Past, Present, and Future in the Imaginary of Song Painting

Abstract

Arthistorical citation is one among several aspects of temporal orientation involving painting of the Song dynasty (960– 1279). Historiographic formulations, modern and historical, variously point to divisions between the Song and later eras of painting, recognitions of the new, and movement toward endpoints of development. Song court paintings may reference presentand futuredirected inaugurations, omen events, and dynastic legacies. Poetic paintings from many Song social arenas often convey passage through time and place. Song scholarofficials directly engaged the problematic of making painting poetic, producing complexly intermingled sequences of imagery and texts, of viewing and reading experiences, and of time, memory, and history within an aesthetic of indeterminacy. Discussions of arthistorical citation in painting of the Song dynasty (960– 1279) open onto broader questions of temporal orientation, both in historiographic discourse and in Song painting practices.1 The following notes explore three arenas of temporality in Song painting, beginning with a consideration of historiographic accounts and images of Songera painting, modern and historical, and evidence of historical consciousness in Song art writing. Examples of past, present, and futuredirectedness, primarily in Song court or dynastic painting, are followed by an account of issues of time, sequence, and experience implicated in poetrypainting conjunctions associated with Song scholarofficial or literati culture. Historiographic Imaginaries Max Loehr famously and aphoristically characterized Song painting in the following terms: “The Song painter, using his style as a tool, tackles the problem of how to depict mountains and water; the Yuan painter, using mountain and water as his media, tackles the problem of creating a style.”2 A few things must be noted, and probably questioned, about even so concise a formulation: the understanding of Song and Yuan (1279– 1368) as coherent, legible units, or objects of arthistorical analysis; the reduction of Song and Yuan painting at large to landscape painting; the interest in style and representation; and the problem/linkedsolution– centered The online version of this article includes digital features that enhance the print version. 62 ARS Orientalis 49 terminology that we might relate to theorists such as E.H. Gombrich and George Kubler in the period when Loehr was writing.3 In such ways we might historicize art history. We certainly could address the limitations of such formulations, whether by recognizing the continuities between Song and Yuan painting or by complicating the component elements of analysis, including not just landscape painting but also other modes and genres— BuddhistDaoist, courtlydynastic, scholarofficial— at the very least. We should also acknowledge, however, that some unitary conception of Song painting is not just a modern arthistorical or pedagogical construct. Such a conception appears in late imperial art discourses, as when Orthodoxschool painters and critics discuss the achievement of Great Synthesis (da cheng 大成) as some joining of conceptualized Song and Yuan qualities. To quote the version of this formulation by Wang Hui 王翬 (1632– 1717): “I must use the brush and ink of the Yuan to move the peaks and valleys of the Song, and infuse them with the qiyun breathresonance of the Tang [618– 907]. I shall then have a work of the Great Synthesis.”4 What Wang Hui meant by those dynastic/categorical terms was perhaps not so distant from Loehr’s understanding: some respective sense of Song representational primacy and Yuan formal/stylistic elements predominating (leaving the Tang aside in this context). As discussed in a recent study by Chenghua Wang, a related notion of the transition from Song to Yuan as a pivotal arthistorical point of division, with Song painting associated with a form of realism and Yuan painting with personal expression, also operated widely in the discourse of early twentiethcentury art and cultural politics.5 While the precise terms of period characterization might differ from era to era, the Song and postSong divide, to state it more broadly, does continue to operate in Chinesepainting studies at least on a macro level, with arthistorical art falling mostly on the postSong side of the divide. What is most commonly meant by postSong arthistorical painting is primarily rhetorical or dialectical uses of artistic identity or school formations outside the immediate environment of production, which can be combined, juxtaposed, or counterposed to form pictorial statements or positions that can be variously about art history itself, the formal elements of painting, or the values of interest groups or social classes. Even so broad a characterization risks downplaying significant strains of arthistorical painting in the Song. We can observe briefly, to reference several wellstudied cases, that some kinds of Song arthistorical art were conservative in the sense of reproductive (Huizong 宋徽宗, r. 1100– 1126, Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk; after Gu Hongzhong 顧閎中, 937– 975, Night Revels of Han Xizai), or were citational (Li Gonglin 李公麟, 1049– 1106, Pasturing Horses, after Wei Yan of the Tang), or at other times archaistic with rhetorical import (Qiao Zhongchang 喬仲常, active early 12th century, Illustration of Su Shi’s Latter ProsePoem on the Red Cliff; Li Gonglin, Mountain Dwelling), among other variants, the full range of which is obscured by the proportionally massive losses from the Song painting corpus. Indeed the very diversity of Song arthistorical painting, even in its fragmentary survivals, also may serve as a reminder that the analytical, rhetorical, or intellectual arthistorical painting of the Yuan and after was only one side of a broader and equally arthistorical painting that could range from continuations of inherited school practices to adept reproductions of old paintings, to the historical fabrications of the Suzhou pian 蘇州片 (Suzhou forgeries), which in their own way were allusive recombinations of old styles.6 We might think of these in vernacular terms as hard and soft versions of art historicism— relatively rigorous and deliberate on one side, relatively passively imitative on the other. Both the practice of arthistorical reference in painting and historical consciousness pervaded the Song in court and scholarofficial circles alike. Importantly, the Song was an era of