Page 21 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

with pictorial language as a way of apprehending the physical world. In this respect he

announces one of the major tendencies of late Ming painting.
A quite different direction -- painting as improvisation -- was pursued by the
Shaoxing artist Xu Wei (1521-93), building on the art of Chen Shun. Xu is also a major
figure in the histories of poetry and drama, where he engaged popular romantic forms and
themes, pushing them beyond their normal bounds. His later paintings consistently raise the

spectre of incoherence, even madness (507). This may, however, largely be an assumed
persona in the line of such Nanjing "fools" as Shi Zhong, and referable through his subjects -
- flowers, fruit, vegetables -- to the "mad Chan" tradition. It permitted him to work

transgressively, breaking down taboos: his inscriptions have strong sexual overtones, and
simply in visual terms his paintings retain their power to shock today. In sixteenth century
terms, the significance of Xu Wei's art may lie in its extreme public exposure of the private
realm. As such, it can be related to the new accessibility of inner architectural spaces, and to
other developments such as the emergence of women painters. Entrepreneurial culture

allowed a courtesan such as Ma Shouzhen (1548-1604) to market her female identity through
recognizable differences of style and iconography -- a particular fragility, the orchid as self-
image (507). Both as a painter and in her life as a Nanjing celebrity, she eroded the barriers

between the closeted space of women and the outer public space of men.

LATE WANLI TO CHONGZHEN (1590-1644)

By the 1590s at latest one can speak of a new stage of development. One change is

quantifiable: many more places were involved in the production of art objects, giving rise to
greater variety. Another change involved a shift of attitudes or mentality -- an increasing self-
consciousness of which irony became one of the principal expressions. A third change was

sociological. The art of the court was becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from
that of the rest of the elite society. From its role as the dominant art patron of the fifteenth
century, the court was now reduced to little more than another, albeit special market.
The Spread of Luxury. Although literati art had already emerged earlier in the
sixteenth century as a central component of entrepreneurial culture, it was only in this late

Ming period that it took a leading role in decorative arts through the phenomenon known
today as "scholar's taste". Objects for the scholar's studio, for contemplation or use in
conjunction with writing and reading, enjoyed a relatively stable and conservative history

from the Song to the early Ming, when they epitomized a restrained literati aesthetic. But as
they became divorced from their original social context, and at the same time took on a