Reexamination of Tang Hou and his 'Huajian' (China)

Tang Hou, an early Yuan connoisseur, has been forgotten in the core of Chinese art history until the late 20th century. He experienced the political transition between the Chinese Southern Song and the Yuan Mongols in the 1270s and was nurtured by dynamic artistic and cultural bursts in the Jiangnan, particularly Hangzhou and near areas from the late 1280s to the very early 1300. Studies show that the market in antique art in Hangzhou was very bustling after the fall of the Southern Song and arouse an interest in collecting and appraising paintings at the same time. Prosperity of the art market and expansion of taste in painting generated some unique ideas in art in the early Yuan. Tang Hou, along with some other famous connoisseurs and collectors, was inspired under this fashion and contributed his connoisseurial knowledge in recording paintings that were accessible to him in his lifetime.; Tang Hou, however, geared his painting records in a systemic and theoretical approach; and revealed some important notions in his Huajian (Examination of Painting) about written between late 1280s and 1300s. His unique concepts, were overlooked, became a dominant force in the painting development in the fifteenth century and onward; and further foreshadowed the formation of literati painting theory by Dong Qichang in the seventeenth century.; This dissertation is the first careful study of Tang Hou and his Huajian. I reconstruct Tang Hou's life, political career, and his associations with the early Yuan elite and important figures; and further situate him among the advocators and leaders of literary and artistic movements in the early Yuan. In addition, this study also sheds light on the artistic context of the time in which Tang Hou's artistic criteria developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries China. This clarification of the context and of the Huajian contributes the modern scholarship to the understanding of Tang Hou's viewpoints and theory on paintings, and readjusts our perception of the painting development in the Yuan.