Meimei Zhang’s presentation is titled “Qing: the Key Standard of Qin Aesthetics in the Song Dynasty.” The Chinese character qing 清 is usually translated as “clear” or “pure.” Yet the exact meanings of qing were hardly definable when describing the qin during the Song, as its connotations and implications were extended to describe almost every aspect of qin playing that included the setting, furnishings, decorative objects, and the entire ambience in which the qin was played. This aesthetical principle at work manifested the intertextual relationship between musical texts and religious texts, as well as between texts describing auditory and other senses, which helps to explain why the qin possessed unique poetic allure and philosophical significance.
Li-ling Hsiao examines the ontology of sound in the ancient qin music as reflected in four Ming paintings. Śūramgama-sūtra reflects the ontology of sound by arguing its creation lying paradoxically within its own demise, and vice versa. Rod Dreher suggests that “sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” How then, is the permanency of sound in pre-technical eras created? In traditional China, painting was used to lend the evanescent sounds its permanent reality as picturing sound embodies the same paradoxes as the ontology of sound itself. Hsiao explores how Ming painters create permanent presence of qin music through colors and shapes. The four paintings examined represent two different types: two paintings respectively by Zhang Lu and Tang Yin show the musician playing on the qin instrument, while two paintings by Chen Hongshou illustrates the instrument that is still being clothed in a bag. This paper investigates the different ontological reflections in these two types of pictorial presentations.
Mengxiao Wang studies an eighteenth-century play Fuhutao (Strategies of subduing the tiger), focusing on how the artistic medium of theater reshaped the conventional narrative of taming female jealousy into a meta-theatrical performance that evokes sadomasochistic emotions among an imagined audience consisted of henpecked men. Wang explores two parodic episodes in Fuhutao, which transform didactic scenes into hilarious plays-within-a-play. In a mock Buddhist sermon, the jealous wife preaches about how to dominate husbands at her “Great Heroine Hall.” Spectators offstage can take masochistic pleasures by resonating with the heroine’s audience onstage, a group of henpecked men who worship her as a “bodhisattva of jealousy.” In a pseudo underworld journey, a masterful shrew tamer plays the role of Netherworld King and orchestrates a fake trial to punish the jealous wife. All characters except for the wife know that the trial is simply a performance. The play blurs the spatial boundaries between stage and auditorium, thereby forming an empathetic bond with its targeted male spectators.
Finally, Li Guo examines the remediation of empathy through literary portraitures in eighteenth and nineteenth century tanci, or chantefable novels. Literary portraitures in these tales about crossdressing and karmic bonds of destiny foreshadow the disguised characters’ re-feminization, endorse filial piety, or facilitate a form of mediated empathy that engages an imagined emotional community of readers. For sympathetic viewers, portraitures may engender synaesthetic pleasures, or activate extra-sensory intersubjectivity and participatory interpretation. Further, literary portraitures may inspire a sense of spirituality in the viewers, or display an arresting responsive efficacy by answering to viewers with gestures, expressions, or voices. Characters’ portraitures of themselves, or of historical figures demonstrate their talent and virtue, or convey moral messages to those of higher status in kinship relations. In short, literary portraitures signify an early modern mediality that transcends the division of orality and literacy, gesturing toward an imagined community of readers through aesthetic effectuation.
The panel consists of four presentations (14-15 minutes each), and a 15 minute Q&A session.