User:NickDupree/Juanqinzhai

The Juanqinzhai (literally, "Studio of Exhaustion From Diligent Service"; also called "Lodge of Retirement") is the first of the Qianlong Palace apartments in the Forbidden City to be restored and opened to the public for study and tours. The Juanqinzhai was completed in 2010 after a $3 million effort led by Beijing's Palace Museum and the American-sponsored World Monuments Fund (WMF). Rooms of the Juanqinzhai were replicated and filled with furniture and other original Qianlong artifacts loaned from the Palace Museum's collection of now-lavishly-restored Juanqinzhai originals for a tour of the United States. The tour began in fall 2010, and ended in 2011 after exhibitions in three cities.

Exhibition

The 1.5-million-yuan ($220,807) exhibition was first organized and debuted at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, then in 2011 moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and finally, exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a three-city tour, with three month stints in each city.

The Juanqinzhai rooms exhibited, carefully recreated spaces within museum rooms, held about 100 exquisite Qianlong period artifacts, "sumptuous murals, furniture, architectural elements, Buddhist icons, and decorative arts—almost all of which have never before been seen publicly," For the exhibition at the Met Museum, these items were placed in carefully reconstructed spaces, including a small garden demonstrating the emperor's brand of 18th century feng shui, rooms with elaborately-restored period furniture and other antiques, Trompe-l'œil false windows and other artistic illusions, including northern wood carved to resemble classic bamboo only found a world away in southern China.

The Juanqinzhai is now regarded as one of the only surviving examples of 18th century Chinese interior design, "...only the successive residential palaces of the Qianlong emperor in the Forbidden City can make any claim to preserve many components of an original secular interior of the pre-1840 period." It has sparked interest and study by art historians worldwide.

Inside the Juanqinzhai

Trompe-l'œil

"The heyday of trompe l'oeil" in China was the Qianlong period, when trompe l'oeil techniques were part of the designs "not just of decorative objects but also of large-scale building projects."

Sino-western trompe l'oeil painting was heavily used throughout the Qianlong Palace; in the Juanqinzhai, the interior walls "appeared to give access to an eternally sunny and warm garden." Trompe l'oeil styles of the type the Qianlong emperor embraced in the design of his Juanqinzhai soon spread among the elite; contemporary aristocrats "followed the same fashions for trompe l'oeil" in their mansions. In his landmark novel of the Qing elite, The Story of the Stone, Cao Xueqin describes an aristocratic family's garden pavilion with trompe l'oeil partitions. "The trompe l'oeil effect of the ingenious partitions had been further enhanced by inserting false windows and doors in [some of] them..."

Cao saw these trompe l'oeil techniques as part of "the Buddhist metaphor of a transient world of appearances concealing a deeper spiritual reality."

Jonathan Hay sees deeper meanings in Qing trompe l'oeil, noting it's no coincidence that the peak of Sino-western trompe l'oeil emerged from Beijing at the height of the Qing court's power. "Court trompe l'oeil, one might say, was born of ideological trompe l'oeil: the Qing state was not what it seemed, in the specific and concrete sense that a major component of its exercise of power was the manipulation of appearances." The Qing rulers, all of them from the Manchu minority, were able to govern the polyglot Middle Kingdom by fostering in each population—above all within the Han majority—"a political culture of denial." Once Qing emperors demonstrated proficiency in Chinese arts and had accrued sufficient cultural capital, Han elites were willing to "close their eyes" to the Qing court's "equal investments" in non-Han culture and what that meant: the conquest of China by outside "barbarian" foes. "...all the dynasty had to do was leave it open to interpretation" and after presenting a tour de force of Chinese design, the Han majority could be counted on to assume the Qing sinicized and transformed by Han officials "into the fulfillment of a specifically Chinese political philosophy." Hay argues that the "very frivolity" of the Qing's theatrical brand of trompe l'oeil "implied that little was at stake in the manipulation of appearances, whereas in fact the opposite was true. The fictive surface-scapes of decoration, in other words, made their own small contribution to the Manchu Qing exercise of power."