Page 183 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

while the gulf that began increasingly to separate the intellectual
elite from the rest of society ensured that henceforth scholars
would no longer concern themselves (except in their capacity as
administrators) with worldly afFairs. It would have been utterly
impossible, for instance, for a gentleman in the Yuan. Ming, or
Ch'ing Dynasty to have painted a scroll like Chang Tse-tuan's
panorama illustrated on page 159.
Whatever the causes of this momentous shift in emphasis—and
there are many—it is well illustrated in the handful of surviving
paintings that have been attributed to members of this small
group of Northern Sung scholar-painters. The short handscroll
illustrated here was first attributed to Su Tung-p'o in the thir-
teenth century, and its actual author is unknown. But it is typical
of the taste and technique of the eleventh-century scholar-painters
in its choice of medium, its dry, sensitive brushwork, its avoid-
ance of obvious visual appeal, and in the sense that this is a spon-
taneous statement as revealing of the man himself as of what he
depicts.
The work of these early scholar-painters was always original,
not because they strove for originality for itself but because their
art was the sincere and spontaneous expression of an original per-
sonality. One of the most remarkable of these men was Mi Fu,
critic, connoisseur, and eccentric, who would spend long eve-
nings with his friend Su Tung-p'o, whom he first met, probably in
Hangchow, in 108 1, surrounded by piles of paper and jugs of
wine, writing away at top speed till the paper and wine gave out
and the small boys grinding the ink were ready to drop with fa-
tigue. In painting landscapes, Mi Fu, it is said, abandoned the
drawn line altogether, forming his mountains of rows of blobs of
wet ink laid on the paper with the flat of the brush—a technique
probably derived from Tung Yiian's impressionism and highly
evocative of the misty southern landscape that Mi Fu knew so
well. This striking Mi-dot technique, as it came to be called, had
its dangers, however; in the hands of the master or of his son Mi
Yu-jen ( 1 086-1 165), who seems to have modified it somewhat, it
achieved marvels of breadth and luminosity with the simplest of
means, but it was fatally easy to imitate.
So radical was this technique of Mi Fu's that the emperor Hui- SUNG HUI-TSUNG
tsung would have none of his work in the imperial collection, nor ANDTHE ACADEMY
would he permit the style to be practised at court. It is not known
whether an official painting academy ever existed before the
Southern Sung. Painters at the T'ang court had been given a wide
variety of civil and military ranks, most of which were sinecures.
Wang Chien, ruler of Former Shu, seems to have been the first to
give his painters appointments in his own Hanlin Academy of
Letters, and this practice was followed by the Southern T'ang em-
peror Li Hou-chu at Nanking, and by the first emperors of the
Sung. Contemporary writers often speak of distinguished paint-
ers as being in attendance (tai-chao) in the Yu-hua-yiian (Imperial
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