The Theater of Consciousness: Self-Aware Fictionality in the Pictorial Art of Seventeenth-Century China

This dissertation is about the illusion of theatrical consciousness in pictorial art of seventeenth-century China. More specifically, it is the first attempt to narrate the history of Chinese art in light of “huan,” which is commonly translated into English as illusion, magic, or deception. The temporal focus of this dissertation is when the paradox between illusion and reality was an obsession of many artists and writers. It was a unique moment in time and in the world, when the acute concentration of commodities and the dissemination of religious practices unmoored from established sectarian traditions. My thesis proposes that the production of illusion began with excessive sensory experiences of proliferating things in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Three case studies presented in the dissertation probe how art objects came to being through theatrical illusionism, “huan.” The first case examines Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock (1610) by Wu Bin (active ca. 1573–1626) to articulate how a series of gazes focusing on a single object creates perceivable worlds interconnected by the individual’s sense perceptions. The second case study focuses on the illustrations of the Story of the Western Wing (1640) edited by Min Qiji (1580–after 1661), which inform questions of literary authenticity, the agency of theater, and the nature of human life perceived by unlocatable gazes. The last case study deconstructs and reconstructs one of the celebrated masterpieces in Chinese painting, Chen Hongshou’s (1598–1652) Elegant Gathering (ca. 1646), to investigate its performative nature as visceral acts of repenting one’s past wrongdoings and acknowledging reality. I take a methodological cue from religio-philosophical discourses on perception that shaped the intellectual landscape proximate to seventeenth-century artists and their audiences. To that end, this dissertation redefines illusion and reality as a process, not an opposition, which became embodied in material forms that defied the binary separation of thought and form, idea and art in the seventeenth century.