Table Of Contentthe full-length mirror
the
full-length
mirror
a global visual history
wu hung
translations by mia yinxing liu
reaktion books
To the Princeton Woods
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2022
Copyright © Wu Hung 2022
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 610 3
CONTENTS
PREFACE 7
PRELUDE
A Prehistory of the Full-Length Mirror
13
PART ONE: OBJECT AND REFLECTION
one
FROM VERSAILLES TO THE FORBIDDEN CITY
The Global Invention of the Full-Length Mirror
39
two
FROM THE HOUSE OF GREEN DELIGHTS TO THE
HALL OF MENTAL CULTIVATION
Mirror-Screens in the Literary and Visual Imagination
95
PART TWO: MEDIUM AND SUBJECTIVITY
three
FROM EUROPE TO THE WORLD
The Global Circulation of Full-Length-Mirror Photography
141
four
FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO SUBJECTIVITY
Discovering the Self in the Full-Length Mirror
219
CODA
Disenchantment of the Full-Length Mirror
247
REFERENCES 253
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 264
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 266
INDEX 268
PREFACE
Af ull-length mirror is a tall glass mirror standing on the floor that
can reflect the viewer’s entire body. Large reflective devices were
imagined and sometimes attempted by the ancients, but functional
wall and floor mirrors were realized only in seventeenth-century
Europe with the invention of large glass mirror plates. What fol-
lowed was the migration and reinvention of such alluring objects
around the world, where they inhabited various regional traditions
to facilitate interior design, commercial culture, political campaigns
and self-expression.
This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One
story, travelling in time and space, criss-crosses the globe to intro-
duce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and
writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans and bourgeois ladies.
The other story explores the interconnectedness between object,
painting and photography, as the full-length mirror offers a reveal-
ing perspective that relates real artefacts and their images to art
and visual culture. The book thus experiments with a new kind of
global art history in which ‘global’ is understood in terms of both
geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia
and North America, and spanning two millennia from the fourth
century bce to the twentieth century.
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the full-length mirror
The book starts with an introduction to some premodern
cases of large mirrors in art and literature. It takes the ancient
Graeco-Roman world and early China as two principal cases, each
of which left a rich body of archaeological and literary evidence
for real and imaginary large mirrors. The main text consists of two
parts. Part One, ‘Object and Reflection’, recounts the invention and
employment of glass wall mirrors in seventeenth-century Europe,
and then narrates their transformation into free-standing screen
mirrors in China during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. Archival research allows us to reconstruct several fascinat-
ing projects of interior design initiated by Qing-dynasty emperors
to integrate imported large glass mirrors into the architecture of
the Forbidden City. Three substantial sections then explore the
impact of this new type of optical equipment in Chinese literature
and visual art of the same era.
Part Two, ‘Medium and Subjectivity’, is centred on full-length-
mirror portraiture, which uses the free-standing mirror as a
principal prop. First invented by European photographers around
the mid-nineteenth century, this type of image quickly proliferated
around the world and played divergent cultural and political roles
in different places. This visual mode was also used to reveal the
subjectivity of the sitter or painter, and was thus connected to the
rise of individualism in modern art and visual culture. The Coda
reflects on the disenchantment of the grand mirror in contemporary
society through analysing a masterpiece of Indian cinema directed
by Satyajit Ray.
This book was written in 2020 at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey. At that time coronavirus had spread
all over the world. I joined my wife, Judith Zeitlin, who was a fellow
at ias, and was granted visitor status there during her residence.
8
Preface
Conceived in this particular environment, the book was an
antidote to the isolation of self-quarantine as it allowed a wide
voyage through uncharted waters. The sense of fluidity also char-
acterized my working method: a large portion of my research and
all of my communications with organizations, colleagues, peers and
assistants were carried out in electromagnetic waves through air.
The following is a thank-you note, to show my gratitude to those
who have contributed to this process; without their help this book
would have not been possible.
First, I would like to thank the organizations – research insti-
tutes, professional associations, universities, museums and so on
– which conducted arduous work to turn a massive amount of
texts, images and objects into online sources. One example is the
digital Archives of the Qing Imperial Workshops, made available
through the joint effort of several institutions. If there were no web
access to these documents spanning more than two centuries and
covering sixty workshops, I would have no way to know how glass
mirrors were used in the Qing palaces, not to mention Qing emper-
ors’ personal involvement in numerous related architectural and
design projects. Another example is the image archive at the Getty
Museum and Institute, which covers a wide range of photo images
both high and low, artistic and commercial. Skimming through
them is like looking into the windows of a nineteenth-century Paris
department store. Accessing museum collections is also no longer a
serious issue, since many museums have put their collections online;
some even provide archival documents for each artwork. Besides
these individual sources, some mega-databases appear as huge online
libraries. China National Knowledge Infrastructure (cnki) is one of
them. Led by Tsinghua University, it offers a comprehensive system
of resources that includes all journals and newspapers published
in Chinese, as well as doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses,
yearbooks, patents and so on. Unknown to scholars of previous
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