Page 181 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

put into proper context the "non-development" of
XuFig. 1 . Anonymous (attrib. Xi, 10th c).
Bamboo, Old Tree, and Stones in Winter.
Late 10th or early nth c. Shanghai Museum.
the technical achievement it displays is nothing
short of amazing. Some technique of reserve was
probably used for the light-against-dark passages;
but how the subtle shifts from these to dark-
against-light were accomplished is not easy to
reconstruct. Like other moves toward realism in
Chinese painting, this one is abortive and produced
no following; it was suppressed, presumably, by a
critical dogma that condemned the pursuit of
verisimilitude, or "form-likeness," as an unworthy
objective for painting. The work has come down to
modern times unrecorded and unnoticed by critics,
with none of the collectors' seals and adulatory
inscriptions that embellish old paintings of more
prestigious kinds.
As an exercise in comparative chronology, we might
ask, "In what other artistic culture, at this time,
could such a feat of descriptive naturalism
avoidance ot artificed patterning, near-photographic credited their viewers with a correspondingly
—depiction have been accomplished?" And if the
answer must be, "No other," the next question is,
"How many centuries must one wait for anything
comparable 111 the West?" In descriptive painting
techniques as in technology, the Chinese far
outstripped the West in early centuries, then />)'
choice largely turned away from that mode to pursue
other directions, while Western artists took up
(more or less) the descriptive vein the Chinese had
abandoned. This understanding of the matter will
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
later Chinese painting, along with the complaints of
seventeenth-century Jesuits and other early Western
writers that the failure of Chinese artists to employ
linear perspective and chiaroscuro made their
Apictures flat and dead. recognition of the true
attainment of early Chinese painting can only be
humbling.
LATER SONG PAINTING: THE PURSUIT OF
POETIC MOOD
If, as argued here, the Chinese reached their
highpoint in the development of representational
techniques as early as the tenth—eleventh century,
all the later history of Chinese painting can be
constructed as a series of moves away from that
point, "retreats from likeness" that take many
Onedifferent directions. of these is the literati, or
scholar-amateur, movement in painting, which
began in the late Northern Song period but is
represented in this exhibition only from the Yuan
dynasty on, and so will be discussed below.
Spokesmen for this new movement were inclined
to adopt antirepresentational positions. Mi Fu,
quoted above, saw landscape painting as a creation
of the artist's mind; Su Shi (1037— iioi), the central
figure in the movement, wrote in a poem that "If
someone talks of painting as formal likeness/ His
way of looking is like a child's."
About the same time that these scholar-amateurs,
whomsome of held official posts in the
government, were working out their new styles and
genres so as to separate themselves clearly from the
professional tradition, another group of semi-
amateur artists were taking a somewhat different
course, aimed at endowing their paintings both
with poetic content and with a cultivated kind of
archaism through allusions to early styles. This
group might be called aristocrat-amateurs, since
they were associated with the court and imperial
family; their socially and economically privileged
positions gave them access to old masterworks, and
their "quoting" of these in their own paintings
sophisticated understanding of historical styles. This
was an art by and for the elite.
Misty River and Layered Hills by Wang Shen
(ca. 104S—after 1104) is a fine example of this
courtly poetic-archaizing mode (cat. 1S4). Wang
Shen, descendant of a military hero, son-in-law a\~
an emperor, friend of Su Shi. and himseli a
distinguished connoisseur and collector, began
painting landscape during a period of political
—banishment from the capital his works have been
read (bv Richard Barnhart, who has written most
interestingly about him) as landscapes ot exile." As a
style-conscious amateur, he could choose among
stvles with a freedom normally denied the full-
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