Craig Clunas

Connected Material Histories: A response

In giving the very first lecture that first-year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I usually employ the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the land masses of the globe, and ask them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigens 1997 book The Myth of Continents (‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act, up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book; also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’. But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is that I suspect it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europes Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what, for most Oxford students, is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his lecture) in that assuredly -etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorize those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history.

Reading Wen Zhengming: metaphor and Chinese painting

In Oliver Goldsmiths Citizen of the World (1762), the imaginary Chinese savant Lien Chi Altangi, cast adrift on the treacherous waters of the literary society of Augustan London, discovers that fo...

Text, Representation and Technique in Early Modern China

This paper examines ‘number’ and numerology as a discursive object among the elite of China in the Ming period (1368–1644). Starting from an anecdote conceming the poet, calligrapher and painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), whose refusal to learn these skills from his father led the latter to burn his books, it examines how technical knowledge of this sort was conceived in relation to the humanistic priorities of the Ming elite. It raises the question of how much and what kind of ‘numerology’, or shu xue, (also the modern Chinese word for ‘mathematics) learned men of the Ming knew, and in what contexts it was appropriate to admit to knowing it. The ownership and dissemination of the relevant texts is examined, along with the cultural implications of the numerical skills involved in administration and commerce. ‘Number’ is ultimately seen as problematic for an elite distrustful of ‘technique’ as a socially compromised form of knowledge.