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Title:
Aestheticizing Stone and Script: Inscription in Three Modern Guises
Abstract:
This paper examines three, visual and/or textual representations of script by scholar-artists in late Qing and Republican China, all of which encircle a central, human figure into stone materials that further contain
carved inscriptions. First, it will consider an 1866 self-portrait by iterant artist Xuan Ding 宣鼎 (1832-1880); second, Ren Bonian's 任伯年 (1840-1896) 1886 portrait of the painter-epigrapher Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩 (1844-1927); and third, Lu Xun's (1881-1936) 1925 prose-poem Epitaph 墓碣文. The paper interrogates how and why intellectual and artistic subjectivity extend into and is absorbed by inanimate material (stone) and form (script). It will argue that an entanglement of human potential and stony script demonstrates a locating of modern identities beyond both metaphysical and material knowns. The two portraits embed the image of the scholar-artist into stone (an inkstone or a stone rubbing-like background). Antiquarian visual convention creates a contrast of black-and-white negative space that is broken only by accompanying painterly renderings of carved-in script, akin to stelae inscriptions and epigraphic calligraphy. Stone in Lu Xun’s Epitaph becomes a haunting yet stabilizing presence amidst the splitting of the literary form into something that is both prose and poem, speaking and inscribing, and this stabilizing ability forces the stone into a central narrative position. Each of these works raise questions of the simultaneous location of creative subjectivity in human form and in inanimate materiality, interconnected by script, thereby adding new dimension to the role of both script and of material in modern Chinese cultural history.
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