Page 222 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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The good life meant leisure, not only for the practice of the arts
but also for the pleasures of philosophy. There were many schools
active in the Ming, most of which were Neo-Confucian with a
colouring of Buddhist and Taoist ideas. The Northern Sung Nco-
Confucianists had stressed the importance, in self-cultivation, of
the "investigation of things," which included not only the mind,
and the underlying principles of things, but phenomena and ob-
jects in themselves. By the Ming, however, study of the external
world had largely given way to study of such questions as the re-
lationship between mind and principle and between knowledge
and action. For a rigorous analysis of things, Ming thinkers such
as Wang Yang-ming substituted a tendency to generalise about
them. The painting of the Ming scholars, like their thinking,
tended to be more intuitive and generalised, as if their predeces-
sors had learned all they needed from the study of the natural
world, and now they had only to "borrow," as Su Tung-p'o had
put it, mountains and water, rocks and trees, as vehicles for the
expression of thought and feeling.
Ming painting consequently does both less and more than that
of the Sung: less in that it tells us so little about nature as we see it
compare, for example, the landscapes of Shen Chou and Wen
Cheng-ming in this chapter with those of Fan K'uan and Chang
Tse-tuan—and more in the sense that the painting is now made to
carry a much richer freight of poetic and philosophical content;
or, to put it another way, the painter is saying things which cannot
be fully expressed in terms of the conventiona. language of land-
scape. It was to help carry that freight, to extend, as the Chinese
put it, the idea beyond the pictorial image itself, that the painter's
inscription became longer and more richly poetic or philosophical
in tone. Thus did the art of painting at its upper levels become
more and more interwoven with the ideals and attitudes of the