Creating through Copying: Materia Medica, Women Painters, and Late Ming Culture

Abstract

In the late Ming, illustrated materia medica works became increasingly salient among educated elites in the Jiangnan area. This article analyzes two hand-illustrated treatises, Jinshi kunchong caomu zhuang and Bencao tupu, and the cultural contexts of their production. The interplays between copying and editing and image-text relationships in the two works provide insight into how materia medica was exploited as a pictorial subject for ideas about the human-nature dynamic. I demonstrate that materia medica images represented symbolic possession of the natural world and thus served as a maker of social distinction. I also shed light on the perpetuated tradition of making images of materia medica as an intellectual practice. My examinations of materia medica images by women artists also challenge the correlations between gender and representations of flora and fauna in the historiography of Chinese paintings.