Exemplary Complicity: The Pictorial Lives of Han Court Beauties in Two Narrative Handscrolls of Mid-Ming Suzhou

McCausland, Shane

Abstract

This study explores You Qiu’s visual narration in the handscroll format via two
paintings in the Shanghai Museum, Lady Zhaojun Leaves China (Zhaojun chusai
tu) of 1554 and Spring Morning in the Han Palace (Hangong chunxiao tu) of 1568.
The first scroll, an extended mono-scenic rendition of figures in a landscape,
describes the journey made by the Han palace lady Wang Zhaojun to marry a
nomad chieftain, an act of self-sacrifice that ushered in a prolonged era of peace
between Han China and the Xiongnu nomads. The second painting, in twelve
discrete scenes, illustrates the life-story of two femmes fatales—Zhao Feiyan and
her sister, Hede, favourites of the Han emperor Chengdi (r. 33–7 BC) whose
conduct almost toppled the empire. The first scroll consists of You Qiu’s painting
alone, whereas in the second, You Qiu’s painting is part of an assembly of related
texts, one inscribed by Wen Zhengming.


The study offers close readings of the paintings. It investigates and extrapolates the visual narrative techniques within, including how text is translated
to image, and explores aesthetic choices in light of the historical position of the
two artworks. It considers the social, political and artistic contexts of the paintings in the latter part of the Jiajing reign, and the ways in which such artworks
could have functioned as veiled admonitions, even as paintings that were not to
be seen at court but rather in Suzhou scholar society. The argument, concerning
the visual imagination of a journeyman painter tasked with illustrating popular
tales, relates to studies of an ‘obsessive’ model of selfhood and desire among Ming
collector-connoisseurs as well as to studies on irony as an aesthetic mode in Ming
culture. In sum, this essay aims to think beyond the fact that these picture-scrolls
draw conventionally on historical precedents to provide illusions of similarity and
historical parallelism, and to investigate elements of audience complicity in how
they manipulate those precedents.

Citation

McCausland, S. (2014). Exemplary Complicity: The Pictorial Lives of Han Court Beauties in Two Narrative Handscrolls of Mid-Ming Suzhou. In S. McCausland, & Y. Hwang (Eds.), On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture (89-116). Hong Kong University Press

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Apr 24, 2014
• Pages: 89-116
• Book Title: On Telling Images of China: Essays in Narrative Painting and Visual Culture
• ISBN: 9789888139439