Page 182 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

19) Mi Yu-jen (1086-1 165). Misty
Landscape. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper.
Southern Sung Dynasty.
His recent poems are dry and hard;
Try chewing on some—a bitter mouthful!
The first reading is like caring olives,
But the longer you suck on them, the better the taste. 1
Just what brought about this momentous change in the edu-
cated man's view of the purposes of art is not quite clear. The
germs of it might be found in the life and work of the T'ang poet-
painter Wang Wei, regarded by the later literati as the founding
father of this tradition of landscape painting; but its emergence as
a philosophy of art belongs to the Sung, and seems to go hand-in-
hand with the tendency, which found its subtlest and most com-
plex expression in the philosophy of the second generation of
Neo-Confucianists, to unite all phenomena, natural forces, qual-
ities of mind, in a universal system of relationships that can only
be grasped through intuition. The very existence of such a syn-
thetic philosophy—the ancient pa-kua had been a primitive at-
tempt in the same direction—encouraged thinkers to leap from
the object of experience straight to the general, all-embracing
principle without investigating it for itself. As this approach to
knowledge took stronger hold on intellectuals, more and more
did it discourage both scientific investigation and realism in art.
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Pnnv/rinhtpH matprial