Huang Yong Ping and the Power of Zoomorphic Ambiguity

Born in China but now a French citizen, the contemporary artist Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954) prioritizes the contradictions and ambiguities that arise from overlapping motifs that signify differently in different cultural settings. Juxtapositions of Chinese and Western zoomorphic symbolism characterize his work since the mid-1990s, seen across diverse pairings and groupings as well as strange hybrid single creatures. Rather than resolving the disjunctions that arise from these works, however, the shape-shifting nature of Huang’s animals emphasizes their polysemy and the profound lack of one-to-one symbolic correspondence in global contemporary art. The power of his zoomorphic works derives from his comfort with ambiguity: although often derived from Chinese ideas, Huang’s works are globally applicable in their complexity of transnational experience and their reflection of human nature as both instinctual and rational.

Weird Science: European Origins of the Fantastic Creatures in the Qing Court Painting, the Manual of Sea Oddities

In this chapter, Greenberg examines a remarkable, unusual, and previously unpublished painting album produced for the Qing court entitled The Manual of Sea Oddities (Haiguai tu海怪圖記‎). The strange sea creatures depicted in this work are unlike anything seen in Chinese art, but are directly related to images from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European encyclopedias. After a close consideration of the most relevant European models, this painting is placed within a broader context of Jesuit scientific enterprise and cartography at the Qing court. Together, these works demonstrate a pattern of engagement and curiosity, as the Qing explored how foreign visual modes could be adopted to advance a Chinese imperial agenda.

The Political Animal: Metaphoric Rebellion in Zhao Yong’s Painting of Heavenly Horses

If an animal is depicted with features that seem more man than beast, it might just be that the artist's real interest has to do with people. With their historical treasure of animal lore, Chinese artists frequently used animals as people in their discourse on human affairs. Sometimes appearances suggest this substitution, while sometimes this is done by the inscriptions and poems which accompany the painting and suggest its intent. This chapter is about one such case. It features horses, painted by the fourteenth-century artist Zhao Yong working in a world both lit and shadowed by his famous father, Zhao Mengfu, accused by some as disloyal to their royal Zhao-family forebears in serving the Mongol Yuan regime, and interrogated for generations to come about whether or not they felt disloyal. This is Zhao Yong's own visual narrative, dated 1352, of certain events, with texts by friend and relative, set against the backdrop of the first peasant uprisings that eventually undermined Mongol power in China.

Labeling the Creatures: Some Problems in Han and Six Dynasties Iconography

Fantastic beings proliferate in pre-Han and Han literature and are represented in a variety of forms up through the Six Dynasties period. They pose some problems of identification and classification for both ancient and modern scholars. Thus different sources specify various bird or animal forms for Feilian, the Wind Earl. Chiyou, another pre-Han rebel, now appears as a warlike monster leading a troupe of storm spirits. These thunders of Southeast China do have specific names on one Northern Wei epitaph tablet of 522. Elsewhere auspicious or apotropaic inscriptions on paired messenger birds and evil-averting tomb protectors are often interpreted as names even though archaeological evidence may suggest otherwise. The Chinese “unicorn,” a creature that resists classification, comes to resemble its mate, the “lion.” In general, the forms and functions of mythical beings are established in this period.

The Pictorial Form of a Zoomorphic Ecology: Dragons and Their Painters in Song and Southern Song China

This essay studies painted dragons, zoomorphic tools of human intervention in the water cycle without correlative in empirical science. By demonstrating the relation of pictorial form to meteorological phenomena in dragon paintings used to summon rain, by arguing that the process of painting dragons mimicked, and thus effected, atmospheric events, and by suggesting how artistic repetition and repeated spectatorship of efficacious dragon paintings produced predictable meteorological outcomes, this essay shows how iconology and ecology converged in dragon painting during the Song and Yuan dynasties. This essay reveals that artistic and meteorological correspondences of form, process, and repetition aligned representational and climatological concerns, the shared language of art-historical description and ritual prescription establishing the painter as rainmaker and the rainmaker as painter. Ultimately, this essay suggests that control over the production, reproduction, and viewing of dragon images constituted the power to produce atmospheric events on demand.

Evil Dragon, Golden Rodent, Sleek Hound: The Evolution of Soushan Tu Paintings in the Northern Song Period

In soushan tu paintings, a seated deity commands ferocious soldiers who search wooded mountains to expel demons in animal forms. It is commonly believed that soushan tu originated from legends of Erlang, a river deity from Guankou, Sichuan who appears as the seated commander in some post Northern Song examples. Earlier textual and pictorial evidence, however, contradicts this assumption. This essay traces the changing identities of the commander during the tenth and eleventh centuries and how certain animals associated with them became part of the pictorial repertoire. Rather than illustrating a pre-existing story with fixed characters, the mountain searches depict a symbolic conflict. The deity stands as the figure of authority, while the demonic animals represent the disruptive forces of dissent and chaos that threaten his control. Characters once considered demons come to occupy the role of commander, reflecting the contested nature of the categories of “demon” and “deity.”

The Didactic Use of Animal Images in Southern Song Buddhism: The Case of Mount Baoding in Dazu, Sichuan

This presentation revolves around the sculptural art of Southern Song Buddhism at Mt. Baoding in Dazu, Sichuan. Among the many sculptural groups imaged, both actual renditions of animals and divinities with animal attributes occur in great numbers. As such animals and animal themes are fully integrated into the overall sculptural program at the site. A number of these sculptural groups reveal an increased sensitivity for animals and pastoral sceneries that is new to Buddhist sculptural art of the Southern Song. Here it is expressed in a stylized form of naturalism.

Trading Places: An Introduction to Zoomorphism and Anthropomorphism in Chinese Art

Zoomorphism: by whatever name, it has been a part of the human imagination and the visual arts throughout our history, from Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs to Donald Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Pogo Possum, and Maus. The word itself means more than one thing, as does its correlate, anthropomorphism. Its early use involved attributing animal characteristics to deities, as with the Egyptian jackal-headed funerary god Anubis, the composite Chinese ...

Animals in Chinese Rebus Paintings

This essay discusses the role of animals in China rebus painting. The homophonic richness of Chinese is the linguistic foundation for using animal images in rebus painting, a richness that allows the use of animal names to make meaningful puns on multiple other words. In this sense, rebus painting is only part of a larger word-play tradition closely associated with the nature of the Chinese language and its literary tradition, and it is an important component of a long tradition invoking the auspicious. The rebus is not an isolated phenomenon in China but is closely associated with many other cultural phenomena.

How the Giraffe Became a Qilin: Intercultural Signification in Ming Dynasty Arts

This chapter explores meanings attributed to a giraffe given to the Yongle emperor (r. 1403–1424) in 1414 by a Muslim sultan of Bengal. Both sides understood its significance in ways mediated by their own cultural traditions and pertinent agendas. Although a Hindu nobleman was the de facto ruler of Bengal, the giraffe probably was presented in the Persian-Islamic terms favored by that kingdom at that time. In China, the exotic animal was identified as a qilin, an animal recorded in ancient texts as an auspicious sign indicating that the ruler was powerful yet fostered peace, an image useful to the Yongle emperor. The author argues that by the fifteenth century some of the ideas circulating in Islamic cultures about giraffes were sufficiently close to Chinese ones about qilin and tribute animals to create an apparent confluence of significations.