The Pink Portent

Till the seventeenth century, pink was markedly absent from Chinese visual culture.In art, there was a traditional preference for monochromes. Artists would even render plum blossoms, a brilliant pink in real life, in shades of black and grey. In clothing, rich colors such as yellows, reds and blues dominated. In the great kilns, potters wrought their magic in blue, white, green, black, purple, red and yellow, with nary a pink in sight.{{1}}Certainly, with tributes flowing into the imperial court from all over the world, Chinese artists and artisans must have been familiar with the use of pink in other artistic traditions. Did pink simply not appeal? Incredibly, it appeared to have failed to inspire a visceral squee in the ladies of the middle kingdom. Perhaps in the inward-looking Ming era (coming on the heels of a hundred years of foreign rule) there was little interest in foreign curiosities.In the seventeenth century, however, foreign-born tribes ruled China once more: the Manchus of China’s last imperial dynasty. The Manchus were cosmopolitan and outward looking, and lifted the Ming-era ban on foreign maritime trade. The Manchu emperor kept many Jesuits at court, partly to stop them from proselytizing, and partly to learn about the latest Western innovations. One of these Jesuits, Guiseppe Castiglione, was the only European missionary to develop a manner of painting pleasing to imperial tastes. His color palette featured pastel pink prominently and the color thus came to be associated with Western tastes. The Chinese term for pastel pink, and its related family of colors, was literally foreign colors or yangcai. Influenced by Castiglione, the superintendent of the Imperial Kiln ordered his craftsmen to create porcelains in yangcai, which came to be known as Famille Rose porcelains. To feed the West’s insatiable appetite for Famille Rose, European traders followed the Jesuits, pushing further into the once impenetrable kingdom.{{2}}

It wasn’t till the very end of imperial rule in China, however, that yangcai made its way to Chinese dress. Portending the end of the old ways, the formidable Empress Dowager Cixi eschewed the traditional imperial colors in favor of yangcai as she thought they suited her complexion better.{{3}}

Pink continues its trajectory of quiet subversion in the contemporary paintings of the Guangdong-born Cai Jin Wei. Cai’s still lifes radiate a calm that masks an underlying restlessness. Hailing from the most historically outward-looking of Chinese provinces, she uses a yangcai palette that once symbolized the Western world knocking at China's door. Thus, she obliquely hints at the winds of change blowing over China once more.

[[1]]Rebecca Feng in Ming Colours: Polychrome Porcelain from Jingdezhen, 2006.[[1]][[2]]D.F. Lunsingh Scheuleer in Chinese Export Porcelain: Chine de Commande, 1974.  For a more nuanced and up-to-date discussion on the same topic, see Rose Kerr in Chinese Ceramics: Porcelain of the Qing Dynasty 1644-1911, 1988 and Rose Kerr in "What were the Origins of Chinese Famille Rose," Orientations, May 2000.[[2]][[3]]Valery Garrett in Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present, 2007.[[3]]