The Ming Dynasty Page 3

The Emperor Guangwu Fording a River – Qiú Ying

Qiu Ying painted in many varied styles. His widespread reputation is associated with illustrative pictures painted in a ‘meticulous manner’; perhaps his best works are his landscapes in ink and pale colour washes, which the Wu School favoured.

His illustrative style was mainly employed when illustrating poems, historical events, or past customs. It was the same ‘blue and green’ style used by ‘Big Li and Little Li’ in the Tang dynasty. ‘Saying Farewell at Xunyang’ is painted in this style.

I have neglected many important Ming painters of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Lu Zhi, Zhu Jie, Jian Gu, Xu Wei, Xe Shi Chen, Ting Yun peng, and numerous other famous names have been passed over to concentrate on the most influential men in formulating the main trends of early Ming painting.

Dong Qichang

Dong Qichang

By the latter part of the sixteenth century, the centre of activity in the traditions of the Wu School had shifted from Suzhou to Songjiang.

The analytical studies of technical methods and aesthetic aims of the old masters that had engaged the attention of the leading painters during the early Ming period were carried further than ever by a group of men in Songjiang. The top minds in this group were Chen Jiru, Mo Shilong, and Dong Qichang.

All three belonged to the scholar-official class and believed that poetry, calligraphy, and painting were the highest forms of expression for the human spirit. Dong Qichang was the most vocal of the three. He held various high public offices, at one time rising to be President of the Board of Rites. He was considered the most significant art expert of his day. Landscape, in his opinion, was a vehicle for the cultivated man to express his spiritual worth and appreciation of the operating principle of nature.

Landscape painting cannot and should not compete with the natural landscape. To try to reproduce the outward appearance and labour over a physical likeness produces nothing but the weariness of the spirit. But painting possesses beauties peculiar to itself – the wonders of brush and ink.

Moreover, if painting is a means of expression, the artist must have something to express. For Dong Qichang and, his class, the men with something worth explaining were the scholar gentlemen, the literati, who, through education, formal or otherwise, cultivation of the humanities, and sincere devotion to nature were tuned to the ineffable order and flow of things.

Such men were free of low ambitions and sentimentality; their painting, in consequence, also became accessible on the one hand from vulgarity, the desire to startle or impress, and on the other from sweetness, the apparent appeal to sentiment.

How an effortless expression of the spirit could best be accomplished in painting directed these men to an intense study of techniques, which led to minute classifications of painting rocks and hills.

The various methods of ‘cun’ (referring to creating texture lines that resemble chapped skin on mountains, rocks, the bark of trees, etc.) represent the trunks, branches and leaves of trees and the methods of painting birds and flowers. For example, Wang Lo Yu, a writer from the very end of the Ming period, lists twenty-six ways to paint rocks and twenty-seven kinds of leaves on trees.

Landscape – Dong Qíchang

In the landscapes of Dong Qichang, there are relatively few elements, and the compositions are simple. There is consistency in structure and tone relationships that gives them their particular actuality.

At the same time, it is as though the landscape had been taken apart, the trivial and irrelevant elements eliminated, and the essential remainder reassembled to present us the world of nature not as the artist saw it but as he knew it to be.

Dong Qichang’s work can be compared to that of the post-impressionists. Like them, he strived to reconstitute the powerful and virile forms rather than the surface likeness of the earlier painters. In his words, ‘Those who study the old masters and do not introduce some changes are as if closed in by a fence. If one imitates the models too closely, one is often further removed from them.’

Zhao Zuo, Landscape of Quick Water from High Mountain

Dong Qichangs immediate followers were known as the Songjiang School, after the town near Suzhou, which was their centre. Dong developed the theory that Chinese painting could be divided into two schools, the northern school characterised by fine lines and colours and the southern school noted for its quick calligraphic strokes.

These names are misleading as they refer to Northen and Southen schools, formed because of a schism in Chan Buddist thoughts on enlightenment rather than on geographic areas. The Northern School was proclaiming softly, steady as you go gradual enlightenment and the Southern School ‘Instant enlightenment.

Hence a Northern painter could be geographically from the South and a Southern painter geographically from the North. Dong Qichang strongly favoured the Southern school and dismissed the Northern school as superficial or merely decorative.

Zhao Zuo

Zhao Zuo was one of these immediate followers. However, his paintings (see above) are less abstract and more descriptive. Nevertheless, they have the same careful organisation, attention to tonal pattern and repetition of forms.

The influence of Dong Qichang can be seen in numerous other vital masters who can be described as seventeenth-century individualists. Li Liufang, Sheng Maoye, Lan Ying, and Ding Yunpeng are among the lights that shone.