Page 48 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

Qianlong's idealized cosmology, as Cao Xueqin (1715?-1763) had done too in his great novel

of life in an aristocratic mansion, The Dream of the Red Chamber.
In Beijing, Luo Ping was most closely involved with scholar-officials serving in the
Hanlin Academy. Publicly, these men were committed to implementing Qianlong's literary
policy, which allowed not a breath of opposition to the Manchus, to the point of having
books proscribed. Privately, however, they were deeply engaged in an alternative culture of

empirical historical inquiry that sought to establish the reality of the distant cultural past on
new, more secure foundations. On the safe ground of remote history, they were able to create
an intellectual world from which ideology was banished by the cult of evidence. At the centre

of this intellectual movement was jinshixue, the collection and study of ancient inscriptions,
inscribed on archaic bronzes or engraved on stelae, which provided a body of archaeological
evidence only partially exploited by earlier scholars. This provided the context for a renewal
of calligraphy itself based on familiarity with these examples of ancient script types. In fact,
jinshixue had already had an effect on calligraphy and the related art of seal-carving as early

as the late seventeenth century. Both Bada shanren and Shitao experimented widely in the
1690s and 1700s; more important, however, was the Nanjing calligrapher Zheng Fu (1622-
93). Zheng's style of clerical script based on Eastern Han rubbings influenced Shitao, and

later Gao Fenghan (1683-1748) and Zheng Xie (1693-1765) in Yangzhou. Jin Nong,
meanwhile, approximated the styles of both stone inscriptions (as in his inscription to the
horse painting) and lacquer-inscribed bamboo strips. But it took the special pressures of the
late eighteenth century to popularize this shift from the historical transmission of the tradition
toward the archaeological approach. Deng Shiru (1743-1805) based his seal script style on

rubbings taken from Han tomb inscriptions. The severity of the script, a standard feature of
jinshixue calligraphy, is mitigated by the relaxed execution and the constant surprises which
he introduces; the detour of primitivism turns out to be the means to authenticity. That

authentic self-expression was indeed the issue was made more explicit in the work of Yi
Bingshou (1754-1815), whose structural experiments differ more obviously from his models
in order to attain highly personal and daring images (560).
The jinshixue movement in calligraphy was pursued through a nationwide network of
officials and the local scholars whom they encouraged. By contrast, the networks of women

artists were necessarily localized. Several interlocking developments had transformed
women's engagement in cultural life in the eighteenth century. All over China, poetry
societies were set up by and for women, and prominent male poets such as Yuan Mei often

took on female students. Women now commonly taught painting to the children of the
extended family, male and female. Li Shan was only one of a number of eighteenth century
male artists who had his first instruction in painting from a woman. Finally, the idea of the