Remedy and Remediation in Chinese Art

Jadeite carved in the shape of a bronze vessel, an ink rubbing of a stele preserving remarkable calligraphy, and a handscroll depicting craggy scholar’s rocks in lifelike detail. What these three instances have in common is remediation, or using one medium to represent a medially different art. Considering the linguistic root of the word, “remediation” is also a “remedy” for counteracting or eliminating the limitation of a medium. While a robe dyed with safflower will quickly lose its color due to sun exposure, a painter can use cinnabar, thanks to its lightfastness, to remediate and capture the allure of the scarlet textile. When writing out a poem, calligraphers employ the visual form and the semantic meaning of words to better express themselves, demonstrating the power of “imagetext.” To remedy the emperor-patron’s desire to convey limitless wealth and opulence, interior furnishings of tropical hardwoods, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, and marble are represented in an illusionistic manner on the imperial palace walls. In this case, pictorial illusion circumvents a material shortcoming in that the actual furniture is much more costly than painted representations of it. The aesthetics of these remedial practices are as much transmedial as political. They evince the visual and material intrigues of simulacra and call up the dictum "medium is the message." We welcome papers that seek new understanding of the historical contexts, theoretical complexity, and material dimension of remediation in any period of Chinese art.