| The famous Mustard Seed Garden painting manuals ( Jieziyuan huazhuan) were published serially in southern China from 1679, but only in the nineteenth century did the first two manuals strictly dedicated to the painting of figures become available on the market. Published in 1818 and 1897, the manuals effectively bracket a period of rapid and often violent socio-economic and political upheaval. They are almost completely dissimilar in look and content. Yet they share one critical point of commonality: the editors make a determined effort to explicate the human figure, to fully disclose it, to make it seen and knowable through textual and diagrammatic representations.; The aim of my dissertation is two-fold: to explore the manual as an object in circulation and the possible range of readings it invited (some intended by its editors, others perhaps not); and to explore the regulation of pictorial representations of the body. Both efforts demonstrate the importance of the manual to identity construction in the nineteenth century. I begin by considering the manual as an important means by which the editors, Ding Yicheng early in the century, and later, Chao Xun, defined themselves and their social roles as artists. Next, I analyze the organization of pictures in the manuals and trace their visual sources. Keeping the spatial dimension of the manuals in mind—the space opened up between reader and book during the performance of reading—I compare the earlier manual to a library space, the later one to the space of a museum. Finally, I turn to the essay, “Secrets of Portraiture” (xiezhen mijue) published in both editions of the manual. This exploration delves into the history of physiognomy, the uses to which physiognomic theory were put in art, and the social and political stresses of everyday life on “physiognomic” vision. In addition, I examine an uneasy consonance between depictions of fictional characters in drama and popular novels with portraits. The narrative of regulation, I argue, only makes sense in a visual context in which subjectivity of the individual seems to have lost its (bodily) moorings. |
