Week Four: April 19 Whose Writing is Worth Treasuring?

The social and political processes shaping artistic preference. Taste as a disputed matter: court versus literati taste. The case of the Song and Yuan periods.

Guest Speaker: Amy McNair, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Kansas

Assignments:

Revisit exhibition, with special attention to the calligraphy by Wang Xizhi, Yan Zhenqing, Huang Tingjian, Mi Fu, and Zhao Mengfu.

Attend Saturday April 21 symposium at Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Read: *Ronald Egan, "Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih on Calligraphy," Harvard

Journal of Asiatic Studies 49 (1989), 365-419.

*Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing's Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics, chapters 1, 2, 4, 7.

*Richard Barnhart, review of Amy McNair, The Upright Brush, CAA Reviews [online].

Eugene Wang, "The Taming of the Shrew: Wang Hsi-chih (303-361) and Calligraphic Gentrification in the Seventh Century," in Character and Context, 132-73.

Recommended further reading:

Peter Sturman, Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China.

Lothar Ledderose, Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy.

Amy McNair, The Upright Brush (remaining chapters).

Stephen J. Goldberg, "Court Calligraphy of the Early Tang Dynasty," Artibus Asiae 49 (1988-89), 189-237.

Questions for study and discussion

Ronald Egan, "Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih on Calligraphy"

1. When did the tradition of collecting inscribed bronzes and stelae begin? When did the process of taking rubbings from these begin, when did it first become a common practice, and what were the early reasons for its popularity?

2. In the Song period, what linkage would you describe between the popular practice of gathering antiquities, the adherence to ancient-prose (gu wen) style culture, and a self-conscious awareness of the place of Song in cultural history?

3. Why do you think was Su Shi an "eclectic" in his calligraphic tastes? (397) How did he perceive the relationship between calligraphic style and moral personality?

4. What is the significance of "non-attachment" or "lodging" in Song thinking about calligraphy? If this, at root, was a Daoist or Buddhist philosophical notion, did Confucianism (or neo-Confucianism) bring a different attitude to bear, more oriented toward moral presence rather than emotional balance?

5. How do you understand the difference between seeing character in a person’s calligraphy and seeing his feelings? Was this difference significant to Ouyang Xiu or Su Shi?

6. Why was Su Shi comfortable writing with a slanted brush but not with advocating the use of the slanted brush?

Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing's Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics

1. In what ways do you think that McNair's work goes beyond what is already present in Egan's?

2. Historians regularly face difficulties seeing a person in terms of the social and cultural context of his own time when the sources for him have been filtered through later generations who used him for their own purposes. In the case of Yan Zhenqing, we do not have his own testimony on the meaning of his calligraphic style or the choices he saw open to him, but we have a great deal of critical literature from the Song concerning the meaning of his style. How successful do you think McNair was in keeping Song interpretations out of her analysis of Yan’s artistic choices?

3. What is McNair’s strongest evidence of a gulf between court and literati taste in calligraphy in Song times? Consider the case of Cai Xiang, discussed on pp. 132 ff.

4. Why would Ouyang Xiu’s off-hand comments on the calligraphy of rubbings of stone inscriptions collected primarily for their historical value have much effect on critical standards in calligraphy, given that there were other critical writings much more directly on calligraphy as an art, such as those by Zhu Changwen and Mi Fu?

5. If blandness is valued in calligraphy, how does one distinguish between bland calligraphy worth treasuring and the routine bland calligraphy that most scholars used in their everyday work?

6. McNair will be joining us for this class, and there may be an opportunity to ask her to explain in more detail something you did not find clear in her book. Look especially at her analysis of particular pieces of calligraphy. Were you ever uncertain what she meant when she described a character as stable, dynamic, or the like?

Richard Barnhart, review of Amy McNair, The Upright Brush

1. Barnhart suggests, first, that Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, and Huang Tingjian's preference for Yan Zhenqing over Wang Xizhi failed to carry the day. (1) He suggests, next, that Ouyang and Su actually contributed to a Song dynasty decline in calligraphy, by following narrowly moral rather than visually inventive standards. (2) Are these two assertions consistent or contradictory?

2. Barnhart distinguishes between writing about calligraphy and actual practice. Is it credible that a given individual's practice of calligraphy will contradicthis writing about it, or vice-versa? Barnhart also asserts that most Song literati "knew nothing of art ... and took no interest in it." Do you find this assertion persuasive?

Eugene Wang, "The Taming of the Shrew: Wang Hsi-chih (303-361) and Calligraphic Gentrification in the Seventh Century"

1. Eugene Wang describes the classic view of Wang Xizhi's calligraphy as "formally condens[ing], or stylistically sublimat[ing], a deep-seated Chinese moral sensibility school in a Confucian culture." (133) Lothar Ledderose's article, "Some Taoist Elements," on the other hand, described Wang and his art in terms of occult Daoist practice, while Ron Egan and Amy McNair contrasts Wang's fashionable distance from political engagement with Yan Zhenqing's deep moral commitment (their calligraphic reputations imbued with these moral overtones). So who was the real Wang Xizhi? Has Eugene Wang set up his initial formulation correctly here? Does either a Confucian or a Daoist theory of emotions preclude or stigmatize the overt expression of grief?

2. Historically, if different critics can look at Wang Xizhi's calligraphy and see such varied (and inconsistent!) things happening in it as those which Eugene Wang documents, what does this tell us about the capacity of calligraphy to embody and convey a sense of individual personality, temperament, or personal morality? What are the implications of this for art history? How would you relate this to Su Shi's concerns about these questions, as described by Egan (399-401)?