Copies That Talk: New Perspectives on East Asian Painting Tradition

Copy-making plays a variety of roles unique to the painting traditions of East Asia. Xie He’s “Six Laws” (c. 550 CE) of Chinese painting—an influential text across East Asia—has one law that emphasizes the importance of "transmission by copying." Making copies and imitating the style of earlier masters have been crucial means of self-training for artists, as well as important ways to preserve images and classic styles, and establish genealogy. Consequently, museum collections of East Asian paintings abound with copies that invite new methodological frameworks for further interpretation.

In the past decades, art historians mainly approached "copies" as either tools to authenticate originals or with macrohistorical concerns regarding lineage, canon formation, and antiquarianism. In contrast to these two approaches, this panel seeks papers that examine copies and the artist's "reproductive hand" from a micro-historical and object-centered perspective. The goal is to unfold the conditions of their production and reception so as to reveal the art-historical agency of copy-making. We welcome contributions that respond, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How can close copies help map out artists' working processes beyond the general framework of workshop practices?
• In what way did the practice of copying complicate authorship and authenticity in East Asian painting traditions?
• How was a specific type of “copy” consumed in relation to the culture of collection and connoisseurship?
• How do "copies" embody the social context or historical consciousness of the time of their production?
• Cross-cultural comparison on copy-making in Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean pictorial tradition.