Visions of Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Painting

Abstract

This essay explores the representation of blindness and its metaphorical dimension in scholar painting of Qing China (1644-1911), a period marked by a major increase of these images. Focusing on a 1757 Zhu Yan’s handscroll titled Groups of Blind People, where one hundred blind characters are engaged in comic or incongruous situations such as appreciating antiquities, fighting or grabbing a giant copper coin, it examines the use of humor and visual satire to express moral criticism, with emphasis on identifying and explaining some of the puns or familiar sayings on which these images rely. By casting some light on this and similar works, as well as sorting out other modes in which the blind were depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, the article also aims to open the way to further studies of this topic.