The Story of Lady Li guides the audience to read together stories within stories about two different Lady Li in Ancient China. The two ladies are from two different time periods, one from the period of Five Dynasties, and another from an earlier period, during the Han dynasty. Yet, despite the hundreds of years that separate them, they share a similarity in their unknowability; Their stories largely remain hidden, told only through snippets.
In 玉台画史 The Jade Terrace History of Paintings, a Qing dynasty collection, dedicated to female painters in the history, the Five Dynasties Lady Li is credited as the original creator of the ink bamboo paintings. This origin story is surprising as most writing on ink bamboo paintings have often focused on the form’s exclusivity to literati gentlemen. The ink monochrome, in particular, was often primed as a manifestation of the literati painters’ skills in using the brush for calligraphy. Because it is an art style that came to symbolize the character of literati gentlemen in later dynasties, this origin tale around Lady Li, a woman artist, exists as a kind of counter-history.
While there are records as early as the Yuan dynasty Xia Wenyuan’s “Treasure Book of Picture Paintings” 圖繪寶鑑, unfortunately, the longest account we have about her is but three lines long. In addition, this account begins by emphasizing the unknowability of this character: 李夫人，西蜀名家, 未详世胄 Lady Li, a daughter of a noble family in Western Shu, whose exact lineage is unknown. We don’t have access to any actual paintings by Lady Li. All we had about her are these snippets of texts, as well as two poems written by her niece, Huang Tingjian, on the beauty of her ink bamboo paintings. Lady Li remains as a footnote in history.
Similarly, the Han dynasty Lady Li’s narrative remains shrouded as well. The story is told in “The Biographies of the Imperial In-Laws” in Ban Gu’s (– c.e.), History of the Former Han. Here, Lady Li is introduced as a performer and later the Emperor’s favorite concubine. In this biography, Lady Li also only exists in snippets– the beautiful performer, the object of the emperor’s desire, and later, the object of cautionary tales. Rather than the story of herself, she is used by the historian Ban Gu as a narrative to warn against danger of beauty with public power.
Such stories can hardly afford any academically rigorous arguments, but we wanted to share their story, so Yiwen wrote a puppetry performance. Through this creation of a performance, I hope to turn the unknowability about them to become space for imagination and fantasy.
Since they have left no material traces other than text about her, and this adaptation is based on the short bibliography and the two poems about her, the performance will begin with an act of reading. The puppeteer is an archival reader, who uses a magnifying glass to slowly uncover the words on the page. As she does so, she seeks to expose the meaning and sensations that are beyond the text: in the reader’s mind, words are presented as lights that seek to illuminate, text slowly transforms to images. Eventually, a full-blown being, a puppet Lady Li, will be born out of the reader’s virtual imagination. But this being is still a ghostly one: this bunraku style puppet is inherently embodied and disembodied with its illusion of a corpse made available by mere air. Most importantly, it is the performer/reader’s hand that becomes the being’s hand, since the whole show is conjured by the act of reading. The puppet is also a reader herself, inviting the audience to conjure forth the spirit of Lady Li.
The Story of Lady Li was first developed by Honglan Huang and Yiwen Wu at Chicago Puppet Lab (2021-2022). The show was then workshopped by Coco Wenke Huang and Yiwen Wu at University of Chicago’s September Lab in Performance as Research (2022).
