The Qing Dynasty Page 2

Wu Li and Yun Shouping

Yun Shouping

The bridge between the new conservatism of the Four Wangs and the priest-hermit individualists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is formed by two painters usually assigned to the Taicang School: Wu Li and Yun Shouping .

Although he was a boyhood friend of Wang Hui and a pupil of Wang Jian, Wu Li proved his essentially different nature through his painting and by becoming a Christian and a Jesuit. His faith did not affect the style of his painting but may have influenced its later mood. Nevertheless, his earlier paintings seem no different in intention or level of accomplishment than those of the Wangs.

Boat Trip on the River underneath a Buddhist Temple – Wú Lì

In the landscapes most often associated with Wu Li, the forms of the mountains are either intricate, writhing and twisting like those of Wang Meng or broken up into numerous piled boulders like the compositions of Juran as interpreted by the Yuan artist Wu Zhen. ‘Boat Trip on the River underneath a Buddhist Temple is of the latter kind. In this picture, Wu Li has given a more definite effect of light than in Chinese painting.

Yun Shouping (portrayed seated) was another friend of Wang Hui. He is often considered a flower painter, but his landscapes are reasonably numerous.

Gong Xian

The fondness for classification that has been remarked on in the theories of Dong Qichang and the techniques studies led to grouping many artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into schools. Some schools or categorical groups have another common factor: the artists lived in the same town or province. Familiar elements of style bind others. There are the ‘Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou’, ‘The Eight Masters of Nanjing’ and ‘The Four Masters of Anwei’.

Gong Xian was the most important painter of ‘The Eight Masters of Nanjing’. Few Chinese artists of the late period worked in a consistent style like Gong Xian. He evolved a distinct and individual manner in drawing, brushwork, ink, and subject matter and held to it throughout his career.

He was a solitary man who seldom left his small house and garden. In one respect, he was like Wang Yuanqi, i.e. He was interested in certain limited aspects of expression in painting and worked within those limitations. His pictures are in ink, on paper or silk. With ink, he accomplished more than any other Chinese painter in constructing tonal patterns ranging from shades of silvery grey to soft, impenetrable black.

Gong Xián Landscapes

More than any other painter Gong Xian used the white of his paper or silk to weave intricate patterns that lead back and forth, in and out, with restless motion throughout his compositions. (see details pictured above). He also expresses an interest in light. This interest as a true pictorial phenomenon is a development of later Chinese painting.

The Individualists

If later Chinese painting can be simplified into two main trends, one would present a marked uniformity and a wide variety. The Four Wangs and their numerous followers would represent the uniformity, not so much in their work, which on closer acquaintance is remarkably diversified, but in their purpose of revitalizing the great traditions of the fourteenth century. But, on the other hand, the variety is to be found in the work of several strongly individual artists who, without altogether divorcing themselves from tradition, painted in their own quite personal ways adhering to no school, group, or codified system.

It cannot be a coincidence that some of the greatest of these individualists abandoned the struggle of social competition and sought freedom in the Buddhist tradition and in wandering among the hills and streams of central China. In many ways, the style of painting and the attitudes towards the past or present of these Qing individualists were the most extreme in the history of Chinese painting until modern days.

While they were just as aware of tradition as any of their more conservative contemporaries, their use of that tradition was free and original. In any case, they went to Dong Qichang’s paintings rather than his writings and his most advanced and unusual approaches to form their use and development. In one way or another, nearly all these men were rebels in retirement, actively out of sympathy with the new Dynasty and the world.

Zhu Da

Zhu Da

Zhu Da  was said to have been a descendant of the Ming Imperial House . His home was in Nanchang, in the Jiangxi Province. It is not sure at what time he became a monk. Some say it was not until 1644, at the fall of the Ming, though he may have entered the Buddhist Sangha before that time.

He used several names, but almost all his extant works are signed by Bada Shanren, by which he is most frequently known. His landscapes form a valuable study. In several instances, the organization with repeated forms is reminiscent of Dong Qichang. Some are relatively complete with dense foilage and many peaks, and others are little more than shorthand jottings.

The Two Stones

Landscape after Night Rain – Kun Can

The two other essential monk painters of the seventeenth century were Kun Can, also known as Shi Ji and Dao Ji, who was most often called Shi Tao . These two are usually considered together as the ‘Two Stones’.

This is because they shared a mutual understanding of the creative possibilities of colour, the use of which was governed by a desire for emotional expression. Kun could probably be the more deeply religious of the two, and Shi Tao was the more original and creative artist.

Shi Tao

Shi Tao

Nearly all his paintings have a splendid and dramatic view of nature in movement. His hanging scroll, ‘Bao’en Temple,’ is an example. The trees and rocks dance and twist. Only the temple is quiescent. Shen Zhou was a probable source of inspiration.

Shi Tao was, in some ways, the most gifted and, in his paintings, the most original of the Qing artists. His family traced its descent to an elder brother of the founder of the Ming Dynasty. He was born in Quanzhou County in Guanxi province. The fall of the dynasty to which he and his family were so closely linked must have been a saddening shock to the boy and drastically altered the course of his life. When he was but fourteen years of age, he entered a monastery, and when he was twenty, he went to the essential Buddhist centre at Lu shan in Jiang xi.