Photo Poetics Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture
Shengqing Wu
Introduction From Mute Poetry to Intermediality
A
fter viewing a painting of a fishing terrace, the Tang dynasty poet Xu Ning 徐凝 wrote:
A lonely river meets blue haze, above two green cliffs, white clouds scattered. The painter strived to draw the heartbreaking sounds of the ape; yet failed to capture its cries from the trees.1 一水寂寥青靄合， 兩崖崔崒白雲殘。 畫人心到啼猿破， 欲作三聲出樹難。
The first couplet presents a pictorial scene—the lonely river, green riverbanks, and white clouds—images that are prevalent in Chinese landscape painting. The description of the rich imagery of a painterly scene in the poem evokes the long-established idea of “a painting in poetry” (shizhong youhua 詩中有畫),2 indicating the collaboration and integration of two media. The poetic voice goes on to explain that a painter would quickly reach his limits were he to try to solicit the cries of the ape from the trees. The painting provides an open invitation for the participation of language to supplement the “voice” in it, and Xu’s poem serves as an example of just such an expressive voice.
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The prominent Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–1998) cited this poem, in his usual erudite manner, after reading Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s canonical arguments on the duality of the art of space and the art of time in Laokoön (1766). Using Xu’s poem to illustrate the differences between painting and poetry, Qian echoes Lessing’s radical conclusion that painting has the capacity “to convey only actions juxtaposed in space (nebeneinander) and not actions that succeed each other in time (nacheinander).”3 Lessing’s thesis—that poetry is a temporal art whereas painting arrests a single moment to capture a specific space—was a reaction to the pervasive eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse that regarded poetry and painting as “sister arts,” which is captured in the popular dictum ut pictura poesis (as a painting, so also a poem).4 In its turn, Lessing’s revisionist argument has become highly influential in Western aesthetics, helping to establish a widespread view of time and space as binary opposites, and visuality and aurality as deeply separate, sensually discrete sources of perception.5 Qian Zhongshu evokes Lessing in the context of a discussion of comparative poetics in an attempt to differentiate the functions of poetry and painting. However, he does not subscribe to Lessing’s view of this dichotomous confrontation and oppositional topos. Overall, the Chinese reception of painting and poetry stands in stark contrast to Lessing’s conclusion that the two media are fundamentally distinct. Instead, an eminent Chinese textual tradition affirms the mutuality between words and images and their elemental interrelatedness, while attending to those aspects of poetry and painting that cater to the different senses of aurality and visuality. The Song dynasty critic claimed to take “pictures as mute poetry, and poetry as a speaking picture” (hua wei wusheng shi, shi wei yousheng hua 畫為無聲詩，詩為有聲畫).6 Another Song dynasty poet, Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), composed two poems about a painting of the historical site of the Yang Pass. The painting by Li Gonglin 李公麟 (1049–1106), originally inspired by Wang Wei’s 王維 (699–759) earlier poem that was sung at a farewell ceremony, further inspired numerous additional poetic writings and inscriptions by later poets and collectors.7 Huang Tingjian’s couplet reads: In the heartbreaking sound of lyrics, there are no shapes or shadows; painted scenes without sound are also heartbreaking.8
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斷腸聲裡無形影， 畫出無聲亦斷腸。
The couplet addresses Wang’s heartbreaking poems (via poetic sound and singing) and Li’s soundless painting that captures “shapes and shadows” (xingying) as equally moving. It exposes the common ground the two media share, emphasizing their reciprocal enhancements and the transference of senses. The temporal aspects of sound, the spatial dimensions of the visual, and cross-sensory stimulations can thus be conjoined to evoke synaethesia (tonggan 通感),9 uncovering the perceptual, sensorial, and emotional power of both media. These poems of Xu Ning and Huang Tingjian belong to a poetic genre called tihua shi 題畫詩 that first matured during the Tang dyansty. Tihua shi, in its narrow sense, denotes a poem addressing the painting that is inscribed onto pictorial space; it also loosely refers to a type of verse that gives a sense of the origins and circumstances surrounding a painting, as well as one that critiques paintings and echoes their sentiments. Unlike traditional Western ekphrastic poetry, defined as the “verbal representation of the visual representation,”10 Chinese poetry that addresses painting does not take the verbal representation of the image content as its main purpose; rather, it engages in artistic appraisal, evoking lyrical sentiment and extending imagination beyond what is depicted in the painting. Operating upon word and image as two closely intersecting sign systems, the analogy between Chinese poetry and painting gives both art forms the advantage of being able to conjointly conjure rich mental images, sentiments, and meanings while at the same time speaking to shared aesthetic ideals. “Painterly poetry” (characterized by its dense and evocative scenes) and literati paintings (infused with rhythmic dimensions and lyricism) often serve as mutual figures of words as images and paintings as writings. Tihua shi, which was transformed in the creative hands of poets such as Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), was not physically incorporated into the pictorial space of a painting itself until the Song dynasty.11 In creating this “integral poem-painting,” poems, calligraphy, and the style of execution became essential elements of ink painting, and poem and painting are created either by different individuals or by the same poet-painter.12 Calligraphy, working at the interface between painting and poem, foregrounds the graphical visual appearance of the characters through balanced brushstrokes, turning writing
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into a series of images.13 The effective synergy of painting, poetry, and calligraphy in the aesthetically integrated art form of the “three perfections” (sanjue 三絕) embodies a holistic view of equilibrium, dynamics, and “visual poetics,” although in actual practice the permutations of the image-text relation are countless and implementation of the “three perfections” is far from uniformly harmonious.14 Against this aesthetic backdrop, in the 1840s when Chinese poetry began encountering photography, the premises behind the traditional poetrypainting analogy started to erode. What exactly happened when expressive, ornamental words confronted photography, which was commonly believed to be a supremely realistic medium? When the brush met the shutter, in what ways were the different combinations of painting, calligraphy, and poetry extended into the new media environment, and how did this lead to new types of interdependence and interplay between words and images? The process of transplanting this new technical medium was accompanied by growing tensions, imbrications, and mutual enrichment between the previously privileged word and the technologically replicable image. To paint in broad strokes, throughout China’s early reception of photography, textual tradition and ideas served as an overarching conceptual framework, substantially informing new media practices in the initial decades of its reception. At the same time, these resources offered a rich vault for further innovations and experiments that dissolved media borders. In delving into this historical encounter, I employ the term “photo poetics.”15 This expression not only refers to interactions between poetry and the photographic medium in particular but also designates the aesthetics generated from the movement of “in-between” media practices. The dynamics of photo poetics—whether as a site of integration, conflict, or transformation— encompasses verbal and visual dialogues, tensions, and intertextual references, as well as the new aesthetics that resulted from these negotiations.16 “Poetics” here pertains to the continuation of classical-style poetry into the modern era and to “the continuation of poetry by other means.”17 Photo poetics is also examined in light of contemporary media analysis to highlight how it constitutes an in-between or figure of intermediality.18 The concept of intermediality as a critical category can be described as the border-crossing between media. Related to but distinct from intertextuality (the referencing and interaction of different texts within the same medium), intermediality transgresses traditional formal and material boundaries between
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the various art media, serving as a fundamental condition for communicative and aesthetic practices.19 Photo poetics is the manifestation of different forms and configurations of intermedial phenomena.20 Paying particular attention to the underlying semiotic system and “composite media,” literary scholar Werner Wolf approached this wide-ranging and flexible concept of intermediality by subdividing it into four typologies: transmediality, intermedial transposition, plurimediality, and intermedial reference.21 The first type of intermediality in Wolf’s taxonomy is transmediality, which describes ahistoric phenomena such as motifs, themes, and narratives that occur at formal and semantic levels across a range of media.22 One prominent instance of transmediality in this study is that of shiyi (詩意, lit., poetic message). As a metaconcept or style, shiyi is commonly interwoven into the content level across poetry, literati painting, and pictorial photography. More concretely, a lonely fishing boat, for instance, appears as a recurring, privileged motif and symbol across media, remaining a perennially beloved image and a transmedial figure. The second type is intermedial transposition, which refers to the transfer of content or formal features from one source medium to a target medium, such as film adaptations of literary texts.23 In this study, the reenactments of literary scenes (e.g., Lin Daiyu burying flowers) or figures (e.g., a fisherman) in costume photo shoots act as prime illustrations of intermedial transposition. Poetic-inspired photography (shiyi zhao 詩意照) is exemplary of the reworking of the shiyi tu 詩意圖, a popular pictorial genre in the Ming and Qing eras that, inspired by a poem, inscribes poetic lines onto the image space.24 The third type is plurimediality, which can be characterized as a combination of several medial forms of articulation. Wolf mentions opera as a form of plurimediality because it uses music, dance, theater, and poetry to articulate the artistic vision of the piece.25 Many Chinese photographs with calligraphic inscriptions and seal imprints offer fascinating examples of such combinations of media. Plurimediality became more prevalent with the proliferation of pictorial magazines and illustrated books. These sites for medial mixture and remediation enable the viewer to reflect on the multifaceted significations and communications that concurrently occur between the verbal and the visual. The fourth type of intermediality that Wolf designates is intermedial reference, in which the reference to the other media may take place explicitly (e.g., painters and musicians as characters in novels) or implicitly (e.g., the
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musicalization of fiction or ekphrasis). In this case, although it resorts to its own media-specific means, a singular medium is nevertheless in close proximity to another medium through evocations and imitations.26 For example, W. H. Auden’s famous 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” is an indirect form of intermediality and a verbal reconstruction of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings. This image-text relationship discloses dynamic interplays between the high drama described in Auden’s poem and the still moment that suppressed the drama arrested in the painting.27 Through the evocation of the presence of visual media, the genre tizhao shi 題照詩 (poems written about portraits or photographs) is inherently an intermedial phenomenon. In addition to Wolf, Irina O. Rajewsky elucidates the “as if” character of intermedial references. She argues that intermedial references create the illusion of another medium’s specific practices. For instance, in “filmic writing” the author uses the verbal medium to imitate or evoke the ability of the camera to zoom in on, edit, or dissolve images, all of which create an illusion of the presence of another medium in the reader’s mind.28 In pictorial photography in both China and the West, it is well known that media-specific means and instruments of photographing were frequently refashioned to imitate, resemble, or evoke their respective pictorial traditions, thus achieving the painterly effects or the illusion of the painting.29 In China’s early reception of photography, the photograph was referred to as tu 圖 (picture) or hua 畫 (painting), and photography gestured toward the native pictorial tradition. More important, imitation and evocation of the themes, motifs, and styles of portrait and landscape paintings helped to establish the definitive intermedial quality of Chinese photography and further facilitated its transformation and innovation as an art form. The intense interaction between poetry and photography is described in detail through these different permutations and configurations of intermediality in this book. The classification of intermediality has pragmatic advantages and heuristic potential, but in practice the four categories already naturally overlap and converge, and the medium’s borders are fluid and constantly trespassed. When imprinting a seal onto a photographic surface and adding inscriptions, the photographer or inscriber mixed media as a form of plurimediality; meanwhile, photographers resorted to the painter’s vision and emulated certain technical aspects of painting to render “as if” effects that bear a resemblance
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to paintings. W. J. T. Mitchell claims that “all media is mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.”30 Moving between intermingled discursive, imagistic, and figural aspects of these heterogeneous sites, the term “photo poetics” represents not only the figure of an inventive expression of image-text intermediality but also a site for translations, disparities, and paradoxes. Attending to on-site communications, hybridity, and displacement from one medium to another, photo poetics enacts relational thinking between mute poetry and a speaking picture, between mimesis and rhetoric, and on multiple levels of (re)-mediations among practitioners, communities, and public cultural spaces.
A PHOTOGRAPH, ITS MESSAGES AND CONTEXT Around 1886, Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901), one of the most powerful politicians during the late Qing era, received a photo album from Yi Xuan 奕譞 (1840–1891) (aka Prince Chun) as an imperial gift. Li later described the album in a long poem, part of which reads as follows: Returning home, I touch the mirror-painting, such a tiny space contains a magic land. The painting from the Mi family may not have both qualities of exact likeness and ingenuity like this.31 歸來撫鏡畫， 咫尺羅瀛壺。 未必米家楨， 有此肖妙俱。
The poem refers to the photo album as “mirror-painting” (jinghua), the glass painting popular in the Qing, and compares it to the master paintings by esteemed Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107) and his son Mi Youren 米友仁 (1074–1153), who are famed for their expressiveness and abbreviation beyond visual details. Appreciating the value of the new technology, Li was impressed by its ability to capture both physical resemblance and spiritual ingenuity.
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Officially recognized as being invented in Europe in 1839, photography was quickly introduced in China by way of Western colonial expansion. The arrival of photography in China in the 1840s precipitated a flood of amateur and professional photographers and explorers, bringing new opportunities as well as clashes with time-honored poetic forms and traditional painting.32 Zou Boqi 鄒伯奇 (1819–1869), who is credited as the “inventor” of the Chinese camera, left photographs and a few poems on photographs in his surviving manuscripts.33 His manuscripts offer the earliest example of poems being written about portrait photographs, and in this case he himself was the photographer. Zou wrote four poems in the 1860s in the subgenres xiangzan 像贊 (encomium on a portrait) and ziti xiaozhao 自題小照 (writings about a self-portrait). Here is one of his poems.
SHOOTING THE SELF-PORTRAIT TO PASS DOWN MY TRUE IMAGE
The ordinary appearance ancient, the whole outfit new. A self-portrait has no specific purpose, being called, it seems to have spirit. Gazing upon it with a full view, it leaves some room to maneuver; reflecting upon it, [I] apprehend the truth. Woodsmen take up on the mountainsides, fishermen reside by the river bank. About to turn fifty years old, I enjoy the way of life, and can tell whereon the fine dust lies.34 自照遺真
平常容貌古， 通套布衣新。 自照原無意， 呼之如有神。 均瞻留地步，
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覺處悟天真。 樵佔鰲峰側， 漁居泌水濱。 行年將五十， 樂道識纖塵。
In the poem, Zou utilizes the strength of the poetic genre to provide a sense of duration and symbolic signs that project the self onto the persona of a cultivated literatus who engages in a carefree lifestyle. Going beyond physical appearance and its representational content, the poem attempts to identify the shen 神 (spirit) of the photographic subject. The underlying message is the recurrent dynamic relationship between xing 形 (form or appearance) and shen, and between formal likeness and the spiritual larger-than-life.35 Zou, a photographer, viewer, and poet relies here on language’s ability to elicit metaphorical signification, while appropriating the existing genre associated with the picture (xiang or zhao) for the photographic medium. In elucidating the characteristics of photographs and the relationship between image and text, Roland Barthes notably argues that photography is unique in that it is completely taken up with what he calls the “first-order” or denoted message (the message of the analogue itself). As a result, it does not seem to produce in a traditional way the “second-order” or connoted message (the message that signifies something other than what is given in the content of the medium). Photography (press photography in particular, in Barthes’s opinion) purports to reveal “objective reality” through analogues without further mediation and appears to be “a message without a code.” However, Barthes also proposes the idea of “the photographic paradox,” by which he means that the photograph contains a denoted message without a code and a connoted message derived from the “art, treatment or rhetoric of the image.”36 The connotative procedures (especially with artistic photographs) include trick effects, poses, photogenia (embellishment by lighting, exposure, and printing), aestheticism in its very material texture, and textual addition.37 In the context of Barthes’s insightful discussions, we can “read” and decipher one of the earliest surviving photographs in the Imperial Palace, namely that of Yi Xuan, who took a photograph with his two guards at the Imperial Palace dated around 1863 (figure 0.1). The photograph of Yi Xuan expresses a denoted
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FIGURE 0.1 Scroll of the photograph of Yi Xuan with his inscriptions, ca. 1863.
Courtesy of the Forbidden City Publisher.
message, a transparent transcription of three standing military men. Yi Xuan wears a saber at his waist and stands in the middle, and two bannermen adorned with weapons stand on either side of him. The connoted message of the photograph, which comes from the poses and accessories of the men, especially from the three weapons they carry, is that weaponry and military exercises are of the utmost importance. Prince Chun was appointed to lead the Peking Field Force, which was founded in 1862 in the aftermath of the Second Opium War. What is most intriguing about the photograph is the quality of aestheticism and the manner of its presentation: It is mounted onto a brocade as a hanging scroll with the prince’s poem and seals inscribed on the top of it.38
“What happened when photography met Chinese poetry? What kind of creative energy was released by this encounter, not only in these two specific fields but also in literary expression, visual culture, and aesthetic experience generally? Thought-provoking answers to these and related questions are found in this highly original, erudite, and thoroughly researched book. A remarkable piece of scholarship.” —W U H U N G , author of Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China
“Photo Poetics presents an encyclopedic treatment of the development of Chinese photography as cultural history. Shengqing Wu considers this new form of imagetext as a cultural artifact and an ‘intermedial’ work of art with close connections with classical Chinese painting and poetry. This book is a major achievement and a milestone in the study of photo poetics.” —L EO O U - FA N L E E , author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
“Photo Poetics is a magnificent pioneering work on the new technology of photography as it encountered indigenous Chinese visual and poetic aesthetics during the Republican era. Its sophisticated approach, comprehensive coverage, and interdisciplinary scholarship will strongly impact studies of comparative photography, intermedial and visual culture, and Chinese aesthetics.” —G R AC E F O N G , author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China
“Photo Poetics excitingly addresses hitherto-unnoticed tensions between modern media and premodern form in early Chinese art photography. Wu expertly applies China studies paradigms while engaging with scholarship on Chinese poetry, painting, and modernity.” —YO M I B R A E ST E R , author of Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
Shengqing W u is professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937 (2013). Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Picture of a Gentle Girl Playing Her Koto, with Su Manshu’s inscriptions, ca. 1909, 10 × 15 cm. Courtesy of Wang Jinsheng.
C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / N E W YO R K
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G L O B A L C H I N E S E C U LT U R E ISBN: 978-0-231-19220-0