Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making by Ying-chen Peng

In Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making, Ying-chen Peng recuperates the voice of Empress Dowager Cixi , one of late imperial China's most important and controversial leaders, through an accounting of the visual and material culture she commissioned for the late Qing dynasty court.Each chapter explores Cixi's efforts in a particular medium, including her portraits in painting and photography; her designs for palace renovations and new construction; sets of porcelain she commissioned for her private palaces; the calligraphy and paintings she made as imperial gifts; and, as an epilogue, her mausoleum.Throughout these chapters, Peng shows how Cixi shaped physical spaces and visual experiences at court in order to redefine gender boundaries that otherwise constricted her involvement in political decision-making.This "artful subversion"-Cixi's strategic use of the arts to gain greater agency in a patriarchal system-gives the book its title. Confucian expectations for proper behavior by women at court create the central tension inPeng's narrative.These dictated everything from where women were seen, and by whom, to what colors and motifs they could wear.We learn that as Cixi matured she put increasing pressure on the spaces and symbols allowed to her by gender conventions.The target of these artistic subversions was not just constraints on her personal expression.This was not art for art's sake.By making her presence at court multi-faceted, multi-sensory, and undeniable, Cixi was able to undermine patriarchal Confucian prohibitions against her participation in court politics.Peng spends little time describing how Cixi shaped policy and guided China with the political agency she gained from these artistic commissions.Rather than focusing on economic and cultural events in greater China that were impacted by court politics, Peng keeps her narrative honed on the insular world of the court.