“Painting the Invisible World: Literary and Theatrical Perspectives on Luo Ping’s Ghost Amusement Scroll”
Prof. Judith Zeitlin
(University of Chicago)
Mar.13 (Friday), 4-6 p.m.
CWAC 156
Cosponsored by The Literature and Cultural of Pre-Modern East Asia Workshop
Abstract
Luo Ping羅聘 (1733-1799) is the youngest of the so-called Yangzhou baguai 揚州八怪– Eight Eccentric Painters of Yangzhou. His most famous work is the extraordinary Ghost Amuseument Handscroll (Guiqu tu鬼趣圖), which accumulated more than 100 colophons, many by the most famous scholar-officials of the day. The handscroll survives in two principal versions, the earlier completed by 1771, the later by 1797. My talk will concentrate on the earlier version to make three basic points. First, that as an assemblage of disconnected but thematically linked images done on different occasions the painting transposes the ghost story collection to visual form. Second, that Luo Ping’s innovative wet paper technique enabled him to create a visual language that captured an aesthetics of invisibility and evanescence applied to specters in the literary tradition. Third, that although scholars have mainly sought to locate the visual antecedents for his ghost images in “high” art, ritual painting and ritual opera may have been more proximate sources of inspiration and deserve further investigation. Although a central task of my talk is to investigate what made Luo Ping’s unusual images legible as ghosts to contemporary viewers, I argue that the indeterminacy of the story implied in each scene is also responsible for the imaginative speculation and interpretative invention that has characterized the outpouring of responses to the painting.
