A Sovereign in Monk’s Garb: Understanding Daoist Visual Art through Vernacular Dramas

This paper utilizes vernacular performing art, specifically Yuan dramas, to unravel a longstanding puzzle regarding the identity of a seemingly anomalous main figure in the Yuan dynasty Heavenly Court murals housed at the Royal Ontario Museum. Previous scholarships have predominantly relied on Daoist textual and visual materials to identify this figure, neglecting how a Daoist deity might have been dressed and enacted in theatrical settings at the time, both influenced by and influencing the visual imagination of their contemporaries. Through a careful examination of a group of Daoism-themed Yuan dramas where Daoist deities play important roles, this paper challenges previous scholarly interpretations by arguing that the purported “anomaly” is not anomalous at all, if we prioritize the popular performing art to understand the visual experience of medieval Chinese.