Page 108 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

anthology Wen-hsiian, in which he wrote that his selection of prose
and poetry had been guided not by moral considerations but by
aesthetic merit alone. This sophisticated position was not reached
at once, however. Literary criticism in the third and fourth centu-
ries had taken the form of p 'in-tsao—a mere classification (often in
nine grades) according to merits and faults, first applied to states-
men and other public figures, then to poets. The great painter Ku
K'ai-chih used it in discussing artists of Wei and Chin (if indeed
the surviving text is from his hand). It was employed more me-
thodically by Hsieh Ho in his famous Ku huap'in lu (Ancient Paint-
ers' Classified Record), written in the second quarter of the sixth
century, in which the author grades forty-three painters of former
times into six classes, a useful but undistinguished contribution to
art history. What has made this brief work so significant for the
whole history ofChinese painting is its preface, which sets out the
six principles (liu fa) by which paintings, and painters, arc to be
judged.
Much— perhaps too much—has been written about the six
principles. But they cannot be passed over, for they have, with
some variation or rearrangement, remained the pivot around
which all subsequent art criticism in China has revolved. They
are:
1. Ch'i yun sheng tung: Spirit Harmony—Life's Motion (Arthur
Waley); Animation through spirit consonance (Alexander Soper).
2. Ku fa yung pi: bone-means use brush (Waley); structural method in
the use of the brush (Soper).
3. Ying wu hsiang hsing: fidelity to the object in portraying forms (So-
per).
4. Shi tei Ju ts'ai: conformity to kind in applying colours (Soper).
i
5. Chin ying weichih: proper planning in placing [ofelements) (Soper).
6. Ch'uan i mu hsieh: that by copying, the ancient models should be
perpetuated (Sakanishi).
The third, fourth, and fifth laws are self-explanatory; they reflect
the kind of technical problems that painting encountered in its
early development. The sixth involves on the one hand the need to
train one's hand and acquire an extensive formal repertoire, and on
the other a reverence for the tradition itself, ofwhich every painter
felt himself to be in a sense a custodian. Making exact copies ofan-
cient, worn masterpieces was a way of preserving them, and, at a
later date, working "in the manner of" great painters of the past,
while adding something of oneself, was a way of putting new life
into the tradition.
The experience of the painter—what Cezanne called, in a cele-
brated phrase, "unc sensation forte devant la nature"—is en-
shrined in the phrase ch'i yiin, Soper's "spirit consonance." Ch'i is
that cosmic spirit (literally, breath or vapour) that vitalises all
things, that gives life and growth to the trees, movement to the
water, energy to man, and is exhaled by the mountains as clouds
and mist. It is the task of the artist to attune himself to this cosmic
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