axis to this more protected space closer to the Grand Council (Junjichu), akin to a privy council. Yongzheng and Qianlong were therefore the first two Qing emperors to use the hall as the center of the emperor’s life in the Forbidden City. The image of Yongzheng giving Qianlong a branch of flowering plum, typically a symbol of spring and renewal, in this particular space therefore symbolized how Yongzheng transferred the authority to rule to Qianlong when Qianlong was in the springtime of his life, visually confirming him as Yongzheng’s successor.51 Without the significance of the architectural reference, the small version of Spring’s Peaceful Message seems to be simply a costume portrait of the two Manchu emperors in Han scholars’ robes, just another of many with a tenuous relationship to reality. Had the scenic illusion been removed from the Hall of Mental Cultivation, it too might be interpreted that way, but remaining in place there has preserved both its effects and its meaning in the original context. Furthermore, Spring’s Peaceful Message is one of only two extant known scenic illusions depicting Qianlong. Since images of the imperial visage were historically as venerated as the emperor himself and could not be destroyed,
it is likely that few scenic illusions depicted him; otherwise more would have survived.52 Surviving in situ therefore adds another layer of significance to this rare scenic illusion portrait.
Crossing Pictorial Boundaries
The sheer volume, meticulous detail, and general incorporation of Western techniques in High Qing court painting as a whole encourage the viewer to treat them as realistic and representationally accurate, making it easy to succumb to Qianlong’s pictorial presentation of himself and his reign. Depicted more often than any emperor before him, he adjusted his presentation relative to the various roles he played for contemporary audiences and how he wanted posterity to perceive him, rendering his pictorial identity both discursively and historically mobile.53 Such control over his perceived image is epitomized by the fact that in 1795, after reigning for sixty years, he formally abdicated the throne in favor of his son Jiaqing (r. 1796–1820) as a filial gesture to avoid surpassing his grandfather Kangxi’s sixty-one-year reign. But he retained control of the empire until his death in 1799, not even vacating the imperial residence in the Hall of Mental Cultivation. Yet the depictions of Qianlong’s many accomplishments in paintings do not always measure up against the truth of events during his reign, which laid the foundation for the “destructive nexus of social disintegration and economic decline that would lay waste to so much of Chinese society in the 1800s.”54 Qianlong may not have left the empire better off than when he inherited it, but court painting produced under his patronage suggests otherwise.
Where this carefully constructed image fractures, revealing something of the real man who was emperor, is in scenic illusion paintings. Scenic illusions and their specific messages differ markedly from the rhetoric and propaganda of the emperor’s carefully controlled presentation in the majority of Qing court paintings. Originally installed in some of Qianlong’s most private spaces, scenic illusions offer his personal (and even secret) thoughts on the major issues of his reign, including empire, ethnicity, identity, longevity, and legacy. Although perhaps not all of the original scenic illusions were as intensely symbolic as those that have survived, and some level of imperial rhetoric is always involved, these works are extant largely because of their personal connection to this emperor who had them installed in spaces that were important particularly to him. The specific circumstances of each painting’s production link them to different moments in the imperial biography, a connection strengthened by the relationship of each work to places deeply meaningful to Qianlong, such as his retirement compound and personal art connoisseurship studio, which were preserved even centuries after his death.
Beyond the personal connection to Qianlong in scenic illusions, institutional, perceptual, and semiotic frames that are not immediately visible also affect the paintings and their meanings.55 Scenic illusions were influenced as much by Qing imperial culture as they were by the literature, political events, artistic trends, and popular interests of
eighteenth-century China, and by the expanding world it was encountering. The aesthetics of illusion inherent in these works is characteristic of Qianlong’s interests, but is also part of a much larger empire-wide trend that predated his reign. Qianlong’s personal interest in Western artistic ideas was fueled as much by the artists at his court as by foreign objects acquired via trade in the port of Guangzhou (Canton), diplomatic gifts that nations from around the world regularly offered as tribute, and occidentalizing works produced domestically by Chinese artisans to meet the popular demand for such things, which extended far outside the court.56 Scenic illusions are therefore not an isolated aberration in the narrative of Chinese painting, or a breakdown in the global spread of Renaissance perspective, but the most impressive and dynamic illustrations of how Chinese visual and material culture were evolving in response to a constellation of period trends.
Scenic illusion paintings therefore cross multiple boundaries in Chinese art. Most simply, they cross the physical boundaries of the painting surface and the supporting wall, and thereby those between illusion and reality. Historically and historiographically, they also challenge the supposed purity of Chinese painting and the previous scholarly avoidance of deeply probing works that obviously incorporated European ideas, crossing the boundary between East and West in art history. Earlier characterizations of Chinese works of art that visibly integrated European ideas often criticized them as products of “European influence,” and therefore unworthy of study, although that approach has recently changed dramatically.57 Scenic illusions might seem to fall within a third, Sino-European or “intercultural” space of inquiry that exists somewhere between Chinese and Western art history.58 Yet even that assessment distances them from the overarching narrative of Chinese art history, which has long since integrated earlier works with elements from India, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, but is still negotiating the role of Western incorporations before the fall of the imperial system in 1911. Instead of occupying some nebulous third space, therefore, as complex products of the multicultural Qing court scenic illusions should be considered a new evolutionary moment in Chinese painting, which has never been purely Chinese. The many boundaries that scenic illusions cross demonstrate the need to continue broadening the very definition of Chinese painting, mandating a revised narrative that places the Qing dynasty generally, and the eighteenth century specifically, in a more prominent position within the history of Chinese art.
1.1Lotus Sutra tableau, south wall, Cave 217, Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, early eighth century.
From Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, plate 5.
ONE
Painted Walls and Pictorial Illusions
EARLY CHINESE RESPONSES TO EXAMPLES OF PICTORIAL ILLUSIONISM intended to deceive are strikingly similar to the tropes in the European tradition. Just as Zeuxis fooled a bird into thinking his painted grapes were real, Xu Mao (act. mid-third century) painted a perch so realistic that it lured a raft of rare white otters into capture for King Cao Rui (r. 226–39) of the state of Cao Wei.1 As Zeuxis himself was fooled by Parrhasius, Xun Xu (?–289) chose to repay a practical joke by painting a figure of the prankster’s deceased grandfather on a wall of the man’s new house. Xun rendered the ancestor so convincingly that the man and his siblings, certain they saw a ghost, abandoned the house in terror. After accidentally dropping his brush onto the white silk of a screen painting for the Wu Kingdom ruler Sun Quan (c. third century), Cao Buxing (act.
