Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 33 (2011), pp. 87–97
Dancing with Degas:
Zhang Daqian’s Balletic Lotus
LI-LING HSIAO
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
DAVID A. ROSS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Li-ling Hsiao and David A. Ross scrutinize the allusive intricacies of our SERAS cover
image: an untitled rendering of a lotus by the preeminent Chinese painter and latearriving Taiwanese immigrant Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899–1983). They argue that for
all its apparent modesty and surface charm the painting is rife with veiled propositions
about metaphysics, religion, and politics. Teasing out these meanings, they discover in
this most unassuming of images both an autobiographical gist and a philosophical
summation.
Bon vivant and gourmet; world wanderer;
master forger; be-robed traditionalist; luminous modernist; Titan of the waning
days of the Chinese ink brush — all describe Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899–1983,
g. 1), arguably the preeminent Chinese
painter of the twentieth century. ―May you
live in interesting times‖ is proverbially a
curse, but Zhang was suited to interesting
times. His impish, protean intelligence was
just the thing to see him through a century
of serial convulsion and catastrophe. Time
and again, he skittered to safety and reconstituted himself, his household, and his art.
The stupidity of history cast its net, but it
was never ne-meshed enough to catch him.
Zhang was born in Sichuan during the
waning phase of the Qing dynasty. Dislodged FIGURE 1 Zhang Daqian
by the fall of the Republicans in 1949, he robed traditionalist.”
© 2011 Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
as “be-
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began a long exile in Hong Kong
(1949, 1951), India (1950), Argentina
(1952–53), Brazil (1953–68), and northern California (1968–76). In 1976, he
immigrated to Taiwan. By government
invitation, he settled across the street
from Taipei’s Palace Museum in a
white-washed walled compound with
interior courtyard and mazy ramparts
(the house is now a wing of the museum). Amid his eccentric creature
comforts – Chinese garden, caged
monkeys, avocado-green Lincoln Continental in the garage – he had the last
laugh, as few of his generation dared to
think possible. The key, perhaps, was
to remain unfazed; like a jujitsu master,
he somehow de ected the blows of the
era and absorbed their aggression into
the ow of his own energy. Zhang’s
untitled and undated depiction of a
lotus – what we will call his Dancing
Lotus ( g. 2) – is so much like him. The
painting’s theme and technique are
ancient, but its felicity, its joy in its
own artistry and in a world that has a
place for such artistry, is the essence of
the Daqianesque.
The Poetry of the Lotus
FIGURE 2 Zhang Daqian, Dancing Lotus,
undated, private collection, U.S.A.
The Chinese lotus is rather like the
Western rose: hoary with centuries of
accreted metaphor. Trotted out by a
lesser artist, the image sinks under the
weight of its own familiarity and becomes cliché; deployed by a great artist,
the image re-constellates its meanings
and becomes something new and all
the more animated for its stirred hive
of association. How effortlessly, for example, Wallace Stevens transforms the
dead weight of the rose image in
Taiwanese Fine Art: Dancing with Degas
89
―Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas‖:
A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.
The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,
And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,
The false roses—Compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,
With this paper, this dust.
The arresting moment comes in the fth line, when the rose slips its own
physical suggestion – shifts from sun to rain metaphor – and blooms as an
all-pervading principle of passionate particularity. Thus poets and artists
reincarnate the heritage of the culture.
Dancing Lotus, which belongs to a private collection in the U.S. and appears on the cover of SERAS by permission of the owners, exhibits the
same rehabilitative genius. Unassuming enough on its surface, the painting
exempli es the aggressive disproportion between image and implication on
which traditional Chinese art is founded. Its glimpse of pond ora interprets central tenets of Buddhist thought; confesses the anguish of exile;
lodges a political protest; and wittily hails the balletic art of Edgar Degas
(1834–1917), as it were returning the favor of Degas’ forays into Japonisme.
As an exhibition of the literati genius for inter-textuality and displacement
of meaning, the image is the work of a maestro.
The painting shows a white lotus ower spiring above a lily pad with
two leggy tendrils gracefully swaying below. The image is set against a
white emptiness, with only a light tinge of brown at the bottom of the
frame to suggest the pond water in which ower and leaf grow. The lotus’
stainless emergence from the muck recalls a passage from the famous essay
―Ai Lian Shuo‖ 愛 蓮 說 (―Adoration of the Lotus‖) by the renowned
Northern Song writer and philosopher Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–73). Explaining his adoration of the lotus, Zhou writes:
予獨愛蓮之出淤泥而不染，濯清漣而不妖，中通外直，不蔓不枝，香遠益清，
亭亭凈植，可遠觀而不可褻玩焉。
I’m so very moved by the way the lotus emerges unstained by the muck,
cleansed by the ripples, unaffected in its grace, its straight stems hollow, eschewing any vine or branch. Its scent becomes ever purer the farther it wafts.
It holds its upright stance. It can be admired only at a distance, where it is beyond sully or debasement. (Zeng and Liu 1988, 263)
Zhang’s dancing lotus is precisely the image of Zhou Dunyi’s idealized
ower-symbol. The painting’s mere hint of pond water amid the otherwise
immaculate backdrop visually interprets the purity of the lotus, suggesting
that it escapes the taint of the natural order and belongs to an ethereal real-
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ity with Buddhist connotations of transcendental peace and perfection. The
feminine sinuousness of Zhang’s lotus interprets Zhou’s allusions to the
lotus’ ―unaffected grace‖ and its freedom from the excrescences of ―vine
and branch.‖
Zhang inscribes a four-line poem written by himself in the upper-right
corner of his painting. Descending in long pendant lines that mirror the
lotus’ tendrils, the poem further multiplies the painting’s contexts and potential meanings as well as focuses its Buddhist implication:
一花一葉西來意，大滌當年識得無？我欲移家花裡住，祇愁秋思動江湖。
仿大滌子筆 爰
One ower, one leaf manifest the inspiration of the West.
Would not an ancient like Dadi have understood?
What joy to reside within the ower,
But I worry that my autumnal thoughts would disquiet the river and lake.
—Imitating the brush of Dadizi, Yuan
Zhang had earlier included these lines in a longer inscription on a fourpaneled lotus depiction known as Colossal Lotus Screen 大墨荷通屏 (1945),
now in the collection of the National Museum of History in Taipei. This
massive painting crowned Zhang’s three-year study of the mural paintings
in the Buddhist caves near Dunhuang 敦煌, Gansu province, in Western
China. It resplendently interprets the lotus motif of the cave paintings,
moved, as are the caves themselves, by the remembrance that the Buddha
preached the Dharma while seated at the center of a lotus ower. Dancing
Lotus, then, is no casual ourish, but a turn in a long meditation that
stretches back to Zhang’s spiritual and artistic awakening in the darkness
of the ancient caves.
Zhang’s poem opens with an allusion to the Buddhist dicta ―One ower,
one leaf, one Buddha‖ (―yi hua yi ye yi rulai‖ 一花一葉一如來) and ―One
ower, one leaf, one world‖ (―yi hua yi ye yi shijie‖ 一花一葉一世界). Dancing Lotus functions as visual short-hand for the gnomic wisdom of these
dicta and implicitly shares their ideal of a world brought within the harmony and unity represented by the lotus. In the context of Zhang’s personal exile, the lotus perhaps expresses his wish for an indivisible world in
which the distinction between home and homelessness has no application;
or perhaps it symbolizes an inner paradise that compensates for an incurably dislocated mortal and physical realm. At the very least, Zhang’s desire
for a home located within the ower speaks at once to his condition of homelessness and to his pessimism about the redeemability of the external world.
The ―inspiration of the West‖ refers to Buddhism, which originated in the
Buddha’s native India and gradually migrated east.
Taiwanese Fine Art: Dancing with Degas
91
If he longs to occupy the lotus, Zhang worries about his worthiness to
do so, about his own ineradicable taint of worldliness. His thoughts are ―autumnal,‖ which is to say ―temporal‖ or ―mortal,‖ and thus unequal to the
lotus’ transcendental purity. Zhang’s sense of unworthiness may acknowledge his prodigious worldly appetites or remember his slightly disreputable
attempt to escape an arranged marriage by brie y turning monk and joining a Buddhist monastery. ―Autumn’s‖ standard metaphorical implication
of age and decline is probably operative as well, with an important implication for the attempt to date Dancing Lotus. ―Autumnal‖ lends credence to
the educated guess that Dancing Lotus derives from Zhang’s septuagenarian
northern California phase, the primary evidence for which is the painting’s
provenance. The painting is traceable to a California estate that included a
number of ne paintings by Zhang, but the trail turns cold beyond that
point.
―River‖ and ―lake‖ (jianghu 江湖) complete the poem’s facade of natural detail. At the same time, the river-and-lake compound idiomatically indicates the universe, the spiritual reality in which the lotus is embedded as
one among countless worlds in the Buddhist cosmos. To ―disquiet‖ the river and lake is to disturb the karma on which the spiritual manifestation of
the lotus depends. Not incidentally, Zhang’s concern that he might ―disquiet‖ the water reverses the connotation of the cleansing ―ripples‖ that
Zhou Dunyi mentions. The least motion of the pond, it seems, has a karmic
character, belongs to a recession of moral meaning. What the innocent
breeze may accomplish, Zhang, compromised by the entanglements of the
world and by his own wayward nature, may not.
―Dadi‖ (―vast cleansing‖) is the style name of the seventeenth-century
arch-canonical painter Shi Tao 石濤 (1642–1707), an orphan who grew up
in a Buddhist temple and eventually joined the Buddhist community on
Lushan Mountain 廬山. Zhang’s allusion to Shi Tao dovetails with the
Buddhist dicta in the rst line of his poem, for as art historian Michael Sullivan notes,
Central to Shitao’s thinking is the concept of the yi hua (literally, ―one line‖ or
―one painting‖); but the very word yi might mean the transcendent ―One,‖ the
unity of man and nature, or simply ―the single,‖ and hua either the art of
painting, ―delineation,‖ or simply ―line.‖ (267)
Zhang’s question – ―Would not an ancient like Dadi have understood?‖ – is
rhetorical. Shi not only would have understood the rst line of Zhang’s
poem, but would have recognized its place in a body of idea that he himself
expounded and theorized in his work of aesthetic philosophy The Language
of Painting (Hua-yulu 畫語錄). The poem’s signature line likewise refers to
Shi, utilizing the honori c form of his style name (―Dadizi‖). The signature
line acknowledges that Dancing Lotus emulates the features of Shi’s lotuses
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(each petal-tip sharply and sinuously outlined in black ink, the petals’ surfaces rendered in a light, translucent wash). Zhang’s emulation of Shi’s
style may signify his impulse to emulate his spiritual example, even as
Zhang’s homage to the esh-af rming Degas symbolizes the hopelessness
of submitting himself to this example. Zhang’s use of Shi’s less famous style
name (―Dadi,‖ ―Dadizi‖), with its connotations of cleansing and puri cation, underscores this spiritual admiration and imperfect discipleship and
perhaps engages in a game of transliterative punning (―Dadizi‖/Degas).
Zhang ends by signing not his own style name (―Daqian‖) but his birth
name (―Yuan‖), as he did commonly. In this instance, Zhang may have
chosen to sign himself ―Yuan‖ as a gesture of self-reckoning and dropped
pretense in the spirit of Buddhist simplicity; alternately, he may have
wanted to play on one of the meanings of his birth name – ―change‖ – in
order to reiterate his earlier emphasis on ―autumnal thoughts.‖
A Chorus of Seals
Seal af xation is a mode of signature, a guard against forgery, and sometimes a subtle compositional device. In the hands of gifted literati, seals
function as a ―chorus‖ in an almost Attic sense, both consolidating and ramifying the meaning of the images that they so unobtrusively adorn. In the
highest literati art, the seals enter into an intricate dialogue with the image
and with each other,1 sometimes shifting or subverting the image’s preponderance of meaning. Zhang owned hundreds of seals, many of which he
carved himself (Fu 1991, 22). He combined and deployed them with the
kind of subtle metaphoric and dialogic strategy that we associate with a
modernist juxtapositor like Ezra Pound (1885–1972) or an editorializing
collagist like Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Zhang af xed four seals to
Dancing Lotus. From top to bottom, these read: ―Daqian’s Hair‖ (―Daqian
Haofa‖ 大千毫髮), ―The Private Seal of Zhang Yuan‖ (―Zhang Yuan Siyin‖
張爰私印), ―World Dweller‖ (―Daqian Jushi‖ 大千居士), and ―Hall of the
Great Wind‖ (―Dafeng Tang‖ 大風堂).
―Daqian’s Hair‖ serves as head note, so to speak. ―Daqian,‖ Zhang’s
style name, means ―world‖2; ―Daqian Haofa,‖ then, means ―hair of the
world‖ or ora in the most general sense. The hair-as- ora metaphor derives from the ancient tale of Pan Gu 盤古, a furred giant who created the
world by transforming his body into the elements of nature. The myth rst
appeared in Xu Zheng’s 徐整 (220–65) lost works History of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors (San Wu Li Ji 三五歷紀) and Annals of the FivePhase Cycles (Wu Yun Li Nianji 五運歷年紀) and thereafter descended in
fragmentary quotations and reconstructions of Xu’s texts. In his Historical
Extracts (Yishi 繹史), Ma Su 馬驌 (1621–73) offers this fragment of the original tale:
Taiwanese Fine Art: Dancing with Degas
93
氣成風雲，聲為雷霆，左眼為日，右眼為月，四肢五體，為四極五嶽，血液
為江河，筋脈為地理，肌肉为田土，髮髭為星辰，皮毛為草木，齒骨為金
石，精髓為珠玉，汗流為雨澤，身之諸蟲，因風所感，化為黎甿。
[Pan Gu’s] breath became wind and cloud; his voice became thunder; his left
eye became the sun and his right eye the moon; his four limbs and torso became the four corners of the world and the ve mountains; his blood became
rivers and his veins the texture of the earth; his esh became elds and land;
his hair and beard became stars; his skin and the hair of his skin became grass
and trees; his teeth and bone became metal and stone; his marrow became
pearl and jade; his sweat became rain and marsh; the lice of his body, transformed by the wind, became people. (Ma 1987, 2.1a)
―Hair of the world‖ acknowledges the lotus in its simple botanic aspect,
while the seal’s compacted allusions to Pan Gu and Zhang’s style name
(―Daqian‖) align the ancient demiurge and the modern artist in their capacities as world-creators or ―artists‖ on the grand scale. The ―world‖ that
Zhang creates is the all-enfolding synecdoche of the lotus.
―The private seal of Zhang Yuan‖ chimes with Zhang’s use of ―Yuan‖
rather than ―Daqian‖ in the signature line of his poem, indicating the personal nature of the entire symbolic construct. The seal’s emphasis on privacy is cognate with the ―distance‖ that Zhou Dunyi mentions (the lotus
―can be admired only at a distance, where it is beyond sully or debasement‖). The implication is that the lotus is not some roadside wild ower to
catch the eye of every passerby; it belongs to a sancti ed inner space, which
one both guards and hesitates to approach oneself.
―World Dweller‖ picks up on the implication of ―autumnal thoughts‖
and identi es Zhang as a denizen of the temporal realm, though the very
acknowledgment of this lesser realm points reverentially to a higher realm
symbolized by the lotus. Furthermore, the seal plausibly takes account of
Zhang’s enforced global citizenship as a political refugee, thus adding another dimension to its rueful phrase. In an entirely different vein, ―World
Dweller‖ suggests the lotus itself in its aspect of East-West syncretism and
Degas-in ected cosmopolitanism. ―World Dweller’s‖ duality – its awareness of both the snares and cornucopian wonders of the world – makes it
the quintessential Daqianesque seal. It was this pervasive duality that lent
such a rich ferment and vinous complexity to Zhang’s personality and art.
In this regard, we might recall a Western artist like Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828–82), whose sensuality and spirituality were also exquisitely balanced.
Degas himself may have been party to this mindset. Don’t his vignettes of
the Parisian demimonde tremble on the verge of Platonic ethereality?
Don’t their gossamer pastels threaten to become heavenly? Isn’t this the
difference between Degas and his disciple Toulouse-Lautrec?
―Hall of the Great Wind‖ is the name of the studio that Zhang shared
with his brother Zhang Shanzi 張善孖 (1895–1943), who was also a signi -
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cant painter. Both seal and studio name allude to the famous poem ―Dafeng
Ge‖ 大風歌 (―Song of the Great Wind‖), which the Emperor Gaozu 高祖
(256–195 B.C.E.) is said to have improvised while celebrating his victory
over the Qin dynasty (221–206 B.C.E.) and the founding of the Han dynasty.
The lyrics read in full:
大風起兮雲飛揚，
威加海內兮歸故鄉。
安得猛士兮守四方？
Clouds y before the great wind.
Having subjugated the world, I return home.
Where to nd brave warriors to guard the realm?
(Xiao 1984, 407–8)
With Emperor Gaozu’s song for subtext, the seal ―Hall of the Great Wind‖
forcefully inscribes themes of homecoming and world-uni cation. The seal
thus comports with the world-unity represented by the nexus of dancing
lotus and Buddhist dicta in the rst line of Zhang’s poem; it also comports
with the theme of homecoming inscribed in the third line (―What joy to
reside within the ower‖). Concatenated with Zhang’s visual rendering of
the lotus, the emperor’s ―great wind‖ enters into metaphorical relation with
the marsh wind that makes the lotus sway and dance. The founding of the
Han dynasty and the transcendental ecstasy of the lotus’ dance become poetically aligned, each ruf ed into life by a wind that represents the ordering
hand or karmic energy of the universe.
―Hall of the Great Wind‖ has a topical and political implication as well.
The seal’s implicit abhorrence of the Qin dynasty’s brutality signi es
Zhang’s abhorrence of all iron- sted mentalities. Zhang learned this abhorrence the hard way, having had to slip from the physical clutches of Mao’s
totalitarianism and the intellectual and political clutches of Chiang KaiShek’s authoritarianism.3 In 1968, he likewise ed the authoritarian policy
of the Brazilian government, which had con scated his large estate, the
famous Bade Yuan 八德園 (―Garden of Eight Virtues‖), to make way for a
dam. The death of Chiang Kai-shek in April 1975 cleared the way for
Zhang’s return, if not to the ancestral mainland of his heart’s desire, at least
to an acceptable Chinese outpost on the island of Taiwan. Assuming that
Dancing Lotus postdates Chiang’s death, as it well might, Zhang’s choice of
seal aligns the ancient and contemporary retreat of tyranny. The lotus becomes an image of Zhang himself dancing in the wind of a new freedom
and a new homecoming.
Taiwanese Fine Art: Dancing with Degas
95
Dancing with Degas
The opening line of Zhang’s poem – ―One ower, one leaf manifests the
inspiration of the West‖ – plays a neat game of double entendre. The ―West‖
indicates India in keeping with the organizing emphasis on Buddhism, but
it simultaneously indicates the Occident in keeping with the lotus’ overt
homage to the ballet dancer so obsessively painted by Degas. The visual
clues are not exactly subtle: the frilly, lacy lotus pad plainly resembles a
ballerina’s tutu; the lotus’ tendrils resemble impossibly lissome feminine
legs; the ower more vaguely suggests a torso and head, perhaps with tiara.
This association becomes almost automatic when one considers how overtly
Zhang’s image diverges from the
botanical structure of Nelumbo nucifera ( g. 3). As found in nature, the
lotus’ oral stem does not spring
from the lily pads; nor do lily pads
have the distinct gauzy rumple of
tulle; nor do the lotus’ multiple rootstems gracefully taper to nothingness
like magically evanescing slippered
feet. In the reality of the pond, the
lotus ower and lily pads have discrete stems that attach to a brownish,
potato-like sub-aquatic root (this is
the ―lotus root‖ that Chinese chefs
thinly slice and stir-fry). As gardener,
gourmet, and gimlet-eyed artist,
Zhang was not likely to mistake his
lotus botany. His fantastic refashioning of this botany is patently meant FIGURE 3 The basic botany of Nelumbo nuto suggest the female form in its cifera, popularly known as the “sacred lotus.”
apogee of grace: the European ballerina en pointe.
The slippage from ―ballerina‖ to Degas is smoothed by the elementary
associations of art history, but it has a few speci c points in its favor. In
addition to the conceivable play on the names ―Dadizi‖ and ―Degas‖ mentioned above, ―Daqian‖ itself is a near-homophone of ―Degas.‖ Zhang
would have been the rst to pounce on and play with such a gratifying fortuity and to assert the validity of the analogy. Zhang considered himself –
and wanted very much to position himself – as the preeminent modern
Chinese painter. On this basis, he made a particular point of visiting Picasso while in France in 1956. Shen C.Y. Fu comments that Zhang opportunistically ―sensed that the press would describe the encounter as master
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Eastern painter meets greatest living Western painter‖ (25). The tête-à-tête
served its purpose, yielding a famous snapshot in which Picasso’s arm rests
fraternally on Zhang’s shoulder. As Fu notes, this is probably the most
widely circulated photograph of Zhang (25). Zhang’s sense of himself as
modern art’s Eastern pillar in complementary relation to some Western
pillar – his propensity for what might be called East-West summitry –
makes Dancing Lotus’ speci c connection with Degas a psychological likelyhood. That Degas had peered East as a collector of Japanese art (see Dumas
1997) and as a painter of exquisite Japanese-style fans (see DeVonyar and
Kendall 2007), just as Zhang himself had ventured West in numerous
senses, make the two great painters logical and symmetrical counterparts.
Furthermore, Zhang enjoyed plum opportunities to absorb Degas’
work. He not only visited Paris at intervals, but, as a resident of the Brazilian city of Mogi das Cruzes from 1954 to 1968, lived only a short drive from
the São Paulo Museum of Art. The museum collection includes no less than
seventy-three pieces of sculpture (acquired in 1954), two pastels (acquired
in 1952), and one oil painting (acquired in 1950) by Degas. The oil painting
happens to be a particularly gorgeous ballet scene titled Four Ballerinas on
Stage (1885–90; g. 4). Rejecting the strict greenery of the lily pad in its
natural context, Dancing Lotus employs cerulean blues and wheaten golds
that plausibly allude to the palette of Four Ballerinas on Stage and to the impressionist palette generally. Nor does it go too far to notice that Zhang’s
pendent lines of poetry mirror the two trees in the upper-right corner of
Four Ballerinas. Degas’ trees seem to euphemize the dancers’ unseen legs,
making Four Ballerinas an odd little study in proto-Freudian displacement;
Dancing Lotus plays leg games of its own, as mentioned above.
FIGURE 4
Degas,
Four Ballerinas on
Stage, 1885–90, São
Paulo Museum of Art,
São Paulo, Brazil.
Taiwanese Fine Art: Dancing with Degas
97
In a more profound vein, Dancing Lotus’ invocation of Degas illustrates
the meaning of the Buddhist dicta to which Zhang’s poetic inscription alludes: ―One ower, one leaf, one Buddha,‖ ―One ower, one leaf, one
world.‖ Zhang wants to suggest that the Buddhist Lotus and the Parisian
dancing girl – whatever unlikely dichotomy you care to dream up – share a
universal congruency of form and spirit, possess a common essence that
expresses itself in endless tiers of harmony and inherence. Thus the Buddha’s billion worlds swim into alignment; thus the cosmos self-enfolds into
the dancing lotus.
Notes
1
See Hsiao and Ross 2010 for a study of this dynamic in the art of Li Keran 李可染
(1907–89).
2
―Daqian,‖ says Bruce H. McLaren, signi es the ―great chiliocosmos, or the one
billion worlds that compose the Buddhist universe‖ (Little et al. 2007, 568).
3
Zhang’s anti-Maoism was scathing. At the height of the Cultural Revolution in
1967, he copied from memory Nesting Clouds by Gao Kegong 高克恭 (1248–1310). His
inscription suggests his bitterness and disgust: ―Mao and Lin [Biao] are dis guring
China and destroying the relics of the culture. Surely this handscroll [i.e., Nesting
Clouds] has been added to the re by now‖ (Fu 1991, 28–31).
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