Seeing and Unseeing: Visuality and Mind Games in Ming-Dynasty Arhat Painting

The Sixteen Arhats handscroll (Shiliu luohan tu) portrays a host of guardians of the dharmic law ushering a scholar into their mythical realm. The work, attributed to Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552), is directly inspired by Fanlong’s (fl. mid-12th c.) eponymous painting. While sharing a subject matter, its modes of representation nevertheless undergo an extraordinary transformation. The meditative air that the Fanlong painting exudes, along with its episodic representation of arhats in somber contemplation, give way to a rambunctious and humor-drenched procession, restructured not as free-standing vignettes, but instead as a narrative painting. The most remarkable transformation, however, is the sudden reorientation of the entire viewing order. Only once unfurled to the conventional “end” of the scroll on the left, does the viewer find that the painting—no longer an episodic representation—is in fact a narrative progression intended to be read from left to right. This tongue-in-cheek “trick” played on the viewer reflects a broader phenomenon in premodern Chinese painting. Dictating modes of engagement between the viewer and the artwork were palindromic structures, inverted elements that could be viewed from multiple directions, and encrypted clues reorienting the gaze. The seemingly irreverent reversal in The Sixteen Arhats echoes the affective and interactive function of Buddhist arhat paintings, intended as mental exercises urging the viewer to question the senses and see beyond the arhats’ grotesque appearance, revealing their true divine form. The painting’s permutations across time straddle the mythical and mundane, the demonic and divine, the lofty and outlandish.