ABSTRACT
The brush of a canonical early modern Chinese painter was never fully laid to rest. After death, their brushwork style was constantly re-embodied in the various methods of direct copying (mo), inspired copying (ni or lin), and stylistic emulation (fang) celebrated within Chinese painting culture from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century. Re-embodying past styles, artists incorporated themselves into a canon of painters that was also organized in bodily terms, as a lineage. The intersection of this culture of re-embodied emulation and the production of outright forgeries for the market continues to frustrate art historians and gallerists alike, confounding notions of originality structured around binary terms of the authentic or the forged. One of the last painters to be emulated within this painting culture was Qian Du (1763–1844), and a discussion of his work is the focus of this chapter. What does the collapse of this process of canonization during the era of Chinese modernization reveal about its necessary preconditions?
