Page 190 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

persuasion. The third of the Wangs, Wang Hui, was
taken on while still young as a protege by the older
two and trained in the Orthodox manner. He had
more natural talent and technique than his mentors
and could imitate the old masters so successfully
that he was much in demand as a forger. He went
on to a highly successful career, including a period
m the imperial court.
The youngest of the Four Wangs was Wang Yuanqi,
who was the grandson of Wang Shimin and so
belonged in the direct succession of the "true
lineage." He held high positions in the Manchu
court and edited an imperial anthology of writings
on painting and calligraphy. Given his wealth and
position, he could have achieved a successful career
in painting merely by carrying on the family style.
Instead, he became the most innovative and
interesting of the four, the equal of the Individualist the basis tor a revival of landscape painting.
masters in his sophisticated manipulations of
semiabstract form. Even more strikingly, he
accomplished this within the boundaries of the
NoOrthodox style. artist who followed that lineage
after him was to be so successful in revitalizing it.
Wang Yuanqi 's Complete in Soul, Sufficient in Spirit
(cat. 204), painted in 1708, is a good example ot
how, while seeming to replicate the over-familiar
river landscape type of his school, he could build a
formal, near-abstract structure charged with
complex tensions. In his inscription he argued that
although paintings in the Dong Yuan—Juran manner
(i.e., the "southern school" style) had to be
sufficient in "spirit and soul," these qualities could
not be attained apart from technical mastery. "But
this," he flatteringly assured the dedicatee, "is not a original or in a good reproduction, it reveals itself
matter one can discuss with shallow-minded
people."
Wu Li has been of special interest to Western
scholars because he was converted to Christianity,
becoming a Catholic priest in 1688 and serving in
his late years as a missionary in Shanghai. Only a
few of his paintings, however, betray any contact
with European art; most are pure landscapes in his
version of the Orthodox manner, in which the
earth masses seem to have been constructed in an
almost modular way out of simple forms and are
given an unnaturally consistent, sometimes furry
Wutexture that eliminates surface differentiation.
Li's Reading "The Book of Changes" in a Streamside
Pavilion (cat. 205), painted in 1678, displays this
manner, which could be seen, like Wang Yuanqi s
painting, as doing for the traditional river landscape
something comparable to, but far less radical than,
what the Cubists would later do for still lifes.
Contemporaneous with the Orthodox landscapists,
spanning the tumultuous Ming-Qing transition and
affected by it in different ways, were the artists who
have come to be loosely grouped as the
CHINESE PAINTING. INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
Individualists. Five are represented here: Kuncan,
Hongren, Gong Xian, Bada Shanren, and Shitao.
They were mostly associated with local schools of
painting in Nanjing andYangzhou (Jiangsu
Province), and in Anhui Province, places where
patronage and other conditions were favorable.
Only Bada Shanren was isolated from these great
centers, working in Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province,
where there was no notable tradition of painting.
All except Gong Xian were Buddhist monks,
having joined the order, as a great many did in the
early Qing, either out of religious convictions
(Kuncan) or as a way to escape involvement in
politically dangerous secular affairs; Hongren had
already been linked with an anti-Manchu
movement, while Bada and Shitao were both
descendants of the Ming imperial house and
therefore under suspicion. Although more or less
marginalized in their time by the "mainstream"
Orthodox masters and their adherents, the
Individualist artists had their own circles of
admirers, and some following in the eighteenth
century. Interest in them was reawakened in the
second quarter of our century, when major artists
took up their strikingly "modern-looking" styles as
The paintings of Kuncan (1612—ca. 1674) are a good
beginning, since an understanding of how they
differ fundamentally from those of the Four Wangs,
to which they may at first appear similar, will
illuminate the Orthodox-Individualist distinction.
His Clear Sky Over Verdant Hills, painted in 1660
(cat. 206), is an outstanding example. Seen in the
immediately as not made up, as Orthodox-school
landscapes are, of repeated, conventional forms
rendered in a neat system of brush strokes, nor are
Onthe forms so clearly demarcated. the contrary,
the heavily vegetated hillsides, depicted in loose,
disorderly brushwork that imparts to them an
earthy naturalism, read as richly variegated
continuums of space and matter, imagery and
texture; the visual experience of moving over the
surface of one of Kuncan 's pictures is, accordingly,
more than usually akin to that of moving through
natural terrain and absorbing transitory sensory
stimuli. The effect is personal to the artist, a deeply
troubled man who found no comfortable place in
the tortured world of human affairs and took solace
in immersion in nature. His paintings typically lay
out an ideal narrative, the kind of excursion
reported in his long inscriptions: from a secure
base, a thatched house shown in the foreground,
one moves upward along paths and through ravines,
perhaps passing a Buddhist temple, sometimes (as
here) going at last through a gate leading still
farther outward. Implied always is the safe return to
the security of one's hermitage.