As I read Winnie Wong’s new book, The Many Faces of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade, an essay by art historian Benjamin David came to mind. In its subject—Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—David’s essay may not seem an obvious comparison with Wong’s book, focused as it is on art created in Guangzhou 广州 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the authors share an interest in artisanal practices that have often been misunderstood as “copying,” and both examine those practices in ways that call into question modern concepts of authorship and originality. David suggests that rather than viewing the Sienese artists as geniuses of a “golden age” and applying twentieth-century values of the avant garde to their work, aligning creativity and innovation with a necessary rejection of the past, we might instead remember that “in Siena, artistic innovation was not achieved through rupture but through the practice and application of conventions that evoke sequentiality.”Footnote ¹ David’s attention to the quotidian conventions of art production allows him to rewrite entrenched narratives of art’s “development.” He argues, for example, that by suppressing histories of collaborative craft practices in Renaissance Siena, later art historians were able to reify master narratives of periodization and glorify the persona of artistic genius. Twenty-five years after his essay was published, many of the strategies and tropes he critiqued persist and, despite much evidence to the contrary, the discipline continues to cling to the persona of an individual maker as the generator of artistic transformation.

“Sequentiality” is central to Wong’s analysis as well. She employs gao 槁 to describe these iterative art-making practices. The term will be familiar to those who have read her earlier book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. Footnote ² Although Wong’s understanding of gao originates from artists working in contemporary Dafen 大芬, she offers persuasive arguments for why the concept applies to art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canton, defining it as “a composition, a template, a pattern, a model, a manuscript, or a script [that] can be executed in various ways by any skilled painter, poorly or well, identically, or with variations” (p. 47). Readers will be fascinated by the information Wong presents about the practices and environments of art-making in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canton, but Wong’s great contribution is the way she employs this information to question art-historical conventions past and present. By destabilizing assumptions of the one-way movement of artistic influence from Europe to China and “a long-held narrative that Chinese painting adopts naturalism as a response to Western art, [and] that Western forms of photographic realism were the inexorable end to which all portraiture was aimed,” (p. 37) Wong questions concepts foundational to linear histories of art, among them innovation’s place in modernity, definitions and practices of “realism,” and the agency of artistic persona.

Each chapter of The Many Faces of Anonymity focuses on an authorial identity, the name of an artist that appears in European-language records but is absent from Chinese-language sources. While these individuals appear as “artists” within Western accounts, Wong’s examination of the Chinese historical record reveals image-makers with practices quite opposed to traditional European understandings of art production. Exploring these identities, which Wong calls “archival fictions,” requires attention to both the specifics of Canton’s “multilingual, multi-imperial, and sea-based” environment and the mobility of artwork and artists beyond the city. Wong’s method is intensely detailed in its charting of acts of translation, transliteration, and invention that may have occurred among languages spoken in southern China to result in the names recorded within European texts. Her arguments draw on a wide variety of Chinese-language materials, from the literary and canonical (including the Story of the Stone Shitou Ji 石頭記 and “tales of the strange” zhiguai xiaoshuo 志怪小說) to the commonplace, among them gazetteers, tourist guides, and lists of provincial examination candidates. But she presents the results of this archival research speculatively rather than as established truths. “Can we imagine…,” Wong often writes, inviting us into a “story,” a “retelling,” of the histories of Canton trade artists, one that opposes conventional understanding of naming, identity, and agency to reckon with an incomplete historical record and lives “we can only guess at” (p. 88).

The Many Faces of Anonymity so beautifully interweaves its visual and textual materials, and draws on so wide a variety of sources, that I can only hint here at the depth and diversity of the arguments. The book begins with Ting Qua, likely the pidgin trade name of the historical individual Guan Lianchang 關聯昌 (b. 1809), and an examination of 13 iterations of an image that has long epitomized the Canton trade, Ting Qua’s Studio Painting. Typically, scholars have aimed to distinguish one of these many iterations as the “original” painting and the others as “copies” that move away from the “original’s” factually accurate depiction of the studio. Through a close reading of the Chinese texts depicted within many versions of Ting Qua’s Studio Painting (most of which have not been previously translated), including signboards, inscriptions on paintings, and paired poetic couplets, Wong disrupts this conventional interpretation. Rather than viewing the Studio Painting as a documentary image, she reveals the work’s highly contrived nature. For Wong, the painting is not a snapshot of an artist’s studio but a textually rich space through which Ting Qua and his fellow shopkeepers (Wong argues that Ting Qua should be seen as the proprietor of a business rather than as an artist) represent and solidify their social position and professional relationships.

The second chapter focuses on the artistic personae of Chin Qua and Chit Qua. We do not know the Chinese names and lifespans of the historical individuals to whom these European-language names refer. Although Wong traces several routes through Chinese-language materials that might lead to a name, none succeeds—further evidence that when discussing the Canton trade, artistic identity cannot be conceived through traditional, Eurocentric concepts of authorship. To offer one example of why identification is challenging, the Chinese character 金 was often romanized as Chin in the nineteenth century. This might suggest that 金 was the surname of the historical Chin Qua. However, as the historian Ng Chin-Keong has argued, 金 was not only a surname but also a commonly used prefix for a partnership among maritime merchants.Footnote ³ For Wong, this information suggests that artists such as Chin Qua, who often operated as part of collective partnerships, might have used partnership names, rather than surnames, to identify themselves. In contrast to naming conventions that signal a communal rather than an individual author, European sources present Chit Qua as very much a lone artist, famous for his 1769 visit to London and noted as a producer of startlingly lifelike figures in clay.

Clay portraits, what Wong calls “kneaded” portraits, are the focus of this chapter, as she puts these works in conversation with materials rarely considered in the context of Canton trade art, including ancestral portraits of members of the Chinese court. The chapter concludes with a discussion of “nodding” head representations of Chinese figures, a sculptural type that became a ubiquitous sign of Chineseness in nineteenth-century European interiors. As Wong traces relationships among these images, she again calls into question common views of verisimilitude in art. She argues, for example, that clay artists working in a linked network of Asian port cities, including Amoy and Madras, as well as Canton, achieved lifelike effects in human portrayal while working in ways—without reference to a “real” sitter, without scrutinizing a living model—that force a rethinking of the centrality of “observation” to achieving “realism.” These arguments resonate for me with artworks as disparate as the terracotta figures in Qin Shi Huang’s 秦始皇 third-century BCE mausoleum (specifically the modular, collaborative, “mix-and-match” modes of production that created the figures’ appearance of realism, as argued for by Lothar Ledderose and othersFootnote ⁴); the life-sized “Oriental” automata displayed in seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s public pleasure gardenFootnote ⁵; and nineteenth-century photographs produced in Hong Kong (Xianggang 香港) by Milton Miller, in which Chinese individuals are presented in different combinations of costumes and props (also in a “mix-and-match” manner) to create “portraits” that appear to be documentary but are in fact fictional.Footnote ⁶ These comparisons show the power of Wong’s book to elicit reconsiderations of “realism” and verisimilitude in histories of art writ large.

The authorial identities of Spolium (once signed in period materials as Ceng Hengshen 曾恆慎, dates not known) and Spillem (once signed in period materials as Shi Bei Lin 士卑林, dates not known) are the subject of the third chapter. It focuses in part on a portrait that Spolium was reported to have painted of Ka’iana (also Ka’iana‘ahu‘ula, c. 1766–1795), a Hawaiian visitor to Canton in 1787. The portrait, documented only in European-language sources, no longer exists (it may never have existed), but Wong argues that we do not need to know “the truth” of the portrait’s material existence to understand the work’s utility as a source image (a kind of gao) in the hands of British printmakers. Specifically, she is concerned with relationships between European imperialism and the European dissemination, primarily through print, of purportedly “faithful” portraits of indigenous subjects. Wong tests the supposed connection between Spolium’s portrait of Ka’iana and the European prints that claim to reproduce it, showing just how tenuous and untraceable that lineage is. Physical resemblance to living persons was not, then, the aim of transoceanic print culture; rather, Wong argues, European colonial ambitions required the creation and circulation of “portraits” of individuals, whose voices, likenesses, and agency the British tried to claim.

The final chapter, which studies the work of the artist known by the pidgin name Lam Qua (b. 1801–4, Chinese characters uncertain, but possibly Guan Qianchang 關乾昌), takes the “copy” back to European painting workshops. Drawing inspiration from Rosalind Krauss’s interpretation of Jean-August-Dominque Ingres’s (1780–1867) iterative practices (he could not let his own paintings alone, but obsessively reworked and reproduced them), Wong argues that the images Lam Qua painted, usually described as “copies,” are not the product of a specifically “Chinese” practice (copying), but rather are embedded in a European preoccupation with imitation and reproduction. In other words, the “sequentiality” that Ben David presents as a typical fifteenth-century workshop practice (a part of the Renaissance artists’ “productive participation with the past”) persisted in Europe into the nineteenth century and beyond. In making this claim, Wong strikes at the heart of “cross-cultural” approaches to the history of art, particularly those that continue to present influence as moving in a one-way pattern from Europe to other parts of the world. In this chapter, Wong asks: Was Ingres copying the paintings and the aesthetic gamesmanship of a Canton trade painter? This question upsets all of the usual assumptions about “exchange” between one of the most canonical of European artists and a “mere copyist” of the Canton trade. By the end of the chapter, I was persuaded that the answer could be “yes.” Wong’s ability to convince readers of Ingres’ indebtedness to the artistic innovations of the Canton trade is just one facet of this powerful and essential new book. Those who read The Many Faces of Anonymity will never think about realism, modernity, or artistic identity in the same way again.