illusionism had become common for Buddhist murals, as had the understanding of an illusionistically painted wall as a porous boundary between human and other worlds. Mural connoisseur Duan Chengshi (c. 803–63) noted a number of examples in the Buddhist monasteries of the Tang capital at Chang’an, and remarked extensively upon the generally magical qualities of wall paintings and their tendency to create supernatural experiences for their viewers.12 Duan recounted one story of viewing a mural in which an associate critiqued its lack of “evocative resonance” (yiqu) relative to its “modeling force” (tishi).13 The man then shocked his colleagues by stepping into the painting and disappearing, and returned a while later saying that he only had time to improve only one portrait, which indeed now wore a different, more smiling expression. This boundary-crossing individual was only a connoisseur and amateur artist; in contrast, it was the professional muralist who was most able to create a magical wall painting that permitted access between worlds. Even when murals were produced with an emphasis on line and painting surface rather than on modeling and spatial recession, the elements of the wall and the artist were consistent features of the animating magic of the painting.
The majority of such anecdotes surround the most famous professional Chinese muralist, Wu Daozi (also known as Wu Daoxuan, act. c. 710–60), and the vivifying power of his swirling style of ink lines, which survives only in textual descriptions.14 Recording Wu as a painter of the “Inspired Class, Top Grade,” the art historian Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815–77) commented that portable formats on silk were insufficient for him, and that only walls were spacious enough for his ideas. The famous poet Du Fu (712–70) further described his contemporary’s paintings as shaking the palace walls and even rotating the earth. In all cases, observers associated the combination of Wu’s abilities and specialization with supernatural qualities. Wu’s Buddhist hell cycles so terrified the capital’s butchers
that some became vegetarians and took up less bloody livelihoods in the hope of avoiding the fate that the artist depicted. His dragons emitted mist and flew away off the painting surfaces, while his figures of the demon-queller Zhong Kui—first produced for no less than emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56) and pasted to the doors of all the houses in the empire—kept evil spirits at bay. Even the craggy rocks and rushing rivers of his landscapes seemed tangible and therefore real. While part of the critical discourse surrounding the assessments of any painter’s skills prioritized his ability to capture nature, during the Tang dynasty the discourse of perceived mural animation was intertwined with the alchemy of the large wall, the professional muralist, and pictorial styles that lent subjects mass, volume, and even life (or at least the appearance of it).
Despite a significant textual record of illusionistic murals after the Tang dynasty, comparatively few have survived relative to the vast numbers of more portable paintings in scroll and album formats, and post-Tang murals have not received anywhere near as much historical or historiographical consideration. During the Northern Song dynasty, painting academy artists serving the Huizong emperor (r. 1101–25) are recorded to have produced murals as well as large screen paintings for imperial temples and palaces such as the Daoist Temple of the Shangqing Precious Registers (Shangqing Baolugong) and the emperor’s own Dragon Virtue Palace (Longdegong). Although none of these are extant, murals continued to be used in northern Chinese tombs from the Northern Song through Yuan dynasties, and might therefore suggest something of the appearance of palace murals when considered alongside portable court paintings from the period.15 The colorful, highly detailed painting style of the Northern Song court painting academy is considered realistic for its “lively and fluid” figures produced with “an organic sense of form in multidirectional movement, as part of a fully integrated, optically convincing space.”16 At the time, paintings by Northern Song masters were explicitly described as making the viewer feel as if actually in the place depicted.17 Providing a sense of how close these paintings came to achieving that impression are those in a Song tomb (figure 1.2) excavated at Dengfeng, Henan. Here, detailed foreshortened figures in different scenes on different walls engage the viewer from within simulated architectural settings treated with horizontal spatial recession and filled with volumetric objects, all the elements working in concert to create an illusion of three dimensions. In one scene, a pair of figures is seated at a laden table, engrossed in each other as their maid looks out at the viewer. In another, a young woman, from behind a door that suggests another space behind her, also peers out at the viewer. Although admittedly flatter and more linear, the Song-style illusionism of these paintings suggests that their scenes of everyday life, material culture, and architecture are real and three-dimensional rather than painted and two-dimensional. Similar illusionistic murals have been uncovered in other tombs, but such discoveries are so recent that these paintings have yet to be fully integrated into the narrative of Chinese painting history.18 Nevertheless, even this single tomb mural indicates the continued ability of such murals to create a sense of animation and the illusion of reality well after the end of the Tang dynasty.
1.2Scenes from Song dynasty tomb at Dengfeng, excavated 2011. From Lobell, “Song Dynasty Tomb Discovered.”
In contrast to portable painting formats, Song and Yuan murals frequently demonstrate continuity rather than disjunction between what is often distinguished as Song realism versus Yuan expressiveness,19 not least because of the trained professionals who continued to produce murals while the literati practiced the more abstract style. What few Yuan and Ming murals survive are all monumental examples from Daoist and Buddhist temples, where their two essential functions were as ritual objects and evangelical media.20 Arguably the most famous Daoist murals are the thirteenth- and fourteenth- century examples from Shanxi of an imperial-style audience with the celestial court of Daoist deities, in front of which a priest would visualize his transcendence from the human realm into the heavens to personally present a petition to the Daoist supreme being during a court audience.21 Fully integrated with the surrounding temple architecture and often with connections to the Wu Daozi tradition, these lively murals helped facilitate the priest’s mental journey to the celestial realm in order that he could actually carry out the presentation there, rather than simply symbolically in front of paintings on earth. Like their Daoist counterparts, late imperial Buddhist temple murals presented monumental assemblages of figures: massive central Buddhas and bodhisattvas in their particular paradises, surrounded by deities, celestials, warriors, and other figures
from a diverse pantheon.22 Far larger than life-size, whether Buddhist or Daoist, these meticulously detailed and colorful works overwhelm the viewer and occupy his or her entire visual field, while some figures within their dense assemblages often engage the viewer directly from inside the painting to increase the perception of a real vision and experience of the divine. Although tomb murals eventually disappeared entirely, through the Ming and Qing dynasties temple murals continued to employ this basic combination of size, realistic detail, wall surface, and overall illusionistic presentation to create an intense visual experience.23
Despite the persistence of illusionistic murals in the Chinese cultural landscape, from very early on there was a disjunction between their popular presence and elite aesthetic responses to them. Some argue that three-dimensional modeling through tone and shading is an indigenous technique that had been part of Chinese painting since the Han dynasty; even if true, at best it was much less well developed than other qualities in painting because it was already considered to be of lesser importance even at this early stage of theorization.24 The slow rise of the highly educated literati (wenren) class as the social and political elite and arbiters of aesthetic taste coincided with the growing production of portable painting formats and critical valorization of a self-consciously amateurish and deliberately abstracted style of ink painting. Admittedly, this
