Since the first millennium BCE, the Yellow Springs has been a Chinese literary reference to the netherworld, the final destination of a mortal after death. No people has been as intensely preoccupied for as long a time with what occurs in this place and how to prepare for it in life as the Chinese. In The Art of the Yellow Springs, Wu Hung tries to understand this preoccupation, at times an obsession, in three ways: space, or how tombs are put together, including the way decoration and subject matter are placed in tomb interiors; materials, or how sizes, shapes, colors, and other physical elements are manipulated and transformed; and time, as it is represented, expressed in objects, and conveys history. Through 20 years, few have taken these issues more seriously than Wu Hung. This book should be read both as his understanding and interpretation of Chinese funerary art to date and as an agenda setting for future work by him and others.
The short introduction makes key points: Chinese views of death, tomb, and burial trace to the first millennium BCE; the exposed structures above ground and concealed spaces of a tomb are interrelated; there are multiple encasements of corpse and burial goods. Wu then moves to space. Central questions are the extent to which the tomb interior assumes life and if the living entered tombs. His evidence includes the Tang story of Cui Wei who entered the tomb of the king of Nanyue (p. 26). Wu proposes that murals of farmland “ensure the deceased's ownership” of this kind of landscape in the post-mortem stage (p. 41). He sees a change, around the second century BCE, from what he calls casket tombs (guo mu) to chamber tombs (shi mu) that had approach ramps for the living to enter. The change corresponds to a shift from temples to tombs as the sites for ancestor worship, and to new concepts of the duality of the soul as containing both hun and po elements. The author also accepts the idea that the tomb “mirrors” quarters of the palace (p. 27). The rest of the chapter deals with images in tomb interiors: the heavens, paradise, and paintings of the deceased. Wu refers to those paintings as portraits, a term some might find questionable. He further argues for the existence of a spirit seat (ling zuo or shen wei), a feature of Eastern Han ritual in Luoyang that is transferred to tombs. A fascinating idea in chapter 1 is the balance of male and female elements in figure groups in, for example, the sixth-century tomb of Xu Xianxiu and tenth-century tomb of Wang Chuzhi.
Wu begins his investigation of materials with mingqi, or spirit articles. Citing Xunzi, he tells the reader they should resemble real objects but not be usable (p. 89). Prehistoric pottery, bronze vessels, lacquerware, paintings, and figurines are his evidence. Effigies provide an opportunity for the author to query the human bodies of funerary sculpture and magic, and to explain through the statue of Wang Jian (d. 918) in his tomb in Chengdu the concept of the stone body that is replaced by a corpse. Corporeal transformation leads to discussion of the eternal quality of jade and to the various extraordinary treatments of the corpse and surrogates, such as manikins by the Kitan.
To frame the discussion of time Wu Hung turns to Paul Ricour's twenty varieties of the concept. He focuses on time that is cosmic/mythic and that is lived. Famous ceilings with star groups in tombs from Luoyang, Chang'an, Taiyuan, and Xuanhua are evidence of cosmic time, and lived time is explored through personal objects of high value, such as toiletries and jade amulets. Narration of biography in painting and relief sculpture, especially on sarcophaguses, demonstrates human passage and other motion. Here Wu intriguingly suggests that the façade at a tomb entry is decorated as a place of movement that interfaces the tomb and the world outside (pp. 211–217). The brief conclusion reiterates that the core conceptions of the Chinese funerary world exist from Han to the thirteenth century.
China has made up for lost time in ensuring its place as a repository of some of the most significant burials in world history. The amount revealed annually and impact of new discoveries have meant that the last sixty years of scholarship on Chinese tombs has been largely empirical. Wu Hung's Yellow Springs is an attempt to fast forward this field into the realm of symbolism and meaning. It is a bold endeavor, for a new find may challenge ideas presented here. Yet Wu Hung never claims that his ideas and theories are immutable. Rather he is a consistent voice insisting that we must move the study of Chinese art forward with available knowledge. For that reason, even as this book introduces a twenty-first-century view of Chinese funerary art to those new to the field, the more one knows, the more she will engage with this book. It is worthwhile reading for any reader of JAS.
