Page 321 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

framed by curling clouds. The disciple Kyogen Chinese master, made him an appealing subject machi period are generalized mountain land-
Chikan (C: Xiangyan Zhixian) sweeps the for the Chinese-oriented Zen monks with their scapes. Small wonder that earlier writers
ground outside his hut and dislodges a pebble penchant for poetry and nature. referred to the "Ashikaga Idealist school."
which strikes a bamboo with a resonant sound. By far the largest number of monochrome In a typical monochrome ink landscape of the
At the sound he laughed, and in that instant Japanese ink paintings of this period are land- period (cat. 229) vertically dominates both the
attained Enlightenment. scapes. Though the ink monochrome style was composition and the mountains it contains.
Of all Zen figure subjects, certainly the most not limited to Zen painters in Muromachi Japan Compared with the usual Southern Song
popular was the White-Robed Kannon (J: virtually all landscape paintings were either Chinese landscape, composition is notably
Byaku-e Kannon) and its numerous variations: painted by Zen monk-painters, commissioned centralized, a trait certainly due to the Japanese
Willow Branch Kannon (J: Yoryu Kannon), by Zen patrons from professional painters inheritance from Korea, which in turn learned
Kannon of the Sacred Jewel and Wheel of the working in a Zen environment, or "adopted" much from an earlier North Chinese tradition.
Law (Nyoirin Kannon), and Kannon Contem- and inscribed with numerous texts or poems The verticality of format may serve two prac-
plating a Waterfall (Takimi Kannon), among composed or written by Zen monks. Landscape tical functions: to provide space above the pic-
others. The Chinese Record of Famous Paint- evoked nostalgia for the mountains near the ture for inscriptions, and to permit hanging
ings of Successive Ages (Li Dai Ming Hua Ji, great founding Chan temples of China and within the relatively high and narrow toko-
compiled 847 by Zhang Yanyuan, in Acker 1954, inspired recognition of the truth to be found in noma, or niche for picture and object display.
p. 293) notes a Tang dynasty painting of nature. Such emotions were also clearly and But the vertical mountains are a far cry from
Kannon seated in a landscape, but this was a directly expressed through the garden art the typical Japanese mountains of a Fuji Pil-
work in color by the famous eighth-century embraced by all Zen monasteries and sub- grimage Mandala or of Sesshu's Ama no
painter of court ladies, Zhou Fang. Almost all temples, gardens quite different from those cul- Hashidate (cat. 232), the gentler, rolling hills of
Japanese painters of the subject were indebted, tivated by the Chinese literary-official class. the "lovely" land of Yamato. Further, an
directly or indirectly, to the great image at Dai- Some landscapes of Chinese subjects were exhibition devoted to Muromachi ink painting
toku-ji by the Chinese Chan painter-abbot of derived from the Chinese paintings in temple, would reveal that the collective "staffage" of
Hangzhou, Mu Qi (Fa-Chang, early 13 th cen- shogunal, or daimyo collections. Thus the Eight these landscape scrolls —wine shops, huts, tem-
tury-after 1279). The basic type as it developed Views of Xiao and Xiang by Mu Qi and by Yu- ples, palaces, boats, fishermen, travelers, resting
over more than a century in Japan is repre- Jian were influential both as subject and as scholars or reflective monks —is not that of a
sented by Noami's Byaku-e Kannon of 1468 examples of hatsuboku technique (see cat. 231). specific place or time but is "typical," "generic,"
(cat. 224). The totally uniconic nature of the Sometimes a specific Chinese scene is desig- or "idealized." The figures and architecture are
representation, informal in pose, costume, and nated, as in Landscape in Sichuan, a work of the elements combined with nature in an ink medi-
landscape setting, complemented the Zen ideal Shubun school in the Seikado Foundation, tation on nature, man, and Enlightenment. In a
of sudden, intuitive Enlightenment independent Tokyo. Sesshu's Four Seasons of circa 1469 (cat. very real sense they are as abstracted as twenti-
of ratiocination or rituals. The usual utter sim- 230) and his masterpiece, The Long Landscape eth-century Western work. The tones of ink,
plicity of the subject also made it accessible to Scroll in the Mori Museum, are clearly Chinese the rhythm of the brush strokes, the relation-
the amateur monk-painter, and we owe many of in subject, even to the architecture of temples ship of stroke to wash, are all part of this medi-
the early surviving representations of Byaku-e and the representation of a Chinese city wall. tative-aesthetic process. And, especially in
Kannon to such amateurs. Sesshu, however, was painting from life, or at comparison with other East Asian paintings,
But even these informal images could be least from memory, having traveled extensively these landscapes seem more indebted to intui-
made more informal within Zen iconography in China. Shugetsu (see cat. 227), Sesshu's dis- tion than to rationality.
and monochrome ink practice. Among the ciple, who may have gone to China in 1493, The last of the subject categories in Muro-
thirty-two Kannon paintings attributed to painted a view of Hangzhou's West Lake with machi ink painting is subsumed under the
Kenko Shokei (act. c. 1478-1506) at Kencho-ji the bridge of the famous Tang dynasty poet Li Japanese term kacho-ga (flower-and-bird paint-
in Kamakura, the most informal shows the deity Bo, and Gakuo executed a pair of scrolls show- ing), which is not entirely appropriate since it
washing his bare feet in a waterfall. Gakuo's ing The Peach Blossom Field of Wu Ling and Li also includes actual animals, legendary animals,
version of the White-Robed Kannon, a variation Bo Viewing a Waterfall. and vegetables and fruits. Even the old Chinese
called Water-and-Moon Kannon (Suigetsu Contrariwise, in Muromachi ink painting term, "fur and feathers" (cat. 305), is not
Kannon; cat. 225), depicts a standing, swaying Japanese landscape subjects are conspicuous by wholly inclusive. Within this category Zen
figure contemplating the moon's reflection in their rarity. The most famous of these land- painters worked with a broad range of subjects.
the water. scapes is Ama no Hashidate, by Sesshu (cat. Spectacular birds (cat. 226, 227, 233, 236), often
Muromachi ink painting includes few non- 232), who also painted a Chinda Waterfall, in landscape settings depicting the four seasons,
Zen figural subjects. Some subjects, such as destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923. Mt. were particularly favored, followed by the
Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), an imperial Fuji would seem to have been an obvious sub- humble sparrow, mynah, wagtail, swallow,
minister who died in exile and was later ject, but only a handful of Fuji scrolls exist, no- goose, duck, quail, eagle, and hawk. The labor-
absorbed into Shinto as patron deity of scholar- tably ones by Kenko Shokei and Chuan Shinko, ing bullock and the free monkey, more rarely
ship and literature, were represented as single a Kencho-ji monk-painter active in the mid- the powerful tiger, make up most of the animals
figures, mostly for Zen patrons. Michizane's fifteenth century, said to have been Kenko Sho- used. Bamboo and orchid, previously much used
position as god of poetry, his (extant) poem kei's teacher. The Pine Beach at Miho, by the Chinese and also elegantly symbolic,
written on the eve of exile to the plum tree in originally painted as a set of sliding screens by were particularly popular, especially for the
his garden, and the legend current by the end of an anonymous fifteenth-century artist, is early amateur monk-painters such as Gyokuen
the fourteenth century that he had sought and extant, now mounted in scroll form. But by and Bompo (c. 1347-c. 1420) and Tesshu Tokusai (d.
received instruction in Zen from a famous large most of the landscapes from the Muro- 1366). Vegetables and fruits in the repertory

320 CIRCA 1492