Where Dragon Veins Meet by Stephen H. Whiteman;

Author:Stephen H. Whiteman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295745817
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.4 Wang Yuanqi, Ten Scenes of West Lake, 1708. Detail of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 62.2 × 656.5 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum.

The Painted Matrix

The entry for Wang Yuanqi’s Imperial Poems in Precious Records of the Stone Moat describes the album in precise, material terms: “Thirty-six scenes of the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat painted by Wang Yuanqi, one album. White writing paper, painted in colors. Altogether thirty-six folios. On the left of each folio is inscribed one of the Benevolent Emperor Shengzu’s [Kangxi’s] poems in small characters.”41 The entry also records the text of each poem, the seals and signatures of Wang and the calligrapher, Wang Cengqi, and the paintings’ dimensions. Although the album does not survive, this description, coupled with contemporary works by Wang Yuanqi, compositional similarities across extant, Qianlong versions of Imperial Poems, and the consistent size of the three Kangxi versions noted above, suggest that Wang’s paintings can be productively characterized, if not precisely re-created, in ways that expand understanding of how a Qing viewer might have read the neutral, monochrome woodblock prints.42 Viewed within the broader context of imperial art production, this reconstruction illustrates ways in which court visual culture drew upon historical models, engaged novel contemporary inputs, and capitalized on the potential of both style and genre as meaning-bearing aspects of a work to convey a multivalent expression of cosmopolitan emperorship under Kangxi.

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