This study of “how to” painting manuals takes as its basic inquiry a question formulated by Craig Clunas in his magisterial book on early modern visuality in China (Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997]): what was the social calculus informing picture-making in the Ming dynasty? As J.P. Park puts it, “Through their textual and pictorial guides, [manuals] were designed to meet the public's desire to acquire taste, technique, knowledge, and sensibility, all of which were prerequisites of elite status” (p. 3). He then asks, “Why did it become so important to possess artistic talent in the late Ming?” (p. 4).
What follows is a meticulously researched social history of the content and function of painting manuals published during the forty-year period between 1580 and 1620. Each chapter explores Zhou Lüjing's (1542–1633) multivolume Grove of Paintings (Huasou) and Forest of Paintings (Huilin) in the context of other noteworthy manuals and paintings. Park charts the evolution and popularity of the genre of the manuals (chapter 1); landscape painting as an artifact of elite culture (chapter 2); figural pictures of men of letters and their relationship to late Ming manners (chapter 3); the ways in which pictures of women may be indexed to their social roles and agency (chapter 4); and the question of how to teach originality through the relatively quotidian genres of bamboo, plum, orchid, and bird-and-flower painting (chapter 5).
Park's analysis of the manuals raises rich meta-historical issues. One is the critical question of authorship. In explicating what it was that was being marketed, circulated, copied, and collected, Park shows that these manuals tended to be composites of earlier publications, presenting established grammars of forms and motifs for aspiring painters to copy. A manual might, in other words, be construed to be a pictorial (and more rare, a purely textual) embodiment of what Roland Barthes calls a “readymade dictionary . . . whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum” (“The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], pp. 142–48). At the same time, manuals often were published as the supposed creations of particular artists or to self-consciously promote the status and reputation of individual authors. Hence, they comprise a genre that encourages reflection on the question of how a book can have no author and yet paradoxically appear to be dedicated to the notion of singular authorship (and even celebrate it).
A second critical issue has to do with the categorization of knowledge of social life. In the chapter on figure paintings portraying educated elites, for instance, Park analyzes depictions of men variously inscribing poetry on cliffs, conversing about metaphysics, or posed in “dancing sleeves.” Such representations echoed the wide-ranging social fad for emulating Wei-Jin scholars and poets at the Orchid Pavilion Gathering or as the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.” Park shows, then, that painting pictures was more than just a social practice that aspirants studied in order to emulate the elite. Because the pictures depicted the very activities that constituted the livelihood of the elite and expressed their social status and function, the pictures themselves were also a complicated, self-reinforcing system of social knowledge.
A third issue is the tension between technique and individual expression. Park describes the conundrum: “[I]n their textual and pictorial aspects, volumes of the Grove of Paintings are clearly designed to expedite readers' acquisition of skill and knowledge. Nevertheless, the artistic formulas in them also . . . [provide] guidance by which readers can pictorialize their personal emotions . . .” (p. 190). This standardization of intimate expression in turn put pressure on how notions of originality, individuality, and authenticity were understood. Park refines his understanding of those terms by mapping them against the emerging idiosyncratic styles of amateur elite painters in the late Ming.
Park's interpretation of each of these issues brings into play an aspect of what he calls the “democratization” of art making and collecting (p. 18). Painting, in his view, was a form of cultural capital flowing through “mass culture” (p. 110). Furthermore, cultivation of taste and access to painterly knowledge mattered profoundly to the socially ambitious consumers of painting manuals. The agglutinative recycling of texts about painting in the manuals, for instance, provided a way by which publishers like Zhou Lüjing could “not only underline the importance of painting but also [show] that its pedigree was as ancient and noble as that of literature” (p. 93). “What was at stake,” in short, “was the ownership of legitimate culture” (p. 119).
In its broadest strokes, Park's argument revisits Pierre Bourdieu's conception of taste, examining the role it played in Ming-dynasty social discourse through an analysis of what “legitimate culture” looked like in pictures, and how it circulated and was consumed by way of Zhou's manuals. Yet the book is most absorbing when Park traces the intimate connections of the manuals not only to the social pleasures of performing with brush and ink, but also to the more private emotions generated by the process of learning to use the brush well and fluidly. As Zhou himself put it, “Enjoyment in painting will find you if you practice long and hard. [But] if your spirit is weary and blue, don't take up the brush [to paint because] if you are distracted, the painting becomes clumsy and unrefined. Relax and drink some wine; then your inspiration will return” (pp. 88–89).
