The Art Institute of Chicago, February 25–May 13, 2018
Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler
The Book of Documents (Shujing), one of the foundational texts of premodern Chinese thought, preserves an announcement by King Wu of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE) in which he remonstrates with his underlings: “the ancients have said, ‘Let not men look only into water; let them look into the mirror of other people. Now that Yin has lost its appointment, ought we not to look much to it as our mirror, and learn how to secure the repose of our time?’” As Eugene Wang points out, this trope of history-as-mirror seized the imagination of political commentators throughout ancient and imperial China and, significantly, went hand in hand with the increasing popularity and complexity of actual bronze mirrors. [1] To title a show of bronze vessels “Mirroring China’s Past” is thus to invoke the lengthy history of a political metaphor. (There are, ironically, very few bronze mirrors on display.) At stake for art historians are the relationships between objects, ideas, and the discursive tools of language that alternately informed and were informed by the reception of things, for the rich semantic exchange between mirrors and verbal images ran counter to, say, the ways that bronze casters deployed complex animal images on vessels. [2] And so, while the trope of history-as-mirror has a venerable status, thoroughly entwined as it is with an array of high-status objects, it’s impossible to generalize about the epistemological status of Chinese bronzes.
This exhibition, which brings together an unprecedented number and variety of bronzes from across the globe, underscores this point both by showcasing the sheer range of forms, uses, and decorative motifs included in the capacious genre of the “bronze” and by attending to the lengthy procedures of interpretation and reinterpretation that have characterized the reception of these objects over the past few millennia. It was not the lot of the bronze vessel to remain static or intact; this goes for their physical integrity, always subject to alteration by later collectors or artists, but it also speaks to the eagerness with which later viewers rewrote bronzes into new versions of the past. The taotie mask, the recurrent motif of two staring eyes surrounded by zoomorphic marks, provides a useful case study. It appears, for example, on a late Shang wine bucket in the exhibition, dominating the vessel’s largest panel and fixing the viewer with the baleful stare of an imaginary creature (or two?) that never quite resolves into something recognizable. By the fifth century BCE, the taotie, under the influence of art from the eastern steppes, came to more often depict recognizable animals like dragons, but it’s hard to say quite what the early images mean. Ancient bronze casters were capable of impressive naturalistic representation, so the abstraction must have been intended; but later commentators, such as an anonymous contributor to Mr. Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi chunqiu) from the third century BCE, found the word taotie used in catalogues of bronzes and interpreted the concept as a mythical creature in its own right. Scholars still describe the taotie as the paradigmatic enigma of Chinese art, “a salutary reminder of our ignorance” and a limit case for interpretation. [3] The repeated return to ancient vessels by politicians and connoisseurs—of whom the Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799 CE) is the show’s most prominent example—meant that concepts like the taotie accumulated a vast palimpsest of interpretation.
While the first half of the exhibition displays a wide range of vessels, together with ceramic precursors, in loose chronological order, the second half dilates on antiquarianism. Three objects show the varied forms that antiquarian interest could take. A diminutive vessel from the Palace Museum, carved from bamboo root, dates to the Qing dynasty (1644–1912 CE) and imitates the form of a bronze you (bucket). The sculptor has carefully carved a range of motifs on the surface and, by reproducing the small raised lines that constitute a geometrically organized ground as well as the larger zoomorphic plaques that make up the vessels’ more recognizable decorative features, they have reproduced both the visual syntax of earlier bronzes and the unmistakable traces of their facture. In another accomplished kind of imitation, the so-called Bucket of Hezi from the Western Zhou dynasty is displayed next to an eighteenth-century bronze copy. Here, unlike the bamboo you, the later bucket demonstrates an interest in replicating form, imagery, and the robust set of material properties—weight, texture, heat, and shine, as well as the procedure of casting rather than carving—associated with ancient bronzes. Finally, a Ming dynasty album leaf by painter Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552 CE) depicts scholars surrounded by attendants in a garden, the elite space of reflection par excellence. A selection of bronze vessels occupies the picture’s lower left and an encyclopedic array of bronze bells and buckets awaits inspection on a nearby table. That Qiu Ying himself produced paintings—like this leaf—at similar gatherings, and for consumption by similar intellectuals as those shown appreciating their ancient wares, underscores just how thoroughly imperial audiences engaged with bronzes and just how eagerly they refashioned them. [4] A gallery dedicated to the Qianlong Emperor’s collections collects examples of antiquarian interest that span the spectrum I’ve just outlined, as well as showing how he literally recontextualized ancient bronzes by compiling mirrors into large albums replete with commentary.
The show omits to mention, however, that we’re now in the awkward position of having access to a wealth of archaeological evidence that scholars like the Qianlong Emperor lacked over the last few millennia, and the “doubting antiquity” debates that galvanized the field during the 1930s forced a reckoning with received textual traditions that still reverberates through the field of Chinese art history. [5] The received wisdom about bronzes turned out to often rely on Confucian rereadings of pre-Confucian history or the purely notional provenances recorded in connoisseurial catalogues. What does it mean, then, for the Art Institute to present these bronzes largely through the lens of premodern antiquarian interest? (To be clear, a final room features contemporary art by the likes of Hong Hao in order to suggest that the antiquarian interest still has some legs; but it fails to address just how much the stakes of investigating ancient art have changed over the course of the twentieth century.) And what does it mean to invoke charged practices like ritual through strategies of recreation in one gallery, where a series of videos present Chinese actors in period dress performing rituals with vessels, before persuasively showing that later antiquarian visions of vessels and their use owed much more to imaginative, historically inaccurate comparisons of object and text in another? Consider, for example, that although scholars generally refer to ancient bronzes as liqi (“ritual paraphernalia”), we still know next to nothing about the forms that particular rituals took. One section of the exhibition foregrounds the contingency of knowledge and interpretation while the other, trading on the authoritative weight of wall text and televised reenactment, sets that contingency aside.
The exhibition’s title also places an undue emphasis on the person of the emperor. A seductive tactic that plays on the interest Western audiences have long demonstrated in Chinese imperial authority (witness the many blockbuster shows devoted to the first Qin emperor’s terracotta army), the titling belies the fact that most collectors of bronzes were, in fact, not emperors and, indeed, the Qianlong Emperor is the only ruler to receive in-depth attention. As with the vexed issue of ritual, the sleight of hand evidenced by the title isn’t so much a problem on its own terms. After all, it can’t be easy to get the same crowds who flooded the Art Institute for 2016’s record-breaking Van Gogh extravaganza to turn out for a large show of premodern bronze vessels from China, and the museum’s push to attract high-profile donors for a new wing of Asian art probably inflected the exhibition’s grandiose advertising. Nor can Midwestern museumgoers be counted on to have much background knowledge of the objects on display or the interpretive issues at stake. But these issues feel like significant missteps in an otherwise landmark exhibition, indicating that museums still have some way to go in the presentation of complex, non-Western art histories to general audiences.
Triumphalist accounts of the exhibition have stressed how unusually generous Chinese institutions like the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum have been. Some of the objects on display are unlikely to travel much in the future and, for this reason alone, the show is worthy of note. The splendid selection of vessels, paintings, and ancillary artifacts clearly aspires to present an encyclopedic account of how bronzes were made and understood and the loans mean that, for the first time, North American museumgoers can get a real sense of how promiscuously they signified. (Racist responses, like a review in Newcity that describes the show as “frustrating—and occasionally exciting—as a flea market,” refigure this generosity through the Orientalist tropes of Asian inattention to quality and disorganized presentation.) [6] An accompanying catalogue, which notably includes several essays by women in a field that remains heavily male-dominated despite the impact of scholars like Jessica Rawson and Wilma Fairbank, considers the bronzes on display from a range of perspectives. In short, Mirroring China’s Past makes a valuable contribution to the study and display of premodern Chinese vessels and their antiquarian reception, setting the bar for future exhibitions of ambitious Chinese art.
I am grateful to Anne Feng and Sylvia Wu for their suggestions with this review.
[1] Eugene Yuejin Wang, “Mirror, Death, and Rhetoric: Reading Later Han Chinese Bronze Artifacts,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (1994): 511–34.
[2] See, for example, Robert Bagley, “Ornament, Representation, and Imaginary Animals in Bronze Age China,” Arts Asiatiques 61 (2006): 17–29; The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Yuejin Wang (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016); Wu Hung, “Rethinking Meaning in Early Chinese Art: Animal, Ancestor, and Man,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016): 139–90.
[3] David Keightley, quoted and discussed in Wu, “Rethinking Meaning,” 141.
[4] See the description of a gathering at Qiu Ying’s house in Stephen Little, “The Demon Queller and the Art of Qiu Ying (Ch’iu Ying),” Artibus Asiae 46, no. 1/2 (1985), 5.
[5] See the discussion in Sarah Allan, “Erlitou and the Formation of Chinese Civilization: Toward a New Paradigm,” The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 2 (2007): 461–96.
[6] Chris Miller, “China Recollects Its Ancient Artistic Achievements,” Newcity, April 27, 2018. Numerous scholars have discussed the flea market as an orientalist trope.
May 2018