The Paper's reporter Zheng Shiliang
Miao Zhe (Zhang Jing-e)
Mr. Miao Zhe, a professor at the School of Arts and Archaeology at Zhejiang University, recently published From the Hall of Spiritual Light to the Wuliang Ancestral Hall: The Remains of Imperial Art at the Turn of the Two Han Dynasties (Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, October 2021 edition). Through the analysis of various important artistic themes of the Han Dynasty, Miao Zhe concluded in the book that in the early art history of China, the transition from the Shangzhou pattern tradition to the Han and Tang dynasties was completed at the turn of the two Han Dynasties; the main driving force for the transition was the ideological construction and dissemination of the Han Empire, and since then, the materialistic painting with the character narrative as the main content has become a new art tradition that has ruled for nearly a thousand years. What he wants to tell further is how the Chinese painting tradition occurred, developed and established in the hundreds of years from the Warring States to the Han Dynasty.
"From the Hall of Spiritual Light to the Wuliang Ancestral Hall: The Remains of Imperial Art at the Turn of the Two Han Dynasties", by Miao Zhe, Life, Reading, xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, published in October 2021, 524 pages, 188.00 yuan
In "From the Hall of Spiritual Light to the Wuliang Ancestral Hall", you said that in the history of Chinese art, there was a "revolutionary turn from the Shangzhou pattern tradition to the Han and Tang Dynasty tradition", which was "not only a revolutionary event in the history of Chinese art, but also in the history of Chinese cognition". Can you please talk about it?
Miao Zhe: I mainly understand this problem from the perspective of the changes in the social structure of the Warring States to the Qin and Han Dynasties, and the symbolic systems required for such changes. The so-called patriarchal system was actually to expand family relations into political structures and transform kinship into political relations. There is a major difference between this society and the Warring States, especially the Qin and Han societies: the understanding and cognition of things and things is relatively direct. The Kings of Zhou were divided into princes, all of whom were brothers and uncles, and all treated each other as relatives. The princes are the same, and there are often kinships between the princes and the princes, and they also have their own fiefs. The superiors and subordinates within the ruling class actually operate within kinship. This relationship is relatively direct, and the resulting social management method is correspondingly direct. Every ruler, whether it is the King of Zhou, or the princes and Qing Dafu, the scope of rule is very small, the so-called "Wang Qi Qianli" in the Zhou Room, "Qianli" is not much bigger, among the princes, Qi and Lu may be slightly larger, and the small princes are only a few tens of miles. The whole society is managed by dividing the territory into independent pieces. This means that the management of things is direct, not indirect. It's like a young couple opening a wonton shop, it doesn't need a complicated management process, and when you go to the vegetable market in the morning, you know how many wontons you can make at noon. Even if ten eight branches are opened, the branch owner needs to report, and the management method is relatively direct. But if you expand into a company like McDonald's and open stores around the world, you can only manage it indirectly through a series of financial statements and research reports. The social structure of the Zhou Dynasty before the Spring and Autumn Period was roughly similar to the stage of husband and wife wonton shops. So, what kind of symbols does this society use to express its etiquette, social relations and ideology to matter and image? This is the tradition of presenting and reinforcing the pattern of the ceremonial vessel itself.
After the Spring and Autumn Period, the princes annexed each other, in the late Warring States period, only seven families remained, and the Qin and Han Dynasties were "unified", resulting in a centralized state, and the past cognitive method of seeing oneself as a relative was not enough, and it was necessary to create an indirect knowledge and cognitive system. This requires mathematics to count accounts and calculate money endowments; it requires laws to replace the past way of judging cases according to custom. Unlike previous kinship relationships, bureaucrats in centralized states are strangers, how can they be made to have value identification? This requires a set of "ideologies". In short, the way of ruling and the way values are shaped is different from before. I think the big thing that happened during this period was that the whole social structure gradually changed from direct to indirect. And painting is exactly at this time. Is there any point in this synchronic relationship?
Here we may wish to make a little intuitive comparison: the so-called painting is actually an indirect thing. Because painting is nothing more than "representation", that is, presenting something "not here". In this sense, painting, like mathematical, medical, legal, ideological and other systems of knowledge, may be understood as an "indirect tool" to help you understand the world. If I'm not afraid that you'll accuse me of "intuition than attachment," I can be more specific. For example, during the Spring and Autumn Period, princes often fought in person, often wounded, or even died; when they met or feasted, the princes would personally preside over or participate; and the same was true of sacrifices and hunting--most of them did it themselves. By the Warring States period, the princes had been separated from wars and sacrifices, which was not as direct as in the Spring and Autumn Period. If you look at the records of the "Chronicle of History", a big war, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are killed at any time, and it is a complex system running. For the princes, or "kings," war is indirect and abstract. The earliest paintings expressed these "indirect and abstract" contents. So how to understand the relationship between painting and changes in social structure? That's what I've been thinking about. But I intuitively felt that this new social structure necessarily required a new, cassirer-sense symbolic system. Painting may be one of them.
Yanle hunting beans, early Warring States period, unearthed in Pingshan, Hebei Province, Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics collection
Feast hunting bean line drawing
Specific to the methods you use in your book, you use a lot of sociological and anthropological theories and methods, such as citing Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss's research on religion and rituals.
Miao Zhe: This involves my understanding of early art. Generally speaking, when people talk about art, they often like to talk about it from an aesthetic point of view. Aesthetics, mainly related to the feeling. For late art, such as the art after the Song and Yuan dynasties in China, or the art after the Western Renaissance, it is valid to understand it from an aesthetic point of view, because the creators do have a strong aesthetic motivation. Shouldn't early art, such as the art of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties and the Qin and Han Dynasties, also be understood aesthetically? Personally, I don't think so. With regard to early art, my understanding is that it is a tool of knowledge, similar to what Plato and Aristotle called rhetoric—an effective expression of truth; specifically, a set of effective visual expressions of social knowledge and social cognition. The humanistic approach is one that leans toward the individual: I put myself in the shoes of your situation and understand your motivations. If we define early art as a visual expression with a public character, then it is not easy to adopt a humanistic approach to its study. So I take the sociological, anthropological path. It provides a collective perspective, that is, to understand early art from the perspective of collective cognition and collective feeling of the whole society. Of course, this is not very popular in our field of art history, because art history is usually defined as a humanities discipline.
To be specific: let's imagine the fabrication of early art and see how the whole mechanism happened. First of all, the initiator of this event must not be the artist. It could be a monarch, it could be a minister, it could be an institution—we can understand it as a ruler in the collective sense. After the decision is made, the workshop is entrusted to design the drawing. If it is a Shang Zhou bronze, it has a developed tradition, as long as the client makes specific requirements, the craftsman will follow the tradition. But if, as I wrote in my book, you need to make a set of paintings that present the ideology of scripture, such as "Confucius sees Lao Tzu" and "Zhou Gongfu becomes a king", then the painter will encounter a problem: how do I know such a complex and elite content? This kind of problem was also encountered by renaissance painters. Raphael, for example, was a painter who lacked the classical knowledge that only humanistic scholars had at the time. But he was commissioned to paint this (like the Academy of Athens). What to do? Only ask his scholarly friends for advice. Something similar must have happened in the Han Dynasty. And because of the artisan "food official", this must have happened at the institutional level. So there is no point in focusing on the individual. What needs to be understood is the institutional mechanism of artistic creation: who starts it, who entrusts it to design, how to transfer knowledge, how to approve the drawings, these are all big systems in operation. With a traditional, individualist perspective, it is not easy to understand.
You have a specific example in the book that impressed me deeply. You go to the Shandong Stone Carving Art Museum to see the exhibition, and the first thing you see after entering the door is the front car and horse. You say, "Before I changed from editor to editor, I skimmed a little bit of Greco-Roman art, so my first reaction was to think that this theme must have originated from the Greek theme that Augustus revived in Rome, that is, the front quadriga (four-horse chariot depicted on the front) in Western art history", how did you generate this wonderful association of Eastern and Western art?
Miao Zhe: My study of art history was actually an accident. I used to be a newspaper editor all the time. Now everyone is under a lot of pressure, it was different at that time, anyway, it is not good, it is not bad, there is a lot of time to read. At that time, there was no Internet, and it was impossible to download books from the Internet, so I could only bump into what counted. I happened to bump into a few books about ancient Western society and art. Among them is the Russian art historian Rostovtsev, who went into exile in the United States after the October Revolution and wrote "The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire", "Iranians and Greeks in Southern Russia", "Animal Styles of the Steppe of Southern Russia" and so on. One of them was obtained from Mr. Yang Xianyi. When Mr. Yang got older, he scattered things casually, and I went to see him, and he said: Whatever you like, take it. I remember that there was a painting of a Ming dynasty hanging in his house, and there was an album of Weng Song zen, and he said that he could take them all. Mr. Yang was born as a noble prince and had a very loose hand. I am a junior, of course, painting is not easy to take, take two books is still OK. At that time, in the Chinese bookstore in Neptune Village, you could also buy some old books in foreign languages, such as many books by the famous British Greek art historian John Boardman, which were found there; in addition, there were some German scholars' monographs on Greco-Rome. Therefore, my earliest understanding of art history did not start from China, but from western antiquity. Of course, I still dare not say that I understand Western antiquity. Later, when I did Han Dynasty research, the only preparation was in the literature. I came from a Chinese background, and I am no stranger to Qin and Han literature, and I have read all the main books. As for the reasons for the study, it is also written in the book, when I was a Doctorate, there were not so many exhibitions and fewer albums. If you want to study art history, it is easiest to see stones, and you can see what you want. So look around and look at the stones.
As for what you mentioned about stringing things together art, I think there is one core thing in the study of art history: the intuition of quality. Now that the study of the social history of art is very popular, this core is a bit untenable. Because the study of social history tends to erase quality. In fact, no matter how art is defined, it is always related to quality, good or bad. This "good and bad essence" has great sociological significance in the era when the work was produced. I'm more sensitive to quality, or picky. At that time, when I saw the front carriage and horse displayed by the Shandong Stone Carving Art Museum, my first reaction was: this thing is very exquisite, it should not be the original creation of the temple craftsman, it was copied from somewhere else. This is reminiscent of the books I have read about Greco-Roman art. You must know that whether from the perspective of cognition or presentation, the front car and horse is a difficult motif, which is not easy to invent, and it is not possible to hit it with a crooked face. And such a beautiful theme actually appeared in such a civilian tomb, and the two could not match. So what's going on? This is to find the answer from the local social structure. So when I say "quality is important", quality matters, it is not from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, but from the perspective of the social information it contains.
This question, we can look at from the perspective of the tombs of the entire Han Dynasty. In fact, the Han Dynasty left tomb portraits in just a few regions: Shandong, northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, Henan, as well as Sichuan and northern Shaanxi. Specific to this area of Shandong, you will find that the quality of different tomb art is very different, some are good, some are bad, and some are between good and bad. Others are purely random; the content may express the life peculiar to the time, but from the point of view of form, it has no historical significance. You let today's children carve it, and the carving is nothing more than that. Why is there a difference in quality? That's what I've always emphasized to my students: whether we take a humanistic or sociological approach, one of the cores of art history research is the focus on quality. Not caring about quality, not having intuition about quality, often missing big problems.
Jiaxiang Wulaowa Portrait Stone, early Eastern Han Dynasty, Shandong Stone Carving Art Museum collection
Arch of Arc de Triomphe motif of Augustus Coin, Collection of the Yale University Museum of Art
You have a famous book, "The Trap of Proving History with Illustrations", which mentions: "The program is lagging behind, and the meaning is erratic." Therefore, the evidence of using images should be included in the tradition of art history in which they are located, and only by returning to the tradition of images can we distinguish which factors of the image, but the old tone of the program, and what factors are the new cavity created by ourselves. Although the old tune does not necessarily reflect 'history' or has no meaning, this issue is too complicated to be understood by looking at the picture in isolation. Otherwise, the image will not only not be able to 'prove', but will confuse the 'history'. Can you combine your research on art history and talk about your understanding of "history in terms of illustrations"?
Miao Zhe: Original art types are always scarce. This is true today, and it is even more so in the past. In ancient times, the type invented by Zhang Shengxuan was called "Zhangjia-like", and the type of Wu Daozi was called "Wujia-like". The so-called "kind" is the type of new creation, which is a kind of scarcity. Tocqueville said: In the galleries of the world, there are so few originals and so many replicas. Indeed, ninety-nine percent—and more—of the so-called works of art are copies and imitations of "likeness." In other words, once the "like" is invented, it will continue to be used, transformed in various contexts, and given different meanings. This creates a conventional "program". Therefore, the main point of using images to prove history is to find out whether the content of images is a program or an invention. Inventions are often (and certainly not necessarily) reproductions of social reality, not necessarily programs. For example, in the Sogdian stone carvings unearthed in China, there are scenes of riding elephants and hunting lions. This is hardly a reproduction of the Sogdian life in China, but a copy of the Sassanid Iranian or Central Asian art program. Where do you go to hunt lions in China?
As for which Han portrait is a program, which is a new creation—or a reflection of a new creation—this is a core issue that I consider in this book. Because the Han Dynasty was in the process of establishing a painting tradition, there were not many programs to rely on. In the more than four hundred years from the beginning of the Western Han Dynasty to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, if we line up the Han portraits all the way, we will find that the changes are rapid, because new traditions are still being established, there are not many old resources to use, and we must constantly create new appearances according to needs. There is a problem here: the real creators must be the workshops of the imperial court, but the appearance of their creations is gone. These programs are copied by the people, some are copied accurately, some are not very accurate, and all kinds of mistakes, errors, or, as the English say, corrupt (corruption). In this way, the material I was dealing with was a pile of copies of the original, and to reconstruct the trend of artistic development at that time, I had to choose from a pile of copies that were close to the original. This brings us back to the qualities I mentioned earlier. If we assume that quality reflects the stratification of society, then there is a basis for choosing from an infinite number of fragments.
Zoucheng Portrait Stone, Late Eastern Han Dynasty
Wu's left stone chamber roof hunting map (partial)
It feels like the various case studies in your book are actually dealing with this problem. But is there a risk that your judgment of the entire development of the sample will ultimately be a reflection of your personal artistic niche, rather than a reflection of the true state of history? The development of Han Dynasty art that you have constructed is only a wonderful inference, not necessarily the true direction of history?
Miao Zhe: The question you asked is very good. My observation and description of the development of Han Dynasty art in the book is indeed thick lines: Shang Zhou art is patterned; with the change of social structure, this pattern tradition gradually merges with the reproduction of real life; then, Han Dynasty art gradually excludes patterns and establishes the reproduction tradition; and then invents a set of naturalistic techniques, and finally completes the establishment of the tradition of object painting. This macroscopic description lacks quantitative evidence to support it, and it is very difficult to prove. Because I'm dealing with dissynchantial, fragmented historical materials. As I said earlier, the original is lost in history, and all that can be seen today is fragments scattered in different archaeological contexts.
But this is not to say that there is no way at all, otherwise why should we study history? So the key is to find a way, an approach. This is what my second book, "The Miracle of the Han Dynasty," focuses on. Here may be a "spoiler" first. My approach is to make quantitative statistics on tombs. We know that the Han Dynasty people had the habit of burying ming vessels in tombs, and the largest number was pottery. Among them, clay pots and clay pots are often decorated with painted paintings. This kind of thing, in large quantities, is as many as tens of thousands, so it has statistical significance. Another type of funerary object is the bronze mirror, which also has decorations. The number of bronze mirrors is not as good as pottery, but there are not many, and it is always possible to count in thousands, so it is also of statistical significance. We narrowed down the location of the tomb to Chang'an and Luoyang, which are the areas that may interact with the imperial court workshops the most, and then we made a quantitative statistics on the decorative patterns of pottery and bronze mirrors unearthed in the two places. In this way, you will find that from the Western Han Dynasty to the Eastern Han Dynasty, the form of decoration has been changing: at first, most of the pure patterns, and then the factors of reproduction gradually increase, and finally the pure reproduction is the mainstay. Of course, this kind of quantitative statistics does not reflect the art of the imperial court itself, but if I say that it can reflect the development trend of the art of the court, will you agree? Therefore, the thick line outline of the development of Han Dynasty painting in my first book cannot be directly proved due to the lack of information. But to give an indirect proof, I want to do it.
After reading the whole book, I think the most interesting thing is your evaluation of Wang Mang. You are highly positive about Wang Mang, mentioning that many of the traditions he pioneered were completely inherited by the Eastern Han Dynasty, and that Wang Mang established a formal direction for the tradition of Chinese painting that has been passed down for thousands of years. How did you come up with such an assessment?
Miao Zhe: I started to conceive this book, probably in 2013, 2014, when Mr. Qu Zhiren from the Metropolitan Museum of Art came to Zhejiang University, he smoked cigars, and I accompanied him to the lake to smoke and chat. He asked me what I had done recently, and I told him about my idea. He said: I have always felt that Wang Mang is a particularly important figure in the history of Chinese art. Mr. Qu's insight, I have always respected. He gave me a lot of encouragement at the time.
As for why Wang Mang caused such a great influence, this is related to the ideological construction of the Han Dynasty. We know that the Han Dynasty can basically be divided into two stages. The first stage was the beginning of the Han Dynasty, from Gaozu to Emperor Wu, recuperating and doing nothing, doing nothing ideologically, and everyone lived quietly. In the period of Emperor Wu, he began to make a difference, but Emperor Wu did not do it thoroughly. The true Confucianization of the Han Dynasty system and ideology began with Emperor Cheng and Emperor Yuan, and ended with Wang Mang's climax.
Why did the climax in the time of Wang Mang? The reasons can be summed up simply in two ways: first, he was a usurper; second, he was a Confucian. The former confronts him with the conundrum of legitimacy, while the latter tends to solve it with "words," or "rhetoric" in the Aristotle sense. In this way, he set off the largest – and one of the largest in ancient China – the construction of etiquette and ideology in the Han Dynasty. We know that if ideology is to be effective, it cannot be just a matter of lip service. It should be embodied in the production of institutions, rituals and material visions. So Wang Mang set off a large-scale material and visual production, such as various large-scale ceremonial facilities, coins, utensils, etc. So what is the content of Wang Mang's ideology? Simply put, it has two pillars, one is called "Zetian", imitating heaven, and the other is "Jigu", imitating gu. But "heaven" or "ancient" are not in sight. If you want to present them in front of your eyes, you need a set of reproducible knowledge – including painting. This provides the most critical impetus for the transition of Chinese art from pattern to reproduction. These narrative paintings must have been used to decorate the large buildings he built. In this sense, Wang Mang and Augustus are the same, they both face the problem of legitimacy, and they all need visible and tangible material visual production to explain their ideology. These productions, in Benjamin's terminology, I call them "aura of aesthetics" in the book. The substance itself is uptake-strong. If you go to Egypt and see the six- or seven-meter-high stone statues in front of the ancient Egyptian temples, your sense of sacredness will be involuntarily aroused and not controlled by reason. Wang Mang built large facilities and decorated them with exquisite paintings, with similar purposes. Therefore, as a type of art, painting should be established before and after Wang Mang. Wang Mang was followed by the Guangwu Emperor. He and Wang Mang grew up in the same cultural context, with the same intellectual traditions, intellectual traditions and ways of feeling. The difference between him and Wang Mang is only in the judgment of specific things; the whole structure of thought and feeling is actually similar. Therefore, after Emperor Guangwu came to power, this set of traditions established for Wang Mang, in addition to highlighting the part of Wang Mang himself was removed, the overall structure was retained and inherited.
However, in terms of the form of painting, there were some new changes in the middle and late Eastern Han Dynasty, the most important of which was the invention of several core reproduction techniques, including short shrinkage, perspective, and simulation of light and shadow, such as the Zhu Tuna Temple and the Han Tomb of Dahuting. This needs to be explained. For in terms of the clear presentation of ideology, flat paintings, such as those embodied in the portraits of the Wuliang Sect, are sufficient. Didn't the two-dimensional art of ancient Egypt maintain a flat character for thousands of years? The pursuit of naturalistic effects will reduce the clarity of ideological transmission. So why is that? I think it has nothing to do with ideology anymore. This may have something to do with the construction and transmission of certain special knowledge—a topic I'm going to explore in my second book.
Xiaotang Mountain Ancestral Hall "Pavilion Worship Map"
Portrait line drawing of zhu tuna temple
Editor-in-Charge: Shen Guanzhe
Proofreader: Liu Wei