Page 190 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

200 Mu-ch'i (jaive mid-trurteenth
century). Evening Clow en a Fishing
who after rising to be tai-chao under Ning-tsung (i 195-1224), re-
Village, one of "Eight View? of the
Hsiao and Huang Rivers." Detail ot a tired to a temple, taking with him the brilliant brush style of Hsia
handscrol). Ink on paper. Southern Sung
Kuei, and Mu-ch'i, who from his monastery, the Liu-t'ung-ssu,
Dynasty.
dominated the Ch'an painting of the Hangchow region through-
out the thirteenth century. There was hardly a subject that Mu-
ch'i did not touch. Landscapes, birds, tigers, monkeys, bodhisatt-
vas—all were the same to him. In all he sought to express an essen-
tial nature that was not a matter of form, for his forms may break
up or dissolve in mists—but of inner life, which he found because
it was in the painter himself. His famous Six Persimmons is the su-
preme example of his genius for investing the simplest thing with
profound significance. Less often recognised is his power of mon-
umental design, shown above all in the central panel of his great
triptych in Daitokuji, Kyoto, depicting the white-robed Kuanyin
seated in meditation amid the rocks, flanked by paintings of a
crane in a bamboo grove, and gibbons in the branches of a pine
tree. Whether or not these scrolls were painted to hang together is
immaterial, for, in Ch'an Buddhism, all living things partake of
the divine essence. What is most striking about these scrolls, and
common to all the best Ch'an painting, is the way in which the art-
ist rivets the viewer's attention by the careful painting of certain
key details, while all that is not essential blurs into obscurity, as in
the very act of meditation itself. Such an effect of concentration
and control was only possible to artists schooled in the disciplined
techniques of the Ma-Hsia School; the brush style of the literati,
for all its spontaneity, was too relaxed and personal to meet such a
challenge.
DRAGONS The influence of the academic attitude toward art in the Sung Dy-
nasty is revealed in a growing tendency to categorise. The cata-
logue of the emperor Hui-tsung's collection, Hsiian-ho hua-p'u,
for instance, was arranged under ten headings: Taoist and Bud-
dhist themes (which, though less popular than before, still pre-
served a prestige conferred by tradition); figure painting (includ-
ing portraits and genre); palaces and buildings (particularly those
in the ruled chieh-hua style); foreign tribes; dragons and fish; land-
scapes; domestic animals and wild beasts (there was a whole