| Chen Hongshou painted Scenes from the Life of Tao Yuanming for Zhou Lianggong in the summer of 1650. Tao Yuanming, who resigned office to live in reclusion, has been admired most for his indifference to worldly concerns. In the long tradition of illustrating his biography since the eleventh century, his image and the episodes selected for illustration all conform to the myth about his joyous transcendence. Chen Hongshou, however, dramatized Tao's image with stylized postures and calculated facial expressions to intimate that Tao's serenity was a mere façade to conceal emotional disturbances. Chen's portrayal of Tao as a self-conscious actor embodied the contemporary view of Tao as a care-worn loyalist in the guise of a carefree recluse. As late Ming historical revisionism deconstructed the one-dimensional representations of many historical figures, Chen Hongshou resorted to theatricality to imply the significant discrepancy between Tao's appearance and inner self.; Earlier studies on Chen Hongshou's Tao Yuanming scroll maintained that Chen painted it for Zhou Lianggong, a political proselyte, to advise him to withdraw from office like Tao instead of serving the Manchu regime. A survey of the socio-political context for the creation of this painting, however, indicates that Chen's attitude toward collaborators like Zhou changed from initial contempt at the fall of the Ming dynasty to full acceptance by the summer of 1650. Like most Chinese in the early Qing period, Chen became more and more disillusioned with the Ming cause by what he heard and witnessed personally. The collapse of the Southern Ming resistance in the spring of 1650 destroyed his last hope for a dynastic revival and convinced him of Zhou's prescience in accepting the Manchu rule years earlier. The painting was meant to be a token of reconciliation with Zhou because like Tao Yuanming, Zhou was an actor in real life by serving the Manchus to protect the Chinese. |
