With his thoughtful new book, Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790–1840, Michael J. Hatch draws attention to a neglected period of Chinese art history—that which falls between the faltering later years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign (1735–96) and the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60). Focusing on a group of educated men who were associated with the influential scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), Hatch examines how their common dedication to “evidential scholarship” (kaozheng xue) is manifest in art forms that range from calligraphy and painting to teapots and marble table screens. Hatch’s meticulous research into this scholarly group is further directed toward defining the sensory culture that its members shared. Thus, he argues that the rubbings taken from ancient stone stele and ritual bronze vessels—which constituted an important source for evidential research into the transmission of texts and recovery of a verifiable past—prompted a turn to “tactile thinking” (5). For although the “apprehension” of a rubbing involved cognitive linguistic skills, it also roused haptic sensations afforded by the rubbing’s textured paper surface that had been pressed onto the concavities and convexities of an object to record its superficial peculiarities. Aiming to “recenter the body in the production and reception of Chinese literati art” (14), Hatch pursues traces of tactile thinking beyond rubbings primarily through the art-historical tool of close looking.

That Hatch should rely upon his own perceptive power is unsurprising, given the paucity of literary evidence that documents the interactions between the human body and material objects among nineteenth-century evidential research scholars. Whether mind and body, thought and sensory perception, were united in the experience of touch among these men is difficult to assess. Moreover, once Hatch aligns his concept of “tactile thinking” with affect theory, and thus with unconscious proprioceptive touch (14), the place of cognition in Hatch’s definition of tactile thinking becomes problematic. From this ensues the uncertainty that imbues Networks of Touch: do the artifacts represented here manifest imagined or evidential sensations?

Running parallel with Hatch’s history of tactile thinking is a history of networking among nineteenth-century scholar-artists. Each of the six chapters of Networks of Touch contains lengthy biographical accounts of either Ruan or one or two of his associates, in addition to an examination of the facet of the “epigraphic aesthetic” (42) with which each man was engaged. This organizational decision lends clarity to Hatch’s narrative; it not only reinforces one of the book’s premises—that an aesthetic anchored in haptic sensations effected the “concretizing of social bonds among elites” (160)—but also explains its title, “networks of touch.” Nonetheless, it should also be noted that the extensive scholarly network that coalesced around Ruan, who required the assistance of hundreds of aides to complete the scholarship for which he became famous, was preceded by patronage systems established during the Kangxi period (1662–1722). More importantly, the biographical approach to history tends to overshadow Hatch’s sensory history, leaving unanswered questions such as why rubbings, familiar since the tenth century, prompted a turn to tactile thinking eight hundred years later.

A summary of the contents of Hatch’s book follows. The first two chapters, “Calligraphy’s New Past” and “Obliterated Texts,” dwell on the nineteenth-century revival of clerical script. To begin, Hatch discusses Ruan’s polemical writings about calligraphy, published in 1823. Following the chart of painterly lineages previously mapped in the seventeenth century, Ruan contrasted a northern school, which he identified with the clerical scripts recovered from ancient stone stele, with a southern school, which he identified with the running and cursive scripts transmitted through model letters that constituted the canonical tradition of Wang Xizhi (303–61). Preferring the clerical script, Ruan claimed that its fundamental superiority to the southern school lay in its authenticity, thus applying to calligraphy the criteria of evidential scholarship. Hatch summarizes Ruan’s position in psychoanalytical terms: Han-period stele allowed evidential research scholars to “divorce calligraphy from the overdetermined biographical interests and the overused characterological exemplars” that had come to define calligraphy criticism (41). He further argues that the “epigraphic aesthetic” drew “tactile attention away from the bodily traces of canonical calligraphers, refocusing it toward the material bodies of objects” (42).

The antiquarian Huang Yi (1744–1802), who reproduced selected rubbings from his private collection in 1800, pursued a different approach to the recovery of ancient calligraphy. Hatch argues that Huang’s decision to reproduce his rubbings in the “outline method” or “double-hook method” (shuanggou fa), a technique ordinarily used to copy model letters, evidences a shift toward tactile thinking. Tracing the contours of a heavily eroded character with this technique manifests a ghostly form that confuses the remnants of the engraved character with the stone’s pitted surface. Hatch suggests that Huang thus demonstrated a way to recover the past without being burdened by it—or rather how to “stage a ‘death of the author’” (62–63). Or did Huang instead forcefully demonstrate the obscurity into which the past must fall and from which it could not always be salvaged?

The following two chapters, “Epigraphic Painting” and “Tactile Images,” analyze the imagined sensation of touch in representational art forms, notably painting and composite rubbings. Two handscrolls from 1803 juxtaposed at the opening of “Epigraphic Painting” contrast the evidence for tactile thinking that Hatch marshals here. Accumulated Antiquities, a group portrait that depicts Ruan at a table surrounded by ancient bronzes and two associates who each handle an object, foregrounds physical acts of touch. The image of a hand appears on a tile placed at the table’s front edge and reinforces a viewer’s imagined haptic experience of the painting. As for the 91 rubbings taken from the assembled objects and appended to the group portrait, Hatch asserts that the pictorial representation of touching is “redoubled in the inky touch of each rubbing catalogued after the painting” (67). Hatch makes a different case for “tactile thinking” with Wang Xuehao’s Presenting the Tripod at Mt. Jiao, a landscape painting that documents Ruan’s donation of a Zhou-dynasty ritual bronze vessel to a Buddhist temple. Hatch argues that painters such as Wang often adopted a “new epigraphic brushwork” that was “raspy, broken, and awkward . . . to signal their affiliation with the authority of ancient inscribed and cast objects” (75). However, in this case, Hatch’s close looking fails to make the case that Wang’s brushwork was not another iteration of a painterly tradition established in the fourteenth century.

Hatch next examines the development of “full-form rubbings” (quanxing ta), also known as “composite rubbings,” advanced by the epigrapher-monk Liuzhou (1791–1858). This technique involves taking multiple rubbings of a single object to embrace all its sides, from front to back, top to bottom, exterior to interior; the juxtaposition of these rubbings produced the illusion of a three-dimensional representation of the object. Liuzhou further experimented with combining rubbings with in-painting. The latter technique is exemplified in the handscroll Cleaning the Lamp from 1836, a collaboration between Liuzhou and a portraitist. A lampstand cast in the shape of a goose’s foot is presented in two views; the portraitist added images of Liuzhou caressing the rubbings of the lampstand and reading its inscription. For evidential research scholars who longed to handle ancient bronzes, this image conveyed both the “pleasure of their touch” (109) and a new kind of knowledge that lay in “true bodily experience” (117). Moreover, Hatch took advantage of ekphrastic writings that calligrapher He Shaoji (1799–1873) composed about this handscroll to enhance his argument for “tactile thinking” (108–9).

The protagonist of chapter five, “A Tactful Literatus,” is the versatile scholar-artist Chen Hongshou (1768–1822). Hatch reviews in detail his various accomplishments in seal carving, painting, and ceramic sculpture, all of which, he argues, manifested Chen’s affinity for the “epigraphic aesthetic.” Turning to painting, Chen favored the “boneless” style that relied on shaping washes of pigments to define the parts of a flower, for example, rather than outlining them with a brush. Hatch argues that Chen thus offered his self to the viewer in a “raw, bodily form of mark making” (136), as he did with finger-painted landscapes, although Hatch also interprets these practices as a “resistance to the fetishization of the brushmark” (131). When Chen began to produce clay teapots in collaboration with a professional potter, he often created shapes that embodied the sobriquets of their recipients. Cognitive linguistic knowledge thus acquired a sensuous materiality.

With the last chapter, “The Limits of Touch,” Hatch brings his book to an unexpected close. He concentrates on Ruan’s fascination with the striated marble extracted from the mines of Dali in Yunnan province, which Ruan cataloged in a five-volume book entitled Paintings in Stone. Although Ruan asserted that the natural patterns in these stones surpassed what the human hand could create, he nonetheless perceived in these patterns classical paintings and illustrations of classical poems. Hatch explains that Ruan advocated a return to “direct and unmediated contact with the world” (156), but does not his seeing a painting in a stone also forcefully demonstrate the inescapable burden of cultural knowledge and the difficulty of Hatch’s own project to imagine haptic sensations?

Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790–1840 recovers the proclivities that animated nineteenth-century evidential research scholars and impelled them toward a sensual engagement with things. Hatch thus opens a path toward understanding not only the interface between sensuous experience and cultural practice but also the potential for sensuous experience to initiate historical change.