The World of Things in Chen Hongshou's (1598/9-1652) Paintings

This dissertation examines how material objects mediated personal experiences, artistic innovation, intellectual discourses, and cultural shifts in early modern China through the depictions of objects in Chen Hongshou's (1598/9-1652) paintings. While primarily recognized for his figurative works both in his own time and throughout history, Chen's profound interest in material artifacts is manifested in his persistent portrayals of objects. Previous scholarship has interpreted these object images as stylistic reflections of aesthetic trends or as footnotes to the often obscured narratives in his figurative compositions. Yet these studies could not explain the artist's obsession with objects in the first place, nor could they fully account for the enduring impact and unique immediacy of these motifs. Foregrounding the agentic roles of material artifacts and their representations in Chen's artistic practice, this dissertation reveals that the artist deliberately engaged with objects to construct pictorial narratives, evoke sensations, convey emotions, and critically reflect upon the material world as an artist, scholar, craftsman, and practicing Buddhist during a period of social and political transition. The dissertation engages theoretical issues centered on relationships among artifact, image, text, and idea, and between object and subject. It argues that Chen Hongshou's depictions not only reflected existing ideas about objects found in texts and object designs, but also constructed new discourses surrounding objects and materiality through visual means. Chen's visual expositions function on two levels: they elucidate the objects depicted while revealing and problematizing both the material reality of the painting medium and painting's nature as artifice. This study thus complicates our understanding of how ideas about objects—including artworks as objects—can be formulated, expressed, and enacted through images, while teasing out interrelated histories of painting and material culture. A throughline of this dissertation is the affective and agentive power of everyday objects as manifested through their pictorial representations. In Chen Hongshou's works, motifs of objects not only function within the pictorial space by assuming critical compositional and narrative roles, but also assert their power beyond the pictorial frames. These commonplace objects, though culturally overdetermined, cannot be reduced to mere symbols; rather, they actively provoke viewers' own experiences of similar objects as three-dimensional, material entities. Tangible yet maintaining an interpretive openness, these pictures guide viewers across time and space to interrogate their relationships with objects and discover truths about their own material surroundings. Equally affected by and acutely aware of the power of objects mediated through his ink and brush, Chen constantly explored new expressions and techniques to capture the objects' inherent vitality, while using these depictions to probe the complex interplay among the materiality of art creation, the subjectivity of the artist, and the agency of art.