Page 13 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

outside -- that all thought of artifice is forgotten. The ordinariness of the scene is reminiscent

of the work of Dai Jin, whom Shen Zhou admired. Yet the image gradually reveals an
underlying complexity. The monk and the servant are equidistant from the well: surely they
have just met, bringing the inner world of the temple and the outer world of the dusty world
into brief contact. There are, one also realizes, three domains in the picture: the street, the
tree-filled courtyard, and a deeper world behind the inner gate. The monk, at the very center

of the image, is on a zig-zag path from outside to inside, from the mundane to the
transcendent. But that path is perfectly balanced, visually, by the horizontal zig-zag of the
wall that defines the street and perhaps our day-to-day lives. Throughout most of his life,

Shen pursued an ideal of receptivity to the world, believing that truths are revealed in the
simplest things -- an attitude as characteristic of the Confucian philosophy of his
contemporary Chen Xianzhang (1428-1500) as of Daoism or Chan Buddhism. In this respect
his relaxed brushwork is of a piece with his casual compositions and unassuming subjects. It
is Shen Zhou's great achievement to have practised painting as a private form of self-

cultivation leading to enlightenment, and yet to have created in the process the most
accessible (and marketable) of visions. For an extension of such empathy into the realm of
the darker side of Suzhou's success, however, one has to turn to a rare set of paintings from

1516 by the career painter Zhou Chen (ca. 1455-after 1536), which depict the city's beggars
(490). Although, as images, these are related to the "Water and Land" depictions of unhappy
deaths, they transcend the simple attempt to stimulate our horror. While also succeeding in
that goal, the artist insists above all on the essential humanity of the old blind woman, who
carries another woman's baby in her arms and is led through the streets by the goat that will

provide milk for the baby.
The other two major painters of Zhou Chen's generation in Suzhou, Tang Yin (1470-
1523) and Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), are both considered to be students and followers of

Shen Zhou, but they developed his heritage in very different ways. Wen Zhengming lived
longer and matured later as an artist, and will be discussed in the next section. It was Tang
Yin who dominated Suzhou painting in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Tang Yin
also studied with Zhou Chen, whose model partly accounts for Tang's avoidance of Shen's
calligraphy-based, faux-naif craft. Zhou's best work always displays careful attention to

optical experience, though the brush manner spans a wide range from meticulous academic
work to sometimes quite dramatic effects in the Nanjing manner. Tang Yin himself, whose
range is even wider, was clearly influenced not only by Zhou Chen but by Nanjing painters

as well. Like them, he was committed to optical experience and brush performance, but
brought to the use of this craft the deep lyricism and sensualism that was his heritage from
Shen Zhou. Whether the harsh and dramatic visions of large landscape hanging scrolls or the