Page 186 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

(cat. 193), but, as his attributes (Daoist wine-gourd,
loose robe, flute) indicate, a scholar-gentleman
enjoying solitude, having come out, presumably,
from the thatched house seen behind. The
melancholy sound of the flute merging with the
splash of water and wind in the pine is evoked as a
familiar metaphor for harmony with nature. The
spaces opening back successively beyond the flute
player serve as sounding chambers for these
imagined sounds and are accomplished with Song-
like gradations of tonal values. Other works by
Zhou Chen and Qiu Ying would bring out better
their individual styles and innovations; these reveal
them as heirs to a great tradition, who could still
practice it on a high level.
The literati, or scholar-amateur, movement in
painting, which had been concentrated in the
Suzhou region in the late Yuan, had received a
serious setback with the persecution of that city
and its cultural elite by the first Ming emperor. Its
real comeback, leaving aside a few secondary
masters active during the first century of the Ming
who bridged the hiatus without ending it, was
accomplished by Shen Zhou (1427—1509). Born
into a gentry family with land holdings, he was able
to live comfortably without attempting an official
career, and devoted much of his leisure to literary
and artistic pursuits. His status also relieved him of
the need to master high-level representational
techniques as a painter; he developed instead an
amiable and ingenuous personal style in which
forms, simply textured and bounded by thick brush
line, are made up into inventive compositions that
read basically as strong, flat designs. In contrast to
the escape-and-reclusion themes of so much of the
output of the Zhe school and other professional
masters, paintings by Shen Zhou and the Suzhou
amateur artists who follow him typically take as
their subjects the local scenery, occasions such as
outings and gatherings and farewells, the villas and
—gardens of friends idealized versions, that is, of the have impressed art-lovers of their time as strikingly
here-and-now of their real lives. The Eastern Villa
album (cat. 196) depicts scenes on the estate of
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
WuShen Zhou's friend Kuan (1435— 1504). Three of
the original twenty-four leaves have been lost, one
of them reportedly bearing Shen's own inscription,
so that the attribution (first made in a colophon
dated to 1611 by Dong Qichang) is not absolutely
secure; this might be an exceptionally tine work in
Shen's style by a follower. In any case, it exemplifies
the flattening and abstracting direction that literati
painting was taking in this period, notably in Shen
Zhou's own hands.
That direction can be seen also in the works of
Shen Zhou's principal follower Wen Zhengming
(1470-1559), who came from a Suzhou gentry
family, had a brief period of official service in the
capital, and in principle painted as an amateur artist
and "retired scholar" without thought of profit. In
reality, he, Shen Zhou, and the others engaged in an
intricate pattern of exchanges of goods, services,
and favors through which they derived substantial
"incomes" from their painting. Works such as Wen
Zhengming's Studio of True Appreciation, painted in
1549 (cat. 197), were usually done at the request of
the owner of a house or villa and portrayed him in
it, receiving visitors, surrounded by the trappings of
high culture and taste, including in this case the
huge, fantastically eroded Taihu rocks brought from
a nearby lake shore to be set up like natural
sculptures in gardens. To have one's dwelling
depicted by an artist of Wen's status and renown, in
his cool, disciplined, irreproachably upper-class
style, invested it with an aura of literati elegance.
The art of Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming is
highly style-conscious and self-reflective, deeply
occupied with its past. Both artists sometimes
painted landscapes in the manners of the Yuan
masters Ni Zan and Wang Meng, among others.
The cautious moves into abstraction in their works
were in part expressions of disdain for the "form-
likeness," or verisimilitude, toward which less
cultivated artists were assumed to aspire; they must
original and "modern." To later Chinese
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