Page 20 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

Related depictions of leisure in city suburbs (the ancestor of the "willow pattern"), rivers

busy with traffic, and ocean-going galleons reflect remarkably accurately the economic
upsurge of their time.
New Explorations in Painting. If Chen Shun's and Qiu Ying's paintings suggest an
age of optimism and advance, the work of other artists reveals unsuspected social tensions.
The major figure of the period from the late 1520s to 1560 was the long-lived Wen

Zhengming. Born into an old-established Suzhou family, his nine attempts to pass the official
examinations were unsuccessful, but when he did through other channels gain the
opportunity to serve in the Hanlin Academy in 1523, he resigned gratefully after five

uncomfortable years. Unlike his boyhood friend Tang Yin, Wen did not have an obvious
natural aptitude for painting. His mastery came slowly and painfully on the basis of
calligraphic skill and art historical erudition, and his art is easily but inadequately understood
in those terms: as an erudite, backward-looking art of self-expression, in which Wen
legitimizes his own position and voice by establishing an art historical context in his

paintings. Increasingly as he grew older, his was an art of extreme structural tensions. The
figures in his paintings come to occupy spaces which are often claustrophobic or disturbingly
ambiguous (504, 505). The landscape around them threatens either to implode or to come

apart. As in the philosophy of his contemporary, Luo Qinshun (1465-1547), the very
coherence of the world is in question. Since landscape was, in Wen Zhengming's tradition, a
social metaphor, we need not doubt the social significance of such tensions in his art. But it
remains to be established whether their social reference is to the growing divide between
intellectuals and the state, or to the uncomfortable position of intellectuals in the

entrepreneurial culture of which he had become a very successful part. Wen Zhengming's
painting and calligraphy circulated throughout China, and were widely forged, within his
own lifetime. He also founded a small dynasty of painters, calligraphers and connoisseurs

who successfully marketed their skills well into the seventeenth century.
One nephew, Wen Boren (1502-75), was among the most important painters of the
second half of the sixteenth century. In certain works he pushed the structural tensions of his
uncle's work to even greater extremes, though in a different spirit. The extraordinary set of
"Ten Thousands" -- trees, waves, rocks, clouds -- tests the limits of the representational

system of "distances" which had come down to Ming painters from the Song. Elsewhere he
builds on Tang Yin's attention to optical experience in almost realist essays (506). And in yet
other works he creates willfully strange visions that give the imagination free reign. Wen

Zhengming's preoccupation with the historical, metaphysical and social place of the
individual seems to have left Wen Boren untouched; the younger man was more fascinated