The seven essays in this collection deal with issues of production, reproduction, and interpretation in the arts of China, from antiquity to the contemporary period. Covering a broad range of materials, the volume makes an effort to link them through the notion of “original intentions.”
In the first chapter, Nick Pearce reviews the controversy between early twentieth-century Western scholars over the authenticity of the so-called Bushell Bowl, a bronze vessel with a lengthy inscription that purportedly dates it to the Eastern Zhou. Pearce outlines how the scholars neglected visual and material evidence of the actual bronze in favor of textual and historical analysis of the inscription. The chapter emphasizes the personal rivalries and bickering between art historians and sinologists (including Stephen Bushell, Édouard Chavannes, Herbert Giles, and John Ferguson), but it presents the interpretive conclusions of each scholar too succinctly to allow a ready understanding of the contending sinological arguments and methodologies.
Reexamining the pictorial carvings on the Nelson-Atkins sarcophagus, Roger Covey asks whether its usual dating to the sixth century was not the result of canon formation in the early development of Chinese art history in the West. He suggests that, with few pre-Song examples available, the sarcophagus may have been assigned a Northern Wei date to fill a gap in a teleological interpretation of the development of landscape painting styles. Through careful visual observation and comparative analysis, Covey demonstrates clear evidence of copying practices, and then directly concludes that the sarcophagus must be a forgery from the 1920s or 1930s. Until detailed technical analyses are conducted, however, such an interpretation should be taken as “contingent and provisional” (p. 41), on par, as Covey points out, with all previous interpretations of the same evidence, including those by Chinese scholars. It should also be noted that copying is not always a sign of forgery; it is also integral to workshop practices.
Ling-en Lu's chapter carefully documents and examines the monumental Yuan-dynasty wall paintings from the Lower Guangsheng Monastery in Shanxi Province, now mostly relocated in American museums. A detailed visual and technical analysis of the brushwork and color pigments, through close collaboration between curator and conservator, sheds light on Yuan artistic production and regional workshop practice in southwestern Shanxi. Close examination also reveals the damage, repair, and retouching that has resulted from the removal and relocation of the wall paintings. The detailed photographs allow the paintings to be seen in new ways; refreshingly, they permit the work of art to speak for itself.
Central to Jason Steuber's essay is the premise that the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors made active use of replication in art, printing, and architecture as a tool for governance. Replication assisted these emperors in their ambition to unite multiple constituencies by allowing for symbolic possession or appropriation of lands, people, and ideas; commemoration and preservation of sanctioned places and events; and targeted adaptations for transmission and propaganda to various audiences. The broad range of Steuber's examples—imperial-palace gardens, palace and temple renovations, imperial portraits, paintings, battle illustrations, and books and libraries—raises the questions of whether the singular framework of replication may not obscure multiple intentions and interpretations and whether differentiation between different kinds of replication might not have strengthened the analysis. For example, when many copies are made from one original, the intent might be economic efficiency, insurance of preservation or transmission, or, as in the painting One and/or Two? (pp. 161–66), a philosophic consideration. Alternatively, considered in relation to the model or to the audience, replication (the re-presentation of an original) can produce commemorative symbols, iconic embodiments, polemical devices, or images of self-aggrandizement. One should also ask whether there was any difference in the nature of replication between the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, and if replication was an intentional act of governing or merely its symptom. In addition, a few statements of fact need clarification, in particular the claim that the Yuanmingyuan imperial-palace garden was initiated in 1709 in imitation of the Imperial Summer Villa at Chengde (p. 148), and the contention that the Nine Dragons painting in the Nelson-Atkins Museum is an original and the versions in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts are Qianlong-period copies (p. 176).
In their respective chapters, Wei-cheng Lin and Shane McCausland investigate how the processes of replication by rubbing and printing have been severed from their cultural context in the past, and how contemporary artists are appropriating these processes in novel ways. Lin notes that surviving rubbings are often thought to transmit and renew an authenticity greater than their original model, which may subsequently have been damaged or lost. Disconnected from its original context, today the meaning of a rubbing continues to be “coded with an idea of the past” (p. 220). Artists including Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Qiu Zhijie, and Song Dong interact with this heritage, challenging its authority and canonicity, or reexamining and reencountering its tradition. In so doing they reveal the process of signification and the myth in the perception of rubbings in traditional culture. The tradition seems so elusive to our modern sensibilities, however, that it raises a question analogous to the philosophical quandary, is water H2O? McCausland discusses similar problems in replication through printing, focusing on a comparison between Xu Bing's subversive A Book from the Sky (1989) and the Ming-dynasty original and copy of the Yongle dadian imperial encyclopedia.
In the final chapter, Changping Zhang presents an interesting excursus on Shang and Zhou techniques of making inscriptions on bronze vessels. The chapter considers mold-cast relief and intaglio inscriptions along with rededicated vessels with engraved inscriptions. Starting with original objects, Zhang uses visual and technical observation to reconstruct how the inscriptions may have been produced.
The individual essays in this volume offer important observations and insights on production, reproduction, and interpretation in the arts of China. The promise of a united reflection on “original intentions,” however, remains unfulfilled, as the essays interpret the phrase “original intent” in fundamentally different ways. Nick Pearce begins the book with a tantalizing introduction on the theme, which might have served as the basis for a sustained dialogue between the authors. While it may be a truism that everything is a copy (p. 1), the idea of original intention in the arts is complex, and would benefit from a more thorough investigation of the relationship between originality and authenticity, copying and forgery, imitation and replication, and production and reproduction. During the cultural history of a work of art, moreover, original intention extends to the later interpretation, reinterpretation, renovation, restoration, and appropriation by the owner, viewer, or user. The limitation of any investigation of original intentions—particularly in light of the dilemma of “intentional fallacy”—should also be taken into account.
