 Yn ystod, wrth gwrs, ydych yn iawn i'r llwyddon yn mewn gwneud sydd wedi'i gweinwch i ystafell ar y cyfnod yr aelodau hynny. Roedd yma'n gweld arall y pleidydd. Yn ystod, wrth gwrs, yno ym mwyn i'r ysbydd am rydyn ni, rydyn ni'n Richard Black, ym ysbydd pro-drector ar yr ysbydd sydd ar y cyfnod yr cyfnod ar yr cyfnod ar Saes, ac yn cael ei ddweud yn y cyfnod i gweithio'r gweithio ar y cyfnod yma'n ystod yma'n rhaid o'r lechffudd ddiddordeb am barynas Balyry Amos, fe gweld yn ychydig fel ond y gallwn Lebanon am ystod o'r ymdeithas hon. Yn gyngor, fe ddim yn ystod ddynulparu gennym yma, gan yw'r ddynulparu gennym ar ddod, da'n cael.. ..a'n cael y pwnghysig ar y ddynulparu gennym ar y ddysgu llynau. Dyn ni'n cael ei panodd. Mae'n cael ei panodd ei fanodd o Chy分, o'r cyfnod yw amser, ac os yw'r cyfnod yma ar gyfer y llunio ar gyfer Y Persefydle David yw Llywodraeth Fygin yw'r argyrchu Chino? Shane, mwy fawr, yn y gwelch am y llunio ar y cyfnod y Llywodraeth Y Persefydle David yw Llywodraeth, ac yn y cyfnod ar gyfer y Llywodraeth yw'r llunio ar gyfer y Llywodraeth yw'r cyfnod yw Llywodraeth, yn y cyfnod ychydig o'r cyfnod yw Llywodraeth yn yr 130 ym Llywodraeth, ac ydyn nhw'r llwysodau ardal yn y clyw gynllunio gwanedd yma'r llwysodau'r Llywodraeth. Yn amser, mae'n gweithio dda wedi'u llwysodau ardal yn llwysodau ardal yn ei llwysodau ardal yn llwysodau'r Llywodraeth. Rwy'n dechrau, mae'r cymerthau gyda'r Ysgrifennidau, mae'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yn y bwrdd yw'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod hyn yn ymwyllgor yma, ac yn yw'r llwyffyr. Rwy'n meddwl, mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw yng Nghymru, ac mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr 7 miliwn a'r amser yn ymwneud i'r llwyffyr. Mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwneud, a'r llwyffyr yn y 10 ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymwyllgor, mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r cyfleoedd cyflwyno mewn ddiwedd y Ffondation, y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac mae'r Llyfrgell Ymwyllgor er mwynogi fe gydechrau'r llwyffyr yw'r gweithfyrdd yn fwy, fe fydd Fanhysg Cymru o anticipated a gwerthfawr i ddod o bryddoedd Llyfrgell neu llwyffyr amser i'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor'u cyflwyno ac mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr. Mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor i'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr, ac yn ddau'r fanlwys ar gyfer genesaf genedlaethau o'r gyflaenau a gliwgolau ar y gyrdd yma 2018. A'r newid yn gwybod a gwneud unig o'r gwneud. Felly, rwy'n golygu i'r gweithio cyflogol ailfaidd gael dda wedi gael Gawrden Sqaer i'r newid bwysig ar yr unig o'r Gweithgrifennu Creadio Creadio. Mae gynhyrch gwybodol ei ddweud yn ei ddweud i'w ddweudio'r newydd yw ddweud o gweithio'r pethau i'r dweud. Fy ffyrdd ei gynnwys ei iawn oherwydd Mae'n ddweud i'w ddweud i gael ysgrifennu'r ysgrifennu wnaeth ychydig, ac roeddenno'n drwllion, oherwydd i'w ddweud i'w ddweud i'w ddweudio'r ysgrifennu ddweud a gynhyrch i'w ddweudio'r drwllion. I'd like to invite you to stay on after the lecture for drinks in the Brunei Gallery, and Shane will say a bit more about that. I'd like to invite you to switch your mobile phones to silent, but please keep them in your hands and tweet throughout the lecture. And then finally, it's my pleasure to introduce two external guests of great distinction who will respectively introduce Shane and propose a vote of thanks. And I will introduce them very quickly because you don't want to listen too long to me, but we're very pleased to welcome Professor Dr Sarah Fraser, who will introduce Shane. Sarah holds the chair in East Asian Art and serves as vice-director of the Institute for East Asia Art History at Heidelberg University. Prior to going to Germany, she was professor and department chair at Northwestern University in Chicago. Sarah leads a consortium of European, Chinese and American universities in a Getty Foundation sponsored initiative focused on Chinese artists trained in London, Paris and Berlin during the 1920s and 1940s. Her books include Performing the Visual, Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, and more recently Cross Media Women and Sue Bing after Book from the Sky. I hope I pronounced that correctly. And then we'll hear Shane. And then finally at the end we will have a vote of thanks from Professor Craig Clunus. Craig is particularly apposite to welcome to give the vote of thanks as he was the previous Percival David Professor of Chinese Art at SOAS before moving to his current post at the University of Oxford. Craig has published extensively, as I'm sure you're aware, on art history and the culture of China, much of it concentrating on the Ming period. Before SOAS he worked at the University of London, so we are kind of following each other across the country. In fact, I'm following Craig rather than the other way around. He's author of Art in China in the Oxford History of Art series and among six other books he most recently published Screen of King's Art and Royal Power in Ming China. And I also realise today that he is currently the visiting Gresham Professor of Chinese Art. So over the course of this year if you wish you have two more opportunities to hear Craig speak in London. So thank you very much to Sarah and Craig for being the bread to tonight's Shane sandwich. And thank you all for coming and I will now hand over to Sarah. Thank you. Good evening and thank you very much Director Black. It is my honour and pleasure to introduce to you a colleague, collaborator and friend, Professor Shane McCausland this evening. And I would like to take you through some of the highlights of his distinguished career and provide some sense of his work and how it's situated in the larger field of Chinese art history. It is certainly a cause for celebration that there is a chair for Chinese art at the University of London and that the legacy of Sir Percival David continues into the 21st century in such a dynamic fashion here at SOAS and in the extremely capable hands of Shane. David's collection of 1700 or more than 1700 Imperial porcelain was acquired as we know almost one century ago. These magnificent objects are now housed as we've just been reprised of this history just around the corner in the British Museum and are still within easy reach for students. But many of Professor Shane McCausland's important publications also draw expertly on the Chinese paintings in the British Museum which left China just around the same time as a Percival David collection of porcelain. That is during the final years of the Qing Court or just after the dynastic period ended in 1911. And Shane has paid special attention to excavating the importance of the encounters during the first decades of the 20th century and how the history of collecting, particularly from imperial holdings has shaped our understanding of Chinese material culture and perceptions of Chinese art abroad. In these liminal moments between Empire and Republic, Puy, the former emperor, enjoyed unique access to the palace's storehouse of painting and calligraphy where his tutor entertained him with modern gifts such as cameras and telescopes and the like. And the non-sovereign monarch gifted him objects from the palace household, two of which are held in SOAS. And today during Shane's fascinating in-depth lecture we will learn more about these objects and how they circulated in a complex network of gift giving. And this is one of the strengths of Professor McCoslin's trajectory of research is to think about the circulation of objects. This is the same period of time when the Drenhuang paintings entered the British Museum's collection and of course the amonditions of the court instructorous, which many of us know in detail now through the research and conferences organized by Shane who has dedicated a great deal of his attention elucidating this remarkable scroll. His 2003 publication produced jointly by the Percival David Foundation and the British Museum joined scholars from the PRC, Taiwan, Europe, the UK and all the schools of Chinese painting studies in the US. And I'm going to say something more about that in a minute, but back to this volume just to point out it is a singular contribution to the field. This is a bible, so to speak, on the painting, or this painting, the amonditions. And something of its history, it's a palimpsest of all the connoisseurs who touched it and the relationship across more than a millennium and the relationships between those who enjoyed it and circulated it across the dynasties. After receiving his BA and MA with honors at Cambridge University, Shane pursued his doctoral studies at Princeton and by all means of reckoning, we, Shane and myself, by virtue of where we studied and with whom, we each represent the distinct scholarly divide or division in Chinese art history in the US that marked the last quarter of the 20th century. Shane, the East Coast, Yale Princeton School maintained by Wen Fang and Richard Barnhart and I, the West Coast Berkeley School at whose helm James Cahill presided. And this long-standing, simmering feud about attributions and connoisseurship probably doesn't matter anymore these days, but it did matter for a long time and even just a decade ago, it infused many of conferences and impacted the field. Actually, before participating today, I probably come to think of it, should have asked Shane where he stands on the riverbank controversy. John Da Chen or not John Da Chen and something in between Dong Yun or not. But in all seriousness thinking about the future of the field, Shane dedicates himself to a wide range of questions and problems and those of you who don't know those inside jokes about the riverbank are probably wondering what it's about and honestly it may not be much about anything. But these earlier divides in the field seem less important, especially in light of much recent scholarship. Yes, attributions and connoisseurship are critical if we're going to continue to expand the canon and include a greater range of objects that we investigate in our research. Equally important, Shane's work continues to draw our attention to how objects circulated in the modern period and earlier. This parallel history is exciting and compelling. It doesn't replace questions of style and it deepens the discussion. And there are so many other objects beyond paintings held in major museums and examples of how Shane's inquiries bring our attention outward includes his deepening study of contemporary paintings such as the Honling exhibition that he curated here in the Brunei Gallery last fall. And we look forward to more work in contemporary painting in his hands. For this reason, Shane has developed and maintained a broad network of scholars and museum professionals across the globe and he has the right public profile to draw attention to the rich holdings here at SOAS and to reach a broad public audience through the Brunei Gallery. His two-plus decades affiliated with museums and libraries means that we can look forward to an exciting mix of scholarship and curatorial projects that bring luster to this institution. His gift for collegial networking and his administrative genius has translated into a fruitful, on-going collaboration with our institute the Institute for Cwnsgysigsta Oas Aziens at Heidelberg University. We are supported under the banner of the Connecting Art Histories initiative from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and this summer we were based here at SOAS in a project focused on early 20th century Chinese artists who trained in Europe. And this winter we will de-camp to Paris but in the next few years Shane will come to Germany and we will welcome him in Heidelberg for a series of doctoral dissertation workshops on Chinese art for graduate students. It is his gracious collegial spirit and his rigorous scholarly training evidenced by his beautiful writing and numerous awards that make him the ideal academic partner. And it is on this note that I am delighted to present to you today the Perseval David Chair of Chinese Art, Professor Shane McCausland whose lecture today is entitled The Art of Quitting Court The Last Emperor of China's Parting Gifts. Thank you. For the scenes of the scenery show last summer I mulled over the role of artworks as keepers of memory and agents of institutional vision. And tonight's lecture grew out of my puzzling about two particular mementos an album and a fan given respectively in 1926 in 1930 by the last emperor of China, Aisin Joro Henry Pu Yi, 1906 to 1967 to Reginald Johnston, 1874 to 1938, his English tutor. The fan is inscribed by Pu Yi who had been deposed aged five after the Qing dynasty fell in 1911 with two ancient poems about leaving and dedicated to tutor Johnston, which you can see in the upper right. On the flyleaf of the album the inscription in English, up or left here reads to Mr Johnston from the Manchu Emperor and this may be Johnston's rendering of Pu Yi's dedication in Chinese to the right which says the year being in fifth month, 27th day as our teacher, Zhuang Shedun, returns to his country we gift this as a memento imperily inscribed by the Xuantong Emperor. Now Johnston and Pu Yi are of course well known to modern audiences from Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 bio epic The Last Emperor but it's less widely known that in 1931 after his final return from China to the UK and his knighthood Johnston became Professor of Chinese at the then School of Oriental Studies and although Sir Reginald did not care for teaching at SOAS his collections have ended up here, some in 1935 and others after his death via his fiancée Mrs Elizabeth Sparshott and the Superstible David Foundation of Chinese Art. So the album and the fan are now formally reunited in SOAS library following the signing of the SOAS PDF library loan agreement which we celebrate tonight and in this regard I should like to thank for his generous support for tonight's event SOAS Pro Director, Professor Richard Black and also the Percival David Foundation in particular its chairman Colin Sheaf and I also wish to record my respect and admiration for the late Paul Webley, former director of SOAS who offered me the chair in 2005 and I am honoured that Professor Sarah Fraser and Craig Clunas have considered it important to come from Heidelberg and from Oxford tonight to top and tail my inaugural lecture as the Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS. Now I say the fan and the album are in SOAS library but that's not quite right by kind arrangement of my colleagues in the library, the Brunai Gallery and events including Christine Wise, John Hollingworth, Gion Wood and especially Payale Gagliani-Batt and Tom White whose sterling efforts have made this evening possible they are in fact mounted together in a temporary display in the Brunai Gallery for tonight only where you'll be able to view them afterwards during the reception. I had so many questions about these parting gifts. How could they be both personally commemorative and yet majestic and royal? Matched in value to the occasion and the recipient and also embodiments of ideals and values of the court. What help with his choices did Paul Webley have from advisers skilled in art and connoisseurship? The fiction of Paul Webley's still being the Shwentong Emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty, 1644 to 1911 as donor of both objects and the proficient quality of the album suggests that these are examples of those carefully graded compliments which we imagine well-schooled royals instinctively know how to give but just how were such things calibrated in early Republican China? For Paul Webley such artworks were his wherewithal and his currency but imperial gifting was also a long time convention in China including for gifts bestowed upon meritorious courtiers leaving court like Johnson. So what were the objects of quitting court in the 1920s? Johnson's tutelage of Pu'i had officially lasted from 1919 when the 13-year-old was still closeted with his family in the Forbidden City to 1924 when as an 18-year-old he was expelled but Johnston continued to advise him off and on during the rocky years under Japanese protection in Beijing and in Tianjin from 1925 to 1931. I did wonder in particular how did the formal choice of this early Qing dynasty album of flowers speak to Johnson and Pu'i's relationship on the occasion of the ex-tutor's return to Britain in July 1926 and I quickly realised that this was just one of several instances of quitting court between 1924 and 1931 all commemorated in some way in art. So the album presented in July 1926 was the first parting gift but Johnston unexpectedly kept returning to China the first time from 1927 to 1930 as the British Commissioner at Weihaiway and he paid several visits to Pu'i on the last occasion Pu'i hinted that his exile in Tianjin would soon come to an end and he presented Johnston with this fan which is upstairs as is shown in The Last Emperor you actually see the fan being presented. Johnston returned again the following year again unexpectedly this time for a conference but also on business to do with the boxer indemnity that's the funding that funded the University's China Committee which originally funded the Percival David chair it doesn't now but it once did. These were what would be his last meetings with Pu'i and this time Johnston secured the preface to the memoir that he had begun which would appear in 1934 entitled Twilight in the Forbidden City. This very polished calligraphy is not by Pu'i but it's by his trusted adviser Zheng Xiaoshu of whom I'll speak quite a bit more later. There's one other instance of quitting court which overshadows all of these examples and that's Pu'i's own desperate escape across Beijing in 1924 into Japanese protection. That event during a dust storm was commemorated by the Inner Circle of Courtiers in a little noticed picture scroll from perhaps 1925 reproduced in Twilight. Uncovering the art historical situation of these various works has been a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Some areas have been trickier than others but most of it needs to be pieced together before you start to get the fuller picture. What I present tonight are going to be vignettes from a longer paper focusing mainly on the paintings. Let's begin then with the album. Each of the ten leaves bears an inscribed flower painting by a scholar artist Chen Shu who was active in Nanjing in the early decades of the Qing Dynasty, that's the 1650s to 1680s. The flowers comprise peonies and pomegranate, lily and chrysanthemum mostly paired with poetic couplets composed and transcribed by the artist in an aesthetic rather than a seasonal grouping of nature popularized by the spiritual patron of this kind of ink mosellony the unconventional Ming artist Xu Wei. For comparison I show you a pomegranate by Xu Wei which exemplifies this so-called sketch conceptualist mode it shows a very similar preoccupation with iconic shading and silhouetteing and the full array of brushed textures in landing tones. Now the album has some successful if slightly repetitive arrangements you see spiky compositions speaking to the rectangular edges of the frame branches and stalks at jaunty angles are boxed in by it and meanwhile the compliant blooms are slightly tipped towards the picture plane on display. Leaf 8 depicts an arching pale pink lily stem dark inky composite strokes capture the outlines and springy forms the deep verdant hues and waxy textures of leaves and stalks and here you've got a complex tone and colour loading of the brush so that a single integrated stroke produces this idiosyncratic half blend of colours and shades note also the modulated softer prancing outlines of the main lily flower and the faded backwash for the pale pink petals in contrast with the much more intense ochre and apple green of the sepals below which are overlaid with scumbled ink. The inscription elaborates on the scene with narrative effect and synesthetic appeal this flower mostly grows by the water's edge he writes among the reeds I picked this pure display to avail of its lonely fragrance later so in lyric voice the artist reveals how he supposedly plucked the stem from a water garden for a scented pure display chingong and if this remark triggers our olfactory sense or even an anticipation of it it's because of a carefully confused looping of the sensory responses the image becomes momentarily functionally real even as its factor as a painting is underscored by the materiality of the album the ragged individualist brush mode and the lodging of poetic text in the picture's surface so a quirky formal indexicality in dialogue with the virtual presence of the forms provides a measure of the painter as a scholar artist and also of his literary urban audience so Pwys parting gift was treasured by Johnson a committed royalist but was it any more than just an old album of flowers? Let's take another leaf the inscription here reads amid the snow a rosy fragrance reveals a precious pearl so as before the artist uses synesthetic images snow white petals a pink fragrance a jewel amid the intangible to commingle senses of touch, sight and smell advanced epigraphic skill and poetic literacy are assumed here but there's nothing out of the ordinary for anyone who had a mainstream education in late dynastic China such as PwY and Johnston and anyway here in the genre of pure display and in an imperial parting gift we should hardly expect any really profound cryptic message yet such albums often did have key leaves or messages within them and two of the leaves do seem to say more as instruments about the purport of the gift one is the first leaf the peony O PwY's autobiography of 1964 is patently ghostwritten by a Communist Party hack the remarks upon Johnston's learning and character and tastes do ring true he was, wrote PwY, a connoeser of Chinese poetry I used to see him wagging his head as he chanted tongue poems just like a Chinese teacher and he was a lover of Chinese tea and peonies conventionally the peony also stood for fortune and status and for the royalist's pleasure PwY further added his imperial seal that's the big one at the top a Xuentong royal stamp and judging by the very messy impression he probably did it himself the artist's inscription refers to an intimate friendship between two people neither of us needs to say a word for us to know each other's minds this clearly was a very well chosen personal gift as to the second significant leaf although the label on the fly leaf states that the album's undated there is a date lurking here amid the highly cursive inscriptions on leaf 9 the chrysanthemum and appropriately the date here is of the chrysanthemum festival when ancestors are honoured now the full inscription reads Lu Fu's poetic emotion returns Tao Qian's wine euphoria borrowed the year Xinyo 1681 on the double yang festival now the Qing dynasty's heyday spanned the long 18th century and Fu Pu Yi who is positioned here in pink in Johnston's pedigree of Manchu emperors in twilight Chen Shu's album was painted in the very year 1681 usually marked as the start of this golden era so in green with the second founding of the Qing by the Kangxi emperor who reigned from 1662 to 1722 following the quelling of a long rebellion and in 1926 living in exile in Tianjin under Japanese protection or control depending how you look at it did this date I wonder somehow signal Fu Yi's hope for a new beginning for a post-Ching empire in the Manchurian homeland and this is indeed what Fu Yi's Japanese backers created for him with him as puppet emperor just six years later as Johnston notes under Pu Yi's name down here ruler of Manchuria from 1932 now what about the chrysanthemum festival this occasion is linked with the ancient poet and courtier Tao Qian who famously quit court in 405 to return to his country estate to cultivate chrysanthemums and drink wine but at court this was a tricky topic because Tao Qian had actually quit in disgust at court corruption and had composed an ode ever after celebrated as the classic of the demoted exiled or otherwise frustrated scholar official so in a strategy mastered by his predecessors Emperor Xuentong drained away the implied criticism from this illusion by gifting this object Pu Yi effectively gave his blessing to Johnston his permission to quit court to return to England on gardening leave what else well in art history 1681 is also just four years before the creation also in Nanjing of this disturbingly modern masterpiece 10,000 ugly ink blots by the great individualist painter Shi Tao now Shi Tao admired Cheng Shu's art as we know from his remarks on a later album of landscapes in the art canon which I'll come to in a minute Cheng Shu is generally classed as a third tier painter yet here Shi Tao praised him for achieving fame with his lofty antiquity and in the company of far better known masters Kun San and Cheng Zhengui it's typical of Shi Tao's cross grained even modern thinking to shape a diachronic concept like lofty antiquity in terms of present agency but it's also significant that in 1926 with the Chinese art world in a maelstrom of canonical transition Shi Tao was himself emerging as a doyen of an expressionistic or sketch conceptualist Xia Yi lineage the one that began with Shu Wei with also a modern following sometimes called the new progressive school Xin Jin Pae for example a young tyro like Zhang Daqian exhibited this Shi Tao inspired landscape in China's first national fine arts exhibition in 1929 such works as this were much more in tune with global modernism than works by followers of the Qing Orthodox Canon known as the antiquarian school for Gu Pae which you might have expected Pu Yi to have been a follower of so how did the Calo Pu Yi come to have in his possession an album by a painter admired by Shi Tao hero of progressive young artists when Pu Yi had been expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924 and to what degree was he even aware of these shifts in the art canon I'll come back to that In the summer of 1930 which was seen on both sides as the last parting Pu Yi presented Johnston with the folding fan A painting side shows a journey away from the capital and this was probably a commission but the inscriptions on the reverse the wonders of PowerPoint you see turn it over were however penned by Pu Yi himself and certainly you can say this on style but also if you look at the layout of the two poems you can see that the first one in green the road leads ever onward it comes as far as here under the mouse arrow and the second one out of the city's eastern gate I go on foot is in pink area here it continues the format of 5.2 format up to this line but suddenly at this point the calligrapher realises the evidently inexperienced calligrapher realises that he's going to run out of space and not have room for his dedication so he switches to these tiny characters that you see here to cram the remains of the poem in so it goes 5.2, 5.2, 5.2, 5.2, 5.0 8351 Touchingly this is quite literally a schoolboy error in transcription yet it is for that again a highly personal gift and one that opens up the question who was actually nostalgic about leaving China was it Johnston going to England or Pu Yi to Manchuria or both now how did Pu Yi come to have at hand such artworks as the album that's no secret inspired by Johnston's education in 1922 Pu Yi and his brother Pu Tia determined to escape from the Forbidden City to study at Oxford only their escape attempt in 1923 failed when Pu Yi was double-crossed by Unux Pu Yi wrote quote the first stage of our escape plan was to provide for our expenses the way we did this was to move the most valuable pictures calligraphy and antiques from the imperial collections out of the palace by pretending that I was giving them to Pu Jie and then store them in the house in Tianjin Pu Jie who came into the palace each day for lessons used to take a large bundle home after school every day for six months that's between autumn 1922 and spring 1923 now the extent of corruption among imperial household palace staff was such that the teens' takings was barely noticed was in fact unographed that had already prompted the heads of the household department to begin making an inventory of the collections and ironically their lists enabled the brothers to choose quote the very highest grade of artworks but this stocktake was also probably the cause of the infamous arson attack on the Jianfu Gong Palace a precinct in the northwest corner of the Forbidden City on the night of June 27, 1923 the fire set by eunuchs to cover their tracks in the aftermath Pu Jie tried hard to reorganise the palace but it came to nothing on the 5th of November 1924 a pawn in North China's warlord rivalries Pu Jie was expelled from the Forbidden City at gunpoint following a coup d'etat in Pu Jie's estimate in 1964 quote we must have removed over a thousand hand scrolls and more than 200 hanging scrolls and albums and these were all taken to Tianjin and later some dozens of them were sold the rest were taken up to the northeast by the Kwantung army advisor Yoshiocha after the foundation of Manchukuo and disappeared after the Japanese surrender unquote here you get that kind of almost gleeful tone of the ghost writer coming through that kind of tone of delight and disaster that writers of inventories like this always seem to adopt when they enumerate the ill-gotten gains of disgraced leaders and politicians now Pu Jie having been reunited with his smuggled treasures in Tianjin what did it mean to choose the album by Chen Shu well that prompts the question what was the state of the art canon and the critical hierarchy of his tutors and advisors and we can infer this from the personnel involved the leading connoisseurs were the imperial tutor Chen Baochun and noted antiquarian and after the gentle gong fire a royalist called Zheng Xiaoshu who had previously lived from selling his calligraphy in Beijing and who subsequently became Pu Yi's de facto court calligrapher it was he that wrote the preface for Twilight in the Forbidden City so Johnson, Chen and Zheng quickly became a triumvirate of loyal advisors to the young ex-emperor now Johnson's time as tutor to Pu Yi coincided with the first concerted moves in the new republic towards modernisation of society and culture the use of new models in the newly founded art academies sparked a ferrory in the media and in 1919 the new culture movement promoted education reforms such as replacing classical Chinese with vernacular literature and brushes with fountain pens for writing meanwhile advances in technology transformed print media spurring the growth of public opinion informed by an illustrated press and in this mix an expressive masculine ink painting thrived in Beijing and Shanghai the antiquarian scholar painter Wu Changshuo painted heartily up to his demise aged 83 in 1927 and exemplifying the social mobility of the new republic a peasant-born artist called Qi Bai Xu famed in 1920s Beijing for his ragged brush work inventive design see here the layering and the framing and his industry he was made a professor in a new art academy in the late 1920s even as he supported a child bride in the provinces a concubine in Beijing and more than a dozen children by both of them all of this coincided with the height of the Warlord era in North China between 1916 and 1928 Johnson remarks in Twilight that he was probably alone among Puy's tutors in introducing him to the news but what were Johnson's aesthetic credentials well to explore this let's consider the commemoration of events that turned Puy's childhood world upside down it's the 5th of November 1924 the city is surrounded by warlord troops and given three hours to leave Puy temporarily takes refuge in his father's mansion north of the Forbidden City for several weeks rumour and civil war plotting swirl around the city and then aided by close advisers including Johnson Puy flees concealed in a cart on the stormy 29th to the safety of the Japanese legation in the foreign controlled legation district just south of the Forbidden City and he remains here under Minister Yoshizawa's protection until early 1925 Puy's escape across Beijing during the dust storm was commemorated in this painting scroll assembled by Zheng Xiaoshu reproduced in grainy half tone in Johnson's memoir in the title piece inscribed with righteousness and dignity Chun Ba Chun called the scroll painting a storm and a marvel and appended a poem he wrote from it from which Johnston took the English title The Flight of the Dragon Johnston's translation is below there I'll come back to that in a second As to the painting the short composition is anchored at the left end by wind torn pine trees traditional symbols of stalwart scholars evidently referring to Zheng Chun and perhaps Johnston and in the middle seen through the dust storm over the outer walls of the Forbidden City the palace rooftops all askew recede into the middle distance and to the right flying half hidden in a swirling cloud of dust is the young dragon the escaping emperor going off alone now the abnormal effects include the disorienting left to right movement the vertiginous looping of the composition the dishevelled pines the childish angling of buildings out of the orderly grid matrix of the city with Zheng Xiao Xu as producer this scroll variously embodies Chinese painting tradition but in uncharted modern waters it depicts the emperor and statesman engaged in affairs of state in republican times presented through the lyric voices of scholar officials it evokes Qing court art in its collaborative production and contemporary look and despite these continuities with the past it's patently reflexive about its purpose as an emotive record of Qing derasernation from the Forbidden City after 280 years now Johnston was a China hand and close to Chun Ba Chun and Zheng Xiao Xu but not like them an art connoisseur and he either mistakenly or deliberately identified the painter as Zheng Xiao Xu whose sobriquet was Su Can if this was a mistake as I suppose it was easily done Chun Ba Chun's inscription says Su Can Tzu Hoa which means literally Su Can made this painting although in classical Chinese it can also mean Su Can had this painting made which is what he meant the signature on the painting is also confusing particularly if Johnston had only a grainy photograph like this as a record it in fact reads respectfully painted by Zheng Chang Zheng Chang Gong Hui and is penned in small formal script in a rather anachronistic formula the third and fourth characters read Gong Hui respectfully painted in the manner of artists at the Qing court it was clearly a commission from a modern artist game enough to play the part of Qing court painter and as to the artist's two character name the surname is the same as Zheng Xiao Xu's while the second character Chang is not easily legible in the reproduction in Johnson's book and it's possible Johnson never actually knew who this person was and his confusion probably arose due to the fact that Zheng Xiao Xu was also famous as a painter of pines as well as a calligrapher Johnston would have supposed rightly that Zheng could easily transpose strokes from calligraphy to paint pine trees as all scholar artists could the basic formula of his paintings backs that up you see these partial cropped views of pines which foreground ink and brushwork techniques but Zheng was not a painter of scenery like this which required mastery of a much wider range of pictorial techniques such as scale and depth, wash and texture and a more complex composition and framing and iconological effects of mood and ambience so the painting Flight of the Dragon does have various characteristics of the early works of the young artist who signed it Zheng Chang notably the anchoring clump of trees in the lower left which you could compare with this undated painting and a composition that ranges back into and across the picture frame and also the gray wash of the sky which serves equally well for the dust-strewn sky in Flight of the Dragon as it does here in the moonlit skies seen through bed branches, layered bed branches in Zheng Chang's Willow of 1926 and the signatures on these two paintings are very close as you'd expect if they were more or less co-evil and as far as I know the Flight of the Dragon has never been acknowledged as an early work by Zheng Chang Now Zheng Chang, also called Zheng Wu Chang was no ordinary painter but by the mid 1920s was emerging as a leading artist of modern literary style landscape having exhibited in the National Fine Arts exhibition in 1929 he'd attended Beijing Normal University from 1915 to 1918 which is presumably when Zheng Xiaoxu encountered him but he spent most of his life from 1922 in Shanghai working in art publishing up to his death in 1952 and he was very close to other prominent artists like Zhang Daqian his magnum opus was a compilation of Chinese painting studies a complete history of Chinese painting studies published in 1929 the title of which featured a trendy neologism painting studies Zheng Chang's book was graced with prefaces by three mavens of China's art world Wu Chang Shuo contributed this title page on the left Zheng Xiaoxu contributed a preface dated 1927 and the painter Huang Binghong another preface Zheng Chang was a sociable creature a portrait of Zheng Xiaoxu features in a handscroll painting commissioned of him in 1930 to record a tea party there's the portrait right in the middle there and he was evidently a sympathetic brush for Zheng Xiaoxu one who completed plenty of transcriptions of old master paintings with a modern flourish and who in his own words advocated quote studying painting not in order to take the past as one's teacher but so as actually to eject oneself from the old master tradition Da Da and becoming a master in one's own right by fusing reality with brush techniques of the ancients that's actually not a bad description of Flight of the Dragon but what can the figure of Zheng Chang tell us about the other paintings of concern tonight in particular the value of our Cheng Shuo album well in Zheng's history Cheng Shuo is listed in the third string of painters in the genre of flowers one of thirty who quote excelled either by dint of sheer industry or else free spiritedness who essentially could all enliven with colour and give life to fragrant flowers and were famous in their own time unquote to imagine the sheer industry mode and this is a slightly pejorative term consider two scrolls ascribed to Cheng Shuo in Taipei intended for display at the Duanwu Festival entitled elegant flowers of the fifth month like our album dated to the double ninth and it belonged in the type called pure display pictures that is elegant paintings made for festivals like New Year's Day or as here the double fifth elsewhere in Zheng Chang's text Cheng Shuo is recognised as famous in his time but the praise is qualified quote Mr Chen's bird and flower, grass and insect paintings are reminiscent of the Ming painters Xu Wei and Chen Chun that's a positive thing though one may object to his brush and ink handling as too bright be more tai guang we might say too flashy and to the lack of any distinctively untrammeled flavour unquote this is important as it elaborates upon Cheng Shuo's other free spirited mode exemplified by Johnson's album this was in the same vein as the mid Ming scholar painters Xu Wei and Chen Chun the demanding critic acknowledged that Cheng Shuo brought fragrant flowers to life but he fell short in using flashy brushwork and displaying a certain lack of exceptional flavour as hard to disagree this is quite useful engaging how the contextual value of Pu Yi's gift to Johnston was probably something above the artist's traditional third tier status we've seen how this free spirited mode was quite fashionable in the 1920s Zheng Cheng's history of Chinese painting studies which goes right up to 1929 provides more detail his exemplar is the recently deceased Wu Cheng Shuo who had inscribed his title page Wu is listed as the last of the top tier of Qing dynasty painters quote he paints flowers, bamboos and rocks in an unaffected and light hearted manner with vigour and archaism somewhere between Xu Wei and Bada Shanren indeed he profoundly captures the spirit of metal and stone that is late Qing antiquarianism among modern scholars he is the pinnacle of fashion unquote so on one side Wu Cheng Shuo is positioned as a torch bearer in art of the values of the late Qing intellectual movement referred to as the metal and stone studies or epigraphic studies movement which is an antiquarian trend within the wider intellectual skepticism called the evidentiary scholarship movement you can therefore posit antiquarian works like this one in which Wu Cheng Shuo painted in the flowers and added an inscription on a sheet of paper that had previously been prepared with an ink rubbing by an artisanal specialist in this from an ancient bronze vessel and its inscription meantime Wu Cheng Shuo was heir to an exemplar of an invigorated individualist or conceptualist CIE lineage see here in 1927 album leaf in Bada Shanren style and his painting was visualized as situated among the early modern greats somewhere between these two 16th, 17th century masters Xu Wei and Bada Shanren there is here a palatable sense of the canon of art in transition as the politically curated Qing order was being dismantled and replaced by a non-denominational set of masters with carefree sketchy brushes an expressive painting mode was being retroactively framed as core to scholar painting and the lineage proleptically founded by Xu Wei in the Ming and continued by Bada Shanren and Shi Tao in the Qing and according to Zheng Chang Wu Cheng Shuo's art supremely exemplified this visual discourse of modern scholars within the 1920s ink painting fraternity we now see the choice of the Cheng Shuo album in a new light the standard criticism held him as a third tier artist but of growing importance in the 1920s was the fact that he worked in this conceptualist ink mode and that he was a contemporary of and worked in a similar mode to the two emerging greats of this lineage Bada Shanren and Shi Tao so the album commemorates past personal and courtly relationships between emperor and tutor but it also has this new progressive quality of the 1920s which speaks as we've seen in particular to Zheng Xiao Xu's artistic network we'll never know if Cheng Baochun or Zheng Xiao Xu did pick out this album for Puy but what seemed at first like a simple memento selected from Puy's teenage art trove actually opens up the complexity of republican china's confused art world of politics in turmoil of a canon in transition and even of the validity of obsolescing royalist codes in shaping reactions to events and desires for the future so as now cares for these two gifts the fan and the album and rightly sees them as embodying its institutional connection with Sir Reginald Johnston and his service to Puy do be sure to have a look at them later in the Brunai gallery as for the flight of the dragon who knows if it survives after 1949 Chinese communists nor the ousted nationalists nor Japan under its new constitution had much reason to cherish Puy and his courtiers who made it as their reputation became enmeshed in the legacy of ambition and conflict in early 20th century East Asia Dear colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen it's a great honour and privilege to be allowed to say a few words of thanks to Professor Shane McCausland for what was a typically erudite stimulating an original lecture to his many achievements as a scholar of the transnational art world of Yuan Dynasty China he's now clearly opening up important new avenues of research into the transnational art world of China's 20th century and we will all have much to learn from this it's also a great pleasure to be able to celebrate the new agreement between the school and the Percival David Foundation and at the same time to welcome Shane into the Percival David chair of the history of art so I'm very conscious now that the longer I go on the less time there is to look at the art that we've just had so entertainingly introduced to us and so I need to be brief Professor McCausland and I are both graduates of the University of Cambridge where we both got our introduction to Chinese language and culture and I remain very grateful to it even if I now make my living at the other place but it has its little ways and so I offer an anecdote which and you'll need to bear with me on this does I believe have a real bearing on what we've heard tonight so 45 years ago this year on arriving at Cambridge and going for the first time to meet my director of studies a very distinguished professor translator of Persian poetry I was literally amazed to be introduced by him to Sir Stephen Runciman Runciman was the hugely renowned historian of Byzantium whose history of the crusades I had read and revered at school so meeting this great man was like being introduced to Edward Gibbon or or Summa Tien the idea that he was really in the same room as me was as I say amazing so in the kind of upper class pre-war accent I wasn't then much used to he said, ah, you are studying Chinese it may interest you to know that I once played four handed piano duets with the last emperor of China now, given that I a 17 year old grammar school boy from Aberdeen had a somewhat more restricted social circle no witty repost came to my lips but I have enjoyed telling this story many times in my life given that it puts me at only one degree of separation from Puyi himself that close to the dragon throne however a recent and exhaustive biography of Stephen Runciman reveals not only that he seems to have made this claim and told this story to everybody he met but that it isn't true he did indeed come to know Reginald Johnson in the course of a grand tour which took him to China in 1925 but meticulous research by his biographer reveals that he never in fact met Puyi at all never mind tinkling the ivories together it was a myth or less kindly a lie so now I'd like to invoke a figure from Shane's other great alma mater Princeton University where Harry G. Frankfurt taught philosophy with immense distinction from 1990 to 2002 in 2005 he published a short and uncannily prescient book on bullshit a serious work despite its title where he defines his topic as quote, speech intended to persuade without regard for truth the liar cares about the truth and tries to hide it but the bullshitter is both more dangerous and more morally wrong than the liar in that they don't really care whether what they say is true or false as long as it has the desired rhetorical effect I'd now put Stephen Runceman in that category at least as regards his encounter with the last emperor of China the mystique of the fallen empire often involving alluring tales about the imperial collections these I suggest have been immensely productive of bullshit in the study of Chinese art a field which in general has perhaps seen enough of that commodity so to hear the lecture we have just heard blending care and imagination into the best kind of scholarly bullshit director is a great intellectual treat and an index of work at the highest international quality in fact, let's face it there has been and sadly still is a lot of bullshit talked about China in the wider world misinformation which isn't quite lies but which cares too little for cannons of evidence or proof and is content to tell stories rather than ask questions that's why the kind of rigorous scholarship we've been privileged to witness tonight firmly grounded in both linguistic and disciplinary skills of the highest order is so important this school has a great record to uphold and after tonight we can be in no doubt that as Percival David Professor of the History of Art Shane McCausland will uphold it with great distinction and in full measure so I ask you to join me again in congratulating and thanking him once more