Page 215 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

must still know how the bamboo grows, and give to his own the
springing movement of the living plant. A great bamboo painting
is a virtuoso performance of a very high order.
The art had first become fashionable in the Six Dynasties, 3
when it was the custom, except when painting on a very small
scale, to outline the stem and leaves in ink and fill them with body
colour. This painstaking technique was chiefly handed down by
the academicians, though the Sung artist Ts'ui Po and the four-
teenth-century master Wang Yuan also used it occasionally. Bam-
boo painting seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion during
the T'ang Dynasty (Hui-tsung had no T'ang specimens in his col-
lection), but had become widely popular by Northern Sung,
when its greatest exponents were Wen T'ung and the poet and cal-
ligraphcr Su Tung-p'o. In the Yuan Dynasty several of the great
ijS Dish. Porcelain, covered with
literati, notably Ni Tsan and Chao Meng-fu, were accomplished celadon glaze, leaving the dragon and
clouds in biscuit relief. Yuan Dynasty.
painters of bamboo in monochrome ink; in this most exacting art
Chao Meng-fu had a rival in his wife Kuan Tao-sheng, one of
China's greatest women painters. Li K'an (c. 1 260-1 310), who
took as his master Wen T'ung, devoted his life to bamboo, which
he studied both as an amateur botanist and as a painter. His illus-
trated manual on the bamboo, Chu-p 'u hsiang-lu, became an essen-
tial tool in the hands of every practitioner, as well as providing the
starting point for all later writers on the subject. A more natural
and spontaneous rendering of the subject than Li K'an ever
achieved is the little album-leaf by Wu Chen illustrated here, re-
markable for its economy of statement and subtle union of the
twin arts of painting and calligraphy.
It used to be thought that the decorative arts in China declined, if CERAMICS
they did not actually come to a standstill, in the Yuan Dynasty, but
now it is realised that this was, on the contrary, a period of inno-
vation and technical experiment. In ceramics, for example, new
techniques such as painting in underglazc red or blue were discov- A
ered or imported, and old techniques, such as modelling in relief
under the glaze, were revived. The northern kilns, except for
those at Tz'u-chou and Chiin-chou, barely survived the Liao,
Chin, and Mongol invasions, and now the focus of the ceramic in-
dustry shifted permanently to the centre and south. The kilns at
Lung-ch'iian and Li-shui in Chekiang continued to produce cela-
dons on a large scale—indeed, production must have increased to
keep pace with the demand for exports to the Near East which the
Pax Tartarica had stimulated. A baluster vase dated 1 3 27 in the Pcr-
cival David Foundation in London is typical of the more baroque
preferences of the period, being elaborately and somewhat taste-
lessly decorated with floral scrolls moulded in relief under the
glaze. More daring was the technique of leaving the central deco-
rative motif on a dish, such as a dragon, unglazed in relief. Some-
times these reliefs were modelled by hand, but the presence in the
Percival David Foundation of a celadon dish and a flask bearing
identical dragons (the former unglazed and the latter glazed) indi- 136 Vase and stand. Ch'ing-pai
cates that moulds were also used. It is possible that spotted celadon porcelain with reliefand pearl-bead
decoration under bluish-white glaze.
(tobi-seiji) may also have been a Yuan innovation. There are signs, Yuan Dynasty.