Page 41 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

or by subordinating it to the needs of illusion, as Qiu Ying or Zhang Hong did in their

different ways. Gong Xian's ambition and achievement in his late work was to reconcile
these two tendencies on a basis of equality. In 1689, the year of Kangxi's second visit to the
Ming tombs in Nanjing and his own death, Gong looked back to the origins of the landscape
tradition to paint a mountainscape in the manner of tenth century masters (544). In line with
this reference, it has the monumentality and scale of a national landscape. At the same time,

there are reasons to think that it specifically represents the tomb of Zhu Yuanzhang, nestled
in a grove of pines on Zhongshan; in its shadow, a house of three bare rooms surely refers to
Gong Xian himself. Paradoxically, only the fall of the Ming dynasty made possible a vision

of its greatness through the filter of loss; only the Manchu conquest made possible a grand
synthesis of traditions in the Ming name.
It was during the early 1680s that the Jiangxi painter, Bada shanren (1626-1705), left
the Chan church in which he had spent the last thirty years as a priest, and established
himself as a painter in his native Nanchang. Although he cloaked his life in such secrecy that

we still cannot be sure of his real name, we do know that Bada shanren was a descendant of
the Yiyang Ming princes, enfeoffed in Nanchang. The concealment of his identity sprang
from real danger, and it found an aesthetic counterpart in a hermetic iconography which has

only recently come to be understood, partially, as a language of private mistrust of, and
resistance to, the Manchus (546). The structures of his paintings are no less difficult of
access. The ambiguities and disjunctions that characterize them surely draw on Chan
attitudes to language, but more deeply, perhaps, they reflect his bitter personal experience of
the impossibility of normal communication after the fall of the Ming. In this sense, the

strangeness of his paintings bears witness in art to the lost value of ordinary language as the
guarantee of community, just as the madness and dumbness he sometimes feigned bore
witness to it in life. It was their personal embodiment of the memory of disaster that

accounted for the high status that such "extraordinary gentlemen" enjoyed at a time of
national reconstruction.
If Bada shanren resisted reintegration into normal life, a second great Ming prince-
painter, Shitao (1642-1707), was more ambivalent. He was a descendant of the Jinjiang
princes enfeoffed in the southern province of Guangxi. Orphaned in the chaos of Ming

resistance to the Qing, he spent the first fifty years of his life in the Chan Buddhist church, as
the follower of a loyalist monk who had been willing to accept imperial appointment under
the Shunzhi emperor, himself a devout Buddhist. In 1689, Shitao sought and received a brief

audience with Kangxi during the latter's Southern Tour, but was disappointed in his ambition
to echo his teacher's success at court. This marked a turning point in his life. Within a few
years he had left the Buddhist church, and he spent the years from 1697 to his death in 1707