Class portraits

Chinese portraiture exhibit highlights the material.

By Daniel Okamura
South Coast Beacon

Any portrait aims to faithfully represent reality while flattering the subject. The paintings exhibited in “Worshipping The Ancestors” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art reinforce this goal, albeit in a non-traditional way, as the portraits themselves may be the least important parts of each painting, telling potential truths about the way the world — East and West, past and present — looks at portraits altogether.

Sallow faces in frontal poses with stoic expressions (sometimes called the “Eternal Face,” the expression they would carry past their lifetimes) blend into the silk scrolls that exhibit them. Crossed eyes and worry lines remain intact on men’s faces, often because an artist had been invited to view their corpses. Women, however, are more idealized, because Confucian conduct prohibited men (and all artists were males) from seeing women who were not related to them, and some of the faces bear such similarity, it looks as if they were cut from stencils.

All is revealed in the second room of the exhibit, which holds a sketchbook of “facial types,” resembling a police sketchbook from which artists would construct faces separately from their bodies, based on verbal descriptions of people they weren’t able to see.

The clothing and gold brocades, however, may be more telling of the portraits’ goals and certainly draw the eye away from the bland faces. Generically designed bodies become mere hangers via which to show off vibrant costumes and accoutrements that scream out the importance of class distinction.

Yellow clothing signifies imperial ties where the number of eyes on a peacock plume tells the height of a man’s distinction in the court and jewelry defines a woman’s class standing. Books might represent a scholar, a spear or a general, and the absence of accessories can reveal just as much. Furs, beads and rugs receive so much meticulous detail, painted dot-by-dot and hair-by-hair, compared to people’s faces, that it begs the question as to whether representation is valued over reality.

But such is the nature of memory (which is never photorealistic), that holds true, even in the European tradition of portraiture. Heads of state, military officials and even that dusty photo on the mantel have been so flatteringly represented that that’s how they are remembered. And, given the choice, would you choose to be remembered with fidelity or with idealized praise?