Drawings of a Life of “Unparalleled Glory”
Drawings of a Life of “Unparalleled Glory”
Ideal Manhood and the Rise of Pictorial Autobiographies in China
This chapter reads Drawings of fleeting memories and karma by the Manchu official Wanyan Linqing 完顏麟慶 (1791-1846) as the culmination of pictorial autobiography, an innovative form of self-creation that used an extensive series of portraits and paintings to recapture the subject’s life experiences. By portraying his life of “unparalleled glory,” Linqing transformed normative masculine ideals into a self-glorifying means. His efforts at reconciling the tension between the images and texts of his autobiography in turn revealed the fluidities of the ideal manhood he constructed - fluidities that were occasioned by his personal vicissitudes and the impending crisis of his time. This chapter therefore demonstrates how the construction of ideal manhood both responded to and articulated the great changes at this watershed in modern Chinese history.
Keywords: Wanyan Linqing, pictorial autobiography, ideal manhood, self-glorifying, fluidities
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