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paintings do not feature porcelain as the primary subject matter. Instead, they portray

scenes of daily life relevant for a certain strata of society - the elite, educated men for

whom ceramic objects were used or displayed in social practices such as burial rites or

dining.

Also notable in the history of ceramics in visual media are paintings produced

during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1644). Contrasted with paintings that depict

ceramics in their various use contexts, Ming and Qing dynasty paintings depicting

ceramics in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries fall under the general rubric of

bird-and-flower paintings. As is well known, this genre had its origins with the

development of the Northern Song dynasty court painting academy under Emperor

Huizong (1101-1125). In the Ming and Qing dynasties, bird-and-flower paintings found

resurgence in painters’ artistic practice. Through exchanges between the Ming court

painters and Ming loyalists who painted in the wake of the Manchu conquest of their

dynasty and subsequent establishment of the royal court of the Qing dynasty, this genre

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of bird-and-flower was the epitome of scholar-amateur ink paintings. Some well

known examples of paintings portraying ceramics are attributed to the extreme

expressionist painters such as Bada Shanrenɞɽʆɛ , whose real name was Zhu Daϡ

ᯋ , and Dao ji֡᏶ (Zhu Ruojiϡ߰฽), also known as Shi Taoͩᏹ , active between the

years 1626 and 1705, and 1642 and 1707, respectively. Bada Shanren and Shi Tao’s

paintings have been analyzed as reflective of a modern subjectivity on the part of artists’

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self-consciousness and alienation. They are significant for bringing to prominence the

material qualities of the nuances in the glazed surfaces or ceramic shapes in visual

representation. In these paintings, the decorative and aesthetic qualities of ceramics