Page 27 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

process of change we can see the gradual loss of authority of the state's hierarchical order

among intellectuals. By the early seventeenth century some, like Dong Qichang, were
attempting to reassert that authority self-consciously while others like Zhang Hong sought a
different, non-hierarchical order in empirical experience.
For many other artists, however, (and even for the same artists on another level),
neither intellectualized order nor empirical experience provided an adequate framework for

self-definition in painting. Instead, they made a radical commitment to the imagination, in the
name of a concept, qi, which could mean "strange", "extraordinary", "original" or "exotic"
according to context. To seize the significance of this alternative aesthetic world, one has to

bear in mind that the concept of qi was to prove central to Chinese culture throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The willful distortions of Dong Qichang's Qingbian
Mountains or Wang Duo's grass script characters, Zhao Zuo's heaving compositions, and
Zhang Hong's surprising viewpoints -- all of them moments where the imagination comes
strikingly into play -- fall equally within the compass of the late Ming aesthetic of qi. So, too,

do Cheng Junfang's inkcake designs based on European engravings, which involved an
imaginative leap of another kind, as did the lacquered furniture imported from Japan. Qi was
an umbrella concept which integrated several "modern" notions: cosmopolitanism, the desire

for novelty, as well as the willingness to treat imaginative experience as authentic.
While few artists could be entirely defined by their engagement with issues of qi, Wu
Bin (active ca.1568-1626) explored it in more ways than most. Prior to around 1600, he
appears to have acted as a court painter based in Nanjing, but perhaps only on an occasional
and perhaps even commercial basis. Most of his paintings, however, postdate that period. His

work draws on many different sources: ornamental rocks, prized for their strange forms and
textures, such as those collected by his friend and patron Mi Wanzhong; Five Dynasties and
Northern Song monumental landscapes and what passed for them among his collector

acquaintances; the old, often anonymous religious paintings handed down in the Buddhist
temples which he frequented; and the -- to the Chinese -- otherworldly visions of European
engravings, which had found their way to China through the Jesuit missions that first arrived
in Nanjing at the very end of the sixteenth century. In the undated Landscape with Palaces, a
man stands at the mouth of a cave, at the foot of a flight of stairs (521). From a distance

another man, hesitant, torn between advancing and leaving, watches him. Only we can see
the extraordinary world that lies within the cave, and which is, on another level, simply the
world of the imagination to which Wu Bin, himself unhesitant, has committed himself.

No less uncompromising is Chen Hongshou's (1598-1652) The Artist with His
Nephew, painted in 1635 (520). Chen was a much younger man than Wu Bin, and would live
on beyond the fall of the Ming. As a boy in Hangzhou, he had studied with Lan Ying, but