December 2019
Since the 1980s there has been a growing interest in Chinese art associated with the literati - the influential, educated minority. For Chinese collectors this was a resurgence of interest, it was the rest of the world that only begun to focus on it in recently.
Traditionally, Chinese aesthetes have valued the arts of this group above those initially fashionable in the West such as exotic, decorative export wares and, later, jade carvings, monumental sculpture and burial wares, including ancient bronzes. Even as late as the 1860s, when a major handscroll of an imperial procession reached France, it was used as dining-room wallpaper, with a large hole cut out of it and discarded to accommodate a serving hatch. But even in China from the 1840s to 1979 the traditional hierarchy of respect in the arts had been threatened by political events. The cataclysmic clashes with western power during the opium wars, from 1939 to 1960, when Hong Kong was forcefully ceded to the British, culminating in the humiliation of the sacking of the Summer Palace in 1860, not only diverted attention from the elite focus on Confucian harmony and evolving consciousness to one of battling for national survival and evolving politics, but led to reformers calling for China to be more like the west politically and militarily. At this point, there was little interest in replacing the aesthetic tradition (that would come later, in the twentieth century), what was needed was only the means to protect it.
Further complicating the situation the fall of the Qing dynasty was followed by constant battles for control between warring factions, invasion by Japan, and the eventual triumph of communism with the flight of the losing side fleeing to the island of Taiwan. During these tumultuous years, the ancient tradition of collecting art, along with concomitant connoisseurship, was significantly interrupted – almost completely between 1949 and 1979. During those three decades, mainland China was also isolated from much of the rest of the world. Collecting Chinese art continued, but hardly at all in communist China. By this time westerners from Europe and America had become a major force in the marketplace for Chinese art, as had the Japanese. Each country influencing the trend from its own perspective, with a particular distinction between Japanese taste and that of Euro-America. They were joined after 1949 by the diaspora, collectors in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere, but this also had its impact on the hierarchy of arts.
The first Chinese collectors to re-assume the traditional mantle of connoisseurship and collecting who, as soon as they acquired the necessary wealth to significantly affect the market, were no longer the scholars of yesteryear but bankers, property developers, shipping magnates and other businessmen. And they were largely informed by widely available publications from the previous hundred years from Europe and America, or, to a lesser extent, from Japan. This greatly influenced their direction in collecting.
These factors led to a complete inversion of the traditional collecting hierarchy by the second half of the 20th century. By 1973, when Sotheby’s established the first open art auctions in Hong Kong, a single fifteenth-century, mass-produced imperial enamelled tea bowl became more valuable than one of the finest paintings of the same period. The recent interest in works associated with the scholar class is a reflection of the current reversal of this phenomenon – the beginning of a gradual return to the traditional hierarchy of value in Chinese art of the last few decades.
Defining literati arts is complicated by two major factors. The first is that the creeping influence of western rationality from the past couple of centuries, which was not well founded in a Chinese perspective on what art was all about, has muddied the waters. Transculturalism is a fairly recent western academic concern as the aspiration to rule the world gradually gave way to the dismantling of colonialism and the attempt to better understand it. The lingering prejudice of a primarily western approach to Chinese art lingered and was spread through its readily available publications and, indeed, marketing approach through major dealers and auction houses. Like their western counterparts who informed them to some extent, this new generation of Chinese collectors began by favouring the same range of arts. Impressive, preferably imperial porcelain wares of high quality; spectacular ancient bronzes; finely carved precious materials such as jade and other hardstones; fine lacquer carvings, and monumental sculpture had immediate appeal. The one area where the Chinese tended not to follow the West was in its lust for mingqi - those wares, mostly of pottery, made to accompany the dead into a presumed afterlife, such as Tang horses. They were considered inauspicious.
It wasn’t long, however, before the anomaly of the inverted hierarchy of meaning in the arts began to be recognized by savvier collectors who came to recognize the anomaly and began taking an interest in the more sophisticated art forms of the tradition. Initially encouraged by major collectors mostly in Hong Kong or Taiwan, once China opened up to the world, and allowed that individual wealth would lead to economic strength for the country, the immense potential of the Chinese economy bursting out of three decades of relative economic poverty, hit the market, as did hundreds of new collectors.
The initial wave of the renewed focus on scholarly arts tended to be somewhat simplistic, and object based rather than process based. While loftier, more sophisticated aspects were more difficult to grasp, objects used by scholars were not. All the obvious functional accoutrements of the scholar’s studio were obvious contenders, as, of course, were those wares both made by, and for, the literati were contenders, of course, but it still took a while to shed the western object-based approach. When I was asked to try to unravel the confusion in preparing a suitable catalogue for the Hong Kong Oriental Ceramic Society’s response to the new interest back in the early 1980s, I was shown the committee’s outline plan which consisted of a gridded chart with the horizontal line at the top listing all the different items, and the vertical one at the side all the different materials. They had decided that to tick each box was a viable plan. Working with Gerard Tsang, then curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, I suggested a quite different approach, resulting in Arts from the Scholar’ studio.1 It was based upon separating out those works of art made by the literati; those made for them, those they collected and surrounded themselves with, and so forth. Strangely the editing committee not only cut the introduction explaining the system, they changed the title to re-focus on the objects of art rather than its process. It was a step in the right direction, however.
Defining a hierarchy of arts by medium is only possible up to a point. In China, the process of art had, for more than two thousand years, been recognized as governing, rather than its products. The process involved the audience, including the sophisticated practitioners and first responders themselves, so ultimately what defined high arts was not the medium, but those involved in perception and expression, across various media. The literati may have settled on a general recognition of the high arts being poetry, painting, calligraphy, and music, but if a respected literatus had chosen to tap-dance on an upturned bucket at an elegant gathering, that would have been open to consideration as a high art form. Sculpture was also adopted as a high art form for the literati, in the form of small objects for scholarly use rather than monumental sculpture. So seal carving, or carving in wood, bamboo and other softer materials were also produced by the literati and, thus, considered high art. It is only the western tendency for intellectual definition governing what it is trying to define that has confused the issue and created a media-based hierarch. Basically, the literati arts were bounded not by genre, but by elegance of perception and expression.
A useful definition of what was considered the higher arts by the influential minority can be seen in how it was valued. The higher the art, the more it was highly valued the day it was produced – as with anything produced by the literati, or even patronised by them and produced by highly skilled craftsmen to reflect their taste. Items lower down the hierarchy, such as ceramics, for instance, had to acquire a patina of age, the resonance of a past ‘golden age’ before they were valued. Song ceramics, for instance, were primarily functional, even at the highest imperial levels, at the time of manufacture, whereas by the late Ming they were revered and collected.
The more decorative arts, such as mass-produced ceramic, house furnishings, symbolic paintings and prints to celebrate a particular season or event, and so forth then made up the lower end of the hierarchy. Burial wares, so highly valued in the West in the past century or more, were not considered art at all when they were produced, and still hold less interest to Chinese collectors and connoisseurs and in so far as they do, it is, again, the patina of age that governs their acceptance.
While these broad categorisations were generally useful, they could be transcended by the involvement of the influential minority. Ceramics produced to the highest standards at Imperial workshops in the eighteenth century, often involving court artists, were treated to some extent as high art that just happened to be on surfaces and materials other than silk or paper.
This brings us face-to-face with an important fact about the nature of Chinese art and culture. The broadly useful hierarchy of arts described above has prevailed for some centuries, but it has not always done so. Consider music and archery; in a much earlier age these were considered art forms, while painting and calligraphy were not. From this it becomes clear that a definition of the high arts rested not in the materially recognisable aspects of art, but in their perceived role.
Two and a half millennia ago, the influential minority saw the highest role of art as being a vehicle for self-cultivation. They considered it a direct and efficient means of developing character and wisdom. This did not deny any of the lower, sometimes banal roles of art such as mere decoration, but it did focus the sophistication of the influential minority, who refined the arts to extraordinarily levels of perception, expression and response. This defining characteristic of Chinese art has persisted into the present day; albeit with occasional brief and anomalous diversions, and inevitable cycles of creativity and orthodoxy across various art forms. Such cycles are inevitable in any culture where aesthetic process overrides its products, and where art is recognised as being a vehicle of self-realisation in its highest role rather than a merely decorative phenomenon.
Reinstating this long-standing understanding of the nature of art in its highest role gives us renewed insight. It grants us a more sensible definition of scholarly arts as being those that most efficiently refine sensibility, self-awareness and character. There is a Chinese saying: 人磨墨墨磨人 Renmomo momoren (‘Man grinds the ink; ink grinds the man’) – indeed, two of the seals I use as an artist refer to it. It implies that while the artist may grind the ink in order to write or paint, the process of becoming involved in such arts ‘grinds’ or refines the artist – and by extension, the audience as well. This sums up the fully mature Chinese approach to the high arts that prevailed for more than two millennia.
This different perspective also implies the predominance of process over product in high art, something that has only become broadly understood in the West during the past century or so. The comparatively recent modern revolution in western art was a belated and rapid emancipation – a recognition of art as an autonomous vehicle in evolving consciousness and self-realisation in its own right, rather than in the service of other vehicles, such as religion, philosophy and science as they had been for centuries. That servitude was most obvious in religion, but most pervasive in science; mainstream art had relied for centuries upon the depiction of reality as revealed to the rational, reasoning faculties of mind that gave rise to science in the first place. In other words: whether you were painting the Virgin Mary, a ship or a haystack, it had to look real.
It follows, therefore, that Chinese art has been ‘modern’ in terms of the underlying achievements of the recent western artistic revolution for more than a thousand years. I explore this new perspective, and its importance to Chinese art, in my recently published book Art Reboot. A transcultural re-evaluation of the nature and purpose of art that finds in China’s ancient past the resolution of global confusion in the modern art world.2
One of my principal arguments is that one major factor in the precociousness of Chinese art is also the main factor in the longevity of the culture itself: the nature of Chinese consciousness. Although the intellectual realm with its attendant fragmentation and descriptive capacities was recognised and highly valued in China, so too was the transcendent unified realm – thanks in large part to the ancient Quietism tradition that evolved into Daoism during the Warring States period. The highest mode of consciousness could only be achieved when these two modes of consciousness – incompatible by nature but complementary in effect – were fully integrated, helping to create a sophisticated syncretism of mind. Chinese cultural longevity rests to a considerable extent upon the fact that what was ultimately important in the culture was beyond description and, therefore, difficult to overthrow: what cannot be described cannot be destroyed.
In China, then, high art has been recognised as a conduit between the intellect and the absolute for more than 2,000 years – an efficient vehicle for travelling between the world of fragments and the unified world of the Dao and integrating the two. This prevailing syncretism clarifies understanding of the whole of art, both East and West. A single example of this may be found in the different view of abstraction in the two cultures. In the West, an artwork was seen in wholly binary terms; something was either abstract (that is to say, free of specific subject matter or message) or it was figurative, depicting something specific. In Chinese pictorial art – from the latter Han dynasty in calligraphy, and from the Tang dynasty in painting – there was a gradual shift to a more syncretic and more sophisticated use of abstraction within figurative subject matter. Artists saw no conflict in painting abstract or abstract expressive paintings made up of figurative subject matter. They simply shifted the focus of the process, and artist and audience alike recognised the powers of abstraction within figuration.
This is why landscapes and other elements of nature have remained such central aspects of Chinese art for centuries. The untrained eye may look at a range of fourteenth-century landscape paintings, read the surface, and miss the art that would have been recognised at the time by both artist and audience within the culture. The real message lay in the inner languages of pictorial art – those languages of line, form, colour (albeit often no more than ink-tones), and texture – languages released to their full perceptual and expressive maturity by Western artists only in the past century or so. To use just one example: if we look at paintings by Hongren (1610-1663) only as landscapes, they all look somewhat similar. Viewed as formal arrangements made up of abstract expressive and powerfully meaningful markings, however, they are wildly exciting and individual.
This brings us back to our starting point. The reinvigoration of this fundamental aspect of Chinese art and culture is at the heart of the renewed focus and rapidly growing interest in the scholarly arts. As our approach to the subject becomes more sophisticated, we recognise that the arts of the influential minority can no longer be successfully defined merely by the objects. The fact that the best of Chinese paintings embody timeless depths of perception and expression does not, of course, imply that all paintings are high art. But the depth of wisdom that a highly refined aesthete is capable of bringing to a painting can also be encapsulated in any other creative exercise undertaken in the same spirit. This more flexible approach to the scholarly arts lets us look at their work from new and richer perspectives.
One last important point is worth making in defining and discussing the high or scholarly arts. The involvement of the audience as a full partner in the artistic process also means that any particular work of art is not forever fixed at a particular level of the hierarchy. Chinese aesthetes elevated strange stones to rank amongst the most revered sculpture in the culture; Picasso created one of his sculptural masterpieces out of an old bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars. We recognise that the ever-shifting aesthetic landscape of art as evolutionary vehicle relies not solely upon the input of the artist, but also upon the endless subsequent interpretation or input of the audience too.
What begins again as a focus on material objects used by scholars, then shifts to include anything created through scholarly input, will continue to be refined as present and future aesthetes follow the millennial, highly sophisticated approach of Chinese aesthetics. As Picasso’s creative restructuring of the handlebars and saddle of a discarded bicycle became a transformative and powerful sculptural work for the twentieth century, so meaningful audience response can continue to broaden the range of potentially transformative high art.
Modern sensibility in the face of any elite may be an issue in using such terms as ‘influential minority,’ ‘educated elite,’ or, indeed, ‘literati.’ In practical terms, however, if we exist with the running commentary of the intellect, a dominant image of a separate self, and the ego, elites are part of the package. The collective ‘literati’ is broadly defined by education, although, of course, not all were necessarily scholars in the strictest sense of being educated within a Confucian framework in preparation for the institutional examination system that led to influence and emolument. Also educated were members of the ruling class but the education system was designed to provide the ruling class with its office not to test them as well. Merchants were also educated, often to the point of passing the exams, as were monks and other religious functionaries and independent sages.
The initial wave of this renewed focus on scholarly arts tended to be somewhat; simplistic start. One of the key drivers for this was the ascent of European and American power, which fuelled a western passion for ceramics, ancient bronzes, jade carvings, monumental sculpture and burial wares as it came into contact with Chinese arts.
The nature of this wide-ranging and flexible group has changed considerably over the centuries, making it difficult and inefficient to define scholarly works of art at the level of the objects produced by and for them, or indeed by the art forms involved.
Hugh Moss
At the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat. December 2019.