Interpreting Chinese Landscape Painting / Curator Kevin R.E. Greenwood transcript

Landscapes, the subject seems pretty straightforward. Images of the natural world, usually vast vistas stretching off into the distance in China. Landscape was one of the most important painting subjects with a history stretching back as far as the fourth century, and with a tremendous diversity of painters and styles. However, landscape painting in China was rarely just about the land. Some of the earliest surviving landscapes are found in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, an ancient Buddhist site in Western China.

In these early paintings like this mural, dating to the sixth century, landscapes were simply there to provide a setting, a backdrop for the story or lesson the painting was made to tell. Note how the landscape here is also used to break up the different parts of the story. By the 10th century, landscapes were appreciated by themselves, as in part representations of the natural world. This work, Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by Fàn Kuān is one of the most famous examples and is over six and a half feet tall.

Such paintings, large and immersive and originally, often mounted on screens, were designed to create a kind of virtual reality for viewers. Artists went out into the wilderness, made sketches and returned to their studios to create paintings that were not images of specific locations, but were instead intended to convey an almost mystical experience of the landscape to viewers. In these paintings, the immensity and majesty of nature was contrasted with the insignificance of human beings, usually tiny figures seen going about daily activities.

At the time, this natural hierarchy of towering mountains, hills, trees, rivers, and finally, humans was understood to symbolize the political hierarchy with the massive mountain, a stand-in for the emperor. If large immersive paintings were one way of suggesting the experience of being in a landscape, another related to a painting format developed in China, the hand scroll. Unlike large screens or hanging scrolls that could be viewed by a group, hand scrolls were a more personal experience.

Viewers could move through the space rolling and unrolling the scroll section by section, pausing or moving seamlessly forward or backward at their own pace as if actually traveling through the landscape. This unique format added an element of time to the viewer's experience of the painting. As we move through this complex and colorful landscape hand scroll, notice how the scene changes from filling the space with immense mountain forms to fading away into the distance.

It is almost like a piece of music, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, varying in volume and complexity. Even though this painting is from the 17th to 18th centuries, it has connections to the past, like the earliest landscapes. It uses rich, bold colors of blue and green. A color scheme that in paintings done in later periods was used to suggest magical far away places, escapist visions of imagined rural utopias where viewers could retreat for a moment from the cares of their daily lives.

However, unlike the earlier images where the tiny human figures were often busy at work, leading pack horses, or carrying firewood, In these later paintings, the figures were often elite gentlemen accompanied by a servant. This was exactly the type of person with the means to own such a painting. Members of the educated elite known as scholar officials or literati who were part of the imperial government and who had wealth and power.

In fact, images of scholars in the landscape became a regular, almost expected part of Chinese landscape painting. But what are they doing exactly? Most often as seen in this 15th century example, the figure is not working or farming or traveling, but pausing and looking and experiencing the natural world. And we as viewers are sharing in their experience, seeing the world of the painting through them. But there is another way of understanding Chinese landscape painting.

In the late 13th to mid 14th centuries, China was part of the vast Mongol empire that stretched from eastern Europe to Korea, the largest land empire in history. During this time, many members of the Chinese scholarly elite could not or chose not to serve the Mongol emperor. Some of them turned to landscape painting, usually combined with poetry and calligraphy to express themselves. These landscape paintings became more about the expressive potential of painting than about representing places or nature.

In this work, the painter Ní Zha's very austere landscape is really a kind of self-portrait here conveying the painter's loneliness and sadness. An isolated group of trees stretch up from a rocky outcropping. Their sketch like quality was a deliberate choice by the artist painted in a way that suggests they were done quickly. In a moment of spontaneous expression, the trees seemed to reach across a body of water toward distant mountains.

For Zha, those mountains represented happiness at the time far away from the artist after the recent death of his wife. The inscription written by the artist in an ancient style of calligraphy reads on the riverbank, the evening tide begins to fall. The frost covered leaves of the wind blown grove are sparse. I lean on my staff. The brushwood gate is closed and silent. I think of my friend. The glow is nearly gone from the hills.

At the end, he writes that he made this painting for his friend. That dedication and the many red seals of later collectors who own the painting point to the importance of these paintings in networks of scholars as well as to their continuing importance as works of art and as objects of great value. As they continue to evolve in the next few centuries, something very interesting happened with one type of landscape painting that took them even further away from representing the land.

Let's compare Ní Zha's work with another by Wáng Yuánqi from nearly 350 years later. They are dramatically similar, but why? As early as the 15th century literati painters began to create a secret expressive language in their paintings by imitating the styles, compositions and even special brush strokes that were connected with earlier painters. By painting in the manner of a past artist, they were associating themselves with that artist's character.

An idea that has its roots in copying the calligraphy of early masters and by doing so, embodying their virtues. Wáng's work is in the manner of Ní Zha, and he credits him in his inscription, writing "Master Ní's brushes incomparably marvelous from his compositions to his brush strokes. There is no area in which he's not deep and concentrated." Although there were many types of painting in China, even many types of landscape painting.

This particular style of landscape favored by the educated elite became the most respected and was considered the official or orthodox style of traditional landscape painting. In this spectacular work, Wáng Qian creates a landscape carefully laid out before us with a foreground, middle and background, and a central axis that draws the viewer up through the painting. Wáng's inscription states that the work is in the style of the 13th, 14th century painter Zhao Mengfu although it has elements from other masters as well.

Painters in China have continued to study and master this literati mode of painting down to the present. And today it provides a stylistic choice for artists who may also be expert in other styles. This painting by the modern painter Liú Haisu is a fine example. Simple buildings nestled in among trees, a boat on water, a bridge. The mountains at the top are done with carefully layered dots. A technique connected with the 11th century painter, Mi Fu.

The painting is firmly a part of the literati tradition. Yet Liú Haisu is best known as a pioneer in modern Chinese art, one of the first Chinese painters to master oil painting as seen in this work, The Cock Fight from 1940. Instead, Liú chose to paint in this most traditional style during a period in the 1960s and seventies, known as the cultural revolution, when artists were expected to paint in modern styles with overt political messages like this painting of a revolutionary worker, student, and soldier, also from the early 1970s.

Always an iconoclast, Liú chose this style at a time when anything traditional was seen as counter-revolutionary. His defiant dedication to tradition and respect for the long cultural heritage of landscape painting seen in this work and others led to his brutal suppression. He survived the suppressive period, perhaps in part by escaping in his mind like generations before him, to the blue and green landscapes of places and times far away.

If landscape paintings in earlier periods represented the imperial power escape, cultural solidarity, elite status, or the inspiration people found in the natural world, in the hands of Liú Haisu, It could also be a statement of resistance, a commitment to a long Chinese cultural heritage, one that he valued and suffered personally to preserve.