Networks of Touch

In early nineteenth-century China, a remarkable transformation took place in the art world: artists among China’s educated elites began to use touch to forge a more authentic relationship to the past, to challenge stagnant artistic canons, and to foster deeper human connections. Networks of Touch is an engaging exploration of this sensory turn.

In this book, Michael J. Hatch examines the artistic network of Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), a scholar-official whose patronage supported a generation of artists and learned people who prioritized epigraphic research as a means of truing the warped contours of Confucian heritage. Their work instigated an “epigraphic aesthetic”—an appropriation of the stylistic, material, and tactile features of ancient inscribed objects and their reproductive technologies—in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artwork. Rubbings, a reduplicative technology, challenged the dominance of brushwork as the bearer of artistic authority. While brushwork represented the artist’s physical presence through ink and paper, rubbings were direct facsimiles of tactile experiences with objects. This shift empowered artists and scholars to transcend traditional conventions and explore new mediums, uniting previously separate image-making practices while engaging audiences through the senses.

Centering on touch and presenting a fresh perspective on early nineteenth-century literati art in China, this volume sheds light on a period often dismissed as lacking innovation and calls into question optical realism’s perceived supremacy in reshaping the sensory experience of the modern Chinese viewer.

“Lucidly written and ambitiously conceived, Networks of Touch is the first English monograph that provides a systematic and critical treatment of many major yet understudied artists in nineteenth-century China. Hatch successfully brings life to the lived experience of individual figures and the embodied experience of their artworks.”—Weitian Yan, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual

“Thoroughly researched, smartly conceived, and artfully presented, Networks of Touch is one of those rare books that would satisfy both the specialist scholar and the general reader. With his intellectual ambition, formal visual analysis skills, and fine eye for details, Hatch has enlivened both the forest and the trees down to the textures of the bark and leaf.”—Dorothy Ko, author of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

“Networks of Touch deftly offers a corrective to the dismissal of literati art of the early nineteenth century as merely a hidebound continuation of early Qing painting orthodoxy; rather, Hatch convincingly argues that early nineteenth-century artists were engaging in a studied ‘antagonism to the canon’ that situates them in continuity with the later challenges mounted by the artists in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Shanghai.”—Patricia J. Yu, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

Michael J. Hatch is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Calligraphy’s New Past

2 Obliterated Texts

3 Epigraphic Painting

4 Tactile Images

5 A Tactful Literatus

6 The Limits of Touch

Epilogue: Modern Horizons

Glossary of Names

Glossary of Foreign Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Art History & Architecture

           Nineteenth-century

History

           Nineteenth-century

Sociology

Sensory Studies