Imperial Illusions - Kristina Kleutghen Art History Publication Initiative Books

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inherently relies on “vision, optics, phantasmagoria, and meditation, and readily dissolves the cognitive boundaries between the observer and the observed.”8 Extant medieval Buddhist murals, most notably those on the plastered rock walls of the temple grottoes at Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves preserve the traces of three-dimensional illusionism in early Chinese murals. Located at an eastern oasis of the Taklamakan desert, Dunhuang was a major pilgrimage site and stopping point for trade caravans, and from the fourth through fourteenth centuries it benefited from the blend of Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, and Central Asian painting styles brought by the many artists who arrived there alongside travelers and pilgrims. To lend convincingly three- dimensional skin, muscle, and animation to Buddhist deities, artists utilized the Indian “flush-tinted” (yunran) or “convex and concave method” (aotufa) painting techniques of layering flesh-toned lines and colors.9 By using rosy-toned pigments instead of black ink to outline the figures, and adding highlights to their limbs and faces, these murals suggested three-dimensional beings rather than flat figures depicted on a flat surface. The fleshy, rounded appearance of these figures is commonly thought to have originated with Buddhism outside of China, both the religion and the representational technique still retaining something of their foreign import during this early period.

      Building on the deceptively sculptural effects of these painting techniques, the Dunhuang artists often presented the Buddha and his entourage in architectural environments that suggested deep horizontal recession, and therefore real three-dimensional spaces contiguous with the viewer’s own space. On the south wall of an eighth-century cave, for example, a representation of a three-dimensional recessed niche populated by the Buddha and his attendants was placed in the center of a two-dimensional landscape (figure 1.1). Appearing to have burst through a more flatly rendered painting of figures in landscape, the niche portion of the painting creates the illusion that the viewer is having a direct encounter with the Buddha.10 This impression is amplified by a viewer’s general desire for their animation that is inherent in all illusionistic paintings of figures regardless of where they are produced,11 as well as by the specific Chinese belief that salvation by a Buddhist deity was entirely possible in the real world. In Buddhist murals like this one, such lifelike deities might therefore appear poised to offer the viewer salvation from the burden of reincarnation, whereas visibly painted figures, as in the background landscape, could not. The sudden juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional treatments in this mural strengthens the illusionism of the central niche scene, the space of which seems to recede horizontally backwards away from the viewer while the surrounding landscape recedes vertically up the plane of the wall in the more linear Chinese mode. Such abrupt contrasts

      between seemingly real spaces and flat paintings, created by breaking up one painting style with another, are found in a number of Dunhuang’s Tang caves, demonstrating that these visual formats convincingly presented a divine space contiguous with the viewer’s own to firmly place the viewer in the presence of the Buddha and thereby offer unmediated experience of the divine. The supernatural beings depicted in the imported convex-and-concave representational style and the illusionistic spaces they occupied facilitated the viewer’s visual entry across the boundary of the wall into this other world, which was now part of the viewer’s own world because it seemingly existed parallel to the viewer’s line of sight (rather than perpendicular to it as the two-dimensional landscapes did). The size of the surfaces on which these images were painted further supported the potential for visual illusion: walls and ceilings, surfaces significantly larger than the viewer, completely engulfed his or her visual field. When deployed together with pictorial techniques that created the effects of mass and volume, the combined wall- and ceiling-painting programs in the Mogao caves often depicted complete alternate worlds in which the viewer could fully immerse him- or herself.

      By the eighth century, when this painting was produced, pictorial illusionism had become common for Buddhist murals, as had the understanding of an illusionistically painted wall as a porous boundary between human and other worlds. Mural connoisseur Duan Chengshi (c. 803–63) noted a number of examples in the Buddhist monasteries of the Tang capital at Chang’an, and remarked extensively upon the generally magical qualities of wall paintings and their tendency to create supernatural experiences for their viewers.12 Duan recounted one story of viewing a mural in which an associate critiqued its lack of “evocative resonance” (yiqu) relative to its “modeling force” (tishi).13 The man then shocked his colleagues by stepping into the painting and disappearing, and returned a while later saying that he only had time to improve only one portrait, which indeed now wore a different, more smiling expression. This boundary-crossing individual was only a connoisseur and amateur artist; in contrast, it was the professional muralist who was most able to create a magical wall painting that permitted access between worlds. Even when murals were produced with an emphasis on line and painting surface rather than on modeling and spatial recession, the elements of the wall and the artist were consistent features of the animating magic of the painting.

      The majority of such anecdotes surround the most famous professional Chinese muralist, Wu Daozi (also known as Wu Daoxuan, act. c. 710–60), and the vivifying power of his swirling style of ink lines, which survives only in textual descriptions.14 Recording Wu as a painter of the “Inspired Class, Top Grade,” the art historian Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815–77) commented that portable formats on silk were insufficient for him, and that only walls were spacious enough for his ideas. The famous poet Du Fu (712–70) further described his contemporary’s paintings as shaking the palace walls and even rotating the earth. In all cases, observers associated the combination of Wu’s abilities and specialization with supernatural qualities. Wu’s Buddhist hell cycles so terrified the capital’s butchers

      that some became vegetarians and took up less bloody livelihoods in the hope of avoiding the fate that the artist depicted. His dragons emitted mist and flew away off the painting surfaces, while his figures of the demon-queller Zhong Kui—first produced for no less than emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56) and pasted to the doors of all the houses in the empire—kept evil spirits at bay. Even the craggy rocks and rushing rivers of his landscapes seemed tangible and therefore real. While part of the critical discourse surrounding the assessments of any painter’s skills prioritized his ability to capture nature, during the Tang dynasty the discourse of perceived mural animation was intertwined with the alchemy of the large wall, the professional muralist, and pictorial styles that lent subjects mass, volume, and even life (or at least the appearance of it).

      Despite a significant textual record of illusionistic murals after the Tang dynasty, comparatively few have survived relative to the vast numbers of more portable paintings in scroll and album formats, and post-Tang murals have not received anywhere near as much historical or historiographical consideration. During the Northern Song dynasty, painting academy artists serving the Huizong emperor (r. 1101–25) are recorded to have produced murals as well as large screen paintings for imperial temples and palaces such as the Daoist Temple of the Shangqing Precious Registers (Shangqing Baolugong) and the emperor’s own Dragon Virtue Palace (Longdegong). Although none of these are extant, murals continued to be used in northern Chinese tombs from the Northern Song through Yuan dynasties, and might therefore suggest something of the appearance of palace murals when considered alongside portable court paintings from the period.15 The colorful, highly detailed painting style of the Northern Song court painting academy is considered realistic for its “lively and fluid” figures produced with “an organic sense of form in multidirectional movement, as part of a fully integrated, optically convincing space.”16 At the time, paintings by Northern Song masters were explicitly described as making the viewer feel as if actually in the place depicted.17 Providing a sense of how close these paintings came to achieving that impression are those in a Song tomb (figure 1.2) excavated at Dengfeng, Henan. Here, detailed foreshortened figures in different scenes on different walls engage the viewer from within simulated architectural settings treated with horizontal spatial recession

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