Page 11 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

parallels the economic recovery from the mid-century retrenchment that began in the 1460s.

In the process, both cities became thriving centers of painting.
Nanjing. By virtue of its strategic commercial importance as the gateway to and from
the relatively wealthier south-east, but also its status as the Southern Capital, Nanjing was
now China's largest and richest city. Here, when they were not in their feofdoms,
congregated many of the princely descendants of the Ming founder and the now aristocratic

descendants of his comrades-in-arms. In Nanjing these aristocrats created for themselves a
bold and colorful culture that reflected their self-confidence and means. Painters in the Song
tradition, following the example of Li Zai and Dai Jin, now flocked to Nanjing as much as to

the court: there are several cases of painters preferring to settle in Nanjing and make periodic
brief sorties to the court from their southern base. Due to the historical links to Southern
Song painting and Dai Jin's Zhejiang origins, the range of stylistic approaches favored in
Nanjing and Beijing from the Chenghua through the Zhengde reigns later became known as
the Zhe school.

However, in the late fifteenth century the leading artist in Nanjing was a painter from
Wuchang in Hubei, Wu Wei (1459-1508). Just as Li Zai and Dai Jin had been connected with
the Princes of Qianning, Wu Wei had such aristocratic patrons as the Duke of Chengguo

(Zhu Yi, 1427-96). He also spent periods at court during the Chenghua and Hongzhi reigns,
and would have done so again during the Zhengde reign as well, had he not died just before
he was due to set out. Living in more prosperous times than Dai Jin, his art was also tied up
with public pleasures in a new way. Wu was a more spectacular brush technician than his
predecessor, and he engaged an audience for whom the public values of performance were

central, both in life and in art. He and other artists such as Xu Lin who were working in the
same direction, along with some of his patrons, were deeply involved in the world of urban
entertainments: banquets, the theater, the pleasure quarters. Not surprisingly, many of the

themes of Nanjing painting in the late fifteenth century are drawn from this milieu. The
strongly male, even bravura, aspects of their paintings, like the Daoist personae that the
artists adopted, have strong links to a culture that orthodox literati disdained as excessive --
altogether too close to the unrestrained behaviour of the urban lower classes. Wu Wei's Lady
carrying a Pipa presents us not only with the heroine of a popular play, The Lute Song, but is

an image that any one of his contemporaries would have understood as a reference to the
singing-girls of his own day (486). The brushwork, fluid but strong, perfectly describes --
almost enacts -- a body in movement. If we understand her to be Zhao Wuniang on her way

to the capital to find her lover, her steady progress and intentness can be seen as a female
equivalent to male bravado; if we bypass this reference, it becomes the stoicism of a working
woman, portrayed with evident sympathy.