Page 180 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

Surviving early landscape paintings, or believable
copies of them, seem designed to fulfill the aims set
forth in the texts. They typically offer densely filled concepts in forms and so convey them to its
scenes of mountains and rivers within which
travelers, mounted or on foot, move among trees;
cross bridges; pass by rustic residences and temples.
The compositions may recede to high horizons,
demonstrating the painter's ability to carry the
viewer's gaze into depth. The individual entities that
make up these pictures, especially those of the Tang
dynasty (618-906), are typically drawn in fine
outline and colored with mineral pigments. This
analytical outline-and-color mode, characteristic of
early Chinese painting, encourages the viewer to
read the picture part by part while moving over its
richly detailed surface.
By the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Five
Dynasties (907—960) and Northern Song
(960—1127) periods that followed the collapse of the
Tang, this archaic mode was seen as charming but
unsuited to new directions in landscape painting,
which in these centuries was rising to displace
figural subjects as the central concern of leading
artists and critics. Landscapes in the new manner
are dominated by earth masses rendered in broader,
scumbled brush strokes of monochrome ink,
strongly varied in tone, which shape the forms with
light and shadow while also rendering the tactile
qualities of their pitted surfaces. Indications of
— —human presence buildings, figures, bridges are
diminished in size and visually integrated into the
landscape setting, so that they no longer command
the viewer's attention. Beside the attractive
artificialities of the archaic landscape mode, this
new manner can be seen (admittedly, in terms
unacceptable to "new art history" practitioners) as a
—great leap forward in naturalism in its power to
engage the beholder's vision with forms that read as
truer to one's experience of the physical world and
as all but palpable. It was exactly the development
of this new manner, combining refinements of
monochrome ink tonality for effects of light and
shade with systems of overlaid brushwork to
differentiate textures, that opened the way to the
towering achievements of monumental landscape in
the Five Dynasties and Northern Song periods.
The supplanting of figural themes, including
narrative, historical, and religious, by landscape at
such an early period distinguishes the Chinese
tradition of painting from all others, prompting us
to ask what conditions and objectives underlay this
crucial change. It is another question too large to
address here, except to say that in the hands of a
succession of great masters, Chinese landscape
painting not only developed to a sublime point its
function of "making the viewer feel as though he
were in the very place," thus allowing it to serve as
spiritual refreshment for people who could not
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
physically retire into the mountains, but also
acquired the capacity to embody metaphysical
viewers. The rise of monumental landscape
paralleled, not coincidentally, the great age of Neo-
Confucian philosophy, which similarly attributes a
coherence and order to natural phenomena. It
corresponded also to the ascendancy of expressive
theories of painting: Mi Fu (1052-1107/8) wrote
that landscape "is a creation of the mind and is
—intrinsically a superior art" superior, that is, to
pictures of animals or human figures, which
could, in his view, be done by simply copying
their appearances. These are, to be sure, Chinese
formulations; our own account of the rise
of landscape painting in China would follow
other lines.
Underlying the "great leap forward in naturalism"
was the development by tenth- and eleventh-
century artists of representational techniques that
opened the way to all these achievements.
Specialists in portraying birds and animals were
creating systems of patiently repeated brush strokes
for natural-looking renditions of plumage and fur,
while painters of interior scenes with figures were
working out spatial schemes as intricately readable
as any that Chinese artists would ever attempt. Early
Song landscapists would refine the device of
atmospheric perspective so as to create breathtaking
effects of height and deep space, within which
strongly volumetric forms were shaped and
geologically differentiated with new texture-stroke
Wesystems. are, that is to say, at that apogee, or roll-
off point, arrived at by the Chinese relatively early
in the collective mastery of representational
techniques that allowed them to create, when they
wished, paintings that could be read as close and
convincing likenesses of the persons, things, or
scenes portrayed.
No painting could better exemplify this observation
than the astonishing Bamboo, Old Tree, and Stones in
Winter (fig. 1), attributed to a tenth-century master
named Xu Xi but in truth an anonymous work of
the late tenth or early eleventh century. The subject
carries a metaphorical meaning of survival and
integrity under harsh conditions, but we know this
only from external literary evidence: nothing in the
picture itself suggests that it is other than a
meticulously detailed, objective portrayal of a
passage of nature. The unknown artist, who has not
signed his name but has inscribed "This bamboo is
worth more than a hundred pieces of gold" in tiny
archaic characters (upside down! on a bamboo
stalk) has concealed his hand throughout, using
virtually no outlining or other conspicuous brush
strokes, creating the image as if entirely out of light
and dark, making the picture seem more a work of
nature than a product of human artifice. In truth,