Elegant Debts

Elegant Debts takes an innovative approach to one of the major figures of Chinese culture, the writer and painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559). Renowned as one of the great ‘scholar painters’ of the Ming dynasty, Wen was enmeshed in a complex web of social obligations – his ‘elegant debts’ as he called them – which led to many of his most celebrated works.

Using an unprecedented quantity of primary sources for his life and work, Craig Clunas looks at the ways in which social obligation and gift exchange were central to personal and individual identity in the Ming period. He also examines Wen’s family relationships, his friends, mentors and pupils, his sense of a distinct local identity, and the interplay of national and regional politics with the achievements of his long life.

The author uses the insights of a range of scholarship – art history, social and literary history and anthropology – to show how ‘self’ was constructed in Ming China. In doing so, the book makes a major contribution towards a more diverse art history that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work.