"All Under Heaven:" Walter Davis in conversation with Lisa Claypool

Eight wood block-printed sheets are displayed across the wall, composing a complete and lofty view of “all under heaven.” Words printed on it flatten the gently modeled landscape from three to two-dimensions; the title, “A Complete Map of the Great Qing’s Ten-thousand Year Unified [Realm] of All Under Heaven” (大清萬年一統天下全圖) floats to the right above hump-backed waves encircling the islands of Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, and Taiwan. At the centre, on the mainland of China, cities are simple circled names. Administrative centres are picked out in white. Rivers run like veins throughout. To the far left, what might be called the “Far West,” beyond the notched lines denoting the Great Wall, lie England, Holland, and the “Small” and “Great” “Western Oceans” (小西洋，大西洋).

The map, from which the exhibition “All Under Heaven” drew its name,* is what it appears to be (a functional object), but it is also more than that. It is an artful representation, a thing to be displayed much like a hanging scroll, and given its pattern-like appearance, perhaps it might be considered ornamental. Further, while the endless city-circles that merge together across the landscape may evoke China’s sprawling megalopolises now, in 1823, when the map was designed, they point instead to an impulse towards order and ordering, of putting each urban space into its own designated place. Indeed, this geography of China bears the stamp of its age – although the surface is broken up into units (cities, prefectures, provinces), it nonetheless also is a space for what can’t be seen, measured or pictured at the empire’s “Far Western” edges.

I recently talked with the curator of the exhibition, Walter Davis, about the themes and objects in the exhibition. Dr. Davis is Assistant Professor of the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the university.

Lisa Claypool [LC]: I’d like to begin with the title of the exhibition, “All Under Heaven.” Can you talk a bit about the meaning of the phrase?

Walter Davis [WD]:  The English phrase translates a Chinese term, tianxia, which shows up in the Chinese titles of several maps in the exhibition. Those maps claim to depict both the whole of the world and the Chinese empire within it in a definitive way.  Of course, like all maps, they’re quite selective and partial. They make China supremely large and important, essentially the political and cultural centre of the world. That was pretty far from the truth in the 19^th century, when they were made. The exhibition’s European maps and books from that era portray China quite differently. So the title of the exhibition is meant to highlight one of the more interesting lessons I think the Sully collection has to offer—namely that understandings of China, even those that claim to be definitive and comprehensive, are really limited and partial, subject to history. I think there is another irony at work in the title, too. The show is eclectic and calls into question the idea of trying to be comprehensive, but it also shows us parts of Chinese culture that we rarely get to see. There are loads of exhibitions about China that focus on artifacts of high culture—imperial bronzes, literati paintings, porcelains from imperial kilns—as if that is all there was. The Sully collection includes all sorts of practical objects—maps, military manuals, export paintings, and the like—that haven’t been widely collected or studied much. So the show shows us more of “all under Heaven” than we normally get to see, even if it isn’t “all under Heaven.”

LC:  Why this impulse towards ordering knowledge? Why was it so necessary?

WD: Yes, a great many of the works do try to impose an order and intelligibility on China. I suppose we might say that this is what literature and art do quite generally—a poem tries to bring subjective experience into some more universally intelligible form through language, for example. But it’s true that the works in the show seem qualitatively different. They’re spelling out things like spatial units, administrative boundaries, techniques for manipulating weapons, military manoeuvres, recursive social customs, etc. The fact that many of the works were originally practical in their primary functions undoubtedly has something to do with this. Government administrators, soldiers, captains of ships and the like need precise information and regular systems in order to make decisions and act. Makers of lanterns used patterns for their designs and may have used pattern books to sell their wares. Regularity makes for efficiency of both production and circulation. In the case of the European texts, which are more clearly ethnographic and probably the least functional, the impulses to order were probably quite different. They have to do with things like English notions of England’s civility in comparison to China’s supposed barbarity—discourses on culture and identity that helped Europeans make sense of their own lives through comparisons with China. Of course, some of the European works, like the English nautical map or the map of Yunnan province, were functional, too, doing things like helping Europeans exploit opportunities in China—showing how to carry opium into Canton or where to develop industrial projects in the interior.

LC: What role did pictures play in the making of knowledge in late imperial China?

WD: One of the minor themes that I tried to subtly point to in the catalogue in particular is that a lot of Western observers of China, who were publishing books about China, were drawn to China in visual terms. And they were composing the bits and pieces of China that they could put together into a mental picture of China, as grist for further visual creation.

And even now, there are artists and designers who come to the exhibition and see stuff for the first time and think, “Wow, that’s a really cool way of forming some sort of shape” – they run with it.

LC:  So they are taking knowledge about China and giving it a new pictorial form.

WD: Or taking pictorial formulations of China that encode knowledge and then putting those out into a different context, so that those pictures evolve.

Historically, one of the things I was struck by is how much the popular 19^th-century [Western] understanding of China was based upon export ware. We have very technically astute maps in the show, scholarly books – a book on Chinese opera, for instance, in which the illustrations are clearly either done by or based upon Chinese export painters’ work. There are older books in the exhibition that do the same thing. They purport to talk about Chinese society, and are produced by English artists who are basically transcribing export painters’ genre pictures. There’s a kind of flow out of China of information that wasn’t meant for Chinese people to begin with. It gets sent into the European context of readers and publishers and the like, and it’s actually being reincorporated into China now.

LC:  It was incorporated into pictures in China even in the 19^th century, though, as painting and photographic practices flowed from Canton -- where the export factories were located -- to Shanghai, for example. Why do you suppose these information-laden objects are attracting renewed attention now?

WD: Well, there is a tremendous interest in the past in China today. For much of the twentieth century and especially in the Maoist era [1949-1976], the past was seen as feudal and corrosive, and the Cultural Revolution destroyed many traces of older Chinese culture—buildings, books, paintings, sculptures, mummies, you name it – in the name of remaking China into a socialist paradise with Mao as paramount leader. But that attitude has reversed now. The market and profit are seen as good things. Many Chinese are now intensely proud of Chinese culture, especially as China is now a superpower, and they’re eager to know and own a piece of its long history. It’s not just traditional esteemed art forms like scholar-amateur painting and calligraphy that sell for high prices on the art market in China but other cultural objects or traces, things that wouldn’t have gotten much attention a decade or two ago.

LC:  One of the challenges of an academic curator is taking research and transforming it into a visual argument or question in the gallery space. Can you talk about the argument you’re presenting here?

WD: I think the show and catalogue make multiple arguments. I would like to think I did this by design, as a way of encouraging people to do a lot of the interpretive figuring for themselves. The type of teaching and writing that I try to practice in general might not be best described as an argument per se, at least not one with a crystal-clear structure, a sequence of linear steps that result in an irrefutable conclusion. The conclusions are perhaps more like realizations, which are multiple and differ somewhat from person to person. I hope the argument – realizations, themes, whatever—emerge for visitors to the show and readers of the catalogue –just as they took shape for me as I tried to make sense of a quite diverse collection of objects. Which is to say in bits and pieces as one confronts details, sees connections, repetitions, parallelism, changes, and that sort of thing.

I am overly beholden to chronology because that helps me personally make sense of the world. And so in most of my work that’s one of the first things I go for if I can, as a way of imposing some sort of order on material that’s somewhat historical.  It helps greatly in making sense of diverse phenomena, as do things like medium, genre, context of production and circulation. So I’ve tried to draw attention to things like formal features and historical developments that help make sense of the works while pointing out interesting details that can tie things together. And often I make mental associations between things I’ve seen, though I am always a little bit worried about free associating too much.

LC:  We’re dealing with pictures that encourage us to develop a historical imagination. That’s one of the interesting tensions in this exhibition. There’s a shifting line between legibility or regulation and something more, something that can’t be defined or expressed so easily. Maps are obvious examples of that, to return to the gallery design – since they are displayed next to each other, and chronologically ordered, they provide us with a window into changing perceptions of China both outside and inside China.

WD:  We have Europeans getting into China increasingly aggressively over time and at the same time, we have Chinese designers picturing China in a pretty old-fashioned way: China as the cultural centre of the universe, China as this massive, powerful, unified whole, that is completely autonomous and not threatened by other nations. And then there is recognition over time -- not entirely through the maps, but it shows up in the military manuals – that China can’t hold its own economically and militarily against more powerful France or England or even Japan later on. There’s recognition  by part of the Qing court that, they really need to revitalize our military and institute foreign practices for hauling cannon, for example, that will allow them to defend themselves. So in the sections of the display dealing with earlier material, there’s a view of China’s power and prestige – one that seems nostalgic, now – that gives way to a frenetic attempt to reclaim that, under pressure, in the later sections. And that crosses media from maps to technical manuals. There are some manuals, for example, about revitalizing the Chinese military through regular training, which wasn’t actually something that they did, and also troop formations and movements. There’s a section of European publications with Chinese expertise coming out of Shanghai, with Europeans firmly ensconced in Shanghai and Beijing, and exploring places that originally would not have been open to them, like Yunnan Province in the south or the Forbidden City itself.  The remainder of the exhibition is in the Peel Collection, and features somewhat normative texts about customs and social cataloguing and description, export paintings, and European paintings on Chinese daily life, mores and manners.

LC: The catalogue is a beautiful extension of the gallery space in book form. Would you talk about the process of designing the catalogue?

WD: I worked with an extremely talented designer, Lara Minja, who has done a lot outstanding design for the Bruce Peel Special Collections. I wrote the text and identified which photographs I wanted to use for illustrations, and she developed the visual means of organizing the text and stating some of its themes. She came up with a number of delightful surprises. One of the things that she did was to take a small print -- one of my favourite objects in the show – depicting the signing of the treaty of peace for the Second Opium War. In the print, the French and British are on one side, and the Chinese on the other side, and in the catalogue she splits that across the gutter. So she has this two-page spread, lovely large reproductions so that you get to see these very small figures, and you get to inspect them up close. It’s great. And yet there’s this physical divide that evokes the kind of divide that probably was present with Prince Kung and Lord Elgin. I would have never thought to do that. I thought that was brilliant.

LC: Shall we look at a few objects together?

WD:  Let’s start with this map of Yunnan Province [published in Shanghai ca. 1917-1929]. Initially I was not quite sure what to do with this map. It looked very much like a modern map of one of the contemporary Chinese provinces. It uses a projection and a numerical ordering system that are very much of 20^th-century Western cartography. Really the only nod to some kind of Chinese cultural dimension is the inclusion of Chinese characters for the name of the province – they’re done in an approximation of an archaic script carved in stone. The more I looked into it, I found that one of the people responsible for this was an Englishman who went to Shanghai as a journalist, and as a promoter of business and economic expansion. It turns out that this map was produced as a starting point for European industrial development of China. It was designed for an economic gazetteer and atlas, which is pretty interesting in its own right. The map includes the postal codes, the postal romanization system that was devised about this time. This was an innovation that allowed Europeans and Americans to transfer goods around China. So I thought that was pretty interesting – we have this economic exploitation, this drooling over China. And then it turns out that the guy who designed it, Edwin Dingle, actually walked across China. He spent time in Tibet, and ended up moving to California and becoming a kind of guru, teaching yoga and trading not on the economic riches of China, but on this spiritual power that he learned in China. That’s quite remarkable – he went to China with this modern European industrialist vision, and ended up taking away something quite different. Still of his time, of course.

LC: One thing I like about the map is that the province explodes out of the map’s frame. And that is something I don’t think you see so often in European map-making. It’s as if there’s something so flourishing, so prosperous about Yunnan that it can’t be contained within the frame of the map. And wasn’t Yunnan also a politically sensitive area at this time?

WD: Yes, that’s true, but Dingle has maps of all of the early Republican-era provinces, and in the atlas there are maps of all of the provincial railroads. But he also wrote a book about one of the political figures in the Republican 1911 revolution. He was in the thick of things – at least in his own view – from an Anglophone perspective

Let’s look at one of my favorite objects in the exhibition. It’s called “The Signing of the Treaty of Peace,” the “Signature du traité de paix.” It has a long, coloured horizontal space, and below that it is an equally-sized space for the paired titles in English and French. The titles don’t actually correspond to the placement of the national representatives in the print. The print is a lithographic reproduction of a Chinese painting, which is noted below – photographed by Goupil, but painted in Peking. So it’s probably the work of an anonymous Chinese export artist – it’s not signed -- showing this traumatic experience when Prince Kung makes even more concessions to stop the French and English from running further amok after the Second Opium War [1856-60]. You’ve got the Europeans on the right – primarily the British, I think – and then the Chinese on the left. There’s lots of detail in the faces, and the Chinese look unhappy about the circumstances. The print was published by a major art dealer in Paris that dealt in reproductions of Orientalist paintings. It’s presented as quaint Chinese art documenting an historical event. But of course history painting is not such an important genre in Chinese painting. And I don’t think it was done in a style that was particularly appreciated in China. You can imagine European patrons snapping this up as a picture of victories in the East, and taking it to be a Chinese picture that actually would not have gone down well at all in China.

LC: Some of the detail, like the figure turned with his back to the artist to better display his long braided queue, would have been fascinating to a European audience. And I like how orderly the soldiers are -- lined up in perfect formation.

WD: I think the musical instruments are pretty delightful. They must have been quite cacophonous. Chinese musicians with Chinese instruments using Chinese musical scales on the left, and the British on the right – maybe including a few French sailors – with some type of horn. It looks like coiled snakes. The artist has clearly never seen that instrument – I’m not sure what it is.

LC: All of the Europeans in the band are wearing spectacles!

WD: They all have reddish beards, giant hooked noses, and look exactly like the stereotypical vision of European soldiers in a Chinese movie about the Opium War from the 1990s – the one that came out when Hong Kong was being reunified with China.

LC: Is there a final object you’d like to introduce?

WD: The “Genryô” album was particularly interesting to work on. It’s a Japanese work, a pictorial rendition of one of the most popular Confucian didactic texts in later imperial China, which actually circulated quite widely in Korea and Japan. The style of the paintings and calligraphies is Japanese. The pastels, and the softness to the figures and the brush strokes, which are more curvilinear and not as angular as contemporary Chinese brush work, indicates that it perhaps is out of the Kanô school. This is probably an early or mid-Edo album [1603-1868], spectacularly framed in gold foil, with gold pigment and gold leaf, arrayed according to Japanese taste. Perhaps it was made for merchants who were trying to get a little bit of Confucian credibility, while at the same time having some snazzy flash. And yet it’s this bit of China which has taken root outside of China. These are stories about legendary emperors and various exemplars of Confucian filial piety. While researching it, it was nice to think of this as being an example of Chinese culture—not just having its origin and existence in China, but actually being part of the lived experience and the valued world elsewhere. In the process of working on it, I was looking through Japanese library websites, and there are a lot of albums of this subject. In mainstream versions – unlike this album – the figures are localized by rendering them in Japanese dress. But there is a smaller but very persistent stream in which they are rendered as Chinese, something like what you see in illustrations to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國志, for instance, and that you see here. The album figures are from Chinese legend and history, and they’re meant to look like that. That Chinese strain in Japan is not widely discussed by Japanese historians of arts of Japan, because it doesn’t fit so much into a nativist view of Japanese culture, which has been pretty strong since the end of the second World War, and yet it’s very much there. This album is on the Sinophile side.

LC: What’s the content, more specifically?

WD: To It has to do with social order. Here, it’s prescriptive. For example, one story about filial behaviour says you should bare your back so that the mosquitoes will eat you and not your sleeping parents. And when your mother-in-law, who doesn’t like you, wants fresh fish in winter, you absolutely should do something as crazy as lying on the river bed to melt the ice with your body warmth in order to get fresh fish.

LC: A perfect picture for Edmonton. Thanks so much for talking with me, and congratulations, again, on this rich and wonderfully curated exhibition.

*At the University of Alberta FAB Gallery through April 17, M-F 10-4 and Sat 2-5, and the Bruce Peel Special Collection in the main library through September 13, M-F noon-5.