Page 178 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

is another case of the same; both responses betray
limitations not in the art but in the observer, who
infers sameness from his own failure to perceive, or
Ofat least to properly evaluate, difference. course
Chinese painting appears to have had no
development if the later ones appear no different
from the early ones.
Also accounting in some part for this phenomenon
is the insistence of many of the Chinese painters
themselves, in inscriptions on their works, that they
are "imitating" some old master: taken literally, such
inscriptions would indeed attest to derivativeness.
But to accept such statements at face value would
be equivalent to charging T. S. Eliot with being
derivative because he claims in a certain passage to
be "imitating" Chaucer. When one looks beyond
the inscriptions to compare the paintings
themselves with their putative models, it is
immediately obvious that the old style is usually no
more than a frame of reference, a jumping-off point
for formal explorations that can be as original as
any in painting. All art, in some sense, imitates other
art; the Chinese have simply recognized and
institutionalized such derivation and made it more
self-conscious, more a matter of deliberate and
sophisticated allusion than Western artists generally
have, at least until very recent times.
Even after we have recognized all these reasons for
the derogation of later Chinese painting, however,
we must admit and come to terms with certain
elements of truth that underlie the perceptions of
repetitiveness. It is generally true (with exceptions,
as always) that later Chinese artists were more open
in their reliance on established convention and
insisted less on direct observation of the world than
Western artists of the same period usually did. One
must quickly add, however, that the best of them
accomplished such creative and even radical
manipulations of the conventions that, again, the
outcomes can scarcely be seen as any real loss of
originality. It can also be argued that after the end
of the Song dynasty in the late thirteenth century
no clear, unilinear development can be observed in
Chinese painting, in the sense of successive
advances in representational techniques, or in
pervasive stylistic shifts like those defined by the old
—art historians for European painting from
Medieval to early to high to late Renaissance,
Baroque to Rococo to Romantic to Modern.
But granting this need not carry any implication
that Chinese painting ceased to be innovative. It
might, alternatively, be argued that the great global
—shifts took place earlier in China that their
equivalent of the Giotto-to-Gauguin phase
happened between the Tang and Yuan dynasties
(i.e., between the eighth and fourteenth
—centuries) and ended sooner, so that the Chinese
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
arrived in their painting, long before we did, at "the
end of the history of art." This is not the place to
make that argument at length, nor am I the person
to make it; an unpublished book by James Elkins,
entitled "Chinese Landscape Painting as Object
Lesson" (1995) presents an interesting case for this
large and highly controversial proposal, in terms
with which I am generally in agreement. In any
case, leaving aside particulars of argument, this is
the direction in which any real understanding of
later Chinese painting's "failure to develop" must be
charted out. Instead of, in effect, writing off later
Chinese painting as attractive but more or less
irrelevant to our own artistic concerns, we might
better look to it for ways out of what may seem
perilously like an end-game situation (Elkins s term,
adopted from chess and Duchamp). A tradition that
folds so insistently back on itself, that comes to be
caught up in such a potentially paralyzing
engagement with its own past, obliges its artists to
devise stratagems for escaping repetition and
stagnation. An account of Ming and Qing
— —painting a non-history, it might be called could
be constructed around the successive stratagems
that were devised to this end, both by individual
masters and within particular movements and
schools. Such an account would acknowledge some
of these stratagems to have been relatively
—conservative the disciplined, somewhat
intellectualized uses of old styles by such Ming
masters as Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming, for
instance; it would recognize others, such as the
brilliant transformations of older pictorial materials
carried out by the Individualist masters of the
seventeenth century, as radical, even revolutionary.
Most of all, such an account would recognize that
critical theorizing, in writings that are sophisticated
and often contentious, affected the later practice of
Chinese painting much as such theorizing has
affected the recent practice of painting in the West.
QmgMany of the Ming and artists, along with
their scholar-critic contemporaries, argued
vehemently and interestingly tor this or that
position on what the artist should paint and how,
drawing their arguments from a diversity of
—grounds aesthetic, philosophical, moral, political,
economic. In both traditions, the artists themselves
might talk themselves into corners. But proponents
of established ideologies could also make
—moralizing judgments Confucian or Marxist or
—other proclaiming certain kinds of painting to be
low-class or inauthentic or otherwise unacceptable,
thus effectively shutting off broad ranges of options
that artists might otherwise have found viable and
fruitful. Or, if they did not manage to shut them off
completely, at least they made them difficult and
unrewarding to pursue, so that those who pursued
them risked, and usually incurred, critical
condemnation. No artistic dilemma could resonate
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