Page 230 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

content merely to paraphrase. His creative reinterpretations of
earlier styles are animated by a passion for pure form, an expres-
sive distortion, which few of his followers understood. They pre-
ferred to take his theories more literally, to the detriment of schol-
arly painting during the ensuing three centuries.
For it is as a critic that Tung Ch'i-ch'ang is most famous. It was
he, borrowing an idea first put forward by the poet-painter Tu
Ch'iung in the fifteenth century, who formulated the theory of the
Northern and Southern schools for the express purpose of dem-
onstrating the superiority of the wen-jen tradition above all others.
It was primarily through landscape painting, he maintained, that
the scholar and gentleman expressed his understanding of the
working of the moral law in nature, and hence his own moral
worth. The wen-jen, indeed, was the only kind of man who could
do this successfully, for only he was free from both the control of
the academy on the one hand and the necessity to make a living on
the other; moreover, being a scholar, his wide reading in poetry
and the classics gave him an understanding of the nature of things
combined with an epicurean nobility of taste which the lower or-
ders of professional painters could never hope to acquire. In the
spontaneous play of ink and brush, in his freedom to select, omit,
suggest, the wen-jen had at his command a language capable of
conveying the loftiest and subtlest concepts.
The tradition of the independent scholar-painter, Tung Ch'i-
ch'ang called the Southern School, because he saw in it an analogy
to the southern school of Ch'an Buddhism in the T'ang Dynasty,
which had held that enlightenment came of itself, spontaneously
and suddenly, as opposed to the Northern or gradual school,
152 cirhiYing(c. 1494-1 55 j +). which had maintained that it could only be attained by degrees,
SS^tSS^L^' aftcr a lif«imc of preparation and training. To Tung Ch'i-ch'ang,
Ming Dynasty.

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