Regional Competition and the Fabrication of a Zhe School in Late Ming China

Join the Institute for Chinese Studies of The Ohio State University as they host Kathleen M. Ryor, Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies, Carleton College.

While the category of the so-called Zhe School has long been seen as problematic within the study of Chinese painting history, the continued emphasis in scholarship on the professional status of the artists identified as members of the Zhe School has obscured an investigation into the use of the regional term Zhe to describe a wide range of artists and styles.  There is ample evidence, however, that at least until the end of the sixteenth century, literati who were native to or lived in Zhejiang province admired the style of painting practiced by the so-called “Wild and Heterodox” painters of the Zhe School.  This lecture will demonstrate that a regional taste for dramatic ink wash styles was part of a larger discourse in which the elite in that province promoted the cultural achievements of their region and may have challenged, either explicitly or implicitly, the cultural supremacy of neighboring Suzhou. 

Kathleen M. Ryor is Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at Carleton College, where she teaches East Asian art history.  She was a past editor of the journal Ming Studies and board member of the Society for Ming Studies.  She is currently the president of the Arts of China Consortium, a scholarly organization for the field of Chinese art and art history.  Her publications include studies of military patronage of the arts, miniaturization and surrogacy in Chinese gardens during the late Ming, and contemporary Chinese painting.  Her other research projects are concerned with the relationship between painting and regional economic and political competition in southern China and a reexamination of late Zhe school painting.  She is currently finishing a book-length manuscript entitled, Sixteenth Century Concepts of the Body in the Art of Xu Wei (1521-1593), which links the artist's painting and calligraphy to a wider discourse on the importance of the physical body during the late Ming period.  She received a 2003-2004 Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship for this project.  Professor Ryor’s second book project, Martial Arts: The Military and Visual Culture in Imperial China, expands on her published work on this understudied subject.