Guest Speaker: Prof. Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis, MO, U.S.A.)

Location: TELUS International Centre (Room 134)

When the Kangxi emperor’s Southern Tours disembarked in Suzhou in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, the ruler arrived in a city famous across the empire for its optical devices. Popular use of these devices in and around Suzhou coincided with the Jesuit introduction of optic and catoptric principles at the court in Beijing. The combination of these factors led to the growth of Qing imperial fascination with vision at the same time as the expansion of the imperial painting academy and the strengthening of the empire as an ordered, unified whole. About sixty years after Kangxi first visited Suzhou, his grandson, the Qianlong emperor, arrived there during his own Southern Tours, and made a special visit to the famed Lion Grove Garden. Both emperors later had their visits to Suzhou depicted in paintings, and the Qianlong emperor commissioned an additional work depicting the garden. By looking at Suzhou in person and in paintings, these emperors created complex visual relationships between reality and representation, all within the larger concerns of the empire.

Focusing on two Qing imperial paintings in the Mactaggart Art Collection that depict Suzhou and its Lion Grove Garden, this presentation uses those works as a lens onto the links between place, perception, painting, and power at the High Qing court. By connecting ideas about vision to the deeper meanings inherent in imperial perception, these paintings attempted to represent the experience and memory of real sites in ways that intertwined art, sight, and politics. Through these two paintings of real Suzhou sites visited by two emperors on numerous occasions, a great deal can be learned about how order in the Qing empire had become inseparable from imperial vision itself. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors’ decisions to have their influential visits to Suzhou, the city with the greatest effect on period conceptions of vision, recreated in paintings begins to reveal the role of sight in the High Qing imperium.