Page 188 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

His nonconformity appears, instead, in highly
cultivated archaisms of style that can turn quirky or
even bizarre. His figures are often drawn in a pre-
Tang mode, with elongated faces and flattened
drapery drawing that implies no articulated body
beneath it.
In Chen Hongshou's handscroll Tlie Pleasures of He
Tianzhang (cat. 199), done in collaboration with his
studio assistant Yan Zhan and a portrait specialist
named Li Wansheng (who painted the man's face,
using the new illusionism derived from contacts
with European pictures), three levels of "reality" and
Heartifice are clearly distinguished. Tianzhang,
seated at a stone table surrounded by the trappings
of high culture, is a "real person" looking
complacently out at us; the diminutive flute player
at the end (left) of the scroll is a conventional image
from the past, without substance. He Tianzhang's
wife or concubine, sitting between them on a
banana leaf and holding an upright fan, occupies a
mediating position also in mode of representation;
she is given some weight and prominence but
reduced to a type of beauty, presented more as a
lovely attribute of his than as an individual person.
Such refinements of style and plays on
representation bespeak both a highly sophisticated
audience and an art that can scarcely present its
imagery any longer in a straightforward way.
Chen Hongshou is the author of an essay
castigating both the professional masters, for not
looking far enough into the past in their search for
models, and the literati-amateurs, for using their
social position to claim lofty achievements in art
beyond their real merits. 9 It is true enough that by
the late Ming period, a great many amateur artists
of small technical prowess were engaging in a
repetitive production of conventional river
landscapes and the like. One great master, however,
rescued the whole scholar-amateur tradition from
its doldrums: Dong Qichang.
Dong Qichang (1555— 1636) could be seen as a foil
to Chen Hongshou in almost all respects. He took
high honors in the official examinations and held
several positions at court, including that of tutor to
the heir apparent. During his long periods out of
service he lived as a rich landholder in Songjiang,
in Jiangsu Province. His paintings, writings, and
expertise as a connoisseur were constantly in
—demand and were always, we can assume, suitably
recompensed. He was the most respected and
influential painting theorist of his time, devising a
grand formulation in which the history of painting
was divided into two "schools," the "southern" and
—"northern" the former corresponding loosely
with the literati tradition, the latter with the
professional and academy masters. As a painter,
Dong limited himself almost exclusively to "pure"
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
landscape, in which figures virtually never appear,
much less the narrative or human-interest themes
of other artists' works. Stylistically, he moved,
moreover, in a profoundly antinaturalistic direction.
"For splendid scenery," he wrote, "painting cannot
equal the real landscape; but for marvels of brush
and ink, real landscape is not at all the equal of
painting." He advocated a kind of free "imitation"
of old styles ( fang), in which the canonical old
masters are evoked in ways that reveal the artists
familiarity with them, at no real compromise to his
originality; good analogies might be to Stravinsky
in music or Ezra Pound in poetry. All three assume
a knowing viewer-listener-reader whose experience
of the work will include recognition of the learned
allusions embedded in it.
Dong Qichang's Poetic Feeling at Qixia Monastery,
painted in 1626 (cat. 200), can be read on a number
of levels: as a quasi-topographical picture (it
"represents" a mountain near Nanjing, with its
famous Buddhist monastery); as a demonstration
of the brushwork and compositional principles that
Dong advocated in his theoretical writings; as a
stark, diagrammatic exposition of Dong's
understanding of old paintings (it invokes, among
others, the monumental landscape type from the
tenth and eleventh centuries); and as a near-abstract
construction within which dynamic forms interact
for powerfuDy unsettling effect. And this last
reading, if one chooses, can be further linked to the
political situation of the late Ming by seeing the
picture as a consciously subversive distortion of
an old type, a deliberate misreading of the
monumental landscape in which established
implications of stability and order are denied, as
Wang Meng (cf. cat. 189) had denied them three
centuries earlier.
When the achievements of Xu Wei, Chen
Hongshou, and Dong Qichang, along with other
late Ming masters not represented here (notably,
Wu Bin), are set against Gombrich's "performance"
art, Danto's "further development unimaginable,"
and Fry's "atrophy of the creative spirit," these
Western assessments of later Chinese painting fall,
I think, into true perspective. And the great early
Qing Individualist masters are still to come.
The late Ming was also the peak period of pictorial
woodblock printing, seeing notable advances in the
quality of block-cutting, refinements of design, and
the introduction of new techniques for color
printing. Major artists, including Chen Hongshou,
produced designs for printed illustrations. In a few
of the pictures in the 1606 Cheng shi mo yuan
("Cheng Family Garden of Ink"), the linear designs
were printed in color through the simple device,
called yitao ("single block"), of putting pigments on
different areas of the single woodblock in place of