Page 49 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

Zhu Xi, rejected the scholar-aesthete model on the
grounds that cultural activity should convey moral
principles, not just entertain or express personal
feelings. But they too strongly asserted the moral
autonomy of the learned by insisting that the goal
of learning was attaining sagehood, not office.
Art comes into this story because both the court
and literati circles used art to bolster their own
authority and legitimacy, and the resulting
competition, collaboration, appropriation, and
specialization seems only to have promoted
creativity. ,s The tremendous flourishing of
landscape painting and caDigraphy in Song times
should not be seen simply as automatic outgrowths
of the long-established cultural value placed on
mountains and writing, but rather as the product of
the conjunction of many elements, including the
competition and collaboration between the court
and circles of literati ambivalent about their
relationship to the court.
The creation of a canon of masterpieces that set the
standards in calligraphy involved an interplay of
imperial sponsorship and literati connoisseurship. In
992 the court had ordered the printing of a book
of rubbings that reproduced copies of famous
pieces of calligraphy, especially early ones by Wang
Xizhi (307?-365?) and Wang Xianzhi (344-386).
But comparing these pieces and determining their
relative quality was largely the work of private
scholars such as Mi Fu (1052-1107/8). J
Court and literati taste often diverged, of course. Su
Shi, who enjoyed social occasions at which
educated men would compose poems, paint
pictures, or inspect antiques, offered a theoretical
justification for the superiority of "scholar's
painting" over professional painting. He valued
spontaneous creation over laborious technique,
asserted the moral superiority of creating a work
without thought of financial reward, and viewed
painting as a form of self-expression much like
poetry. Capturing the outward form of an object
was not nearly as valuable as conveying its inner
principle. 20
Some of the monuments of landscape painting
were created at court for imperial patrons, but
court painters viewed themselves not as artisans
but as scholar-officials, with all the moral
independence claimed for that status. Guo Xi
(ca. 1061-ca. 1090), for instance, was a learned man
who wrote on the theory of painting and
participated in literati circles, and in his writings he Huizong had .1 passion for antiques, especially
took a romantic view of art as self-expression. Yet
his employment at court would have required him
to work on projects not entirely of his own
choosing. To complicate matters further. Guo Xi is
also known to have been a Daoist devotee, and his
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
specialization in landscapes may owe something to
his understandings of Daoist ideas about the
correspondences of the microcosm and macrocosm:
a single depiction of a mountain and a river can
represent the entire cosmos.
The emperor who took the greatest interest in art,
Huizong (r. 1100-1126), did not care for Guo Xi's
paintings and had them put in storage. Moreover,
he did not share Su Shi's rejection of technique. In
his paintings he took considerable pains to convey
the outer form of objects, and he trained court
artists to observe nature with minute attention.
Some of this difference in artistic taste may relate to
Huizong's ambivalence toward the Confucian
scholars of his day. Intellectually, Huizong was
attracted to subjects like music, poetry, calligraphy,
and medicine, interests many literati like Su Shi and
Shen Gua shared. As a prince, he had shared a
passion for art collecting with his uncle, the painter
Wang Shen (see cat. 1S4), who in turn was on good
terms with Su Shi. As emperor, he invited Su Shi's
friend, the renowned painter and calligrapher Mi
Fu and later his son MiYouren (d. 1165) to come to
court as curators/professors. Yet politics estranged
Huizong from the circle of Su Shi, since for most
of his reign he excluded from his court those
involved with the opposition to Wang Anshi, who
had been prime minister during the reign of his
father, Shenzong (r. 1067-1085). Even the books
written by the leaders of the opposition, such as Su
Shi, were banned and could not be reprinted.
Huizong took a strong interest in Daoism, which
can be seen in such paintings as the one he made
to commemorate the appearance of white cranes
over the main gate of the palace during a festival in
1112. Such a painting certainly glorified Huizong, as
the appearance of the cranes was interpreted as a
portent that cosmic powers approved of his rule.
But the painting itself was probably seen only by a
relatively small number of people in the palace.
Much more important for impressing the general
population with the grandeur of his rule would
have been his many construction projects. Over the
course of his reign he had main' temples, palaces,
government buildings, and gardens constructed,
often on grand scale. To Huizong. however, the
religious impulse behind these projects may have
been stronger than the desire to impress Ins
subjects. Through his gardens, in particular, he
attempted to recreate the cosmos, with .ill ol its
myriad plants and animals, mountains and waters.
Although Confucian scholars might condemn the
grandiosity ofl [uizong's construction projects, it
was much more difficult for them to decry Ins
attempts to collect and catalogue cultural treasures.
Shang- and Zhou period bronze vessels and
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