Ensnaring the public eye: Painting manuals of late Ming China (1550--1644) and the negotiation of taste

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing (1542--1633), a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books entitled Huilin and Huasou, which constituted the first multi-genre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary painting manuals. As a special commodity of early modern China, when people's cultural standing was measured by their command of literati taste and lore, Huilin and other painting manuals provided a growing reading public with a device (or simply the illusion of such) for enhancing social capital.; Focusing on Zhou's painting manuals, this dissertation will describe how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public; in other words, I will point to how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. The manuals accomplish this in three ways: through the selection of visual motifs, the manipulation of pictorial styles, and through written guides to artistic choice. As a result, many features of Huilin and other painting manuals do not correspond to late Ming artistic practice and knowledge as described by contemporary critics and accounts of the lives of major artists.; Staking out the cultural high ground, leading critics and master painters of the time criticized these manuals as suitable only to philistine tastes. They even claimed that the program registered in these manuals was harmful to true artists who aspired to innovation and authenticity in their painting. They promoted instead a new cultural paradigm emphasizing "originality" in art and literature, which, I argue, was triggered by the very popularity of painting manuals among late Ming public. Such disjunctures in artistic taste underscore how the production and consumption of painting manuals intertwined with the taste-making mechanisms that affected both low- and high-brow consumers in early modern China.