Page 37 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

the capital in very different circumstances. The grandson and protegé of Wang Shimin, he

was also a high official. After 1690, he spent the next twenty-five years in Beijing as the
part-time advisor in painting to Kangxi, and it was through his influence that the pictorial
language of cultural continuity came to take its place as the literati expression of Qing
dynasty orthodoxy. His own version of that abstract and intellectualized style was deeply
subtle: his landscapes are flexible structures which incorporate disjunctions without ever

risking instability (535). Given Wang Yuanqi's political career and his close ties to the
Emperor -- many of his works were painted in the imperial gardens -- one is justified in
noting the analogy his landscapes offer to Kangxi's cultural policy.

Father d'Entrecolles, writing of porcelain decoration at Jingdezhen, was able to say:
"All the skill of these painters and in general for all of the Chinese painters, is not founded on
any principle, and only consists in a certain routine helped by a limited turn of imagination.
They don't know any of the beautiful rules of this art". In fact, as we have seen, Chinese
painters had been aware of those "beautiful rules" since the end of the sixteenth century, and

had used them selectively throughout the seventeenth. In the special circumstances of the
Kangxi and Yongzheng courts, however, it was possible for painters to learn directly from
missionary-artists, as was the case for two Shandong artists, Jiao Bingzhen (active ca.1680-

1720) and his follower Leng Mei (active ca.1677-1742 or later). Characteristic of their
exploitation of perspective drawing within a Chinese framework, and of a whole class of
expressly political paintings, are Jiao's "Illustrations of Agriculture and Weaving", later
reworked by Leng Mei and by countless other artists at a lower level. The original 1696
illustrations by Jiao Bingzhen became the basis not only for the 1712 color-printed version

reproduced here (536), but also for decoration on ink-cakes, jade table screens and even
porcelain. In Confucian ideology, (male) agriculture and (female) weaving were the symbolic
basis of the state, and did indeed in their contemporary forms receive intense attention from

Kangxi. As a pictorial project, such paintings clearly allude to the propagandistic paintings of
dynastic revival sponsored by the Emperor Gaozong at the beginning of the Southern Song.
But it is entirely characteristic of Kangxi's patronage that they have been brought up to date
by a technological innovation.
The missionary-artists, meanwhile, hoping as always to find favor and influence with

China's rulers, developed their own version of a Sino-European style,. The man responsible
was Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), known in China as Lang Shining, who had joined the
Society of Jesus as a fully-trained painter, and had come to China in that same capacity in

1715. Although he was initially employed in the palace as an enameller, Castiglione (perhaps
following the lead of prior missionary artists such as Giovanni Gherardini who left China in
1704) must have already been adapting his painting to Chinese taste under Kangxi. His first