2: Emotional Tensions and Visual Responses: Rethinking Zhao Mengfu’s Service to the Yuan

The collapse of the Southern Song dynasty inflicted both practical hardship and spiritual anguish upon the literati of Jiangnan. As a descendant of the Song imperial family, Zhao Mengfu’s 赵孟頫 (1254–1322) decision to serve the Yuan court provoked a range of negative collective emotional responses among early Yuan literati in Jiangnan. This paper reexamines Zhao’s highly controversial historical choice from the perspective of the history of emotions, exploring the emotional tensions it triggered within the literati community and how these responses, in turn, influenced Zhao’s artistic production. Drawing on the theoretical framework of emotional communities, this study first analyzes how early Yuan literati expressed their negative sentiments toward Zhao through various textual forms such as poetry, colophons, and correspondence. It then investigates how Zhao, under the pressure of such emotional criticism, strategically employed artistic modes such as archaism and reclusion in his landscape, figure, and bird-and-flower paintings, as well as in his literary writings, to respond to social affective expectations and to reconstruct his cultural legitimacy and emotional stance. This paper argues that emotion is not merely an external or secondary factor to literature and visual art, but rather a constitutive and driving force in artistic creation. Zhao Mengfu’s artistic practice can thus be understood as a form of “visual emotional response” shaped at the intersection of political identity and collective affective tension.