Painting in the Age of Evidential Scholarship (Kaozheng): Luo Ping's Late Years, ca. 1770-1799

In 1771, Luo Ping (1733-1799) left his native Yangzhou for Beijing, where he spent intermittently the last thirty years of his life. In Beijing, Luo Ping gained a distinct voice in the circles of poets and antiquarians who gravitated around the Xuannan District and its symbolic heart, the Liulichang antique market. The social and cultural profile of Xuannan, its feeble balancing of powers, and interaction with the Manchu nobility and the court frame the reconstruction of Luo Ping's network of Beijing patrons and the analysis of the transformations that took place in the artist's late practice. Luo Ping's Xuannan production, its limited circulation, and extensive colophons sanctioned and publicized new modes of elite sociability, serving a self-fashioning function consistent to other cultural manifestations of the time in poetry and antiquarianism. Generally understood as the last of the 'Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou,' this dissertation argues for a synchronic reassessment of Luo Ping and for a new understanding of the seminal yet largely overlooked transition from the late Qianlong to the Jiaqing period. The four chapters focus on four paintings and trace Luo Ping's investigations on the painting medium, beginning with the coming to terms with his Yangzhou artistic identity. Symptomatic of the climate of disillusionment pervasive of much cultural production of the time, Luo Ping's late paintings put under rigorous scrutiny the validity of transmitted canons, its aesthetic and intellectual foundations, and their applicability in the present. Overall, the paintings registered a progressive shift from a brushwork-centered, process-based aesthetics to new forms of visual immediacy. Analogous to transformations in the realm of calligraphy, my study understands this shift as informed by the calls for authenticity and origins promoted by 'evidential scholarship.' Reconfiguring painting in terms of 'image' - deflecting the self-expressive for the self-reflexive- proposed a new mode of conceptualizing the relationship between subject and the world, and an attempt to rethink, or perhaps to reinvent community, through images. Like the contemporaries Huang Yi or Xi Gang, Luo Ping embodied a modernized version of classical scholarly ideals that prefigured the profile of the 'antiquarian artist' of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.