Review
The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China
CAA.reviews (New York, N.Y.)
02/26/2025
DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2025.11
Abstract
Luo Ping was introduced to audiences in Europe and the US through a 2009 exhibition that traveled between Museum Rietberg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in studies by Kim Karlsson (Luo Ping: The Life, Career, and Art of an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Painter, Peter Lang, 2004) and Ginger Hsu (A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-Century Yangchow, Stanford University Press, 2001). Matteini’s understanding of Luo Ping helps reposition art from eighteenth-century China, challenging the conventional understanding that paintings from this period were either regurgitations of the past or idiosyncratic products of eccentricity. Despite the author’s insistence upon Luo Ping’s departures from convention, Luo’s innovation remains opaque, given that preexisting examples of site-specific landscape paintings also demonstrate a mixture of reality and multiple, layered references. Matteini’s careful treatment of Luo’s artistic choices sheds light on the implicit and complex relationship between artist and patron. Since Luo Ping’s major patrons, Ingliyan (1707–1783) and Faššan (1753–1813), were from bannerman backgrounds (a Manchu elite military institution), perhaps the next logical question is to consider their cultural pursuits from a multiethnic perspective of art history of the Qing dynasty.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China
- Creators
- Amy Huang
- Resource Type
- Review
- Publication Details
- CAA.reviews (New York, N.Y.)
- DOI
- 10.3202/caa.reviews.2025.11
- eISSN
- 1543-950X
- Publisher
- College Art Association, Inc; New York
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 02/26/2025
- Academic Unit
- School of Art, Art History, and Design
- Record Identifier
- 9984802501302771
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