Page 25 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

commitment to naturalism. Yet others allowed an unprecedented authority to the

imagination, introducing unprecedented distortions into pictorial representation.
One of the changes accompanying the decline of the hereditary Ming aristocracy in
the mid-sixteenth century had been the rise of scholar-officials to new prominence. But as the
state's internal problems accumulated, fierce factionalism developed, from which no clear
direction emerged. It was perhaps their intense consciousness of their futile situation, as well

as of the commercial possibilities available outside government, that led so many scholar-
officials in this period to turn to calligraphy and painting. There they created a world of stark
and clear moral choices. The most important of these calligrapher-painters was Dong

Qichang (1555-1636), whose obsession with order in art and art history influenced the
history of painting into the nineteenth century, and art historical writing into our own day.
From the first, Dong rejected the painterly attempt to explore the texture of experience,
preferring to focus on brush and ink, and the underlying ideographic structures of pictorial
language (516). His painting represents, in fact, a self-conscious restoration of the values of

Yuan literati painting, and it is clear that he took the monumentality and coherence of their
work as a standard for his own. On the other hand, given the age of disorder in which he
lived, and his post-Wen Zhengming historical position, it is understandable that the road to

such monumentality and coherence passed through structural tensions. In his finest works, he
wrests order from fragmentation, as he aspired vainly to do in his role as a government
official.
Dong legitimized his practice as a painter by establishing a polemical art historical
opposition of lineages on the model of Chan sects. This set a "Northern" tradition of painterly

craft (the slow path to enlightenment) against a "Southern" tradition of calligraphic craft in
painting (the path of sudden enlightenment) anticipating his own. The social prejudice
implied in this unequal opposition between so-called "professionals" and "amateurs"

subsequently passed into orthodox thinking, and came to obscure the ecumenical relationship
between different craft traditions, and painters of different social origins, that existed in
practice. Dong himself not only was commercially successful, but was closely associated
with artists whom his own theoretical framework would place in the "Northern" camp. The
fact that some of the latter acted as ghost painters for Dong has provided a convenient way of

explaining away the association, but it is by no means certain that the relationship was purely
hierarchical, even in such collaborations. Dong was deeply influenced by the art of his
Songjiang contemporary, the career painter Zhao Zuo, and wrote admiring inscriptions for

works by Dai Jin and Qiu Ying, for example, whom his theory implicitly criticized.
In the wake of Dong Qichang, calligrapher painters were widely active in the
Songjiang area and at the two capitals. The most original of them was the central government