Page 183 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts
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were abolished, and although Khubilai Khan sought Fig. 2. Zhao Mengfu (1254—1322). Villa by the Water.
Dated to 1302, Yuan dynasty (i2jg-i36S). Handscroll,
to surround himself with traditionally educated ink on paper; 24. g x 120.5 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.
Chinese advisers, many such scholars who would of brush strokes were admired as the antithesis
to the now-unacceptable drama and diversity of
normally have attempted government careers later Song painting. Zhao's picture is even flatter
withdrew instead from public lite, supporting and simpler than any of DongYuan's, with
themselves through various activities for which minimal detail absorbed into the fabric of
their scholarly backgrounds fitted them, among brushwork to the point of being barely discernible.
which were calligraphy and painting. The literati, or It is executed in brush strokes that reject everything
scholar-amateur, movement in painting, inaugurated gestural and overtly expressive; the ink is rubbed on
in the eleventh century but eclipsed during the dry to catch the slight nap of the paper, for an
later Song by the brilliant achievements of the effect not unlike charcoal drawing. Here for the
professional and Academy masters, came to the fore first time landscape takes on the capacity to express
during the Yuan and maintained its primacy during in its forms and execution both the reclusiveness of
most of the later centuries. the recipient and a tranquil state of mind
considered an essential attribute of high character
The Song- Yuan transition is accordingly seen as a in the artist.
great turning point in the history of Chinese This expressive capacity of landscape painting is
painting, when (to oversimplify) a primarily fully expanded in the late Yuan, especially in the
representational tradition gave way to one primarily
works of two artists who are often paired in a
aimed at individual expression. A Yuan-period
relationship more of contrast than of similarity:
critic, reflecting a view that had already become
orthodox among the literati, put "form-likeness" Ni Zan (i306[?]-i374) and Wang Meng
last on a list of criteria forjudging paintings; what
was to be esteemed, he wrote, was "plays with (ca. 1308— 1385). Ni Zan spent his early years as a
brush and ink in which lofty-minded men and rich, cultivated youth who collected antiques,
superior scholars have lodged their exhilaration entertained a rigorously selected group of friends
[intense feeling] and sketched their ideas." The (he was neurotically cleanly, washing his hands
move from painting as pictorial description of
frequently and shunning anyone he considered
appearances to painting as an expressive art
"vulgar"), and practiced poetry, calligraphy, and
concerned with its own conventions and its own
Whenpainting. he was in his thirties, however, the
past, the very shift that in the West (according to
burden of taxes and the depredations of local
one common view) marks the beginnings of
uprisings drove him to disperse the family property
modernism, thus happened at least half a
millennium earlier in China. and take up a wandering life. He traveled about by
A central figure in the creation of new literati styles small boat, staying with friends and patrons,
in landscape painting during the early Yuan was repaying their hospitality with his paintings, which
Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322). Although a descendant
of the Song imperial house, he did not adopt the —were increasingly in demand by the time of his
stance of a Song loyalist, but accepted high posts in
the Mongol administration under Khubilai Khan death, we read, the ownership of a Ni Zan was a
and had a distinguished official career. As a painter
he rejected, like most others in his time, what he mark of elevated cultural status for families in the
saw as the polish and overt appeal of Song painting,
choosing instead to revive styles from the more region. In his hands the sparse, dry-brush manner.
distant past, especially the Tang and Five Dynasties
periods. His Villa by the Water of 1302 (fig. 2), with its effect of visual disengagement, became a
painted for a friend whose retreat bore that name, is
for Chinese connoisseurs "in the style of" the metaphor for emotional alienation from what he
tenth-century landscapist Dong Yuan, whose
deliberately plain scenery and lulling repetitions saw as a contaminated world. His Six Gentlemen of
1345 (cat. iSS). done for one of his hosts, presents
his typical river scene with widely separated
—banks a compositional device itself expressive ot
—distance and loneliness with six exiguous trees in
the foreground "representing" the six men present
at the gathering. This way ot endowing the barest
CHINESE PAINTING INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS 181
