Page 18 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

views" which would incorporate some scene beyond the walls into the garden. On the

contrary, the whole challenge of the garden was to create a world of such internal complexity
that the city would be forgotten (500). By offering choices of path at frequent intervals, and
by artfully disclosing only part of the view beyond any of the scenes (jing) that make up the
whole, a garden could become inexhaustible -- as big, in fact, as one made it by one's
wanderings. In this respect, the Zhuozheng yuan is among the most ambitious and successful

of the hundreds of traditional city gardens to have survived. Much of its success derives from
the extensive use of water to create, not only ponds and a "lake", but also a "river" which, of
course, seems endless. As in other Suzhou gardens before and after, the rocks in the

Zhuozheng yuan -- microcosmic mountains -- are primarily eroded limestone rocks in
organic forms from nearby Lake Tai.
Luxury of a different kind is represented by the paintings of the Suzhou artist Qiu
Ying (d.1552) who, like Tang Yin, studied with Zhou Chen. Prior to this, however, he is said
to have served an apprenticeship as an architectural painter: this craft background may

account in part for a level of meticulous craftsmanship in painting that had not been seen
since the Song dynasty. Active during the period of a burgeoning antique market, Qiu Ying
took the connoisseur's sense of contact with the past through objects as the basis for his own

imaginary reconstructions of the past (502). The past as he imagined it, more often than not,
was a romantic anticipation of the wealthy world to which he catered. It is altogether logical
therefore that his closest relationship with a customer should have been with Xiang Yuanbian
(1525-90), whose business activities, including ownership of a pawnshop, dovetailed
perfectly with a passion for collecting ancient and modern paintings. This has naturally given

ample room for the assumption that craftsmanship and unabashed commercialism had to
mean a lack of intellectual content. Yet Qiu Ying was widely admired by his literati peers in
Suzhou, who often collaborated with him, supplying in colophons the literary and

calligraphic components of complex, collaborative works of art. From these colophons one
sees that once a certain level of excellence was reached, the artisan was considered to
transcend his craft, which was then judged in the terms of self-cultivation that the literati
normally reserved for their own artistic practice. Xiang Yuanbian himself, it should be noted,
was from a noted Zhejiang family and painted competently in a scholarly style. For a literati

counterpart to Qiu Ying's luxury, we can turn to the flower paintings of Chen Shun (1483-
1544). Although Chen studied with Wen Zhengming, his warm and easy style, heavily reliant
on the wash effects of the "boneless" technique, has little in common with Wen's highly

intellectualized and linear approach (502). It comes much closer to the sensuous art of Tang
Yin. Chen enriched the iconography of flower painting immeasurably to give yet another
optimistic form to urban prosperity, this time as summer profusion.