The subtitle of Pattern and Person, Martin Powers's book on Eastern Zhou art, lays bare the issues at stake in this detailed study, which spans the fifth to the second century BCE. Given the material and textual richness of this period, any one of these issues could easily constitute a monograph in itself. It testifies to the rigor and originality of Powers's project that he investigates the connections between the artistic, social, and intellectual history of this period alongside a sustained meditation on the methodological ramifications of crossing disciplinary, chronological, and cultural boundaries. As a result, this book does more than complement important recent scholarship on the human dimensions of early Chinese visual and material culture, such as the work of Lothar von Falkenhausen and Anthony Barbieri-Low. Powers's narrative also moves across time and space to bring a disparate group of thinkers into fruitful dialogue. The reader at times feels as if present at a symposium where Mozi and Marx contest the control of labor, Zhuangzi and Sartre debate the nature of self-knowledge, and A. C. Graham and Oleg Grabar discuss the moral significance of artifice.
Grounding the diverse threads of this discussion is Powers's central inquiry of “whether, or how, claims about personal identity and prerogative could be negotiated in visual terms in early society” (p. 13), which the author first addresses through the lens of the late Spring and Autumn period. Powers dissects the prevailing bronze motif of compartmentalized, interlaced dragons into indices of thought, production, and possession and proposes that the preference for closed ends, grid-like forms, and inward complexity both reflects and articulates rigidly hierarchical concepts of political and social authority expressed in the Shujing, Guoyu, and Zuozhuan. Giving particular attention to terms such as grade/jie, degree/du, and procedure/fa that described the rules of both craft manufacture and social governance, the author argues that ornament functioned to display and shape the ideals and anxieties surrounding the control of material and human resources.
What are the implications of Warring States bronze vessel decor, whose patterns of gold and silver inlay contradict nearly every stylistic rule of the preceding period? What does this shift in ornamental language say about a collapsing political system based on lineage and a rising philosophical literature reappraising the human and natural worlds? Powers argues that while earlier ornament depended on degrees of density (varying the quantity of set motifs) to demonstrate the control of labor, the logic of fourth-century ornament depended on degrees of ingenuity (varying the quality of instable motifs) to demonstrate the control of thought. This move from a mechanical process of replication to a mental process of design was underscored by the emergence of socially destabilizing aesthetic terms such as taste/guan and novelty/pi in the Mozi, the Guanzi, and the Xunzi. The author contends that these terms portray a cultural milieu of greater agency and access, in which art and politics, self and society, were notions to be invented and consumed rather than inherited and maintained.
The last section of Powers's study investigates the development of the dragon/cloud scroll on late Warring States and early Han bronzes and lacquers. For the author, the significance of this ornament resides not only in its ambiguous status between representation (animal) and abstraction (vapor), but also in the implications of this visual ambiguity for debates on indeterminacy. Focusing on the concepts of water circulation and non-action/wuwei from the Zhuangzi, Powers relates the movement and situational elasticity of dragon/cloud ornament to ideals of human agency and political flexibility within a natural order independent of ceremony and the spirit world. While many dragon/cloud scrolls of this period appear without center when viewed closely, they fall into larger circular structures when viewed distantly, and Powers correlates this tension between micro-flux and macro-pattern to the most crucial concept to emerge from this period: the Dao.
Most significantly, this book raises ornament, frequently dismissed as meaningless, to the historical legibility of received texts. Yet lifting Eastern Zhou patterns from their material context takes these visual documents from the frameworks of archeology, regionalism, and circulation. One wonders, for instance, whether differences in bronze decor from a single multigenerational cemetery such as the Spring and Autumn shi tombs at Xiasi might illuminate shifting stratifications both within and between social classes. Might the remarkable inlaid bronze animals from the Warring States tombs at Pingshan index the regional identity of the Zhongshan rulers at the edges of the Zhou cultural sphere? Yet the expansiveness of Powers's study makes such specificities appear as minor quibbles. Art historians and early China specialists alike will revisit this book repeatedly, as much for its data as for its meditations.
