eighteenth-century Beijing. Today only a handful of those that Qianlong commissioned remain to testify to the scenic illusion phenomenon at the Qing court. More may come to light in the future, but for now, only five single paintings and one complete interior program remain in situ; four paintings survive outside their original architectural contexts; and there is visual evidence for three works that have not survived. Now held almost exclusively inside restricted areas of the Palace Museum, three of the extant single scenic illusions were briefly displayed internationally,6 but upon their return to Beijing became just as inaccessible as before. The unwieldiness and fragility of these massive paintings severely complicate their handling, photography, and display, consequently circumscribing even scholarly access, and there have been correspondingly few publications.7 In spite of their current rarity and their historical, historiographical, and institutional invisibility, scenic illusion paintings offer new insights into late imperial China’s most influential emperor. More importantly, however, they also provide a new perspective on how Chinese art integrated or rejected foreign concepts during the height of early modern Sino-European exchange.
Approaching Scenic Illusion Paintings
“Scenic illusion painting” is a connotative translation of tongjinghua, the functionally elegant Chinese term that describes the viewer’s experience of these paintings: the term literally means “to connect, cross into, or move through” (tong) “scenes” (jing) that are “painted” (hua). Although this was the most common term, many others were used and could even designate the same painting over the course of its production, including “deep-distance paintings” (shenyuanhua), “perspectival paintings” (xianfahua, literally “line-method paintings”), “scenic illusion perspectival paintings” (tongjing xianfahua), and “scenic illusion oil paintings” (tongjing youhua). Translating tongjinghua both into English and into concise, modern art-historical terminology has proven difficult, resulting in renderings as varied as “panoramic perspective scene” and “illusionistic murals.”8 It is most often rendered as “trompe l’œil” (tricks the eye), the anachronistic, culturally distant, and heavily weighted Western term now indiscriminately used to designate nearly all illusionistic paintings. Although the Western tradition of pictorial illusionism famously began with the competition between the Greek painters Zeuxis (act. 435–390 BCE) and Parrhasius (act. 440–390 BCE), vividly described by Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) in his Natural History (c. 77–79 CE), “trompe l’œil” appeared as a noun only around 1800 to denote a specifically French genre of ultrarealistic, self-contained, framed still-life easel painting.9 Quadratura, the perspectival Renaissance and Baroque wall and ceiling paintings that rely on visual contiguity between painting and architecture to create the illusion of real, permeable space,10 played an important role in the development of scenic illusions. But the concept of “moving through scenes” (tongjing) originated about half a millennium earlier in the Yuan dynasty, when tongjinghua described landscape paintings with a high isometric
or bird’s-eye viewpoint that allowed the viewer to move visually through the depths of the entire depicted scene.11 The eighteenth-century Qing reappropriation of this term therefore prioritized native over foreign painting terminology, contextualizing firmly within Chinese tradition this type of painting that integrated Western techniques. Therefore, the translation of tongjinghua as “scenic illusion painting” aims to convey the illusionistic viewing experience inherent both in the Chinese term and in these particular paintings within their own unique cultural context of late imperial China.
The viewing experience for scenic illusion paintings comprised four phases: the imperial viewer’s initial deception by the pictorial illusion, his recognition of the reality of the painting, his identification of the significance of its subject matter, and finally his simultaneous appreciation of both the illusion and the painting as a single meaningful entity.12 As the viewer approached an installed scenic illusion, its deceptive, erasive style and wall- encompassing format supported the superficial illusion of reality by effacing the artists’ labor, thereby denying the work’s materiality and medium specificity. In the second phase, the composition of the painting (which was customized for the site), the particularity and significance of its architectural location and its logical imagery together buttressed the viewing experience. The painting was physically part of the real architectural space, and its subject matter was always absolutely appropriate for and even expected in that space. Only after recognition of the work as a painting cemented its materiality would the viewer reframe the experience as “viewing a painting” (albeit an unprecedented type of work) and evaluate the meaning of the subject matter. Ultimately, one enjoyed both the visual illusion and the knowledge that the work was a painting without one aspect weakening the other. As marvelous as the illusions were, the representational techniques supporting them made the paintings marvelous in themselves. The way that pictorial illusionism initially destroyed the materiality of the painting thereby redeemed itself, modulating any disappointment through the practical magic of the techniques and the revelation of the underlying meaning, which resituated both the work and the imperial viewer within more familiar cultural territory. This did not diminish the imperial viewing experience of scenic illusions, but rather enhanced it, and acknowledged the viewer’s superior refinement. Only a truly sophisticated viewer could simultaneously perceive and appreciate the illusion of space, objects, and figures alongside the meaningful reality of the painting as two aspects of a single experience (rather than two alternating experiences) without being troubled by such phenomenological doubleness.13
Scenic illusions therefore did something that traditional Chinese paintings did not: for an extended moment, the viewer had no sensory data that would support differentiating the painting from reality. In traditional Chinese paintings, typically portable works with distinctive ink brushwork that pointed to a recognizable artistic identity, the viewer’s world extended only up to the borders and the surface of the object. However, with scenic illusions that world continued seamlessly into the painting, creating a provocative alternative to the medium-specific nature of most viewing practices and the dominant
formats of scrolls, albums, fans, and screens. Traditionally, a portable painting was physically present and identifiable because its format, viewing customs, and storage practices all demanded that viewers engage it with the knowledge that it was a painting well before actually seeing brush traces on paper or silk. This knowledge created a sense of anticipation that encoded all ensuing thoughts and actions with the meaning “viewing a painting” and physically connected the viewer with the material object identified as a painting prior to seeing the work. Furthermore, by the Qing dynasty the vocabulary that had developed specifically for “looking at a painting” (kan hua) or “reading a painting” (du hua) implied an acquired skill particular to the learned elite gentleman capable of truly contemplating or scrutinizing (guan) a work: “scholars contemplate, while peasants (along with women, children, and eunuchs) just look.”14 Before the elite male implicitly understood to be the appropriate viewer even physically saw a painting, therefore, he was already firmly situated within a complex preconditioned visuality.
In contrast, the emperor encountered a scenic illusion without performing any of the physical movements or thought processes that typically preceded “viewing a painting,” such as unrolling a scroll or opening an album, and initially received no visible contextual or material clues to suggest that the view was a painting. Scenic illusions typically did not receive seals or inscriptions (traditional marks of authorship, ownership, appreciation, and pictorial surface), which eliminated another key cultural process that instantiated paintings as such. In short, the combined aesthetic and kinesthetic experience that prepared the eighteenth-century Chinese elite male viewer to “view a painting” was short- circuited: he simply entered a room and, without any preparation or expectations,
