rrf

â

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CLUI.\,rü CAÀ\G_

ÁRr \r{ cH\r'.r^Art in thc Lifeof the trlitc

Calligraphy as an Élite ArtThe most valued of âll art treasures in China have historically been

examples of the writing of certain aristocrats of the fourth cenrury cE,

incluáing casual notes exchanged between them. The Process whereby

this came about is a lengthy one. It had to do with religious

developments in the third-seventh centuries- It was also connected

intimaiely to the role of writing in upper-class life, to notions of the

personaliry and the visible expression ofpersonality. It depended also

,rpo., ..t. of imperial Patronâge, the formation of a canon of great

masterpieces of writing, and the dissemination of that canon to the

wider upper classes. Many factors contributed to making calligraphy,

the various forms ofwriting the Chinese language, the pre-eminent art

form in China, pre-eminent in the number of its practitioners as well

as in its status to the present. All educated men and women were to an

extent participants in this artistic tradition, many more than ever

engaged in the production ofpicrures ofany sort.

The earliest forms of the Chinese script date back to the Shang

period, at which era the pointed writing brush was already in use' The

close relatio.rship berween written and pictorial images was already

understood in the Zhou period to derive from the 'Book of Changes'

(see p.4z), and gave characters a role in the most sophisticated

philosophical problems then discussed. The notion ofwriting as ân art

íorm, ho*"ver, probably does not aPPeâr until the early cenruries of the

Common Era, It is linked to the emergence of the idea of the artist as

an individualwhose personal gualities allow command of the technical

resources to producework of a higher quality and greater value (in the-

aesthetic ".rà

.orr,*"..ial senses) than that oí the common run of

wrirers. It is also associated with the development of Iess angular forms

of the characters, able to be written more quickly, hence oíten called

'cursive' script in English. These were believed, as early as the second

century ar, io ,.l,."i more of the writer's moral worth and personal

characteristics. Finally, it is connected with the growth from about roo

ce in the use of paper as a medium, its absorbency enabling it to catch

every nuance oi the writer's touch more effectively than silk or the

earlier writing surface of bamboo strips.Detail oÍ 72

these harcbêe-à'li§ted únder the:

$.1j ;*"á",b<iokiirclude r3, t4: 31, 4o,s2, 6s, 74(rnaií ttit); s3;iúrd sz.

Left! Detâil of 26. rAbirve: Detáil of 92

-E-i-

.ú'EO §êal.§'cript (zá un s:hu):

Ilistorically úe çarliestform to;appêar(r.ruoorce), andpysítimitiâdaround.zoo iéi rinder theü"àis,tüí;Êro,i"iij,,Ê.iy.U,s9{ since thenq}{f.- forsealb and in ôúer fcirmiúêontexts of insuiption, itievived as an artiliicmedium in the eighteenth,century. Examplesinthe

present bookinclude all imprcssed reàlsas rcllas carved. imitations ofsealsr,suchasthoseoh1,25,26,3t,&, .

and 23. Sed scriptwritten üth a bnrshcm be seen in 74 (title only) md 89,while the upper register ofinscriptionon 90 is incised into the clayin sealscript chilacteÍs.O Clerical script (li sbu): Ascript.developed after r.zoo sce, and uedi nitially for bureaucmtic record-keeping.AIso a formal script used chieflyforinscriptions, but also enjoying a revival I Detail of 1o1

forartisticpurposesfromaboutrToo. I ODr"fti.g.oipt(raaráa):ThemostExamples in the present book include I rapidty written of úe scripts, and the9, lt, and sS (left-hand textpage). I last to develop, becoming cunent onlyO Regular sqript (Ãai shu, zhen shu. or I in the seventh centuÍy cE. Exampleszbengshu):Developedczoo-4oocr, I inthepresentbookinclude6g,T0this is sti'llthe most widely used script I utreme left-hand section only), andtoday, and the basis for printed loa (the inscription at centre-right).

The man revered in later centuries as the greatest calligrapher of alltime was Wang Xzhi Qo3-6r), who was taught calligraphy by WeiShuo, known simply as Lady Wei (z7z-349). Both of them werearistocrats of the post-Han period of Disunion, living under the Jindynasry with its capital at Nanjing. The aristocratic ideals ofspontâneiqf and relaxed nonchalance in circulation at this period arecaptured in the figures shown in 12. There was also a deeper religiouspurpose to much writing at the time. Since the Shang dynasry, writinghad been understood as a form ofcommunication with higher spirirualpowers. In the milieu in which Wang Xizhi moved, it was used as rhechannel for revelations within the religious tradition of Daoism.Messages from on high were wÍitten down in newly developed cursive

rj6 nat rN .tHe uFE op rHE ÉLrrE

O Curslve.scrili1 (xing shl: D evelopedin the fourth centurycr, úis is one ofthe màjoi forms of the.script used forrtistic opression. Examples in thepresent book include 20, 57, 68, 70(central se«ion), a2, 91, lo1, lo2, to9,113, âÍid 117.

'Letter to Bo Yuan'. cailigraphyby Wang Xun (35H01 c),done in cursive script onpapêr. Only the five lines oÍlarger chaÍacteís are by WangXun, the texts in smalleÍcharacters aÍe by DongQichang ( 1555-1636), to theleft. and the Qianlong emperor(r. 1736-95), to the right. lhepainting is also by the emperor

\----------r

forms of the script, while new ways of talking about calligraphy âs anart grew out of the languages of texrual criticism necessary toauthenticate these sacred texts.

None of Lady Wei's writing survives, but this should not serve âs anexcuse for ignoring the role of upper-class women in the transmissionand development of calligraphy as an art in its early stages. Modernscholarship âccepts that none of Wang Xizhi's work survives eitheçand that the objects revered for centuries as the rare traces ofhis geniusare all at best copies ofcopies: The same is certainly true for the work oí'his almost equally famous son, Wang Xianzhi (l++-88). Curators ,rl'the Palace Museum in Beijing asserr rhar a lettcr by Wang Xrrn(35o-4or), a nephew and childhood student of Wang Xizhi, is thr: orrlyauthentic fourth-cenrury relic of the most presrigious and imitatctlperiod of calligraphy, a style which is still practised today by millions inthe Chinese-writing world t68).

To later connoisseurs, the content of such a piece of writing isimmaterial-an ephemeral social note to a friend named Bo Yuan,regretting the writer's inabiliry to meet him on the grounds of i1l

health. The surviving pieces attributed to \ /ang Xzhi include thesmall change of élite social intercourse: comments on the weather, anda note dashed off to accompany a gift of oranges, as well âs longerDaoist religious texts and prose pieces commemorating socialgâtherings. But their very personal nature was felt in later centuries tobring the vicwer and the writer closer, and it was this ideal of'communion of spirit' with a past figure which lay at the heart ofcalligraphic prâctice.

So prestigious was the writing of Wang Xizhi and his son (knowncollectively as the 'rwo Wang') in later times that it is something of eshock to realize some closer to his own day thought it roa good. Onesixth-cenrury aristocratic writer counselled his sons against developing

ART IN TI{E LIFE OFTHE ELITE I37

Íhe opening of the'AutobiogÍaphy', rn draftingscript on paper by theBuddhist monk Huaisu (active

c.730-80 cÊ), dated 777. Thescroll is Íormed from fifteensheets of paper mountedconsecutrvely.

their calligraphy to the point where their literary talenrs, much moreimportant for social and politicai advancernent, will be ignored, and helists Wang Xzhi himself as one of the unfortunates to whom thishappened.' In the Tang period (618-9o6) imperial support for theWang sryle consolidated the process of rurning ii into the nearest thingto an 'official' style of writing. The empero. Tãizo.,g (d. 6+g,r.. p. ajhad himself buried rvith Wang Xizhit mosr famous work, the ,OichidPavilion Preface' (written 353), thus more or less guaranteeing its ascentto the status of fabled relic. Later courts were toio.rti.r.re as centres f.r.úe emulation of Wang's wriring, culminating in the possession by theQanlong emperor of almost ali the significÃt ,e.sio.rs of their work(including 68), their storage in a speciãl room ofthe palace, and theirfran-ring by extensive comments anà pictures ofhis own.

If imperial courts were the settings rvhere calligraphy styles werevalidatcd and eventually authorized à, no.rn. to b! widely imitated,they were nor necessarily the milieu where cailigraphic'work wascreate d. This can be seen in the case of a work which is iodry a. famousas anything by the Wang family, but has been only rarely andintermittently in imperial possession since it *as *ritten in the Tangperiod, the so-called Autobiography, of the Buddhist monk Huaisf(active r.73o-8o) t691. What s,,rlrive. today is only one of an originalgroup of three lengthy scrolls written on paper in 777 in a yer_;orerapid script form called 'drafting ,..ipt' lr, sbr)'.'its autÍrenticirydespite its fame, is not beyond q,_r.rtion.. Most of Huaisu,s life wísspent south of-the Yangtze River, far away from the Tang court at themodern city of Xi'an, which he did not visit until 77r. ífi, extensivereputation in his own lifetime was based on his extreme developmentof.the.drafting script into what has been called,,crazy drafting r.ript,,:i1""1 ^f.I

a spontaneiry which pushes legibility to the very li;its. H;himself cited inspiration deriveá from alcohol as fuelling his very rapidand light touch with the brush. since the rures for thã fo..,riion ofcharacters are regular and well-known, an educated person is able toretrace imaginatively the process bywhich this forceful piece ofwritingwas brought into being, and re-enact the very motiorrs Àf çreation.

Clearly, before tl're era of modern museums, very few peoplehad acrually seen Wang Xun's ,Letter to Bo yuani or Huaisu,s

r-18 AR'r tN I u ri I_ttr ()t..t.trE í:Lr I I

I'hc long tradition,oflvÍid;d aÉóür àÍtrilChina, plus the practiceofadding sealsand inscriptions ro m object, makes itpossible to trace indiúdual pieces over avcry longperiod. Here iswhatis knownofthe passage through time oftheAutobiography' of the Tang monkHuaisu [69], based on the research ofHe Chuauing ('Huaisu ZishütiezaiMingdai zhi liuchuan ji yingxiang',Intem.ational Colloquium on Chiner ÁrtHistory, ry9r: Proceedings, Painting andCalligrapby (z vols., Taipei, 199z), ii.ó6r-98). From úe late renú centuq/ tothe early twelfth, the scroll passedbyinheritance through four successive

generations ofhigh officials ofthe Sufamily: §u Yijian (gSrqS), SuJi(987-ro35), Su Shunqin (roo8-48), SuMi, and Su Yi. Byro96, itbelonged toanother ofi6cial named Shao Ye. In rr3z,after the fall ofthe Northern Songcapital, itbelonged to a mannamed LuBian. Seals indicate that in the latetwelfú-arly thirteenth cenrury itbelonged to thc.imperial collection oftheJin dynmty (rrr5-r234), and to theSouthern Song statesmanJia Sidao(t2415),zmaLn reviled in later times forhis role in the collapse ofúat dynasty Éo

the Mongols. The scroll then wnishesfrom the records for two hundred years.

Bythe r47os, itbelongcd to a mancalledXu Tai (142979), andthen to hisheir, Xu Pu. In 1499 Xu Pu died, and thescroll passed successively to collectorsnamed\À/uYan (r4515r9) and LuWan(ra58-r526). By 156r it was omed byYan Song G+8o-r565), úe richest andallegedly the most comrpt official of theage. It pased from him to Zhu Xixiao(r5r8-72) on his fall from power Áiound1573, úe great collectoÍ and artpatronXiangYuanbian (r525-9o) paid theenomous sum of 6oo ounces of silverfor the Autobiogmphy'. It remained inthe possessiôn ofhis heir§ after his deathrThe Xiang family later sold it to acollector fromÁnhui proünce namedChengJibai (d. ró26) for r,ooo ouncesof silver. He sold it to oneYao Hanzhen,

s;+,i.Í'i:' :l

t,'

i-

t'

who in turn sold it in 1693 to XuQlame.

Before r7oo, itwro bought byAn Q(c:683tfter q44), a merchant of Koreanorigin who wm possibly the greatestcollector ofhis time, In 1748 his heire'presented' it, probably under duess,to the imperial collection of úeQjanlong emperor. On the fall oftheempire; this artworkpassed into thepossession of úe Chinese Republic, andhence to the National Palace Muemsituated in Beijing, and subsequentlyonúe island ofTaiúan. Ás well as those ôfomers, the seals and inscriptions oftheorists and artists who saw the workenable modern scholrs to study the wayitwas used and assimilated into thecalligraphy traditions of later ages.

Deàitof 69

ÁRTTNTHE LrFEorrue Éllre r39

A page oÍ rubbings ofengÍaved calligraPhy, from the'Model lêtters in the lmperialArchives in the Chunhua Era',

taken frôm wooden blocksoriginally carued in 992 cE.

Autobiography', so how were they and works like them widely copied,imitated, adapted? Technical processes were developed so pieces ofwriting could be reproduced in multiple copies. From a very earlyperiod, famous works of calligraphy were copied on to wood or stone,often by taking traced copies ofthe original, and by the sixth cenrurycE at the latest, these stone copies were being used for the creation ofink rubbings. If a sheet of thin paper is placed over rhe engravedsurface, and then tapped gently all over with a cloth pad soaked in ink,an accurate image of the writing, in white on a black ground, will beobtained in all its detail.

In 992, as part of the early Song programme of cultural renewal (seep. 5r), the imperial court ordered that 4r9 notes and letters, mostly bymembers of the Wang family, be carved on to wooden blocks, fromwhich rubbings were taken t701. This set of 'Model Lerters in theImperial Archives in the Chunhua Era', in ten volumes, was the firstcompilation of model calligraphic specimens, and very quickly becameâlmost as rare âs the objects it reproduced. The example shown maywell be from the original blocks, but was taken from them over a

century after they were carved, and reproduces a letter by the Liangdynasty (Sor-S) official and aristocrat Wang Yun. It may well havebeen produced in the lifetime of Mi Fu (ro5r-rro7, see p. 6o), âctive astheorist, calligrapher, and painter himself. He carried our extensiveresearch on all surviving works attributed to the 'rwo \Mang', ând morethan anyone else formed the canon of masterpieces of early Chinesecalligraphy. The gendered term 'masrerpieces' is used here quitedeliberately, since one effect ofthe Song caraloguing projects was tomake the links between artistic prowess and male virtue cxplicit, and toexclude from consideration work by women.

This set of rubbings was far from the last to be produccd underimperial auspices, and similar collections began to be produccd byprivate individuals, fuelling the rapid growth in the Song period of a

r4o ART IN THE LlpeorrHe ÉrIre

connoisseurship of calligraphy, where questions of which (if any) r,.

these precious copies were genuine were hotly debated. The financia-lvalue of these objects was considerable, and was related to theirauthenticiry further reinforcing the already strong associations ofcalligraphywith the hand of the individual artist. These associations ofthe work and the maker were also increasingly strong in the case ofpainting, making the idea of a great, anonymous work less and less

possible for the prevailing discourse ofart from this point on.

Art and Theory in the Northern SongThe composition of the Song ruling class was not the sanre as it hadbeen in the Tang period, and their relationship to artistic creation was

not the same either. Broadly speaking, an aristocrâtic ethos, strcssingthe inheritance of élite stâtus, gave way to one in which moral andcultural cultivation, measured by a system of examinations in thcConfucian classics, ensured the right to rule. The attention paid bywomen and men to Tang aristocrâtic interests like horses and huntingdeclined. Nevertheless, it is possible to overstress the differencebesveen the 'scholar' ruling class of the Song and their Tangpredecessors. Both depended on land ownership as the source oftheirwealth, and for both groups access to political power on the nationallevel lay via the imperial state and the dynasry.

Perhaps it was a consciousness of not coming from families withancient antecedents, rvhich led in the eleventh century to a hardeningofthe theories separating the products ofthe'scholar'from those ofthe'artisan'in art. We have already seen a suspicion of technical skill, as

when Wang Xizhi suffered a disregard of his writings becrusc of his

calligraphic skill. A famous anecdote \n Zhang Yenyuan's accorttrt oí'

Tang artists (see p.+5) has the court official Yan l,ibcn (d. 673) so

moÍtified to be summoned suddenly by the emperor to dcpict :r rarc:

bird on a pond, that he cautions his son against practising the art ofpainting at all. The same author, writing in thc ninth century, asserts

against all the acrual evidence that: 'From antiquity on, those who have

excelled at painting have all becrr nobles with official positions, or rare

scholars and lofry-minded men. They awakened the wonder of theirtimes and left behind reputâtions for a thousand years, which is notsomething that village rustics could accomplish." There is indeedevidence that men and women of noble birth engaged in sketching as

an elegant pastime as early as the fourth century cE, but it was only inthe eleventh cenrury that a general theory of painting was created

which elaborated for the first time a distinction befween amateur'scholars' and professional'artisan' painters.

The principle creators of this theory were a coherent social group

around Su Shi (ro37-rroI), a ma.jor and controversial political figure inhis own day, who also had a towering reputation as a Poet, calligrapheç

'--t

^RT lN THÊ LIFE or tue ÉLtrt r4r

ând painter. Su was the Íirst person ro use the term 'scholar's painting,(sbi ren hua), and in a conrexr which includes a discussion of the woÃof his cousin Wen Tong Çor9-79) t7rl. He stresses a number ofthemes: the relationship berween such painting and the élite art ofpoetic composition, the disinterestedness of the true scholar-painter,who will never work for financial reward, and the superioriry ofspontaneous creation over Iaborious technique (an idea which has clearlinks with Chan Buddhism, see O. t7). He addresses rhe cenrralquestion of representation of external realiry of'likeness of form'versus the capruring of enduring principle, in rerms which siruate himwithin the major philosophicai debates of his time. Painting theorywas a minor part of his writings, and painting for Su Shi was arelatively minor part of a larger culrural project, the central aim ofwhich was to provide men (not women) with a set of practices whichwould generate morally responsible actions.

The kind of painting Su Shi saw as enabiing men to develop isexempli6ed by his cousin's painting of bamboos, a subject h. al.otreated in his own work. It is done entirely in shades of plain ink, anddepends on acrual observation ofthe appearance ofgrowing bamboo,but is at the same time removed in its technique from the Àa.,ner ofpainting seen in somerhing like Guo X's 'E,arly Spring' t20l withwhich it is contemporary. The 'scholarly'qualities Su Shi would havepraised lay partly in the subject-marteÍ. Later legend associares theorigins of bamboo painting in plain ink with a tenrh-cenrurynoblewoman named Lady Li, but by the Song dynasry the bamboástood in poetry for rhe châracteÍ of the gentleman, ,bending but notyielding', while the handling of the brush, with each leaf renãered in asingle stroke, draws closer to the more prestigious art form of calli-graphy. By the early nvelfth cenrury'ink bamboo'was listed in paintingtreatise s as a separate branch of art. The contexts in which s,,.À urt *a,

Album leafon paper,'Bamboos'byWen Tong(1019 79cr).

I42 ÂRT IN TI,IE LIFE OF THE T]I,I'TEÂRT INTH[: LIT.EoFTHEÉLITE I4-I

72opu*,Bse.trmiã ho;,,J

scroll on pape( containing thesequence oÍ poems 'PineW ind P avilion' (Songíengge

shr, by Huang Tingjian( 1045-l 105 cr), written1 101-5.

created in the eleventh cenrury were also new: social gatherings ofupper-class men, often in the form of excursions, at which paintingtook its place beside calligraphy and poerry as an art prâctisedspontaneously by artists unbound by obligation to paint and unfetteredbyurlgar adherence to the actual appearance ofthe visible world.

This was the ideal. As an ideal, it had immense power over éliteChinese cuhure for the next 9oo years, shaping artistic theorizing andartistic practice equally. But the force wirh which it is expressed in thewriting of Su Shi and his contemporaries should not be raken as

making it descriptive of the re aliry they lived, or of the role of art withinthat realiry which was much more compiex. To take one example, notonly were Su Shi and his circle socially and intellecrually absorbed inBuddhism, on close terms with many Buddhisr monks, but we knowthat Su Shi's wife was, after her death, the subject of an elaborate'Water and Land' ritual (see p. n6), in which rypes of visual repre-sentation very different from scholar painting played a central role.Again, relations berween Su Shi, his contemporaries, and the imperialcourt were closer and more convoluted than much later simplisticdivisions would prefer. Rather than seeing the scholar ideal in paintingas synonymous with 'Chinese art', it may be helpful to see it as onlyone, albeit socially privileged, rype oí visualiry coexisting with andinteracting with others.

Certainly the l-inks berween the arts of calligraphy, poetry, andscholar painting were becoming more ciosely drawn at this period. Itwas in the Su Shi circle in the eleventh cenrury that integral'poem-paintings', works of art where each part was of equal starus, were first

produced (see 57 for an early example). In later centuries thisprogressed to the point where a claimant for scholar-painter statuscould not be seen as lacking in úe other two accomplishments. Thereverse was not necessarily the case. A great poet and calligrapher didnot hâve to paint, and this is the case with another member of theeleventh-century generation, Huang Tingjian (ro45-rro5). One of hismost famous works in later cenruries was a paper scroll of his ownpoems entitled 'Pine Wind Paülion', written between rror and hisdeath in rro5 cE t721. It is in the cursive form of the script most closelyassociated with Wang Xizhi and his family although here the contentis significant, a sequence by the most famous poet of his time. It wascreated, üke all of Huang's work, out of a great self-consciousness.Huang was acutely âware of what traditions (both poetic andcalligraphic) he was following, which he was rejecting, and how theeffects he sought were achieved through control of the brush. He isknown to have had access to Huaisu's Autobiography'[69J, and to havestudied a wide range of earlier calligraphy available to him in originalpieces, in rubbings, and in the form of stone inscriptions. Only a

person of a particulâÍ social standing would have been able to gainaccess to such treasures, and thus the link between status andcalligraphic prowess was further reinforced.

The Southern Song (1127-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368)In the Southern Song period, the ideals expressed by Su Shi and hiscontemporaries became increasingly normâtive in élite writing on art,and increasingly influential at the court in Hangzhou. Whethersomeone like Mi Youren t25l is a tourt'or a'scholaÍ' artist is a questionwhich may not admit of a simple answer, and in fact may simply be thewrong question. The complex context of much Southern Song'scholar' art is seen in another work produced towards the very end ofthe dynasty, by a man who in later cenhrries was very firmly placed inthe 'scholar-artist' camp, and is not normally thought of as a 'courtartist', but who was in at least occasional contact with a court milieu.The activities of someone like ZhaoMengían(tryg-ctz67), a memberof the extended imperial clan, underscore the difficulty, indeed thepointlessness, of seeking to draw a 6rm line in purely sryiistic termsbetween 'professional' artists of the imperial painting Academy and'scholars'. His album leaf of r.rz6o showing branches of bamboo,flowering plum, and pine is the earliest surviving painting bearing thissubject, later known as'The Three Friends of the Cold Season' t731. Itis painted on paper, in the plain-ink technique which by the SouthernSong was one of the more prestigious styles available to an artist, andwhich is ciosely related to the system of strokes used in the writing oftext (see p. 136). It has been customary to âssociate this suBject with thescholarly, non-court tradition, and to read the plants as emblems of

r44 ÁRT rN THE Lrrs orrHn Ér-rre

':i:!:.,11

-r;:l'.:.

.'i,li1.

,-]:.

ii:hi'.:,

moral male rectirude (the plants being unbowed in the face of harshweather). These ideas are certainly present in Song poetry. But themeaning of this combination may be at least as much to do withnotions of congratulation on the occasion of the New Year, which was

always celebrated at court as elsewhere with great festivity. The firstexample of this subject in any medium in fact appears on theembroidered sleeves of a young woman who was buried in rz43 and itcertainly in later centuries becomes associated very closely with courtlyobjects [31, 35, 36].0 Later prejudice against anyone who painted toorder would act against any record of involvement on the part of ZhaoMengiian with the court, but the situation may in reality have been

more complex.Similar complexities surround the person of Zhao Mengfu

(r254-ryzz), also a distant descendant ofthe Song founding emperor.

He was already a junior ofEcer of the imperial guard in 1279, when the

Mongols captured the capital of Hangzhou, and he spent most of the

next ten years living on his estates nearby, studying with several famous

scholars in his home town of Wuxing. It was on account of his

scholarship in the Confucian classical texts that he was recommendedfor office in o87 and visited Beijing. He subsequently had a long and

successful administrative career there and elsewhere in China, as well

as achieving great fame as a caliigrapher and painter who was in his

later years close to the court. His courtly connections, production ofcelebratory paintings to order for the Mongol emPerors, and the (to

some) dubious fact of transferring his loyalry to a new and alien

dynasty do not stop him being seen in later years as one of the great

73

Album leaÍ on paper, 'TheThree ÊÍiends oÍ the Cold

Season', by Zhao Mengiian( I 199-c. 1267 cÉ), 1260.

t-1:,

,il'!:i

ART rN TrrE r-rFEorrHe Érrre r45

$.i

-*.1

u;ii:,1 [ü

Làr"/

Éí,N*

Opening section oÍ the'Recoíd oÍ the MiaoyanMonastery at Huzhou , hand

scroll on paper ily Zhaolúengfu (1254-1322 cE),

c. l3O9-1.0. As early as theÍourteenth century, Zhao'sstyle oí writing was a model

used by the cutters of wood

blocks Íor printrng, and

it becâme one of the most

common styles in whichbooks were produced.

ji r'l1.i:}Í

É rp",1

were Buddhist believers, and there is no doubting the genuine piery insuch an act, but it was done also partly to express ties of patronage withthe monastery which would be glad to advertise its links with rwo menof such fame (their titles head the document). Zhao begins with a slx-character title written in an ancient form of the script, so-called 'seal

script', based on his own study of early stone inscriptions of thefourth*fifth cenfury cr. He then writes the rest in the 'regular script',modelled primarily on Wang family protorypes, for which he was

particularly famous.Zhzo was the first theorist to claim explicitly that painting and

calligraphy had 'a common origin'. He was at least as renowned himselfas a painter, who produced work in a wide range of subject matteÍs andstyles, sorne of which were reworkings of earlier art, often thatfavoured by the Northern Song court. This was now avallable âgâin to

l.rim through his position in Beijing. Thus there is the paradox that the

dcvelopment of'scholar' painting in the Yuan, seen in later cenruries as

an acme o[ artistic achievement, may have depended on the resources

FPt] r,

'scholar-artists'. He was certainly one oíthe chief beneficiaries in art ofthe reunification of China under the Mongois. The imperialcollections of the Northern Song and the Southern Song were norvphysically reunited in one place, and ir was possible for those with theright connections to see them in Beijing. Travel berween north andsouth was restored, and upper-class artists were now able to seedevelopments which had taken place in the other half of the countryover the preceding 2oo years.

A famous calligrapher and a major political figure would inevitablybe in demand for dedicatory inscriptions of all kinds, and tl.reillustrated example t74J is only one of many that Zha.o Mengfir wouldhave written out in his lifetime. The text wrirten is A Record of theMiaoyan Monastery at Huzhou', and was not composed by Zhrchimself, but by a retired Song official named Mou Xian (rzz7-rjrr).The text is written on squared paper, making ir rnorc likc a Íbrnialstone inscription. It is a description and brief tristory àf , .,iajo.Buddhist monastery in Zhejiang province. Both Zliao and l.ris wiÍê

146 aar rn rxe rrre or rrtt Ér,rre ART tN THE LIFEOFTHE ELITE T47

75Section oÍ'Bamboo Groves in

Mistand Rain', byGuanDaosheng ( i262-13 19 cE),

dated 1308. This painting is

now mounted on a hand scrolltogetheÍ with other works by

artists of the Yuan dynasty(1279-1368\.

fi*/,)hYL

rQ

rmU*tt

11{+eifrr{'rZhao's painting was that of interaction between Chinese members of

the élite, in a way which did not depend on the actions or artirudesoftheir rulers. It is this intersection ofthe self-conscious adaptation ofearlier painti ng s tyle s (what Zhao called the'spirit of antiq uity', gu y ),with the world of élite social inrercourse, which above all frames theotherwise nebulous entiry called 'scholar painting'.

It was a form of social interaction, and a form of art which wasbecoming more widely practised in the fourteenth cennrry. And it didgive rise to new types of subject-matteÍ, often üth personal or literaryconnections which might be comprehensible only to the very narrowgroup at which it was originally directed. One novel subject-matter isassociated with the name of Guan Daosheng (rz6z-4ry),who was thewife of Zhao Mengfu. She was bv no means unique among élitewomen in her artistic practice, but she is supposed to have been the firstto paint what became one of the standard subjects of the repertoire,clumps of bamboo by water t751. Single branches of bamboo had longbeen used to symbolize masculine virtue t7ll, but the allusion here isprobably very different, being to the faithful wives of the mythicalsage-emperor Shun, whose tears dappled the bamboo on the banks ofthe Xiang River, into which they flung themselves on his death.Bamboo groves by water thus come to stand for marital fideliry in a

general sense, though it is very much in rhe narure of a painting likeGuan Daosheng's that the acrual personal meaning for the artist (ifany) is not fully recoverable. She and Zhao Mengfu were married larein life, and certainly artistic legend has them as a genuinely devotedcouple, who occasionally worked together on the same picture. Shehas signed and dated the painting, equivalent to the early summer ofr3o8, and, âs wâs to become standard, makes a brief note of thecircumstances of its composition. It was painted on board a boat onLake Bilang, and is dedicated to the 'Lady of the Kingdom of Chu',another upper-class woman like herself. The picture is therefore aboveall a gift, expressing not so much the artistt deepest personal feelings,but her ties to a member of her own peer group, the nuancàs of whichare now lost and were probably lost very shortly after the work'.s

r48 ÂRT rN THE Ltre or rse Éurr

md curators to identú indiüdualworkb, Forgglnnle, the picture in t751,by Guân Daosheng, is cuneàdy titledbyúe National Palace Museum,Taipéirai tsamboo Groves in Mistand Rairf. When itwas omed by theeightggriflr-çentury collecter An Qjhe gavi it úe name'Ten ThousandBmt oo Poles in Cloudy Mist'.,

EH--d=-ã::b-fãrebien+?

tl,etail oi a5

The original tide used by thc artist isnot known, or indeedwhether thcpicrure had a formal tide at all at tharpornt.

creation. This loss of thc original circumstances of the picrure'smeaning has forced the study of st-rch painting, aimost from the time itwas made, to concentrate instead on formal questions of sryle andbrushwork.

Guan Daosheng aiso painted murals in Buddhisr remples andwrote calligraphic pieces ât the command of the N{ongol emperorRenzong (r. 4tz-zo). However, in her lifetime some members of theupper classes were increasingly involved in the creation of picrureswhich were only ever intended for a tiny audiencre, or a single recipient.This was so eveh for someone like Ren Renfa (r255 rjzT), who enjoycda successful administrative career before retiring to his family estates inwhat is now the city of Shanghai. He is particularly noted for l.ris

paintings of horses [761, a subject for which his contemporary ZhaoMengfu also had a reputatiorr. Ren's work was collected by the imperiaicourt, but he did not work explicitly for it. Instead, his picrures werepart ofthe network ofélite interconnections, painted to be presentedto contacts in the bureaucratic web. As such, they might haveiconographical schemes suited to flatter their recipients, in which thejudging of horseflesh stood for the judging of talented men, or a rhinhorse stood for the honest official as against the sleek and corrupt.

The whole question of the meanings embedded in the scholar-painting tradition has only recently come to be a focus of research,replacing an earlier view of these images as one in which representationno longer mattered, and purely art-historical criteria (allusions toearlier sryles, displays of personal brushwork manner) dictated thepicrure's appearance. The political circumstances of the Mongolconquest, in which members of the Chinese élite were often eitherexcluded from political power, or else refused ro serve what they

of the court. There is no doubt that the social conrext of much of

ART IN TrlE LIFE OFTHE ELL'rE I+9

76 regarded as an illegitimate power, have always been seen as crucial tothe growth of the scholar ideal in the Yuan period. The role of thedisinterested hermit, living in seclusion, was now one adopted by manyof the most valued painters. In the eyes of contemporaries, as well assubsequent critics, this was allied to purely formal changes in themanner of making paintings, ir-rcluding a more prominent role for theartist's own inscriptior-rs, and a change in the understanding ofvisualiWto stress the surface ofthe silk or paper over illusionistic representationofspace.

Both ofthese facrors have iong been recognized as coming rogerherin a work like the long hand scroll (over 6 m.) on paper by HuangGongwang Qz6g 451, entitled'Dwelling in the Fuihun Mountrinrí[77J. Huang was the adopted son of a wealthy family, who after abumpy official career which ended with his imprisonment, was closeiyassociated with the Qranzl'ren school of Daoism for tl-re second half ofhis long lifç, towards the end of which he painted the scroli. It waspainted over a period of three or four yeaÍs, Í347-r35o, for a man namedZheng Wuyong, and has for cenfuries been one of the most farnous ofall Chinese paintings (it belonged to Shen Zhou (see p. r55), to DongQchang (see p. 16o), and the Qanlong emperor). Its depiction of thàscenery along the Qantang River in Zhejiang province is not in anysense a 'pure' depiction of an acrually eústing landscape. In the firstplace, such visual reportage was by now in low repute with upper-classaesthetic theorists, including the circle in which Fllrang moved.Although in his writing on the rechniques of landscape painting headvises painters to carry a brush with them to record strange rocks and

r5o ÂRT rN rue rrpsorrHe í:rrre

Detarl of the hand scÍoll,'Nne Horses' rn ink aodcl)lorrrs on paper, by RenRcoía ( I255- 1327 cr).d.rled I324. Thrs prcture

may have been made lora fanlly mernileÍ as a g Ít.and remarned in the arlisl'sÍamrly untrl aÍ1er his death.

Il'.

l:rl

à,:íil:'iltl

§rril1í,':ié

77 trees they come across, this is not an advocacy ofdrawing from natureas a generãl principle. The rype of rock formations painred, and themanner in which they are represented by a build-up of lots of separatesmaller brush-strokes, are above all a cultural landscape, a way ofseeing which is privileged by its links with the most valued parts of thetradition ofpainting. The special brush-strokes used in representingrocks and trees, called czz in Chinese, were by the fourteenth cenruryone of the chief focuses of connoisseurly writing. There was anextensive technical vocabulary to describe their forms. Theywere oftennamed after their putative discoverers; for example, wet horizontâldots of ink were called 'Mi dots' after Mi Fu (see p. 6o), even though itis now known they were being used in tomb mural painting as early asthe seventh century cE. They provided above al1 a set of forms painterswere supposed to master. Huang associated his own manner of usingthe brush with fwo great names of the pasr, Dong Yuan (d. 962) and LiCheng (grg-6il, claiming to synthesize what were to him rwo entirelyseParate traditions.

Discussion of a work like this scroll has therefore, in the sixcenturies since it was painted, concentrated above all on the techniquesand effects of Huang Gongwang's brushwork, its antecedents, and itsimitators. Little thought has been given to the role of the dedicatee,Zheng Wuyong, or to the precise circumstances of its creation. Inrecent years it has been demonstrated that the choice ofscenes in the'Fuchun Mountains'scroll contains allusions to a specific hermit of theHan dynasry and that the true theme of the picrure is therefore not thelandscape (still less the brushwork in the abstract) but the recluses whoinhabit it (even ifthey are not depicted). The story therefore involvesthe 'hermit' Huang Gongwang himself, who has rejected politicalinvolvement, but is still involved in relationships with the locallyprominent. An alternative reading would see the painting as fl.atltering the pâtron, by associating him with the noble recluses of an-tiquiry, Studies of other Yuan landscape paintings have begun touncover similar circumstances which help us to relocate these worksin the context ofélite conceprs oflandscape and property, as well as

ir.r the revolution in representation which separated certain kinds of

Detarl oÍ the hand scíoll,'Dwelling in the FuchunMounta ins'. done in ink andcolours on paper by HuangGongwang ( 1269-1354 cr),paintêd 1347-50.

ART IN THE LIFE oFTHE ÉLITE I5I

§----------l

7A painting patronized by the élite from the continuing bulk ofpictorialactivity.

There was a distinct geographical focus to the ink-centred'scholar'painting of the fourteenth century in the prosperous cities of the lowerYangtze region. Wealthy private patrons in a ciry iike Suzhou couldhave interactions with many famous ârtists, at least some of whomwere dependent on their support in some way. These relationships are

never spelt out in detail, in the inscriptions which were becomingmuch more common at this time. Huang Gong'wang moved in Suzhoucircles, as did the other members of the group later known as the'FourYuan masters'. So too díd Zor Fulei, who painted 78, and who mayhave been on social terms with one of these masters, Wang Meng(r.r3o8-85). Verylittle is known about Zou himsel{, bur he was a Daoistpriest, âctive r.136o, when the great flowering plum tree which forms ABreath of Spring'was painted. The subject-matter of flowering plumsdepicted only in tones ofink was long established as a separate branchof painting, and like bamboos it has distinct connotâtions. Theseinvolved both the ideals of the secular gentleman and the spontaneous

intensity of religious inspiration; the Chan monk Zhongre n (d. r r z 1)was later revered as the creator of ink plum' painting. Both Buddhisrand Daoist monks continued to interact with the élite, and to be thcrecipients of works of cailigraphy, poetry, and painting. Their mon-asteries were important sites for upper-class tourism, they were wheregentlemen lodged when travelling, and they provided an ambiencewhere the gatherings which so often resulted in artistic activities couldtake place and be commemorated.

The Ming Dynasty: 1368-1644The culrure of upper-class travel was central to the development ofpainting in the scholar tradition in the succeeding Ming dynasry$368-úaQ. tavel enabled men (women were much more confined tothe home) to see th€ famous paintings of the past held in privatecollections, and to become familiar with their subjects and sryles. Itenabled them too to see culturally important sites, often associatedwith poets and painters of the past, and appropriate these scenes fortheir own work. For example, the topography of onc fanr<>us sccnicregion, Mount FIua in Shaanxi province, was represented in an albtrmby Wang Lü (c.432-g5) tzsl. Wang was not solely 'a painter'; theproduction of paintir-rpçs did not deÂne who he was. He wrote a

theoretical treatise on art, but also ones on medicine (which he

practised successfully), and on the sciences of astronomy andgeomancy. All of these are underpinned by a common theoreticalunderstanding of the role of 'norms' and'variants' at work in disparateareas of human experience.

His Mount Hua album rnay be that genuinely rare itcm amongChinese painting, a work created principaüy for himsel{ outside ofpatronage networks or the demands of reciprocal gift-giving. It is notsimply a series of pictures, but a uniry of texts and images whichprovide an account of Wang's ascent of the sacred mountain in rj8r. Itis distinguished by its concern with topographical accuracy, Wangarguing that, although it was the expression of ideas, not the representation of forms which made painting art, ideâs existed in the

Hand scroll in ink on paper, 'A

Breath of Spring', by Zou Fulei(active fourteenth century c€),

dated 1360,

isiÍi;rff§ 2Éó"tüiij"slráu,rüV'êri' Ziengpqing (r4zô-r559) t83 t,

'Tan§'Yin({7o-r5a) tezt; ând Qlu.Y'ng (c.t 4g4-c.tsjz) tgot are

;:..{r.nelr_nes grgup. e-d as, the lFour{asters ofúe Ming', while the QinBirtists WaÍig Shimin (r592-168o),

l' Wa"[1i"" G598-r67), Wang Hui..' l" (iel'wi\ tt4l, and Wang Yuanqi

l' 6àl+r75)risl are collectivú, kirowri as tle Fou Wang-. Such

*{99Prn8r ar;rraluable guides to

Bting tU:"t p{ntins, but,'sq'Íeliable ü guides to

r52 ÂRT rN THE Lrre or rHe Ér-rre ART IN THE LITEOFTHE ELITE I5J

.,oum leaf on PaPer,'Reclining on the Steps in

Front oÍ the Shrine Hall', by

Wang Lü ( c.1332-95 cE),

painted after the artist's ascentoÍ the sacÍed mountain in

1381. This is one of theÍourteen surviving pictuÍesÍrom what was oÍiginally a setoí forty.

world in visual forms, and could only be represented through visualmeans. He argued for the importance of the direct engagement withthe seen, as against the mediation of existing paintings. His subtle andserious arguments about the narure of representation show that thescholar tradition was not one in which mimesis was rejected altogether,but that it was still possible in the fourteenth century to argue withconviction a role for the primacy of experience over art-historicalstudy, and of'likeness of form' over pure expression of the painrer,s'untramelled spirit'.

The form of the Mount Hua album was a relatively new one, beinga suite of pictures designed as a coherenr whole. The experience ofviewing an album is even more restricted as to the size of the audiencethan is the hand scroll, and it was therefore suited particularly well roan intimate engagement by one person with the picrures it contained.Servants were needed for one to look at a hanging scroll, but an albumcould be looked ar by one person alone, in an experience of communionwith the artist which was more akin to reading a book. It was a formparticularly associated with artists in the scholar tradition over the nextfew hundred years.

Another new pictorial format and subject-matter of tl-re fifteenthcentury was a type of 'portrait in a landscape', in the form of a shorthand scroll which could be taken in in one viewing, i.e. it did nor haveto be looked at by unrolling successive secrions, as did a picture like'Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains't771. These short scrolls typicallyshowed a gentleman in an outdoor setting, often a reprçsentation ofthe gardens which were being built in increasing numbers afrer aboutr45o in the political capital, Beijing, and in Suzhou, now rhe unoÍtrcial

r54 ART tN TlíÍr Ltrr oprur ÉLlte

but uncontested culrural capital of the empire. Such scrolls werecreated- to be presented to the person depicted, put together over aperiod by a group of his associates, and involüng a picturJwhich mightbe made by a member of the same circle as fulfilmenr of u ,oãi"lobligation,-or might be purchased from a professional,s workshop.

. The earliest surviving example of the genre is a work by the Suzhou

scholar-artist Du Qlong (rll 6-r+74) depicting his brothei-in-lawWeiYousong receiving a guesr in such a gard.n sefting tg0). Only thepicrure survives today, to be written into ,art history,, but it is reallyonly a fragment of a now-dismembered work which would haveincluded a large tide for the scroll, and a number ofprose and poetrypieces describing and praising the recipient and his properry. Th;privileging ofthe picture over the words is not a recent occurrence. Inúis case, the text had been trimmed offby the late sixteenth cenrurythe subject being much less famous by then than the artist, and theoriginal social impulse which had brought the work into exisrencebeing long exhausted. The prestige of the scholar ideal in Ming socieryand the growing influence of the commercial market in *orL of .ri,meant the rapid appropriation by the market of works which hadoriginally been created as part of the network of gifts, favours, andobligations which bound men of the upper classes together. when thathappened, the meaning of the pictures to their subsequent owners wasentirely altered.

. !u QionS was probably not paid money to create rhe picrure of hisbrother-in-1aw. Similarly, a wealthy Suzhou landownãr like ShenZhou (t427-r5o9) could not be prevailed upon ro creâre for cash. Butthis is not the same as saying that their art was a pure outpouringofspontaneous feeling, or rhat they only ever painted what thiy wa.rtedto when they felt like it. shen Zhou certainly fulfrlled social obligationswith paintings, exchanging them with his peer group for other fíours.These might include hospitaliry or the writúg of an epitaph by afamous calligrapher for Shen's father. The exact circumstances inwhich he painted his album of 'Twelve Views of Tiger Hill,tail arelost, but this set of üews of the Buddhist monasterlijust outside thecity walls of Suzhou, where the upper classes of both sexes couldcombine piery with cultural get-togethers, was almost certainlypaintedrbr somebody or some reason. These reasons ,.. lort today,

".ráwere probably lost very soon after the workt creation, there being noneed that they be recorded. This leaves later crirics, for whom ShJn isone ofthe great figures ofwhat came to be identiÊed as a Suzhou (or'Wu', after an alternative name for the region) school of painting, roexpatiate freely on the characteristics ofhis brushwork, the sourcãs ofthe various cun (see p. r5r) he uses, and the expression ofhis much-admired personality in his art.

It is quite possible that Shen Zhou's pupilTangyin (r47o-1524) was

ÂRTIN THE LIFE oFTHE ÉLITE I55

'Befriending the Pines', bY

Du Qiong (1396-1474 ce),

a shoÍt hand scroll on PaPeÍ,now shoÍn of the extensivetexts which were an integÍalpartof the aÍtwork atthetime of its creation. The

recipient oÍ the painting is

shown in his red formal Íobes,

receiving a guest.

81

Albu,rileaf oú;pe, í;om -the series 'Twelve Views of

Tieer Hill', by Shen Zhou(1427-l5A) ct).

§-----_-l

were entitled to break them. Tl-re Suzhou upper classes among whomhe lived were a tightly knit group, intermarried and obligated to oneanother in nurnerous interlocking ways. The producrion of this scroll,presented to arr ofEcial named Zheng Chuchi on his departure forBeijing, was not â spontaneous gesture on Tang's p2rrt, but was broughtinto being by a group (fifteen figures in official tlress bow in farewell as

Mr Zheng steps irrto his boat). The farewell picture was another newformat oíthe fifteenth century, available in all sorts oIpackaees, fromsigned works by highly prestigious artists as here to formulaic worksbought ofi:the-peg ir-r workshops. Here the artist may have sought toimpress both the recipients and the commissioners of the work with a

display ofbrush-strokes associated not with Suzhou but rvith the othergreat ârtistic centre of Nanjing. He paints rocks in longer, wetterstrokes ofthe brush, instead ofbuilding them up from lots oflitúe cun

like his teacher Shen Zhou. Such artistic subtleties were probably notlost on the audience, even if the1. were secondary to the social role ofthe painting in forging a tie berween the Suzhou élite and a powerfulfriend at court. It is a rnark of Tang's position that the painting isextensively inscribed by him with a poem, his abiliry to compose verse

being one of the things that sustained his scholar status in the face ofthe unpleasant fact of his economic dependence on l-ris art.

Few such social ambiguities surroundcd the austere figure of Tang'schildhood friend Wen Zhengming Ça7o-r55), at least in his nativeSuzhou. There he was written about as the acme of the scholar ideal, as

poet, calligrapher, painter, and man. Yet even he, in the course of his

rewarded financially for painting 'Farewell at Jinchang' t821. Hecertainly was paid for other paintings and relied on selling l.ris art trr

live, but this did not in the eyes of his contemporaries or of latcr criticsmake him a'professional painter'. His acceptabiliry as a soci:rl cqual toa peer group of landowners and government officials was pertly dtre

to his artistic tâlent, partly to his early success in thc inipcrirrlexaminations (from which he was subsequently debarred in a sc:rntl:rl

over cheating), and partly to the sense that those who maclc thc rr.rlcs

156 e.n'r rN rHe r-rns or rHe Ér-rre ÂRT INTHE LIFEOFTHE ELITE I57

'Farewell at Jinchang', by

TanB Yin ( l47O-1524 ct),hand scÍoll on paper, painted

some time after 1498. The

scene oÍ iarewell is sêtattheJinchang Gate in the west wall

oí the city oÍ Suzhou. The

extensive inscription rn theartrst's own hand is evidenceoÍ hrs social standing.

briefcareer in rhe Beijing bureaucracy ofthe r5zos, could be insulted bymuch younger men with the sneer that he was just a 'painter'. Most ofthe upper classes did not paint. Those who did constantly had tonegotiate areas of contested meaning surrounding visual images,proving again and again that their paintings were somehow differentfrom the images which decorated the walls of temple s or were bought tobe presented to loved parents on their birthdays.

Wen Zhengmir.rg had been a pupil of Shen Zhou, and like his masterhis work was much sought-after in his lifetime. Most of it norvcirculates shorn of the circumstance s which led him to paint it, but a

work like 'Cypress and Rock', dated r55o, can still be understood in a

richer manner t831. The peinting and poem, in Wen's highly regardedcalligraphy, are a unity; neirheÍ occupies a subsidiary ro1e, even thoughthe context ofthe present book on ârr hisrory imposes a reading on tbisob.iect of 'picrure with inscription'. The ideal of a painting and a poemof equal quality was not always realized; in fact literary critics weredubious about the qualiry of the verse of most famous scholar-artists,but it remained the ideal. Theywere created in tl-ris instance as a gift fora younger friend who lay i1l at the time, and urge on him the fortitude ofthe ancient gnarle d cypress (a1so an ingredient in medicine), ar the sametime as they quote a line of a Tang dynesry poer ro allude elegantly tothe young man's promise as a writer. Such a work was almost certainlytreasured by its recipient tbr its personal tone, linking him to a veryfamous old man. Paradoxically, this very personal nature, the visibletraces of Wen Zhengming's brush, made the scroll worth a great deal ofmoney, and hastened its exit from the arena of relationships berweenknown men into the wider, anonymous market-place (see p. 176).

Upper-class artists in the Ming learnt to paint from private furors, orelse from members of their own Íãmilies. (Wen may have received someearly tuition from his morher, Ji Shouduan, praised by.shen Zhou x'the Guan Daosheng of today'.s Family traditions could be susrainedover generations, and the Wen íamily of Suzl'rou provided rhe most

r58 ^R'r

rN'rnE LtFE oF Tur: Ét.trrl

Hand scroll on papeÍ,'Cypress and Rock', by WenZhengming ( 1470-1559 ce),dated 155O. The callagÍaphyts in' t egulat scí tpt' ( ka i sh u ),íor which the artist was

ílarlicularly famous.

striking example of this, with a series of prominent calligraphers andpainters stretching down into the seventeenth cenrury. Wen Peng(t48g-r57),WenJia (r5or-83), and Wen Boren (r5oz-75) were rhe mostfamous. Some of the family may eíÍêcrively have been professionalartists, but the lustre of a famor,rs name was still worth something. \ /enZhengming's great-granddaughter Wen Shu (1595,1634) is one of themost interesting câses. Married into an equally distinguished Suzhoufamily, who were descended from Zhao Mengfu (see p. r45) and hencefrom the emperors ofthe Song dynasry she learnt to paint as one oftheaccomplishments oí an upper-class lady. Most of her surviüng woíkwas done after t626, when her father-in-law died and her family was inreduced circumstances. It seldom carries poems or dedications,suggesting it was done íor commercial clients, and that she may havesupported the family by painting.

The fan illustrated may hâve been done for such a client t841. As anarena for small-scale work, which could be produced in a very shorttime, the folding ían was ideal for the casual or spontaneous gift orcomme morative piece, when something larger was not appropriate. Itsrise as a format in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must havesomething to do with the growing role of art in élite sociabiliry at this

ART IN -f HE lrre or rHe Él-Irl r59

Folding fan on gold paper,

'Carnations and GaÍdenRock', by Wen Shu(1595-1634cE), dated1627. The folding fan was

almost the last piciorialíormat to be developed in

China, being an import fromJapan, and not widely useduntil the sixteenth century.

W

flü

I

1*

I

84 time. Fans like this were painted before they weÍe mounred on sticksfor use. Some may never have been used, but mounted almostimmediately in albums for the enjoyment of art collecrors.

The subject-matter, carnarions and a garden rock, are rypical ofWen Shu and of other late Ming women artists. Just as male scholar-artists were restricted by convention in the range ofsubjects they mighttreat, so further unwritten rules operated in the case of women. Theyrarely painted landscapes, the most prestigious artistic subject, themost common subject being instead flowers and insects. (These werenot exclusively female subjects for art, being painted by men also.) Inboth literature and art the imagery of flowers was capable of beingassociated with the beautiful lady. In Wen Shut lifetime a number ofeducated upper-class women, along with educated courtesans whoserviced the male upper classes, were able to deploy this imagery inverse and pictures to create a context for artistic activity by women on a

larger scale than had ever been possible before.

The Art and Theory of Dong Qichang: 1 555-l 636A scroll or even a fan by a descendant of Wen Zhengming was still a

highly desirable thing to many at the beginning of the sevenreenrhcentury, but the hegemony ofSuzhou âs â centre oftaste was beingopenly challenged at this time. The challenge câme from a group ofupper-class ârtists and aesthetic theorists associated with the nearbytown of Songiiang, of whom the mosr prominent and mosrsubsequently famous was Dong Qlchang (1555-1636). The views ofDong and his circle, and the artistic prâctice in which he manifestedthem, have been so influential in all subsequent versions ofthe historyof Chinese painting that it is only recently that the framework hecreated has been subjected to any real scrutiny.

The theory he advanced about the history of Chinese painting is

easy to caricature: since the Tang dynasty at least, two distinct schoolsof painting have existed, named the Northern and Southern schools.

16o nnr Iru rne Llre on tnr ÉLItg

The Northern school, characterized by meticulous brushwork an\intensive use ofcolour, was sustained largely by professional painters \and is inferior. The Southern school, the manner of painting practisedby scholar-amateurs, manifests brushwork principally in ink, and issuperior. The movement of art is a teleological process, culminating inthe achievements of Dong Qchang himself t851. This is an unfaircaricature. Dong's pronouncements, which drew on a long aesthetictradition of binary opposition between Northern and Southern (theseâre not geographical terms, but come from rwo strands within ChanBuddhism) were in reality a lot more subtle, not to say inconsistent,than that. But it contains a certain âmount ofaccuracy about how thetheory was used in subsequent centuries, sometimes creating a tidyopposition between'scholar' and'professional', which is played out inpurely stylistic terms. A simplistic opposition of ink and colour, paperand silk, small-scale and large-scale, Yuan dynasty models and Songdynasty models, 'Wu school' (from Suzhou) and'Zhe school' (fromZhqiang proünce), realism and self-expression, has arguably donemore to cloud than to illuminate the history of Chinese painting. Thetheory is one of the central facts of Chinese ârt history from theseventeenth century to the twentieth, and must be srudied as such. It isless helpful as a guide to everything which went before. In fact it hasbeen demonstrated that Dong very often made mistakes in his ownconnoisseurship of earlier painting and calligraphy; this introducedfurther inconsistencies into the theories he wove around them.

Dong Qchang's own artistic practice, as calligrapher and painteçwas extremely highly regarded in his own day. He rose to the top inofficial life, his immense social prestige being intimately related to hisartistic activities. His art was a tool in the struggle for prominence, thatprominence in turn lending desirability to samples of his writing and tohis pictures. He was also extremely rich and owned one of the great artcoliections of the day, including Wang Xun's 'Letter to Bo Yuan' [68],and Huang Gongwang's 'Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains' [77].Meticulous scholarship has uncovered in his case the way paintingswere used within the patronage networks ofthe bureaucracy, given as

gifts to cement existing relationships and create new ones.ó Like manyleading scholar-artists, he employed on his staff'ghost-painters', tomake works in his style destined for recipients of lesser importance tohim. In this deployment of art within the social realm he was nodifferent from, if rather more intense and committed than, previousmen of his ciass and educatior-r who had been involved in similarrelationships.

It would be wrong to see Dong Qlchang simply as an artisticmanipulator. FIe was deeply iearned in the Buddhist tradition, as wellas in the philosophical debates ofhis day, debates in which the questionof the relationship of the mind to external phenomena remained hody

ARTrN THE LIFEorrHr ÉLtrs rór

85

>L!ã &J ,

';":d- .4Êi!.

and hardening of the distinction between 'professional' and 'amateur'

painters, and the reduction of these categories to simple srylistic

equivalents, did throw up new complexities and ironies. Some of the

principal, and conscious, upholders of landscape painting in the

manneÍ of Dong Qichang were effectively professional artists like

Wang Hui (see p. 7a). The calligraphy of Dong himself became almost

the official sryle of the Qing dynasty court (1644-19rI), copied by the

Qanlong emperor himself.Others who have been seen by art history as admirable 'amateurs'in

realiry occupied complex social positions. This is Particularly true ofsome ofthe artists ofthe sevente€nth cenrury who chose liíesryles and

deveiopetl styles of art in which implicit rejection of the nerv political

order was never veÍy far out ofthe frame. Several ofthese rvere Budd-

hist monks, men who were in polite sociery but not of it, and for whom

painting was both livelihood and mezts of self-expression. These men

characterized themselves often as ltitnin,'remnants', people left over

from the N{ing and unable to fully give their allegiance to the Qing.Shitao (16+z-r7o) has become since the iate Qng dynasry one of

the most admired of these monk-artists, the well-attested fact of his

selling paintings íor cash doing nothing to damage his social standing

in the eyes of those for whom this'eccentric'is one of the great masters

of the'scholar' tradition. His 'Selí-portrait Supervising the Planting ofPines'oí1674 [86] uses the rel,ival of Portraiture as an acceptable genre

for the scholar at this time, perhaps to make a more general point about

the possible restoration not just of the te mple where he was living, but

of the Ming ruling house (to which he was related)' It is hard to Posit a

context Í-or the making of such a picture, other than the personal needs

of the person wl-ro painted it, unless it be for sharing with a very small

coterie who understood the deeper meanings the image and its poem

contain.The same is true to an even more extreme degree of some of the

'lnvitation to Reclusron at

.Jingxi', by Dong Qichang(1555-1636c8). dated 16I IHand scroll on paper. ln thrs

case the title is that given by

the artist, and written on lhepicture ilselÍby him.

'i , ,il,i it'it tffiài *

IrtrFiiÍ:,..1i,,,

debated. He was also the most prominent of a group of artists aroundthe beginning of the seventeenth cenrury who took the theoreticalrejections of'fornr likeness', 6rst articulated by the Su Shi circle in theeleventh century (see p. r4z) more seriously than anyone before them.In a painting like 'Invitation to Reclusion at Jingxi', painted in r6ut851, the middle-aged Dong Qchang has made a landscape whichcirrries the rejection of representation of the observed scene to a newintensity. Qrite deliberately, this is nor a'rea.l'iandscape, even ifJingxiis a real place. What it is, above all, is'a Dong Qchang', advertised as

strch by brushwork identifiable to the educated and arr-historicallyconscious recipient. The man for ra,hom the picture was made in thiscase was a friend named Wu Zhengzhi (incidentally ir previous ownerof the 'Fuchun Mountains' scroll). The picture is integral with arvritten text weighing up rhe dangers of that friend taking a

government posr, as opposed to living our rhe eremitic ideals of thefamous recluses of old, which the writer has resolved to do. Both Dongand Wu did take official jobs again, but this does not make either a

sirnple hypocrire. By the late Ming, the interpl.ay of personal wealth,perceived social status, and government position was so cornplex (andhigh office potentially so personally dangerous, due to fierce factionalpolitics) that the hermit ideal losr none of irs compelling force even forthose who served the Ming dynasry in high offices.

The Seventeenth Century and the Ming-Qing TransitionWhen tl.rat dynasry collapsed in the face of peasant rebellion andManchu invasion io ú44, the social upheaval faced by the upper classeswas negotiated by individuals and íamilies in a variery of difFerentways. Most acquiesced. Some retired. Tl.re way calligraphy andpainting were used in upper-class life arguably changed very little as a

direct result of the change of ruling house. However, thà widespreadacceptance of Dong Qchang's theoretical positions, the sharpening

162 ÁRT IN THE LttL r)r t.uE Él_tL.t

Êi;l

IB/r'l

,J'-

AR't IN THE LIFEorrHe Él-lre 161

ÉiJà

Detail of hand scroll on papeÍ

'Self 'portrait Supervising thePlanting of Pines'. by Shitao( 1642- 17 07 cf). dated 167 4

paintings and poetry of Shitao's distant older relative, known to historyby the name, adopted late in life, of Bada Shanren (1626-17o5). Asanother man who took to Buddhist monastic life to escape from the

Qlng conquest, but returned to secular life in the r67os, Bada led anoften marginal existence. Both he and Shitao were the recipients ofpatronâge, not the dispensers of it, unlike Dong Qchang. The socialacceptabiliry of those r.vho supported themselves by painting was nowso problematic that the most prestigious of those who did so were nowtacitly enrolled as 'amateurs' on the basis of their fideliry to certainsrylistic norms (and their avoidance of others), regardless of theiractual economic circumstances. There were in any câse many ways ofaccepting patronage rvithout seeming to sell work outright, includingthe enjoyment of lengthy periods of hospitaliry.

Bada Shanrens highly distinctive work is not quite like an1'thingpreviously produced by a painter in China, and the extent to which it isthe product of extreme mental states continues to be debated byscholars. His scroll of 'Fish and Rocks' t87l was probably painted aboutr69r, and uses distortions and wrenches ofpoint ofview to disorientatethe gaze. The poems which are so closely integrated into the layout ofthe scroll speak enigmatically of the fallen Ming dynasry, and of thefate oíits descendant, tlre painter.; Here it does seem fullv justified totalk about an art ofpersonal expression, and one which found relativelyfew admirers among collectors in China before this century, whenBada Shanren has becorne viewed retrospectively as one of the greatpainters of the last imperial dynasry. He was also an ârtisr whoregularly worked to commission in the last nvo decades of his life forthe élite of his home city of Nanchang, Jiangxi province. Shitaomeanwhile had settled in Yangzhou, in Jiangsu, and was similarlyengaged as a professional painter. The economic growth of the laterseventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led to the risç ofa numberofnew centres ofélite culture, where the patterns oíart-collecting andart-making in upper-class life, developed in the Suzhou region,

164 ^.RT

IN THE LrreorrrrE ÉLrte

Yellow Sea

.rffi

The Lower Yangtze Delta and

its Cultural Centres

East China Sea

established themse lves over the course of the Qng dynasry. Yangzhou

was peÍhaps the most important of these. One result of this r'vas that

ârtistic sryles came to be seen as having regional roots, ând are so

spoken about in ârtistic criticism. It is at this time that the opposition

between the 'scholarly' ârtists of Suzhou (the Wu school) and the

'professional' artists from Zheiiang (the Zhe school), hardened into an

artrhistorical commonplace. As a further example, in the seventeenth

cenrury a distinct school of painting associated with Anhui province

had come to be written of for the first time, one of its most famous

exponents being another'remnant' monk, Hongren (r6ro-63).

The Qing Dynasty: 1644-1911It is striking that, although the ideal of the scholar amateur xrtist was

entirely dominant among the upper class of the Qng empire in the

eighteenth and nineteenth cenruries, very few members of it made or

have sustained reputations as painters. Su Shi and Dong Qchang were

verJ/ importânt political figures before they were painters; Shen Zhou

unà W.n Zhengming were independently wealthy members of the

gentry who also enjoyed greât artistic reputations âmong their peers'

the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equivalents of these men' as

politicúns and local magnates, by and large were not so esteemed'

ART tN THE LIFE or rur Éllrr ró5