Page 182 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

time, vocational masters, adopting the manner of his
great court-academy contemporary Guo Xi for one
painting, reviving the old outline-and-color mode
from the Tang for another. Misty River belongs to
the latter style, using green mineral pigment within
decoratively repeated outlines. Unrolling the scroll
from right to left, one traverses a long stretch of
empty silk that stands for water and that renders the
farther shore of cloud-veiled hills, when it
eventually appears, even more remote. The picture
echoes, presumably by intent, paradise or isles-of-
immortals imagery in which the green and blue
colors represent jade and chalcedony. The flattening
and decorative richness that can be seen as
genuinely archaic in early works (or close copies
after them) are here elements in an archaistic mode
consciously adopted for the cultural values it
carried.
Other members of the Song imperial family
(surnamed Zhao) who painted include Zhao
Lingrang (also called Zhao Danian; act. ca. 1070-
ca. 1 100), who did bucolic scenes of thatched
houses on the riverside which evoked the ideal of
escaping the sordor of the city for a simple life in
the (morally and physically) purer air of the
countryside (as none of these artists could do in
reality); and Zhao Ji, the emperor Huizong
(r. 1100— 1126), who painted bird-and-flower
subjects and was especially taken with the ideal of
making paintings that embodied poetic concepts,
enforcing it on the artists who served in his
Kmacademy. The late Song painter Zhao
(1185-1266) did not belong to the imperial family
but held a high ministerial post. The handscroll
Dutitled In the Spirit of Poems by Fu (cat. 185)
originally bore his signature, according to a
colophon by a slightly later writer, but the signature blossoming plum are made, somewhat forcedly, to
has been lost, probably in remounting. The painting
echoes a couplet from a poem by the great poet Du
Fu (712-770): "The depths of the bamboo grove
urge the visitor to stay/ And enjoy the cool of the
tranquil lotus." Unrolling the scroll, we are taken
through groves ot bamboo by a stream and glimpse
the top of a thatched kiosk hidden among them,
then two servants bringing donkeys along a path,
and finally, toward the end, a man who sits in a
waterside pavilion and is fanned by a servant as he
gazes out over water Thelilies. scroll recreates the
quiet experience of escaping from the city and
the heat into cool seclusion; it may represent
scenery around Yangzhou, where Zhao Kui lived
for some years.
The ideal of poetic painting advocated by Emperor
Huizong continued to pervade the output of the
imperial painting academy in the Southern Song, or
late Song, where masters of transcending technique
and sensitivity created works that are among the
glories of Chinese painting. One of the greatest of
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
Mathem is Yuan (act. late I2th-early 13th century).
An unsigned Snowy Landscape (cat. 186) is not
attributed to him but is closely in his style and may
well be from his hand. Whatever its authorship, it
belongs to a mode of poetic terseness that became
popular in the late Song. The scenery is simple: a
traveler with his servant carrying the luggage
approaches a Buddhist temple in a ravine. Dark
mists capture the wintry mood; earth banks and
hilltops recede in clear stages, the nearer ones given
volume, the farthest in simple silhouette. With all
technical problems of creating effects of space and
atmosphere long solved, insofar as China was ever
to address them, the artist could work in a broad,
sparse manner, reducing the pictorial materials as a
poet might evoke an extensive scene in a couplet.
Art-historical hindsight allows us to see this as an
end-of-an-era work, attenuated in both its
composition and its poetic content.
Another work that reveals the late Song passion for
poetic imagery is the woodblock-printed book
Meihua xishen pit ("Album of Plum Blossom
Portraits") by Song Boren. First printed in 1238, it
survives in a single copy of a 1261 reprint and has
been called the world's first known printed art
book (cat. 187). In text and pictures it presents one
hundred aspects, or "moods," of blossoming plum
branches, each comprising a poetic title, a simple
pictorial image, and a quatrain (four five-character
lines) arranged on a single page with an elegance
that is astonishing: the book appears to be the
earliest attempt at anything of the kind, in China or
Aelsewhere. craze for blossoming plum had swept
China in the Southern Song, producing thousands
of poems and paintings that celebrate its pure and
Afragile beauty. range of meanings, including the
erotic and the political, had come to be attached to
the theme (as explored in Maggie Bickford's recent
book Ink Plum). 7 Song Boren's poems are full of
—allusions to the plight of his country the Mongols
had already conquered the north, and the Song was
—soon to fall and admonishments to strength and
loyalty, themes that the various stages of the
symbolize.
YUAN PAINTING: LANDSCAPE AS
SELF-EXPRESSION
The Song dynasty ended with the conquest ot
south China by the Mongols under Khubilai Khan,
grandson of Chinggis Khan and first emperor of
the Mongol dynasty in China, which they named
the Yuan. Although Mongol rule was to last less
than a century (1279-1368), it was a traumatic time
for the Chinese: never before had their entire
territory been under the control of one of the
northern nomadic peoples whom the Han Chinese
had traditionally regarded as "barbarians." In the
early Yuan period the civil-service examinations