Page 49 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

artistic couple, epitomized by Luo Ping and Fang Wanyi (1732-79), but best known through

Shen Fu's early nineteenth century autobiographical novel Six Chapters from a Fugitive Life,
had firmly taken hold. It was against this background that painting by women became a
significant commercial phenomenon. In addition to women's self-affirmation, however, the
growing inability of educated men to ensure the livelihood of their families must also have
stimulated the entry of women into the painting market. On this level, women's painting can

be seen as a modernization of the ancient practice of selling woven and embroidered textiles
to make ends meet. There are, in fact, strong stylistic connections between the work of
certain women painters and textiles. The paintings of Ma Quan (active ca.1706-62), for

example, avoid the kinesthetic effects canonically defined as essential to good painting;
instead, she has laid the motifs carefully into place, fixing them with slow outlines and
unambiguous colors (560). Like so many of her colleagues in the microculture of women, she
pursued an effect of sensuality drained of eroticism.
Finally, in Guangzhou, sustained contact with Europe within the framework of a

changing economic relationship was creating a new culture in which Chinese identity itself
was implicated. Yangzhou's economic decline, paralleling that of the court, had already
begun by the 1770s; it was precisely around this time, however, that Guangzhou's economy

came to the fore. The merchants of the port city were protected from the decline of the court
as a market for Guangzhou "tribute" by the trade with Europe, which the Qing government
had restricted to Guangzhou alone in 1729. One of the direct effects which this had in the
visual arts was a proliferation of decorative workshops in Guangzhou itself. Some of these
specialized in the enamel decoration of porcelain, acquired in undecorated or semi-decorated

form from Jingdezhen. Enamels had now displaced underglaze blue as the preferred form of
decoration of European customers, and the presence of the porcelain decorators in the port
allowed them to maintain tighter control over their commissions. It was not until the early

nineteenth century that an industrialized European ceramic industry permitted them to
dispense with Chinese ceramics altogether. The Qianlong and Jiaqing periods, consequently,
were the heyday of decoration copying European designs, with armorial bearings and popular
prints leading the way (562). On the basis of this familiarity with European conventions, a
second type of workshop emerged which specialized in watercolor paintings, produced by a

semi-industrial process from templates designed by the master of the workshop (561). By the
late eighteenth century, the major genres of these often enormous sets had an anthropological
character. They satisfied a Western curiosity about life in China: its social structure, its

environment as known to Western visitors, the processes by which imports from China --
including ceramics and workshop paintings -- were produced. Their rhetoric of objectivity, as
much as their intended market, made the conventions of European realism a necessary