Autumn Viewing in the Forbidden City: An Interview with Dickson Hall
In late 2016, The Forbidden City Publishing House released a colour edition of a catalogue of the early paintings in the Palace Museum, Beijing that had originally been published in the late 1980s. The catalogue, Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century), is unique in that it was written in English by a Western scholar with unprecedented access to the paintings, and in that it was intended as a guide for Westerners visiting the regular autumn display of the works. The author, Dickson Hall, was one of the first Westerners to study at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). A frequent visitor to Hong Kong, Dickson recently talked to Orientations about the book and his experience in Beijing.
Dickson Hall with Zhu Lan, director (right), and Wang Conghui, editor (left), of the Painting and Calligraphy Editorial Office at The Forbidden City Publishing House, June 2017
Orientations Dickson, can you tell us how your catalogue came to be republished?
Dickson Hall I was attending the gala opening dinner for the exhibition ‘The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery a couple of years ago, and I was introduced to Zhao Guoying, editor in chief of The Forbidden City Publishing House. She had gone to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, as I had, and I told her I had written this book, which had been published in Hong Kong by Joint Publishing. She said, ‘Next time you come to Beijing bring me a copy—I’d love to have a look.’ I go back and forth frequently, so I did. They have these beautiful offices inside the Gugong [the Palace Museum]. She flipped through it and said, ‘Let’s do a new edition. We’d love to have a book written in English for English-speaking visitors to the museum.’ And so I had to go back and rework some of the material and try to bring it up to date. They gave me a list of their conventional English titles for the paintings, because when I originally did it some came out of books published in the States and some I had to translate. I think they did a beautiful job on the design and layout.
O How did you get the idea for the original book?
DH I was at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and I was doing a paper that I was going to use as my MA thesis for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It was on a Yuan dynasty [1271–1368] painter named He Cheng [1217–after 1309?]—there are three paintings left in the world with his name on—and the one painting that had just come to light at that point was in the Jilin Provincial Museum in Changchun. It’s a long handscroll illustrating Tao Yuanming’s [365–427] Homecoming ode. It’s a beautiful painting, a very Zhao Mengfu [1254–1322]–literati kind of painting, whereas all the records of He Cheng say he was a court painter. Anyway, I went up to Changchun to go and look at this painting, and on the train I was reading a biography of Bernard Berenson, the great art historian of Leonardo [da Vinci]. The first book that Berenson ever wrote was a handbook to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and it had a picture of the object and a page of text, and I thought—that’s what they need in the Gugong!
Cover of the new edition of the book Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century) by Dickson Hall showing a detail of the painting Night Revels of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong (act. 943–60)
O This was not long after the Cultural Revolution—you were studying at CAFA from 1979 to 1980.
DH I was in Beijing from basically 1977 to 1983 and from, say, mid-September to mid-November each year they did this early painting exhibition at the Gugong, and at other times they’d have newer paintings, Ming [1368–1644] and Qing [1644–1911]—it was all to do with the fragility and temperature and so on. They put the same early paintings out every year, and there was maybe a name in the corner but no information as to what you were looking at, either in Chinese or in English. In fact the small label might say something like ‘Ni Zan’ [1301–74] and have a date, and it would also say something like ‘Landlord’ or ‘Feudal landlord class’! I thought I could do better than that! My idea was that there were enough foreigners around Beijing, and if they had this book they could go in there and identify the paintings and read an introduction to them.
O I’m sure the display of the paintings has now changed!
DH Indeed! Where they had the paintings in those days is not where they now have the painting gallery, and of course the gallery today is all temperature-controlled. For the early works, what they’ve started doing is having rotational shows. For example, the Qingming shanghe tu [(Life along the Bian River at the Pure Brightness Festival) by Zhang Zeduan (act. 1111–26)], which was on display about a year ago, won’t be displayed again for another 8 years, apparently. People were lining up to see it.
First group of foreign students at CAFA, 1979–80 academic year, on a school outing with staff. Dickson is second from right.
O How did you go about preparing the catalogue?
DH I started collecting whatever information I could about the paintings and recording what they were. You could take pictures in those days, you could sit there with your camera—you could even use a flash. You could set up a tripod on top of a case! There was nobody there. So I took pictures of all the paintings, and then I’d go back to the library at the art institute or to the Shoudu tushuguan [Capital Library], and I collected whatever information I could from Chinese sources. I think at that point I’d already been to Taiwan and I’d bought the Osvald Sirén seven-volume set Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, and so I just collected as much information as I could and compiled it.
O Were the staff at the Gugong aware of what you were doing?
DH I could never get anybody to pay any attention! So eventually I came to Hong Kong, and I went to Joint Publishing, and they said that they would publish it. So we did a final edit—this has to be in 1983 or ’84—but then nothing happened. My own life changed, I moved on and did some things, and then around 1988 I got a letter from a new editor at Joint Publishing who said that one day he had opened his drawer and inside was the manuscript with all of the photographs, and that they were finally going to publish it. So they did, as a hardcover book with maybe five or six colour plates in it, and everything else was black-and-white. The reproductions were not very good, because frankly a lot of the photographs I had taken were not very good, and we had also taken some photographs of reproductions in magazines because the paintings had never been published except in Chinese magazines. They did a print run of 2,000 copies or something and it was positively reviewed in the South China Morning Post.
Dickson at the Shanghai Museum looking at a painting by Sheng Mao (act. c. 1310–60) that was being restored. On the left is Bo Songnian, a professor at CAFA.
O How did you first become interested in China and Chinese art?
DH That’s a good question. My interest at university in Canada had originally been history, and then I started doing Asian studies, and then switched to art history. I did a survey course in Asian art history and really liked the visual record, the way it brought history, literature and philosophy together in some kind of image. I got very interested in Chinese painting just through the survey course. So it started as an interest in history, and I found the study of Chinese painting an interesting way to approach it because Chinese artists would often use historical figures to comment on modern politics or to give morality lessons. I ended up majoring in Chinese art history for my BA, and then I went into the MA programme. In the last year of my BA I started doing modern spoken Chinese, and then as I started the MA I began doing classical Chinese. I then applied for the Canadian government exchange programme and went to China in 1977.
O Did you go directly to the Central Academy?
DH No, in those days foreign students went to Beijing Language Institute first, and then depending on how much Chinese you spoke, they would send you to one of maybe five universities that were open to foreigners at that point. There was no art history, so I was sent to the history department at Peking University, and they let me sit in on the archaeology courses—they had tried to send me to Shenyang to study history at Liaoning University but I wouldn’t go! I said I had to stay in Beijing so that I could at least go and see the paintings in the Gugong. As it was still just post-Cultural Revolution, everything was very rigid and you were only allowed to study certain things.
Another thing that started happening was that they allowed the foreign students to travel on their own, and somehow I got out to Dunhuang, and there I met Jin Weinuo, the head of the art history department at CAFA. I talked to him, and he said, ‘When you come back to Beijing come and see me—we think we’re going to be able to enrol some foreign students next year.’ I had a two-year scholarship and I got the Canadian government to extend it for a third year, and so I moved to CAFA. I think there were five foreign students, one of whom was Jonathan Hay, now a professor of Chinese art history at NYU. They put on this painting history programme just for the five of us. We had Jin Weinuo, one of China’s best painting historians, and Bo Songnian, who was a specialist in folk art, New Year prints and so on, and people from the Gugong would come and lecture from time to time.
At The Temple of the Sleeping Buddha in the Fragrant Hills, Beijing
O Did you have any behind-the-scenes visits to the Gugong?
DH I think we went on two occasions that I can remember, and they brought out paintings for us. We had another trip to the museum in Shanghai, and there it was really interesting because they took us into the conservation rooms and showed us very well known paintings that they were fixing. But for the catalogue, it was all work I did myself through going to the museum.
O Was China very different to what you had expected?
DH There were people from the university in Canada who had gone for a year or two, and we used to see things like China Pictorial around, so we had a bit of an idea before we went. And then I had this interest in classical China. When I arrived I somehow thought I would find more of a connection, but there really wasn’t one. I remember being shocked at how little people knew about their own history and cultural background. Going to the art institute was a bit of a breath of fresh air. At the language institute and Peking University there was a lot of skiving off! We would jump on our bicycles and try to find our way into old temples and things like that. Somebody got a copy of the old Nagel guide to China, which had maps of where these old temples were, and we’d go down there and of course no foreigners were allowed, or there were barriers. People would try to climb over and get in. A lot of places were closed in those days, closed to anybody, including the Chinese.
Dickson at Democracy Wall in Beijing
O You ended up moving away from Chinese art history and going into business.
DH Much as I was interested in what I was doing, China was changing very quickly too. There was Deng Xiaoping and the Gaige Kaifang [‘Reform and Opening-up’] movement and foreign companies coming in, and I started doing bits of translation and getting paid for it ... So somewhere along the line I decided that it was either further and further into this kind of narrow, academic pursuit or it was doing something a little broader. I decided I was more interested in the reality of trading in iron ore than pursuing this kind of art history thing!
O You don’t regret it?
DH No, not at all. It provided me with an economic base to go off and do other things. It kept me in touch with China and I was always able to travel. Wherever it is in China, a weekend comes up and I go down to the local museum. I’ve been all over China on business, and I’ve had a lot of opportunity to go to places that would be hard to get to. The sponsor of the fund that we manage at the moment is based in Nanchang in Jiangxi. You know what the most famous thing in Nanchang is? The Bada Shanren Museum! There’s nothing really there, but there’s this old house where he lived, beautiful bamboo, some photographs … I spent a lot of time in Tibet on business at one point, and once again I got to go and visit places I wouldn’t necessarily have had the chance to go to. Xinjiang and Gansu, same thing, I got to all the cave temples. For a long time I did try to keep up on the art history, though. I always bought lots of books.
Ink, Bamboo and Rock
By Gao Kegong (1248–1310)
Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 122 x 42.3 cm
Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century), cat. no. 067
O Did you ever collect any paintings or other art?
DH Not really. I remember at one point somebody said, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s got some really interesting paintings,’ so one night there we were on our bicycles riding down the hutongs, hats pulled down and collars up [so that nobody could see we were foreigners], and we went to somebody’s house and they pulled stuff up from underneath the floorboards. Beautiful! Were they Ming, was this one by Shen Zhou [1427–1509], was it fake, was it real— who knows? And then they said, ‘If you can get us a television,’—or whatever it was that there were restrictions on buying in those days—‘I’ll give you this painting!’ Hmm … So how would I ever get that painting out of China? And what happens if I get caught with it? Do I get kicked out, is that the end of my access to China? So I never did anything about it, but I’d go riding off and think, were those real? It was a very interesting time, I must say.
O Finally, do you have any favourites among the paintings in the catalogue?
DH My real interest from an academic point of view was always in the Yuan dynasty—the literati tradition, a mixture of calligraphy and painting, mostly just ink, not colour. However, I asked Zhao Guoying to put Night Revels of Han Xizai [by Gu Hongzhong (act. 943–60)] on the cover of the new edition because I always thought that was one of the more interesting paintings. It’s like a series of stage sets telling stories, and they kind of move seamlessly through. The story there is supposed to be that the emperor commissioned the artist to go and make the paintings to report on whether Han Xizai, a minister, was some kind of playboy who wasn’t paying attention to the affairs of state. Bamboo paintings are among my favourites too. But the person I was always most interested in in all Chinese painting history would be Zhao Mengfu, because he’s supposed to epitomize this scholarly person with fantastic calligraphy and he’s also a very good painter. He did everything from ink-play landscapes through to horses, but I think it’s the austere ink paintings that are the most interesting.
Waterside Village
By Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322)
Handscroll, ink on paper, 24.9 x 120.5 cm
Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century), cat. no. 059