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The Full-Length Mirror: A Global Visual History PDF

272 Pages·2023·36.132 MB·English
by  Wu Hung
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the full-length mirror the full-length mirror a global visual history wu hung translations by mia yinxing liu reaktion books To the Princeton Woods Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2022 Copyright © Wu Hung 2022 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 610 3 CONTENTS PREFACE 7 PRELUDE A Prehistory of the Full-Length Mirror 13 PART ONE: OBJECT AND REFLECTION one FROM VERSAILLES TO THE FORBIDDEN CITY The Global Invention of the Full-Length Mirror 39 two FROM THE HOUSE OF GREEN DELIGHTS TO THE HALL OF MENTAL CULTIVATION Mirror-Screens in the Literary and Visual Imagination 95 PART TWO: MEDIUM AND SUBJECTIVITY three FROM EUROPE TO THE WORLD The Global Circulation of Full-Length-Mirror Photography 141 four FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO SUBJECTIVITY Discovering the Self in the Full-Length Mirror 219 CODA Disenchantment of the Full-Length Mirror 247 REFERENCES 253 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 264 PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 266 INDEX 268 PREFACE Af ull-length mirror is a tall glass mirror standing on the floor that can reflect the viewer’s entire body. Large reflective devices were imagined and sometimes attempted by the ancients, but functional wall and floor mirrors were realized only in seventeenth-century Europe with the invention of large glass mirror plates. What fol- lowed was the migration and reinvention of such alluring objects around the world, where they inhabited various regional traditions to facilitate interior design, commercial culture, political campaigns and self-expression. This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, travelling in time and space, criss-crosses the globe to intro- duce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans and bourgeois ladies. The other story explores the interconnectedness between object, painting and photography, as the full-length mirror offers a reveal- ing perspective that relates real artefacts and their images to art and visual culture. The book thus experiments with a new kind of global art history in which ‘global’ is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia and North America, and spanning two millennia from the fourth century bce to the twentieth century. 7 the full-length mirror The book starts with an introduction to some premodern cases of large mirrors in art and literature. It takes the ancient Graeco-Roman world and early China as two principal cases, each of which left a rich body of archaeological and literary evidence for real and imaginary large mirrors. The main text consists of two parts. Part One, ‘Object and Reflection’, recounts the invention and employment of glass wall mirrors in seventeenth-century Europe, and then narrates their transformation into free-standing screen mirrors in China during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Archival research allows us to reconstruct several fascinat- ing projects of interior design initiated by Qing-dynasty emperors to integrate imported large glass mirrors into the architecture of the Forbidden City. Three substantial sections then explore the impact of this new type of optical equipment in Chinese literature and visual art of the same era. Part Two, ‘Medium and Subjectivity’, is centred on full-length- mirror portraiture, which uses the free-standing mirror as a principal prop. First invented by European photographers around the mid-nineteenth century, this type of image quickly proliferated around the world and played divergent cultural and political roles in different places. This visual mode was also used to reveal the subjectivity of the sitter or painter, and was thus connected to the rise of individualism in modern art and visual culture. The Coda reflects on the disenchantment of the grand mirror in contemporary society through analysing a masterpiece of Indian cinema directed by Satyajit Ray. This book was written in 2020 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. At that time coronavirus had spread all over the world. I joined my wife, Judith Zeitlin, who was a fellow at ias, and was granted visitor status there during her residence. 8 Preface Conceived in this particular environment, the book was an antidote to the isolation of self-quarantine as it allowed a wide voyage through uncharted waters. The sense of fluidity also char- acterized my working method: a large portion of my research and all of my communications with organizations, colleagues, peers and assistants were carried out in electromagnetic waves through air. The following is a thank-you note, to show my gratitude to those who have contributed to this process; without their help this book would have not been possible. First, I would like to thank the organizations – research insti- tutes, professional associations, universities, museums and so on – which conducted arduous work to turn a massive amount of texts, images and objects into online sources. One example is the digital Archives of the Qing Imperial Workshops, made available through the joint effort of several institutions. If there were no web access to these documents spanning more than two centuries and covering sixty workshops, I would have no way to know how glass mirrors were used in the Qing palaces, not to mention Qing emper- ors’ personal involvement in numerous related architectural and design projects. Another example is the image archive at the Getty Museum and Institute, which covers a wide range of photo images both high and low, artistic and commercial. Skimming through them is like looking into the windows of a nineteenth-century Paris department store. Accessing museum collections is also no longer a serious issue, since many museums have put their collections online; some even provide archival documents for each artwork. Besides these individual sources, some mega-databases appear as huge online libraries. China National Knowledge Infrastructure (cnki) is one of them. Led by Tsinghua University, it offers a comprehensive system of resources that includes all journals and newspapers published in Chinese, as well as doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses, yearbooks, patents and so on. Unknown to scholars of previous 9

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