UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation recovers the Qing “collaborator” and painter Fa Ruozhen (1613–1696), a literati from Shandong province. Through Fa, it problematizes traditional scholarly approaches that privilege accounts of “national” memories produced by Ming loyalists and foregrounds instead what united artists from both sides of the political spectrum, namely the widespread turn to picturing the locale and its capacity to serve as a site of personal and collective memory key to individual and group identity formation.

Following the establishment of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), commemorative landscape paintings took pride of place in artists’ oeuvres. In the 1660s, the new regime executed over seventy literati for recording their memories of the fallen Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Known as the Ming History Case, this brutal episode gave additional weight and urgency to the act of recording memories. The dissertation contends that Fa Ruozhen responded to the traumatic dynastic change and imperial censorship by turning to the well-established genre of commemorative landscape painting. For instance, he painted a series of cloudy mountains that commemorated his parents. He employed seriality as a strategy to create place-based memories rooted not in the built environments but in natural landscape. By repeating specific natural features across paintings, Fa Ruozhen imbued local landscapes with recollections of family, friends, and cultural history. Where imperial commissions celebrated national events, designed to consolidate Manchu rulership, Fa’s artistic practice aimed at reconstructing collective literati identities of the conquest generation by elevating familial and local memories.

Strikingly, the same strategies are evident in the landscapes of painters who are usually seen as the ethical antithesis to early Qing officials: those who remained loyal to the Ming dynasty such as the artist Xu Fang (1622–1694). The dissertation argues that the commemorative landscapes of the early Qing became a vibrant site for the negotiation of conquest identities. They provided a medium for artists to construct continuities across political and dynastic divides, pointing to the vitality of the genre in a period of rapid transformation.