Jeehee Hong's Theater of the Dead is a bold, interpretive study of four hundred years of Chinese funerary art of the time frame currently referred to in Sinology as the Middle Period. Focusing on representations of performance in relief and paint that decorate tomb walls and on tomb figurines primarily in Shanxi and Henan provinces of North China, she builds a case that representation of dramatic, orchestral, and other kinds of performance such as acrobatics cannot but enliven the tomb environment. This merging of the world of death and entertainment, she believes, is a “distinctive mode of visual theatricality” (3) in which tomb builders, many of them without titles or government offices, of the status of perhaps local elite, indulged from the Five Dynasthies (907-960) through the Yuan dynasty (1267-1368).

Hong articulates her theses in the Prelude. Presenting strong evidence of the interest in zaju and yuanben, the most prevalent forms of popular theatre in Northern Song (960-1127), Jin (1115-1234), and Yuan China, and that performance took place in commercial theatres, in temples, on street corners, and in private houses, and knowing that Chinese tomb builders have brought images of their lives into the tomb since the earliest evidence of tomb decoration, she writes that one still has to reckon with the proclivity of representations of performance in architecture of death during this period. She says she will seek answers for the sources of representation in society, not just in performances but in aspects of life of the non-official, non-literati such as the funeral procession; for having surveyed scant evidence of patrons in tomb inscriptions, Hong is convinced the tombs in Shanxi and Henan belong to this social group. She will present the tomb as a “social space” (p. 11) in which tomb builders link their visual and cultural experiences in life to the afterlife. Finally, she emphasizes that the decorative programmes in the tombs that are her subject are examples both of spectacle and of ritual performance.

Chapter 1 explores the relation between theatre and the funeral, specifically that drama occurred as part of the funerary ceremony. Starting with a few accounts from texts as evidence, Hong builds her case by focusing on the sarcophagus of Zhu Sanweng that was commissioned in 1096. Based on clothing and known representations of performance, she identifies the images on it as zaju actors. She emphasizes that it has long been known that Buddhist and Daoist entertainment was part of the funeral ceremony, so the secular nature of performance can be viewed as a next phase of the development of funerary performance. She writes, further, that representations of performance often take place in an architectural framework, a configuration that traces to Han (206 bce – 220 ce) representations labelled heavenly gate (or gate of heaven [tianming]). The gateway, funerary procession, and Buddhist death ritual all are rendered on the walls of a tomb in Henan near Zhengzhou dated 1108, one in southern Shanxi dated 1153, and one near Dengfeng, Henan, dated to the end of the eleventh century.

Hong expands her discussion in the second chapter to representations of actors on walls of Northern Song, Jin, and Yuan tombs, again in Henan and Shanxi. She has a section on materiality, emphasizing that the techniques of relief and use of relief in tombs in which murals also exist are means of focusing the viewer on performance: it literally emerges from the wall. Noting the importance of facial detail and gesture in these images in pictorial relief, the author probes whether illusionism is present on the walls, suggesting that the techniques of dealing with surface both in paintings on silk and in these multi-dimensional walls offer a “visual sensibility” (p. 65), and perhaps even reflection (ying), phoenomena that are described in writings about middle period painting on silk and wall-preparation for sculpture. And amazingly, in all this, most of the performers on tomb walls are clowns or others whose intent is to make people laugh. This is the set-up for the next chapter, that will explain the narrow distance between the laughter of life and world of the dead.

“Theater of the Dead,” the title of chapter 3, seeks through figurines, relief, and murals of actors to show that the representation of a theatre in a tomb is the interface between the world of the living and the world of the deceased, in other words, that theatre in a middle period Chinese tomb is not just for the dead, but that the dead become participants. Hong begins with one of the best known images of the Jin tombs in southern Shanxi, the stage with five yuanben actors on the back wall of the tomb of Dong Qijian and his wife, buried there in 1210. Although scholars cited in the book have turned to the stage as evidence of the popularity of drama in southern Shanxi in the Jin dynasty, Hong offers another interpretation, that the position of the stage above the sculptures of Dong and his wife, who therefore cannot see the performance, render it nonperformative (p. 78). Who, then, is the intended audience? Actors on the wall of a tomb in Huafeichang, Shanxi, similarly find no contact with the interred who in this tomb are not portrayed on the walls. Hong wonders if the audience might be tomb figurines which, according to an eighth-century text, were conceived as inert yet alive (p. 82). An understanding that figurines may be activated in the tomb environment makes more emphatic the contrast between the tomb occupants, usually frozen in their poses, and the performers shown with exaggerated dimensionality. If the tomb is for the afterlife of the deceased, the author rightly asks why there is this apparent role reversal. Her best explanation is that the contrast is the strong reminder that the deceased are dead, whereas performers still live outside the tomb. This leads to a discussion of the enigmatic “ghost doorways” referred to in Chinese drama, particulary in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties.

The last chapter, “Theater, Body, and Passage”, turns to images on sarcophaguses, in relief, and on murals, many of them with stages, to explore the relationship between stages on view and spaces behind doors, including open doors with figures peering through or next to them. Hong posits that new kinds of relationships in Chinese funerary art are intended. Two doorways, for example, may “transform an actor's space into a ‘living’ theater”.(p. 125) Thereby, she concludes, the site of performance, in the physical world at a temple, on the sarcophagus of someone buried at that temple, and in a tomb image “served as the path between the worlds of everyday life and the sacred”, giving way to a flexible boundary (p. 135). Virtual performances “doubly intersected the realms of life and death, the everyday and the ritual”. (p. 135)

The Postlude focuses on two funerary inscriptions, one in a tomb of ca. 1309 in Shanxi that is almost identical to the famous Yuan poem “Autumn Thoughts” by playwright Ma Zhiyuan (ca. 1260–1325) and the second in a tomb dated ca. 1200, also in Shanxi. The writings are Hong's final evidence of what she refers to as a “social turn” or “socialization of the funerary space” in middle period China (140-141). There follows a highly useful appendix of middle period tombs in Henan and Shanxi and extensive notes.

Theater of the Dead is an exciting sample of new approaches for understanding Chinese funerary art. Although every reader may not agree with Hong's many ideas and some may say she pushes the material beyond what is actually there, anyone who studies China's middle period or Chinese tomb imagery should be aware of and grapple with her interpretation. In fact, the book raises questions that were asked about this kind of material half-a-century ago, when the field was not ready for theoretical explanations. In the 1960s, Annelise Bulling posited a similar argument in her study of representations on the walls of Han tombs that she argued were dramatic performances. Alexander Soper's strong rebuttal, entitled, “All the World's a Stage”, received a response from Bulling, but the representation of performance on walls could not be proved; and in the 1960s, Bulling did not know that hundreds of performers were soon to be excavated from Han tombs.Footnote ¹ The stages on the walls of Jin tombs in southern Shanxi also were unknown at that time. Theater of the Dead perhaps vindicates Bulling's instinct about representation on tomb walls, but more importantly, this book calls for a re-examination of funerary representation in Han and in the periods between then and the one that is the subject here.