Imperial Illusions - Kristina Kleutghen Art History Publication Initiative Books

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semiotic frames that are not immediately visible also affect the paintings and their meanings.55 Scenic illusions were influenced as much by Qing imperial culture as they were by the literature, political events, artistic trends, and popular interests of

      eighteenth-century China, and by the expanding world it was encountering. The aesthetics of illusion inherent in these works is characteristic of Qianlong’s interests, but is also part of a much larger empire-wide trend that predated his reign. Qianlong’s personal interest in Western artistic ideas was fueled as much by the artists at his court as by foreign objects acquired via trade in the port of Guangzhou (Canton), diplomatic gifts that nations from around the world regularly offered as tribute, and occidentalizing works produced domestically by Chinese artisans to meet the popular demand for such things, which extended far outside the court.56 Scenic illusions are therefore not an isolated aberration in the narrative of Chinese painting, or a breakdown in the global spread of Renaissance perspective, but the most impressive and dynamic illustrations of how Chinese visual and material culture were evolving in response to a constellation of period trends.

      Scenic illusion paintings therefore cross multiple boundaries in Chinese art. Most simply, they cross the physical boundaries of the painting surface and the supporting wall, and thereby those between illusion and reality. Historically and historiographically, they also challenge the supposed purity of Chinese painting and the previous scholarly avoidance of deeply probing works that obviously incorporated European ideas, crossing the boundary between East and West in art history. Earlier characterizations of Chinese works of art that visibly integrated European ideas often criticized them as products of “European influence,” and therefore unworthy of study, although that approach has recently changed dramatically.57 Scenic illusions might seem to fall within a third, Sino-European or “intercultural” space of inquiry that exists somewhere between Chinese and Western art history.58 Yet even that assessment distances them from the overarching narrative of Chinese art history, which has long since integrated earlier works with elements from India, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, but is still negotiating the role of Western incorporations before the fall of the imperial system in 1911. Instead of occupying some nebulous third space, therefore, as complex products of the multicultural Qing court scenic illusions should be considered a new evolutionary moment in Chinese painting, which has never been purely Chinese. The many boundaries that scenic illusions cross demonstrate the need to continue broadening the very definition of Chinese painting, mandating a revised narrative that places the Qing dynasty generally, and the eighteenth century specifically, in a more prominent position within the history of Chinese art.

      1.1Lotus Sutra tableau, south wall, Cave 217, Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, early eighth century.

      From Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, plate 5.

      ONE

      Painted Walls and Pictorial Illusions

      EARLY CHINESE RESPONSES TO EXAMPLES OF PICTORIAL ILLUSIONISM intended to deceive are strikingly similar to the tropes in the European tradition. Just as Zeuxis fooled a bird into thinking his painted grapes were real, Xu Mao (act. mid-third century) painted a perch so realistic that it lured a raft of rare white otters into capture for King Cao Rui (r. 226–39) of the state of Cao Wei.1 As Zeuxis himself was fooled by Parrhasius, Xun Xu (?–289) chose to repay a practical joke by painting a figure of the prankster’s deceased grandfather on a wall of the man’s new house. Xun rendered the ancestor so convincingly that the man and his siblings, certain they saw a ghost, abandoned the house in terror. After accidentally dropping his brush onto the white silk of a screen painting for the Wu Kingdom ruler Sun Quan (c. third century), Cao Buxing (act. third century) cleverly transformed the splattered ink dots into a fly. The result was so realistic that the king himself was fooled and tried to brush the fly off the surface of the screen. More than a thousand years later, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, the addition of an illusionistic fly or a bee rendered so skillfully that the viewer would try to brush it away from the surface of the painting became a particularly popular device. Even when mentioned in literature, this addition that was otherwise unrelated to the painting evoked illusionistic skill in the tradition of Zeuxis and Parrhasius.2

      This scant cluster of third-century responses is all the evidence that remains of Xu Mao, Xun Xu, Cao Buxing, and their works. Yet even these three anecdotes begin to

      demonstrate the presence and power of successfully deceptive pictorial illusionism in Chinese painting well in advance of European contact and the later introduction of perspectival illusionism. Long before scenic illusions were affixed to Qing imperial walls, deceptively illusionistic murals occupied an important historical position in Chinese painting. Therefore, tracing the history of this type of painting and responses to it contextualizes scenic illusion paintings within the much larger narrative of Chinese painting rather than isolating them. Specifically, ideas about illusionistic painting were significantly shaped by literati criticism of trained technique and realistic depiction in paintings produced for popular consumption as inferior to the originality and spontaneity of paintings produced for self-expression. Thus, when European paintings began to circulate in China during the late sixteenth century, elite aesthetic responses to them were nuanced by this discourse into something more than simply reactions to foreignness. Amid the literati-driven “cultural politics of the brushstroke” that arose in response to the challenges of European representational modes, however,3 not only were these new imported styles and techniques approved of at the imperial level, but even the most dismissive critics could not deny the deceptive power of the foreign techniques. Tracing this trajectory into the Kangxi reign frames the late imperial introduction of European illusionistic painting within both the long history of Chinese paintings and the shorter High Qing era of Sino-European artistic engagement vis-à-vis the missionary artists at court, which together created the diverse pictorial environment in which scenic illusion paintings would develop in the late 1720s.

      The Rise and Fall of Murals

      Textual sources record the presence of illusionistic murals inside palaces and public spaces from at least the Western Han through Yuan dynasties, but the relatively few extant examples (compared to the innumerable portable paintings) are found almost exclusively in religious and mortuary contexts.4 Within these liminal spaces of supernatural contact and otherworldly access, tomb and temple murals demonstrate how large architectural surfaces could be transformed into permeable membranes connecting the human and suprahuman realms. Over the centuries, a consistent visual language of supernatural motifs in these murals helped transform walls into the borders between the mundane and magical worlds.5 The persistent presence of murals in early and medieval tombs marks the paintings as essential to conceptualizing the overall space and purpose of the tomb: murals complete the relationship between tomb occupant(s), material contents, and spatial layout to create a fully realized mortuary world that was distinct from the human realm.6 Tomb murals were, however, primarily produced for the dead. With the renewed interest in Daoism and the rise of Buddhism among the tumultuous fragmentation of post-Han medieval China, the emphasis on the supernatural and otherworldly in murals expanded aboveground to temples and cave grottoes, which were firmly situated within the realm of the living.7

      As the primary mode of decoration in medieval Buddhist temples and cave grottoes, murals visualized the narratives and events described in sutras as ways to achieve enlightenment, and presented detailed visions of accessible afterlife paradises populated by seemingly three-dimensional deities. Buddhism, with its practices of conflating reality and illusion, reconciling the

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