Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 34 (2012), pp. 196–206
The Empty Eye and the Full Heart:
Lin Fengmian’s Figure Paintings and
Modernist Tradition
DAVID A. ROSS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
One of twentieth-century China’s preeminent painters, Lin Fengmian 林風眠 (1900–
91) transformed the outward aspect of the guohua 國畫 or ink-brush tradition while
preserving its spiritual and poetic essence. It was his genius to epitomize a century of
serial catastrophe in the symbol-language of bird, lake, and mountain. In addition to his
landscape art, he is renowned for his countless images of reposing, dancing, and
instrument-playing courtesans. These paintings have an obvious visual charm, but their
philosophical implication—their place and meaning in Lin’s philosophy of life—is
possibly obscure. This essay considers what these paintings mean and how they relate to
Lin’s landscape art.
The Western artist may become reiterative for any number of reasons. He
may struggle or luxuriate in the grip of some internal preoccupation, suffer
some impasse of technique or idea, or respond to market demand. But the
reiterative impulse can be a guilty and uncomfortable one. Romanticism,
now entering its third century of cultural dominance, sanctions fidelity to
personal vision, but abhors the rigidity of formula, even deeply felt and
intensely personal formula. For the Western artist who has not entirely
renounced the romantic tradition, each day must be an apocalypse of the
imagination. The Chinese artist is more at ease, accepting reiteration as the
device by which art bows to the past and brings incremental novelty within
a framework of new tradition. This dynamic explains and sanctions the
most renowned motifs of modern Chinese art: Qi Baishi’s 齊白石 shrimp,
butterfly, and dragonfly, emblems of the quizzical unlikelihood of natural
beauty; Fu Baoshi’s 傅抱石 mountain sages, at once symbols of aspiration
and the wisdom that renounces aspiration; Lu Yanshao’s 陆俨少 mountain
passes, glimpses of the far border where earth dissolves into the mystic.
Born in 1900 and active until his death in 1991, Lin Fengmian 林風眠
was among the last of the incontestable masters, though his French
Essays & Ideas: Ling Fengmian
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FIGURE 1
Lin Fengmian’s hastening birds evoke a century of serial catastrophe. For the
painting, see Lin 2007.
apprenticeship during the 1920s and his Western technique made him
anomalous. His more acclaimed reiterative motifs include tableaux of
autumnal valleys seen from a distance and scenes of low-flying birds
speeding across a backdrop of brooding lake and mountain (fig. 1; see also
Lin 2005, passim). Lin’s scenes of hastening birds represent his genius at its
subtlest and profoundest. Typically set against a blighted landscape of
apocalyptic twilight, these scenes evoke a century of hair-trigger crises,
rapid-response deployments, and desperate communiqués.
Lin’s most famous reiterative motif—solitary courtesans reposing,
reading, or playing instruments, sometimes in the nude—is certainly his
most endearing and accessible (figs. 2–3).1 Sculpted of abstract oblongs that
recall the series of caryatids that Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) executed
between 1912 and 1914 (fig. 4; see also Modigliani 2005, 105–14) and the
work of Matisse generally, Lin’s figure paintings are sinuously rhythmic,
engagingly colorful, and readily intelligible in their belated postimpressionism. Their au courant integration of Chinese and Western
elements and their bright, flat, forthright surfaces make them favorites of
the high-end auction block, and yet they are far from being merely semiFrench eye candy. Their inflection is subtly but impalpably philosophical.
They have the aura of something to say, but what is their message? We
might further ask how their message integrates into the lager dialectic of
Lin’s art, and how these almost powdered paintings in the boudoir
tradition of Boucher and Fragonard (fig. 5) comport with Lin’s dominant
mood of estrangement and elegy, his sense of a world in which, as Yeats
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FIGURES 2–3
Lin Fengmian’s figure paintings: “Nothing but stillness can remain when
hearts are full / Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.” For the paintings, see
Lin 2007.
FIGURE 4 Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), FIGURE 5
Caryatid, ca. 1913–14, Musée d'Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–
1806), The Love Letter, ca. 1770,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Essays & Ideas: Ling Fengmian
199
FIGURE 6 Lin’s
nestlings counterbalance his birds of
dislocation and
flight. For the
painting, see Lin
2005.
writes in “The Second Coming” (1920), “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . . .”
Lin’s aesthetic seems contradictory and confusing until we grasp its
implicit dynamic of thesis and antithesis, yin and yang. Lin’s scenes of
hastening birds, for example, have their reverse image in equally numerous
scenes of bowered nestlings (fig. 6). The birds of these paintings—
sometimes owls—are soft and serene, happily perched and manifestly
harmless. These are nestlings to counterbalance birds of flight and
dislocation. The two kinds of bird—self and anti-self, as Yeats would say—
function as mutually dependent symbols, partial truths that become
complete only in conjunction. The implication is that Lin’s dismay was not
absolute; it was a valid and perhaps dominant mood but was not without a
reverse mood that was equally valid and integral. Lin’s penchant for
qualification contrasts with the assertive absolutisms of Western
modernism and conceivably reflects a Confucian ethic of balance and
moderation. Lin’s figure paintings plausibly function as a similar but far
more sophisticated antithetical structure, not merely opposing his darker
vision, but concertedly probing a solution to its implicit problem. The
figure paintings reverse the paintings of hastening birds in certain overt
ways: they are indoor rather than outdoor, feminine rather than masculine,
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color-saturated rather than misty and tenebrous. The idea underlying this
formal counterpoint is harder to articulate.
To begin with, Lin’s females exemplify a traditional aestheticism—
they read books, contemplate flowers, arrange their hair, and play dizi 笛子,
pipa 琵琶, and guqin 古琴. They are usually seated gracefully on what seems
to be a cushioned floor, in what I take to be ancient Eastern fashion, though
sometimes they sit upon simple, traditional stools. This pose of decorous
cultivation is consistent with the traditional role of the Chinese courtesan,
and Lin’s celebration of this role has a clear rearguard and reactionary
implication, especially in light of the Maoist feminism that sent women
into factories and propelled them into politics, in keeping with Mao’s own
apothegm: “Women uphold half the sky.” The traditionalism and the
aestheticism of Lin’s tableaux seem inextricable, as if representing different
facets of the same antidote to the pain of modernity, the one inconceivable
without the other. Lin’s point is not a chauvinistic and prescriptive one
about the role of women—it is not a version of “barefoot and pregnant,” as
the phrase goes; rather he uses a certain kind of woman to symbolize a
certain kind of grace, elegance, and cultivation that the world has turned
against. Lin’s bowered ladies represent not merely a feminine ideal, but an
aesthetic ideal and a world ideal; they are the ghosts of departed dynasties
stranded sadly and forlornly in the nostalgic imagination.
The basic terms of this polemic have force and courage, but the
paintings’ real interest lies in their subtleties and ambiguities. The
paintings suggest not merely aesthetic tradition, but an acutely selfenclosed beauty, an eremitism of rustling silk that seems an expression of
both withdrawal and repudiation. So too there is the suggestion of
imprisonment—call it house arrest. Formally, the paintings suggest this
self-enclosure by the basic fact of the ladies’ solitude; by the self-enwound
folds of the ladies’ robes, which lend these paintings a centripetal force; by
the ladies’ gracefully balanced seat upon the floor, which suggests
immobility; by the tightness of the frame, which suggests constraint and
captivity; and by the heavy background drapery, which suggests a muffled
and insulated interior world. The ubiquitous detail of the floral bouquet in
a vase adds an imagined perfume to the air—perhaps a cloying sweetness or
soporific heaviness—that infuses the feminine space with a quality of
inertial repose. In a particularly telling detail, many of the paintings feature
a curtained window to the rear, sometimes translucent with a vague, muted
light. The window at once gestures toward the external world and seems to
deny it.
The difficulty is determining the implication of the scene: is it
painfully claustrophobic or happily bowered? Do we witness a gilded cell or
high-aesthetic hermitage? Lin carefully preserves both suggestions. He rues
Essays & Ideas: Ling Fengmian
201
the necessity of self-exile and regrets the intense privacy that represents the
only possible escape from the “blood-dimmed tide,” and yet he savors the
hothouse atmosphere that nurtures and sustains such exquisite beauty. The
dynamic is one of loss and consolation, or perhaps retreat and selfpreservation, with the rear window, visible as a mere vague outline or patch
of light, representing an existing but uninviting and merely notional option
to return to the world.
Like his bird paintings, then, Lin’s figure paintings respond to the
crisis of modernity. They represent a version of the aestheticism that the
West had explored as a strategy of meaning in a shattered modern world at
least since the early nineteenth century, when Keats, in poems like “Ode on
Melancholy” (1819) and “To Autumn” (1820), began to construe intensities
of beauty as plausibly compensatory and redemptive structures of meaning.
Later romantics quickly moved to institutionalize and solidify Keats’
realization by conceptualizing an entire mode of life premised on the quest
to embrace and order these intensities. Thus was born the doctrine of
aestheticism and the aesthete proper, whose avatars include Walter Pater
(1839–94), the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Morris (1834–96), James
McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). In his poem
The Palace of Art (1833, revised 1842), Tennyson summarizes the logic of
the aesthetic retreat. His unnamed protagonist—presumably his own
epigone—builds “a lordly pleasure-house / Wherein at ease for aye to
dwell,” but eventually, like a good Victorian poet laureate, realizes the folly
of this barren isolation and in the end returns to the world, much chastened.
In France, whose cultural currents more overtly ripple through Lin’s art,
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) gave aestheticism its most radical,
decadent, infamous, and influential expression in his 1884 novel Against
Nature, imagining a hero who recedes into the inner world of his own
outrageously sumptuous apartments, there to cultivate the hyper-exquisite
refinement of his senses. Lin’s figure paintings belong to this tradition,
properly understood not as hedonistic but as heartbroken, an attempt to
create a realm of beauty and meaning in the context of a larger world that
no longer provides either. Lin’s birds rush upon some embassy of desperate
purpose, attempting to negotiate the moment of crisis; Lin’s women have
abandoned—or represent the abandonment—of whatever urgent, futile
hope this strenuousness implies.
Even as we seem to grasp the meaning of Lin’s figure paintings,
however, they seem to escape into deeper meaning, indicating not merely a
reclusion of the senses but a reclusion of the soul. The crucial detail is the
almost invariably closed or at least pupil-less eyes of the ladies, which
indicate that their bower is merely a staging ground for a further retreat
into a yet richer inner life. The thematic importance of the closed eyes is
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D. A. Ross
FIGURE 7
A rare figure
painting in which the
female subject is open
eyed. For the painting,
see Lin 2007.
indicated by the exceedingly rare painting in which the eyes are
conspicuously open (fig. 7). The obscure implication of oracular or
transcendental inner-vision is erased and the lady becomes a mere denizen
of a constricted external world, the charm of her hidden immensity
sacrificed entirely, and even her physical beauty somehow degraded, as if
an animating inner light has gone out. I have discovered very few paintings
in which the eyes are open in this fashion. Lin presumably recognized the
importance of the closed eye and did not care to repeat the experiment.
The motif of the eye “closed that it may see” is full of rich precedent in
romanticism and in romanticized elements of Victorianism and modernism,
beginning with Blake’s allusions to the “mind’s eye,” the “visionary eye,”
and the “inward eye” (Blake 1982, 271, 140, 313, 721), all of which widen in
vision once we learn to close the outer eye. Yeats, Blake’s greatest disciple,
paraphrases the idea in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (1919):
“[W]hat but eye and ear silence the mind / With the minute particulars of
mankind?” Having closed one’s senses to the “minute particulars of
mankind,” this is to say, the mind effloresces in vision. In Yeats, the motif
of the closed eye becomes feminized and pervasive, achieving consummate
form in his poem “I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness
and of the Coming Emptiness” (1923). Yeats’ description of his visionary
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203
FIGURE 8
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828– FIGURE 9
Odilon Redon (1840–1916),
82), Beata Beatrix, ca. 1864–1870, Tate Closed Eyes, 1899, Van Gogh Museum,
Collection, London.
Amsterdam.
ladies upon unicorns—avatars of the “heart’s fullness”—precisely
articulates the deepest meaning of Lin’s figure paintings:
Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
Romantic artists likewise explored the image of the female with eyes closed
to the world but opened to some vista of inner contemplation. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828–82) famous Beata Beatrix, a work of the 1860s now
enshrined in the Tate Collection, comes to mind, as do Odilon Redon’s
(1840–1916) several paintings of the 1890s titled Closed Eyes, perhaps the
most spectacular of which resides in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
(figs. 8–9). The latter shows a woman in meditative ecstasy, the wealth of
her inner vision revealed only by her air of beatification, though in an 1895
version of the image the inner vision is externalized in a hallucinatory
fantasia of pulsing flowers. Edward Munch’s (1863–1944) five paintings of
1894 and 1895 titled Madonna likewise belong to this tradition and may
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indeed be its masterpieces (see especially the version in the National
Museum, Oslo).
The romantic tradition overwhelmingly assigned such inner vision to
the female. Like the rural peasants and island natives in whom the
romantics likewise glimpsed a mode of rescue from the balefulness of
modernity and the ravening of the modern mind, women seemed less prone
to the abstractions that engender a crippling self-consciousness and selfdivision. In what Yeats calls their “unity of being,” their bodies become
souls and their souls bodies and they sink into their own repletion, while
men remain entangled in the war of mind and body. Yeats articulates the
relevant metaphysics in “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” (1921):
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite,
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like—if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.
Lin’s art is conceptually cognate with this tradition, though it differs in
tone and inflection. The women of Rossetti, Redon, and Munch experience
behind their own eyelids a sensual and transcendental ecstasy, as their
expressions imply. Lin’s women seem to experience a placid calm, a sense
of order that pacifies all strain, resistance, self-conflict. The serenity of the
music they play, of the flowers they contemplate, of the beauty—their
own—they arrange, is a metaphor of inner harmony and self-identity, of
what Yeats calls “uncomposite blessedness.” Theirs is not a mode of
transcendence, but of embrace, and not least of self-embrace.
Western artists made a fetish of the Orientalized boudoir during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, introducing kimonos, screens,
and other playthings of the East as visually interesting and vaguely erotic
props, but this art does not necessarily align with either the romantic
tradition or with Lin’s superficially similar scenes. The eyes of the elegant
women who populate these canvasses remain quintessentially Western and
modern—shrewd, subtle, world considering—as in William Merritt Chase’s
(1846–1916) Girl in Blue Kimono (fig. 10; ca. 1888, Parrish Art Museum),
Girl in a Japanese Costume (ca. 1890, Brooklyn Museum), and Study of a Girl
in Japanese Dress (ca. 1895, Brooklyn Museum). These women are at once
empirical objects and agents, belonging to a world of outward things and
relations and representing a materialism that Lin rejected as intrinsically
Essays & Ideas: Ling Fengmian
205
FIGURE 10
William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), FIGURE 11
James McNeill Whistler
Girl in Blue Kimono, ca. 1888, Parrish Art Museum, (1834–1903), La Princesse du Pays de
la Porcelaine, 1863–65, Freer Gallery
Water Mill, NY.
of Art, Washington D.C.
barren and dangerous. Only Whistler’s La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine
(1863–65, Freer Gallery of Art) seems to associate the conventional
trappings of Japonisme with a certain alarming interiority or second-sight,
represented by the cavernous black orbs of the princess’s eyes (fig. 11).
Lin’s paintings, then, are neither merely ornamental nor chauvinistic.
They represent a deliberated staked position with political, aesthetic, and
metaphysical dimensions. Standing against the tenor of the times, they
represent a quiet heresy in silk.
Note
1
Lin painted hundreds—possibly thousands—of images in this mode, almost all of
which are difficult or impossible to date with any precision. Numerous Chineselanguage volumes are devoted to Lin’s work, but I have yet to encounter the detailed
scholarly apparatus of the Western catalogue raisonné. To an extent, then, we must speak
in generalities and indulge in guesswork.
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References
Blake, William. 1982. The complete poetry and prose of William Blake, newly revised edition.
Ed. David Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
Lin Fengmian 林 風 眠 . 2005. Lin Fengmian huaji 林 風 眠 畫 集 [Catalogue of Lin
Fengmian’s painting]. Eds. Chen Gaochao and Chen Chaohua. Beijing: Beijing
Gongyi meishu chubanshe.
———. 2007. A pioneer of modern Chinese painting: The art of Lin Fengmian. Eds. Szeto
Yuen-kit, Raymond M.L. Tang, and Asta C.M. Ho. Hong Kong: Leisure and
Cultural Services Department.
Modigliani, Amedeo. 2004. Modigliani: Beyond the myth. Ed. Mason Klein. New York:
the Jewish Museum; New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press.