Hu Zhengyan

Hu Zhengyan (; 15841674) was a Chinese artist, printmaker and publisher. He worked in calligraphy, traditional Chinese painting, and seal-carving, but was primarily a publisher, producing academic texts as well as records of his own work.

Hu lived in Nanjing during the transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty. A Ming loyalist, he was offered a position at the rump court of the Hongguang Emperor, but declined the post, and never held anything more than minor political office. He did, however, design the Hongguang Emperor's personal seal, and his loyalty to the dynasty was such that he largely retired from society after the emperor's capture and death in 1645. He owned and operated an academic publishing house called the Ten Bamboo Studio, in which he practised various multi-colour printing and embossing techniques, and he employed several members of his family in this enterprise. Hu's work at the Ten Bamboo Studio pioneered new techniques in colour printmaking, leading to delicate gradations of colour which were not previously achievable in this art form.

Hu is best known for his manual of painting entitled The Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, an artist's primer which remained in print for around 200 years. His studio also published seal catalogues, academic and medical texts, books on poetry, and decorative writing papers. Many of these were edited and prefaced by Hu and his brothers.

Biography

Hu was born in Xiuning County, Anhui Province in 1584 or early 1585. Both his father and elder brother Zhengxin (, art name Wusuo, ) were physicians, and after he turned 30 he travelled with them while they practised medicine in the areas around Lu'an and Huoshan. It is commonly stated that Zhengyan himself was also a doctor, Their home on Jilongshan (, now also known as Beiji Ge), a hill located just within the northern city wall, It functioned as the headquarters for his printing business, where he employed ten artisans including his two brothers Zhengxin and Zhengxing (, art name Zizhu, ) and his sons Qipu and Qiyi (, courtesy name ). Hu, who was noted for his seal-carving and facility with seal script, created a seal for the new Emperor. The court offered him the position of Drafter for the Secretariat (zhongshu sheren, ) as a reward, but he did not accept the role (although he did accord himself the title of zhongshu sheren in some of his subsequent personal seals). Since contemporaneous biographies (Wen's work was not published until 1830) make no mention of these events, it has been suggested that they were fabricated after Hu's death. implying that his carvings were popular with visitors and travellers passing through Nanjing.

In 1644, Hu took it upon himself to create a new Imperial seal for the Hongguang Emperor, which he carved after a period of fasting and prayer. He presented his creation with an essay, the Great Exhortation of the Seal (Dabao Zhen, ), in which he bemoaned the loss of the Chongzhen Emperor's seal and begged Heaven's favour in restoring it. Hu was concerned that his essay would be overlooked because he had not written it in the form of rhyming, equally-footed couplets (pianti, ) used in the Imperial examinations, but his submission and the seal itself were nevertheless both accepted by the Southern Ming court.

Ten Bamboo Studio Fruit (Persimmon and Three Yellow Tangerines) from the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, showing the colour gradation achieved through Hu Zhengyan's printing methods. Despite his reputation as an artist and seal-carver, Hu was primarily a publisher. His publishing house, the Ten Bamboo Studio, produced reference works on calligraphy, poetry and art; medical textbooks; books on etymology and phonetics; and copies of, as well as commentaries on, the Confucian Classics. Unlike other publishers in the area, the Ten Bamboo Studio did not publish works of narrative fiction such as plays or novels. This bias towards academia was likely a consequence of the studio's location: the mountain on which Hu took up residence was just to the north of the Nanjing Guozijian (National Academy), which provided a captive market for academic texts. Between 1627 and 1644, the Ten Bamboo Studio produced over twenty printed books of this kind, aimed at a wealthy, literary audience. The studio's earliest publications were medical textbooks, the first of which, Tested Prescriptions for Myriad Illnesses (Wanbing Yanfang, ) was published in 1631 and proved popular enough to be reissued ten years later. Hu's brother Zhengxin was a medical practitioner and appears to have been the author of these books. At his studio, Hu Zhengyan experimented with various forms of woodblock printing, creating processes for producing multi-coloured prints and embossed printed designs. As a result, he was able to produce some of China's first printed publications in colour, using a block printing technique known as "assorted block printing" (douban yinshua, ). This system made use of multiple blocks, each carved with a different part of the final image and each bearing a different colour. It was a lengthy, painstaking process, requiring thirty to fifty engraved printing blocks and up to seventy inkings and impressions to create a single image. He refined these block printing techniques by developing a process for wiping some of the ink off the blocks before printing; this enabled him to achieve gradation and modulation of shades which were not previously possible.

In some images, Hu employed a blind embossing technique (known as "embossed designs" (gonghua, ) or "embossed blocks" (gongban, ), using an uninked, imprinted block to stamp designs onto paper. He used this to create white relief effects for clouds and for highlights on water or plants. Both Hu and Wu used embossing to create decorative writing papers, the sale of which provided a sideline income for the Ten Bamboo Studio.

Major works

Hu's most notable work is the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (Shizhuzhai Shuhuapu, ), an anthology of around 320 prints by around thirty different artists (including Hu himself), published in 1633. It consists of eight sections, covering calligraphy, bamboo, flowers, rocks, birds and animals, plum blossoms, orchids and fruit. Some of these sections had been released previously as single volumes. In this book, Hu used his multiple-block printing methods to obtain gradations of colour in the images, rather than obvious outlines or overlaps. Said Charles Aylmer, Head of the Cambridge University Chinese Department, "The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars."

This volume went on to influence colour printing across China, where it paved the way for the later but better-known Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden (Jieziyuan Huazhuan ), and also in Japan, where it was reprinted and foreshadowed the development in ukiyo-e of the colour woodblock printing process known as . The popularity of the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual was such that print runs continued to be produced all the way through to the late Qing dynasty. Whilst primarily a catalogue of decorative writing papers, it also contained paintings of rocks, people, ritual vessels and other subjects.

Other publications Other works produced by Hu's studio included a reprint of Zhou Boqi's manual of seal-script calligraphy, The Six Styles of Calligraphy, Correct and Erroneous (Liushu Zheng'e, ) and the related Necessary Investigations into Calligraphy (Shufa Bi Ji, ), which discussed common errors in the formation of characters. With his brother Zhengxin, Hu edited a new introductory edition of the Confucian classics, entitled The Standardised Text of the Four Books, Identified and Corrected (Sishu Dingben Bianzheng, ) (1640), giving the correct formation and pronunciation of the text. A similar approach was taken with the Essentials of the Thousand Character Classic in Six Scripts (Qianwen Liushu Tongyao, ) (1663), which Hu compiled with the aid of his calligraphy teacher, Li Deng. It was published after Li's death, partly in homage to him.

The three Hu brothers worked together to collate a student primer on poetry by their contemporary Ye Tingxiu, which was called simply the Discussion of Poetry (Shi Tan, ) (1635). Other works on poetry from the studio included Helpful Principles to the Subtle Workings of Selected Tang Poems (Leixuan Tang Shi Zhudao Weiji, ), which was a compilation of several works on poetry and included colophons by Hu Zhengyan himself.

Among the studio's more obscure publications was a text on Chinese dominoes entitled Paitong Fuyu , written under a pseudonym but with a preface by Hu Zhengyan.

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