Text / Zheng Yan
The object of this little book is "fragments".
The fragmentation of historical writing is an issue that has been debated more in recent years in the field of historiography. However, the "fragments" mentioned here are not in a figurative sense, but in their original sense, referring to tactile and perceptible objects, so they are not directly related to the controversy in the field of historiography.
Just as archaeologists excavate objects abandoned by ancients, art history research begins in a sense from fragments. The tang Dynasty Zhang Yanyuan's "Records of Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties" volume three title "Record of the two Beijing Waizhou Temple Guan Painting Wall" small character annotation: "Huichangzhong more destruction, but also loaded, there are also good things to receive the painting wall in the people's homes." "Also:
In the fifth year of Huichang, Emperor Wuzong destroyed the Temple Pagoda of the World, and left three or two in each of the two capitals, so the name painted on the temple wall, only one or two remained. There were good things at that time, or exposing them to the wall. He has been a former journalist, and he has been widowed. First of all, Li Deyu, the prime minister, founded the Ganlu Temple in zhejiang, but the ganlu was not destroyed. Take the painting walls of the temples inside the pipe and place them in the temple...
Li Deyu was an active advocate of the destruction of Buddhism, but his attitude towards Buddhist art was relatively relaxed. He founded the Ganlu Temple in Runzhou, Zhejiang Province (the ruins are in the northeast of present-day Zhenjiang City, North Tuanshan Houfeng), preserved the Jin Dynasty Dai Kui,
Illustration of a pamphlet published in 1525–1527 accusing the Reformation of destroying iconoclastic relics
The murals painted by Gu Kaizhi, Song Zhilu Tanwei and Xie Lingyun, Liang ZhiZhang Monk, Sui Zhizhan Ziqian, Tang Zhihan Gan, Lu Yao, Tang Xiang, Wu Daozi and Wang Zhizi can be called a collection room of famous artists.
The Song Dynasty Guo Ruoxuan's "Picture Seeing and Hearing Zhi" also mentions that after the Huichang Fa Difficulty, the Chengdu hu clan "was a strong man who recruited strong men, and used his strength to be on the occasion of decadence", and had to exhibit ziqian and Tang Dynasty Xue Ji murals, build a treasure ink pavilion to store, and ask Guo Yuan, a simenmen, to make a note, "Since it is the car of the elderly, it is beneficial to fill its doors."
A similar approach is seen in Europe. In 1517, Martin Luther, a professor at the Faculty of Theology at wittenberg University in Germany, launched the Reformation, which was mixed with radical "iconoclastic campaigns", in which some people violently attacked churches. While the religious significance of icons and relics was denied, some neo-scholars began to collect them as works of art and to study them from an aesthetic point of view. In the 17th century, many Protestant churches in Europe opened up special rooms for the storage of works of art, which became the prototype of the museum.
Collectors after the European Iconoclastic Campaign were confronted with fragments of objects. These fragments depart from the church to which they originally belonged and return to the things themselves; in the field of art, they are transformed into "works". In later centuries, these works were reclassified under the concept of "fine arts" and belonged to paintings, sculptures, crafts, etc. Scattered icons and relics are gradually connected into successive and complete art history works and museums to show the vitality of art itself.
As the world's first general history of painting, the writing of "Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties" is a repair after countless disasters in works of art. Zhang Yanyuan wrote bitterly that in the rebellion of Dong Zhuo at the end of the Han Dynasty, the pictures were taken by soldiers as dwart bags, and half of the remaining seventy cars were abandoned in heavy rain when they moved west; when the Hu people entered Luo, a large number of Wei and Jinzang were burned; the accumulation of the north and south was exhausted, and there was no one in ten; the Sui Emperor went down to Yangzhou, the ship in the middle road was overturned, and most of the famous paintings were abandoned, and his beads changed hands several times and eventually returned to the Tang Dynasty, but the ships transporting the paintings were suddenly adrifted on the pillar, and there was no one in the ten that existed; the anshi rebellion and the misfortune of Emperor Wuzong made it worse... However, with the fragments of these works of art, Zhang Yanyuan still built a grand historical temple of painting.
Art history works are voluminous, and museums are more all-encompassing, with orderly and clear displays of specific themes, styles, techniques, and genres. We almost forget that what we are facing is only the fragments of the fragments, and we forget the calamities that the fragments have experienced. When researchers try to understand and explain the beautiful form of the work in combination with various external factors, those once denied religious values are also resurrected, and the broken works are no longer broken.
Contrary to this tendency, the book attempts to refocus on the specific form of fragments. The fragment itself is important because it disintegrates the integrity and visual boundaries of the artwork, which can lead to new problems that are not noticed by us.
First, when we realize that the fragment originally belonged to a complete organism, we try to reconstruct its material and historical context, no longer stopping at the fragment itself. A perfect piece of porcelain can only be viewed from a distance, not played closely; but the brokenness allows us to see the internal space of the utensils, the carcass exposed after the break, and feel the fragility of the walls and the sharpness of the stubble. New horizons inspire a rich imagination and an unquenchable desire for restoration, which in turn leads to a deeper understanding of the complete artifact.
The most famous case in the history of art is the restoration of the legend of the broken arm of the "Venus de Milo" in the Louvre Museum in Paris. A recent example is the efforts made in recent years to harness digital technologies. Researchers have used virtual means to restore fragments of Buddhist statues scattered in the hands of public and private collectors around the world to the original grotto space. They no longer see the fragments as independent works of art, but through the reconstruction of the context, they place the "parts" with sculptural forms into the building, and even the historical and cultural space to observe and understand.
Similarly, when we realize that more than a dozen stone carvings of the Western Han Dynasty's Huofu Tomb originally belonged to the part of the sealed soil on the tomb, we no longer regarded them as "sculptures" with independent value, but reconstructed a huge and complex religious art landscape, and re-explored the material, technology, form, theme, meaning, and the characters and events behind the works on this new basis.
Second, under certain historical conditions, fragments are also regarded as complete entities. For example, a natural boulder about 10 meters high and 43.1 meters in circumference under banzai Peak in the southern foothills of Mount Dengfengsong in Henan was originally a fragment of a landslide, but it was recognized as the embodiment of the mother of Xia Qi as early as the Western Han Dynasty. During the reign of Emperor Wu, a temple was built for this stone, and in the second year of the Eastern Han Dynasty (123), Yingchuan Taishou Zhu favored the construction of Shinto and Shique in front of the temple.
These facilities and the various rituals that followed transformed the boulder into a monument. In the open wilderness, it is huge, visually striking, and has the formal characteristics needed for a holy relic. It transcends the precarious physical form and becomes the focal point and symbol in a complete belief system. In this context, in addition to focusing on the form of the fragment itself, it is necessary to discuss the cultural traditions, religious concepts, political motivations that give it symbolism, and to explore the mechanisms and channels of connection between various internal and external factors.
Third, the gap between the fragments is also worth paying attention to. Gaps are pauses, rings, hollowness, nothingness; however, just as springs and waterfalls flow out of the gaps of the earth, these small parts also give people great room for imagination, such as the gates of all wonders, the mysterious and mysterious. The divination of Yin Shang is the explanation of the cracks in the oracle bone after drilling, chiseling, and burning. The word "Bu" itself, elephant sound, but also pictogram, a long and a short two paintings, that is, the cracks of the tortoiseshell. The crack is the divine crevice, the answer of the gods to the Shang King's question.
According to the legends recorded in books such as "HuainanZi", the Qimu Stone under banzai Peak broke through the north and was born, and the cracks were the passage of life. In the Song Dynasty, the opening pieces of "hundreds of broken" pieces on the kiln porcelain, the gold wire and iron wire, the eight directions were staggered, and the limitations of technology were transformed into aesthetic taste. A piece of porcelain broken and patched with curium nails, intermittent, hooked and hooked, also constitute a cultural history.
Fourth, fragmentation is the result of fragmentation, and fragmentation is an event. The breaking of a piece of porcelain is an event, and the impact of external forces, scattered limbs, and the sharp sound of landing on the ground will bring pleasure or pain to the soul; saving, bearing, justifying, concealing, prevaricating, fighting, repairing, discarding, burying, consternation, stealing joy, mourning, recalling, forgetting, etc. are also events, so that we can discuss the general history of a kind of thing that covers a variety of internal and external factors through fragmentation and fragmentation itself. These fragmentary reflections are not enough to summarize the full significance of fragments in the study of art history from a theoretical level.
Theoretical analysis, deduction, and presentation are not my specialty, and in this book I use more ink to tell stories than to discuss concepts directly. The book is a metamorphosis of iron. The so-called "Iron Robes", originally belonging to a Statue of The Vajrapani of the Tang Dynasty at the Lingyan Temple of Changqing in Shandong, is a fragment created by the late Tang Dynasty's campaign to extinguish Buddhism. The information in the literature, as well as the Li Yong stele and inscription, are also fragments.
Through the stitching of various fragments, the restorative study of the statue of Vajralus can be roughly completed. This work undoubtedly benefits from the history of traditional art – without the introduction of modern sculptural concepts, we would never have recognized the cultural value of these ancient statues. However, the "iron robe" is missed by scholars who hold the concept of modern "fine art", perhaps because it is too broken, and people ignore the thing itself when rejecting the old theory attached to it. A short essay I wrote more than a decade ago aimed at restoring the original appearance of the remnant iron, but it also implied contempt for various texts and discourses since the Song Dynasty.
Reflection on this omission inspired me to re-explore the relevance of the "iron robes" to the historical background and cultural traditions of various periods. I have tried to show that, in addition to the original meaning of the iron statue to which the "iron robe" belongs, the process of the destruction of the iron statue and the new meaning of the fragments in later generations are equally important. I begin with Huang Yi's wanderings, with the aim of pulling this piece of iron back into the original realm of time and space, back into the relationship between things and people—not just the Lingyan Temple of the Qing Dynasty, of course.
Many years ago, the book "Anshangfang" that I co-authored with Professor Wang Yuejin has involved a change in the meaning of the work in the history of acceptance. Unlike Anjofang, the book also explores the destruction, imagination, aggregation, and reconstruction of works of art. I spent a lot of time discussing "iron robes", and some of the key words were further expanded in the "outer edition". The outer editor is four cases that can exist independently and be read separately. They are juxtaposed here because the issues involved are interrelated rather than overlapping.
The study of the Afang palace drawing is an old work, and I have slightly deleted and adjusted it and included it in the book to compare it with other cases. It was from this article that I noticed the problem of the destruction of works of art in history. The imagination and fiction of the Afang Palace is a resistance to attack and destruction, and the gap after destruction can fill the most brilliant picture. That group of palaces that were not built in the Qin Dynasty relied on human imagination and were built in later generations. Here, I discuss in passing the language used in pictorial fiction to see how the concept of nothingness is concretely transformed into a real image.
The word "broken" reappears in the dragon jar in Jingdezhen. The poetry of the senior monk Rinchen of Lingyan Temple jumps too much, and we can deduce the specific process of the deification of the "Iron Robe" by virtue of the prose of the Inspector Tang Ying and the story behind it. And the black basin that imprisons the spirit and flesh of the dead happens to be the "antonym" and "dual sentence" of the dragon tank. The two literary texts of the Dragon Jar and the Book of Wu Peng show that it is a universal tradition to anthropomorphize lifeless artifacts. The martyrs and victims here are no longer a city, a work of art, but a living life.
In terms of the nature of the material, this section goes further and goes beyond the usual scope of art history. The object of my discussion is not visible, the broken dragon jar has been lost, but this is not important, because it is only in the Dragon Jar that it is transformed into a work of art. The wu pen is too ordinary, and we can paint its portrait with daily experience. In my opinion, the reason why art history can exist as an independent discipline is of course related to its unique research object, but more importantly, it has a set of perspectives and methods for raising and analyzing problems. Therefore, in my study of literary texts, I still pay special attention to the morphological and visual characteristics of the artifacts.
Liuzhou Monk's ash pile work "Centennial Blessing Birthday Map" uses special techniques to poetize broken antiquities, deviating from the mainstream of art in form. Through the analysis of the inscription, we can observe the reaction of this work with the characteristics of "modern art" in the environment at that time. This discussion echoes the study of the history of the reception of the "iron robes", from which we will also notice that some modern and contemporary art works have striking similarities with such "non-mainstream" works in history, although later artists may not be familiar with those ancient works.
From the artist Xu Bing's description of the collapse of the "Twin Towers" of the World Trade Center in New York, we can imagine the scene when the great statue created by Wu Zetian collapsed; the secret combination of ancient art and contemporary art does not mean that there must be a well-inherited stylistic genealogy between the two, but because today's artists are still facing those ancient problems. Therefore, for the current art practice, the significance of art history is not only to provide a model for devout worshippers to pass on the model, or to set a target for the brave/frivolous challenger to break through/offend, but to remind the present generation to constantly think about those ancient and eternal propositions and continue to search for new answers.
To be honest, I ended with Xu Bing's work because I gave myself a problem. The "last pillar" in New York's 9/11 memorial is easily reminiscent of an "iron robe." In contrast to this pillar, Xu Bing's work is a transcendence of the event itself, which reminds us of the limitations of historical interpretations that overemphasize causality. Just as I tried to reflect on the paradigm of traditional art history writing with examples such as "iron robes" and "ash piles", the whole book's dedication to things was also questioned by "nothingness". This work reminds us that when trying to get out of one enclosed room, we don't have to build another closed room. So, here, I hope it's not just the end of the book, but the beginning of a new way of thinking.
Xiang Shengmu's "Vermilion Self-Portrait"
The book does not deal with literati paintings that scholars have discussed a lot. In fact, the same problem exists in this traditional field of art history. For example, there is no shortage of strong reactions to the overthrow of the dynasty in literati paintings, and Xiang Shengmo's "Vermilion Self-Portrait" was composed in 1644 after hearing of the fall of the Ming Dynasty. The beginning of the painter's inscription poem reads: "The remaining water is still the color of the mountain, and the dark shadow of the sky is faint." The poem says that after the Jiashen Incident, "the sky was dark", but the landscape that should have been painted in ink was reversed to vermilion, which is a metaphor for the Zhu Ming Dynasty. The fragments appear in the text, and the mountains and rivers of the images are as complete as ever; the characters in the painting are calm, the lines of poetry are blood and tears, and the text and the image present a very complex relationship.
Another example is a leaf in Shi Tao's "Plum Blossom Poetry Album" (1705-1707) in his later years. Shi Tao's original name was Zhu Ruoji, and he had the blood of the Ming Sect. When the Qing Dynasty was founded, Shi Tao was still a child, so he did not consider himself a relic. The "ancient relics" mentioned in the inscription poem are a more universal concept. The branches that are about to break and the flowers that are still blooming symbolize the inner spiritual power of the scholar himself, which transcends the ups and downs of a certain dynasty and beyond his personal gains and losses. When faced with this type of work, it is well worth digging in by combining the elements inside the image with historical events.
I am in favor of an open, comprehensive study that connects art and history, but in addition to this book," the materiality of the work itself is emphasized. Traditional historical research also often uses material materials, but does not pay special attention to the materiality of documentary materials; while art history emphasizes the "presence" of research objects. Art historians are confronted with a kind of material and visual history, and their concern for internal factors such as shape, material, and technology is the basic gesture of art history. Therefore, the scope of this book is no longer limited to a specific art form such as painting or sculpture, but involves a wider range of fields such as statues, cities, architecture, artifacts, literature, goldstones and installations, trying to explore the potential of materiality in the study of art history from multiple perspectives such as destruction, fragmentation, regeneration, and aggregation.
Today, the concepts and forms of art are changing dramatically – perhaps ever. Then, the object of art history research does not have to stick to a certain warehouse or exhibition hall inside the traditional museum, although that kind of research still has the value of not being underestimated.
I have worked for many years at the Academy of Fine Arts, as a bystander to the ever-changing artistic practices, and the new landscapes constantly inspire me to rethink the concepts, classifications, and forms of writing of ancient art history, which is why I have written about this book piecemeal and piecemeal to contemporary art that I am not very familiar with. Nevertheless, I do not have the ambition to exhaust all aspects, and if the discussion in this book is still positive, I look forward to other scholars expanding and deepening their research on these issues.
In addition to the diverse forms of fragments as objects, the book also pays special attention to the discussion of the changing meaning of fragments. Archaeology is also a discipline of study objects, but there are subtle differences with art history, which treats objects more as specimens, while art history emphasizes the unique value of the objects themselves as works. Another difference is that a Qin figurine awakened from the ground by archaeologists is "no Han, no matter Wei or Jin", so people can use it to discuss the history of the Qin Dynasty without touching on the problems of other eras. Many of the objects discussed in this book continue to survive in many historical periods after their birth, and have produced different values and meanings.
The significance of a work of art as a monument is not only embodied in the so-called "artistic value" that meets some objective aesthetic standard (the existence of which has been deeply questioned), but Alois Riegl also reminds us of its other two values, namely, the historical value of commemorative for people or events that have passed and no longer exist, and the chronological value related to the feelings and emotions of today's people about time.
The intricacies between these values show that works of art, which exist as cultural relics, have always been in the interaction between the smooth and counter-tense of the great clock of history. What is more complicated is that various accidental and inevitable events and characters continue to join in, making the dial of the big clock become uneven. Only by combining the meaning of works of art with the context of the era in which these works were produced can it be possible to clear out some clues; only by taking into account the meaning in the process of circulation and use, and setting the "meaning" as a plural form, can time become fluid.
Again, this is not a general history of fragments of artwork, not about reconstructing a complete story with fragments. I am not a supermarket manager, and I have no intention of placing materials from different sources in rows of chronology, category, material, or any other criteria into a pre-prepared theoretical framework, but I just stack these strange fragments together, some parts are closely connected to each other, some parts are intertwined, some parts are scattered, and the gaps in them liberate the mind and wander out. Readers and friends may wish to see this book as a clumsy imitation of the Liuzhou Jin ash pile, and when encountering those exciting plots, I occasionally come up with some sentences that are slanted out, that is, the so-called "unavoidable child atmosphere" of Liuzhou.
This article is excerpted from Zheng Yan's "Iron Robes: Destruction and Rebirth in Art History", published with permission from Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore)
Selected Chinese books
The Iron Robe: Destruction and Rebirth in Art History
Zheng Yan
Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore
December 2021
It is an attempt to bring art and history together in an open, comprehensive study. Art history works are voluminous, and museums are more all-encompassing, with orderly and clear displays of specific themes, styles, techniques, and genres. We almost forget that what we are facing is only the fragments of the fragments, and we forget the calamities that the fragments have experienced. This book attempts to refocus on the particular form of fragmentation, which disintegrates the integrity and visual boundaries of the artwork and thus leads to new questions that go unnoticed. The scope of this book is no longer limited to a specific art form such as painting or sculpture, but involves a wider range of fields such as statues, cities, architecture, artifacts, literature, goldstones and installations, trying to explore the potential of materiality in art history research from multiple perspectives such as destruction, fragmentation, regeneration, and aggregation.
Good books in Chinese
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