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Figure 81 Xugu, “White Cat Looking for Prey,” in Miscellaneous Album, 1895. Leaf 7. Album of 10 Leaves, ink and color on paper, 34.7 × 40.6 cm. Shanghai Museum.

Duckweed Society demonstrated the opposite effect. As a traditional painting society in Shanghai, members’ adoption of his intimate, lifelike aesthetic catapulted Hua Yan’s legacy in the modern era. As contemporary sources reveal, members of the Duckweed Society placed a certain value on stylistic lineage and biography—especially that of Zhejiang artists. Although these practices may have seemed antiquated in nineteenth-century Shanghai, they nonetheless represented one key aspect of its art worlds, serving to deepen ties among its members and establish their position toward the past. Beyond artistic circles, matters of locality still figured prominently among artists active in Shanghai. Xugu was raised in Yangzhou, but sojourned widely throughout the region, especially to Shanghai where he grew acquainted with Ren Bonian. Due to his upbringing in Yangzhou, he likely gained early exposure to Hua Yan’s work due to his posthumous recognition by later followers in

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Figure 82 Wang Li, Cat, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 120.3 × 39.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, In Memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986.267.61.

Yangzhou. He frequently referenced Hua Yan, as seen in his dry, sketchy inscription upon a striking portrayal of a white cat in Miscellaneous Album, dated 1895 (Fig. 81). Pictured sitting atop a rock surrounded by blue and green tufts of grass, with a paw raised to its face, the cat gazes downward with round, yellow eyes and flattened ears that suggest a sinister appearance. It could be compared with Hua Yan’s image of a white cat on a rock in a garden that smugly gazes down at a puppy (Fig. 51). It also could be compared to another painting by Wang Li, Cat, which similarly pictures the back of a cat seated on a rock, with its expression upturned toward two inscriptions regarding Suzhou proverbs about cats (Fig. 82). Hua Yan’s painting, one of a series of pictures intended to reflect Song dynasty aesthetics, demonstrates the expressive potential of the creature’s gaze. Moreover, it engages the dualities of Song-dynasty elegance in its fine-lined brushwork and restrained composition, coupled with

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Figure 83 Xugu, “Squirrel Looking for Food,” in Miscellaneous Album, 1895. Leaf 8. Album of 10 Leaves, ink and color on paper, 34.7 × 40.6 cm. Shanghai Museum.

the vulgarities of folk culture in its reference to popular superstitions and common subjects. Both Xugu and Wang Li later exploited these concepts in their renderings of cats—a common subject further moderated by its visual rendering. In the same album as “White Cat Looking for Prey,” Xugu’s depiction of a squirrel evokes a startling awareness of the nature of its subject (Fig. 83). The squirrel, its mundane existence captured in profile amid the broad, blue-green leaves of a grapevine, exudes a frenetic expression through its lifelike posture and terse, dry brushwork. Xugu’s reference to Hua Yan’s Hangzhou studio, Unsheathing the Sword, once again participates in the ritual of myth-making by acknowledging style and lineage, yet parses out the sensitivity of Hua Yan’s brushstrokes and delicate compositional arrangements. Indeed, Hua Yan did depict the same subject with meticulous brushwork on the plump, shorthaired squirrel in contrast with wet applications of ink and color on the vines (cf. Fig. 40). However, the softness and curiosity of Hua Yan’s squirrel, so novel in the eighteenth century for its bold contrasts and inquisitive character, seems innocent in comparison with Xugu’s squirrel, its mouth open and its fur rendered

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in elongated, dry brushstrokes surrounded by ink-laden grapevines. Recalling Hua Yan, Xugu capitalized on how mundane subjects could evoke recognizable attributes—not for the purpose of illuminating social tensions, but rather in service of individualized expression. Artists—many of which remain obscure today—responded to Hua Yan’s work not as a rote adherence to a stylistic lineage, but as an approach that inspired new ways of seeing. While written histories detailed Hua Yan’s plainclothes persona and charming subject matter, his followers created a myth of Hua Yan through their paintings that cast his perspective, so overlooked in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, as fresh and visionary. Thus, the Xinluo School represented later artists’ orientation to Hua Yan’s work, as denoted by their vivid compositions and conscious exploration of their subjects’ inner nature. In conclusion, the Xinluo School, here defined as the followers of Hua Yan, took shape in the texts and paintings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Although Zhang Sijiao and Luo Ping initially championed Hua Yan’s works in Yangzhou, the close connection between Yangzhou and Shanghai led later artists to study the expressive possibilities of his paintings. However, in this context—Shanghai, a century later—Hua Yan’s works lacked the framing of Hangzhou literary circles or Yangzhou garden culture, prompting later artists to further construct the myth of Hua Yan. Thus, his works came to signify the early modern era, when artists such as Hua Yan channeled their social anxieties through claims to rustic, yet highly cultivated pursuits. Later followers still participated in literary societies, though garden culture had faded and urban visual culture had expanded to new media, transgressing many of the boundaries that once challenged Hua Yan. In these new worlds, artists invoked his style to make sense of their rapidly changing world, whether by capturing the personas of various members of society or grasping the nature of animate things. Their interest in the myth of Hua Yan revealed a desire to see old things anew, a stance that helps us to define art in modern Shanghai.

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Lives of Jiangnan Artists, 1700–1900 While this book portrays Hua Yan as an iconic artistic figure, it also concerns mythologies of artists’ lives in early modern China. As an artist whose posthumous fame eclipsed his struggles for recognition during his life, Hua Yan came to stand for the innocence of the eighteenth century, when artists were inhibited by their social status and challenged to adapt to the demands of a new landscape of patronage. His interest in human nature, as sung in his lyrics and expressed in pictorial allegories, emerged from his position as a painter in a society arranged around the literary rather than the visual arts. Hua Yan’s work raises the question: what is an artist in early modern Jiangnan? His paintings and poetry provide insight into how artists saw themselves, how society perceived artists, and how artists engaged with history and their contemporary moment. Certainly, artists constructed personas to lure patrons and earn social recognition—this was not a new concept. However, in early modern Jiangnan their artworks often envisioned things, or wu 物, thereby connecting objects and ideas to fashion their personas and illuminate both real and ideal social worlds. As Martin Heideggar first described, it is the object’s relationship to the world that makes it a thing: its presence activates the space it inhabits, gathering together both object and subject in a new relationship, and drawing near a constellation of social relations and spatial realms that were once distant.1 Hua Yan’s works reveal his belief in the agency of the artist whose crafting of things expressed the structures and values of his world. Significantly, Hua Yan traversed many worlds as a Jiangnan artist in the first half of the eighteenth century. His early travels carried him up the Grand Canal to Beijing and to Hangzhou, where he began his career as a poet-painter. Working in Yangzhou at the residence of the Yun family, he used lyrical imagery to communicate the intimacy of friendship and project his self-image as the mountain man of Xinluo. After the passing of his patron, his painting practice turned toward the illusory realm of the garden, where literary gatherings brought together the wealthy and cultured. However, while Yangzhou enjoyed a cultural efflorescence following the city’s early Qing reconstruction, Hua Yan struggled as a painter in a world dominated by literary circles and poet-celebrities, including those from his hometown of Hangzhou. Artists, their prestige 1 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1971), 161–84.

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only secondary to poets, were tasked with recording, embellishing, and amplifying the wealth and tastes of their patrons. Like the Zhe School poets, they often positioned themselves as purveyors of cultural knowledge, embracing the values that conveyed cultural capital—a purported irreverence for wealth and fame that often manifested as the eccentricity of Chan Buddhists, coupled with neo-Confucian values of diligent study that were central to Han learning. These qualities—framed as what Bourdieu might have described as “an interest in disinterestedness”2—countered the anxieties of being a Jiangnan artist in the first half of the eighteenth century. These social and economic tensions gradually unraveled over the following century, leaving only traces of style and brushwork to represent the work of artists active in mid-eighteenth-century Jiangnan. As later disciples and their chroniclers suggest, our understandings of Hua Yan are tempered by modern conceptions of the artist as someone who sees the world in real time, capturing its spirit and immediacy. Overlooked by wealthy merchants, Hua Yan aimed to capture the mundane, fleeting moments of nature and humanity. His paintings transformed the artistic field by exposing the self-evident givens of his time and place, revealing his position both in and outside of society. His perspective opened avenues for artists to portray new worlds: the common, mundane, popular, vulgar, and elegant. With honesty and sensitivity, Hua Yan’s works visually inhabited realms of high and low, rich and poor, turmoil and peace. As such, later artists and authors portrayed Hua Yan with a degree of nostalgia (albeit romanticized), positioning him in a lineage that legitimated their own work at a time when new forms of visual culture challenged the enterprise of painting. As Hua Yan remarked to Zhang Sijiao, he lived in a moment when “art could be looked down upon,” thereby calling into question longstanding assumptions about art and the role of the artist—a quandary that would only intensify in nineteenth-century Shanghai. The egalitarian ideology espoused by Hua Yan’s work, as expressed through his undulating brushwork, common subjects, and rustic yet erudite social persona, was well suited for a move out of the Yangzhou gardens and into urban Shanghai. In fact, one might ask whether the Xinluo School represented a distinctly Zhejiang manner of lyricism that registered as pictorial expression in late imperial Shanghai. Although the abundance of later paintings inspired by Hua Yan at times threaten to distort our view of his oeuvre, works by Wang Su, Ni Tian, Xugu, and many more reveal a broader interest in nature and expression through lifelike gestures and movement. These qualities, developed from Hua Yan’s lyrical approach in words and images, appear to have inspired fresh 2 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 40.

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inquiries into formal representation. Artists sought visual impact through the sensual qualities of nature, with particular attention to overlooked subjects— market produce, for example, or undignified subjects like squirrels. They rendered psychologically probing glimpses of figures in private moments, such as a scholar eagerly reading by candlelight while his student naps at his side. Hua Yan, his mythology crystallized in the Xinluo School during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, transmitted a cultural identity that Zhejiang artists and poets initially revived in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the concept of a new Zhejiang School emerged in the twentieth century with the painter Pan Tianshou 潘天壽 (1897–1971), who returned to Zhejiang from Shanghai and founded the China National Academy of Fine Arts. Xu Jianrong has pointed out that Zhejiang artists represented a majority among artists active in nineteenth-century Shanghai, and consequently, the visual modes of the Shanghai School drew in large part from an aesthetic cultivated in Hangzhou.3 As Xu further suggested, the commercialization of the Zhe School beginning in the Ming dynasty formed a precedent that could be traced up through the eminent painter Pan Tianshou. Red Lotus of 1963, for instance, shares the qualities of bold tonal contrasts, brushwork that is both detailed and unconstrained, compositional asymmetry, and lifelike expression of a mundane subject—all qualities seen in Xinluo School painting, but certainly not unique to Hua Yan (Fig. 84). Perhaps the most compelling relationship to Hua Yan’s principles is its expressive potential as a lotus, conventionally understood as a symbol of purity arising from murky waters. Its vibrant red hue, which in Qing-dynasty Jiangnan may have referenced the fallen Ming dynasty, in the 1960s likely alluded to the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976). However, while Pan Tianshou’s choice of red seemingly aligned with the agenda of the party on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), other features of the painting belie revolutionary sentiments. Commonly seen around Hangzhou’s West Lake, the lotus may have held particular significance for Pan Tianshou, for he pictured one blossom extending from the mire with its pointed petals gesturing toward his inscribed 3 Xu Jianrong 徐建融,“Haipai yu Zhepai 海派与浙派 (The Shanghai School and the Zhe School),” in Haipai huihua yanjiu wenji 海派繪畫研究文集 (Studies on Shanghai School Painting), ed. Lu Fusheng 廬輔聖 (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2001), 671–92. See also Xue Yongnian 薛永年, Haipai de Yangzhou baguai de fazhan yu Zhongguo hua 海派對 揚州八怪的發展於中國畫 (The development of the Shanghai School and Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou for Chinese painting) in Haipai huihua yanjiu wenji, 854–67; Wang Hanwei 王菡薇 and Pu Yan 蒲燕, “Haishang huapai de yuanqi yu fenqi 海上畫派的緣起於分期 (The formation and different stages of the Shanghai School),” Arts Exploration 29, no. 6 (2015): 6–10.

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Figure 84 Pan Tianshou, Red Lotus, 1963. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper. 125 × 65.5 cm. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum, Hangzhou.

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sentiments, similar to Hua Yan’s composition of a chrysanthemum (Fig. 28). Unlike Hua Yan’s followers in nineteenth-century Shanghai, Pan Tianshou typically avoided inscribed references to earlier artists. At the same time, his striking visual image and inscription remain lodged in Zhejiang lyricism, wherein the artist or poet evokes sentiments in response to the object. He wrote: Luminous sunset and pooled water, wind on a jade screen, Resplendent reflection of the brilliant flower, fans of red. After drinking, [Yang] the sixth declined greatly, Who could escort him into the jade quarters? 彩霞凝水玉屏風， 豔映花光扇扇紅。 醉後六郎頹甚矣， 憑誰扶入翠帷中。

Moved by the evocative image of the brilliant red lotus, Pan Tianshou drew a parallel to the Northern Song general, Yang Yanzhao 楊延昭 (968–1014), in a drunken state. Here, an image of radiance is set against one of decay. Like Hua Yan’s images, Pan Tianshou’s depiction of the red lotus thus opens up the possibility for social and political critique through the relationship between words and pictures. Further research is needed to understand the lives of Jiangnan artists from the late Ming through the twentieth century. Although it is the habit of chroniclers, as well as art historians, to attribute artists’ approaches to well-known masters such as Bada Shanren or Shitao, Pan Tianshou’s lyricism elevates the role of more recent, lesser-known artists like Hua Yan. At the center of the revival of Song dynasty aesthetics in the eighteenth century, Hua Yan forged new possibilities for lyrical imagery at a moment in which artists struggled to position themselves in a shifting cultural field. More research may reveal why he emphasized concepts such as narrative, which later artists abandoned in favor of visual immediacy, and how such preferences may help to define modern art in China. Other lines of inquiry may extend beyond Jiangnan to consider lives of painters in China, more broadly, as they navigated the intersections of an authorizing canon, perpetuation of traditional culture, and the market demands for innovation. They may probe further the integration of the mainstream with the regional and misfits, as Yeewan Koon has described in her study of Su Renshan 蘇仁山 (1814–ca. 1850).4 Though Hua Yan struggled for 4 Yeewan Koon, A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Early 19th-Century Guangdong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), 4.

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artistic recognition during his life, he ultimately challenged the dominant modes of production not from a position of power and prestige, but from the position of exclusion and marginalization. Future studies may build on the role of the artist as a figure who can illuminate various worlds and nuance historical records, whose work marks the essential process of seeing and being seen in early modern China.

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Index

Index

Index Abramson, Marc 154 Album of Birds and Flowers (Zhu Cheng) 188f Album of Flowers and Landscapes (Yun Shouping and Wang Hui) 83–84 Leaf 2 83f Album of Flowers and Portrait of Shitao (Shitao) 84–86 Leaf D 85f Andrews, Julia 182 antiquarian studies 19, 33, 37, 39, 104 art market 15–16, 90, 132. See also patronage Bada Shanren 八大山人 62, 121, 197 Bai Qianshen 124 Bamboo, Rock, and Chrysanthemums (hanging scroll Zheng Xie and others) 106 Ban, Lady 班婕妤 147 Banquet on a Spring Evening at the Garden of Peaches and Plums (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 136, 137f 138 Bao Dong 包棟 188 “Bee and Tiger” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 114, 115f Beijing: Hua Yan in 7, 13, 39–40, 156, 193 Jiangnan artists in 102 patronage in 5, 21 Yangzhou 182 Bickford, Maggie 131 Birds and Insects from Life (album; Hua Yan) 116 Leaf 2 129, 130f 131, 190 Leaf 4 126, 127f 128 Leaf 6 125, 126f 180 Boating under the Autumn Moon (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 99n23, 101, 104, 161–62 Bodhidharma 156 “Bodhidharma” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 158f Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 133, 194 Brilliant, Richard 21 Bringing the Message of Victory to Dongshan (hanging scroll; Wang Su) 176–77, 178f

brushwork 41, 62, 194 figure paintings 13, 25, 33, 56 flower-and-bird paintings 60, 71, 77, 87, 91, 92, 107, 108, 125 Xinluo School 53, 164, 176, 177, 180, 183, 185, 190, 191 Buddhism 66–67, 96, 154, 156. See also Chan Buddhism Burnett, Katharine P., 12 Cahill, James 8–9 calligraphy 33, 37–38, 52, 104 lacquered (qi shu 漆書) 161 seal script 38, 49n79 stone and metal (jinshixue 金石學) 37 Camel in Snow (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 156, 157f 158 Cat (hanging scroll; Wang Li) 190f Central Asia 153–59 Chan Buddhism 18, 37, 67, 161, 167 eccentricity 128, 194 frontier paintings 156, 158 Hua Yan 20, 28 Chang, Kang-i Sun 78–79 Changzhou 21, 53n85 Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (Laolian 老蓮) 7, 19, 33, 36, 136, 141, 143–45 Chen Yunru 135 Chen Zhang 陳章 99, 162 Cheng Mengxing 程夢星 89, 90, 162, 174, 176 Children Engaged in the Games of the Four Seasons (album; Wang Su) 177, 179f Children’s Games in Four Seasons (album; Hua Yan) 152, 177 Leaf 4 151f Leaf 6 150f China National Academy of Fine Arts 195 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 195 Chou, Ju-hsi 12, 164 Cloud Sea at Mount Tai (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 49, 50f, 51–54 Giant Peng 60, 61 Cloud Sea of Mount Huang (hanging scroll; Ding Yunpeng) 51

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Index Cloud Sea of Mount Tianmu (hanging scroll; Yun Shouping) 51 colors 176, 191 flower-and-bird paintings 10, 60, 77, 84, 90, 91, 96, 102–3, 107, 108, 110, 116, 117, 123 landscapes 42, 45, 56, 141 Contentment and Delight of an Abundant Harvest (album leaf; Li Di) 124, 125f Conversation in Autumn (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 55f, 56 “Counting the Nines” (shu jiu 數九; jiu jiu ge 九九歌) 131 Cultural Revolution 195 Dai Jin 戴進 19, 23 Daodejing 96 Daoism 46, 47, 53, 62, 67 garden imagery 91, 108, 110, 112, 121, 128 Giant Peng 58, 63 Daxue 大學 (Great Learning; Li ji 禮記) 167 Ding Jing 丁敬 37 Ding Yunpeng 丁雲鵬 51, 52 Dong Yuandu 董元度 171 Dong Yushu 董玉書 177, 179 Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢; Cao Xueqin) 134, 145, 149, 152 Drinking in the Bamboo Garden (hanging scroll; Luo Ping) 174, 175f Duck Bathing in an Expanse of Peach Blossoms (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 64, 65f, 66–68 Duckweed Society (Pinghuashe 萍花社) 182, 188, 189 Elegant Gathering (handscroll; Chen Hongshou) 141n18 Elegant Gathering (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 142f Elegant Gathering at the Pinghua Society (hanging scroll; Qian Hui’an and Bao Dong) 188 Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (handscroll; Chen Hongshou and Hua Yan) 141, 143f, 144–45 Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (handscroll; Shitao) 141

215 Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 139, 141 Elman, Benjamin 37 evidential research (kaozhengxue 考證學) 37, 104, 161 Fang Shishu 方士庶 99n23, 162 Feathers Rustling atop Branches (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 98n18 figure paintings 13–14, 133–62 garden imagery 174–76, 185 Hua Yan 6, 7, 33, 34f, 55f, 58, 117f, 137f, 140f, 142f, 146f, 150f, 151f, 155f, 157f, 158f, 160f Hua Yan 1, 3f, 4, 6, 7, 19, 21, 22f, 23, 24f, 25, 33, 165–66, 171 Luo Ping 167–69 poetry 25–29 self-portraits 6, 7, 21, 24f, 25, 28, 29, 33, 35, 44, 49, 53, 54, 169, 171 Shanghai 182–84 social identity 21–29, 36, 133, 167–69 Xinluo School 163, 164, 176 Figures in a Landscape (hanging scrolls; Ren Bonian) 182, 183f Finnane, Antonia 89, 98 Five Pine Trees (hanging scroll; Li Shan) 77 Flower and Bird Album (Hua Yan) 71–78, 92–98 Leaf 1 71f, 76f, 103 Leaf 2 77f Leaf 3 93f, 197 Leaf 5 72f Leaf 6 74f Leaf 7 97f Leaf 8 94f “Flower Garland Sutra” (Huayan jing 華嚴經; Avatamsaka Sutra) 66–67 flower-and-bird paintings: “four gentlemen” (si junzi 四君子) theme in 94n11 “friends of winter” theme in 38n59 garden imagery 71, 73, 75, 76, 91, 110, 117, 120, 124 Hua Yan 4, 13, 57, 63, 65f, 71–78, 80f, 87f, 92–98, 106, 107, 110, 117, 153 identity 79, 153 lyricism 7–8, 19, 57–58, 68, 70, 77, 78–88, 92

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216 flower-and-bird paintings: “four gentlemen” (si junzi 四君子) theme in (cont.) peonies in 80–82, 84–85, 86, 105, 187 plum blossoms in 101–5 political themes in 10, 78–88, 107, 120 social relationships 56, 76–78, 106–32 transformations 58–63, 114 Xinluo School 164, 176 Yangzhou artists 102–3 Flowers and Birds (album; Li Shan) 102–3, 102f Flying Fish (hanging scroll; Bada Shanren) 62f foreign peoples (fanzu 番族) 153–59 “Free and Easy Wandering” (Xiaoyao you 逍遙游; Nanhua jing) 53–54, 60–61 “Frogs Fighting” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 112, 113f, 121 frontier paintings 153–59 Gao Qipei 高其佩 102 Gao Xiang 高翔 57, 84, 86, 100, 103, 104, 106, 162 Gao yangtai 高陽台 (ci tune; “Lofty Terrace”) 31–32 garden culture 10–12, 133, 161 decline of 162 literary gatherings 2, 4, 89–91, 99, 134–45, 193 Shanghai 182, 185, 187, 192 garden imagery 10–12, 13, 89–132 Daoism 91, 108, 110, 112, 121, 128 Dream of the Red Chamber 149, 152 figure paintings 174–76, 185 flower-and-bird paintings 71, 73, 75–77, 91, 110, 117, 120, 124 political themes in 7, 119–23 seasons in 106, 145 social relationships 91, 99–100, 106–32 Song dynasty 64, 145 women 145–52 Xinluo School 179–80 Garden of the Golden Valley (hanging scroll; Ni Tian) 184f, 185 Ge Kunhua 戈鯤化 63 Giant Peng (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 59f, 60f, 110, 188 description of 58–63

Index Duck Bathing 64, 67 Flower and Bird Album 73 inscriptions on 60–61, 63 Goldberg, Stephen 18 Golden Valley Garden (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 139, 140f, 177, 183 Goya, Francisco 5 Grand Canal 40, 47, 52, 181–82, 193 Green Pearl (Lüzhu) 139, 145, 177, 185 Guanyin 25 Han Learning 37, 194 Han River Poetry Society (Hanjiang shishe 韓江詩社) 90, 99, 134 Hang Shijun 杭世駿 37 Hangzhou: Hua Yan in 6–7, 13, 18–29, 61, 68, 89, 90, 98, 193 Hua Yan’s return to 159–62 Ming loyalism in 81, 86 poetry in 6–7, 25, 57–58 Shanghai School 195 social change 181–82 Southern Song dynasty 9, 18, 19, 23, 28 West Lake in 18, 19, 30–33, 148 Xinluo School 176, 192 Yangzhou 2, 133 Zhe School 13, 30–33, 37, 39, 52, 57–58, 162, 167, 170 Hansong ge tanyi suolu 寒松阁谈艺琐录 (Trivial records from discussing art in the Studio of the Cold Pine; Zhang Mingke) 187 Heideggar, Martin, 193 Hermit Xu You Resting by a Stream (hanging scroll; Dai Jin) 23, 24f, 27 Hibiscus and Rocks (hanging scroll; Li Di) 131n56 historical themes: and figure paintings 13, 23, 29, 36, 131, 133, 145 Hua Yan 16, 21, 36, 45, 84, 88, 163, 177 identity 4, 20, 21, 81 Jiangnan artists 6–7, 88, 193 landscapes 19–20, 47, 54 literary 2, 10, 104, 148, 152 literary gatherings 131, 135 History of the Jin Dynasty 138 Hogarth, William 5 Homing Birds (poem; Tao Qian) 73

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Index Hsü, Ginger 156 Hua Yan 華嵓: death of 162 marginalized status of 4, 14, 188, 198 martial arts 18, 23, 138 portraits of 1, 3f, 19, 21, 22f, 23, 25, 165–66, 171 professional artist 7, 10–11, 13, 61, 69, 88, 91 self-portraits by 6, 7, 24f, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33, 44, 49, 53, 54 status of art 1, 2, 166, 194 wives and children of 39–40, 68, 98. See also Xinluo, mountain man of; Xinluo School Huang Shen 黃慎, 103 Huizhou 89 identity 16 figure paintings 21–29, 36, 133, 167–69 flower-and-bird paintings 79, 81, 153 frontier paintings 153, 154 garden culture 90–91, 120 Han cultural 7, 9, 13–14, 18, 49, 86, 133, 148, 152 historical themes 4, 20, 21, 81 Jiangnan artists 9, 86, 100–104, 193, 195 landscapes 18–19 literati 9–10, 14, 15, 100, 106, 107 portraits 21–29, 36, 167–69 women 148, 152, 153. See also personas, social recluse identity “Inscribing Miscellaneous Flowers” (Ti zahua 題雜花; Hua Yan) 89 Inscribing Plum, Bamboo, and Pine (painting, poem) 67 Jesuits 6 Jiang Kui 姜夔 99, 173–74 Jiang Xueqiao 蔣雪樵 36, 57 Jiang Yan 蔣妍 (wife) 39–40 Jiangnan artists 39, 193–98 historical themes 6–7, 88, 193 painting styles of 23, 104, 106, 141, 194 patronage 193, 194 social personas of 4, 9, 44, 86, 100–104, 193, 195. See also Zhe School Jiangnan region 6, 10, 88

217 Ming loyalism in 9–10, 20–21, 81, 84, 86. See also Hangzhou Yangzhou Jin dynasty 177 Jin Nong 金農 101, 103, 162 Hua Yan 38–39, 57, 58, 92, 100, 107 Luo Ping 121, 174 works by 104–6, 161, 167, 168f Zhe School 6, 31, 37, 132, 161 Jin Zhizhang 金志章 32–33, 159 Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記; Wu Cheng’en) 154, 156, 158 Kangxi Emperor 47–48, 148 Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (hanging scroll; Wang Hui) 48 Karlsson, Kim 167 “Kingfisher Holding a Fish” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 110, 111f Kong Shangren 孔尚任 148 Koon, Yeewan 197 Lady and Willow Tree (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 145, 146f, 147–49 Lady with a Fan in the Autumn Breeze (hanging scroll; Tang Yin) 147f, 148 Laing, Ellen Johnston 135, 139 Lake Dongting 44–45 Lake Tai 46 rocks from 93, 94 Lan Ying 藍瑛 7, 8, 19, 39, 40, 41 landscapes 4, 6–7, 116–17, 180–83 color in 42, 45, 56, 141 vs. frontier paintings 154 historical themes 19–20, 47, 54 literary gatherings 141 lyricism 57, 58 poetry 19, 21, 23, 25–29, 42–47 travel painting 39–56 Xinluo School 177 Landscapes (album; Hua Yan) 40–47, 54 Leaf 1 46f Leaf 5 44f Leaf 8 41f Leaf 14 43f Landscapes, Birds, and Insects (album; Li Yu): Leaf G 180f Leaf 1 181f

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218 Landscapes after Song and Yuan Masters (album; Lan Ying) 41, 42f Layered Peaks and Splashing Waterfall: Portrait of Hua Yan as a Young Man (hanging scroll; Hua Yan and Wei Shijie) 21, 22f, 23, 25, 171 Lee, Hui-shu 62, 85 Li Bai 李白 136, 138 Li Bai’s Literary Gathering in the Peach and Plum Garden (hanging scroll; Chen Hongshou) 136n10 Li Di 李迪 124 Li Dou 李斗 163 Li E 厲鶚 131, 144n19, 174 Hua Yan 28–29 lyricism 57–58, 78 Yangzhou 39, 58, 99, 104 Zhe School 6, 29–33, 36, 132, 161, 162 Li Fangying 李方膺 100, 101, 103, 104, 162 Li Gonglin 李公麟 141, 141n16 Li ji 禮記 167 Li Mian 李葂 12 Li Sao 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow; Qu Yuan) 20 Li Shan 李鱓 11–12, 76–77, 100, 102–3, 107 Li Yu 李育 176, 179–80 Li Zicheng 李自成 122 Liezi 列子 (Lie Yukou 列禦寇) 32, 53–54 Ligou ji 離垢集 (Hua Yan) 20, 63, 92 lineages, artistic 16, 36, 39, 133, 163; and Hangzhou 28–29 Shanghai 14, 189 Xinluo School 14, 181, 192, 194 Yangzhou 12, 14, 129, 171, 173 Zhe School 7, 37, 79, 170 Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden (hanging scroll; Fang Shishu and Ye Fanglin) 99 literary gatherings: extravagant 76, 90, 138–39, 162 garden culture 2, 4, 89–91, 99, 133, 134–45, 193 historical themes 131, 135 Hua Yan 139, 167, 193 social status 89–91, 134, 135, 141, 145 literary inquisitions 10, 13–14, 16, 86, 120, 123 literary societies: in Hangzhou 31 Shanghai 182, 188, 189

Index Xinluo School 192 Yangzhou 90, 99, 133, 134 Liu, Bo 95 Liu, James 161n43 Liu Hai 劉海 112 Liu Ziji 劉子驥 54 Lives of the Artists (Vasari) 16 Los Caprichos (hanging scroll; Goya) 5 Lu Jianzeng 廬見曾 90, 162 Luo Ping 羅聘 14, 104, 121, 163, 164, 167–76, 192 lyricism 7–10, 57–88 flower-and-bird paintings 7–8, 19, 57–58, 68, 70, 77, 78–88, 92 Hua Yan 182, 193, 197 poetry 9, 19, 39, 67–68 political dissent 78–88 social relationships 9, 14, 57, 67–68, 70–78 Song 79, 197 transformation 58–63 travel writing 43, 54 Xinluo School 16, 180, 194 Yangzhou artists 100, 101, 104 Ma Lin 馬麟 23 Ma Yuan 馬遠 19, 87–88 Ma Yueguan 馬曰琯 89, 99, 101, 135, 162, 176 Ma Yuelu 馬曰璐 89, 99, 101, 132, 135, 162, 176 Ma Zuchang 馬祖常 81–82 Manchu court: vs. Han loyalism 9–10, 20–21 Jesuit influence in 6 Jiangnan artists 7, 86 Mount Tai 49 painting styles at 13–14, 36, 53, 148. See also Qing dynasty Mandate of Heaven 47, 48 “Mantis Stalking a Cicada” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 108, 109f Mao Pijiang 冒辟疆 162 Mao Zedong 毛澤東 195 Marriage-a-la Mode (hanging scroll; Hogarth) 5 Master Clam Catches a Shrimp (painting) 128n55 merchants 1, 89, 132, 154, 194 literary gatherings 134, 135 patronage from 5, 10, 63

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Index Messerschmidt, Franz 5 Mi Fu 米黻 49, 141, 141n16 Ming dynasty 12, 135 fall of 7, 10, 62, 122, 173–74, 195 Zhe School 30, 33 Ming loyalism: in flower-and-bird paintings 78–88 Jiangnan 6, 7, 9–10, 20–21, 47, 81, 84, 86 peonies 82–83, 84, 86 Yangzhou 10, 86, 120 Yangzhou women 148–49 Miscellaneous Album (1749; Hua Yan) 116–23 Leaf 3 117f Leaf 6 123f, 124 Leaf 7 119, 120f Leaf 10 117, 118f, 119 Leaf 12 121, 122f Miscellaneous Album (undated; Hua Yan) 107–16 Leaf 2 112, 113f, 114 Leaf 4 108, 109f, 114, 115f Leaf 5 110, 111f Leaf 6 108, 109f Leaf 8 112, 113f, 121 Leaf 9 121n49 Leaf 10 114, 115f Leaf 11 16f, 114 Leaf 12 110, 111f, 112 Miscellaneous Album (Xugu) 189–91 Molin jinhua 墨林今话 (Current comments on the forest of ink) 164, 176 Mount Tai (Shandong) 47–52 Nanhua jing 南華經 46, 53, 60–61, 62 Flower and Bird Album 73, 74–75 Nanping Poetry Society (Nanping shishe 南屏詩社) 31 neo-Confucianism 152, 194 Ni Tian 倪田 14, 177, 181, 185, 194 Ni Zan 倪瓚 106 “Orchid Pavilion Poems” preface (Wang Xizhi) 135n7 Orthodox School 53 Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 19, 159–61 painting styles: baroque 13 gongbi 公筆 (working brush) 107, 125

219 Hua Yan 29, 47, 71, 73–74, 91, 106, 107, 131–32, 163, 174, 176, 191, 192 Jiangnan artists 23, 104, 106, 141, 194 Manchu court 13–14, 36, 148 mo zhu 墨竹 (ink bamboo) 94 mogu 沒骨(boneless) 84, 92 Shanghai 181, 191 Song 84, 85, 123, 124, 130–31, 190 xiesheng 寫生 (drawing from life) 84, 94, 106–7, 124 xieyi 寫意 (sketching the idea) 107, 125 zhezhi 折枝 (broken branch) 85 Pan Tianshou 潘天壽 195 patronage: and Hua Yan 7, 12, 16, 48, 68–70 imperial 5 Jiangnan artists 193, 194 literary gatherings 90, 135 merchants 5, 10, 63 modernity 15–16 travel 39, 40 Yangzhou 5, 21, 90, 99, 104, 132, 176, 188 Yun Guotang 68–70 “Peonies” (Album of Flowers and Landscapes; Yun Shouping) 83f “Peonies” (Album of Flowers and Portrait of Shitao; Shitao) 85f Peonies and Birds (hanging scroll; Wang Li) 187f “Peony” (poem; Ma Zuchang) 81–82 personas, social: and Chan Buddhism 167 eccentric 11–12, 104, 128, 169, 194 Hua Yan 2, 6–7, 14, 18–29, 54, 58, 88, 91, 122–23, 132, 133, 138, 139, 158, 161, 164–67, 169, 176, 192, 193, 194 Jiangnan artists 4, 44, 104, 193 Li Fangying 101–2 Li Shan 103 plain-clothes (buyi 布衣) 70, 101, 164, 167, 192 Shitao 47 social status 70. See also recluse identity pilgrimage: artistic 39–56 figure paintings 133, 154, 158 imperial 47–48 Pine, Lilies, and Melon (hanging scroll; Li Shan) 77, 103n34 “Plants and Insects” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 110, 111f, 112

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220 Plum Blossoms (album; Jin Nong) 104–6 Leaf D 105f Poetic Concepts, inspired by the poems of Jiang Kui (album; Luo Ping): Leaf 10 173f, 174 poetry: “bamboo-branch lyrics” (zhuzhi ge 竹枝歌 ) 81 ci 詞 30–31, 36, 37 elegant (ya 雅) 99 figure paintings 25–29, 148 flower-and-bird paintings 10, 19, 71–73, 92–93, 95–98 Hangzhou 6–7, 18, 25, 37, 57–58 landscape (shanshui shi 山水詩) 44 landscape paintings 19, 21, 23, 25–29, 43–47 literary gatherings 134, 136, 139, 141, 145 lyricism 9, 16, 19, 37, 39, 43, 54, 57, 67–68 vs. painting 1–2, 4, 13–14, 29, 193–94 prose- (wenfu 文賦) 161n43 “singing of the thing” (yongwu ci 咏物詞) 9, 67–68, 78–79 social relations 14, 15, 29, 36–37, 38, 57–58, 67–68 societies for 31, 90, 99, 134 Song 30, 31, 33, 37, 99, 161, 174 travel 39–56, 153. See also Zhe School; particular authors and titles political themes 36, 174, 197 flower-and-bird paintings 10, 78–88, 107, 120 garden imagery 7, 119–23 lyricism 78–88. See also Ming loyalism Pomeranz, Kenneth 15 Portrait of Mr. Dongxin [ Jin Nong] (hanging scroll; Luo Ping) 167, 168f Portrait of Mr. Jingshen [Ding Jing] (hanging scroll; Luo Ping) 167–68, 169f Portrait of the Poets Wang Shizhen and Zhu Yizun (hanging scroll; Luo Ping) 170– 71, 172f Portrait of Wu Shicang (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 33, 34f Portrait of Xinluo Shanren (hanging scroll; Zhang Sijiao) 1, 3f, 165–66 Portrait of Yuan Mei (hanging scroll; Luo Ping) 170f portraits. See figure paintings

Index Posthumous Portrait of Hua Yan (hanging scroll; Zhang Sijiao) 40 Powers, Martin 4 “Preface for the Poetry from a Spring Evening Party for My Cousins in a Peach Blossom Garden” (poem; Li Bai) 136 “Preface to the Peach Blossom Spring” (Tao Qian) 67 Pure Land Buddhism 67 Qian Hui’an 錢慧安 188 Qian Xuan 錢選 79 Qianlong Emperor 83, 86, 131, 148, 153 Qing dynasty 17 expansionism of 153, 158 fall of Ming 7, 10, 28, 62, 122, 173–74, 195 founding of 20 garden imagery 121, 122 gathering paintings in 135 literary inquisitions by 10, 13–14, 16, 86, 120, 123 opposition to 6, 7, 9–10, 20–21, 81, 82, 84, 86, 148 Zhe School in 19–20, 21, 33. See also Manchu court; Ming loyalism Qu Yuan 屈原 20 Quan Zuwang 全租望 37, 99, 162 Queen Mother of the West 67 Rainbow Bridge gathering (1757) 90, 162 recluse identity: and garden imagery 90–91, 92, 120 ideals of 7, 18, 19–20, 28 Liezi 53–54 nature 20, 29 portraits 23–29 social relations 10, 54–56 Xinluo School 177 Yangzhou 10, 90–91, 114 Zhe School 23, 32, 39, 86 Recorded Remarks on Painting by Monk Bitter Melon (Shitao) 128 Red and White Herbaceous Peonies (handscroll; Hua Yan) 79–84, 80f, 86, 87, 121 inscriptions on 81, 82 Red Friend (hanging scroll; Lan Ying) 7, 8f Red Lotus (hanging scroll; Pan Tianshou) 195, 196f, 197

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Index Ren Bonian 任伯年 (Ren Yi 任頤) 14, 181, 182, 185, 189 Ren Xiong 任熊 169 Ren Yi 185 “Rhapsody on the Sounds of Autumn” (poem; Ouyang Xiu) 159–61 “Roosting Bird” (poem; Hua Yan) 98 Sancai tuhui 三蔡圖會 (Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms) 73–74, 156 satire 5, 16, 124, 132, 133, 156, 185 Self Portrait (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 24f, 25, 28, 29, 44, 49, 53, 54 Self-Portrait (hanging scroll; Chen Hongshou) 33, 35f Self-Portrait (hanging scroll; Ren Xiong) 169, 171f Sensabaugh, David Ake 134 Shanghai 5–6, 194, 197 frontier paintings 153 garden culture 182, 185, 187, 192 Hua Yan in 6, 15, 169 social change in 181–82 treaty port 182 Xinluo School in 14, 16, 163, 181–92 vs. Yangzhou 188–89 Zhejiang artists in 164, 176, 189–90 Shanghai School 海派 15, 181–92, 195 Shen, Kuiyi 182 Shepherds, The (hanging scroll; Watteau) 5 Shi Chong 石崇 138–39, 145, 177, 185 Shitao 石濤 (Zhu Ruoji 朱若極) 10, 20, 39, 47, 102, 197 paintings by 84–86, 128–29, 141 Shouxihu 瘦西湖 (Slender West Lake) 11, 148 “Snake” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 121n49 Snow on Tianshan (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 153–54, 155f, 156, 158, 159 social change 4–6, 10, 17, 176, 181–82 social relations 193 figure paintings 14, 25–29 flower-and-bird paintings 56, 76–78, 106–32 garden culture 91, 96, 99–100, 106–32, 138

221 lyricism 9, 14, 57, 67–68, 70–78 poetry 14, 15, 29, 36–37, 38, 57–58, 67–68 recluse identity 10, 54–56 Shanghai vs. Yangzhou 188–89 Yangzhou 10–11, 47, 98–106 Zhe School 29–39 social status: and figure paintings 133, 152 garden culture 89–91, 99, 131, 135, 145, 193 literary gatherings 134, 135, 141, 145, 193 literature vs. visual arts 1–2, 4, 29, 193–94 patronage 1–2, 5, 10, 12, 194 Shanghai 181–82 theme 4, 16, 90, 91–98, 107, 110, 112, 117, 121, 122, 138–39, 145 Yangzhou 1–2, 89–91, 114, 181–82 Yangzhou artists 100, 105, 107 Song dynasty: flower imagery in 80–81, 105 frontier paintings 153 garden imagery in 64, 145 gathering paintings in 135 Hangzhou 9, 18, 19, 23, 28 landscapes of 45 loyalism to 81 lyricism 79, 197 painting styles of 84, 85, 123, 124, 130–31, 190 poetry of 30, 31, 33, 37, 99, 161, 174 Southern 6, 9, 18, 19, 23, 28, 30, 31, 85, 99, 105, 124, 174 Zhe School 31, 33, 37, 64, 161, 174 Song of Li Fangying, the White-Robed Mountain Man, painting plums (poem; Yuan Mei) 101 Sounds of Autumn (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 159, 160f, 161, 174 Southern Tang dynasty 88 “Squirrel Looking for Food” (Miscellaneous Album; Xugu) 191f, 192 “Squirrel on a Branch” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 114, 115f, 191 Strassberg, Richard 43 Studying on an Autumn Night (hanging scroll; Yu Li) 185, 186f Su Renshan 蘇仁山 197 Su Shi 蘇軾 19, 94–95 Suzhou 21

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222 symbols: birds as 95–98 Buddhist 96 peonies as 80–82, 84–85, 86, 105, 187 plum blossoms as 101–5 wealth 76, 80 Taiping Rebellion 14, 182 Taishan (Shandong) 47–52 Tang dynasty 135 Tang Yin 唐寅 147, 148 Tao Qian 陶潛 25, 27–28, 54, 67, 73, 96, 167–68 Ten Verses by a Frosted Window (album; Gao Xiang) 100 Teng Maoshi 滕茂實 144n19 Thinly Leafed Paulownia (Ten Verses by a Frosted Window; Gao Xiang) 100 “Thrush on a Bamboo Branch” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 108, 109f Tian, Mount 154 Tiantai Buddhism 67 travel poetry 39–56, 153 “Turtle” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 114, 116f Vasari, Giorgio 16 Vegetables (album; Shitao) 128, 129f Vinograd, Richard 21, 134 Wang Cheng-hua 16 Wang Guan 王觀 80–81 Wang Hui 王翬 20, 48, 83–84 Wang Li 王禮 187, 188, 191 Wang Shen 王詵 (Jinqing 晉卿) 141n16 Wang Shishen 汪士z慎 100–101, 103, 104, 132, 162 Wang Shizhen 王士禎 148, 162, 170, 171 Wang Su 王素 14, 164, 176–77, 179, 180, 181, 194 Wang Xizhi 王羲之 135n7 Wang Xuexuan 汪學軒 166 Wang Yun 王鋆 11–12, 164, 165, 167, 176, 179 Watteau, Jean Antoine 5 Wei Shijie 魏士傑 21, 25, 29, 171 Wei Xi 魏禧 11 Weishi Buddhism 67 wenfu 文賦 (prose-poetry) 161n43

Index West Lake 西湖 (Hangzhou) 18, 19, 148 Zhe School 30, 31, 32, 33 “White Cat Looking for Prey” (Miscellaneous Album; Xugu) 189f White Peony and Rocks (hanging scroll; Hua Yan) 87–88, 87f “Wildfire” (undated Miscellaneous Album; Hua Yan) 112, 113f, 114, 173 women: abandoned 145–52 figure paintings of 133, 145–52 identity 148, 152, 153 literary gatherings 139 Yangzhou 82, 148–49, 152 Wong, Aida Yuen 1n2 Wu Shicang 吳石倉 33, 39 Wu Zhen 吳鎮 106 Wu Zonglin 吳宗麟 182 Wue, Roberta 5, 163 Wulin qijiu ji 武林耆舊集 (Compilation of a Later Generation from Wulin; Wu Shicang) 33 Wuyue 五岳 (Five peaks) 47 Xia Gui 夏珪 19 Xiang River 45 Xie An 謝安 177 Xie Huilian 謝惠連 136 Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 18, 27, 44, 136 Xie Yuan 謝元 85 Xihu chun gan 西湖春感 (ci tune; Sentiments of spring at West Lake) 31–32 “Xihu zhuzhi ge” 西湖竹枝歌 (Bamboo Branch Songs of West Lake; Yang Weizhen) 81 Xiling School (Xiling pai 西泠派) 31 Xinjiang 153, 154 Xinluo, mountain man of (Xinluo shanren 新羅山人; Hua Yan) 2, 6, 14, 18–56, 88, 165, 193 figure paintings 133, 138, 139, 158, 161 garden imagery 91, 122–23, 132 Xinluo School (Xinluo pai 新羅派) 14–15, 163–92, 194–95 defining of 176–81 Shanghai 14, 16, 163, 181–92 Yangzhou 164–76, 179, 181, 192 Xu Bin 許濱 38 Xu Chongsi 徐崇嗣 84, 88

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Index Xu Fengji 徐逢吉 30, 31, 36, 39, 52–53, 57, 58 Xu Jianrong 徐建融 195 Xu Mi 許謐 28n25 Xu Xi 徐熙 87–88 Xu You 許由 23, 24–25 Xuanzang 玄奘 154, 156 Xugu 虛谷 14, 189, 191–92, 194 Yang Weizhen 楊維楨 81 Yang Yanzhao 楊延昭 197 Yang Yuanzheng 99, 174 Yangzhou huafang lu 揚州畫舫錄 (Record of the painted boats of Yangzhou; Li Dou) 163 Yangzhou huayuan lu 揚州畫苑錄 (Record of the Painting Gardens of Yangzhou; Wang Yun) 11–12, 164 Yangzhou shaoyao pu (The Herbaceous Peonies of Yangzhou; Wang Guan) 80–81 Yangzhou 揚州: decline of 162, 174, 176, 182 garden culture in 2, 4, 10–12, 89–91, 99, 133, 134–45, 161, 162, 193 Hangzhou 2, 133 Hua Yan in 6, 7–13, 16, 23, 57–58, 61, 69, 98–106, 129, 193 Li E 厲鶚 in 39, 58, 99, 104 literary societies in 90, 99, 133, 134 Ming loyalism in 10, 86, 120 patronage in 5, 21, 90, 99, 104, 132, 176, 188 recluse identity in 10, 90–91, 114 School of 揚州畫宗 11–12, 13, 15 vs. Shanghai 188–89 Slender West Lake in 11, 148 social change 181–82 social relations in 10–11, 47, 98–106 social status in 1–2, 4, 89–91, 98, 114, 181–82 travels to 39, 40 wealth in 1–2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 70, 89, 90, 98–99, 162, 182 women of 82, 148–49, 152 Xinluo School 164–76, 179, 181, 192 Zhe School in 29, 31, 39, 90, 99, 101, 103, 104, 132, 135, 161, 164–76 Yangzhou 揚州 artists 84, 98–106, 132, 133 eccentricity of 11–12, 104, 128, 169, 194

223 lineages of 12, 14, 129, 171, 173 lyricism of 100, 101, 104 Shanghai 164 social status of 100, 105, 107 Yao, Emperor 24 Ye Fanglin 葉芳林 (Zhenchu 震初) 99n23 Yongzheng Emperor 148 Yu, Pauline 64 Yu Li 俞禮 185 Yuan dynasty 19, 28, 64, 79, 85, 86 and Song loyalism 81 Yuan Mei 袁枚 30–31, 44, 70, 78, 101 portrait of 167–68 Yun Ailin 員艾林 69 Yun Guotang 員果堂 13, 57, 84, 89, 92, 96, 193 death of 98–99 Hua Yan’s relationship with 63–70 Yun Qingqu 員青衢 69 Yun Shangting 員裳亭 69 Yun Shouping 惲壽平 7, 20, 39, 51–53, 83–84, 86, 101 Xinluo School 176, 187 Yun Shuangwu 員雙屋 69 Yun Xunzhi 員巽之 67 Yun Zhounan 員周南 (Yun Dun 員燉) 69– 70 Zha Shenxing 渣慎行 30, 78 Zhang Mingke 张鸣珂 187 Zhang Sijiao 張四教 1–3, 14, 40, 194 Hua Yan 164–67 Xinluo School 163, 164, 174, 192 Zhang Yan 張炎 31–32 Zhao Mengjian 趙孟堅 (Zhao Zigu 趙子固) 38 Zhe School (Zhexi cipai 浙西詞派): commercialization of 195 Hangzhou 13, 30–33, 37, 39, 52, 57–58, 162, 167, 170 Hua Yan 6–7, 9–10, 13, 44, 64, 70, 159, 167 Jiangnan artists 81, 86, 194 later influence of 163, 164, 197 lineage of 7, 37, 79, 170 new school of 195 political ideology of 174 portraits of 170 Qing 19–20, 21, 33 recluse identity 23, 32, 39, 86

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224 Zhe School (Zhexi cipai 浙西詞派): commercialization of (cont.) Shanghai 164, 176, 189–90 social relations 29–39 Song dynasty 31, 33, 37, 64, 161, 174 Yangzhou 29, 31, 39, 90, 99, 101, 103, 104, 132, 135, 161, 164–76 Zheng Xie 鄭燮 (Banqiao 板橋) 100, 103, 104, 106, 162

Index Zhou Mi 周密 33 Zhu Cheng 朱偁 (Menglu 夢盧) 187–88 Zhu Yizun 朱彞尊 30, 78, 170, 171, 174 Zhuangzi 莊子 75, 117, 119 garden imagery 108, 110, 128 Peng bird 61, 62, 73 Xinluo School 180

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