Jottings from the Granite Studio

In the Ming sixteenth-century fin-de-siècle, elite painters clung to an ideal of amateurism in art and painting. Painters such as Wen Zhengming (文徵明 1470-1567) and Dong Qichang (董其昌 1555-1636) among others championed the connoisseurship of the dilettante and disparaged those who painted to make a living. Never mind the constant exchange between literati of especially prized paintings as “gifts” and “loans,” it was the amateur intent that mattered. (The exchange of ‘gifts’ reminds me of the old “Jon Lovitz as Picasso” sketch on SNL when he would pay his bar tab by drawing a smiley face on a cocktail napkin and sign it with a flourished “PICASSO!”)

In the world of education and government, the proper gentleman was a generalist idealizing Confucius’ famous comment that the 君子 (nobleman) was not a tool/vessel. Specialization was derisively considered the domain of the merchant or the craftsman. According to Joseph Levenson, “The amateur’s scorn of professionalism has an aspect, too, of patrician contempt for the grasping climbers who were not the gentry’s sort. There were overtones of anti-commercial feeling in the scholar’s insistence that the proper artist is financially disinterested.”[1]

Perhaps of even more concern to the scholar-gentleman than the professional painter were the scholar’s new neighbors: rich merchants who had grown wealthy plucking the fruits of the economic boom of the mid- to late-Ming. The nouveau-riche could ape the trappings of elite status without the bothersome and tiresome burden of study and examinations. Craig Clunas has described the joys and perils of connoisseurship in this period in his classic Superfluous Things—the title of which comes from a famous work on connoisseurship 长物志 by Wen Zhengming’s grandson, Wen Zhenheng (文震亨 1585-1645).[2]

Clunas describes how connoisseurship, the whims of fashion, the need to be “in-the-know,” allowed the scholar-literati to maintain their position at the top of the cultural food chain at a time when commercialization was acting as a solvent on social barriers. These barriers, which had always been fixed more in theory than ever in practice, began to buckle and fall. Rich merchants bought beautiful homes with lavish gardens and decorated them with the finest objets d’arte that money could buy. Some of these homes were grander than most of the literati families could ever afford. Connoiseurship and fashion were the weapons of the old elite against new wealth: a merchant could buy things, but would he know the right things to buy? (Q: “Why does a Prada ‘bowler bag’ cost $1445?” A: “Honey, if you have to ask, you’re not allowed to carry one.”)

In painting too, the scholar clung to his ideal of inspired amateur imperfection in the face of painters manuals and how-to guides. The Mustard Seed Manual（芥子园画传）provided late-Ming wanna-bes with their own “Idiot’s Guide to Classical Chinese Painting.” Scholars of course scoffed at such books. Painting was not something to be recreated mechanically or with precision. It was to be a bold statement of intuition—a surge of feeling sprung from deep within the well of the mind and heart. The late-Ming/early Qing art critic Mo Shilong (模式龙) lamented the decreasing 自然—“natural spontaneity” of paintings as the era progressed.[3]

What then would Mo and the Family Wen make of 21^st century businessman Huang Jiang’s oil painting factory in Dafen Village just outside of Shenzhen? Huang’s factories and those of Huang’s new competitors and erstwhile employees pump out thousands of precisely-imitated works of art for sale in the Wal-Marts and Targets of the United States giving the upwardly mobile the chance their own version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Da Vinci’s Last Supper, or a bust of Michelangelo’s David.

Who needs a Mustard Seed Manual when you have factory laborers to provide both nouveau-riche and ne’er-do-well alike with the illusion of class and taste? Or at the very least, provide them with something to put on the wall opposite the home entertainment center.

One of the young painters in Huang’s factory, Wu Hanwu, was asked what he would paint if he didn’t have to paint copies for the classless and clueless. Wu, whose technical skill allows him to reproduce hundreds of copies of Western works of art each year from mere photographs of the originals, answers that on his own he would soon run out of ideas.

自然 indeed. If one wants to reproduce the Last Supper with technical precision, the least they could do is also add a dash of Zhang Hongtu’s sense of humor.