In the 6th Century A.D., the scholar-poet Hsu Ling assembled an anthology of love poems entitled New Songs from a Jade Terrace. "Jade Terrace" has ever since served as an abstract literary reference to an ideal, eternal place where immortal women gather to enjoy aesthetic pleasures. Centuries later, during the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911), The Jade Terrace History of Calligraphy and The Jade Terrace History of Painting were published, both devoted exclusively to artistic accomplishments by women. The Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibition and catalogue by the same name pays homage to these earlier works.
The museum is to be heartily congratulated not only for mounting a landmark exhibition of Chinese women artists, but also for producing an exhibition volume that is much more than a handsome coffee-table book. The excellent reproductions of the 80 paintings by 43 women artists, gathered from 23 collections around the world, are matched with four analytic essays and an exceptionally detailed and scholarly catalogue of enduring value. Here is a book that can be used, and repeatedly, as one rethinks the role of women in the history of Chinese art and culture.
While the photographic reproductions give eloquent visual depth to the diverse and substantial talents of these artists, the greatest strength of this volume lies in the text. The contributors argue persuasively for assigning a more prominent place to women artists in the world of Chinese art. This is accomplished in large part by placing them in context—showing how they interacted artistically and socially with the cultured societies in which they often enjoyed highly-respected positions.
The essays raise important historical, aesthetic, literary, and historiographical issues, and use the biographies and artistic works of these painters to give them substantial form. For example, there are particularly illuminating insights into the symbolism of flowers in traditional China, whether they are found in paintings, poetry, a garden, or arranged in a vase.
Two of the essays are by Dr. Marsha Weidner, Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, who first suggested assembling this exhibition six years ago. Her essay "Women in the History of Chinese Painting" (see excerpts in previous article) illustrates the intellectual tact taken with equal success in the essays by Dr. Ellen Johnston Laing, Kerns Professor of Oriental Art at the University of Oregon, and Dr. Irving Yucheng Lo, a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. These contributors bolster cogent arguments with scrupulously-researched details about artists (male and female), schools of painting, and aesthetic motifs-information that might be overwhelming without the carefully-prepared index material. The latter includes an index of extant and reproduced paintings by women, and a supplementary bibliography, index of Chinese and Japanese terms, chronology, and photographic appendix. Here is professionalism mixed with the teacher's touch; to read is to enjoy as much as learn.
While Weidner discusses broader themes in her lead essay, such as the place of women in social history, the difficulties in finding biographical material about female artists that goes beyond formulaic stereotypes, and the current status of women's art history, her essay "Flowers from the Garden: Paintings in the Exhibition" focuses on the narrower theme of flower painting in Chinese art. For anyone who in the past may have found Chinese flower paintings a bit flat and tedious, this essay is guaranteed to change perceptions.
The cultural value of flowers has accumulated over centuries of aesthetic expression in China. They represent seasonal motifs, refer to emotions and honorable traits of character, and have complex links with bird and insect painting—all of which contribute to "reading" a painting. In the latter case, the excellent catalogue notes written by Dr. James Robinson, the Jane Weldon Myers Curator of Asian Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, are especially useful. One of Robinson's specialties is the tradition of bird, flower, and insect paintings, and his expertise is readily evident in these notes. See, for example, his sensible and sensitive analysis of Kuan Tao-sheng (1262-1319), long considered "the first lady of painting" in Chinese art history. Mere biography, political history, social matrices, art motifs (especially bamboo), and connoisseurship are all seamlessly interwoven.
The other catalogue notes by Weidner, Laing, and Christina Chu, curator at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, are of comparable quality, and are made even more useful to serious students by the addition of footnotes and bibliographic references in several languages.
Laing, co-author of the catalogue and co-curator of the exhibition, focuses attention on three female painters of the Ming Dynasty: Wen Shu, from an old, elite, and lettered gentry family; Miss Chiu, an artisan painter who depended upon artistic production for her livelihood; and Ma Shou-chen, who utilized her considerable painting skills to enhance her cultured entertainment of upper-class men as a courtesan. Laing compares artistic as well as life styles; aesthetic motifs are gracefully infused with social history.
"Poetry, painting, and calligraphy are generally considered by the Chinese as the three supreme art forms," Lo writes in the opening lines of his essay, "Daughters of the Muses of China." In his analysis of women and poetry, a clearer view emerges of the traditional Chinese social milieu, where women were usually expected to play subordinate roles. The ability of women to make names for themselves in poetry as well as painting, despite stereotypical restraints placed upon them by tradition-bound Confucian society, is a remarkable story.
Lo's examination of the social conditions that "nurtured and encouraged female accomplishments in poetry" places the essays by Weidner and Laing in a broader context. It is clear from these essays that literature, art, and social history are tightly intertwined. If the place of women in the history of Chinese art is to be fully appreciated, all three areas deserve close attention. There is no better way to start than to read this truly stimulating work. —(Dr. Richard R. Vuylsteke is editor of the Free China Review.)