Visual Narratology in China and Japan around 1600: A comparative study

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2 Visual Narratology iN ChiNa aNd JapaN arouNd 1600

a Comparative study

Shane McCausland

As a contribution to this volume of studies on comparative and intercultural issues in the narrative arts of Asia, the essay which follows is concerned with the visual configura-tion of two narrative paintings from two regions of early modern East Asia, China and Japan, that—sometimes problematically—share one originating culture, namely China as it was under the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty (618–907). Both cultures share the tradition of creating illustrative paintings to be mounted in the format of the handscroll.1 The transformations in narrative scroll painting in Japan between the late Heian period (794–1185) and the start of the Edo period (c. 1600–1868), long a focus of research, far outpaced developments in China until the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644).2 Numerous picture scrolls from and around the Kamakura period (1185–1333) evince the expansive range and sophistication of narrative story-telling in Japan, whereas the Night Revels of Han Xizai attributed to Gu Hongzhong (937–75), held in the Beijing Palace Museum, as well as Song-dynasty (960–1279) versions of the Goddess of the Luo River composition, illustrating the eponymous third-century ode, cut lonely

figures as exemplars of China’s narrative painting from the middle of the imperial era (221 BCE–1911 CE), particu-larly the Song dynasty.3

Despite their common cultural roots and rich artistic and religious exchanges over the centuries, “Chinese art” and “Japanese art” remain largely discrete fields of research, with the exception of some recent studies on relations between them in the wake of Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868.4 This study is distinctive, therefore, in adopting a comparative stance and in inves-tigating a moment in the relatively unstudied “later” period, around 1600. It also scrutinizes an assumption in the discipline that artistic types and forms were his-torically drawn, according to the prevailing west-to-east model of appropriation across cultural bridges to Japan from China but not vice versa. Further, it sets out to explore other modes of and motives for transference or appropriation created under the historical conditions of early modernity, and how these affected artistic produc-tion and practice.

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Such is a crude sketch of the disciplinary back-ground to this study. More specifically, the impetus for a comparison of these two paintings was their juxtapo-sition in the galleries of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin during a 2010 exhibition, Telling Images of China: Narrative and Figure Paintings, 15th–20th Century, from the Shanghai Museum.5 The sinologically informed art-historical researches undertaken on these paintings in advance of the exhibition were the basis of papers pre-sented at a colloquium held in conjunction with it.6 Such culture-specific research paved some of the way, if it was not actually a pre-requisite, for the current contribution to this volume of comparative and intercultural studies. In addition, the display of the two scrolls highlighted the various disciplinary issues outlined above and also mooted specific topics for comparative study arising from their configuration as East Asian narrative picture-scrolls on related topics.

The two paintings in question are You Qiu’s (active 1553–83) Spring Morning in the Han Palace handscroll of 1568 (Shanghai Museum) and Kano Sansetsu’s (1590–1651) Song of Lasting Sorrow Picture-scrolls (Chōgonka gakan) of about 1646 (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin). You Qiu’s painting is a rare, late example of a full-blown narrative painting from mid-Ming Suzhou, executed in a “bland,” scholarly figural mode in an era when narrative painting languished at the bottom of the critical hierarchy

of genres dominated by scholars’ landscape paintings.7 Kano Sansetsu’s piece is a monumental work from the atelier of the Kyoto branch of the Kano School. Based in the old capital, Kano Sansetsu headed a line of the Kano School that rivaled the branch in the new capital at Edo (Tokyo). This painting demonstrates this distinction in various ways, including its singular openness toward its Chinese source text and, though this is harder to gauge, toward Chinese visual sources.

Both the paintings, by well-connected profession-als, illustrate ancient Chinese texts about royal femmes fatales that can be read both as romances and as admo-nitions, two iconic lyric modes in East Asian culture. Both are long handscrolls that portray the action in serial monoscenic form, also having in common some dramatic qualities. Both date to a period of social and economic change across East Asia (late Ming in China; early Edo in Japan), as widening literacy, commodification, and commercialization challenged the established concept of what it meant to practice as an artist. A comparative study is suggested, first, by the conservative, literary world-view they share: both are, as noted, rare examples of extended narrative picture-scrolls in a “later” age, long after the presumed heyday of narrative painting. This is also an opportunity to explore the distinctive cultural and aes-thetic forces at work on artists and patrons in this region. We may wonder how the Japanese painting’s appropria-

Fig. 2.1 “Emperor Minghuang mourns Yang Guifei” (Scroll 2, Act 3). Kano Sansetsu (Kyoto, 1590–1651) & studio, Song of Lasting Sorrow Picture-scrolls (Chōgonka gakan), 1646–47. © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

43Visual Narratology in China and Japan around 1600

tions from the art of late Ming China, the milieu of the other, embody and exemplify the kind the cultural bridging which had, time and again, linked Chinese and Japanese arts for a millennium.

Typically, however, despite the closely related plotlines in these two paintings, the approaches to visual narration continually bifurcate, providing grounds for the identification of East Asian regional and cultural distinctions in spite of common cultural origins and later bridges. Insofar as the two paintings diverge as examples of distinct, yet related, branches of an East Asian tradi-tion, they also establish patterns and bounds for the genre of East Asian narrative scroll painting in the neglected early modern period. They suggest how shared effects may be manifestations of social, commercial, technologi-cal, and other changes affecting artistic practice across early modern East Asia. While the main themes of this essay are the text-image relationships of these two paint-ings and the creative practices of their respective painting masters, the sub-headings of the essay listed below further identify selected topics for the elucidation of content and modes of pictorialization and also for com-parison and contrast. They touch on narrative overviews and techniques, text-image hierarchies, and the epito-mization and popularization of elite culture and values as seen in painting.

The Dublin painting is a full-scale, early Edo-period, Japanese illustration of the Chinese poet Bai Juyi’s

(772–846) ballad, “Song of Lasting Sorrow” (Chang hen ge) (Fig. 2.1). The creator, Kano Sansetsu, was a sinophile, a member of the China School, as were his likely patrons, a Kyoto family called the Kujō, who had enjoyed a hered-itary role as imperial advisors.8 Sansetsu’s artwork was created within a Japanese tradition of illustrating court romances in handscroll format, but it is also clear that he drew visual authority for this composition from his adap-tation of historical and contemporary motifs and images from Ming-dynasty China. The painting is executed in lavish Kano School style with ink and colors on silk. Each scroll measures 31.5 centimeters high by approximately 1100 centimeters long.9

Composed around 806, the “Song of Lasting Sorrow” ballad is a romantic fiction based on events that led up to and culminated in the An Lushan Rebellion of 756, which almost toppled the Tang dynasty at the height of its power.10 Emperor Minghuang’s infatua-tion with his Precious Consort Yang—the femme fatale, Yang Guifei—seemingly came to an end when, as the inner court fled the capital to escape rebels, the imperial bodyguard demanded her execution, blaming her for the crisis. She was strangled with a silken cord and her body thrown into a dike. In the popular imagination and in the ballad, however, the lovelorn Minghuang was later able to communicate with the soul of Yang Guifei through a Daoist magician, who had the power to travel to the isles of the immortals and meet her. Although celebrated as

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a romance in China, as well as in Japan (it is mentioned in the opening chapter of the novel, The Tale of Genji of about 1008), this ballad also had a political edge in its function as an admonition or warning to emperors against favoritism in their relationships with palace women.

Each of the two Sansetsu scrolls comprises six lengths of silk that are approximately 180 centimeters long. Within these, the ballad has been dramatized: each of the lengths of silk contains one “act” of, typi-cally, three defined scenes. In some “acts” this pattern is varied—there might be just two scenes to one piece of silk, followed by two full and two half scenes on another. The entire ballad is illustrated across a sequence of twelve acts containing some thirty-six scenes over more than twenty meters of silk. Nowhere is the text of Bai Juyi’s famous ballad inscribed on the painting; it is assumed that the viewer knows it already. The only writing on the scrolls are the titles on the outer wrappers and the artist’s inscription of his name at the end. This grand narrative project in the handscroll format has no obvious prec-edent in early Edo Japan. There are formal and thematic elements of the artist’s Kano School lineage, but the comprehensive approach, soaring ambition, and technical facility that are hallmarks of this painting make it stand

alone, impeding assessment of it within Japanese art his-torical discourse.

The other narrative scroll is a product of the influ-ential literati art circle of late Ming-dynasty Suzhou, the southern city that was the heartland of genteel, cultured living. Containing both calligraphic transcriptions and a long painting, it is known by a generic title, Spring Morning in the Han Palace, although the title-inscription at the head of the scroll itself, “Pair of Swallows in the Han Palace,” identifies the featured narrative as that of the notorious Zhao sisters, Feiyan and Hede, who were respectively empress and Bright Consort to Han emperor Chengdi (r. 32–7 BCE). This scroll was assembled by the collector-connoisseur Wang Shizhen (1526–90) after he acquired a transcription of a text entitled “Outer Biography of Zhao the Flying Swallow” (Zhao Feiyan wai zhuan), a kind of “unofficial” biography composed not long after her death by Ling Xuan (active 6–1 BCE), which had been transcribed by the leading Suzhou scholar-artist Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) (Fig. 2.2).11 To complement this transcription, Wang Shizhen com-missioned a pictorial illustration by senior journeyman artist You Qiu, which is mounted directly following Wen Zhengming’s calligraphy. The patron solicited further

Fig. 2.2 Spring Morning in the Han Palace: Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), transcription of Ling Xuan’s (active 6–1 BCE) “Outer Biography of Zhao the Flying Swallow.” © Shanghai Museum.


transcriptions of related “unofficial” biographical texts, which are included after You Qiu’s painting. Remarks by Wang Shizhen himself, as well as further transcriptions and colophons, follow this material on the backing paper at the end of the scroll. Somewhat unusually, therefore, this painting, which pictorializes the text transcribed by Wen Zhengming, an artist of far greater stature than You Qiu, is sandwiched between written texts. Presumably this is the original mounting order created by the patron. Nestled amidst texts, You Qiu’s painting, although measuring over eight meters in length and comprising approximately twelve individual scenes, is only one part of the larger scroll ensemble.12

Narrative overviewsAn overview of Sansetsu’s narrative painting is as follows. Scroll 1 depicts the life of Minghuang and his beloved Yang Guifei together across six acts, while Scroll 2 describes their separation after her death in a further six acts. The opening two acts of Scroll 1 depict first the discovery of the future Precious Consort and, second, the emperor’s growing infatuation and dalliance with her. The third act relates the expanding influence and power of her clan due to her position at court. The latter half of the first scroll narrates events from the time of

An Lushan’s rebellion in 756, beginning with the rebels approaching the Tang capital at Chang’an (Xi’an) (Act 1.4), followed by the torching the imperial palace as the court flees (Act 1.5), and ending with the mutiny by the imperial bodyguard and the demand for the execution of Yang Guifei (Act 1.6).

The second scrol l opens with the emperor mourning her, but quickly proceeds to show the court’s flight south through southern Shaanxi Province along the “plank roads” and through the mountains to Shu (Sichuan Province) (Act 2.1). In Act 2.2 the court is seen returning to the capital a year later. Act 2.3 shows the now retired emperor Minghuang mourning Yang Guifei in the palace (see Fig. 2.1), before he engages a Daoist wizard to search for her soul in Act 2.4. In the last two acts, the wizard finds her abode in the isles of the immortals (Act 2.5) and converses with her before he prepares to return to the world of the living at the very end (Act 2.6). The narra-tion is strongly romantic and epic in tone, never satirical, and in this respect is faithful to the romantic interpreta-tion of events in Bai Juyi’s ballad.

You Qiu’s painting of the story of the Zhao sisters is divided into a sequence of twelve distinctive single scenes, and these are numbered from one to twelve in this essay. It seems, however, that originally some of these

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twelve scenes were conceived as pairs or else short suites of scenes since, in his concluding colophon to this scroll, Wang Shizhen refers without elaboration to the painting as comprising nine duan (passages or scenes). Possibly, Wang was numbering the passages every time there was a clear change of location, such as in the case of Scenes 1, 2, and 3 (Fig. 2.3).13 All the scenes are in the nature of vignettes or excerpts, rather like the text of the “outer biography” itself. The first illustrates Zhao Feiyan and her younger sister Hede in the household of the emperor’s sister, where they learn singing and dancing. Scene 2 shows Feiyan appearing naked on a winter night before a startled huntsman, a young man with whom she is having a liaison. Spotted by the emperor on a visit to his sister’s house, in Scene 3 Feiyan sits chastely on the emperor’s bed for three nights before receiving his “favor.” When the emperor becomes debilitated from his co-habitation with her, he summons her sister Hede, who travels in a carriage (Scene 4) before being presented to him at court (Scene 5).

Scenes 6 and 7 illustrate the awkward relations between the two women, one now empress (Feiyan) and the other Bright Consort (Hede), after the emperor begins to favor Hede. Scene 8 depicts a barge and an ornate rock in illustration of an anecdote about an imperial pleasure outing during which the empress is almost carried off by a high wind. Meanwhile, both women try desperately to conceive and bear a male “heir” (they took clandestine lovers in their desperation to become pregnant), and thereby consolidate power at court. Scene 9 illustrates one bullish lover (Red Phoenix), over whom the women compete, as he climbs over roofs to an assignation. Scene 10 shows the sisters’ subsequent reconciliation. The penultimate scene shows the emperor as a voyeur, watching Hede bathing in the Orchid Room by candlelight from behind a screen. The last scene shows the emperor and Hede amusing themselves at genteel pastimes in an elegantly appointed garden setting; such a moment is not mentioned in the text, but is clearly intended to show the afternoon before their final night of passion during which she drunkenly gives him a fatal overdose of aphrodisiac.

Artist-patron situations comparedIf there are loose parallels behind the motives for the commissioning of these two paintings, as I argue below, there are also similarities in the practices whereby they were created. Both are rare examples, for the time period around 1600, of long East Asian picture-handscrolls by prominent artists which illustrate related texts and originate in comparable contexts—the literati world of late Ming Suzhou and the China School of early Edo-period Kyoto.14 Both stories and both painting traditions originated in ancient China, but a narrative painting mode shared across late medieval and early modern East Asia is one produced by two traditions, each with its own history, predilections, borrowings, and interactions. One characteristic of this comparative study, a possible function of the short time lag between the two paint-ings, is the apparent one-way direction of cultural traffic from China to Japan. There is no suggestion that You Qiu appropriated from Japan, but specific questions arise concerning Sansetsu’s connection with China. While You Qiu’s roots as an artist and his formative sources lay primarily in Suzhou, Sansetsu, although largely shaped by his Kano School teacher, Sanraku (1559–1635), also drew upon styles and types associated with Suzhou—including imported copies and pastiches of paintings by Tang Yin (1470–1524) and Qiu Ying (c. 1494–c. 1552) (known as Suzhou pian, “Suzhou forgeries”)—as well as more up-to-date Chinese images in print-illustrated collectanea of dramas, dating to the early seventeenth century and immediately transmitted to Japan.15 To what extent did drawing from China’s art tradition generate pictorial authority for both artists in the eyes of their patrons? What sources were available to choose from to represent that China? How did these translate into the format of a picture-scroll in Ming China and Edo Japan?

Such was the notoriety of the two femmes fatales in question, Zhao Feiyan and Yang Guifei, that they were commonly paired in the East Asian cultural imagina-tion as embodiments of complementary—slender and plump—images of female beauty.16 That both were also celebrated dancers reinforces the notion of female beauty in East Asia as not merely inhering to the physical char-


Fig. 2.3 Spring Morning in the Han Palace: painting by You Qiu (active 1553–83), dated 1568, (right to left) Scene 1, “The Zhao sisters serve in the household of Princess Yang’a”; Scene 2, “Zhao Feiyan and the huntsman”; and Scene 3, “The emperor and Feiyan in the bedchamber.” © Shanghai Museum.

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acteristics of a woman’s body, but as something accrued through her qualities of movement, poise, bearing, char-acter, and cultural learning. The two late sixteenth- to mid seventeenth-century pictorial depictions of the women’s life-stories indicate a sharp distinction, however, between the source texts, which speaks to the two artistic contexts.

As a work of biography, the “Outer Biography of Zhao the Flying Swallow” belongs within the category of recorded exemplary lives, even though, by virtue of its salacious and sexually/medically explicit content, it was transmitted outside and parallel to official history.17 Illus-trating an historical cautionary biography was a common enough type of commission for You Qiu. His patrons among the leading Suzhou literati demanded copies of old master paintings, as well as paintings that essentially rehashed the style of the previous generation of Suzhou masters, including Tang Yin and (You Qiu’s father-in-law) Qiu Ying.18 The timing of Wang Shizhen’s project is an issue that deserves further research. Dated to 1568, the painting was made in the second year of the reign of the Longqing emperor (r. 1567–72), who came to the throne after the sudden death, possibly from mercury poisoning, of the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522–66). The Jiajing emperor’s interest in Daoism extended, as was well known, not just to a large-scale and long-term search for elixirs of immor-tality, but also to the recruitment of virgins for arcane sexual rituals designed to prolong his life. The appearance of this painting, illustrating Wen Zhengming’s earlier transcription, among Suzhou society shortly after the Jiajing emperor’s death could be interpreted as a kind of veiled admonition about such pursuits addressed to the new emperor, even if it was never intended that he should see it.

As regards the Dublin painting, Bai Juyi’s ballad was a famous work of romantic poetry, which any well-educated individual in pre-modern East Asia would likely have known by heart. It was a text, in other words, which hardly required transcription on a painting intended for Sansetsu’s courtly, sinophile circle of patrons. Indeed, simply mentioning the title “Song of Lasting Sorrow” could, in context, have been enough to serve as an admo-nition, especially where members of the imperial family

were concerned. Whoever commissioned this beautiful painting of the topic would have possessed a potentially cautionary artwork, but one also capable of sugaring the bitter pill of admonition. However, the imperium of early Edo-period Japan in Kyoto was symbolic of old-world politics, so Sansetsu’s lavish narrative painting existed at a distance from the very real power of the military execu-tive in Edo.

I would suggest that ownership of Sansetsu’s painting also potentially conferred a status equal to that of a courtier charged with the grave responsibil-ity of admonishing the imperial family. In the context of military rule in early Edo Japan, when the monarchy was greatly reduced in status and power, it is possible that the act of commissioning the “Chōgonka” ballad as a narrative painting served as a kind of latter-day commemoration of the hereditary role of Sansetsu’s presumed aristocratic patrons as imperial advisors. In the case of You Qiu’s painting, the Ming court was not likely to have seen the painting, suggesting that it too was fulfilling some other cultural demand or demands beyond “admonition.”

Narrative techniquesNarrative handscroll painting occupied a small, but nonetheless significant, position in mid-Ming Suzhou visual culture. Old and new copies and new works on old subjects, often colorful and decorative, played their part in reshaping and transmitting to posterity the old master repertoire.19 You Qiu’s oeuvre contains a good number of narratives in the handscroll format, falling into the category of new works on old narrative themes executed by a professional in an “amateur” style for patrons of the scholarly class. The Shanghai Museum collection also contains an early work, Lady Zhaojun Leaves China, for instance. Although the setting is a long and seemingly developmental landscape, in terms of the figures, it is effectively monoscenic.20

As the two Shanghai Museum scrolls show, You Qiu’s general approach to narrative painting relates to the monochrome, monoscenic narrative mode associated


with Confucian admonition. This is seen in works like a probable Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) copy of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Palace Museum, Beijing), traditionally ascribed to the scholar-painter Li Gonglin, and in an anonymous, somewhat later (seven-teenth-century) handscroll in the Freer Gallery entitled Illustrated Stories of Former Emperors and Their Subjects.21 You Qiu’s favored ink-outline mode was thus something of a throwback to a didactic mode from ancient China, going back to the copy of the Admonitions of the Court Instructress and its presumed source, namely the painting attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406) in the British Museum.22

In Sansetsu’s case, the choice of the long handscroll set was the revival of a celebrated, late medieval format—the emaki (picture-scroll) tradition famous for illustra-tions of court narratives, such as The Tale of Genji, and also religious legends. Typically, in such scrolls, particular painted scenes alternated with selected inscriptions from the text being illustrated. In Sansetsu’s painting, the pic-torial narrative was similarly meticulously choreographed, having been divided into scrolls, acts, and scenes, but without any calligraphic inscriptions of the source text.

Within this new, dramatic approach to the picture-scroll format there is considerable variation in the visual narration, as the two following examples show. The act in the second scroll where the retired emperor mourns Yang Guifei is a case of an almost completely discrete section within the narrative. It is contained within one length of silk and presents an endlessly circling movement within the three-scene sequence (see Fig. 2.1). The giant rock at the opening clearly marks this act off from the previous act depicting Minghuang’s return to the capital; he is seen gazing leftward at lotuses, which stand for Yang Guifei. The visual momentum continues to the left, and from late summer into autumn, over the bridge strewn with red-hued leaves. In the third scene, the emperor, on a cold winter’s night, is facing to the right. Behind him, large rocks mark off the end of the suite of scenes. His posture and gaze, and the empty steps leading down to the right foreground swing the visual momentum back around and along—from left to right—the stand

of willows (another symbol of Yang Guifei) in the fore-ground.

The effect is one whereby the bereaved Minghuang is endlessly reminded of his lost love through the cycle of passing seasons and years. This circle is all the more effective for being a loose reworking of a device used in the previous act, namely the archaic circular “space cell.”23 The looping circle of willows, clouds, and figures around the place of execution recalls a “crude,” and so authentic (being coeval with the story depicted), compositional effect common in Tang and pre-Tang painting, seen in, for example, recensions and copies of the poet-painter Wang Wei’s (699–759) Wangchuan Villa scroll. The circle of the emperor’s mourning in Act 3 is only broken when the viewer chooses to roll the scroll on, where he or she will discover that the emperor has moved on emotion-ally, although only insofar as he now engages a wizard to search for Yang Guifei’s spirit.

The other, contrasting example is the sequence portrayed in the second half of the first scroll of Song of Lasting Sorrow Picture-scrolls, from the beginning of the rebellion. The emperor and Yang Guifei are shown aloof and dallying in a mountaintop palace as rebels approach the city walls below. From here on, the unfolding of the narrative is drawn out and carefully paced with dramatic scenes: soldiers rush headlong, leftward, through the palace gates; these men torch a palace building; the f lames and smoke drift left; the court f lees westward amid the smoke and mist (Fig. 2.4). The last act of the scroll portrays the crux of the narrative: the emperor is informed of the mutineers’ demand for Yang Guifei’s life, and she is brought out for execution (see Fig. 2.7). Contrasting with the discrete moment of the emperor’s mourning, these scenes show a sudden, high pace to the action and a frenetic, open-ended sequence of events unfolding at breakneck speed. These examples illustrate not just the variety of visual techniques employed but also how specific visual devices were selected to match and elaborate upon the romantic features of the source text itself.

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You Qiu’s scroll contains a visual sequence of twelve single scenes. On first viewing, each one seems to stand alone, in illustration of one particular anecdote in the “outer biography.” It is also possible to think of the scenes as layered vignettes, whereby each overlays the last, enriching and deepening the narrative experi-ence in a serial manner. On reflection, it appears that some scenes were formally linked to create visual and/or narrative bonds, which are only implied in the text. The linked Scenes 9 and 10, depicting first the rivalry between the sisters over Red Phoenix and then their reconcilia-tion, are an example (Fig. 2.5). The last two scenes also present an underlying causative link (Fig. 2.6). In Scene 11, the emperor derives a deviant pleasure from covertly watching Bright Consort Hede at her bath (she is horri-fied and has the lights extinguished and her body covered when she learns about his concealed observation of her); in the final scene (Scene 12), deviance turns to overindul-gence, leading to the emperor’s death.

Looking at individual scenes themselves, there is a cool, detached tone to their illustration. The image of

the lover clambering over roofs to visit the royal women’s quarters in Scene 9, for instance, looks like a generic description of a man on his way to an assignation—and it depends on the text for the specifics of identity. But this scene is also loaded with dramatic irony. The cloudy, moonlit night is symbolic of the excessive yin (female essence) that is overwhelming the imperial palace. It is doubtless the cause of the empress’ and Bright Con-sort’s inability to produce sons, as well as symbolic of the two sisters’ ruthless politicking and their disposal of rivals and their rivals’ newborn sons. Later, because of an overdose of aphrodisiac, the emperor unstoppably emits his yin essence and dies. Through these images, the artist grapples with the problem of how to illustrate this violent, colorful biography and how far a complementary “outer” visual biography could go without transgressing the bounds of social acceptability.

Text-image hierarchiesBoth of these picture-scrolls testify to their makers’ statuses as professional masters of painting, in part by

Fig. 2.4 Song of Lasting Sorrow, Scroll 1, Act 5, Scene 2, “Rebels enter the capital”; and Scene 3, “The inner court flees.” © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.


playing upon taut relationships between literary and pictorial genres. Sansetsu’s painting goes far beyond assuming the viewer’s knowledge of Bai Juyi’s ballad in that his graphic choreography and manipulation of detail test and toy with the viewer’s facility with the source text. The painting was preceded historically not just by the text, but by its reputation, transmission, and partial illus-tration over many centuries in China and Japan. Yet it seems never before to have been the subject of a full-scale narrative illustration in the picture-scroll format. The text, however, is not incorporated as an inscription, but as a function of cultural memory. Arguably, this pictorial-ization of the ballad challenges and plays with, or simply “rewrites,” the text for its time.

The field and limits of this “play” are illustrated in the following two examples. First, the act portraying the rise of the Yang clan due to Yang Guifei’s growing power as the emperor’s favorite (Act 1.3) demonstrates a basi-cally faithful approach in that it shows all the details and events described in just one short passage of the ballad (lines 23–26). This act and the sequence depicting the Daoist’s search (bridging Acts 2.4 and 2.5) stand out

as the only vignettes in the entire painting that do not depict either Minghuang or Yang Guifei, yet they are still included. Their presence and form reinforce the idea of the priority of the text as the proper model for the visual narrative being played out.

In a second example, the scene of Yang Guifei’s execution (Act 1.6) is a case of an inconvenient passage or detail in the text being ignored, if not undermined, in the illustration (Fig. 2.7). In the ballad, she was dragged kicking and screaming to her death, a scene evoked by torrid poetic images of her hair ornaments falling to the ground beside a column of restless horses waiting to move out (lines 37–40). Kano Sansetsu romanticizes this by picturing her in a dignified pose stoically awaiting her fate; her maids are the ones who writhe on the ground to one side, while eunuchs weep and lament nearby in the background. For Sansetsu’s audience, Yang Guifei’s lack of composure was transposed onto figures of lowlier status—embodying a class convention in Japanese painting. Thus, Sansetsu is in principle faithful to, but in detail occasionally divergent from, his source text accord-ing to the dictates of domestic Japanese aesthetic choices.

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Fig. 2.5 Spring Morning in the Han Palace: Scene 9, “A lover visits the sisters by night”; and Scene 10, “The sisters are reconciled.” © Shanghai Museum.

Fig. 2.6 Spring Morning in the Han Palace: Scene 11, “The emperor secretly watches Hede bathing by candlelight”; and Scene 12, “The emperor and Hede at leisure before his death from an overdose of aphrodisiac.” © Shanghai Museum.

By contrast, the twelve scenes of the You Qiu painting are all in the nature of selective moments culled from anecdotal passages within a broader biographical narrative or, as the patron Wang Shizhen’s describes the story in his colophon, a gushi or historical cause célèbre. The scene depicting the “combined palaces barge” ferrying the emperor (“front/middle palace”) and his “back palace” (i.e., harem) to a lake island on a pleasure outing is an example. The text describing this vignette merely

starts by stating how the emperor and Bright Consort Zhao Hede led the outing, and it is they who are por-trayed in the boat. All of the rest of this long anecdote concerns a dance and music performance on the island’s high platform by the empress and the man she loved, during which she is almost carried off into the sky by a sudden windstorm. Yet, none of this is portrayed—only the island venue is suggested by the exotic rock. Any nar-rative development must be iterated in the mind.


There is an expectation that narrative paintings such as these should demonstrate visual fidelity to their textual sources, because the texts enjoyed precedence over the images in the critical hierarchy. However that may be, moments of euphemism, oblique reference, and omission in a visual narrative can be telling. Both painters at some points employ visual euphemism or otherwise displace or defer explicit description of events recounted in their texts. We have just mentioned the case of Yang Guifei’s execu-tion, where her loss of composure was displaced onto her servants. The final scene (Scene 12) of You Qiu’s painting

is another example where the text is skewed in the image, since it shows the happy couple at leisure in a garden by day, rather than as the text describes, engaged in a night of drunken sex and “uncontrollable giggling,” culminating in the death of the emperor from loss of fluid. On the face of it, this is a deliberate understatement, if not visual self-censorship, following from the penultimate scene (Scene 11) in which the emperor resorts to bribing Zhao Hede’s servants with gifts of gold coins to enable him to spy on her bathing by candlelight. Scene 11 is one of two scenes of female nudity (along with Scene 2), a subject rare in

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Chinese painting outside erotica, and appropriately sets up the final denouement (Scene 12), where the seemingly incidental feature of two priapic tree trunks, glimpsed through rounded holes in the rock, refers to the future effects of the aphrodisiac.24 This pair of scenes helps to determine some of the boundaries of visual acceptability for this genre—somewhat beyond what might normatively have been expected for scholarly patrons.

The bathing scene from the scroll of Spring Morning in the Han Palace (Scene 11) makes a good comparison with the third scene of the first Sansetsu scroll (Fig. 2.8), in which the Tang emperor gazes admir-ingly at the future Yang Guifei as she steps frailly out of the hot springs at Huaqing. Historically, the emperor invited women from his own and his sons’ harems to bathe there, in the hope that he would discover, as Bai Juyi put it, a woman “such as ruins domains.” In fact, the Yang woman was a concubine of the emperor’s son, the Duke of Shou, from whom she was formally separated before becoming an imperial consort. Bai Juyi omits this detail; Kano Sansetsu goes even further in romanticising the episode when, for the sake of decorum, she emerges from the hot waters limp but already fully dressed by her maids. The emperor himself is not a tired, leering figure,

glassy of eye and wet of lip, but is romanticized as young and handsome. Only the presence of a serving woman hanging up the bath towels adds a touch of realism. In both these paintings it is clear that certain moments of intimate male-female interaction, which can be conveyed in evocative or even poetic words, require singularly careful treatment when portrayed visually.

Portraying intimacy, decadence, and death at courtOne of the features of early narrative art in the didactic mode of text illustration in China is the selection and portrayal by artists of pivotal, emotional, or otherwise revealing moments in human relationships, often in intimate settings. The Japanese emaki tradition has this characteristic too, seen in illustrations of The Tale of Genji for example, but elsewhere is less reticent about picturing the outward signs of crisis and disaster, such as palace conflagrations. Sansetsu’s painting, as a work in this local tradition, does not disappoint in terms of visual drama when portraying some of the outdoor scenes of rebellion and Tang dynastic crisis (see Fig. 2.4). But how do Sansetsu and You Qiu deal with intimate rela-tions and taboo-type topics like the death of an emperor or empress?

Fig. 2.7 Song of Lasting Sorrow, Scroll 1, Act 5, Scene 3 (detail), “The execution of Yang Guifei.” © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.


Fig. 2.8 Song of Lasting Sorrow, Scroll 1, Act 1, Scene 3, “The emperor watches Yang emerge from the hot spring at Huaqing.” © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

There was a long tradition in China of depicting emperors and their consorts in bedchambers—the Admo-nitions of the Court Instructress scroll is perhaps the locus classicus—and such interactions were iconographically as much about deception and power as the procreation of male heirs. In “the bedroom scene” of the Admonitions scroll, a ruler sits on the edge of a mistrusted concubine’s bed in illustration of the tract that a person whose speech deceives is not trusted even by a bedmate.25 Indeed, this mode continued into the seventeenth century,26 despite the way that deep-rooted social and economic changes, including the spread of literacy and growth of the pub-lishing industry, had transformed popular taste in the sixteenth century.

Popular tastes in late Ming China were catered to in the print medium with new depictions of sala-

cious tales and stories, including fanciful ones depicting Yang Guifei. Such books would also have been avail-able in early Edo Japan, in addition to erotica featuring Yang Guifei. Two prints from the Complete History of Yang Guifei (Tang Guifei Yang Taizhen quanshi) are “Consort Yang’s Spring Slumber” (Yangfei chunshui) and “Coupling under the Comforter” (Beidi yuanyang). The first shows the emperor gazing at a naked Yang Guifei, who lies asleep in a sexually receptive pose after a night of “spring” (a byword for sex), as he returns from the dawn audience. The second shows them coupling in bed while courtiers compare them with a pair of mandarin ducks, which mate for life.27 How did these two profes-sional painters balance the weight of pictorial tradition with the momentum of popular culture in their working environments?

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One comparison of courtly intimacy may be drawn from a juxtaposition of the two quite similar nuptial scenes, which represent desire. These are Scene 3 in You Qiu’s painting (see Fig. 2.3) and Act 2, Scene 1 in San-setsu’s (Fig. 2.9). You Qiu’s depiction shows the emperor hugging the body of Zhao Feiyan, his future empress, for three nights while she demurs, as the text describes. She is coy, here, rather than demure. The iconography of marital deception seen in the bedroom scene of the Admonitions scroll resurfaces here in You Qiu’s painting to offer a foretaste of the emperor’s future delusion by the two Zhao sisters in this narrative. Eventually, in a verbal exchange, Zhao Feiyan sidesteps the emperor’s feeble enquiry about her affair with the huntsman by declaring that she has been overwhelmed by and can no longer hold out against his royal virility.

Despite the similar context, Kano Sansetsu’s nuptial scene, one of the finest in the entire painting, takes a somewhat different tack. It literally illustrates the text—which is more lavishly descriptive than discursive—by showing how the emperor had eyes for none of the thousands of women in his palace but Yang alone. The place, the ambience, and the activities are all seemingly geared towards illustration of her beauty and the depth of their romantic attachment. She is idealized as a demure, submissive woman; her pose and the fluttering tassels of her dress recall ancient Chinese images of beauties (like in the Admonitions), while her position of honor is evoked by her role as the sole preparer of the emperor’s beverage. The chamber is enclosed by sumptuously decorated curtains and hangings, the floral imagery—including lotus—being a visual celebration of Yang’s peerless beauty.

Fig. 2.9 Song of Lasting Sorrow, Scroll 1, Act 2, Scene 1, “Minghuang and Yang Guifei in the nuptial bedchamber.” © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.


A second look at royal intimacy may be taken from a comparison of the two bathing scenes that show the emperors enjoying their view of beauties bathing. Here, as elsewhere in Kano Sansetsu’s visual rendering of the Minghuang-Yang Guifei story, he sugarcoats any admonitory message with romantic appeal by adopting a tone of dignity and decorum in keeping with the textual source. The emperor’s first sight of Yang emerging fully clothed from the hot spring in the Dublin painting is romanticized in an almost prudish fashion, at least by contrast with You Qiu’s bath scene (Scene 11). You Qiu takes a mildly titillating approach, showing the emperor as a voyeur, a deviant whose behavior shocks the Bright Consort. The illustration of her nude figure, and in the following scene of landscape elements suggesting geni-talia, seems calculated to shock, here in a scholarly—not a popular—illustration of this tale. However, You Qiu’s painting does not illustrate a text that is, at its heart, a romance between a man and a woman, but rather one about a pernicious and deviant love triangle between an emperor and two sisters. Many of the scenes depict the vicissitudes of the sisters’ relationship in light of the emperor’s changing favoritism. These scenes are highly dependent for their understanding on a close reading of the text, and, in particular, an appreciation of the repartee and veiled meaning in the protagonists’ dialogues. The bland ink-outline style, a scholarly calligraphic mode of painting, not only underscores that literary connection but also ratchets up the emotional intensity of the inner palace setting.

As for the portrayal of death, although You Qiu’s source text describes in gruesome detail both the emper-or’s and the Bright Consort’s deaths by poisoning, neither event is depicted. Both take place “off stage,” after the end of the scroll, seemingly to reinforce its moral impact. Visually, the pivotal moment of the Dublin painting is the death of Yang Guifei, which is also unseen, happens between the two scrolls, such that the first scroll depicts the couple’s life together and the second their “lasting sorrow.” To show the event about to happen (Yang Guifei awaiting the silken death-cord), heightening anticipation and dramatic tension, and then having happened or else

happening elsewhere (the emperor’s grieving reaction) demonstrates Sansetsu’s guiding interest in the elabora-tion of the narrative over and above any duty of moral suasion. In these cases, the artists’ methods have been strongly shaped by the choice of text to illustrate, by its tone and tenor, and by the authority of conventions and practices in relevant classical painting traditions.

In sum, what results from a juxtaposition of these two narrative paintings? First, some relevant patterns and flows of visual authority in painting in and across East Asia have been uncovered. In this respect, the late Ming artist, a man of Suzhou, the cultural powerhouse of China, draws upon Chinese tradition as embodied in paintings in local collections, the style of local old masters, and contemporary local taste. The early Edo Japanese artist, the leader of Kyoto Kano School, was a sinophile who was primarily shaped as an artist by his local school and its network of old-world patrons, and by the Japanese narrative-painting tradition, but whose painting, in this instance, was also enriched by reference to Chinese sources of the moment, including copies of Suzhou painters’ works and print-illustrated books. The formal appropriations affirm how, in practice, both the Chinese artist, looking within, and the Japanese artist, looking west, held the artistic legacy of the Chinese past in high regard.

Second, certain boundaries and structures of the East Asian tradition of narrative art in the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century are revealed. Although the prevailing modes for the pictorialization of text conform, largely, to regional patterns, still, the fringes of decorum and social acceptability in both text and image, and the values underpinning these, remain close. Although pos-sessing, potentially, a raw power, one unmediated by writing or language, both visual narrations of these tales nevertheless seem curbed by elite social concerns and responsibilities, themselves informed by taste and perhaps self-censorship or else an inclination towards the evoca-tion of desire. In the context of early Edo-period painting on such a topic, Sansetsu’s commission and his execu-tion of it display a notable reserve, one concomitant with his position as head of the distinguished Kano atelier in

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Kyoto. You Qiu’s painting exemplifies no less meticulous attention to discreet picture-making in light of a text, which also speaks to its social milieu of educated southern Chinese gentry.

In the findings of this study, a comparative approach that has contextualized these two narrative paintings and explored the processes and practices under-lying them, it seems impossible to do away with the notion of a default position, prevailing in pre-modern East Asian narrative art, whereby painting should ulti-mately serve as a didactic or admonitory tool. Yet, it is the romanticizations, embellishments, displacements, and corruptions in a process of picture-making that go far beyond mere illustration and start to reveal the social and commercial contingencies at work in these two artistic practices. In demonstrating signs of an early modern pro-fessionalization in the practice of painting in East Asia in the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, nar-rative painting has served as a strand of art history that offers insights into the East Asian cultural formation. It may also hold promise for further comparison with early modern cultures and practices on more distant shores under the purview of a globalized discipline of art history.

Notes

1. The format of one of the earliest transmitted East Asian picture-scrolls, the Admonitions of The Court Instructress attributed to the pioneering master Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–c. 406). This scroll, in the British Museum, is emblematic of the didactic mode of early dynastic pictorial art in China. For further studies, see Shane McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, No. 21 (London: British Museum Press in association with the Percival David Foundation), 2003.

2. An example of a general Japanese study of Japanese narrative painting ending around 1600 is Hideo Okudaira, Narrative Picture Scrolls (New York: Weatherhill, 1973).

3. A study which presents a cultural biography of the Gu Hong-zhong attribution is De-nin Deanna Lee, The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

4. These include Yu-chih Lai, “Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian’s Frontier Paintings and Urban Life in 1880’s Shanghai,” The Art Bulletin 86, 3 (September 2004): 550–72; Shane McCaus-land, “Nihonga Meets Gu Kaizhi: A Japanese Copy of a Chinese Painting in the British Museum,” The Art Bulletin 87, 4 (December 2005): 688–713, which also puzzles over the sepa-ration between the fields; and 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). A relevant methodological study is Sato Doshin, “‘History of Art’: The Determinants of Historicization,” in The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays on Scholarly Method, Papers Presented for an International Conference at National Taiwan University, October 4–7, 2002, eds. Naomi Noble Richard and Donald E. Brix (Taipei: Rock Publishing, 2007).

5. See Shane McCausland and Ling Lizhong, Telling Images of China: Narrative and Figure Paintings, 15th–20th Century, from the Shanghai Museum (London: Scala, 2010); www.cbl.ie/china (cited April 23, 2012); and Shane McCausland and Matthew P. McKelway, Chinese Romance from a Japanese Brush: Kano Sanset-su’s Chōgonka Scrolls in the Chester Beatty Library (London: Scala, 2009).

6. By this writer (on the Chinese painting) and by Matthew McKelway (on the Japanese one). The former is forthcoming as “Exemplary Complicity: The Pictorial Lives of Han Court Beauties in Two Narrative Paintings of Mid-Ming Suzhou” 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). Another relevant study is my “Chen Hongshou (1598–1652) and his Workshop,” in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Wen C. Fong, 2 vols., eds. Judith G. Smith et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1: 165–84.

7. In an essay entitled “Narrative Painting as a Major Art in Sixteenth-Century Suzhou,” to be published in the volume, On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture, Cédric Laurent challenges this conventional view by presenting a strong case, based primarily on literary evidence, that narrative painting was no minor art, but in fact a premier literati mode of artistic practice in sixteenth-century Suzhou.

8. See McKelway in McCausland and McKelway, Chinese Romance, 149. I am indebted to the work of Matthew McKelway and Lin Li-chiang, respectively co-author of and contributor to the above title, where the painting is reproduced in full, in the preparation of this paper.

9. Alfred Chester Beatty acquired the artwork in 1926 from the estate of the French collector Louis Gonse (1846–1921), who had presumably obtained it in Meiji Japan.

10. For the text of the “Song” and its companion piece by Chen Hong (early ninth century), “An Account to Go with the ‘Song of Lasting Sorrow’” (“Chang hen ge zhuan”), see Quan Tang shi (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1960), 3435 and 4816–19. Translated by Stephen Owen, Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 442–52. See also Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry: The Late Han through T’ang Dynasties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988).

11. This biography is characterized as “outer” in contrast with the standard—and implied “inner”—biography of Zhao Feiyan as Empress Xiaocheng passed down in the official dynastic history of the Western or Former Han dynasty, Han shu (Book of Han), compiled by Ban Gu (32–92 CE). The implication is that an “outer biography” is unfit to serve as part of core history.

12. For a full illustration and discussion, see McCausland and Ling, Telling Images, cat. no. 34, and McCausland, “Exemplary Com-plicity.”


13. Further research is necessary to explain Wang Shizhen’s num-bering.

14. Many examples of narrative handscrolls from sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Japan are extant; however they belong to a separate genre of vernacular narrative illustration known as Nara ehon (Nara picture-books). No comparable vernacular tradition is known in China, perhaps due to the vagaries of transmission and survival. For a study of one of the many Nara ehon painting sets in the Chester Beatty Library, see Taketori monogatari emaki (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Picture-scrolls), Yomigaeru emaki ehon 2, Chiesutā Bītī Raiburari shozō (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2008).

15. On Sansetsu’s lineage and studio practice see McKelway, “Kano Sansetsu and Kano Workshop Paintings of ‘The Song of Lasting Sorrow’,” in Chinese Romance, McCausland and McKelway, 106–49.

16. For instance, Zhao Mengfu, “Ti Dongpo shu Zuiwengting ji” (1296), in Zhao Mengfu ji (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1986), 251.

17. In Chinese official history and in Confucian morality literature, the term “exemplary biography” can refer to a life that stands out for having been a model for the viewer to emulate or to denounce and avoid.

18. You Qiu’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace is, however, unre-lated to the well-known, eponymous work by Qiu Ying in Taipei. It either originated with You Qiu, having been com-missioned to illustrate the text in the calligraphic inscription by Wen Zhengming, or else he re-worked a painting by Qiu Ying which does not survive; see my “Exemplary Complicity” for further details.

19. The Nymph of the Luo River painting in the British Museum, loosely based on earlier, Song-dynasty versions, may be an early Ming (fifteenth century) work in this vein. (N.B. There is little consensus about the dating of this painting, which has

been ascribed to as early as the tenth century and as late as the seventeenth.) A copy of Gu Hongzhong’s Night Revels of Han Xizai in the Sichuan Museum, which depicts an orgiastic gath-ering of courtiers, is attributed to Tang Yin (McCausland and McKelway, Chinese Romance, fig. 90). A long handscroll version of the Peach-blossom Spring narrative in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is attributed to Qiu Ying.

20. McCausland and Ling, Telling Images, cat. no. 33. It shows only one place—the northern frontier—but relies for its effect on the pivotal moment illustrated, that is, the moment the protagonist leaves China and becomes the wife of a “barbarian” chieftain. All other events in this harrowing (from a Chinese perspective) tale are implied.

21. F1970.37; McCausland and McKelway, Chinese Romance, fig. 23.

22. See above, n. 1.23. In Act 2 of Scroll 2, the emperor’s escort, returning to the

capital, revisits the site of Yang Guifei’s execution at Mawei.24. I owe this reading to Lukas Nickel.25. This scene is followed by one depicting three generations of

a family together, in illustration of the admonition to palace women to make the royal house great by providing heirs. For illustrations, see McCausland, ed., Gu Kaizhi and the Admoni-tions Scroll, 74 (the bedroom scene) and 79 (the family scene).

26. An example of a pivotal, intimate moment of human interac-tion in the Freer Gallery painting cited above is the scene of Yang Guifei cutting off a lock of her hair (McCausland and McKelway, Chinese Romance, fig. 23). The literal “outer” loss of face was understood to show an “inner” change of heart.

27. Identified and discussed by Li-chiang Lin, “Ming Paintings and Prints: Possible Sources for Kano Sansetsu’s Chōgonka Scrolls,” in Chinese Romance, McCausland and McKelway, 150–63, esp. figs. 101 and 102.

Visual Narratology in China and Japan around 1600: A comparative study

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