Page 40 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

"wilderness", to be nominated by local oficials. The Emperor's first southern tour of

inspection followed in 1684; when he reached Nanjing he was careful to make sacrifices at
the tomb of the first Ming emperor. By the time he made his second and more elaborate
southern tour in 1689, he had demonstrated his conciliatory attitude toward yimin Chinese
intellectuals in numerous ways, and the relatively enthusiastic reception he received from the
urban population only marginalized the loyalists further. It is understandable, therefore, that

"wilderness" painting gradually softened through the 1680s and 1690s as the painters found a
place for themselves on the margins of normal life. The art that they created in these finally
peaceful circumstances, until the last of them died in the 1700s, constitutes one of the

outstanding achievements of the history of Chinese painting. Together with their
predecessors of the pre-1680 period such as Hongren and Kuncan, they were a diverse group,
encompassing a wide range of political positions, personalities and stylistic approaches.
Western art historians have given such yimin artists the name of Individualists, but in early
Qing terms they were "extraordinary gentlemen", qishi -- a very different conception of the

extraordinary from the one that held in Kangxi's court.
Here, three painters will have to stand for many. Gong Xian is one such painter who,
as we have seen, had already achieved a fully-developed style in the 1670s. Having come to

painting through a displaced need for political expression, it was only much later that he
gradually confronted the complex heritage of the tradition. Part of the context for this was
publication in 1679 of The Mustardseed Garden Manual of Painting, designed by another
Nanjing painter, Wang Gai, which was the most ambitious and systematic painting manual
ever produced (it would be expanded with two more volumes in the 1700s (545). The result

of Gong Xian's engagement with the tradition, worked out not only in paintings but in
voluminous theoretical writings, was an extraordinary synthesis in this age of syntheses. The
physical character of Chinese painting, always a matter of doing as much as making, made

the brushstroke highly self-referential, in contrast to illusion, by its nature tied to the world. It
was therefore through the fundamental relationship between the material presence of ink (and
color) on paper or silk and the illusionistic presence of, say, a landscape, that painters had
always reconciled the subjective and objective poles of experience. Northern Song and Yuan
painting represented two ideal forms of balance between the two, and under the Ming there

was an attempt to recover such a balance in the generation of Dai Jin and Shen Zhou. After
the fifteenth century, however, few painters even made the attempt. One tendency was to
subjectivize painting by exploiting illusion as an expressive structure, as in Wen Zhengming

and Dong Qichang: Gong Xian's own early work was built on this basis. The other tendency,
found among career painters, was to objectivize the act of painting. This was done either by
turning brushwork into performance as we have seen in the work of Wu Wei and Lan Ying,