Page 8 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

The great Fujianese artist Bian Wenjin (ca.1354-1428) specialised in the genre of

flower and bird painting, creating teeming microcosms of a peaceful, prosperous and stable
world (478). The counterpoint of richly colored flowers and birds and an ink setting derives
from an imperial synthesis of opposing stylistic traditions first achieved in Huizong's
academy at the end of the Northern Song. Indeed, the Ming imperial collection of ancient
paintings may have played a role in forming Bian Wenjin's mature style. There is a further

connection with Huizong's academy in the fact that the Xuande emperor, like Huizong, was
himself a painter. In his case, too, it remains to be fully established which of the surviving
works of the period bearing his signature come from the imperial hand.

The palace wall paintings of the time are recorded to have treated scenes from history
which offered precedents for the self-image of the Ming dynasty. These wall paintings are
now entirely lost, but Shang Xi's almost mural-sized depiction of Emperor Xuanzong on a
Pleasure Outing allows us to glimpse something of the monumental visual effect they would
have offered (480-81). On the right, and scattered through the rest of the composition, are

birds, animals, flowers and plants which recall Bian Wenjin's iconography of peace and
prosperity. The wall in the top right corner signifies an imperial site, most likely the vast
imperial hunting park to the south of Beijing. A mounted party of eunuch officials awaits the

arrival of the Emperor, seen at the top mounted on a white steed, and hieratically depicted as
the largest figure in the painting. The quivers and bowcases identify this as a hunting
expedition, in which the Emperor, whose arrows are the only ones visible, will symbolically
take possession of his dominion.
That dominion is explicitly shown in several surviving monumental landscapes by

another Fujianese artist, Li Zai, active during the Xuande period. Unlike the court artists
proper, Li was based in Nanjing, now reduced to the status of a secondary, southern capital.
There he was patronized by the Ming hereditary aristocracy, who maintained mansions in the

city although their feofdoms were often far-flung. From Nanjing, Li Zai went several times to
Beijing to fulfil court commissions, and his influence, like Bian Wenjin's, can be seen in
ceramics of the period. Li's landscape vision revives the styles of Guo Xi and Li Tang in the
late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. In bravura performances of brushwork he summons
up vast landscapes dominated by great peaks, so close to surviving works by Guo and Li that

we must asume that he had access to such early paintings in Nanjing or Beijing (482). To
describe his art as derivative would miss the point of the allusion, which is twofold: the unity
of the Great Ming is shown to have restored what had been lost since the fall of the Northern

Song, while conversely the Song past is invoked to legitimize the Ming present.
Following Li Zai, Dai Jin (1388-1462) was the most widely accomplished and
inventive painter of his day, master of numerous styles, and entirely catholic in his approach