Page 189 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

ink. This method was soon superseded by another,
the douban ("pieced-together blocks") method of
using a number of blocks, one for each color. The
Chinese way of printing, with the block face-up.
ink or color applied to it, and the paper laid over it
and rubbed with a burin, permitted subtle effects of
shading by applying the pigments unevenly or by
wiping the block after applying them. No two
impressions, then, are quite identical.
This process was superbly utilized in two works
published in Nanjing by Hu Zhengyan.The
Shizhuzhai shuhuapu ("Ten Bamboo Studio Manual
of Calligraphy and Painting") (cat. 201), completed
in 1627 and issued in eight volumes between then
and 1633, reproduces paintings of flowers-and-birds,
bamboo and blossoming plum, garden stones, and
other subjects by a number of artists. It can be
admired both as the finest reproductions of
paintings made anywhere up to that time, and
simply as color printing of a technical and aesthetic
refinement similarly unmatched elsewhere. The
Shizhuzhai qianpu ("Ten Bamboo Studio Letter
Papers"), issued in four volumes by the same
publisher in 1644 (cat. 202), added a further
technical innovation: in addition to the designs in
ink and colors, "blind blocks" were used to impress
low-relief patterns into the paper, a process called
gauffrage. It is hard to believe that these papers can
really have been intended for use, with letters or
poems written (in elegant calligraphy, to be sure)
over their exquisite designs. Happily, examples that
have survived have no such writing.
Color printing continued in China, but for
economic and other reasons still to be explored, the
achievements of the late Ming in this medium were
never surpassed and seldom approached there
afterward. The Japanese learned the techniques of
color woodblock printing from China and used
them brilliantly through the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries for the well-known Ukiyo-e
prints, as well as for the less-known printed books
called gaju, and these have understandably
overshadowed later Chinese color printing in
Aforeign writings. late nineteenth-early twentieth-
century Chinese publication titled Baihua tupu
("Album of a Hundred Flowers") (cat. 203), based
on paintings by Zhang Chaoxiang, a flower-and-
bird specialist active in Tianjin, illustrates this
observation; the quality of the color printing is still was far from their purpose: an overall title such as
high, but represents no real advance over the Ten
Bamboo Studio publications. The finest pictorial
printing of the late period is not in color but in the
ink-line tradition: in stylistic and technical
refinements, the books designed by Ren Xiong
(1823— 1857) nearly match those by his model, Chen
Hongshou of the late Ming period.
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
EARLY QING PAINTING: ORTHODOXY AND
INDIVIDUALISM
Dong Qichang was unquestionably the most
influential painter of his age, but his following took
two more or less opposed directions. In one, his
creative manipulations of old compositions inspired
the Individualist masters of the early Qing period
to attempt similarly radical feats of transforming
selected materials from their heritage while
seeming to embrace them. In the other, Dong's
authoritative pronouncements on the "right" way
to paint, and the possibility of deriving a consistent
set of compositional techniques, brushwork
conventions, and type-forms from his more routine
works, encouraged the emergence of an orthodoxy.
Such an orthodoxy took shape, in fact, in the
paintings and writings of the so-called Four Wangs
—of the Ming-Qing transition Wang Shimin
(1592— 1680), Wangjian (i598-i677),Wang Hui
—(1632-1717), and Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715) along
with Wu Li (1632-1718) andYun Shouping
(1633— 1690), who have collectively come to be
called the Six Orthodox Masters. Their following,
in turn, has continued down to the present,
although significant contributions to the style
declined precipitously after their time. An
appreciation of Orthodox school landscape, and the
ability to discriminate between the different hands
engaged in it, has remained the very hallmark of
traditional connoisseurship in Chinese painting.
Whole exhibitions, symposia, and book-length
studies have been devoted to the Orthodox school,
and deservedly. It will receive less attention here, in
keeping with the argument of this essay and the
direction of this exhibition, in which only one of
— —the Four Wangs Wang Yuanqi is represented.
Wang Shimin is credited with establishing the
school. As a well-to-do young collector he had
studied painting with Dong Qichang, and it was he
who reduced Dong's prodigious artistic
achievements to a learnable system, in keeping with
his own more limited talents and conservative taste.
The "right" or "true" lineage of painting that Wang
Shimin and his followers defined was set in
opposition to other currents of painting in their
time: what we would regard as a healthy, exuberant
diversification of styles and subjects in late
Ming-early Qing painting they saw as
fragmentation and decline. Variety in subject matte)
River Landscape with Houses ami Trees would cover
most of their output. Spokesmen today for this kind
of painting exhort us to "I 00k .it the brushwork.
not the scenery!" but one can wish nonetheless for
a bit more variety in the scenery. Wang Shimin s
fellow townsman and friend Wangjian, through an
abundant and consistently high-level output, helped
to consolidate the style and establish its
preeminence in the eves ot critics ot their
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