Page 193 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

would then invite noted literary people to add
inscriptions to it. The choice of Yuan Jiang as
painter indicates a desire for a detailed and
descriptive picture in the conservative tradition
stretching back to the Song dynasty. Yuan
accomplished this on a high technical level, laying
out his panorama of the garden so that the viewer
can explore its spaces and appreciate its elegance.
The aim of Gao Xiang (1688-1753) in Finger-Snap
Pavilion (cat. 215), by contrast, is certainly not close
description, but rather to apply his loose, amiable
style to conveying the rustic charm of the place, the
residence of a noted monk at the Tianning Temple
Ain Yangzhou. Buddhist altar is visible in the upper
story of the open building, and the monk himself
and a visitor appear outside, under shaggy trees.
Yuan Jiang s patron, given such a picture by his
chosen artist, would have returned it indignantly,
complaining of sloppiness; the recipient of Gao s
would have reacted the same way to one in Yuan s
style, calling it fussy and stiff. Both artists worked in
response to well-understood expectations, instilling
their paintings with visual pleasures of very different
kinds. The ingenuous, technically less demanding
mode seen in Gao Xiang's work would be favored
and developed in interesting directions throughout
the eighteenth century by the artists known
collectively as the Eight Strange Masters ofYangzhou.
Some time in the second decade of the century,
around the end of the Kangxi era, with the deaths
within a few years of the major early Qing
landscapists Wang Hui, WangYuanqi, and Shitao,
Chinese painting seems to undergo a great change.
Whatever economic and other factors we introduce
in accounting for it and however we assess its
—effect it might be seen as the onset of decline, but
many specialists in Chinese painting would argue
—vehemently against such a reading we must
recognize that painting of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries was on the whole milder,
flatter in all senses than that of the late Ming and
early Qing, less concerned with creating spacious
and otherwise plausible worlds or stirring effects
and less engaged in the large, complex formal and
expressive problems of its predecessors. Interest in
landscape declined among the best artists and their
audiences, who turned their attention to figures
(including portraits) and flower and plant subjects,
along with some fresh imagery, unknown in earlier
painting, that expanded the artists' thematic
repertories. The fondness of some eighteenth-
century artists, especially those active in Yangzhou,
for sketchy, quirky, and otherwise unorthodox
brush manners, and for compositions that are
sometimes equally odd. has earned them
reputations as nonconformists within Qing
painting. Prominent among them are the Eight
Strange Masters, or Eight Eccentrics ofYangzhou.
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS- ENDS
One of the eight, Gao Xiang, has already been
Aintroduced (cat. 215). more serious and prolific
artist numbered in the group is HuaYan
(1682-1756). Born in the southeast coastal province
of Fujian, he was active in his later years in
Hangzhou and Yangzhou, supporting himself by
producing a large and heterogeneous body of
painting that encompasses nearly all subjects and an
astonishing range of styles, drawing on predecessors
as diverse as the Song Academy masters and Shitao.
He is unmatched in his time for group figure
compositions, of which Tlie Golden Valley Garden
(cat. 219), painted in 1732, is an outstanding
example. This was the garden of Shi Chong, a
fabulously rich man of the third century. HuaYan
portrays him with his concubine Lii Zhu ("Green
Pearl"), who was an accomplished flutist. Rocks,
trees, flowers, and servants surround the two in an
arrangement that harks back to the "space cells" of
early painting.
Another who was attracted from his native place in
Fujian by the richer patronage and livelier
atmosphere ofYangzhou was Huang Shen
(1687—after 1768). The local style he learned in
Fujian was too finished and detailed for Yangzhou
taste, to which he accommodated by moving into a
looser brush manner that had the added benefit of
permitting faster and more copious production.
Best known for figures, he also painted landscapes
and quickly rendered scenes from nature, such as
Willows and Egrets (cat. 216). Here the gestural
flourishing of a heavily loaded brush for the broad,
suffusing strokes at the base of the trees and for the
trees themselves creates a sense of the momentary,
which is caught also in the stalking movements of
the birds through shallow water. The picture
demonstrates, among other things, how an artist
with Huang Shen's solid training can make
seemingly free, calligraphic brush strokes serve
descriptive and evocative ends.
Li Shan (1686—after 1760) was born near Yangzhou
into a scholar-official family. He himself attempted
a government career and spent some time at the
court in Beijing during the reign of the Kangxi
emperor (1662-1722), whose special favor he
enjoyed as a poet and painter. Later, after he had
lost imperial support and become frustrated with
officialdom, he settled in Yangzhou as a professional
artist. In a stylistic shift like Huang Shen's. he gave
up the more traditional and careful manner he had
learned at court to do vigorously executed pictures
of trees, flowers, and other plants, along with
vegetables and other mundane subjects. In addition
to their decorative value, all these carried auspicious
and symbolic meanings that fitted them for hanging
on particular occasions. Prominent in Li Shan's
oeuvre, accordingly, are large hanging scrolls such as
his [755 Pine, Wisteria, and Peonies (cat. 217). Here
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