Echoes of Great Brightness: The Ming Dynasty and Beyond

Echoes of Great Brightness: The Ming Dynasty and Beyond

An International Conference in Honor of Craig Clunas

 

 

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SCHEDULE

 

Day 1: September 16th 2025

 

 

1. Timothy Brook, “Confounding the Two: A Comparative History of Seventeenth-Century European and Chinese Libraries.”
2. Winnie Wong, “Naming a Qing Visual Culture.”
3. Martin Powers, “The Persistence of Pattern: Seeking Alternative Paradigms for Cosmopolitan History.”

 

Tea Break: 11:00-11:15

 

1. Yu-jen Liu, “On the Edge of the Canon: The Evaluation of Guiseppe Castiglione in Modern China.”
2. Motoyuki Kure, “Arts and Politics in the Diplomat’s Collection: Yakichiro Suma’s Connoisseurship in Modern Chinese and Spanish Paintings.”
3. Stephen Whiteman, “Encountering Maps in Early Modern China.”

 

Lunch: 12:45-2:00

 

1. Cheng-hua Wang, “Imagined Cities and Imperial Territoriality at the Court of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1795).”
2. Pedith Pui Chan, “Remembering and Reimagining Jiangnan in Southwest China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.”
3. Timon Screech, “First Steps Towards a Cultural History of the Rokuhara District of Kyoto.”

 

High tea: 3:30-4:00

 

1. Luk Yu-ping, “Mounting and Mending: Traces of borders and early conservation work on Dunhuang portable paintings and banners.”
2. Dorothy Ko, “In Search of the “Spirit of Artisans” in Early Modern and Modern China.”
3. Aida Yuen Wong, “The Quiet Path: Horticultural Restraint and Therapeutic Silence in East Asian Gardens.”

Day 2: September 17th 2025

 

1. Judith Zeitlin, “The Strange Reimagined: Illustrating Liaozhai Tales in Different Mediums.”
2. Tadahito Tsutsui, “Ming Dynasty Printed Books and the Emergence of Early Ukiyo-e.”
3. Lukas Nickel, “Suzhou Prints and their reception in Austria.”

 

Tea Break: 10:30-10:45

 

1. Huang Xiaofeng, “Fictionalizing Real Faces: Cultural Constructs in the Portraiture Album of Ming Eminent Men”
2. Elizabeth Kindall, “Persona and Space in an Unbound Album of Parting Paintings.”
3. Ziru Li, “The Dissemination of the Nine Horses schema and the Conceptualization of Ren Renfa’s Canonicity in Art Historiography.”
4. Quincy Ngan, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Color in Chinese Art Historiography.”

 

Lunch: 12:30-13:30

 

1. Wu Hung, “Mountains as a Spiritual Medium: Rethinking Sixth-century Landscape Representation.”
2. Lihong Liu, “Delineating the Stream: The Riverine Aesthetic in the Art of Ming China.”
3. Yin Jinan, “《扬士奇的江河湖海》: 一个明代首辅的视觉之旅”

 

Tea Break: 15:00-15:30

 

1. Katharine Burnett, “Chen Jiru, Shi Dabin, and the Marvelously Extraordinary, Inventively Original Teapot.”
2. Richard Vinograd, “Set Pieces: Media, Matching, and Materiality in Illustrations of Jin Ping Mei.”
3. Yuhang Li, “Fluid Transcendence: Commemorating Time Through Boats and Water.”

 

Break: 17:00-17:15

 

Introduction of Craig Clunas: 17:15–17:30

 

 

Wine Reception: 18:15-19:15 (Open to all participants and audience)

 

Conference Dinner: 19:15 (by Invitation Only)

 

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Paper Abstracts (in alphabetical order of presenters’ last names)

One of the great contributions that Craig Clunas has made to the history of Ming China has been to incorporate scholarly approaches derived from European historical experience in this period into his methodology and to apply these approaches where it is applicable to what we understand of Chinese culture, though without forcing China into a European framework. His classic demonstration of this approach is my favourite book, Superfluous Things. There he showed us that the history of China can draw on findings in other historical fields. As he puts it on page 4, he took up “a comparative perspective on the China of the late Ming” not to traduce the work of European historians but to “put something back into their enterprise” in a way that broadens our ability to comprehend cultures of the past both in China and in Europe.

Superfluous Things will be the point of departure for the paper that I wish to present at the conference. My paper will explore the challenge of bringing libraries in China and Europe in the seventeenth century together for comparative study. The term “confounding” in the title comes from a remark by John Selden, owner of the largest private libraries in England assembled from scratch in that century, in his Table Talk (p. 49). There he observes that “the not distinguishing where things should be distinguished, and the not confounding [combining] where things should be confounded [combined], is the cause of all the mistakes in the world.” This paper will explore the history of seventeenth-century libraries to explore the question of when comparative history should distinguish, and when it should combine, in order to broaden our understanding of the past.

 

 

Zisha (purple clay) teapots made at the pottery town of Yixing in Jiangsu Province have long been prized by tea connoisseurs for their flavor enhancing characteristics and their inventive shapes. The inventiveness of the shapes, formative in the late Ming, have become if not commonplace, commonly accepted as a norm for Yixing ceramics. While the tradition of potting in Yixing is millennia old, it was only in the mid-Ming that potters first began to create pots in inventive shapes; this inventiveness really took off and came to full fruition in the late Ming. The question is: Why? This paper looks at specific examples of late Ming teapots, contemporaneous art theory, and the known relationships between major potters (commoners) and art theorists (the intellectual elite) to help us better understand how ideas could have mixed between social groups, and how major aesthetic values of the day might have affected tea ware production.

 

 

Jiangnan has historically served as a cultural and economic hub of China with considerable impact on artistic production. Its distinctive natural scenery has cultivated specific landscape aesthetics that have defined Chinese art. During the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), the Nationalist government initiated the Southeastern Tours project to develop transportation infrastructure, tourism, and scenic sites in the region, thereby incorporating Jiangnan into representations of the national landscape. However, the onset of the Sino-Japanese War catalysed the cultural center’s shift to the southwest inland, where displaced artists toured the exotic wilderness of southwest China. This paper explores the discourse of Jiangnan and its role in shaping representations of the national landscape during wartime China, uncovering the multi-layered sociocultural meanings embedded in the textual, visual, and spatial representations of Jiangnan in modern China. Wartime periods provided complex sociocultural contexts that shaped artists’ perceptions of southwest landscapes. Building upon the landscape aesthetics of Jiangnan, new scenic sites were constructed and promoted by the government. Despite cultural leaders’ critiques of this aesthetic as overly feminine and in need of alteration to suit wartime exigencies, Jiangnan’s landscapes continued to be memorised and imagined by artists and writers who encountered and redefined the picturesque landscapes of southwest China.

 

 

Portrait painting flourished during the Ming Dynasty, producing many exquisite works that have become essential sources for art historians and scholars. These portraits are often examined in the contexts of ancestral worship rituals, the influence of European visual traditions, or efforts to reconstruct the tangible appearances of historical figures. Among them, the Album of Ming Dynasty Portraits (Mingren xiaoxiang ce), housed in the Nanjing Museum, consists of twelve leaves believed to depict officials and literati from the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region during the Wanli and Tianqi reigns. The album features prominent late-Ming cultural and artistic figures such as Li Rihua and Xu Wei. Recently uncovered records indicate that the Shanghai Museum also holds a strikingly similar album. However, the identities of these portraits’ subjects were retrospectively assigned by early 20th-century collectors, with no reliable contemporaneous evidence to support these attributions—casting considerable doubt on their authenticity. This paper challenges these claims, proposing that these bust-style portraits may not depict the presumed historical figures at all. Instead, they could be fictionalized representations, possibly created as promotional showcases by portrait workshops.

 

 

How did viewers physically interact with unbound painting albums prepared as parting gifts? I explore how viewers of the 1583 Album for Li Yi constructed persona and space through their physical interaction with this unbound album. Created as a parting gift for the Suzhou official Li Yi, sixteen of its leaves are paintings that illustrate identifiable sites in the south, such as waterscapes and mountainscapes. Each also has a companion leaf of poetry written about the site. While each painting or poem could be read on its own or as part of its pair, my close examination of Album for Li Yi shows underlying connections between all the folios and how they worked together to meet the sociocultural agenda of the coordinators. I will first examine how albums produced a public space that afforded coordinators and participants opportunities to perform the ceremonial parting behaviors they could not achieve in real life. I will then explore how the coordinators of the album orchestrated a persona that was activated when the entirety of the album was laid out on tables.

 

 

In his book The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China, historian Yü Ying-shih revises Max Weber by arguing that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in early modern China were conducive to the development of a capitalist work ethic, and that one can discern this ‘mercantile spirit’ in the life and deeds of merchants detailed in their epitaphs. Taking this argument as a point of departure, this paper asks two further questions. First, did artisans share the merchant’s spirit, or did craft workers forge a distinct ‘spirit of artisans’? Second, did domestic women, in their everyday practices of nühong /nügong (womanly work,) partake in this ‘spiritual significance of labor’? In shifting attention from merchants to artisans and women—actual producers of myriad goods and commodities—we highlight the importance of embodied skills and handwork in sustaining political and social life before the machine age. In this way, this paper begins and ends with a question: What is the meaning of craft, and what role should it play in modern life?

 

 

Yakichiro Suma (1892-1970), a Japanese diplomat during the Showa period, is well known as one of the first collectors of Qi Baishi (1864-1957), a master of modern Chinese ink painting. Suma was dispatched to China in the 1930s, prior to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and later to Spain during World War II. As a “literati,” a diplomatic bureaucrat with a deep appreciation for art, he collected numerous artworks in both China and Spain. These collections are now housed in the Kyoto National Museum and Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum.

Suma employed the artworks in his collection as tools for diplomatic negotiations with the Wang Qingwei administration in China and the Franco administration in Spain. His unique connoisseurship is admired in both diplomatic circles; he recognized a "naivety" in the paintings of Qi Baishi and José Gutiérrez Solana (1886-1945), highlighting the commonalities between Eastern and Western art. This paper examines Suma’s connoisseurship of modern Chinese and Spanish paintings to reveal how a Japanese diplomat sought to bridge art and politics in China and Spain during the first half of the twentieth century.

 

 

In both Buddhist and Daoist practice, a boat or a ferry refers to its infinite capacity to transport all sentient beings to cross the sea between the living and the dead, and is used to explain the idea of universal transcendence. Such doctrinal concepts were often illustrated in religious prints and murals. In the late Qing period, however, Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), the de facto ruler of late Qing China (1840-1911), began to evoke the meaning of such transcendence through actual boats and to incorporate boating on water as part of the visual and material practice of birthday celebrations. This paper rethinks water, or more specifically lakes in imperial gardens, as a site for the construction of religious experience. By discussing how the material forms of the boats made in various media and the act of boating, this paper explores how a female monarch practiced mimesis to transport herself into a religious realm through the creation of spectacles and how she sought her own immortality through her birthday celebrations.

 

 

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Yuan-dynasty Feeding Horses (attributed to Ren Renfa) replicates a mirrored section of the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s Nine Horses, epitomizing the proliferating “Nine Horses” schema tied to Ren. While similar schema and works underpin modern studies of Yuan horse painting, authenticated Ren pieces remain scarce. By the Ming dynasty, the schema was systematically replicated across social strata via printmaking and exact copies, often misattributed to Li Gonglin or Zhao Mengfu to amplify canonical authority. Concurrently, Ren-attributed works entered Japan as aristocratic collectibles, spurring localized reinterpretations. Divergent Sino-Japanese interpretations of Ren’s artistry emerged from distinct painterly epistemologies, a schism intensified by 19th-century photomechanical reproduction and Euro-American acquisitions of Sino-Japanese art. Tracing the schema’s transnational circulation, this study examines how image dissemination, epistemic frameworks, and viewer reception collectively construct—and destabilize—art-historical taxonomies, deconstructing the artificial mechanisms of artistic canon formation.

 

 

One day in autumn 1489, when Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) was just beginning to learn painting from Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Shen demonstrated how to paint “Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River” (Changjiang wanli tu ). At that time, the twenty-year-old Wen had just passed his county-level examination to become a government student. However, many years later, after he became a famous painter, it was this painting and that story that he recalled. Why did Wen recall that story and that painting? This talk reveals that the riverine and riparian landscapes of the Yangtze persisted in Chinese landscape painting not only as subject matter but also as an aesthetic mode and impetus for art historiography. I argue that the river system, as a political realm and a hydro-social landscape, facilitated literati engagement with the material world and inspired their artistic creation. They aspired to channel and change the waterways as a fundamental part of their political ideology of governance, self-image, and artistic lineage.

 

 

Giuseppe Castiglione (Ch. Lang Shining 郎世寧, 1688-1766), the Milan-born Jesuit painter serving at the Qing court, has attracted ambivalent views since the first half of the twentieth century, at the time when a modern story of ‘Chinese art’ emerged. Despite working for the Qing emperors for more than half a century, Castiglione’s European origin and art training, as well as his ‘hybrid’ style, have tended to result in his being edged out of the Chinese art canon. Nevertheless, the numerous works he left in the former Qing imperial collection ensure his public visibility in the museum environment. This paper examines the conflicting views and attitudes on Castiglione expressed during the Republican period by artists, theorists and art historians of various backgrounds and stances, as well as his representation in popular culture. In the hope of understanding the mechanism of art evaluation for past Chinese art in modern times, this paper aims to see how these views from different positions developed into standard sets of opinions about Castiglione ready for later mobilisation, and how they might clash with one another at different levels, thus leaving the appraisal of Castiglione permanently unsettled.

 

 

Research on Dunhuang portable paintings and banners from the so-called ‘Library Cave’ (Cave 17), Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, tend to focus on images depicted on them rather than their construction as material objects. Yet, these paintings are stitched together with pieces of silk or hemp fabric, and often have textile borders that protected them or supported their display. These borders may have been separated from their central panels because of later conservation work. Some paintings have fragments of paper, reused from manuscripts, that have been pasted on to their reverse to mend points of weakness. This paper examines examples of these processes of production and modifications to consider early conservation and mounting practices at Dunhuang and what they may reveal about these paintings and banners as material objects.

 

 

Suzhou prints, a type of large-size woodblock prints featuring vistas of famous sights of the commercially prosperous city of Suzhou, scenes of family life and well-known historical tales, became popular in China during the first half of the 18^th century. The prints often emulated visual elements known from European copper etchings, a feature that apparently enhanced their visual attraction among the local urban population.

Slightly later, European merchants began including the prints among the trade goods shipped to Europe. There, Suzhou prints reached a new and unintended, but likewise fascinated audience. This talk will investigate the case of Vinzenz Graf Sauer (1744-1773), who had installed a set of 28 Suzhou prints in his townhouse in the city of Graz in Styria at around 1770. An examination of the mode of display, the position of the print room in the building, and of the information preserved in contemporary records will provide some insight into the way the local Austrian nobility appreciated Chinese prints.

 

 

Over the past few decades, studies in Chinese art have revealed the multivalent significance of color in textiles, ceramics, bronzes, culture, history, and philosophy. In this historiography, ancient and medieval China are often conceived as the heyday of Chinese civilization with Ming and Qing being the shadow of this cultural prosperity. This paper seeks to reframe Ming and Qing as a forward-looking, early modern period in the long-term development of color’s usage. Divided into three parts, this paper first reflects on the needs and broader issues within the field by introducing recent studies, highlighting different approaches, scholarly interests, and the potential of incorporating scientific analysis in art-historical research. The second part examines how studies on Chinese painting color differ from and align with other mediums of Chinese art and the broader discipline of art history. The last part delves into Ming and Qing paintings within the context of early modernity, analyzing artworks, painting treatises, and other textual records. The juxtaposition of historical discourse on color with existing scholarship challenges established literati biases in the historiography of Chinese painting and refutes the persistent assumption of stagnation in the cultural history of color during the few centuries in question.

 

 

In “Sinicizing Early Modernity” David Porter suggested that, for Hegel and other European apologists, “writing China out of history was an act of instrumental amnesia: a deliberate occlusion of rival claimants to exemplarity, and of the memory of a more truly cosmopolitan early modern past.” From the late Twentieth century until today, Craig Clunas has ranked among the most articulate and thoughtful exponents of a more cosmopolitan history of the modern era. Having grown up during the last Cold War, he contributed persuasively to the development of a more culturally integrated history of art. That development peaked in the early years of this century, but now a second Cold War has erased much of whatever was gained. What are our options? This paper examines the visualization of “China” over roughly a century. Despite the rich variety of imagery, most images were built from a limited number of scaffoldings, or paradigms. Some scaffoldings could support a cosmopolitan history of art; most cannot. Let us see if we can discover where the differences lie.

 

 

This paper is the first foray into a projected book-length study of Rokuhara. Although the placename has mostly fallen from use, Rokuhara was once the key district of Kyoto - or rather of just outside it. Kyoto was established on a green-field site in 794 with ten east/west avenues, all abutting the River Kamo to the east. The city was established with two rules: it was to have no privately-endowed temples and no warrior residences.

A little community called Rokuhara (‘six fields’) lay across the river between Fifth and Sixth venues, in the mid-city area, so easily accessed from Kyoto proper. This soon became site of many temples, and a Fifth Avenue bridge was added to ease passage. Temples meant graves, which imparted a somewhat wistful, if not lugubrious aura to the place, as smoke rose up from funeral pyres. For warrior residences, the Taira clan took possession of a swathe of the area, and when they were obliterated, the first shogunate set up its Kyoto base here.

 

 

The ways societies react to new cultural forms can vary widely. As trade routes expanded in the 17th century, various countries around the world began importing printed books from China. However, the types of books imported, the social classes that had access to them, and people’s responses to Chinese culture differed significantly. In 17th-century Japan, with its long history of contact with Chinese culture, the imported classical Confucian and historical texts elicited little reaction. However, the Japanese of this time were fascinated by the illustrations appearing in illustrated printed books intended for the general public, which emerged from the early modern consumer society of the Ming dynasty. Their expressive style became an important inspiration for the imagery of the early ukiyo-e prints that were beginning to flourish in Japan. That said, the adoption of popular illustrations from Ming-era printed books and their incorporation into popular ukiyo-e prints was not a straightforward process. Instead, the intellectual classes of Japan played a mediating role in this cultural transmission. This presentation will clarify the specific ways in which the imagery appearing in Ming-era printed books was received in Japan and how it influenced later artistic developments. By doing so, I will explore the issue of cultural mobility across social classes.

 

 

At the Qianlong court, by restructuring traditional categories of paintings associated with landscapes and/or figures and introducing new modes of pictorial representation, court images transformed the land and people into manifestations of territorial domination and imperial authority. These pictures were so diverse as to include route maps, city views, ethnographic images, battle scenes, pictorial records of imperial tours, and various kinds of works that can generally be subsumed under the label of “landscape.” Many of these pictorial themes and modes were not unprecedented, but the Qianlong examples formulated new signified fields that conveyed the sense of territorial authority. The research in the present study employs the concept of territoriality to explore the position of cityscapes in Qianlong’s politics of visualizing territory through an examination of three paintings depicting imagined cities.

By “territoriality,” I refer to the emperor’s political agenda of reifying the vast territory under his reign through different types and levels of visual representation. To quote Chandra Mukerji’s theory, territoriality is not only “a way of feeling about a portion of land” but also “a form of material practice,” which, in the context of this research, refers to the production and viewing of the paintings that manifested the land and/or people under Qing rule, both real and symbolic. The so-called “Qing territory” was not necessarily an empirical and given fact but something that required constant characterization, codification, and endorsement to assume a role capable of bolstering the Heavenly Mandate. The paintings at issue, two of which are based on Qianlong’s poems, inform the emperor’s approaches to land and people, represent the imperial enterprise of territory, and construct what “Qing territory” signifies. They also reveal power relations between the viewer and the depicted scenes, the central authority represented by the emperor and local places, and among the different places and spatial units seen in them.

 

 

This paper will explore some complex relations between textual narratives, woodblock print illustrations and album painting illustrations of the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei, focusing on the 200-episode set of print illustrations in the Chongzhen period (1628-1644) edition of the novel and a corresponding but now dispersed illustration project of album paintings likely sponsored by the Kangxi-era (1661-1722) imperial court. The translations between monochrome prints and painting media present questions of authorship, originality, and illustrative strategies. The most conspicuous alterations in the paintings, which are highly but not entirely derivative of the prints, are the profligate depictions of vibrantly colored and patterned objects to accompany the figural narratives: embroidered and brocaded textiles and figured carpets, lacquered bowls and columns, gold vessels and jewelry, ornately festooned and painted lanterns, patterned marbles, and inlaid screens among many other types.

The album paintings often depict hypermaterial, visually and spatially intensified environments that offer analogues for domestic, social, and psychosexual interactions within patterned but at times disorienting interiors. Throughout the narratives and illustrations of Jin Ping Mei, things, and people take part in complex orchestrations of display and hiding, observation and obscuration. Amid the kaleidoscopic arrays, possibilities of confusion and dissimulation are ever-present.

 

 

Early modern China experienced a significant expansion of geographic knowledge, in terms of both its quantity and detail, and in its availability and dissemination. Maps shaped and were shaped by changing perceptions of space within China, and China’s place in the world. From manuscripts to books, sheet prints to fans, and much more besides, the material record shows that maps were everywhere. But how and where were they encountered? How did they circulate? How were they looked at and used, and what did people have to say about them? This paper explores material encounters with a range of cartographic objects in order to rethink the place of maps and mapping in relation to broader visual and spatial cultures, particularly those of print and the book, in early modern China.

 

 

 

 

Chinese art from the Warring States period to Han (5th century BCE-3rd century CE) produced three kinds of natural images, namely mountains of gods and spirits , mountains of immortals , and mountains as economic property. Despite their manifold differences, all were regarded as external objects to be explored, pursued, and possessed. A fundamental change took place in the concept of nature in subsequent Six Dynasties art from the third to sixth centuries: landscape gradually established an increasingly intimate relationship with the human subject, becoming a medium for scholars, Buddhists, and Taoists to comprehend the mysteries of the universe and to express their own thoughts and feelings. Instead of relying on a few extant texts on landscape painting from this period, this paper utilizes all sorts of visual evidence, especially newly available archaeological materials, to explore this profound transformation.

 

 

作为经历过明朝前期洪武，建文、永乐、洪熙、宣德和正统六位皇帝统治时期的明代文官扬士奇，政治生命漫长，既是江西文官集团的政治领袖，也宫廷台阁文学的文坛领袖，他本人收藏古籍，刻帖碑拓，古代的书法和绘画，看过其他人的收藏，为当时的文宫和贵族写有大量题跋。他与当时的宫廷画家高度互动。早年游历长江，湘江，衡山，在武昌生活十年，曾经两次往返于京杭大运河，观看过两岸的古迹和友人，一生长期居住在南京和北京。既看到了南洋的贡品，也看到了中国古代传统意义上的祥瑞。杨士奇早年因为避祸有三年的经历在他的年谱中处于空白状态，经过我的研究全部复原出来。也实地走访了他去过的地方。本文通过大量材料讨论杨士奇个人关于自然山川，政治地理，历史景观，他那个时代的当代艺术和文学之间的视觉经验和图文关系。

 

 

Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) masterpiece, Liaozhai’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi ) was not published until fifty years after his death, whereupon it became a major hit. Woodblock imprints of tale and anecdote collections in Classical Chinese, unlike other genres of fiction and drama, were not typically illustrated; the first published edition of Liaozhai and the many subsequent annotated editions over the next century were no exception. This changed in the later nineteenth century with the introduction of lithographic printing technology, and the publication of a fully illustrated edition with poetic captions (Xiangzhu Liaozhai tuyong , 1866), which subsequently inspired pictorial reworkings of these illustrations in other mediums from hand-painted albums to reverse glass painting. The lithographic edition is credited with launching the vogue for visual renditions of Liaozhai tales, but many chapters of a completely independent large scale multivolume lavishly painted album called Liaozhai quantu have recently been rediscovered scattered in two European libraries (Vienna and Geneva). This striking, deluxe album is undated but probably dates from the nineteenth century. Twentieth- century ink painters, such as Pu Ru (Xinyu ) (1896-1963) and contemporary artists such as Peng Wei ( b. 1974) have gone further in imagining playful new modes of illustrating Liaozhai. Rather than conducting a survey or history, this paper will focus on close readings of several key illustrated stories to see how the core Liaozhai theme of the strange was transposed into different visual mediums and reinterpreted in different artistic idioms from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century.