Page 179 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

more painfully with the predicament of artists
today. It is not that the Chinese artists, freed of such CONQUESTS
pressures, would have made their choices purely on
aesthetic grounds, unconcerned with the broader
issues of their time; but they surely had their own
agendas, as their writings sometimes indicate, which
did not necessarily correspond with the established
systems that sought to control them and usually did.
Counterforces to the coercion of the literati critics
were few and mostly weak.
Two opposing forces, one aimed at narrowing
options for artists and so inducing them to paint in
the "right" way, the other at broadening again the
spectrum of acceptable styles or breaking the
boundaries altogether, are represented by the two
major writers on painting in the late Ming and
early Qing: Dong Qichang (1555— 1636) and Shitao
(1642- 1 707). The two can be seen also as arguing in
opposite directions about what was for both of
them the central dilemma: how to stand up, as
creative and highly original artists, against the nearly
overpowering weight of the past. They establish
themselves as the most powerful proponents of two
different ways out.
Dong's way was to reduce and absorb the past by
making a rigorous selection of suitable models from
it, simplifying the history of painting into two
"schools," or lineages, only one of which he judged
to be appropriate for the practice of a cultivated
literatus-amateur like himself. He then "imitated"
the models in this established canon so freely that
the old styles virtually vanished under his hand,
transmuted into new structures within which the
old are scarcely recognizable. Shitao s way out, based
on a desperate recognition of the advanced state of
conventionalization into which much of the art had
descended, was to reject the past entirely and start
over, as if situated at the first dawn of painting.
That, at least, would be his claim and the ideal
toward which he would strive in some of his late
and more extreme works. It was a magnificent but
—ultimately unrealizable attempt painters can no
more return to a state of pristine simplicity than
—anyone else and incapable of pointing a clear
direction out of their common predicament for
artists who followed. Dong Qichang's direction,
carried on in ever more exclusionary ways by the
Orthodox landscape masters who claimed to be his
legitimate successors, was to prove more influential,
but its authority was sapped by the quick
debilitation of that landscape tradition.
The capsulized account of Chinese painting that
follows, while it certainly will not substantiate the
proposal outlined above, will accommodate it, as
conventional histories that attempt broad
characterizations of the "period styles" of the
successive periods cannot.
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
EARLY PAINTING: REPRESENTATIONAL
Early Chinese writings about painting praise its
capacity to arouse the feelings and responses that
the depicted thing would arouse if seen in reality.
Portraits, for example, captured salient qualities of
the sitter and presented them to the viewer, thus
taking on the Confucian function of preserving for
contemplation models of moral worth or depravity.
The painting could fool the viewer into confusing
it with the real thing: a picture of a beautiful
woman would be mistaken for the person, a
painting offish hung on the riverbank would attract
otters to leap at it. For this criterion of excellence, a
high degree of verisimilitude and even "magic
realism" are obviously appropriate. But these naive
views (as we would see them) were supplanted
relatively early by recognition of the evocative
powers of paintings that transcended simple
representation and required of the artist more than
descriptive techniques. Brief essays by Zong Bing
(375-443) and Wang Wei (415-443) already credit
landscape painting with the power to present
expansive and absorbing vistas to the entranced
viewer, who can enjoy vicariously, through the
artist's subtle understanding and technical skill,
journeys among mountains and rivers that refresh
the spirit.
Pictures with the capacity to affect their viewers
that way, however, were preceded by centuries of
simpler landscape representation, a formative stage
that can be traced in designs on bronze vessels and
other objects, including several in this exhibition.
An Eastern Han (25—220 Ce) gilt-bronze vessel with
hills and animals (cat. 51) represents hilltops and
clouds in the simplest schematic forms. By contrast,
on an inlaid bronze chariot fitting (cat. 49) the hills
on which the animals scamper are drawn in
intricate linear arabesques derived from earlier
dragon forms, a metamorphic process common in
early Chinese art. Simple, overlapping triangular
peaks make up a schematic landscape (a "magic
mountain") to which trees and animals and figures
are added in the splendid gilded bronze incense
burner from the tomb of Prince Liu Sheng
(cat. 50). The landscape scenes on a late Han relict
tile from Sichuan Province (cat. 103) achieve
remarkable (for that time) integrations of the
pictorial materials in space, and some transcending
of schematic forms, but the achievement was not
followed up, at least on extant objects. Three
centuries later, for instance, the landscape settings
for Buddhist narratives on a Liang dynasty
(502-557) stele (cat. 151) still display an archaic
system in which rocks and trees and hilltops
compartmentalize the composition into "space
cells" within which the figures and other narrative
elements are placed.
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