Between Holy Mother and Empress Dowager: The Re-making of Marian Imagery in Early 20th-Century China

Abstract

<p>This paper examines a distinct set of hybrid style Madonna portraits made by Chinese Catholic artists at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was a time when Catholic missions in China turned to a different direction in the aftermaths of the Boxer Rebellion, and the Manchu court presided by Empress Dowager Cixi began to embrace Western culture in her last attempts to recover the Qing regime. These factors incidentally prepared an opportunity for a group of Catholic artists from the Tushanwan Art Workshop in Shanghai to experiment new modes and styles of Marian iconography. Taking a closer look at the image-making process, which has been largely ignored or misinterpreted in previous research, I will discuss how these artists undertook sophisticated treatments in two subsequent Madonna portraits. They integrated different parts of the classical Marian icons and the most recent photograph/portrait images of Cixi to fashion a creative synthetic representation, an artwork crossing the boundaries of Chinese and Western, religious and secular, and church and state. Such imagery offered a new way in which Chinese Catholics could express devotional energy and sensibility towards Mary, particularly for her salvific power in times of adversity. As the first portrait appeared in the 1904 World’s Fair at St. Louis and the second one was officially accepted as the model image of Our Lady of China, I argue that they became effective media for Chinese Catholics to represent and document collective memory of the Holy Mother featuring a mixed Western and Chinese appearance.</p>