New Scholarship Is Revealing the Private Lives of China’s Empresses

In 1903, seemingly inexplicably, an American woman painted a 15-foot-tall portrait of China’s Empress Dowager Cixi, the last empress of the Qing dynasty, the lineage of hereditary rulers that governed from 1644 to 1912 and is renowned for its wealth, splendor and ostentatious displays of power.

This was at a time when almost no outsider, especially a foreigner, had access to the empress’s private rooms in the imperial palace in Beijing and when, by tradition, only men were permitted to paint formal court portraits.

Ever political, Cixi wanted a Westerner to paint a portrait destined for the West. She commissioned artist Katharine A. Carl to do the painting for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, hoping to boost U.S.-China relations at a fraught time. Carl did the portrait in the Art Nouveau style. It went to St. Louis and was then gifted to Teddy Roosevelt.

This is one of the many startling discoveries in the exhibition, “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644 – 1912,” at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler, which opened March 28 and continues through June 23.

The museum’s director Chase Robinson says the show is the largest in more than a decade there and the first three-way collaboration between the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art. It took more than four years to organize. Though the Cixi portrait belongs to the Smithsonian, more than 100 of the 135 works in the show are on loan from the Palace Museum.

“The show is propitiously timed,” Robinson said at a press preview. “It recognizes an important milestone, the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S and China.”

The exhibition comprises the lavish paintings, sumptuous court robes, objets d’art and religious artifacts owned by the five most powerful Qing dynasty empresses (out of two dozen). It encompasses imperial portraits, narrative paintings, sumptuous furnishings, even gold chopsticks, that testify to a given empress’s elevated rank. These include imperial yellow satin court robes, gem-encrusted headdresses, elaborate pieces of jewelry, gold vessels, cloisonné enamel ewers, jade hairpieces, porcelains and lacquer wares. “Our aim was to pull the story out from the art,” says Jan Stuart , the museum’s curator of Chinese art. “I want the art to do the talking. By looking at the aesthetics, the technical perfection, we can use art to discover facts and consequences.”

The problem she and co-curator Daisy Yiyou Wang of the PEM faced was that, unlike Chinese emperors, the lives and contributions of empresses are largely missing from Qing court history. “We were subject to the male-centric ethic of the court,” Stuart says. “We wanted to bring our scholarly training to see what we could rediscover about the empresses’ lives.”

The Qing dynasty was founded in 1644 by the Manchus of northeast Asia, north of the Great Wall. After conquering the Han Chinese, the Manchus formed a new multiethnic and multicultural state. The Qianlong emperor, for example, saw himself as ruler of five peoples: the Manchus, Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans and Uyghurs.

The Manchus had their own language, history and culture. Manchu noblewomen could divorce. Unlike the Han, Manchu women did not bind their feet. They rode horses, practiced archery and went hunting with men. They read books, painted, did calligraphy and tutored the princes of the realm. They were even allowed to leave the Forbidden City to attend festivals or tour the provinces with the emperors.

Their private residences at court, while separate from those of the emperors, had fine antiquities, furniture, paintings, porcelains and books.

“Our object-based approach also reveals that the artworks and furnishings in the empresses’ and other top consorts’ residences were of the same superlative quality as the emperors,’” Wang and Stuart write in the introduction to the excellent, multi-author catalog . “Court residences were decorated as ‘gender neutral’ spaces.”

The title empress was bestowed on a woman chosen by an emperor’s parents or to a woman the emperor elevated to that title, such as his mother, which was seen an act of filial piety. To take one example: Dowager Empress Cixi’s title was based on her role as mother. An emperor could have many consorts but only one empress at a time.

The real fun of the exhibition is learning how to identify a work of art as belonging to an empress and how to decode the symbols displayed on it.

We learn, for example, only empresses were permitted to wear robes colored imperial yellow. There are phoenixes embroidered on the robes because the mythical bird was the emblem of the empress, the sovereign of the female realm of the entire empire.

Only an empress could wear three double-pearl earrings in each ear, which you see depicted in Qing formal portraits.

Her objects are decorated with peonies, the “king” of flowers and the symbol of wealth. Peaches stand for immortality. Furniture made of bamboo, or paintings of it, represent righteousness. Porcelains depicting scenes of mothers with children are recognized as fertility symbols, which would be important in an imperial court where the chief duty of the wife, whether empress or consort, is to produce a son who could become an emperor.

Images that hint of sexual union include butterflies flying wing to wing and two goldfish swimming together.

Particularly enticing is an 1889 silk court album depicting the grand imperial wedding of the Guangxu emperor and the Xiaoding empress. Before the wedding, we see a representative of the emperor go to the bride’s house to confer the title empress on her and present her with emblematic gifts, including a large gold seal, and a wish-granting golden scepter (ruyi). Then, surrounded by an enormous entourage, the bride is carried in a golden phoenix palanquin from her residence to the emperor’s.

At the entrance to the Forbidden City, at the Gate of Heavenly Purity, the empress steps out of the palanquin holding the scepter in one hand and an apple, the symbol of peace, in the other.

The emperor holds a feast to honor the father of the bride and his male relatives. The bride is introduced to the wives of Manchu nobles and exchanges her scepter for a vase filled with pearls, gems, gold and silver coins and ingots conveying wishes for wealth. The dowager empress honors the mother of the bride and her female relatives. The empress eventually enters the Palace of Earthly Tranquility to spend her first night with the emperor.

The exhibition includes not only the scroll but an antique golden scepter engraved with the Chinese character for “double happiness,” a festive silk robe embroidered with dragon-phoenix rondels and imperial symbols, and a photograph of the very bed where an imperial marriage is consummated.

Sometimes an imperial marriage was a true love story. When the beloved Empress Xiaoxian died in 1748, the sorrowful Qianlong emperor visited her coffin 50 times in the first month after her death. He also wrote an emotional poem about her: “Expressing my Grief,” which includes the lines:

As Stuart explains, “We wanted to illustrate love through physical objects.” Throughout the exhibition are illustrations of filial piety, an important Confucian virtue, including four painted scrolls the length of a football field that the Guangxu emperor commissioned to commemorate Cixi’s 70th birthday. It took ten years to paint and recorded all the celebrations he had held for her on her 60th birthday. It depicts the enormous palace with members of the court, relatives, opera singers, actors, musicians and cavorting imperial children.

Through such displays of material culture, the exhibition illustrates, for the first time, the role the empresses played in the arts, religion and politics. “We had to prove that women’s lives were worth studying and prove that the best objects didn’t just belong to men,” says Wang. And the show does prove it, in spades.

Empresses of China's Forbidden City, 1644-1912 , curated by Daisy Yiyou Wang and Jan Stuart, is on view through June 23, 2019 at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

This Summer, Play Nine Holes at This ‘Art Course’ in Kansas City

It could be said that the art of miniature golf design reached its pinnacle when some crafty individual decided to plop a windmill on a course, challenging players to sink a hole-in-one past its rotating blades. Over time windmills have become synonymous with the miniaturized sport, so leave it to a museum to shake up mini golf course design for the first time in years (insert golf clap here).

Taking inspiration from its vast collection of artworks, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, has created a nine-hole golf course that changes how we view not just mini golf, but also art. Appropriately titled “Art Course,” each hole reinterprets a piece of art in the museum’s permanent collection. And the best part: It’s completely interactive.

“We wanted it to be fun and informative, but not so wildly out there that it didn’t have resonance with what we are about, which is our collection,” says Casey Claps, project manager for “Art Course.” “We have over 40,000 works and we’re encyclopedic; it’s really at the heart of our mission to connect people to our collection.”

And it's working. Since it opened over Memorial Day, “Art Course” has proven popular with people of all ages, who are lining up at the museum's 22-acre Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park , putters in hand, to get the chance to sink holes that re-envision pieces like a vase dating back to the Ming Dynasty, Wassily Kandinsky’s Rose with Gray , and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen towering Shuttlecocks .

To make the idea for the course a reality, the museum put a call out to artists for submissions. The only catch was that the holes must be inspired by works in the museum’s permanent collection, which is recognized for its Asian art as well as pieces by well-known European artists like Willem de Kooning, Rembrandt, Claude Monet and El Greco. (The museum was founded in 1933 and combined the collections and monetary backing of William Rockhill Nelson, founder of the Kansas City Star , and Mary McAfee Atkins, a local schoolteacher.) A cross-museum review committee narrowed down 75 entries—submitted by elementary school classes, retirees, architects and others—to nine finalists. The museum partnered with A to Z Theatrical Supply and Service, Inc., to fabricate each design.

“We really tried to select submissions that taught us something about the artwork that [finalists] were inspired by,” Claps says. “So for our Kandinsky hole, a lot of the elements from the painting have been converted into noise-making machines, such as chimes, bells and gongs. It was inspired by the condition synesthesia, which Kandinsky had. So you would be experiencing sound in a similar way that he did when he painted.”

Another hole reimagines the four popular Shuttlecocks sculptures strewn across the museum’s rambling lawns.

“When Claes and Coosje created them, they had imagined giants playing badminton over the Nelson-Atkins building, which acted as the net,” she says. “When we selected the winner, we did so because you became the giant in the artists’ story, where you putt up over [a miniature replica] of the building.”

After playing a round, museumgoers can then go on a treasure hunt inside the museum to find the original artworks that inspired the golf course and learn more about the renowned artists.

“It’s like eating your vegetables without knowing it,” she says. “We really hope that people have a new appreciation for a work of art because they experienced it differently. We’re trying to build that connection that art is not a solitary experience that can only be appreciated on a gallery wall, but that it can be brought to life.”

The best part: There’s nary a windmill in sight.

“Art Course” is open now through Labor Day weekend. The cost per round of golf is $14 for adults and $9 for kids ages 4-12. Kids 3 and under are free.

More Than 40 Light Installations Have San Francisco Aglow During the Holidays

While many cities around the world have dialed back their holiday celebrations due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, San Francisco has found a way to (safely) flip the switch and move forward with one of its most popular festivities this winter. Last week marked the start of the eighth installment of Illuminate SF Festival of Light . Running nightly through January 23, the annual event features more than 40 light installations scattered across 17 of the city’s neighborhoods, turning San Francisco into a dazzling wonderland.

The festival was able to move forward this year because nearly all of the installations featured are visible outdoors, making it an activity that people can enjoy while also practicing safe social distancing. “It’s a great opportunity to experience either on foot or driving around in a vehicle,” says Brenda Tucker, director of arts marketing for the San Francisco Travel Association, the entity responsible for organizing the festival. “Because of the pandemic, people want to feel safe, but also inspired.”

As in previous years, the festival features installations created by a roster of world-renowned artists who create dramatic, eye-grabbing illuminated artworks, many of which are large enough to alter the city’s iconic skyline. In addition to a number of permanent displays that are visible year-round, including New York City-based artist Leo Villareal's The Bay Lights , a massive piece featuring 25,000 white LED lights stretching across the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and local artist Jim Campbell's Day for Night , a beacon comprised of 11,000 programmable lights and video screens atop Salesforce Tower in the Embarcadero neighborhood, several pieces by artists new to the event debuted this year.

One piece premiering this year is The Ladder (Sun or Moon) by Chilean artist Ivan Navarro, who’s known for creating ladders and other architectural elements in his work. For this piece, located at 1066 Market Street, he’s created the rungs of a ladder using neon tubing. Other installations coincide with the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park. These include the 15-story SkyStar Wheel , a Ferris wheel lit with more than 1 million colored LED lights, and Entwined , a grove of towering trees ranging in height from 6 feet to 20 feet located in the park’s Peacock Meadow, designed by Bay Area artist Charles Gadeken.

While Illuminate SF Festival of Light does feature creations by artists recognized around the world ( James Turrell , Jenny Holzer and Olafur Eliasson , to name a few), it also strives to nurture up-and-coming local artists who are doing impressive work. One of these emerging stars is Dorka Keehn , a self-trained artist who serves as chair of the Visual Arts Committee with the San Francisco Arts Commission and also runs an art consulting firm called Keehn on Art . After spending much of her career in politics, Keehn shifted her focus to art and began collaborating with fellow artist Brian Goggin, resulting in two installations for the festival.

The first, Caruso’s Dream , in SoMa, features 13 pianos made from pieces of illuminated glass dangling off the side of a 17-story residential tower. The piece is inspired by the late opera singer Enrico Caruso , who, in 1906, was staying in the nearby Palace Hotel when he was jostled awake by the historic 7.9-magnitude earthquake. “This piece is what we imagine he would’ve seen in a dream before waking up to the earthquake,” Keehn says. “The display is programmed to music, so people can tune into 90.9 FM [from 4 to 10 within a block of the artwork] and listen to Caruso singing.”

Keehn and Goggin’s second piece, located in a plaza connecting Chinatown and North Beach, is called Language of the Birds . It serves as an homage to the city’s thriving literary scene and features birds in flight, each of their wings represented by the pages of a book illuminated by LED lights. Beneath the display are words and phrases embedded into the plaza’s floor, each verse selected from written works penned by area authors and poets. “As an artist, I strongly believe in the importance of the creative economy,” Keehn says. “It’s a driving force and one reason why people want to live in [San Francisco]. Illuminate SF is an example of how this city supports artists and allows them to be creative, which attracts people to come here.”

Keehn says that every year the festival continues to grow and evolve, citing the early years when she and Goggin would offer impromptu walking tours of their artworks to crowds of people. This year the festival features a Light Art Trail that visitors can follow on foot on their own. Organizers have also teamed up with Big Bus to offer nighttime open-air bus tours where passengers can sit on the top level of the double-decker buses (face masks required).

“The breadth and depth of our program is pretty spectacular,” Tucker says. “The art trail is designed so that people can drop by area coffee shops and cafés to pick up a warm drink as they walk around the city. [Especially during this pandemic], it’s important to support small businesses as well as the arts.”