Including art historian Catherine Pagani’s study of Chinese popular prints based on the

classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms 􀳘􀝓􁀆􁁬. Like Wang, Pagani argues that

the prints “reinforced ideas presented in theater” by “presenting the same tales and

promoting the same cultural ideals.”213 For Pagani, theater also “provided the context for

an image that would allow for a full understanding and enjoyment of a Three Kingdoms

print.”214 Similarly, sinologist Li-ling Hsiao has argued that the many printed illustrations

of theater performances found in the published plays of the Ming period are also designed

to evoke the experience of theater for readers. Hsiao uses the term “performance

213 Catherine Pagani, “The Theme of Three Kingdoms in Chinese Popular Woodblock Prints,” in Three

Kingdoms and Chinese Culture, eds. Kimberly Besio and Constantine Tung (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 2007), 103.

214 Ibid., 94.

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illustration” instead of “narrative illustration” to stress the emphasis on theatricality

found in these images.215

In this chapter, I will argue that depictions of theater in Mianzhu nianhua play

into a whole range of issues beyond simply conveying a narrative or evoking a theatrical

performance, although these elements are certainly present. Instead of approaching

nianhua as symbolic or communicative devices that represent an existing narrative or

performance, I will stress their role as catalysts for creative storytelling sessions where

references to theater can take on new meaning and ritual significance. Drawing on a

growing body of scholarship that examines the limitations of interpreting visual media as

fixed linear narratives, I will underscore this issue of performativity and push for a

rethinking of established categories such as theatre-based nianhua or narrative-based

nianhua.

In her study of Chinese “narrative illustration,” art historian Julia Murray has

pointed to the fact that there is no traditional term or category for “narrative” in the

Chinese literary tradition, a problem long recognized by literary specialists.216 Murray

thus warns against imposing a “core narrative” upon images that might actually call up

multiple narratives and interpretations for different viewers.217 Keeping this issue in

mind, Murray argues that it is still worthwhile to analyze different forms of narrative

illustration in relation to the written narratives found in Chinese cultural discourses. For

215 Li-ling Hsiao, The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theater, and Reading in the Wanli Period

(Leiden: Brill, 2007): introduction.

216 This particular issue is dealt with in Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The

Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 37-52.

217On this issue, Murray cites Barbara Herrnstein Smith, who challenges the structuralist notion that primal

core stories underlie all manifestations of a particular narrative. For Smith, there are only versions or

retellings of stories that are constructed in relation to each other, for specific purposes and within particular

contexts. Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology

(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 2007), 10.

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Murray, the essential characteristic of narrative “is that something happens. There is a

story, which means that one or more events occur in a sequence of time… in terms of

visual art, narrative illustration might then be defined as a picture that relates a story”

(author’s italics).218

In contrast to Murray, art historian Efrat Biberman has argued for an alternate

conception of narrative illustration that does not take for granted the existence of

coherent temporal orders within images. Biberman argues that paintings do not unfold

temporally in the same way as written or verbal texts. Although the notion of narrative

structure has been recast as a “meta-concept valid for various human activities” since the

writings of Roland Barthes, there is still the tendency to bring various literary

assumptions to bear on images. This includes the assumption that a “painting is a

coherent, decipherable object” that can be “solved” with a narrative interpretation and

that a painting may bear a “coherent structure within a given temporal order” and that this

order is “fully available to the viewing subject.”219

Challenging these assumptions, Biberman points to the “persistent gap between

the picture and the narrative discourse it entails,” which always produces “a visual

surplus that cannot be verbalized.”220 Instead of imposing a temporal narrative structure

upon a picture, Biberman argues that “viewing a picture is fragmentary by nature; its

temporality is not necessarily successive and does not correlate with the strict criteria that

narrative structure demands.”221 For Biberman, a theory of “narrativity in the visual field”

must therefore acknowledge how “every viewer, in a sense, reinvents the narrativity she

218 Murray, Mirror of Morality, 12.

219 Efrat Biberman, “On Narrativity in the Visual Field: A Psychoanalytic View of Velazquez's Las

Meninas,” Narrative 14, no. 3 (2006): 241.

220 Ibid., 237.

221 Ibid.

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finds in a picture.” Depending on the situation, this may or may not involve the narrative

components such as “series of events, time duration, causal connections and plot.”222

In this chapter, I will contribute to this by adding that it is not only the “visual

surplus” or lack of temporal order that sets pictures apart from other written or verbal

narratives. The very notion of the “visual field” must also be qualified to address the

multi-sensorial, embodied, and culturally specific modes of engagement with images. To

do this, I will draw on the critical work of visual studies scholars and anthropologists who

have complicated the very category of the “visual.” As visual studies scholar Mieke Bal

has convincingly argued, the “act of looking is profoundly ‘impure’” in that it is

“inherently synaesthetic” and an act that is “framed, framing, interpreting, affect-laden,

cognitive and intellectual.” 223 There is certainly greater need to trouble the disciplinary

divides separating the visual and non-visual realms of activity, as productive topics of

critique rather than policed boundaries.

Along the same lines, anthropologist Christopher Pinney has set forth the notion

of “corpothetics” to move beyond debates concerned with the aesthetic value of art. In his

study of popular religious prints in contemporary India, Pinney defines the notion of

“corpothetics” as “the sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement that most

people (except Kantians and Modernists) have with artworks.”224 In shifting the analysis

from aesthetics to corpothetics, Pinney attempts to “transpose the discussion of aesthetics

onto political grounds” by acknowledging how the agency and social significance of

popular prints are produced within “fields of conflict” that inform everyday life in the

222 Ibid.

223 Mieke Bal, “Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 5

(2003): 9.

224 Christopher Pinney, “Piercing the Skin of the Idol,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of

Enchantment, ed. Chris Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 158.

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“messy reality of India.” Instead of framing the issues around the stylistic or formal

features of the prints, Pinney’s emphasis is on “bodily praxis” or the “poetics of

materiality and corporeality around the images.”225

In the discussions below, I will use these theoretical advances to rethink the role

of narrativity in nianhua and to ask the question: What is at stake, politically and

historically, in these embodied practices of narrativity that lie beyond the archive? To

tackle this question from a few different angles, I will first draw on interview sessions

with local printmakers who strategically deploy a range of performative gestures and

storytelling techniques to boost the social capital of their workshops and their nianhua

products. These knowledgeable producers creatively perform their mastery of nianhua in

ways that directly meet the needs of the situation at hand, often using voice, gesture, eye

contact, rhythm, and other storytelling conventions to shape the social relations between

speaker and audience. I will then build on this discussion by connecting these

“corpothetic” practices to the many gestures, costumes, sounds, props, and famous

characters of theatre that appear in a wide range of nianhua, where they are transformed

and put to new uses in the home or marketplace by nianhua consumers. In doing so, I

will attempt to uncover some of the parallels between Sichuan’s ritual theater traditions

and the nianhua industry that have been concealed by folk art typologies that organize

works according to function or format.

Instead of treating only certain works as narrative illustrations, I will argue that

the embodied practices of narrativity are not reserved for a special class of nianhua.

Instead, many works serve as sites of “narrative density,” a term I will use to describe

how nianhua are densely packed with narrative cues (such as mnemonic and aural cues)

225 Ibid., 169.

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that give rise to a range of narrative possibilities to be activated by knowledgeable

viewers. This notion of narrative density is illuminated in the interview sessions

discussed, but it also pushes for an alternate interpretation of a high profile nianhua

“treasure,” a set of late Qing dynasty scroll paintings titled Greeting Spring 􁂒􀔽􀹭 (fig.

56). While existing interpretations treat the work as a narrative illustration that unfolds

temporally due to the presence of repeating figures in a street parade, I will argue that the

painting can be understood as a site of narrative density, where a range of narratives may

be activated to suit the immediate needs of its elite patrons and users. In particular, I will

argue that the prevalent use of rebus imagery suggests that the painting was both

designed and used as a ritually efficacious image to activate auspicious speech. The key

goal here is to recover the role of narrativity within the ritual context of this important

work, and thus establish a way forward for recuperating the ritual significance of many

other historic nianhua.