Page 36 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

traced to Buddhist metalwork when they are not purely modern innovations. They imply a

conception of decoration and contemplation free of literati baggage.
Even further removed from Chinese tradition were the "extraordinary objects", qiqi,
in an Europeanizing style which were one of the main products of the workshops in the
palace. After 1680 Kangxi vastly expanded the operations of the workshop organization
[Zaobanchu], each workshop [zuo] specializing in a different technique: enamels, lacqering,

jade-carving, glass-making, etc. During the Yongzheng reign, the Emperor's brother, Prince
Yi, managed both the Zaobanchu in the Forbidden City and a second one established at the
Garden of Perfect Brightness. Of the two emperors, Kangxi was the one most deeply

fascinated by Western technology and ideas, and it was under his impetus that technically
and artistically skilled missionaries and secular artisans were brought into the palace
workshops. Through the Jesuit missions, moreover, Kangxi received many European objects
as diplomatic gifts. Kangxi appears to have seen the workshops as a means of demonstrating
symbolically his dynasty's technological superiority, not only in relation to earlier Chinese

dynasties, but also in relation to the rest of the contemporary world. He used their products as
political gifts in both domestic and diplomatic contexts. The desire to match wits with
Europe, as much as the presence of European artisans, may explain the initial development of

a Europeanizing or sino-European style. Enamelling seems to have played a key role,
perhaps because it could be used on objects of different materials: metals, glass and porcelain
(532). The enamel workshops may also have benefited from the fact that the outstanding
missionary artist, Giuseppe Castiglione, worked there in both the Kangxi and Yongzheng
periods. In time, the sino-European style became an important court fashion, perhaps

attractive to the Manchus for its very difference from Chinese taste.
As might be expected in such a culturally active period, an enormous number of
painters were active at court, though there was not yet a formal painting academy. An early

breakthrough came in 1690, with the arrival in the capital of the other two of the "Four
Wangs", Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715) and Wang Hui (1632-1717). Wang Hui was a career
painter of extraordinary talent, who pursued a life-long project of a "great synthesis" of what
might crudely be called the Song illusionistic and Yuan expressionistic traditions. His
encyclopaedic mastery of traditional pictorial craft, which owed much to his access to the

collections of Wang Shimin and others, was perfectly in tune with Kangxi's technical bent.
He had been invited to Beijing to take charge of the project of documenting the Emperor's
triumphant southern tour of inspection in 1689, an event which consecrated Kangxi's success

(534-35). The success of this painting commission -- twelve huge handscrolls on silk,
completed over a period of seven years, by a team of several painters -- in turn consecrated
Wang Hui in the eyes of official culture as China's greatest painter. Wang Yuanqi came to