Page 32 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

together with his own protegé Wang Jian (1598-1677), from another prominent Taicang

family, devoted himself to collecting and painting. The two men shared Cheng Zhengkui's
commitment to formalist explorations of the "Southern" tradition, but were more rigorous in
replacing illusion by stylistic allusion. They also specialized in hanging scrolls, a format
which lent itself better than the handscroll to images of hierarchical order (526). Their
paintings aspire to be apolitical, appealing to a concept of culture transcending dynastic

boundaries. After 1680, however, when the Kangxi court came to align itself with Chinese
cultural tradition, this style of painting was to become one of the principal expressions of that
Qing policy.

Most reactions in painting to the Manchu conquest sought less to neutralize the
trauma than to bear witness to it. For an artist like Chen Hongshou, for example, who had
been and continued to be deeply involved with self-consciousness and luxury, there were
strong feelings of guilt. In such post-Ming works as Sixteen Episodes from a Hermit's Life,
the ironic self-presentation familiar from his earlier work has shifted in meaning (524). Our

very knowledge of the intervening events has altered the significance of the irony, pushing it
toward self-accusation. This is one of a series of paintings from the last few years of his life,
in which Chen Hongshou catalogues the models and personae of the literati in his generation

and world, as if to expose the emptiness of the ideal.
Another common reaction was to register the sense of loss which the fall of the Ming
dynasty had thrust into the center of national consciousness. For this, painting offered several
directions. In Hangzhou, Yun Shouping (1633-90) employed the language of flowers to
evoke the lost glories of the Ming, in vividly sensual images that take their cue from

Southern Song album leafs and fans, and the "boneless" flower studies of Chen Daofu. No
painter would be more influential on eighteenth century flower painting, but the lingering
Ming resonances were there forgotten. In Nanjing, Fan Qi (1616-ca.1695) created colorful

landscape worlds pervaded by a strange, other-worldly tranquility for which the model was
the hidden utopian land of the Peach-blossom Spring -- a subject which he and many others
in this period loved to paint. Like the land of the Peach-blossom Spring, Fan Qi's landscapes
in general represent a world irretrievable except in memory.
In the process of mourning for the fallen dynasty -- the national family -- the

counterpart of loss was survival. The emblematic motifs of pine, bamboo, orchid and plum
blossom had already been adapted to the specific circumstances of foreign conquest under
the Yuan dynasty, and were widely revived in this period. Rather more specific to the early

Qing was the landscape language of the wilderness. The wilderness, ye, in contra-distinction
to the world of examinations and official service, chao, had long been the metaphoric
environment of those in exile, withdrawal or retirement. Now, it came to evoke the