Published to accompany an exhibition at New York’s China Institute Gallery, this lavishly illustrated catalogue deftly contextualizes a group of extremely appealing small-scale works of painting and calligraphy that were made by or for the Southern Song court in Hangzhou (called Lin’an at the time) during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Situated in a fertile and temperate region near the center of China’s east coast, Hangzhou was a beauty spot famed for its West Lake and scenic mountains dotted with Buddhist and Daoist monasteries. In addition, from 1138 until 1276, it was also the supposedly temporary capital of a dynasty that had lost its northern heartland and original capital to foreign invasion. After the Southern Song regime abandoned the effort to recover the North and settled into ruling its truncated domain from Hangzhou, the palace and governmental institutions were re-established there, and the city evolved into a major cultural and economic center. By the end of the thirteenth century, Hangzhou was the largest city in the world, whose sophisticated urban life and bustling commerce famously dazzled Marco Polo. Its art, however, has hitherto received short shrift from scholars for various reasons, among them the condemnation of Southern Song rulers as morally lax by later historians, and later art critics’ disdain for works by professional artists as opposed to “scholar-amateurs.”

In her introductory essay, “West Lake and the Mapping of Southern Song Art” (for which a Chinese-language summary is provided), Hui-shu Lee describes how the physical landscape and human culture of Southern Song Hangzhou were closely intertwined and are embodied in surviving artworks. She focuses her discussion on the ways in which the objects reflect or evoke Hangzhou’s scenery and customs, rather than emphasizing their individual authorship and precise dating. In reconstructing the geographical setting and cultural practices of the capital, she cites contemporary gazetteers, histories, informal memoirs, and even creative literature, which shed considerable light on the activities of the four seasons, annual festivals, and special events, as well as provide information about Hangzhou’s physical landscape and architecture. Insights gleaned from these documentary sources enrich her interpretations of the fan and album paintings, which were sometimes made for special occasions and may allude pictorially to the festivities.

At the heart of Southern Song Hangzhou’s cultural life was the West Lake, which was bordered by mountains on three sides and faced the walled city to the east. South of the city proper was the imperial palace, built on the lower slopes of Fenghuangshan (Phoenix Mountain) and extending toward the southeast shore of the lake. In order to identify the places represented in fans and album leaves, Lee first correlates a labeled map of the West Lake region from a late Southern Song gazetteer (unfortunately illegible in fig. 2’s computer-generated reproduction) with two panoramic and detailed handscrolls that depict roughly the same area (fig. 3 from the Shanghai Museum and fig. 4 from the Freer Gallery, both attributed to Li Song but unlikely to be directly from his hand). Another work that Lee repeatedly invokes but reproduces only in a detail (Fig. 6) is an album by Ye Xiaoyan (fl. ca. 1253–58) called Ten Scenes of West Lake (National Palace Museum, Taipei), the earliest extant series of selected scenes around the lake, which are associated with a particular season, time of day, or special occasion, often with poetic undertones. The gazetteer map provides the names of many specific sites, and the paintings supply their physical appearances. Using these matchings as a visual database, Lee is able to recognize distinctive locations and buildings when they appear individually in small album leaves and fans. In her view, many paintings actually depict particular places, rather than simply generic scenery. She proposes precise identifications for a number of surviving paintings, some of which apparently portray buildings, courtyards, and gardens inside the extensive palace compound. Although her suggestion that these descriptions provide the “infrastructure of Southern Song visual culture” (20) seems something of an overstatement, her methods and insights are nonetheless an important contribution to scholarship on Southern Song art.

Drawing upon her extensive research concerning the artistic involvement of certain Southern Song emperors and empresses, Lee traces several patterns of interaction between the ruling house and court artists. Far more cultivated than rulers of any other dynasty, most Southern Song emperors (and some empresses) were accomplished practitioners of poetry and calligraphy who frequently deployed their works as gifts in both public and private contexts. Of particular interest to Lee are examples of imperial calligraphy that appear on or juxtaposed to paintings. In contrast to the common tendency of traditional connoisseurs and modern scholars to focus primarily on the painting and treat the calligraphy as an appendage, Lee correctly points out that the text (whether composed or merely selected by the emperor or empress) would have preceded the pictorialization, providing the reason for making it. Thus, she argues that surviving examples of imperial inscriptions that accompany paintings are vital for interpreting the context and significance of the work as a whole. Furthermore, in comparing examples from earlier and later Southern Song reigns, she observes that the aesthetics of the overall design became increasingly important in determining where an imperial inscription was placed on the painting created to receive it. Summarizing the most interesting points from her previous studies, Lee analyzes the artistic collaborations of Emperor Ningzong (r. 1194–1124) and Empress Yang (1162–1233) with Ma Yuan (fl. ca. 1190–1225) and Emperor Lizong (r. 1225–64) with Ma Lin (ca. 1180–after 1256) in some detail.

Whether or not imperial patrons inscribed paintings by court artists, they often bestowed such works as gifts. In her brief discussion of religious paintings, Lee speculates that surviving icons painted in courtly styles were commissioned either for observances in the palace or for pious donation to local Buddhist monasteries and Daoist temples, several of which were patronized by the imperial family. She contrasts the colorful sophistication of court religious paintings, such as Liu Songnian’s images of Luohan (a set of originally sixteen or eighteen hanging scrolls, dated 1207, three extant in the National Palace Museum, Taipei) and Ma Yuan’s portraits of Chan patriarchs (originally five hanging scrolls, three surviving in the Tokyo National Museum), with the rougher and often monochrome works that were painted in the religious establishments themselves. While interpreting such contrasts as emblematic of more fundamental distinctions between the secular world of the urban palace and the spiritual realm of the mountain monastery, Lee nonetheless notes the frequent interactions between the two spheres and suggests that the unadorned monastic aesthetic influenced some court artists, such as Xia Gui (fl. ca. 1195–1230). Without arguing the case in detail, she rightly suggests that Southern Song religious painting should be studied as part of the larger context of Hangzhou art, rather than being treated as a separate tradition, as many previous scholars have approached it.

The catalogue proper contains thirty-seven entries, most of which are self-contained discussions of individual paintings or calligraphy, with one collective entry for eight ceramic bowls representing three kinds of Southern Song ware. The objects in the exhibition include not only loans from museums and private collections in the United States and Taiwan, but also an unusual number of works made available by dealers. Although the propriety of incorporating so many of the latter may be questioned, the pieces themselves are of high quality and interest. For the most part, Lee’s descriptions of the objects are precise and to the point, occasionally rising to eloquence. In contrast to her introductory essay, the entries do engage with questions of style, attribution, and dating, in addition to offering interpretations of subject matter. Her citations of relevant information from documentary sources are usually helpful and illuminating, such as the description of the moon’s once-a-year appearance (like the sun at Stonehenge) in the narrow cleft of Moon Cliff (Yueyan) on Fenghuangshan, which is useful for interpreting the scene depicted in an album leaf from the Cleveland Museum of Art (cat. no. 7). On occasion, her speculations overreach the evidence, as in her suggestion that Emperor Ningzong’s persona is depicted in Scholars Conversing Beneath Blossoming Plum Trees, a fan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (cat. no. 17). The entry on ceramics seems a somewhat random afterthought, serving primarily as a pretext to mention Aoki Masaru’s hoary dichotomy of the “rustic” vs. the “elegant” modes in Southern Song culture.

Apart from occasional minor faltering, the catalogue represents fine scholarship and is a worthy contribution to the field. Readable enough for undergraduate classroom use, its inclusion of extensive notes, bibliography, and list of Chinese characters (but alas, no index) make it a valuable resource for graduate students and scholars as well.