Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

Can a painting such as the one shown here (fig. 1) say anything at all? In Western academic settings questions like this either appear to be worn-out commonplaces that induce yawns or are suspected to be quibbles, equivocation and play on the different senses of the word say. In a different institutional universe, however, these same questions may carry frightening implications. In March 1974 a group of painters in China, specializing mostly in traditional ink painting, were charged by the Ministry of Culture with blaspheming "the Socialist system"--meaning the state.1 Their paintings were put on public display in China's National Art Gallery in Beijing, as the so-called Black Painting Exhibition. The organizers' captions constituted a de facto indictment of the artists' subversive political intent. Among the paintings showcased, the centerpiece was Huang Yongyu's Owl (fig. 1),2 which shows a squat owl perched on a sparsely budded tree branch, facing the viewer head on, with an enigmatic expression that can be seen either as a wink or as a one-eye-open stare. Its exhibition caption read: "Huang Yongyu produced this Owl in 1973. The owl, with its one eye open and the other closed, is a self-portrait of the likes of Huang. It reveals their attitude: an animosity toward the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Socialist system" ("PH," p. 27). A grueling chastisement followed the Ministry of Culture's categorical pronouncement. Reprimand sessions ran for months in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, where Huang was a professor of woodblock printing, to coerce the painter into confessing his antisocialist stance.3

[...] It is easier to settle the political scores than the art historical accounts, and it is easier to exonerate the artist than the painting. There is a consensus now that the painter was a victim more sinned against than sinning, that he became an innocent pawn in a game of high-level power politics, and that the inquisition to which the painter and his painting were subjected made a travesty of art criticism. It is not clear, however, how innocent the painting was. Does the painting contain the message it was charged with?

[...] The owl's wink itself seems to reinforce the impression that the bird's enigmatic expression indeed contains an encoded message. For "to wink," according to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, "is to try to signal to someone in particular, without the cognisance of others, a definite message according to an already understood code."11 The overwhelming central frontality of the owl, which claims the viewer's attention, makes explicit the painting's impulse to communicate with the viewer. Believing that the painting was wrongly charged with conveying a message it did not contain, one is likely to go about showing that it in fact means something, but not the kind of meaning that was unfairly imputed to it. This is an occasion for some radical alternative thinking. The enduring assumption that a painting is a deposit of meaning not only got this particular artist into trouble, it has also led art historians into a methodological morass. Wouldn't it be better for us to drop altogether the notion that a painting as such has an intrinsic message or cognitive content?

1. Fang Dan, "Pi heihua yuanshi cailiao" (The original document of the Castigation of the Black Paintings), Nanbeiji 105 (Feb. 1979): 27; hereafter abbreviated "PH."

2. See Huang Yongyu, "Shao Yu he maotouying shijian" (Shao Yu and the owl incident), Jiushi niandai, 247 (Aug. 1990): 102.

3. See Joan Lebold Cohen, "Art in China Today: A New FreedomÑWithin Limits," Artnews 79 (Summer 1980): 67; Liang Tianwei, "Huang Yongyu de maotouying fengbo" (The controversy over Huang Yongyu's Owl), in Huang Yongyu et al., Wushimang luntan (Mr. Much-Ado-About-Nothing's Forum) (Hong Kong, 1989), p. 153; Huang Yongyu, "Shao Yu he maotouying shijian," p. 102; Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949Ð1979 (Berkeley, 1994), p. 373; and Shelley D. Hawks, "Painting by Candlelight during the Cultural Revolution: Assertions of Autonomy and Expertise in the Battle over Culture" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Seattle, Jan. 1998).

11. Gilbert Ryle, "The Thinking of Thoughts: What Is `Le Penseur' Doing?" in Collected Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1971), 2:480.

Eugene Y. Wang is assistant professor of art history at Harvard University. He is the author of several articles on medieval Chinese art and modern Chinese visual culture and has translated Roland Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux into Chinese.