Imperial Illusions. Kristina Kleutghen

aesthetics. Chinese viewers typically interpreted dark shading and sometimes even cast shadows as dirt on the surface of a painting or as indicating dirty faces and soiled clothing. Qianlong himself vehemently disliked it, thereby ensuring its near absence in scenic illusions, where light and highlight (rather than light and shadow) lend mass and volume to objects and rooms. Figures sometimes and landscapes often cleave more to Chinese than to European conventions, as is seen in the area of the Spring’s Peaceful Message presented as outside in the garden (figure I.4), where the figures are depicted with the flatter, more surface- and line-oriented aesthetics of traditional Chinese figure painting rather than the volumetric possibilities of Western painting. The unpainted background landscape, distinctive texture strokes on the rocks and tree trunks, highly stylized plant foliage, and complete lack of either cast shadows or modeling are what one would expect in a traditional Chinese landscape painting, and not in a quadratura. Nevertheless, this blend of three-dimensional European perspectival illusionism with traditional Chinese representational modes is what ultimately helps lead the viewer to recognize the scene as a painting.

      I.4Detail of figures in garden, Spring’s Peaceful Message scenic illusion (figure I.2).

      Unless one is near enough to this painting to touch it, however, there are no visible brushstrokes, particularly in the area that depicts the floor, walls, and ceiling. This lack runs counter to essential aesthetic values in the traditional Chinese brush arts, which valorize the artist’s visible presence in his brushwork. However, this erasure of the artists’ identities as well as of the technology of representation perfectly suited the collaborative and therefore typically anonymous working processes of the Qing imperial painting academy (Huayuanchu). Scenic illusions were uniquely produced by the Wish-Fulfilling Studio (Ruyiguan), the separate elite branch of the painting academy where the European missionary artists worked alongside the emperor’s best Chinese and Manchu painters.²⁷ The Wish-Fulfilling Studio’s archives (hereafter abbreviated RYG) are therefore the primary documentary source for these paintings, recording commissions, requested changes, installation locations, artists’ identities, and more that have otherwise been

      lost. As scenic illusions were particular to these artists, Spring’s Peaceful Message would have been immediately identifiable as their work once the illusion had been dispelled.

      Despite the important role that European pictorial techniques play in scenic illusions, neither the production of these paintings nor their definition as scenic illusions depended on the presence of European hands: Chinese Wish-Fulfilling Studio painters were producing scenic illusions on their own at least as early as 1738.²⁸ Yet without an artist’s hand immediately visible in the brushwork, there was also no sign of brushes, pigments, or silk. By concealing the process of creation, the agency of the artist, and any material sign that scenic illusions were paintings rather than reality, these erasures initially directed the viewer’s attention to the spaces, objects, and figures depicted instead of to the depiction itself, allowing the paintings to appear to become what they represented.

      As Qianlong would have seen it through the doorway in figure I.1, the illusion of Spring’s Peaceful Message is compelling because everything in it appears to be part of the viewer’s world, and therefore creates the desire for touch that generally accompanies illusionistic painting. The complexity of this urge that links sight and touch is increasingly resulting in interdisciplinary studies of vision, cognition, perception, neuroaesthetics, and even neuro–art history, and is essential to fathoming the relationship between psychology and physiology that underpins the perception of illusionistic paintings.²⁹ Perceptually, the formula is simple: if an object seems to project into the viewer’s space, then it must be real, and is therefore touchable. Neuroscience has revealed that visual perception is not defined by a positivist need to either validate or disprove what we see by touching it, but is instead inseparable from the physical preparation for performing an action. It is this interdependence of perception and action that compels a viewer who sees an illusionistic work to touch it.³⁰ The viewer has no expectation of cognitive dissonance or incoherent perception because experience teaches us to trust our senses, particularly the sense of sight. Unlike sight, concentrated in the head, the sense of touch pervades the body through the skin, the largest organ, which in the Chinese tradition was the primary “boundary of affective exchange” between the body and the world.³¹ As the “sensory faculty that shapes our social connections,” touch connects us physically with others in the myriad contact gestures that define our relationships and their varying levels of intimacy.³² In the case of the hand in particular, touch comprises both agency and receptivity in touching and being touched in return.³³

      Given the consistent legibility of most European pictorial depth cues in late imperial China, as well as early modern Chinese theories of vision that linked sight and touch with the idea that objects pushed toward the eye,³⁴ perspectival illusionistic paintings in eighteenth-century China resulted in the same “anthropologically constant interaction between sight and touch” as they did in Europe.³⁵ The temptation to touch deeply engages the scenic illusion viewer with the world of the painting, and transmutes the merely visual into the real and tactile. Given the “emotional valence of touch,”³⁶ the most powerful temptations are naturally human: the figures in scenic illusions, which sometimes

      directly engage the viewer, provide the nexus between the viewer’s tangible body and the intangible sense of sight, personally drawing the viewer forward into the depicted world. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century comments, as well as the literary record, indicate that touch was often responsible for a viewer’s recognition of what he saw as a painting: viewers did not understand a seemingly permeable space to be a wall-mounted illusionistic painting until they touched it, or even accidentally bumped into it. The same visual depth cues in the painting that drew viewers forward to touch the objects depicted, however, also moved them inexorably toward the discovery of the painting’s materiality and the collapse of the illusion.

      Touch was always only a means to an end, however. Whether by intellectual recognition or haptic connection, scenic illusions were always discovered as paintings and were enjoyed as such, even though all their features initially conspired to conceal that identity. Their deceptions were extended by the perfect viewing position prescribed by both linear perspective and the surrounding architecture, which directed the viewer into place. But the illusion always disintegrated in the end, thereby giving rise to the moment of recognition necessary to the disjunction between first seeing the scene and then understanding that it was a painting. The goal of illusionistic painting in general is not permanent deception (which is impossible), but instead astonishment or amazement at one’s own misperception.³⁷ Illusionistic paintings “lose their raison d’être” without the viewer’s willing complicity in balancing his or her perception of real space with the acknowledgment of a mere flat painted surface.³⁸ That Qianlong repeatedly commissioned and engaged with views that he knew to be only paintings demonstrates just how enjoyable he found both visual illusions and these paintings in particular.

      The Necessity of Space and Place

      As paintings intended to decorate (rather than visually replace) their supporting walls, ordinary affixed hangings were typically much smaller than the walls and were displayed continuously for long periods of time. Sometimes they were removed and replaced with other paintings, moved to other locations to decorate those spaces, or remounted as scrolls, as the small version of Spring’s Peaceful Message was some time after being removed from the Hall of Mental Cultivation.³⁹ Using a monumental wall-encompassing version of the affixed hanging format for scenic illusions theoretically implies that one could move them from one wall to another, as long as the dimensions were