Page 26 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

official Wang Duo (1592-1652), represented here by his calligraphy. Dong had pursued a

classicizing path as a calligrapher, following the example of Mi Fu. Clearly separated
columns, distinctions between script types, and consistent self-restraint are characteristic of
his work. Wang Duo, on the other hand, was drawn to "wild cursive" script and would even
slip characters of that type into calligraphies of other kinds (518). Following Zhu Yunming,
he pushed calligraphy further in a pictorial direction, notably deconstructing ideograms in

order to reconstitute them as new and unexpected patterns of energy.
The late Ming was equally a period of scientific curiosity and engagement with the
material world. Even within Dong Qichang's immediate world, painters contributed to this

new exploration of experience. The vivid immediacy achieved by Zhao Zuo (ca.1570-
ca.1633) and Shen Shichong (active ca. 1602-ca.1641) in their landscape paintings partly
derives from a complex play of light on surfaces. However, it also owes much to meandering
and destabilized compositions which create an effect analogous to that of a hand-held
camera. In Suzhou, Zhang Hong (1577-after 1652) continued Wen Boren's testing of

representational conventions against optical experience. Unlike Wen Boren, however, he did
not refer his experiments only to the inherited conventions of the painting tradition, but was
just as likely to explore the conventions of Chinese or even European topographic depiction

(518-19). Although the resulting naturalisms in his work are extraordinarily diverse, they
tend to have in common an all-over focus which makes the viewing experience an
inexhaustible journey of the eye. This trust in the capacity of the eye to register
differentiation links Zhang Hong to the contemporary Gongan school of literary theorists, for
whom authenticity lay in a radical receptivity to sensual experience. Elsewhere, particularly

in Nanjing, painters came close to Gongan theory in a different way, using the same visual
empiricism to create a modern version of the Southern Song genre of illustrations to Tang
poems. Sheng Maoye (active ca.1594-ca.1640) is the best-known exponent of this approach,

which focused attention on specific moments defined visually by their atmosphere, and made
resonant by the poetic narrative and associations. Multiple short brushstrokes break up the
surfaces, creating a viewing experience akin to a lingering gaze.
It is a measure of the transformation of Chinese thinking over the seven centuries
from the Five Dynasties to the end of the Ming that order and experience were now entirely

uncoupled, whereas in the work of the early landscape masters from Jing Hao to Guo Xi they
had been fused in metaphoric visions of social and cosmic harmony. When Yuan literati
artists created a new synthesis in the fourteenth century, they did so self-consciously,

affirming as myth the harmony that had once been taken for granted. And when Shen Zhou
and Dai Jin, in less troubled times, sought a synthesis again in the fifteenth century, it
entailed a clear narrowing of scope from the national to the local landscape. In this long