Page 110 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

then "that correspondence will stir the spirit, and when the spirit
soars, truth will be attained. . . . What more," he asks, "could be
added to this?"
Another brief essay, attributed to Wang Wei, a scholar, musi-
cian, and man of letters who died in 443 at the age of twenty-
eight, starts by pointing out that paintings must correspond to the
pa kua (the "eight trigrams"), meaning that just as the pa leua is a
symbolic diagram of the workings of the universe, so must land-
scape-painting be a symbolic language through which the painter
may express not a relative, particularised aspect of nature seen at a
given moment from a given viewpoint but a general truth, be-
yond time and place. Though he too is full ofwonder at the artist's
mysterious power of pictorial compression, he insists that paint-
ing is more than the exercise of skill: "The spirit must also exercise
control over it; for this is the essence of painting." The landscapes
of Wang Wei, Tsung Ping, and their contemporaries were all lost
centuries ago, but the ideals that are enshrined in these and other
writings of this critical formative period have been the inspiration
1 16 After Ku K'u-chih (c. 144-406). of Chinese painters up to the present day.
Illustration Co The Fairy oftkt La Rivtr.
Detail of a handscroU. Ink and colour on
silk. About twelfth century.

KU K'AI-CHIH AND THE The life and work of Ku Kai-chih (c. 344-406), more perhaps
BIRTH OF LANDSCAPE than that of any other creative personality of this time, seem to
PAINTING embody the forces that inspired men in these turbulent years.
Himself wildly unconventional and yet a friend of the great at
court, a calhgrapher and painter of Taoist landscapes who yet was
seldom far from the hurly-burly of intrigue in the capital, he
moved unharmed among the rival politicians and warlords, pro-
tecting himself by the aura of idiocy which the Taoists held to be
the only true wisdom. His biography tells us that he was famous
for his portraits, in which he captured not merely the appearance
but the very spirit of his subject. 1 A fascinating essay attributed to
him describes how he would go about painting the Cloud Terrace
Mountain and the ordeal to which Chang Tao-ling subjected one
of his disciples on the top of a precipice. The text shows that he