The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade

Explores how the function, norms, and meaning of artists’ names in Chinese modernity have been misunderstood.

Challenging contemporary procedures for establishing attribution, chronology, and authenticity in Chinese art, Winnie Wong explores the means, methods, and stakes of recovering the names of an anonymous community of artists. To examine how Western art history has misconstrued and miscategorized names and identities in Chinese art, she looks to conflicting features of modernity: the European attachment of singular names to individuals and their works, and the Chinese use of socially contingent names that often are not attached to material labor and sometimes operate against it. Wong charts the genealogy of this naming problem by bringing to life the artists of the Qing Empire’s trade with Europeans at the port of Guangzhou, centering on a group of portraitists known by names that were recorded in a pidgin language: Chin Qua, Chit Qua, Spoilum, Lam Qua, and Ting Qua.

Many of these paintings survive today, yet scholars have identified only a handful of the painters’ identities. Pushing against Western norms that have shaped our understanding of authorship, Wong reveals that these artists shared names, created works in multiples, and signed their pieces with different names or none at all. This lavishly illustrated volume explores portraiture across media, including unfired clay, reverse painting on glass, watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, and the daguerreotype, to propose new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the Sino-European visual culture of the long eighteenth century.

Winnie Wong is professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade and the coeditor of Learning from Shenzhen, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.