Visualizing exemplary lives: women’s self-portraits in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract

This paper examines women’s self-portraits during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in China. I am particularly interested in the category of portraits that served for the women painters as a visual means of self-promotion. By capturing crucial moments in their life-time dedication to the ideal of female virtue, while at the same time soliciting responses from elite society, these women painters used their visual representations to assert their moral authority and to seek social honor. Although women’s self-portraits were traditionally a marginal artistic genre in China, and only very few of them have survived, in this paper I argue that an abundance of literary texts testifies to the prominence of these portraits during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I refer primarily to the inscriptions and colophons, which not only occupied the physical spaces of the portraits but also became “extended social events,” often carried out in the form of poetic exchanges among the elites. Despite the loss of the original portraits (a few do survive), many of these texts have been preserved in treatises on paintings and in women’s collections of writings. Their essentially “visual” quality, I argue, allows us a chance to reconstruct this neglected artistic genre and to hear the messages that these portraits conveyed.