Page 170 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

rules." "Painting in the i style," said another author, "is most dif-
ficult; those who follow it . . . despise refinement and rich colour-
ing and draw the forms quite skctchily, but grasp the natural (tzu-
jan) spontaneously." The notion of I was to crop up again and
again in the history of Chinese painting to describe painters who,
so far as the orthodox canons were concerned, were hors concours.

185 Attributed to Ku Hung-chung
(tenth century). A Night Entertainment of
In the meantime, quite another tradition was flourishing at
Han Hn-tui, Detail ofa handscroll. Ink
and colour on silk. Possibly a Sung Nanking, whose painters might have raised their hands in horror
Dynasty copy.
at the antics of the fauves up in Chcngtu. There, Li Hou-chu, the
"emperor" of Southern T'ang, had recreated in miniature the lux-
ury and refinement of the T'ang court under Ming Huang. One
recent writer describes the art produced under his patronage as the
twilight of the T'ang, another as "premature Sung"; all we can say
is that it provides an important link between the two great epochs.
Under his patronage, the spirit of Chou Fang and Chang Hsiian
was reborn in Chou Wen-chu and Ku Hung-chung. The painting
of which a detail is reproduced here is probably a very close copy,
dating from about the twelfth century, of a scroll by Ku Hung-
chung depicting the nocturnal revels of the vice-president Han
Hsi-tsai, rumours of whose thoroughly un-Confucian behaviour
with singing and dancing girls, of whom he had at least a hun-
dred, had reached the ears of the emperor. Li Hou-chu sent a
painter in attendance (tai-chao) to observe and record what was
going on, and then confronted Han Hsi-tsai with the evidence of
his dissipation. The scene looks respectable enough, but the casual
attitudes of Han, his friends, and his singing girls, the meaningful
glances, the figures half-hidden behind bed-curtains, are all highly
suggestive; indeed, not the least intriguing thing about this pic-
ture is the way in which licentiousness is suggested in a formal lan-
guage of such exquisite refinement and dignity. The painting,
which the fourteenth-century writer T'ang Hou considered "not
a pure and fitting object for a high-class collection," is also