Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei

Fong, Wen C., and James C. Y. Watt, with contributions by Chang Lin-sheng, James Cahill, Wai-kam Ho, Maxwell K. Hearn, and Richard M. Barnhart (1996)

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Only two major exhibitions from the fabled Chinese Palace Museum collections have been seen in the West—the first in London in 1935–36 and the second in the United States in 1961–62. These two exhibitions provided an extraordinary stimulus to the study of Chinese culture, revolutionized Asian art studies in the West, and opened the eyes of the public to the artistic traditions of Chinese civilization. Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei is the publication that accompanies the third great exhibition of Chinese masterworks to travel to the West. Written by scholars of both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and conceived as a cultural history, the book tells the story of Chinese art from its foundations in the Bronze Age and the first empires through the rich diversity of art produced during the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, contrasting China's absolutist political structure with the humanism of its artistic and moral philosophy. Synthesizing scholarship of the past three decades, the authors present not only the historical and cultural significance of individual works of art and analyses of their aesthetic content, but a reevaluation of the cultural dynamics of Chinese history, reflecting a fundamental shift in the study of Chinese art from a focus on documentation and connoisseurship to an emphasis on the cultural significance of the visual arts.

National treasures passed down from dynasty to dynasty, the works of art that now form the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, originally constituted the personal collection of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, who ruled China from 1736 to 1795. Two centuries after Ch'ien-lung ascended the dragon throne, when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the nearly 10,000 masterworks of painting and calligraphy and more than 600,000 objects and rare books and documents—which had earlier been moved from Peking to Nanking following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931—were packed in crates and evacuated to caves near the wartime capital, Chungking. It was not until after World War II that the crated treasures were moved to their present home in Taiwan, where today they represent a major portion of China's artistic and cultural legacy.

Drawing on this extraordinary collection, the authors explore in depth four interrelated themes: a cyclical view of history, the Confucian discourse on art, the social function of art, and possessing the past. The last theme, from which the volume takes its title, refers both to imperial China's possession of its past through the art of collecting and to the broader cultural tradition of embracing change through the creative reinterpretation of the past.

This major scholarly publication will expand our understanding and deepen our appreciation of works of art that over the centuries have emerged from a remarkable and, in the West, still largely unexplored culture.

Table of contents

Directors' Forewords
Acknowledgments
Chronology

Introductory Essays

The National Palace Museum: A History of the Collection
Chang Lin-Sheng

Chinese Art and Cross-Cultural Understanding
Wen C. Fong

I. Foundations of Civilization
1. Jade
James C. Y. Watt
2. The Bronze Age and the First Empires
James C. Y. Watt

II. The Vision of a Cosmic Order
3. The Imperial Cult
Wen C. Fong
4. Some Cultural Prototypes
Wen C. Fong
5. Monumental Landscape Painting
Wen C. Fong

III. Cultural Efflorescence During the Sung Dynasty
6. Sung Imperial Portraits
Wen C. Fong
7. The Scholar-Official as Artist
Wen C. Fong
8. The Imperial Painting Academy
James Cahill
9. Some Buddhist Images
Wai-kam Ho and Wen C. Fong
10. Antiquarianism and Naturalism
James C. Y. Watt
11. The Orthodox Lineage of Tao
Wen C. Fong

IV. The Mongol Conquest
12. Imperial Portraits of the Yuan Court
Wen C. Fong and Maxwell K. Hearn
13. Reunification and Revival
Maxwell K. Hearn
14. The Artist as Hero
Maxwell K. Hearn

V. The Ming Dynasty: Empire of Restoration
15. Imperial Portraiture of the Ming Dynasty
Wen C. Fong
16. The Return of the Academy
Richard M. Barnhart
17. The Literati Artists of the Ming Dynasty
Wen C. Fong
18. The Expanding Literati Culture
Wen C. Fong
19. Creating a Synthesis
Wen C. Fong
20. Official Art and Commercial Art
James C. Y. Watt

VI. The Ch'ing Dynasty: A New Orthodoxy
21. The Orthodox School of Painting
Wen C. Fong
22. The Individualist Masters
Wen C. Fong
23. The Antique-Elegant
James C. Y. Watt
24. Imperial Patronage of the Arts Under the Ch'ing
Wen C. Fong

Notes
Bibliography
List of Plates
List of Maps
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

Wen C. Wong is Consultative Chairman, Douglas Dillon Curatorship of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, of the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

James C. Y. Watt is Brooke Russell Astor Senior Curator in the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Chang Lin-sheng is Vice Director of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

James Cahill is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.

Wai-kam Ho is former Laurence Sickman Curator of Chinese Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

Maxwell K. Hearn is Curator in the Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Richard M. Barnhart is Professor of the History of Art, Yale University.

Press reviews

Choice Reviews Online

"The authors, individually and together, synthesize the best scholarship of the past three decades on the subject and reexamine the cultural dynamics of China's history, providing new bases for understanding it. Sumptuous color photographs; chronologies; charts; extensive bibliography. Indispensable for the study of Chinese art for years to come."

Publishers Weekly

"... breathtakingly beautiful volume, a major work of scholarship ..."

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