Even as studies have begun to illuminate the lives of Song dynasty women, scholars have largely overlooked their participation in the realm of visual culture, as noted in Hui-shu Lee's authoritative (and beautifully illustrated) book (p. 4). Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China sensibly focuses on several imperial consorts and their sponsorship of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but the author also delves into the women's calligraphy and considers how they viewed paintings. Along the way, she writes about female agency and subjectivity, patriarchal values, the elision of women's achievements from the historical narrative (pp. 9–10), and gendered modes of representation, including the expression of women's interiority (p. 21) and men's exteriority (p. 228). Her assessment of the historical record as “both biased and grossly incomplete” (p. 15) is persuasive, and it clarifies how visual culture can complicate our understanding of Song imperial women.

One of the strengths of Lee's book is its attention to historical context. The introduction includes accounts of pre-Song female artistic production and their implications for the Song dynasty: Lee's analysis of the legacy of the female ruler Wu Zetian (r. 690–705) is compelling. Historians cast this empress—a patron of prominent Buddhist sites, a calligrapher, and a collector—as a “self-aggrandizing usurper” (p. 15) who flouted the established gender division of the court. Lee argues that her example led the Song imperial consorts to employ art as a means of demonstrating their “virtue” or “worthiness” (p. 18).

In the body of the book, the author identifies “a gender-based pattern of patronage and self-imaging” (p. 53) that recurs throughout the Song dynasty. She devotes Chapter 1 to unraveling the complex web of connections between the architecture and sculpture of the Jin Shrine in Shanxi province, the worship of the ambiguous Sage Mother, and the patronage of Empress Liu (969–1033). Lee argues that the empress's involvement at this site and elsewhere represents a careful balance of “self-glorification” (p. 69) and propriety. In Chapter 2, she considers imperial women and writing, briefly discussing female calligraphers of earlier periods before turning to the Song consorts who acted as official calligraphers or “ghostwriters” (p. 80), including Empress Wu (1115–1197) and Empress Yang (1162 or 1172–1233). Lee closes with a discussion of ambivalent attitudes towards representations of women's literacy. The third chapter focuses on the normative function of the paintings produced during the era of Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1162) and Empress Wu; Lee argues that this empress's participation in the court's didactic art program “established a new standard of talent for Song imperial women” (p. 159). She discusses not only the collections of Empress Wu and the imperial concubine Liu Wanrong (d. 1187), but also Empress Wu's responses to paintings and her collaborations with court painters. Chapter 4 centers on the paintings and calligraphy associated with Empress Yang, the subject of the author's groundbreaking doctoral dissertation. Here, Lee analyzes the works of art—some personal, some political—created under the empress's purview, including her own collaborations with court painters, and compares her with Emperor Ningzong (r. 1194–1224).

In the Epilogue, Lee takes a broader view, explaining how it happened that “appreciation of the period's exquisite achievement in the arts became a guilty pleasure” (p. 238) and what this meant for the achievements of court women, as well as detailing how later artists came to represent the dynasty itself as feminine. This section also considers patronage after Empress Yang, focusing on Emperor Lizong (r. 1224-1264) and introducing Empress Xie (1208-1282). Lee's conclusions about the artistic practice of empresses lead her to reject Marc Wilson's attribution of one painting's inscriptions to Empress Yang (in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980, pp. 72, 75-76), proposing instead the authorship of Empress Xie. Yet what if Empress Yang had in fact written these inscriptions? (See Lara C. W. Blanchard and Kara J. Kenney, “Traces of Collaboration: Empress Yang's Captions for Xia Gui's Twelve Views of Landscape,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture 18 [Fall 2009]: 6–33.) Perhaps the most striking thing about this material is how much reconstruction the narrative on empresses and art still requires—a testament to Lee's accomplishment.

All in all, Empresses, Art, and Agency represent a major contribution to the fields of Chinese art history and women's studies. The author's thorough research has unearthed a wealth of information about the imperial women of the Song dynasty, and this, along with her astute analysis of often-marginalized works of art, provides readers with a more nuanced understanding of the visual culture of this period. There is but one oversight: not all of the sources cited in the Notes (which use shortened references throughout) appear in the Bibliography.