Presenting China’s Last Empress Dowager
Spin doctoring—the art of turning bad news into good and scoundrels into saints—goes back a long way. How far back is subject to debate: To the bust of Nefertiti? Roman bread and circuses? Jacques-Louis David’s heroic paintings of Napoleon? An exhibition of photographs from the dawn of the 20th century, now at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, provides a look at spin, Qing dynasty-style.
The photographs’ primary subject is Empress Dowager Cixi, the dominant figure in the Qing court for more than 45 years until her death in 1908, at age 72. The photographer was a diplomat’s son named Xunling. Though not a charmer, even by the somber photographic portrait standards of the day, the empress dowager seemed to like the camera and imagined that the camera liked her, says David Hogge, head of archives at the gallery and curator of the show. “She thought about self-representation, and—out of the norm for Chinese portraiture—she sometimes posed in staged vignettes that alluded to famous scenes in court theater. Sometimes she looked like a bored starlet.”