Gender, Space, and Self-Fashioning in Liu Rushi’s Landscape with Figures

Landscape with Figures, attributed to the celebrated courtesan-turned-gentry lady Liu Yin (1618–1664, better known as Liu Rushi 柳如是), is an eight-leaf album now housed in the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. Each leaf combines a painted scene—ranging from gardens to landscapes, with solitary figures or paired figures—with a poetic inscription by Liu herself, creating an integrated work of image, poetry, and calligraphy. This essay argues that Landscape with Figures should be read as a composite act of self-fashioning, in which Liu Rushi negotiated her identity within cultural forms that largely excluded women. The album draws upon the conventions of literati painting, long associated with ideals of reclusion, solitude, and cultivated withdrawal, yet it refracts these ideals through Liu’s position as a courtesan whose life was marked by displacement and instability. In doing so, Landscape with Figures illuminates how women could intervene in, and subtly transform, the cultural frameworks of late Ming literati art.