Page 191 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

Kuncan spent his later years in monasteries in the
area of Nanjing, but also traveled to Anhui and
knew the scenery of Huangshan, the spectacular
range of granite peaks that has inspired poets and
painters from the late Ming, when it was first made
accessible to pilgrimages both religious and literary,
down to the present day. In the early Qing a school
of painters grew up in southern Anhui that took
Huangshan as their principal subject; the central
figure was Hongren (1610-1664). Responding in
part to the bare, geometncized patterns of
Huangshan rock formations, the Anhui landscapists
most often worked in a dry-brush linear manner,
taking Ni Zan and some works by Dong Qichang
(cf. cats. 188, 200) as their principal models,
relinquishing washes and texture-stroke systems for
effects that are often stark and semiabstract. Their
pictures thus occupy an opposite pole from
Kuncan's dense textures and variegated forms.
Hongren's Peaks and Ravines at Jiuqi (cat. 207) is less some years in Buddhist monasteries near
severe and geometricized than some others of his
works (notably, the great Sound of Autumn in the
Honolulu Academy of Arts), but exemplifies his
ability to create, within his self-imposed limitations,
effects of substantiality and even monumentality in
his landscapes. Sparse pines and other trees grow
from rocky crevices; in the lower right, a path leads
up from a bridge to a simple pavilion. This, no less
than Kuncan's, is a landscape inviting imaginary
engagement with a somehow believable world.
Engaging the viewer in visionary worlds that
cannot simply be dismissed as convention and
artifice, as most of the landscapes of the Orthodox
masters can, is the large project underlying the best
painting of the Individualists. They too plunder the
past, but less for style-conscious allusiveness, more
to retrieve pictorial devices that enhance the power
and presence of their images. For a few of them,
including Gong Xian (1618-1689), the leading
master of the Nanjing school in the early Qing, the
search extended even outside the boundaries of
their own painting tradition, to the European
pictorial art that had by this time become known
to Chinese artists through paintings and prints
(principally, engravings in books) brought from
Europe for proselytizing uses by Jesuit missionaries.
The question of what seventeenth-century Chinese
painters adopted from European pictorial art is
complex and controversial, and it is enough for the
present purpose to point out that the rendering of
light and shade, air and space, seen in such Gong
Xian paintings as his Summer Mountains after Rain
(cat. 209) cannot be accounted for without looking
beyond Chinese precedents to European pictures.
The indistinct and overlapping brush strokes on the
slopes, for instance, are not so much the texture
strokes ot Chinese practice as a brush equivalent of
Western style stippling. The inky depths of the
groves ot leafy trees, set against strange, ambiguous
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS
areas of light in which empty houses appear, seem
similarly foreign to Chinese landscape. In Gong
Xian's hands, the European illusionistic devices are
used, not as one might expect for the portrayal of
comfortingly real-world scenery, but for
otherworldly visions; and the whole effect is
somber and unsettling. Gong is another painter
who was somehow involved in the throes of
—dynastic change the short-lived court of the last
—Ming pretender was located in Nanjing so that
political readings of his dark landscapes seem
warranted.
Bada Shanren, or Zhu Da (1626— 1705), is the other
famously "mad" artist (along with Xu Wei) in
Chinese painting. In the late 1670s, after spending
Nanchang, he experienced bouts of crazy behavior;
opinion is still divided over whether they were
feigned to escape suspicion of political subversion
or, as seems more likely, real. He burned his monk's
robes and returned to secular life, but according to
contemporary reports never spoke again,
communicating instead by laughing and crying and
gesturing. His paintings, which he produced
prolifically in later years, came to be in great
demand and probably were his chief means of
support. He was not, like the other Individualist
masters, primarily a landscapist; his best-known
works are enigmatic portrayals of birds and fish,
along with plants and rocks, in which the creatures
strike unnaturally expressive poses, often seeming to
—project negative human feelings suspicion,
—disgruntlement, anger along with a dark humor.
The models for these came chiefly from the
mysterious pictures of such subjects by Muqi and
other Chan (Zen) Buddhist monk-artists of the late
Song and Yuan, which are known now only
through examples in Japan, since Chinese collectors
for the most part did not consider them worth
preserving. Bada must have seen examples, and
perhaps a contemporary practice by monk-
amateurs, 111 the local monasteries. His Ducks and
Lotus (cat. 210), painted in 1696, is a striking
example. The oft-balance poses and cryptic,
mismatched interrelating of the two birds, the way
the lower-right rock hovers without a solid base,
and the way the contours ot rock and lotus stalks
repeat and intersect as thcv twist upward, confusing
mass and space, are among the devices that give the
picture, like others of Bada 's, powerful instabilities
which viewers both then and now are inclined to
ascribe to Ins bottled-up "madness."
The youngest ot the Individualist masters was
Yuanji, or Shitao K142-1707), who like Bada
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Shanren was descended from one ot the Ming
rulers. Since Shitao was only a child when the
Ming dynasty tell, the rupture was tor him less
traumatic. Late in his lite he renounced Ins Ming
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