Response: Shifting Biographies, Shifting TemporalitiesAuthor(s): Patricia BergerSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), pp. 459-463Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067332 .

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INTERVENTIONS: BERGER RESPONDS 459

from the war forced upon us by the distinction between subject and

object. A nonhuman is thus the peacetime version of the object: what the object would look like if it were not engaged in the war to shortcut due political process. The pair human-nonhuman is not a way to 'over come' the subject-object distinction but to bypass it entirely." "Actor,

Actant: . .. Instead of starting with entities that are already components of the world, science studies focuses on the complex and controversial nature of what it is for an actor to come into existence. The key is to define the actor by what it does?its performances?under laboratory trials. Later, its competence is deduced and made part of an institu tion. Since in English 'actor' is often limited to humans, the word 'act

ant,' borrowed from semiotics, is sometimes used to include nonhu mans in the definition." Latour, Pandora's Hope, 308, 303.

82. Gell, Art and Agency. 83. As Nagel and Wood, "Interventions: Toward a New Model," have

shown, Renaissance artworks were already dematerialized in important ways.

84. The term is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's, from his assessment of the cur rent state of art historical methodology in Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Buchloh (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 22.

Response: Shifting Biographies, Shifting Temporalities Patricia Berger

I want to argue for the nonexistence of Li Cheng. ?Mi Fu (1052-1107), Huashi1

A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks ( Qingluan xiaosi) in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, is

one of the most familiar paintings in the Chinese canon,

often used as a starting point for a discussion of the classic

landscapes of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). As

Jonathan Hay observes in the first paragraph of "The Medi

ating Work of Art," this unsigned hanging scroll has long been associated with the artist Li Cheng, but, he adds, even if it "incorporates an awareness of Li Cheng's art, [it] is gener

ally thought to postdate Li's lifetime." In a longer study soon to appear in Artibus Asiae, Hay has reattributed the scroll to the "ruled-line" (jiehua) architecture specialist Wang Shiyuan, who was active during the years just before and after 1000 in the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng. Here, however, his concern is not with authorship so much as with the painting taken as "an event that comprises mediations with which the

painting also engages reflexively." With this choice, Hay aligns himself with the ranks of social historians of art, who have puzzled over the ways in which art might be understood not to mirror the society within which it is made so much as

to interact with it dialectically. This approach views the work of art itself as continually generating and inhabiting new

contexts (and where painting-as-text and its context are in

creasingly blurred) ; it sees art as radically contingent, forever

in dialogue with its larger environment and fluid in its affect.

To this end, Hay explores A Solitary Temple from numerous

angles: as material object and visual code, as embedded in a

social practice of painting, as reflecting recent political and

religious events, as a semiotic system of reference, and even?

most strikingly, to my mind?as a Buddhist icon enmeshed in a web of Confucian commentary. What Hay leaves for his second study (which I eagerly

await) are the implications of A Solitary Temples assumed

authorship. Yet the traditional attribution of the painting to Li Cheng, whose eye and hand it was thought to embody since at least the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), is as striking as

any of the other modes of mediation he raises, in that the act

of attribution?whether accurate or merely hopeful?speaks

directly to the painting as an event that continues to unfold

long after its original audience has left. For if we accept A

Solitary Temple as the product of an artist?Wang Shiyuan or

anyone else?who was aware of Li Cheng and his reputation, then we have to ask what he knew about the work of this

famously elusive painter or under what circumstances of

reception the painting he made might later have been ac

cepted as a work of Li Cheng's own hand. What, in other

words, did it mean to produce a painting in the style of Li

Cheng at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries? And what did it matter who the author of such a sublime painting might be?

By the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth, a hundred years or so after Hay says that Wang

Shiyuan painted A Solitary Temple and one hundred and fifty years after Li Cheng's death, the latter had achieved the status of painting sage among Northern Song connoisseurs. If

we can trust contemporaneous observers, Li Cheng's authen

tic works were already extremely rare. Though the Xuanhe

huapu, the imperial painting catalog compiled during the Xuanhe era (1119-26) by officials at the court of Song Emperor Huizong (r. 1101-26), lists 159 works under Li

Cheng's name, only four were accepted as authentic by the

artist's granddaughter, who came to court at the invitation of

Emperor Renzong (r. 1023-64) to identify her grandfather's true works. Mi Fu (1052-1107) recorded this unusual event in his Huashi (History of Painting), where he also made the

startling claim that he wanted to "argue for the nonexistence

of Li Cheng." This conclusion, effectively staged as an art

historical comparison of real and fake, comes at the end of a

long peroration in which Mi asserts that of the three hundred works attributed to the master he had seen, only two were

authentic:

I have seen only two of Li Cheng's landscapes: one of pines and rocks and one of a

landscape. The four-scroll painting of pines and rocks came from Sheng Wensu's collection

and is now in my studio; the landscape is at the priest Baoyue's place in Suchou and is a profoundly refined and

uncommon picture. The pines are straight and vigorous; their branches and needles are bushy and shade-filled.

The small Chu-shrubs are rendered without any superflu ous brushwork that would make them look like dragons, snakes, demons, or spirits. The large pictures that are in

the collections of noblemen these days resemble the signs

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460 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 3

on pharmacies done in the style of [the calligraphers] Yan

[Lugong] and Liu [Gongquan]: they are not natural and

thoroughly vulgar. The trunks of the pines are decayed,

emaciated, with many knots. The shrubs look like firewood and have no sense of life. Cheng himself was an assistant in

the Office of Imperial Banquets and received his jinshi [advanced scholar] degree. His son You was an official in the imperial censorate, his grandson You was a daizhi

[scholar in the Hongwen guan]. Cheng was awarded the

purple belt and gold seal as an official in the Office of

Imperial Banquets. But even if he had been an artisan

working for clothing and food, he could never have done so many paintings. They are all the products of vulgar hands working under false names. I want to argue for the

nonexistence of Li Cheng.2

Here Mi Fu, in a flurry of positive and negative description, gives his readers a sense of a real Li Cheng painting by contrasting it with what it cannot possibly be: "vulgar," "un

natural," lacking a "sense of life." He also suggests that he

alone can separate the real from the fake; he is, after all, the

owner of one of two extant authentic paintings by the master.

He performed a similar sorting out for other early masters.

The breadth of the Southern Tang painter Dong Yuan's (fl. late tenth century) actual painting practice was focused and defined by the very particular taste of Mi Fu and his contem

poraries, who, ignoring the artist's own documented alterna

tive interest in color, fine detail, and dragons, celebrated only the part of his production that was monochromatic and

rejected "form-likeness" in preference for affective evenness

and "blandness" (pingdan). The role of Mi Fu and men of similar social position in crafting a written history of painting and calligraphy and, more specifically, in narrowing the boundaries of acceptable material that would support their own claims as the just inheritors of a long, unbroken tradition of disinterested gentleman artists (men who were, nonethe

less, politically powerful and factionalized) has been vividly described by historians of Song painting, among them Rich ard Barnhart and Peter Sturman.3 Most later connoisseurs

knew the masters of even the fairly recent past through two

strands of recollection: verbal descriptions and copies. Lofty

eulogies, which generally addressed the character of artists

through the medium of their paintings' formal and stylistic effects, were respectfully repeated by later writers, who may have had access only to copies of their actual works. Great

paintings gathered together in collections of wealthy connois

seurs were difficult to access, and artists' entire oeuvres some

times disappeared almost entirely with a change of taste (as in the famous case of Guo Xi). Paintings also proliferated in

long replicatory chains, losing force or taking on the polish and pointedness of a set form, operating in a quasi-literary fashion as a semiotically laden trope, not "natural," but also

not meaningless. As characterized by the literati of the North ern Song and later dynasties, good copies could also provide access to the very character of the original artist, to his ability to see beyond superficial forms and appearances and to make

the deeper principles of nature (li) legible. In Mi Fu's Huashi, we get a sense of how ideological, how protective of a certain

class of painter this writing of the history of art could be. We also see how the connoisseur and collector Mi Fu was able to

craft his own (and potentially better) Li Cheng descriptively out of what he saw as a group of miserably inadequate fakes.

In his hands, and in the hands of his contemporaries and

successors, Li Cheng emerges as a scholarly, reclusive saint,

one whose pure and untainted relics were hard to come by. The mechanism that drove this history of art was biography

or, more properly, hagiography, though by the Northern

Song, the writing of an artist's life was simply one element

that was deployed in complicating the relation between paint ing and writing (or viewing and history). The hagiographie framework of art historical writing and the system of ranking, in force since at least the sixth century, which put some

painters, including Li Cheng, in the highest "inspired" (shen) category, shifted the stress away from paintings that few had the opportunity to experience and onto the artist, who in

creasingly existed only as a literary artifact, immortalized by anecdote. Thus, we learn from various early sources that Li

Cheng was a difficult man from a family of respected Confu cian scholars in Yingqiu, Shandong Province, that he was well-educated to the point of obtaining the jinshi degree (though late in life and only after many failed attempts), that he served in an official capacity in the Office of Imperial Banquets but generally rejected ordinary society in favor of immersion in painting and alcohol, and that his paintings achieved a cultic attraction for some collectors, one of whose

obsession with the artist led to the complete disappearance of his work from the market. When all was said and done, Li

Cheng was transformed into a paragon, who, bad habits and

nasty temper aside, was one with the Dao. His paintings, the

basic evidence that made possible this reincarnation, may have disappeared, but descriptions of them still offered an

ekphrastic, imaginative glimpse into a golden moment in the

past.4 This kind of traditional hagiographie account does not

enter into Hay's discussion, though he does not turn his back on the character and intention of the artist as it was under

stood in the Song dynasty. Hay works to unravel how A Solitary Temple actually accomplishes its work as a painting, so he

concentrates not on the supposed artist but, among other

things, on the philosophical and practical implications of the method of observation and self-cultivation encapsulated in

the phrase gewu (the investigation of things), and he redirects

attention by questioning the presumed "stability of the image and thereby the artwork's objecthood." Expanding on ideas

put forward by Wu Hung and John Hay, he emphasizes the tension inherent in the ink monochrome painting medium,

which tugs the viewer back and forth between interest in the

painting's surface and the quality of brushwork, on the one

hand, and enchantment with the optical and illusionistic force of its technique and its subject matter, on the other.5

This oscillation, coupled with the carefully arranged shifting perspectives that enable the eye to move around the land

scape in a way that mimics the experience of a traveler who

hovers above it, looks up at it, or views it straight on, depend

ing on his progress through it, produces a temporalization of

space, a built-in instability.

Beyond this temporalization of space through shifting per spective, Hay points to another, literary temporalization, which I find particularly intriguing: the subtle inclusion of a

glimpsed, calligraphed poem on a screen hanging in the

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INTERVENTIONS: BERGER RESPONDS Qfr\

window of one of the pavilions located at the bottom of A

Solitary Temple. He hazards, and I think he is probably right, that this fragment of swiftly written text is likely to be part of a Tang dynasty (618-906) poem (or at least was intended to

signal one), which casts a spell of antiquity and lost grandeur over the landscape, poeticizing it and drawing attention both to its potential legibility and to its refusal to come into focus.

Here the Tang inhabits the Song, a colonization of the

present by the past not at all alien to other works attributed to, among others, Li Cheng. Sturman, for example, has

pointed to the intentional (but seemingly haphazard) inclu sion of text in Travelers in a Wintry Forest (Metropolitan Mu seum of Art, New York), another Li Cheng attribution.

There, a bit of calligraphed text spills out of a servant boy's pouch and allows Sturman to identify the gentleman on

donkey back he follows as the Tang poet Meng Haoran, a

literary hero in the Five Dynasties and Song.6 Nor is this the

only example among the very few extant works that modern

art historians believe might hint at what Li Cheng's painting was actually like. The often-repeated composition Reading the

Stele, in which another gentleman on a donkey has stopped to read the text carved into an ancient stone slab, also depends on the ways in which the inscription (or superscription) of the landscape complicates any narrative moment, creating a

pictorial space where two or several different times can exist

simultaneously and even interact.

The mechanisms of temporalization and the "density of its visual connections to a world beyond painting" that operate in A Solitary Temple are thus complicated by the artist's paint erly habit and by the written past; they include the slippage between awareness of surface and capitulation to illusion; the

conscious use of shifting perspective, which destabilizes the viewer's eye and forces it to move; the insertion of literary

fragments, which redirect the mind to the past experiences of

others and induce a poeticized sense of hindsight and nos

talgic reverie; and much more. And, if A Solitary Tempieis not the work of Li Cheng, then we have to recognize another

level of temporalization that has been added by those viewers who have thought or hoped it was (and by the Nelson-Atkins

Museum, which asserts that it might be) : one that must now take all its viewers imaginatively back to an otherwise lost and unrecoverable model.

That Li Cheng/Wang Shiyuan (for they might best be viewed from our postmodern vantage point as a unit, at least

in this case) was able to do all this points to the artist's innate

connectivity to the larger world around him, embodied in the

ancient principle qiyun (breath?or "energy"?resonance or

consonance), first put forward by the theorist Xie He in the sixth century in his Six Laws of Painting. As James Cahill has read it, "The first law is: engender [a sense of movement]

[through] spirit consonance."7 I take this "movement" to mean both the gestural movement of the artist (who is moved to paint by his resonance with his subject) and the facturai traces of his movement?the marks of his brush?that come

together to form the painting. With this in mind, if we return to Li Cheng's biography, particularly as it was being con structed and refined in the twelfth century by such writers as

Dong You, who had a particular affinity for Li Cheng (com ing as he did from the same town in Shandong), we see how this process was understood in the Northern Song. Dong You

stressed the artist's incomparable abilities in a practice that

begins with the cultivation of resonance or harmony with

nature, moves to the achievement of clarity, and ends with his

insurmountable need to release his insight through painting, which is accomplished in a state of forgetfulness resembling evacuation of the self:

Those who look at [Li] Hsien-hsi's [Li Cheng's] paintings are first impressed by the forms and then suddenly seem to

forget them. Most people are astonished and think the work divinely inspired, but can what they read into them be insight? Hsien-hsi [Xianxi] was a potential official of Chi-hsia [Qixia] who lived in the landscape, among cliffs and valleys. He was born loving the piled-up ranges and

mountains, the denseness of gorges and the height of

peaks. He stored his love in his mind, and after a while it became part of him. He concentrated on it without relax

ing, even forgetting the outside world, until exceptional clarity was contained in his breast and he could not avoid

having it. Then one day he suddenly saw many mountains

spread out before him, emerging piled together one on

top of the other, in a hazy glow in clearing mists, and they corresponded in each part from top to bottom with those he

gradually released outside, unable to hold them back. For what has

been transformed by the art of the mind comes forth when it is time and makes use of painting to lodge its releasing, thus cloud and

mist, wind and rain, and thunder's transmutations follow

in turn. At this time the artist suddenly forgets his four limbs and body; then what he sees with his insight is all

mountains, so he is able to achieve Tao [Dao]. Later men

who try to understand his method through his paintings do not know that they were painted unconsciously [hua

wang] .8

The process of preparing to paint and of the act of painting itself that Dong You describes here, which begins with Li

Cheng's natural affection for hills and valleys, moves into a

focused meditation, and culminates in action fueled by an irresistible urge to lodge his insights in painting, is so over

whelmingly powerful that Li Cheng "forgets his four limbs" and paints in a state of unconsciousness, literally, as

Dong You writes, "forgetting what he is painting."9 Yet the result, if we can take A Solitary Temple as any indication, is far from

being wild and unstructured; on the contrary, it is light, perfectly balanced, rationally composed, carefully detailed,

and built up with layers of carefully modulated texture strokes that record a slow, gradual process of manufacture.

There are slippages, however, which Jonathan Hay care

fully enumerates: the rupture between the temple and its

mountain setting, the sudden flattening of the waterfall, and

the curious, if almost indiscernible misalignment of the pa goda's mast, all places where the illusionistic fabric of the

painting threatens to come apart and where the artist seems

to point, "unconsciously" perhaps, to some different possibil

ity of meaning. Hay also argues for another mediation,

sparked by the pagoda that forms the centerpiece of A Solitary Temple and is the goal of the gentlemanly pilgrim on donkey, making his way into the picture at lower left. The pagoda in the painting, Hay believes, evoked another similarly auspi cious structure for Song dynasty viewers, the Fusheng Pagoda

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462 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 3

of the Kaibao Monastery in the Northern Song capital at

Kaifeng, built to celebrate one of the major political (and

conspicuously Buddhist) events of the day: the reinstallation in Kaifeng of the Buddha's relics that the Song had removed from the southeastern state of Wu-Yue. This project was only

part of an ongoing appropriation of Buddhist trappings by the Song emperors and the growing involvement in Buddhist

practices (particularly but far from exclusively Chan in style) by the literati who gathered around such luminaries as the

off-again, on-again court official, poet, calligrapher, and

painter Su Shi (1037-1101). There is little if any evidence to connect Li Cheng to

Buddhism (though Dong You shows us that he engaged in some sort of practice of mental concentration, he does not

specify that it was Buddhist in nature),10 and even less in the case of Wang Shiyuan, about whose personal life we have only scant details. So the statement that the Buddhist pagoda in A

Solitary Temple operates "according to the antinarrative logic of the religious icon" must be taken as a deliberately provoc

ative move on Hay's part, one that forces us to question the

artist's intention once again. Hay points to the clear efforts to

highlight the pagoda: it is at the center of the painting, it is surrounded by a "halo" of light that emerges from an inde

terminate source, it is foregrounded against the main moun

tain (which was likely read as symbolizing the emperor him

self), it outmasses the other architectural structures in the

picture and functions more like a mountain peak than a

building. But it also departs from the usual frontality of the

average Song dynasty Buddhist icon, in that it is presented in

three-quarters view.

A pagoda is a reliquary, a particularly Chinese interpreta tion of the Indian stupa that elaborates the stupa's multi

tiered mast, the symbolic form that signals the exalted, royal status of the person whose relics are interred within. The

stupa or pagoda can hold actual bodily relics of the Buddha or of exalted Buddhist saints, but pagodas were also con

structed, as in the case of the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an, to

hold sacred scriptures (taken as speech relics of the Buddha) or, as in the great wooden pagoda at the Foguang Monastery in Yingxian, Shanxi, built by the Liao in 1056, to hold mul

tiple, complex, and sculptural ensembles supporting an

iconic image of the cosmic Buddha Vairocana (for whom there are no material, bodily relics). In semiotic terms, the

pagoda's relics?whether bodily, scriptural, or sculptural? are indexical traces, actual remains of the Buddha's cremated

body that convey a sense of him directly. The pagoda protects

and conceals this powerful treasure and represents its con

tents symbolically, marking the landscape itself as Buddhist

by virtue of the relics' presence.11 Semiotically, the pagoda is a complex object, and a representation of a pagoda?whose size

and architectural importance reference another famous

structure, one that held the Buddhist spoils of imperial con

quest?must be even more so.

Both A Solitary Temple and the woodblock print Hay cites, which celebrates the reinstallation of the Buddha's relics

from Wu-Yue in the Fusheng Pagoda in the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng (his Fig. 7), are complicated for modern viewers by their (very different) visual links to paintings found in a specifically Buddhist setting: the cave-temples of

Yulin, Anxi, in northwestern Gansu Province, a remote part

of the greater Dunhuang cave-temple complex. In Cave 3,

opened in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century when

the region was under the control of the Tangut Xixia dynasty, a twin set of murals shows the bodhisattvas Manjusri and Samantabhadra on their lion and elephant mounts, painted in the baimiao (plain drawing) style of the Tang master Wu

Daozi.12 They emerge from mountain landscapes, which are,

as in A Solitary Temple, dominated by temple halls and pago das. The landscapes, both essentially monochromatic, respec

tively represent the Five Platform Mountains (Wutaishan) in Shanxi and Mount Emei (Emeishan) in Sichuan, where these two bodhisattvas are thought to dwell and where they con

tinue even today to manifest themselves for the benefit of

pious pilgrims. Although the artist who did these paintings apparently knew something of the painting of Li Cheng and of another great Northern Song master, Fan Kuan, he was

likely also aware of contemporaneous Southern Song land

scapes by artists such as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, suggesting that the rare products of these great masters (or their offspring in

copies) were part of the visual dialogue even in regions

bordering the Song. The major difference at Yulin is that these landscapes (both of which were far from the Xixia

realm), inhabited by the bodhisattvas themselves and their realms of enlightened activity, are translated into carefully

specified and populated mountain environments that are

also sites of miraculous visions. The reconciliation between

Buddhism and Song-style gentry culture?apparently as

much an issue for the residents of the Tangut Xixia realm as

for the Song?is negotiated through a blending of brush

techniques drawn from both Buddhist painters of the Tang and landscape painters of the Song.

The Buddha's presence is only implied in A Solitary Temple-, in fact, it is conspicuously guarded. The pagoda, which turns

slightly away from the approaching scholar on donkey, both announces and conceals the true traces of the Buddha that

lie within. This skewed placement, in which the pagoda is set

against the dramatic backdrop of the "imperial" central peak, underscores the ambivalent accord between state power, em

bodied in the main mountain peak behind, and the power of

the Buddhist establishment that Hay reads into the slight deviation from the vertical, the "suture across empty space" he notices in the pagoda's mast. But the three-quarters place ment also recalls one of the most noteworthy innovations of

Buddhist painting, specifically that created for an audience of

highly educated practitioners of Chan Buddhism, which re

ceived direct imperial support in the Song dynasty. I am

thinking of such famous late-twelfth-early-thirteenth-century works as Muqi's Guanyin, which occupies the center of the

Daitoku-ji Triptych, or Liang Kai's Sakyamuni Descending from the Mountains (Tokyo National Museum), though the latter

represents a subject also painted by Li Gonglin (1049-ca. 1105), a contemporary of Mi Fu and Su Shi and a devout Buddhist. Li Gonglin's version is long lost, but we might imagine that it, like Liang Kai's painting, presented its subject in three-quarters view, emerging from the mountains after a

long period of ascetic meditation, in silent possession of the truth but not yet a fully enlightened Buddha. In the paintings by Liang Kai and Muqi, the Buddha and the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin refuse to offer the direct gaze that con

fers blessings on the devout, and both conceal their hands in

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INTERVENTIONS: E. WANG RESPONDS 453

the folds of their robes, withholding the mudra that might clarify their meaning. By moving away from direct confron

tation with the viewer, both paintings also blur the distinction

between icon and narrative, demanding that the timelessness

of the sacred somehow be fitted into a human temporality. This is essentially what A Solitary Temple does, and, as Jonathan

Hay amply demonstrates, this mediation and the many others it

effects simultaneously are far from simple and far from stable.

Patricia Berger, associate professor of Chinese art at the University of

California, Berkeley, specializes in the Buddhist art of China, Mon

golia, and Tibet. Her most recent book is Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003) [Department of History of Art, 416 Doe

Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif 94720-6020,

pberger@berkeley. edu].

Notes 1. Mi Fu, Huashi (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), 14.

2. Ibid., 13-14.

3. Richard Barnhart, Marriage of the Lord of the River: A Lost Landscape by Tung Yuan, Artibus Asiae Supplementum, 27 (Ascona, Switz.: Artibus

Asiae, 1970); and Peter C. Sturman, "The Donkey Rider as Icon: Li

Cheng and Early Chinese Landscape Painting," Artibus Asiae 55, nos. 1-2 (1995): 43-97.

4. See, for example, Liu Tao-chu'un, Evaluations of Sung Dynasty Painters of Renown: Liu Tao-chun's "Sung-chao ming-hua p'ing," trans. Charles Lac li man (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 56-58, 95.

5. Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Paint

ing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Reaktion Books,

1996); and A. John Hay, "Surface and the Chinese Painter: The Discov

ery of Surface;' Archives of Asian Art 38 (1985): 95-123.

6. Sturman, "The Donkey Rider as Icon," 44-54.

7. The Six Laws appear in the opening passages of Xie He's Guhuapin lu

(Record of the Classification of Ancient Paintings). All historians of Chinese art have grappled with them, and James Cahill, who sees all six as four-character phrases and as couplets with parallel structures, has provided a valuable discussion and translation of them in "The Six Laws and How to Read Them," Ars Orientalis 4 (1961): 372-81. That Li

Cheng and Wang Shiyuan knew Xie He's Six Laws is almost certain. Not only was his Guhuapin lu well read in the Northern Song but also his laws were repeated, with some small changes, in the late Tang painter Jing Hao's treatise Bifaji (Record of Brush Methods), in Gu Ruoxu's Tuhua jianwen zhi, and elsewhere.

8. Dong You, Guangchuan huaba, juan 6.8a-b, trans. Susan Bush, The Chi nese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037-1101) to Tang Ch'i-ch'ang (1555 1636), Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies, 27 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard University Press, 1971), 53, emphasis mine, based on Zhang Junheng, ed., Shiyuan congshu (Wucheng: Privately printed, 1916).

9. Dong You, Guangchuan huaba, juan 4.6b, trans. Bush, The Chinese Lite rati on Painting, 54.

10. The fourth-century Buddhist layman and painting theorist Zong Bing, a proponent of "landscape Buddhism," strongly believed that the land

scape itself, and paintings of it, were appropriate objects of Buddhist

contemplation. See Leon Hurvitz, "Tsung Ping's Comments on Land

scape Painting," Arlihus Asiae 32, nos. 2-3 (1970): 146-56.

11. On Buddhist relics and their material and ritual framing, see Robert Sharf, "On the Allure of Buddhist Relics," Representations 66 (Spring 1999): 75-99.

12. See Dunhuang Academy, Zhongguo shiku: Anxi Yulin shiku (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1997), pis. 158-70. They can also be seen on ARTstor's Mellon International Dunhuang Project, under Cave 2 (www. artstor.org, James and Lucy Lo Photograph Archives, nos. yl-c2-l and

yl-c2-2). This pair of murals draws on earlier paintings at the Dun

huang site, the most celebrated of which is in Cave 61 (dated to the mid-tenth century), where the field of enlightened activity of the bodhisattva Manjusri is similarly depicted as the actual landscape of

Wutaishan, filled with temples, pilgrims, and miracles of the past and

present moment. This mural originally formed the backdrop for a

large sculpted image of Manjusri on a lion, which is no longer extant.

Response: "Picture Idea" and Its Cultural Dynamics in Northern

Song China

Eugene Y. Wang

Not all pictures are created equal. There is no guarantee that

a painting necessarily has a "pictorial conception." Thus

spoke the Chinese theorists in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), when such a notion became a discursive preoc

cupation. The premise is that a painting is considered to

display a "pictorial conception" only when its formal mecha

nism produces certain ineffable effects that evoke sugges

tive moods, conceptual overtones, or extralinguistic flavors

comparable to those inspired by poetry. What is evoked is thus known as the "pictorial conception" or "picture idea

(huayi)."1 The concept is now often explicated through a

master narrative of a general shift in taste and formal dispo sition away from the professional painter's deadpan verisi

militude toward extrapictorial conceptualism favored by the

literati. This is a half-truth. The richness of "pictorial

conception" is not necessarily proportional to the reduced

verisimilitude. Moreover, the familiar narrative that spans

centuries of development gives short shrift to the cultural

dynamics of the initial moment, that is, the eleventh century, when the notion was first proposed. How did the notion find

its consonance in pictorial practice? Insofar as the "pictorial

conception" leads us into the murky domain of mental di

mensions, it brings up the question of how the pictorial and

conceptual universes may be brought to a level of commen

surability. To the extent that the literati, the exponents of the

"pictorial conception," sought to impregnate painting with

poetic sensibility, it remains to be seen how poetic thinking

reshaped the pictorial medium that is inherently resistant to

verbalization and textual closure. This in turn raises the

question of how professional painters responded to the lite

rati's aesthetics of "pictorial conception." No other painting demonstrates these issues better than A Solitary Monastery amid Clearing Peaks (A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks), a Northern Song hanging scroll, now in the Nelson-Atkins

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