Good or Evil?

Whether medieval monsters in the European visual arts or demons, ghosts, and goblins in Chinese painting and sculpture, supernatural spirits exist in many cultures and civilizations. Their visualization is evidence of humanity’s limitless imagination and fascination with them. In China, they populate the Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian worlds. Historic figures representing these belief systems, such as Shakyamuni Buddha or demon queller Zhong Kui, exert control and governance over those creatures, imposing order over chaos. 

This exhibition presents sculptures of fearsome guardian figures and more than a dozen Chinese paintings that depict demons and monsters in their role of either causing havoc on earth or acting as protectors against evil forces and harmful intruders. One highlight is a pair of large tomb-guardian figures that was moved from the Clara T. Rankin Chinese Art Galleries (239) into the exhibition space. Also on view is a handscroll from a private collection depicting the theme of searching the mountains for demons that, fully unrolled, is more than 32 feet long. Paintings of this theme are rarely seen and only about a dozen of them are known to be extant. Ten album leaves from the museum’s collection that illustrate aspects of the same story are displayed alongside the scroll. 

Searching the Mountains is associated with the legend of the god Erlang, who succeeded in ending devastating floods by defeating a vicious dragon and other malevolent creatures on Mount Guankou in Sichuan Province in southwest China. Illustrations of this story include violent scenes of fierce-looking demons, accompanied by hounds and hawks, charging through mountain terrain and chasing, capturing, and exterminating beasts, serpents, and wicked creatures that are part-human, part-animal; some of them appear in the guise of alluring women. While the demons are somewhat comical, the hunted beasts appear monstrous. A pivotal scene shows a giant dragon being chained by demon-soldiers under the command of Erlang, who appears in the civil robes of a court official. The painting thus depicts a battle between good and evil.

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Visitors may notice that—partly due to extensive exposure to light—the silk ground of this scroll has turned dark over time. When the work was created, some 800 years ago, the ink traces and brush lines must have stood out against a much brighter silk. For the exhibition, digital technology allowed the CMA to generate scenes of the original scroll in what we believe to be an earlier, more readable state, which the viewer finds paired and juxtaposed with the original scroll.

Other contexts in which monsters and supernatural spirits are pictorialized are festivals. A finger painting of popular demon queller Zhong Kui depicts him with his typically ugly face and disheveled beard, an appearance that was supposed to scare evil spirits away. The figure’s ugliness is enhanced by the scratches, blotches, and dots in ink achieved with the artist’s split nails, fingertips, and palm in place of a brush.

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Legends describe Zhong Kui as an unrecognized scholarly talent who once appeared in a dream of Tang emperor Xuanzong (reigned 712–56) to kill a harassing demon. Relieved of the demon, the emperor had Zhong Kui’s image painted after his dream, which became the model for all later depictions of the demon queller. In popular belief, Zhong Kui is a powerful guard against evil spirits, particularly on New Year’s Day and at the Double-Fifth Festival, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, when his image is hung in households to prevent their members being met with diseases and other misfortunes.