The following article is adapted and reprinted from the essay "Women in the History of Chinese Painting" by Dr. Marsha Weidner, Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, originally published in Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300-1912, and used with permission of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Given the images of Asian women prevalent in Western literature, it may be difficult to visualize a traditional Chinese woman, standing on tiny bound feet, confidently creating a work of art. Yet this was not an uncommon sight in the upper-class households and entertainment districts of late imperial China.
From 1300 to 1912 (the period covered by this exhibition), numerous Chinese women were recognized by connoisseurs and collectors for their artistic achievements. Some were wives or daughters of professional painters, but most either belonged to scholar-official families—China's gentry—or were courtesans who served gentlemen of this class. The women of the gentry and courtesans were counterparts to the male scholars whose art theories and practices eventually came to dominate Chinese painting in the Ming (1368-1644) and Ching (1644-1911) Dynasties.
These scholars—members of the literary intelligentsia who served in China's government, or at least prepared for official careers—painted as amateurs and regarded their own work as superior to that of professional artists. They maintained that meaningful art was created only by refined, learned individuals who took up the brush for personal reasons or for the pleasure of their friends, and that the quality of this art depended upon the character of the artist.
In contrast, works produced in imperial and temple workshops or for the general market, although decorative and useful, belonged to the realm of craft, where technical skill mattered more than the personality of the painter. Scholars likened their own painting to calligraphy and poetry, and used all three, often in combination, as vehicles for self-expression and instruments of social intercourse. Rather than seeking formal training in painting, they learned brush techniques from the practice of calligraphy, studied antique works and painting manuals, and received instruction from friends and family members. Their success was measured not in sales or commissions, but by the reputations they established among their peers.
If painting had not become an elite pastime, but had instead been left entirely to the professionals, women would seldom have contributed to its history. In traditional China the primary occupations of men and women were quite distinct. Women were generally limited to careers in the home, nunnery, or brothel, and only in the first could they fulfill their primary obligation to Confucian society, the continuance of the family. Since the home was the sole completely sanctioned arena for female activity, gentry women were able to discover their talent for painting only after scholars had made this art a domestic pursuit by practicing it themselves in their private libraries and residential gardens.
Once this happened, however, in some respects Chinese women painters faced fewer obstacles than their female contemporaries in the West, who were often denied access to the institutions that provided art training and the means for advancement. Chinese women could become accomplished artists without stepping beyond their front gates. Like their fathers, brothers, and husbands, they gained recognition through familial and social channels. They were further aided by the literati definition of painting as an avocation. Just as Chinese gentlemen did not have to give up their traditional occupations as scholar-bureaucrats to be considered serious artists, ladies did not need to slight their family duties. For both men and women, painting was a lifelong activity, taken up as time permitted, in leisure moments and in retirement.
Of course, not all women of the gentry could take advantage of the opportunities offered by the scholar- amateur tradition. A degree of literacy, familiarity with the writing brush, and knowledge of the art of the past were requisites for scholarly painting, and these were beyond the reach of many women. Conservative families protected their daughters from the distractions of literature and taught them little more than filial behavior and needle skills. If these girls were fortunate, they married into families with more liberal attitudes toward female literacy, but this seldom happened. Thus, there are far fewer women than men in the historical record of Chinese art.
It must also be acknowledged that, with perhaps one exception, the renowned bamboo painter Kuan Tao-sheng of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), the names of women do not appear on the rolls of the "great masters." On the whole, Chinese women painters were sustainers rather than innovators. Their inventive potential was limited by conventions designed to support the rigorously patriarchal social system of premodern China. The most infamous of these was the custom of footbinding. However, minds were also bound, not only by the thoroughgoing subordination of women to men within the family and the exclusion of women from public life, but also by definitions of virtue based on self-sacrifice and the equation of fragility with femininity.
These and other behavioral constraints on Chinese women are so well known that there is no need to belabor them. It is enough to recognize that under these circumstances women were not prepared, intellectually or psychologically, to wrestle with art history, break new ground, or assume positions of leadership in the manner of, for example, the late-Ming Dynasty master Tung Chi-chang (1555-1636).
Women who became skillful painters usually had the support and assistance of male family members. Tung Chi-chang went so far as to insist that the women of his household copy pictures, and he scolded any who showed signs of tiring. More typical are accounts of the pleasure that couples took in shared aesthetic interests. References to art as a bond between men and women are common in the literature about female painters, poets, and calligraphers. Often these women were secondary wives, concubines remembered no less for their artistic and literary skills than for their beauty, but intellectual matches also occurred in arranged marriages with primary wives—sometimes by fortunate accident, sometimes by design.
Although the wives and daughters of successful male artists were particularly likely to take an interest in painting, Chinese women painters were not always dependent on fathers or husbands for inspiration and training. Especially during the Ming and Ching periods, artistically inclined young women found female role models in history and literature as well as in their own households. Mothers sometimes taught their daughters to paint and compose poetry, and many families boasted a number of talented women. If a girl expressed an interest in painting and her parents approved, but no one in the immediate family could provide instruction, teachers could be found among more distant relations or family friends. Women could also avail themselves of the scrolls, screens, fans, and "treasures of the scholar's study"—brushes, ink, inkstones, and paper—that were standard equipment in gentry homes.
Amateur painting naturally flourished in the foremost home in the land, the imperial palace, and on occasion gentry women were summoned to Peking to instruct empresses, princesses, and imperial concubines in this polite art. It also spilled over into China's religious communities. Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns, taking cues from the secular world of the Confucian literati, produced works that bear little resemblance to the religious images painted by craftsmen on temple walls. In the pleasure districts, especially during the Ming Dynasty, elite courtesans such as Ma Shou-chen and Hsueh Su-su added sketching to the repertoire of refined entertainments they offered visiting gentlemen.
The women painters who functioned outside the scholarly tradition were for the most part relatives of professional artists. Just a few can be named, and we know little about them other than that they were proficient in the technically demanding subjects and styles of their fathers. The daughter of the early-Ming Dynasty master Tai Chin. (1388-1462) painted landscapes and figures. The works of Miss Chiu—see the Portrait of Kuanyin—closely resemble those of her father, the Soochow figure painter Chiu Ying (c.1494-c.1552). In the Ching Dynasty, Ting Yu of Hangchow took up her father's practice of using Western techniques in portrait painting. Under normal circumstances, women from "artisan" families lacked the leisure to pursue the arts for their own amusement or as a means of self-expression, so we can assume that these women painted because this was the family livelihood.
The line between professional and scholar-amateur painting, however, like lines between social classes, cannot always be easily drawn. The early-Ming master Sun Lung, for instance, was not only skilled at rendering plants and insects, the specialty of the professional painters of his hometown, but also sketched blossoming plums, a theme popular with scholar-artists. The more scholarly side of his art influenced the work of his daughter and her husband Jen Tao-hsun (1422-1503), both of whom are remembered for their plum-blossom paintings.
On the other hand, artists with scholarly backgrounds often deviated from strict amateurism. When family fortunes declined, perhaps as the result of dynastic change, political misadventure, the failure of one or more generations of males to pass the examinations requisite for government office, mismanagement of family properties, or simple extravagance, some well-educated men and women found it necessary to use their literary and artistic skills for material gain. A surprising number of the women painted, at least in part, to contribute to the support of their families.
Subject Matter in Paintings by Women
All of the standard subject categories of Chinese art—figures, landscapes, architecture, flowers and plants, birds and animals—were accessible to female artists. None of the themes employed by men was thought to be unsuitable or too demanding for women. On the whole, they did not have problems comparable to those confronted by Western women painters, who worked in artistic environments dominated by representations of the human figure while subjected to social restrictions that impeded their acquisition of the training necessary to excel in this challenging subject.
Figure painting had become a secondary genre by the time Chinese women began to paint in appreciable numbers. After the rise of landscape painting during the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), fine depictions of historical scenes, religious subjects, and beautiful women continued to be produced, but the majority of the leading male artists built their reputations on mountain-and-river views. These scenes included travelers, fishermen, and other stock characters, but often they were sketched in abbreviated, perfunctory ways. Artists were not expected to demonstrate great expertise in figure drawing unless they specialized in it. As far as the connoisseurs were concerned, technically challenging or physically demanding undertakings, such as imperial portraits or temple wall paintings, were the province of professional masters. Women did not invite criticism, then, if they drew figures amateurishly or chose not to draw them at all.
Those who did take up figure painting were fortunate in not having to deal with the nude. Except in erotica, figures in traditional Chinese paintings are invariably clothed and usually heavily draped. Women learned to draw them, as men did, by studying instruction manuals, model books, and old paintings. Many also relied on family traditions. Miss Chiu and Jen Hsia learned the techniques of their fathers, and the style of Yu Ling resembles that of her husband Su Liu-peng. Until the early 20th Century, when Chinese artists working in Western modes began to draw from nude models, the question of participation in life-drawing classes simply did not arise.
In figure painting women favored female subjects and religious themes. They were especially drawn to the Bodhisattva Kuanyin, a protector of women, and produced images of this Buddhist deity in great quantities, often as acts of devotion. A survey of such works would reveal considerable stylistic and iconographic diversity. It would display, for example, a range of brush styles, from boldly modulated to extremely delicate, as suggested by the contrast between Hsu Tsan's ink rendering of Kuanyin Crossing the Sea and Miss Chiu's finely drawn representations of the deity in gold.
It might be assumed that landscape was for Chinese women what the nude was for women in the West, a subject highly valued yet rendered inaccessible by the rules of society. However, this was only true to a limited extent. Bound feet ruled out mountain climbing, and mansion walls that protected virtue also shut off views of the countryside. Still, many women were quite mobile and well informed about the outside world. Mobility, of course, varied with social status. Courtesans were not as restricted as gentry women and seem to have been able to move around as their financial circumstances permitted.
In theory, gentry women had no business beyond the women's quarters, but even here some variation in practice was admitted. Older women, for instance, had more freedom than girls, who were kept out of the sight of men not members of their immediate family. Situations also arose permitting or requiring women, regardless of age, to travel. Journeys were necessitated by changes in family fortunes, perhaps precipitated by social upheavals or the collapse of a dynasty. In times of peace women sometimes accompanied fathers, husbands, and sons to their official posts outside their home districts. From sedan chairs and boats, the same modes of transportation used by traveling gentlemen, they then saw a good deal of China.
Firsthand experiences with nature, however, were not required for landscape painting. Even thoroughly sedentary women could learn to draw streams and mountains the way men of the Ming and Ching Dynasties often did, by imitating the methods of "the ancients" transmitted in paintings and illustrated texts such as the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. Freed from representational concerns, they used old compositional formulas and brush methods as vehicles for self-expression. In choosing to describe rocks and trees in particular old "manners," they registered their views on painting history and proclaimed their spiritual affinity with certain of their predecessors and contemporaries. Chen Shu not only sketched the scenic waterways of her native region, but also executed ambitious landscapes in the style of the Yuan master Wang Meng (c.1308-85), thereby aligning herself with the orthodox artists of her day.
Flowers, plants, birds, and insects dominate this exhibition, and in some respects the emphasis is appropriate. Chinese women genuinely loved flowers and apparently accepted the whole package of girl-and-flower associations perpetuated by centuries of poems, stories, and legends, not to mention female names. This conditioning undoubtedly led some women to specialize in flower painting. It will be unfortunate, however, if the disproportionate representation of flower paintings reinforces stereotyped notions about women's "natural" preference for this genre and for the delicate, meticulous painting methods it often entailed.
By and large, Chinese women painted flowers and plants for the same reasons men did, including consumer demand. In many cases they took up this subject matter because it was the specialty of their family or school. For example, Yun Ping and Ma Chuan, two famous and prolific flower painters of the 18th Century, were not following feminine inclination but precedents set by male relatives, Yun Shou-ping (1633-90) and Ma Yuan-yu (1669-1722), respectively.
Although flower-and-plant painting traditionally ranked below landscape in the Chinese hierarchy of genres, it was enormously popular, especially during the Ching Dynasty. The old Pi-ling school was revitalized by the brilliance of Yun Shou-ping. The Yangchow masters animated plants of all sorts, from ethereal plum blossoms to everyday garden vegetables. Flower specialists were in great demand at the court. Nevertheless, modern scholars, absorbed in the study of landscape painting, have had relatively little time for flowers.
The Critical Reception of Paintings by Women
In writing about women painters, critics and historians used some of the same conventions they did when discussing men: they were child prodigies; they excelled at family styles; their works resembled and sometimes surpassed those of great masters; they were rein-carnations of a particular old master; their brushwork was strong or forceful; their works were of the "marvelous" or even the "untrammeled" class; and, occasionally, they opened new paths. Women also came in for the same types of criticism applied to men. For instance, the figure paintings of Fu Te-jung (active in the late 17th Century) were judged skillful, but tainted with a slight professional air.
Mixed with these fairly routine observations are others that are gender specific. Sometimes standard formulas were simply modified. Thus, rather than just comparing Miss Chiu to the Sung Dynasty figure painter Li Kung-lin, Chian Ta-hsin (1728-1804) called her a "Li Kung-lin among women." Most common, however, are the comments that grew out of the literati belief that painters reveal themselves in their art. As a man registers his uprightness and strength of character in his brushwork, so a woman was thought to imbue her painting with feminine purity, refinement, and modesty.
The terms "elegant," "refined, " "pure," and "chaste" are regularly encountered in descriptions of women's works and styles. From here it was only a short step to the arguable notion that a feminine hand can be recognized as such or, as Wang Wen-chih (1703-1802) put it in describing a work by Wen Shu (1595-1634), "One look and you know it is a woman's brush." Wang meant this as high praise, and went on to assert that the quality of Wen's work is so special that it cannot be duplicated by a man, not even by an old master steeped in the principles of painting. Her artistic descendants could only be women, such as his student Lo Chi-lan or granddaughter Wang Yu-yen.
Only a few scholarly articles concerning Chinese women artists have appeared in English. Most focus on paintings in the collections with which the authors are affiliated, and one also reflects contemporary political efforts in China to give women greater recognition. Presented in diverse publications and at wide intervals, these pieces, though useful, have not compensated for judgments such as Osvald Siren's (who found only the courtesan-painters interesting enough to consider at any length in his chapters on the Ming and Ching Dynasties in Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles) or for the scarcity of references to women's achievements in surveys and other major studies of Chinese painting.
The reasons for the neglect of Chinese women painters by Western scholars are to be found primarily in Western patterns of scholarship. Western scholars were not accustomed to seeing the women in their own art history, so they did not look for them in China's either. The situation was not helped by the images of oppressed and ignorant Chinese women transmitted to the West by the writings of missionaries, travelers' diaries, and accounts of "things Oriental." Another problem was that many Chinese women painters specialized in flowers, a category of subject matter more esteemed in China than in the West.
Finally, most of the known Chinese women painters were active in the late Ming and Ching Dynasties, which Western scholars initially considered artistically stagnant or decadent, hence unworthy of serious consideration. This notion has long since been discredited, but it delayed Western studies of the wealth of material handed down from this relatively accessible period. Consequently, the Ming and Ching painters awaiting rediscovery are by no means all women.
Why Investigate the History of Chinese Women Painters?
If women painters were a minority in Chinese art history, and none attained the stature of the "great masters," why should anyone take issue with the way they have been treated by Western scholars? Why should female artists be included in any considerations of Chinese painting?
The female artists of China, like their counterparts in Europe and America, deserve attention because they created beautiful objects and were an integral part of their country's art history. Separation of male and female spheres of activity within Chinese society prompted women to recognize artistic lineages of their own, but this did not mean that they were isolated from or ignorant of broader currents. They associated with male artists, scholars, and connoisseurs, participated in major schools and stylistic trends, won the praise of their contemporaries, taught others, and left behind works treasured by later generations. The retrieval of each one brings us closer to a complete picture of painting in premodern China.
Completing this picture in all of its diversity, however, involves more than fitting unfamiliar pieces into a familiar frame. The frame itself has to change to accommodate them. Appreciation of the contributions of women artists requires reassessment of accepted methods and concerns. To date, our approaches to Chinese painting have been based almost exclusively on the roles of men, usually scholars, in the Confucian social order. These men were similarly educated, and, if not personally inclined to travel, had close connections with individuals who traveled extensively. They sat for provincial and imperial examinations, and participated in a bureaucratic system that sent them to posts all over the country.
These experiences linked them to intellectual networks that operated on a national level, skimming across the top of Chinese society. This is reflected in Chinese painting studies that have adopted a bird's-eye view and followed prominent scholar-painters through a maze of high-level social, political, and artistic connections. The spotlight has been kept on a surprisingly small number of artists identified by the Chinese critics as the elite; often they have been packaged in groups such as the so-called Six Orthodox Masters of the Early Ching and the Eight Eccentric Masters of Yang chow.
Against this background, women painters can only be seen as tangential. Except for the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi and a few other imperial ladies, women did not function in the national arena. Many were well educated, but they did not prepare for or take the examinations. Consequently they did not have the personal connections that resulted from these experiences and from holding office. Though they traveled, few were free to roam the countryside or able to make far-flung friends. Most spent their days serving their families at home. It is with the family and the home, then, that the study of women painters must begin. As men have led the way through the upper political and intellectual reaches of Confucian society, women can lead one into the heart of its fundamental institutions.
Cross sections of painting history from these two vantage points are quite different. Consider, for example, the cases of Yun Shou-ping and Yun Ping. Studies of Yun Shou-ping have emphasized the hardships he faced as a Ming Dynasty loyalist and his unwillingness to compromise his scholarly values even though he was forced to paint for a living. They place him among the Six Orthodox Masters of the Early Ching and connect his ideas and practices to those of another of the Six, his close friend Wang Hui (1632-1717). Wang Hui and the other men included in this group all specialized in landscape painting. Taking this fact and the prestige of the landscape tradition into account, Western scholars have often paid as much attention to Yun Shou-ping's landscapes as to his flower paintings, even though he displayed his real genius in the latter genre.
Yun Ping was a female descendant of Yun Shou-ping and followed him in flower painting. Within the existing scheme of Chinese art history, there is really little else to say about her. She and her works appear to be a dead end, until one looks beyond landscape lineages and below the upper strata of artistic connections. Yun Ping was a member of one of China's great painting families, yet one seldom hears about any of her relatives other than Yun Shou-ping. The importance of painting as a Yun family enterprise becomes evident when one begins to reconstruct the social environment that permitted Yun Ping to become an artist. More than forty artists surnamed Yun from Wuchin (Changchow) established reputations adequate to secure them places in the written record; twelve were women, and two were Yun Ping's sisters. This flower-painting clan was also closely connected to others. One Yun woman married the famous flower painter Tsou Yi-kuei (1686-1772), and a fascinating web of artistic relationships was woven by the men and women of the Yun, Ma, and Chiang families.
More broadly, biographies of women artists provide insights into the circumstances of art production and the use of painting in Chinese gentry society. Reports of women executing scrolls for their husbands' visitors, serving as "substitute brushes" for more famous individuals, and employing "substitute brushes" themselves in order to satisfy large clienteles indicate, among other things, the extent to which painting served as a form of social currency, a medium of exchange used to secure tangible and intangible rewards in literati circles.
By now the observation that the study of women offers new perspectives on familiar material may be a cliché; nevertheless, it remains true. It is hoped that this exhibition will not only modify existing notions about premodern Chinese women by demonstrating their creative capabilities, but also expand the context within which all Chinese painting is discussed.