Page 52 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

his hands it gave rise to abstract structures of extraordinary discipline and clarity. The

context for such uncompromising classicism may partly be inferred from the fact that the
work illustrated here, a wall-like vision of the mountainous heartland of north China, was
painted for the man responsible for China's coastal defenses against the British at the
beginning of the 1840s. It further deepens our understanding of Dai's conservatism to know
that when the Taiping forces entered his native city of Hangzhou, he refused to give himself

up, preferring to commit suicide.
In that same year, the combined forces of the allied powers reached Beijing and
destroyed the complex of summer palaces outside the city, reducing the already long

neglected sino-European buildings in the Yuanming yuan to ruins. A year later, imperial
power came into the the hands of the Empress Dowager Cixi, mother of the child emperor
Tongzhi, who managed to retain that power (with only a brief interruption in 1898) until
1908 (566). Her astonishing response to the destruction of the summer palaces came
somewhat later, in 1887, when she proposed refurbishing Clear Ripple Garden, the most

outlying site in Qianlong's complex of summer palaces, as the training ground for a new
naval fleet. Having acquired the funds, however, she used them to restore and transform the
garden over a period of eight years into a final enormous summer palace (568). Given the

name of the Garden of Harmonious Unity, it became her home and an important seat of
government. It was there that she studied painting with the Yunnanese woman artist, Miao
Jiahui (active late 19th-early 20th century), who was no doubt responsible for a series of
superb formal paintings signed by Cixi, of branches emerging from clouds in a gesture of
imperial largesse.

In contrast to such extreme conservative responses, much of nineteenth century
culture involved a painful process of adapting traditional ideas to new ones, and vice versa. It
was in this way that an entirely new type of scholar-artist appeared in the second half of the

century, equally adept at seal-carving, calligraphy and painting. These artists, of whom Zhao
Zhiqian (1829-84) was the pioneer, created an aesthetic based on the fusion of different
principles from the three arts. In his case, a supple architectonics came from Northern Wei-
inspired calligraphy, immediate visual impact from the blunt images of seal-carving in Qin-
Han style, and lushness from ink-wash flower painting (570-71). It is this fusion which

differentiates Zhao from his predecessors, and defines his relative modernity. By daring to
summarize the literati aesthetic in a single, essential visual form, he revealed his
disengagement from the tradition and ability to conceive it, so to speak, from the outside. He

also made it viable in a now thoroughly commercialized world, since he turned to bright, flat
colors that were not only powerfully expressive but also highly decorative.