Rubbings as Perception in Early Nineteenth-Century China and the Case of Liuzhou's Buddha

At the turn of the nineteenth century in China, as a craze for epigraphy studies dominated intellectual culture, rubbings reshaped the aesthetic and perceptual parameters of elite arts. Artists and scholars began to reorient the sense of touch away from the bodily traces of canonical artists reified by brushwork canons and to direct it toward the direct surface sensations of art objects. This not only enabled them to move beyond stagnant artistic genealogies, it also allowed them to more easily move between mediums, to conjoin previously separate image-making practices, and to reassert the role of the senses as a primary means by which audiences could engage with artworks. As scholars maintained bonds with one another through the exchange of art objects, they cited ancient sources visually, materially, and tactilely. This paper takes a close look at one handscroll in particular, Liuzhou and Chen Geng's 'Paying Homage to the Buddha' (1836) in order to think through this tactile turn and its relation to Buddhist antiquities.