Since the late 1980s, art historians have increasingly turned their scholarly attention to Chinese women's participation in the arts in the late imperial era. Most research has focused on the paintings of two groups of women: those known as mingyuan 名媛 or guixiu 閨秀 (both often translated as gentry women) and courtesans.Footnote ¹ Yuhang Li's new book, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China, considers a subset of both groups of women—gentry women and courtesans of the Ming and Qing dynasties who identify as Buddhist laywomen—and their worship of the bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音, examining how religious and artistic practices intersect. But rather than focusing narrowly on painting, Li defines the arts broadly to include other examples of visual culture, material culture, and performative media: thus, though she writes about drawing and painting, she also analyzes hair embroidery, dance, and ornaments used in self-fashioning. The result is illuminating.

The historical context and theoretical framework for Li's research are set out in the Introduction. Li reviews the history of Guanyin's feminization in China and its impact on women's religious practice; she also delves into women's lives in the Ming and Qing periods. Significantly, Li asserts that in her focus on women's practice, she seeks to move beyond the limitations of male-authored sources. Noting that “women's identities are always already constructed in ways that are almost inevitably linked to male discourses” and adding that she focuses on “material objects created and used by women to gain insight into the ways women gave shape to their subjective selves” (17), she proposes that one way forward is to focus on the analysis of “women's things,” which she sees as cultural objects that reveal women's agency through their connections with women's histories, spaces, and bodies (18–20). The examples of women's things that she examines throughout the book include not only material objects created or possessed by women, such as paintings, examples of hair embroidery, and hairpins, but also women's writings, including poetry, painting inscriptions, and even embroidery manuals. At the same time, she observes that certain examples of material culture—such as female-authored paintings of Guanyin—can still be construed as responses to male-authored discourses, and she is careful to remind the reader to think critically about the relationship between the creative process and women's roles in society.

The last section of the Introduction provides the schema for the body of the book, throughout which Li links Guanyin worship to notions of manifestation and transcendence, describing women practitioners as engaging the deity through material and performative forms of “devotional mimesis” (20–24). Thus, Chapter 1 concentrates on courtesans and their religious practices, most prominently Guanyin dances, and discusses musical performances as offerings in keeping with the Buddhist emphasis on the illusory nature of being. This chapter dwells on contradictions and oppositions: those between performers and viewers, between lived experience and representation. Courtesans, as transgressive figures, embody the binaries of erotic and sacred, low and high; their male viewers, in watching them transform into Guanyin through dance or other forms of performance, experience their own desire undergoing a transformation from physical to spiritual. Li describes this manner of becoming Guanyin as a form of religious expression and a means of increasing social prestige. She notes that the Guanyin dance itself is only known through textual descriptions—primarily by men—and in surviving examples of visual media that depict it. Woodblock prints, book illustrations, and paintings provide evidence of the performative media analyzed in this chapter; here and elsewhere in the book, long captions that describe subject matter and style occasionally appear beneath the images, allowing the narrative within the chapter text to focus on matters that are more germane to the author's argument.

In Chapter 2, Li focuses on paintings of Guanyin, discussing how gentry women drew the bodhisattva as a means of expressing their abstract identification with her virtue and purity. (Courtesans were known to make Guanyin icons as well—for example, Xue Susu 薛素素, ca. 1564–ca. 1637—and this is briefly discussed in Chapter 1.) Li discusses the icon-making of gentry women as a form of projection, a different way of becoming Guanyin. The topics covered in this chapter include women's social standing, access to art education, and literacy; their choice of the baimiao 白描 or “plain drawing” style; and women's and men's use of Guanyin icons as a form of prayer. Li identifies texts and images as “relatively independent semiotic systems” (74) and she analyzes women-authored inscriptions and paintings throughout the chapter. A major concern throughout the book is how women negotiated devotion to Guanyin within the dictates of Confucian ideology, and this idea receives significant attention in this chapter. The examples chosen to illustrate this chapter include lesser-known works by women artists such as Ms. Qiu 仇氏 (possibly named Zhu 珠, fl. sixteenth century), Xing Cijing 邢慈靜 (ca. 1573–after 1640), Fang Weiyi 方維儀 (1585–1668), Xu Can 徐燦 (1617–98), and Jin Liying 金禮贏 (1772–1807).

Li writes about laywomen who used plucked strands of their own hair to make embroidered images of Guanyin in Chapter 3, arguing that in certain ways this is a specifically feminine practice. Li considers the women's labor and skill through several frameworks: that of “costly art” (109) and its relation to ritual objects; that of Buddhist doctrine, which suggests that each embroidered stitch represents the body of the Buddha, with accumulated stitches increasing the maker's merit; and that of “womanly work” (113). Li analyzes the multiple meanings of hair, looking into its connotations of regeneration and attachment; considering it as a “material gift” (121); identifying the contexts in which hair is gendered as feminine; and explaining how using hair as a medium relates to ideas about “religious pain” (127). She concludes that icons of Guanyin, whether examples of hair embroidery or painting, ultimately function similarly, in that they allow the devotee to merge with Guanyin. Throughout the chapter, Li presents rare examples of hair embroidery that date from the Yuan dynasty (at the earliest) through the twentieth century as evidence.

Chapter 4 focuses on the use of elaborately wrought hairpins made of precious metals and jewels that bear images of Guanyin or the Buddha Amitābha—or a figure that resembles a devotee in the attitude of prayer—as ornaments that allow women to mimic Guanyin's appearance. All the hairpins that Li analyzes were excavated from Ming dynasty tombs, where they rested on the headdresses of the tombs’ female occupants. Upon reading this, I initially questioned the extent to which the decedents were able to shape their own “mimetic devotion” (143). Li clarifies that some of these hairpins may have functioned as “lived objects” that were worn by a woman in life, while others were “spirit objects” created for use in her burial (161); moreover, Li explains that some elderly women did plan the garments and jewelry for their own burials. Even when hairpins appear to be placed on a female decedent's headdress by her relatives, Li understands such an act as reflecting the woman's agency. Li identifies another complicating factor, related to Pure Land Buddhist ideology: the strong association between adornment and femininity might seem antithetical to the longstanding Chinese perception that women could not enter the Pure Land. In answer to this, Li finds examples of Ming visual culture that indicate that women could indeed experience rebirth there. Throughout the chapter, Li compares excavated hairpins and their location on women's headdresses with visual representations of Guanyin's “Heavenly Crown” (145) in both sculpted and painted icons, arguing that women who wore such hairpins gained religious authority through their emulation of Guanyin, and, further, that “a laywoman's body and a female deity's body (a statue) can be linked through the hairpin, whose offering is hoped to stimulate the deity's divine power” (160).

The body of the book is followed by a brief Conclusion, in which Li turns from the residential spaces inhabited by gentry women and courtesans to the Buddhist temple and the imperial court. She points out that women made offerings of material objects at temples, and that some temples collected women's artworks. At the Qing court, as well, imperial women received gifts of Guanyin icons, made embroidered images of Guanyin, and embodied Guanyin themselves through dress and the creation of visual media. Clearly, however, women's religious practices in these different contexts also take different forms and might therefore benefit from further study, as Li herself suggests.

As well constructed as Li's argument is, there are some minor errors. Li overstates her case when she asserts that “Guanyin was the most popular subject for mingyuan (renowned gentrywomen) painters from the Ming and Qing periods” (62). Ninety-six painters of this social standing and era are covered in the third chapter of Tang Shuyu's 唐漱玉 1837 History of Jade Terrace Painting (Yutai huashi 玉臺畫史), and the information presented there suggests, in fact, that Guanyin is the most common subject among the 26 mingyuan who made figure paintings, with 15 recorded as painting the bodhisattva. Many more, however—65 painters—painted subjects from nature, with 45 painters focusing on flowers in some form, sometimes in conjunction with birds, insects, or other plants.Footnote ² Given Li's attentiveness to women's experiences and her wish to look beyond male discourses, a regrettable omission occurs in her discussion of painter Fang Mengshi 方孟式 (1582–1639). When she discusses a female-authored preface for Fang's poetry collection, some words are accidentally deleted, such that it is not clear which educated seventeenth-century woman wrote the preface. In fact, this woman is Wu Huijing 吳慧鏡, who is mentioned later in the paragraph (63).Footnote ³

In its entirety, Becoming Guanyin greatly expands the scope of inquiry into Ming and Qing dynasty women as artists and practitioners of Buddhism, through its thoughtful analysis of pictorial and performative representations of the feminized bodhisattva. Li draws attention to little-known works of visual and material culture and reconstructs performances from the few sources that describe them. Her interdisciplinary research helps readers to understand more about the accomplishments, agency, and concerns of gentry women and courtesans in late imperial China, as well as gender politics in these eras, the nature of religious practice, and points of conflict between Buddhist practice and Confucian ideology. In demonstrating how Buddhist laywomen used mimetic devotion to achieve religious transcendence, Li has written a book that stands as an important contribution to art history, religious studies, and women's studies.