Week Five: April 24 Calligraphy and the Literati Arts (Session on TUESDAY)

Literati as calligraphers, connoisseurs, and collectors. Access issues: Who gets to see what forms of calligraphy? The market for calligraphy. Calligraphy compared to painting as a literati art form. Book arts and the impact of printing on calligraphy. The case of the Ming period.

Guest Speaker: Qianshen Bai, Assistant Professor of Art History, Boston University. Talk on Late Ming Cultural Life and Calligraphy: Handscroll/Album in Assorted Scripts

Assignments:

Revisit exhibit, paying particular attention to the Ming dynasty calligraphy

Read: *Qianshen Bai, "Calligraphy for Negotiating Everyday Life: The Case of Fu Shan (1607-1684)," Asia Major, 12 (1999), 67-125.

Chuan-hsing Ho, “Ming Dynasty Soochow and the Golden Age of Literati Culture,” in The Embodied Image, pp. 320-41.

*Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber, pp. 31-41.

*Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style, pp. 11-15.

Recommended further reading:

*Shane McCausland, “Private Lives, Relics of Callligraphy by Zhao Mengfu,

Guan Daosheng, and their Children,” Oriental Art 46 (2000), 38-47.

Questions for reading and discussion

Qianshen Bai

1. For what cultural and social reasons do you suppose Fu Shan, like Gu Yanwu and others of his colleagues, became interested in ancient examples of clerical script and in epigraphy in general?

2. Evaluate the example of Fu Shan's calligraphy in the Elliott collection in terms of the social standards for production set forth in Bai's article.

3. Given the enhancement of Fu Shan's reputation by his stance as a Ming loyalist, how would you compare his work and his reputation with that of Chen Hongshou and Wang Duo, also included in the Elliott collection?

4. Of the various aspects of "gift" (yingchou) calligraphy described here, which of them seem already to be of long-standing practice, which of them seem to be new at this time, and which seem to be most "modern" in terms of future practice?

5. Although Bai contrasts Fu Shan as a "professional amateur" with those artists who were wholly professional and nothing more, he does not discuss the latter in much detail here. Lacking "cultural capital," how would you imagine those artists' professional lives to have differed from one like Fu Shan's? And who were those "professional" calligraphers, after all?

Chuan-hsing Ho

1. On p. 321 and later Ho refers to the “chancellery style” of calligraphy used by scribes employed by the court to copy documents in a small regular script modeled on that of Wang Xizhi. He views this style as ossified, something for calligraphy critics to scorn. Do you imagine a sharp distinction between calligraphers concerned with artistic expression and scribes employed to keep neat records for court archives? Or would there have been a continuum from one to the other? Where would the personal letters of literati who took no particular pride in the calligraphy fall? What about formal memorials and petitions written by officials as part of their official duties?

2. We learned last week that Song calligraphers, such as Mi Fu, made great efforts to collect calligraphy of the Tang and earlier, especially of Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi. Ho tells us that Shen Zhou collected mainly the works of the Four Masters of the Song (Cai Xiang, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, and Mi Fu). What does this tell us?

3. On page 337, Ho interprets “tendons” (sinews) as brushwork, “bones” as composition, and “flesh” as ink. How do these interpretations mesh with your understanding of the points John Hay was making in his article?