Page 31 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

policy for the arts, and intellectual responses to the trauma of the Manchu conquest were at

their strongest. Artistically, this period appears very much as the aftermath of the Ming.
The Qing took over the Ming palace complexes in Beijing and Nanjing, leaving them
essentially unchanged at first, except in the names and functions of buildings. Their previous
palace in Shenyang, the Qing capital from 1625 to 1644, had been modelled on the palaces
that were now their own. A portrait of the Kangxi emperor from the 1670s belongs in a sense

to the late Ming world (522): grasping a mother-of-pearl inlaid brush, as if to write one of the
large character calligraphies for which he is known, he sits at an ornate lacquer table, its
decoration incised and then filled in with gilding. Judging by later Kangxi documents, such

objects may have found their way to the court on an ad hoc basis, sent in as tribute (though
they were probably purchased, at least in part) by local government officials. In the case of
ceramics, orders did go out to Jingdezhen from the beginning of the dynasty, but on a limited
scale. As late as the early 1670s a distinct group of wares marked for use in the Hall of
Central Harmony in the palace, employed the decorative vocabulary of late Ming ceramics

drawn from painting and book illustration. In fact, pre-1680 ceramics are so close in
character to those of the Tianqi and Chongzhen reigns that the sixty years from ca. 1620 to
ca. 1680 are treated in Western literature on Chinese ceramics as a single "Transitional"

period between two longer periods of strong state involvement.
There were a number of significant artists among the scholar-officials who served the
Manchus at this early date, including Wang Duo who served as President of the Board of
Rites. But one who found his artistic direction in these particular circumstances was Cheng
Zhengkui (1604-76), a protegé of Dong Qichang. Cheng is best known today for a series of

numbered landscape handscrolls, entitled "dream journeys", which eventually ran into the
hundreds (524-25). He began the series in 1649, shortly after returning to government in
Beijing under the Manchus, and continued with it after his retirement in 1657. According to

one of his own inscriptions, he initially intended the scrolls for fellow southerners serving at
the capital, which at this point was culturally rather barren. Visually they refer to the
landscape of south China as formulated by the masters of Dong Qichang's "Southern"
tradition. On one level they articulate an experience of exile, but on another they may be read
metaphorically as a defense of the decision to collaborate. They speak of cultural continuity

in the name of orthodoxy, their infinite permutations of structure bringing the world into a
reasuringly stable order.
It was another protegé of Dong Qichang, however, who created a more viable

pictorial language of cultural continuity. Wang Shimin (1592-1680) was a major landowner
in the Taicang area of Jiangsu who, like his father and grandfather before him, had served in
the Ming central government. After the fall of the Ming he avoided taking office again, and