Chair: Edward L. Dreyer, University of Miami

This panel will explore the engagement of martial culture with the practice of painting in China, from the Yuan (1279–1368) through Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. It seeks to expand scholarship of Chinese painting history, whose emphasis on civil and Confucian cultures has excluded the practice of painting by military men from its literature. Simultaneously, it also seeks to expand scholarship of Chinese military history, whose emphasis on political, institutional, and strategic issues has excluded sustained examination of its cultural production. By establishing dialogue between the subfields of Chinese military history and Chinese art history, this panel hopes to address/redress the previously unexplored territory in which Chinese military and painting histories intersect.

The papers will address the relationship of martial culture to the production of painting in traditional China through examination of literati interest and participation in martial affairs, and through investigation of patronage and participation in painting by military people. Thus this panel will question, clarify, and redefine categories of wen and wu with respect to changing nuances of philology, social-history, and cultural production. The issues to be explored by this panel establish dialogue between two subfields of Sinology as yet unrelated. Moreover, this panel will offer insight into the mechanics of the consolidation of cultural capital and political legitimation in traditional China, as distinction of martial and civil culture was a rhetorical strategy frequently deployed in these pursuits.

Jennifer G. Purtle, University of Chicago

Extant scholarship views Yuan painting as a medium for political resistance through development of an "iconography of virtue," for picturing loyalism to the fallen Song state, and expansion of painting technique for implicitly inscribing nativist, anti-Mongol sentiment on the picture plane. This paper explores the relationship of wen and wu to visual production not only as reflections of political administrative categories, but as operative cultural constructs in Yuan Fujian.

The work of Li Zhongming (fl. 14th cent.), a Brigade Commander from Shaowu, and Huang Zhou (fl. 14th cent.), son of the Jianning Brigade’s Command Officer, will serve as examples of modes of painting traditionally termed "civil" employed by individuals whose social and official identities were primarily martial. These martial artists utilized such visual modes without engaging Song loyalist, or anti-Mongol nativist, discourse.

Examination of the work of Qian Xuejie (fl. 14th cent.), a Brigade Commander active in Quanzhou, and nephew of Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), will illuminate social and political uses of the deployment of civil and martial identities through different forms of visual and literary production. To understand Qian’s manipulation of, and self-fashioning through, iconographic, stylistic, and generic choice, his work will be examined as part of the broader circle in which he worked, which included the painter Bian Wu (fl. 14th cent.), civilian Secretary to the military Commander of the Minhai Pacification Commission. This paper will conclude by assessing the complex relationship of martial expression in painting production in Yuan Fujian to ideologies of Mongol collaboration.

Kathleen Ryor, Carleton College

Literati painting of the latter part of the Ming dynasty, and its patronage, have recently been the subject of art historical scholarship in which permeability of social boundaries is emphasized. Although interactions between scholar officials and merchants are most widely documented, during the sixteenth century members of the literati, as defined by their mastery of civil culture, became increasingly interested in military affairs and pursued careers as military strategists. Simultaneously, hereditary military officials engaged in the same pursuit of civil cultural capital as merchants and other socially "disadvantaged" but economically privileged individuals outside the shidaifu class.

This paper will focus on the career of the artist Xu Wei (1521–1593), who also worked as a military strategist and whose major patrons were military officials. Martial interests are not reflected in the subject matter of Xu Wei’s painting. Instead, the boldness of Xu’s performative style of brushwork, which reveals the bodily movement of the artist, and accompanying poetic inscriptions, which employ allusions to military heroes and a more forceful poetic language, constitute the martial aspects of Xu Wei’s work. The adoption of wu qualities in his work was not only an aesthetic response to a military taste, but also an attempt to expand the expressive possibilities of art beyond narrow canonical models. An examination of Xu’s social and professional relationships will also reveal the ways in which many members of the educated elite in Zhejiang promoted a distinct system of aesthetic values, characterized by conscious balance of wen and wu.

Nixi Cura, New York University

Traditional accounts of Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese bannermen—the Qing conquering elite—present them as having been captured, in turn, by the ineluctable attractions of Chinese culture. Recent scholarship reevaluates this Sinocentric interpretation by recognizing the Qing investment in the manipulation of martial and cultural archetypes to sustain a stable, integrated polity. Although the cultural hybrid of bannerman ethnicities was upheld as superior to its constituent parts, it caused anxiety among Qing rulers, who blamed Chinese cultural refinements for the erosion of military spirit. Institutionalized mistrust of such Chinese influence eventually contradicted the rhetoric of balance and inclusion, and culminated in the ejection of most ethnic Chinese from the banner ranks between 1742 and 1779.

This study will focus on Zhu Lunhan (1680–1760), who successfully balanced artistic productivity and military prowess. At a time when most Chinese bannermen held civil positions and never saw battle, Zhu attained the rank of Vice-Commander of the Chinese Yellow Banner and gained renown for his skill in mounted archery, and for his poetry and painting. Discarding the brush, Zhu specialized in finger-painting, which combined the physicality of martial arts with the representational potency of painted images. Zhu’s career began during a time of idealism and innovation in bannerman painting, and ended when indoctrination and instrumentality governed artistic production in bannerman circles. Examined contextually, the painting and poetry of Zhu Lunhan reveals the inherent tensions and external pressures that ultimately undermined the hybrid ideal of military prowess and cultural refinement.

Hongxing Zhang, University of East Anglia

There were instances in Chinese history in which people in the military system were actively involved in art, either through patronage or through personal participation. In official rhetoric these cases can be termed examples of the perfect balance or combination of the cultural and martial. This paper seeks to break through this veil of rhetoric by proposing that some cases of military involvement in art can be better understood by looking at the historical conditions under which the "involvement" was able to exist. Indeed, this paper seeks to probe the nature of "involvement" by stressing its historical specificity.