Page 3 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

as late as 1393. It is as an embodiment of these artists' responses to their new circumstances

that their early Ming works have an essential place in a history of Ming dynasty art.
One reaction, so minimal that one does not naturally relate it to the events of the time,
is represented by the astonishing continuity in the works of Ni Zan. Ni, who had earlier
refused to be drawn into the cultural world around Zhang Shicheng's court, maintained a
similar detachment after Zhu Yuanzhang's victory. In the great Rongxi Studio (448), for

example, painted in 1372 and reinscribed by the artist in 1374, he holds more tightly than
ever to the security of his long-standing, narrow mode of representation, in which the affairs
of the world are washed away, leaving a perfect stillness of the self. The implications are of

an utter distrust of the possibilities of community except at the zero degree of intimate
friendship, where the public person and the private self are not forced into contradiction. In
the case of Wang Meng, by contrast, the new situation seems to have brought about a
thorough transformation in his work. Although Wang served as an official after 1368, his
Ming period paintings document increasingly close ties to Buddhist monks. The Forest

Grotto at Juqu (468) is one such painting, probably presented to a monk who had reluctantly
come to Nanjing, first to preach to the Emperor, and then to become the abbot of one of the
monasteries in the capital. All Wang Meng's effort has gone into the depiction of a rigorously

inturned world, a world which opens up to the viewer as a like-minded participant but is
unambiguously closed to others. The only break in the rock wall, in the top right-hand corner,
discloses not sky but water -- therefore, separation -- and is further devalued by the addition
of the title, which sends the viewer back into the forest grotto. The seven figures are hard to
make out at first, buried as they are in the landscape; so too is the signature which gives the

names of the artist and the recipient, and seems almost carved into the rock. Withdrawal, as
represented here, is inseparable from concealment. Knowing the violent deaths met by so
many intellectuals of the period, including Wang Meng himself who died during his sixth

year of imprisonment, it is is hard not to see in this oppressive image a recognition of his
dangerous political circumstances.
During these same years, a very different painter from the Suzhou region, Wang Lü
(b.1322) left to study medicine far to the west in Shenxi province. He took advantage of this
to climb Mt. Hua, the sacred mountain of the west and China's most important Daoist

pilgrimage site. In contrast to the mainstream of literati, Wang Lü had studied the painting
styles of the Southern Song academic masters Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. It was to their realist
pictorial language that he turned in order to document his wonder at the experience of

climbing Mt. Hua, in a forty-leaf album which is his only surviving work (470-71). Through
image after image, we are immersed, through his tiny figures, in the mists, the rocks, the
paths, the views, of the mountain. Here the outside world is not banished but simply