A Companion to Chinese Art by Martin J. Powers & Katherine R. Tsiang

Author:Martin J. Powers & Katherine R. Tsiang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118885208
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Proto-Museums

Modern museum institutions and their associated publications developed relatively late in China in comparison with Europe, and it was not until the mid-1920s that museums of important collections like the Palace Museum began to fully function as public institutions. Before that time private, temple, and imperial collections fulfilled some of those museological functions for audiences or “publics” that might be limited to aristocrats, officials, local notables, or literary and artistic celebrities. Gatherings for viewing and inscribing appreciations or commentaries on paintings could also be occasions for sketching pictorial records of notable works for future circulation and reproduction.

Architectural monuments occasionally further concretized the canonical status of calligraphies or paintings. The Hall of Three Rarities, the Qianlong emperor's personal studio within the Qing imperial palace, was named in 1746 to commemorate his acquisition of three famous treasures of calligraphy by Wang Xizhi, and by Wang's son and nephew. Such foundations were not fully museological since their only viewers were the emperor and some members of the court. Confucian temples, which also functioned as academies of higher learning, often served as repositories of stone stelae and other monuments inscribed with calligraphic texts. The Confucius family temple in Qufu, Shandong, was one such institution, which preserved famous stone steles from as early as 156 CE down to the present (Ledderose 1979: 10). Other proto-museum sites included the Forest of Steles (Beilin) collected at a Confucian Temple in Xi'an, northwest China since 1090 CE. Beginning with two groups of Tang dynasty steles assembled there in a special hall, the collection was augmented by nearly 3,000 other examples over time, culminating in its formal conversion to a public museum institution in 1944 (Figure 12.4). Inscriptions carved on stone cliffs by or after famous visitors at notable touristic or pilgrimage sites over the years or centuries provided another form of broadly accessible, enduring collections of cultural monuments (Harrist 2008).

Buddhist and Daoist temples could serve as other kinds of proto-museum spaces, with more or less permanent collections of sculptures and paintings on display to public audiences within often historically significant architectural structures. The role of temples in defining and disseminating artistic canons was particularly significant in eras such as the Tang (618–906 CE) and Song (960–1279 CE), when some of the most renowned artists of the day undertook commissions for temple mural painting decorations. The fame of particular works was augmented by their often metropolitan locations and by literary records describing famous mural paintings. Wu Daozi (act. 710–760), and his followers executed mural paintings for a significant proportion of the famous temples of the Tang capital cities of Chang'an and Luoyang. Not only the finished murals but also Wu's performative production of them attracted crowds of spectators (Barnhart 1997: 73–74; Bush and Shih 1985: 55–56). The Seiryōji sculpture and iconographic print interred inside it discussed above (Figure 12.2, Figure 12.3) indicate how temple images could serve as canonical models for replicas and disseminated versions, even if ritual or worship objects were at times secret, hidden, or rarely visible.

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