Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

of landscape background, a communion with nature, religious syncretism, and visual idioms from Buddhist and Daoist iconography created a strong sense of individuality.⁸¹ Moreover, the evolution of Self-Encomia (zizan 自贊) is meaningful. This phenomenon started in the eighth century, perhaps before, from the practice of commenting on portrait paintings. During the Song dynasty, in syntony with the rise of Neo-Confucianism, it was stabilized as a more focused literary exercise of moral introspection, by a rhetorical dramatization that renegotiated the self’s boundaries through a play of identity and difference: a rhetorical dialogue between the “I” of the writer and the “you” of the image expressed the ethical tension between two existential states, what one is and what one ought to be, or between the represented self and the speaking body, the expansion of the self from the limited, inauthentic, and selfish to a true, universal, and impartial self.⁸² A new intimacy is acquired in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century self-encomia, where the refusal of identification with the image alters the genre’s classical structure and projection and destabilizes the self’s already unstable boundaries.⁸³ According to Hajime Nakatani, the Ming self-eulogist emphasized the existential sense of inner disunity as an inexorable condition, a perturbed self,⁸⁴ so that “the liminality of the painted double is hence ultimately reflected back upon the self, which ends as the image of its own image and an other to itself, […] constantly oscillating between eccentric disturbance and sentimental merger.”⁸⁵

The relationship between image, self, and emotions is even more meaningful for another quest of self-perfection: the search for one’s self and the expression of unfulfilled desires in the case of self-portraits done by some heroines, which constitutes a leitmotif of several works of literature.⁸⁶ Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) works, for example, stand for their constant pondering over the cult of passions (qingjiao 情教 as opposed to mingjiao) whereby the genuine self of humans is conveyed through genuine love (zhenqing 真情), either as true morality (as in Qingshi Leilüe 情史類略) or as essential lively desire (see Shan’ge 山歌), while “wisdom” (zhi 智) is conceptualized as the practical ability to preserve one’s well-being by ignoring social conventions (refer to