Originally delivered in 2012 as the 61st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Chinese Painting and Its Audiences advances an argument that might at first appear counterintuitive: “Chinese painting” as a subject is unknowable, or at least any attempt to generalize about what it means, in terms however tentative, would be missing the point. Instead, Craig Clunas charts how the parameters of “Chinese painting” were circumscribed by viewers and audiences, and by historical actors who all shared stakes in defining what it was. Hence the palpable tension in the title: Chinese painting in the singular, and its audiences.

Chapter 1, “Beginning and Ending,” places the emergence of “Chinese painting” as a viable discursive subject around the year 1550, when a number of paintings produced by Ming court artists were assembled and adapted into the Safavid Album owned by Bahram Mirza (1517–49), to represent the “Chinese” tradition. The first paintings ever to be called “Chinese,” they joined a lone European example as the cultural others in a “world history of art” otherwise dominated by artists of the Islamicate world. This exemplifies a tendency, exhibited by a scholar as eminent and recent as Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), that some of the most tendentious arguments about what Chinese painting is were made, paradoxically, based on very little knowledge of it. This book is not, however, as Clunas emphasizes at the outset, an account of “how a category was imposed from the outside” (p. 14). Those within China were equally complicit in bringing a staggering array of arguments to bear on “Chinese painting.”

Each of the remaining five chapters is thus devoted to one constituency of viewers; together they span four and a half centuries between Mirza's album and the present. Chapter 2, “The Gentlemen,” foregrounds a painting subject that enjoyed considerable popularity in the late Ming: the four arts of the gentleman—zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting. Most of these paintings depict gentlemen in the act of looking at paintings, rather than actually painting. The high irony of these pictures, Clunas points out, is that they also adumbrate their own exclusion from an increasingly narrow category of hua—“painting, pure and simple”—that would have included their embedded images (often landscapes done in monochrome ink), the objects of such collective looking, but not the framing images themselves.

Chapter 3, “The Emperor,” focuses on the explosion of visual production under the Qing emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–96), and in particular the large body of tongjinghua, the kind of site-specific illusionistic paintings done by the Jesuit Painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) and his disciples. If many of these paintings were created with the impression that they catered to a singular viewing subject—the emperor—Qianlong seems to have also kept a measured distance from the genre. All of these images were left out of his imperial cataloging projects.

If Qianlong considered such forms of Western visuality, while enjoyable, ultimately incommensurable with “Chinese Painting,” according to chapter 4, “The Merchant,” such a bifurcation became further entrenched and led to its most ironic ends. A canon of Chinese painting—one that bears a striking resemblance to the modern canon that is partial to works of the “literati” (Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Dong Qichang, Shitao)—began to take shape in the collections of Cantonese collectors like Pan Zhengwei (1791–1850), right at the moment when Canton became the center of a whole host of export paintings by local artists trained in the “Western methods.” Not only does Pan's backward-looking canon fail to acknowledge the full diversity of contemporary visual culture that obtained in his time and in his hometown, “Chinese” paintings seen by their European audiences were presented to them in naturalistic portraits and port views by artists like Lamqua (fl. 1825–60), to whom Pan's emerging canon would have been out of reach and out of sight.

Chapter 5, “The Nation,” and chapter 6, “The People,” carry the narrative into the modern period. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Japan played a key role in mediating the introduction of the Western apparatus of art history to China, and providing the likes of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Chen Shizeng (1876–1923) with a critical language to speak of a Chinese painting tradition and a Western one on comparative terms. Differences borne out by such comparisons became in turn institutionalized in Republican-period art historical publications and art exhibitions, to the point that “much of the painting being created in China could not now be ‘Chinese painting,’ or at least not for certain audiences, most particularly foreign ones” (p. 186). Under the PRC, political exigencies required that realism be given a new lease of life under the new regime, primarily in the form of mass-produced graphics designed to reach potentially every individual. Viewing of painting was restored to a collective setting, not in the late-Ming spirit of literati camaraderie, but arranged through the danwei, the “work unit.” Clunas demonstrates how Cold War politics shaped the way in which artistic practice of this period was received by audiences outside China. In the United States, particularly in the context of the traveling exhibition of the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 1961–62, it was presented as a contemporary foil—individual freedom inhibited by the autocratic state (“red China”)—against a fantasy of “free China” of the past, a mirror image of the contemporary West, the champion of free subjective expression. A Soviet audience, on the other hand, found a “plurality of styles” in the socialist realism practiced in China (p. 216).

Therefore, central to Clunas's narrative is the constant tension in the formation of an essentialism to cast “Chinese painting” as a cultural idiom, in spite of and at times because of the diversity of painterly practices within China.Footnote ¹ These attempts to reduce “Chinese painting” to a limited, knowable subject have served various ends, not in the least because they often make certain arguments about what art or painting generally does—by default of the West—possible. As such, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences is both an exemplar of, and a historiographic admonition against, global comparative history. The footnotes and the bibliography also show Clunas's efforts to take stock of the most recent studies in the field. The book is lavishly illustrated with more than 200 images, most in color. It should appeal to not only historians of Chinese art, but also anyone with a historiographic interest in how a scholarly subject is created and sustained in Asian studies.