Contemporary Chinese Art. Academia. Fried Chicken. Terracotta warriors.

I met SY at the art bloggers’ party the other night; she’s a friend of MY’s. Coincidentally enough, it turns out we both wrote our M.A. theses on the same subject: Chinese artist Yue Minjun (he of the bald, pink, grinning figures). Over a ginormous dish of Korean fried chicken, SY was bemoaning the fact that, in hindsight, there’s so much she would have done differently.

Boy, do I know the feeling …

It got me to thinking about my thesis-writing experience. Mostly I tend to be my own harshest critic, but, oddly enough, those couple of months of my life weren’t all stress and hair-pulling frustration. Don’t me wrong, a lot of it was, but at the end of it I actually … kinda liked the final product.

Oddly enough.

For me.

Anyways. So the ACM is currently hosting Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor and His Legacy, where a small number of the famous terracotta figures from the Emperor Qin’s army are on loan from Xi’an. Eight of them, to be exact. Yue’s work – and that of Fang Lijun‘s, the other artist I wrote about in my thesis – have much in common with the so-called First Emperor’s funerary legions, and I devoted a short portion of my work to exploring these areas of confluence, along with a brief excursus into Peircean semiotics.

Thought I’d give it a bit of an airing out here.

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The Semiotics of Repetition: Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun and the Qin Terracotta Warriors

Apropos of his work, Yue Minjun has observed:

In the year of 246 BC, the first Emperor of Qing [sic] Dynasty built a huge tomb for himself. Thousands of warrior figures, chariots and other things were buried in this colossal and gloomy underground kingdom. These warriors all wear a similar expression, serious and stiff.[1]

Critics have likewise noted the structural resemblance between Yue’s constantly reiterated figures and the terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇:

These soldiers, created according to a standardized criterion and fired from hard clay, were taller than real men. By means of sheer numbers and a rigid, schematic arrangement, they formed a single unit in which each individual member existed solely for the purpose of serving the collective. The critical base of Yue Minjun’s work is founded on this particular Chinese conceptual lineage.[2] (See below.)

The terracotta army, Xi’an.

Similitude, seriality, quantity—the tropes inherent in the mortuary objects of the Qin emperor, produced over two millennia before, are likewise at work in Yue’s contemporary iconographic negotiations, a fact apparent at first glance. His oeuvre in both painting and in sculpture is visually dominated by the one salient motif that also informs much critical discourse surrounding his art: the relentless, iconic image of the neon pink visage, with its close-cropped head of hair and tightly scrunched-up eyes, mouth wide open to expose two rows of perfectly even white teeth, its expression lodged somewhere between a manic grin and a grimace of pain. Even the most cursory survey of Yue’s output bears this out, from his Idol Series 偶像系列 组图 of 1996, which presents a mass of smiling, laughing pink faces arranged into a grid-like composition on the canvas surface; to The Night Wind 晚风 (1997), featuring a rhythmically calculated line of the same figures queued up in a horizontal column, each and every one hugging his knees and smiling into an unknown distance; to the unruly multitude of forms piled up, helter-skelter like a trash heap, in Garbage Dump 垃圾场 (2003). (See below.) It is Yue’s Contemporary Terracotta Warriors series, 现代兵马俑, however, that brings the historical connections of his work most clearly to the fore, the explicit reference to the subterranean legions of the First Emperor emphasizing the correspondences with the visual culture of an earlier epoch. A veritable phalanx of Yue’s figures – clad in a uniform of white tee and black pants – stand poised like the infantrymen of the terracotta army, ordered into the rigidity of a military formation and seemingly frozen into their postures, positions and ranks for all time. (See figures below.)

Yue Minjun, Idol Series (right) 偶像系列 组图 (右) (1996)

Yue Minjun, The Night Wind 晚风 (1997)

Yue Minjun, Garbage Dump 垃圾场 (2003)

Yue Minjun, Contemporary Terracotta Warriors 2 现代兵马俑 2 (1999)

Figures of infantrymen from the Terracotta Army.

Although, unlike Yue, Fang Lijun has never drawn any links between his work and ancient funerary material culture, the visual field generated in his paintings and woodcuts is also produced by the repetition of the single individual to represent a crowd, raising similar issues of similitude and uniformity. His Heads (2002), for instance, an installation piece comprised of some 15,000 small, gilded bronze heads mounted on slender steel rods, immediately calls to mind the massed, ordered profusion of the Qin warriors. It also appropriates the very experience of viewing the army in its underground pits today: laid out like a carpet of gold-tipped needles on the floor, Heads obliges the viewer to look down at its gleaming plenitude, in the same fashion that visitors to the Qin emperor’s mortuary complex in Xi’an today are required to gaze at the sea of subterranean statuary from the height of a platform at ground level.[3] (See below.) Elsewhere, Fang’s Series 2, No. 2 系列 2，第 2 号 (1991 – 2), which features the famous yawn so prominent in his paintings from the early 1990s[4], positions the main, yawning figure up front and center, against the backdrop of a cerulean-blue sky and a row of identically bald men with heavy-set, simian facial structures, each indistinguishable from the other. (See below.) The same figural complex appears in most of his work from this period: Series 2, No. 4 系列 2，第 4 号 (1991 – 2) reproduces a group of them, clad differently in blue Mao suits or the usual standard ensemble of a white button-down shirt and pants (donned by most urban-dwelling men in China in the 1980s), but otherwise sporting the same close-eyed expression and ponderous, hulking physiognomy. (See below.) Fang’s later work extends this strategy of reiteration to its most surreal limits, where even the most superficial differences of dress are eliminated, retaining only the omnipresent facialities. Untitled, from 2002, jettisons any trace of recognizable space from the composition altogether, instead filling the pictorial surface with a densely-packed agglomeration of bald, squinting heads, the yawn of previous paintings here transformed into gapes of astonishment or slack-jawed howls of dismay, the immediate effect of the piece one of near-hellishness. (See below.)

Fang Lijun, Heads (2002) at The Lab in Belmar, Colorado, 2007.

The terracotta army, Xi’an.

Detail of Heads.

Fang Lijun, Series 2, No. 2 系列 2，第 2 号 (1991 – 2)

Fang Lijun, Series 2, No. 4 系列 2，第 4 号 (1991 – 2)

Fang Lijun, Untitled 无题 (2002 – 3)

Both Yue’s and Fang’s creations are generally read as portraits of the artists themselves. Despite their obviously outlandish appearance, characterized by the saturated skin tone, an improbable number of teeth, and the impossibly smooth complexion free of wrinkles and blemishes, the facial peculiarities of Yue’s ubiquitous figures are understood as a form of pictorial autobiography, a self-portrayal. (See below.) On the occasion of Yue’s first museum exhibition in the U.S. in 2007, a New York Times reviewer observed: “Your first reaction upon meeting Yue Minjun might be, yes, it is indeed he! The face with the enigmatic, jaw-breaking grin, perhaps the most recognizable image in contemporary Chinese painting, is a self-portrait.”[5] Fang’s iconography of reiteration gestures in the same manner towards an originary moment in the artist’s physical appearance, particularly in the “entirely personal” fact of his shaved head, according to one commentator.[6] As Fang explains, this resemblance was at least partly true: “[It] … was physiological; I was a compulsive head-shaver …”[7] (See below.) However, as in Yue’s case, the appearance of Fang’s figures reveal a gulf between his own image and those of his paintings, their distinctive semblance approaching caricature rather than being grounded in verisimilitude. The slippage between realistic transcription and inflected representation – between a strict sense of fidelity to nature and an adapted or modified rendering – foregrounds issues of individuality and collectivity. This dynamic was anticipated in the terracotta army of the so-called First Emperor more than two millennia ago, and by conflictual opinions of their ontology and function. The means of production allowed for synchronized corporeal articulations across the range of figural categories, from the standing to the genuflecting, both charioteer and foot soldier alike, while including at the same time more particularized representational modes. (See below.) The statues were assembled from a selection of prefabricated body parts crafted in molds, including the head; torso; legs (below the garment); arms and hands; feet; the plinth.[8] Details of facial physiognomy, such as the eyebrows, moustache and lips, were reworked by hand after the bodies were put together, as were the joints between the constituent parts. Those components, while conforming to a limited number of shapes – 8 different varieties of heads have been distinguished, for instance – could be, and were, combined with great diversity. (See below.) Warriors were also equipped with real weapons made from bronze, thus further contributing an aura of absolute lifelikeness. The cumulative effect is the oft-noted uniqueness of each separate statue, an assessment that, however, belies the extent of the modular process of manufacture. The figures, as such, were caught in a tension between these various representational modes, from structural uniformity (mass-produced components) to individual authenticity (hand-worked particulars) to actual reality (genuine weapons, as opposed to representations) – and it is precisely this interplay that finds resonance in the dialectic between the individual and the crowd one sees at work in Yue and Fang.

Yue Minjun in front of his artwork in his studio, Beijing. Photo from the New York Times, November 13, 2007.

Fang Lijun with two of his works, at his solo show at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum 台北市立美術館 in 2009, “Endlessness of Life: 25 Years Retrospect [sic] of Fang Lijun” “展覽主題：生命之渺—方力鈞創作25年展.”

A standing horseman from the terracotta army, Xi’an.

Terracotta charioteer.

Sections of a standing terracotta figure. From Ledderose.

Scholarly opinion has traditionally assigned these soldiers the role of posthumous protectors of the monarch, surrogates for the people who served him while he was alive, but more recent scholarship has indicated that the so-called individuality of the figures might instead be secondary to their social or ritual role in the grouping, a “notation of the specific segment of reality to which the figural image refers … sustaining distinctness of entity within a given context, without necessarily having to contain any qualities of individual personality.”[9] The American philosopher C. S. Peirce proposed a semiotic system based on a classification of different sign-types: a tripartite typology of icon, index and symbol. It is the first two sign-types, the icon and the index, which concern us here. Of iconicity, Peirce had this to say: “Most icons, if not all, are likenesses of their objects.” Or: “… firstly, Likenesses, or, as I prefer to say, Icons, which serve to represent their objects only in so far as they resemble them in themselves …”[10] Later, he qualified the concept in a more specific fashion: “An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line.”[11] In other words, likeness, as it concerns iconicity, is not predicated on actual existence; rather, the resemblance may relate to completely imaginary objects or to ideas (e.g. geometry) instead. An icon, then, may operate along the lines of visual similitude without gesturing at any particular object existing in reality. To return to the case of the terracotta army: any one statue may seem uniquely verismilar, distinguished from its fellows in myriad details (thus leading to claims that each soldier was a portrayal of a real human being), but it retains an undeniable, underlying structural resemblance to the rest of the group, being crafted from the same molds and parts. Like Yue’s and Fang’s figures – who, though changing clothes, are engaged in different activities, embody shifting performative roles, and inhabit different compositional settings and scenarios from one canvas to the next, are nonetheless comprised of the same figure over and over – the terracotta warriors are predicated on a structural likeness which serves as a basis for exterior difference, understood to be iconic signs without necessarily being portraits.

The driving force behind the phenomenon, the First Emperor Qin, is remembered by posterity for his unification of the Central Plains and the founding of a cohesive Chinese state. Aided and abetted by the Legalist-minded Li Si 李斯, who served as his Chancellor, the monarch founded a polity that boasted a powerful bureaucracy centered on his person, capable of regulating a variety of standardized systems throughout the land as both a means and a reflection of the new central authority. The most salient articulation of this power was the Legalist doctrine 法家, a utilitarian code emphasizing the role of the ruler in politics. One of the key Legalist texts was written by the philosopher Han Fei 韓非 (Li’s fellow student), in which he proposed three foundational tenets of strong, practical kingship: power 勢; strategy 術; and the law 法. The last of these was explicitly wed to a regimen of punitive measures: “Therefore … to unify the folkways of the masses, nothing could match the law. To warn the officials and overawe the people, to rebuke obscenity and danger, and to forbid falsehood and deceit, nothing could match penalty.”[12] Even more pertinently, the exercise of power by a sovereign was considered paramount to the maintenance of law and order. One scholar sums up this position as such: “Whereas the ruler as individual is limited in his capacity to regulate the conduct of others, from the strategically advantageous position of the throne he can use his political status as ruler to amplify his influence over others. It is this political status and its application as a fulcrum for increasing the ruler’s capacity to influence others that constitute his shih [power].”[13] In addition to imposing Legalism as a clear public ideology and the incontrovertible law of land – at the expense of other existing schools of thought, like Confucianism – the Qin emperor, with the help of Li, also standardized the written language, enforcing the small Seal Script 小篆书 as the state-wide norm (see below), and further consolidating systems of measurements and currency.

An example of a small Seal Script rock carving from Mt. Tai.

The modular, mass manufacture of the Qin subterranean army was possible precisely because of the centralization of political power, and the consequent ability of the state to marshal vast amounts of resources: manpower, materials, tools, time. In this sense, the terracotta statuary may be read as indices of the political system that brought about their existence – apropos of which, the Peircean index, as a sign, is premised on existential contiguities between representamen and object. Peirce stated that “an index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant.”[14] As commonly understood in art historical circles, the painterly gesture, qua index, is a trace of the artist’s hand that emphasizes its own processual or representational nature, rather than being an image grounded in naturalism. Elsewhere, Rosalind Krauss has said of the index: “As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents … Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects …”[15] As signs that exist “along the axis of a physical relationship”, indices are marks (like footprints) that act as material indicators of their origins (the foot that made it). The primary mechanism of the semiotic process here, then, is one of cause and effect. Moving back to the case at hand, the modular, serialized nature of the terracotta warriors not only index the specific methods and processes of their production, allowing archaeologists and art historians to reconstruct those means of fabrication, but allude to the very social forces which allowed for the sorts of large-scale operations involved. By one rough estimate, the workforce responsible for crafting the more than six thousand life-size human figures and horses may have numbered as many as a thousand men, toiling away in the eleven years from the time the emperor conquered various local territories and kingdoms (of the aptly-named Warring States period) in 221 B.C. to establish the empire, to his death in 210 B.C.[16] To churn out an average of some six hundred figures a year, each standing warrior weighing between 150 to 200 kg [17], and often involving the working of facial details by hand after the assembly of the body, after which the painting of the statue had to be done – those numbers must have been necessary, and it was the centralization of power in the hands of the First Emperor that permitted the forced conscription of laborers, convicts and slaves from the four corners of the realm to begin work at the site. This centralized body politic has been adduced as a socio-historical imperative of the Qin era, indexed by the formal, material and logistical characteristics of the terracotta army:

The Lishan mausoleum … occurs at a critical juncture in the history of Chinese art, at the moment when the coercive power of the ruler was matched with his ability to command vast economic resources and, above all, to exert exclusive authority over forms of visual mediation. Because of such an unparalleled capability … a microcosm could have been created that sustained claims to authenticity.[18]

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[1] “Contemporary Terracotta Warriors”, on Yue’s personal website, The Gallery of 岳敏君. See <http://www.yueminjun.com/en/biography/bio14.html&gt;.

[2] Sabine Kunz (扎比內.庫蒽茨), “Yue Minjun” (岳敏君) in Song Zhuang: Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun, Li Dapeng (Bremen: Städtische Galerie im Buntentor, 2001), p. 45.

English translation my own; the text in Chinese reads: “这些士兵是按统一标准，用硬陶土烧制的，比真人还要高。通过数量和严格的排列，它们体现了一个集体，一个个人必须为全体服务的集体。岳敏君的作品就是批判性地建立在这一个中国传统观念上.”

[3] The installation received an exhibition at The Lab, a multi-purpose space in Belmar, Colorado, in 2007. See <http://www.belmarlab.org/fanglijun.php&gt;.

[4] Wu Hung, for one, refers to a “profound sense of boredom” expressed by Fang’s yawning figure; Karen Smith calls it “an image of mocking amusement.”

[5] Bernstein, Richard. “An Artist’s Famous Smile: What Lies Behind It?” New York Times, November 13, 2007. The exhibition, ”Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile”, ran at the Queens Museum from Oct 14^th 2007 to Jan 6^th2008.

[6] Karen Smith, “Fang Lijun: Sink or Swim”, p. 151.

[7] In Jérôme Sans, “Fang Lijun: A Primitive State of Humanity”, p. 17.

[8] Discussed in Chap. 3 of Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 50 – 73.

[9] Ladislav Kesner, “Likeness of No One: (Re)presenting the First Emperor’s Army.” The Art Bulletin, vol.77, no.1 (March, 1995): 115 –132.

[10] Qtd. in T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge, U.K. & NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215.

[11] Qtd. in Short, p. 215.

[12] From Chap. VI of the Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, translated by W. K. Liao. Available online at the University of Virginia portal: <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=xwomen/texts/hanfei.xml&style=xwomen/xsl/dynaxml.xsl&chunk.id=tpage&doc.view=tocc&doc.lang=bilingual&gt;.

In the original, the passage reads: “故  … 一民之軌，莫如法。屬官威民，退淫殆，止詐偽，莫如刑。”

[13] Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), p. 72.

[14] Qtd. in Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2 (June 1991), pp. 174 – 208. See p. 189.

[15] Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., and London, U.K.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 196 – 209. See p. 198.

[16] See Ledderose, p. 70.

[17] See Ledderose, p. 70.

[18] Kesner, p. 131.

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The Semiotics of Ink Plum Painting

YAN SOU’S PLUM BLOSSOMS & ZOU FULEI’S A BREATH OF SPRING

Yan Sou’s 巖叟 Plum Blossoms 梅花诗意圖 is a rather extraordinary work of art (top, above). Currently in the collection of the Freer Gallery, it is mounted on a long, horizontal silk scroll measuring forty-five inches, or nearly four feet, across. Both the exact identity of the painter and the precise date of the painting remain something of a mystery. Although authorship has traditionally been ascribed to Wang Yan Sou 王巖叟, a calligrapher and court official who lived during the Northern Song dynasty, his dates – ca. 1041 to 1091 – are now believed to rule out that possibility. (1) Hin-cheung Lovell, writing on Yan Sou, opines that the artist’s use of the ‘reverse-saturation’ method 倒暈法 places his work in the late Southern Song or early Yuan periods.(2) As such, operating on the supposition that Yan Sou was a style name 子 rather than a given one 名, and in keeping with the chronology established by stylistic considerations, Lovell proposes a tentative identification of one He Menggui 何夢桂 as the author. He (ca. 1240s – 1330s?) was an official who retreated into retirement after the ascendency of the Mongols, and thereafter produced a number of prose works under the pen name of Yan Sou.(3) However, no extant paintings are attributed to him, nor is there any record of interest in painting on his part. Yan’s true identity, then, is still very much an open question.

Plum Blossoms is commonly referred to as one of a pair of parallel momei paintings owned by the Freer, the other being A Breath of Spring 春消息圖 by Zou Fulei 鄒復雷 (bottom, above). The correspondences between the two works are striking: they depict similar subject matter (a cross-sectional ‘close-up’ – such as it were – of a flowering plum tree) in comparable formats (extending lengthwise across a horizontally-oriented scroll). Yet such markedly different techniques and visual effects are displayed that they seem almost to represent deliberately oppositional modes of formal description. The practice of juxtaposing them follows a somewhat identical trajectory of ownership and documentation for both; almost four centuries after their production, they seem to have entered the collection of the Qianlong Emperor around the same time. Zou’s painting is recorded in the imperial catalogue, Treasures of the Stone Canal 石渠寶笈, of 1745 (4), and Yan’s seems to have narrowly missed being included there, appearing instead in the supplement 石渠寶笈續編 of 1793.(5) Later, the scrolls passed out of the imperial collection into the hands of the 20th century collector and connoisseur Guo Baochang 郭葆昌. A Breath of Spring features an extended colophon of his, where he records how he came into possession of the piece. It was sold to him by Miao Suyun 繆素筠 in 1914 (6); he also then owned Yan’s Plum Blossoms (though perhaps not acquired from the same seller). It is in his colophon that, for the first time, Zou’s work is explicitly compared to Yan’s, though not in any formal sense: “I searched through all the old painting catalogues, and there are no other extant works by Fu-lei apart from this one … Both the Plum Blossoms handscroll by Wang Yen-sou of Northern Sung which I obtained and this painting are ku-pen.”(7) The two paintings were shown in Tokyo in 1929 as part of a massive exhibition of Chinese and Japanese works of art, after which they may not have returned to China (or so Lovell speculates) – subsequently, in 1931, the Freer Gallery purchased them from the Fukushima Company in New York.

The iconography of Plum Blossoms is very much embedded in what Bickford refers to as the gumei 古梅, or old plum, tradition (8): images of twisted, battered old plum trees, with broken boughs, misshapen roots and lichen-encrusted trunks, that developed out of a broader convention of depicting such flora in general. The gumei as an expressive image really comes into its own, Bickford remarks, during the Yuan, when it becomes associated with the figure of the scholar-recluse, the yimin 移民 alienated from foreign rule and reduced to voluntary exile. The old, deformed tree, blasted by the elements yet tenaciously enduring, becomes a poetic emblem of the isolation and survival of these ‘leftover subjects’. The specific technique that Yan utilizes here likewise builds on traditional means: the reverse-saturation method, which entails applying an ink-wash over a composition except for certain areas in reserve, thus arriving at a design of negative space, first appears in writing in Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 collected colophons during the Southern Song period, where he mentions the daoyun fa in connection with the painter Tang Zhengzhong 湯正仲. (9) Lovell’s reconstruction of Yan’s working process is probably worth quoting at some length here:

… the artist probably sketched in very lightly the plum blossoms only and then applied a very light wash over all the silk except the blossoms, leaving them in reserve. The trunk, branches, and cylax were applied then, not before, as evidenced by the light areas in the trunk and the occasional slivers of space on the branches left by the split hairs of the brush. The last step was probably drawing in the thin outlines of the petals, thus accentuating them and making them appear pale against the background. (10)

As Lovell points out here, Yan does not only utilize reverse saturation, but also the style known as quanban fa, or the circled-petal method 圈瓣法 – a practice of creating flower-forms, through the outlining of clusters of petal shapes, made famous in the celebrated paintings of Wang Mian. The significance of Yan’s gestures at the generic conventions of ink plum tradition, both iconographic and technical, becomes clear when we consider the specific pictorial innovations that are manifest in his work, or the ways in which he departs from, or expands upon, such conventional praxis. The format of Plum Blossoms – a limited, horizontal view of the middle section of a plum tree, with myriad flowering boughs extending upwards from the bottom margin and length-wise across the expanse of the scroll, in effect producing a cropped perspective – is part of a “strong tradition in compositional selection beginning in the late Sung” (11), or what perhaps may be looked upon as a sub-genre of the larger momei tradition. Lovell refers to this sort of compositional selection as a “close-up”(12), and indeed, in Yan’s hands, it approximates the same visual impact as the cinematic zoom. While his blossoms are delineated in the more customary circled-petal and reverse-saturation techniques, their pellucid, stylized elegance of form only serves to bring into sharp relief the rough, scaly and weather-beaten texture of the bark of the trunk and boughs, almost as if the viewer were being brought up close for a detailed look. This is by way of broaching Peirce’s idea of the iconic, and its implications of likeness or resemblance. The reduced perspective and illusionistic naturalism of the image, its most salient features, can be said to shift interpretive focus away from Bickford’s connotations of the scholar-recluse, under Yuan domination, towards issues of visual representation. The concern with articulating even the most humble nuances of surface texture is quite unique to Yan – or, rather, the extent to which he seems to want to conjure up the physical existence of the tree itself, in all its tactile complexity and visual reality, suggests a kind of verisimilitude missing from other ink plum depictions (whose creators may nonetheless see themselves doing precisely that – practicing pictorial naturalism). Among momei masters and practitioners generally, only Yang Wujiu’s 楊無咎 Four Views of Flowering Plum 四梅圖 comes close to expressing a similar sense of the textural possibilities of representation. Even Yang, however, falls quite short of the dazzling, almost plastic naturalism of surface that Yan Sou achieves in his portrayal.

An icon, in the Peircean sense (13), need not necessarily be predicated on realism: Yan’s painting of a plum tree, after all, may not be of a specific plum tree, but a demonstration of how plum trees on the whole may be depicted two-dimensionally. However, what the iconic does allow us to do is to read an image in terms of its perceived degree of likeness within a certain, self-contained interpretive structure – or, to put it another way, to judge standards of verisimilitude in a systematic, comparative fashion. One can plausibly imagine any number of old plum trees, weathered, battered and twisted, which would permit us to claim that, indeed, Yan’s evocation of just those qualities of gumei brings his painting closer to experiential reality in ways that, say, Zou Fulei’s far more stylized depiction of the same subject does not. While there certainly exists other means of conveying a sense of naturalism than a scrupulous representation of surface detail, it is Yan’s somewhat uneasy position within the ink plum tradition – with his embrace of particular momei conventions on the one hand, and his departure from the accepted standards of pictorial lifelikeness on the other, imbuing his art with a textural, even tactile, sophistication – that offers scope for reading his work as an exemplar of the iconic, in relation to other ink plum paintings that perhaps do not approach those same naturalistic qualities. To apply the ‘icon’ label to Plum Blossoms is to make a claim for its specific visual traits, its mode of graphic description, vis-à-vis the genre as a whole – i.e. using the Peirce-an trichotomy as a means of sorting and categorizing, to see where specific paintings may fit under those pre-determined rubrics, or whether they may reasonably be read as corresponding to more than just a single semiotic modality. What the application of Peirce’s terminology in this case implies is that by looking at the painting as approaching the state of being iconic (rather than indexical or symbolic), we can explicate it both in light of what it accomplishes, and what it does not. A simple, straightforward understanding of Yan’s work as merely naturalistic or lifelike would probably prevent us from appreciating that those aspects of his vision should be acknowledged as relational, or relative, rather than absolute.

Lovell observed of Plum Blossoms that “So consummate was the artist’s skill that nowhere in the painting can any evidence of the first two steps [the reverse saturation and circled-petal techniques] be detected.”(14) The concept of the icon perhaps suggests that the invisible hand of the artist – the deliberate suppression of the painterly gesture – is a contributing factor to the semblance of illusionism; its reverse, the conspicuously calligraphic brushstroke (in the case of East Asian painting), brings us then to the indexical. One of the ways in which the index functions is via the phenomenon of cause and effect: that category of expressive marks which alludes to the maker’s hand does so by being interpreted as the material result of a physical, bodily process of sign- or image-production, as in the case of Pollock’s paint-flinging or dripping to arrive at his ‘allover’ canvases. In particular, the idea of the indexical has much in common with the art of calligraphy, and calligraphic forms of painting. When understood as the manifestation of the artist’s state of mind in the gestural motion of the hand, both arts reveal their common foundation in the basic building block of the line: “Inner peace is the starting point for the externalization of personality in the execution of the actual calligraphy. The forceful brush stroke in one uninterrupted sweep, excluding any possibility of subsequent correction, is indeed the seal impression of the soul.”(15)

In this sense, Zou’s A Breath of Spring, which embodies – literally – the ‘forceful brush stroke in one uninterrupted sweep’, presents itself as an illustration of the indexical. The so-called companion piece to Yan Sou’s Plum Blossoms, it is by far the more famous of the pair. Like Yan, too, Zou remains a shadowy figure in the annals of Chinese painting. The inscriptions on this scroll, his only recorded, extant work (a ku-pen 孤本), provide the chief source of information – however scanty – that we have of his life. A poem inscribed by the artist himself dates the piece to 1360 (or earlier); another poem, dating to 1361, by his fellow painter and calligrapher Yang Weizhen 楊維楨, tells us that both Zou and his elder brother were accomplished masters, one in the art of painting plums like Zhongren; the other, bamboo like Wen Tong.(16) Apart from his inclination for momei painting, the younger Zou was apparently also a Taoist doctor, as evidenced by his title of lianshi 煉師, and by the home in which he dwelt with his sibling, which they dubbed the Dong Xuandan Fang 洞玄丹房.(17) Yang Weizhen also includes an account of a visit he paid to the two, in which he was shown A Breath of Spring, and asked for the gift of an inscription. Another lengthy colophon, by a certain Shixian Guyan 時顯顧晏 who remains unidentified, discusses the “cosmogonal”(18) implications of Zou’s painting in relation to the concepts of purity and impurity.

Admittedly, to read Zou’s work as an example of indexicality is a matter for debate, rather than a given. The artist himself was an admirer of the momei style of the monk Zhongren, otherwise known as Huaguang 華光 for the monastery with which he was associated. In his accompanying poem, Zou writes:

Where’er my straw-roofed hut may be, I long for the return of Spring.
And so I bid the autumn moon to linger on the old plum tree.
Though the silken wisps of smoke die out and the empty room be cold,
My daubs of ink may keep for me its shadow on the window.(19)

The allusions here – specifically the references to the moonlit night and the silhouettes on the window – recall the oft-repeated legend of how Zhongren founded the tradition of ink plum painting, and his discovery of the ‘shadow-blossom’ or ‘ink-saturation’ method, the moyun fa 墨暈法, in particular. The Plum Manual of Huaguang 華光梅譜 records:

The painting of plum trees in ink was begun by Hua Kuang. Old Jên [Zhongren] loved them very much and planted many plum trees at his monastery. Each time the flowers bloomed he hastened to move his cushion beneath them and stayed there all day intoning his prayers. Still he did not grasp their true meaning. By chance one moonlight night before he went to bed, he watched on the window the latticework of their crisscross shadows, wonderfully beautiful. Then he took his brush and drew their forms, and in the cool of the morning he saw that verily here was a reflection of the moonlight.(20)

As the quote demonstrates, the observation of nature as the basis of ink plum painting is very much foregrounded in momei discourse, finding a privileged position in the originary myth of the tradition. Apropos of which, A. G. Wenley notes of the great masters that they “undertook to study [their] … subject under all conditions and in all its moods, and not until he really knew it did he paint it.”(21) Pictorial naturalism, as a corollary of this act of observational fidelity, also loomed large in contemporary reception of Zou’s painting. Yang Weizhen, for one, wrote in his verse that “Hua-kuang [meaning Zou] retains the breath of Spring”, a line which Wenley parses as calling attention to “the verisimilitude of the artist’s work, which seems to catch and hold the feeling of springtime.”(22) Shixian Guyan comments of Zou’s momei that “Famous are these bizarre forms, wind-tossed branches and snowy buds, revealing his skill in all details.”(23)

In this regard, A Breath of Spring certainly seems to exemplify one of the central tenets of iconicity: visual likeness. However, as we shall see, the artist’s own conception of his work is not quite so unambiguous as has been assumed, and, in fact, the mode of pictorial description that he adopts here incorporates both generic norms and personal innovation, the latter lending itself to a reading of indexicality instead. While Zou may have seen himself as a follower of the Zhongren school, grounded in a respect for natural forms, his painting and its companion poem reveals a disjuncture between the artist’s present reality and an idealized future moment. He asks “the autumn moon” to linger on the plum tree, and mourns the dying candles and cold, barren room. What the quatrain opens with, though, is an unabashed yearning for springtime, and its warmth and connotations of renewed hope no doubt. This, the optimism of the spring season and the new year, is what is expressed in the visual image as well: the bent old tree trunk (or what little we can see of it) may seem melancholic in its twisted, misshapen deformity, but the aggressive thrust of the single bough, extending across half the length of the long scroll in one powerful, unbroken, sweeping gesture as testament to the vigor of new growth and of hope – the incipient breath of spring – indicates the message that Zou intended to convey. Like Yan Sou, Zou’s flowers are indebted to tradition: he channels Zhongren’s shadow blossoms by applying a wet brush to the paper, and allowing the ink to seep and spread, thus producing a shadowy form free of outline, and capturing the poetic, tenebrous mood of the moment in which the ink plum is said to have first arisen. His twigs and branches, however, are delineated in rather different styles: the slender branchlets are comprised of a single, short, continuous brushstroke that tapers out towards the tip, while the thicker boughs are characterized by an effect not unlike the ax-cut stroke 斧劈皴, where holding the brush at an angle results in a sort of ‘split-hairs’ texture, as if the hairs of the brush were clumped together in separate skeins instead of coming together at a pointed tip. The stamens of the flowers are indicated by numerous tiny dots of ink, which bring to mind the raindrop stroke 雨點皴 popularized by Fan Kuan.

Zou shares this aspect of Yan Sou’s artistic vision: they owe a debt to the momei masters who preceded them, yet both also depart from traditional praxis in very conspicuous – even ostentatious – ways. In Zou’s case, far more so than the various effects he deploys for the blossoms, branchlets and boughs, it is the dynamic, irresistible thrust of that singular brushstroke, streaking across the paper in one fluid motion, that compels the viewer’s notice, and allows us to speak of his brushwork here as calligraphic. Another painter of flowers, who was active somewhat later during the Ming era, recounts the corporeal process that underpins both painting and calligraphy:

From the moment I grasp the brush until calligraphy is achieved, that is my hand; from the point at which calligraphy results until the calligraphy works its magic, that is my heart/mind. … The heart/mind is superior, the hands follow it … [Calligraphy] is not the shapes of the dots and strokes, but moving the brush … A wall dividing the road, shadows in a courtyard, a broken hairpin, a seal impressed into paste, an awl piercing patterns in the sand – these are the shapes of the dots and strokes. They are not as marvelous as the movement of the hand; furthermore, they do not approach its utmost magnificence. From this, I know that calligraphy is perfected in the heart/mind and the hand.(24)

The hierarchy here is clear: the ‘dots and strokes’ that go towards building up recognizable forms on a two-dimensional surface may perform their task admirably – if one can identify objects like awls and hairpins – but they simply do not compare with the ‘magnificence’ of the calligraphic stroke, which assumes priority because it is ultimately the expression, through the agency of the hand, of the heart/mind complex 心. The calligraphic mark is very much the material document of the painter’s gesture that produced it – it is, in other words, indexical in nature. It functions not simply to limn clearly discernible shapes on a canvas (the province of iconicity), but is a graphic record of the artistic hand, and the personality behind it. Zou’s stunning brushwork in A Breath of Spring situates it firmly within the discursive framework of the index, despite what his peers like Yang Weizhen, or the enigmatic Shixian Guyan, may aver. To quote the fourteenth-century connoisseur Tang Hou 湯垕 on the ideational character of the best plum painting:

Painting plum (hua mei) is called “sketching plum” (lit. “writing plum”, xie mei) … Why? Because of the utter purity of [these] flowers, the one who paints [them] ought to employ ideas to sketch them (yi yi xie zhi), not dwell on formal likeness (xingsi). Chen Qufei’s (Yuyi) poem says, “If the idea is adequate, don’t pursue color and likeness …”(25)

1. Details from Hin-cheung Lovell, “Yen-sou’s Plum Blossoms: Speculations on Style, Date, and Artist’s Identity”, Archives of Asian Art, vol. 24 (1975), 59 – 79.
2. Lovell, 61.
3. Lovell, 71.
4. A. G. Wenley, “A Breath of Spring,” by Tsou Fu-Lei”, Ars Orientalis 2 (1957), 459 – 469. See p. 460. Wenley’s article is a thorough look at the inscriptions on the painting, and, like Lovell on Yan Sou, is one of the few comprehensive scholarly considerations of Zou Fulei’s work.
5. Lovell, 70.
6. Lovell, 70. Miao was in the service of the Cixi Dowager. Wenley describes her thus: “ … 繆嘉蕙 Miao Chia-hui(‘s) … courtesy title was Su-yün. On account of her proficiency in calligraphy and painting she was called to court in the latter part of the reign of the Kuang Hsü Emperor (1875 – 1908) to aid the Empress Dowager Tz’û Hsi whose “ghost” calligraphist and painter she became. … We gather … that this painting [Breath of Spring] was given to Miao Su-yün by the Empress Dowager during this period …” See Wenley, 462.
7. Qtd. in Lovell, 70 – 1.
8. See Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: the Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 60 – 2.
9. Lovell, 60 – 1.
10. Lovell, 60.
11. See footnote no.6 in Lovell, 73.
12. Footnote no.6 in Lovell, 73.
13. An icon, in the sense of a sign that approximates, with more or less verisimilitude, its real-life referent. See C. Pierce, “What is a Sign?”, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893-1913 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
14. Lovell, 60.
15. Heinz Götze, “Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy” in Heinz Götze, ed., Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy Spanning Two Thousand Years: the Heinz Götze Collection, Heidelberg (Munich: Prestel, 1989), 9 – 33. See p. 11.
16. Wenley, 464. The relevant lines from Yang’s poem read (in the original): “小復解畫華光梅, 大復解畫文同竹”.
17. Wenley, 459.
18. Wenley, 468.
19. Qtd. in Wenley, 464.
20. Qtd. in Wenley, 459 – 60.
21. Wenley, 460.
22. See Wenley, 464 – 5.
23. Qtd. in Wenley, 466.
24. The painter in question being the (in)famous Xu Wei 徐渭. Qtd. in Kathleen M. Ryor, “Fleshly Desires and Bodily Deprivations: the Somatic Dimensions of Xu Wei’s Flower Paintings” in Hung Wu & K. R. Tsiang, eds, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center [distributed by Harvard University Press], 2005), 121 – 45. See p. 125.
25. Qtd. in Bickford, 180.