by Jon Lackman | 2 February 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books
Women collectors are the subject of several recent publications including the Morey Award nominee Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China by Hui-shu Lee, who notes that “studies of imperial involvement in the arts in China have scanted the role of women.” This is the first art history book I’ve read that opens with a palindrome: “Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.” This may seem like a frivolous opening for a scholarly book but in fact it serves as the jumping-off point for a fascinating discussion of Chinese huiwen, texts that can be read forwards and backwards but that spell out different messages–often even more than two. This genre enjoyed popularity among women writers in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), and it serves as a useful metaphor for the artistic patronage of the period’s empresses:
[Poet Su Hui's huiwen] express genuine, heartfelt emotions, but as they are embedded in an endless puzzle of characters, they ostensibly exist in a space of intense privacy. Readers of the poems become voyeurs. We pry, configure, and unlock the secrets of the palindrome, ultimately becoming furtive admirers of both Su Hui’s private feelings and her exceptional talent. This secrecy is a by-product of an intuitively accepted principle in Chine: self-expression is an extension of the body, and a woman’s revelation of inner thoughts and feelings consequently is like a public disrobing. Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome describes a world of private interiors. In Empress Yang’s world feminine expression was also conceived in terms of interiors, of private thoughts and feelings. Exposure does not happen of its own accord but rather takes a particular effort, such as that of Wu Zetian, who brings Su Hui’s creativity to public notice.
These are surface thoughts that the story of Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome elicits, but a closer look reveals something different: Su Hui’s interior world was never intended to be truly private … Empress Yang also took pride in her talent and accomplishments, and her practice of art similarly operated within well-defined boundaries. Moreover, Empress Yang recognized that the interiority of her world was part of a necessary illusion. As I demonstrate later, her effectiveness as a ruler from behind the screen depended on her willingness to obey the same rules of agency, even though the nature of those rules was such that her talent and creativity, even her very person, would become misconstrued and lost.
Empress Yang, Hui-shu Lee writes, “was arguably the most important female art patron of the Song dynasty” besides being “a major player in court politics” — “she worked closely with favored court painters (Ma Yuan and Ma Lin) to help produce paintings with poetic inscriptions that are both exquisite works of art and meaningful modes of expression.” And yet, she has “remained an obscure and little understood figure.” This book should change that.
