Asian Art and Architecture: Art & Design 382/582

Northern Song China 960 - 1126

Southern Song China 1127 - 1279

Design List

489 Eleven-headed Guanyin Song 12th c

The major facts of Song history as they have been interpreted in Chinese tradition have focused on the continuing issues of unity and division, indigenous and foreign rule. Both the traditional Confucian and the Neo-Confucian interpretations have seen periods of disunity and foreign rule as times of cultural disaster and their opposite as the correct state for normal human life to develop. The Song dynasty (960-1279) is therefore credited for reuniting China after the Five Dynasties interregnum (907- 960) that followed the collapse of the Tang. But the dynasty is divided into two periods, as it was defeated and driven out of the north by the Tartar, Jin Dynasty. Thus we have a Northern Song period in which all of China was united under one indigenous (Han) rule from 960 to 1127, and then a Southern Song period, from 1127 to 1279, during which the Song ruled in the South and Mongols in the North. This split only came to an end with the conquest of the south by the Tartar dominated north and the subsequent ambivalent Yuan Dynasty period during which a unified China was ruled by Mongols.

We have fragments of painting in China back as far as the plastic arts, in the form of markings on ceramics (Lee 10 & Color Plate 1). We have evidence of it in the design of decoration on metalwork (CP 3). And we have it on cloth going back to Han (CP 6). The Oldest Buddhist painting goes back to Tang, in work preserved at Dunhuang.

Painting in China, as in most everywhere else, is found in both mural and portable formats. What is unique about China, and the nearby cultures influenced by the Chinese, is the rolled scroll format. Large paintings on paper and cloth, suitable for hanging, were mounted in such a was as to be rolled-up when not on view. More significantly, some paintings on paper were mounted on horizontal rolls that could be viewed not by hanging but by continuous scrolling before the viewer, in the manner of reading a written text.

The Barbarian Royalty handscroll takes us to the more uniquely developed Chinese format. Elongated, horizontal narrative depictions can be traced earlier in the murals of Dunhuang, and even back to previous Buddhist narratives in India, though there is no reason to trace the Chinese examples of the format to India. It is a natural enough format for any culture to come upon, and such designs as Lee’s Zhou period lacquer painting show it in China long before the coming of Buddhism. What is particularly interesting about the format in China is the way in which it was developed in the handscroll format.

What we see is once again a "wire line" drawing with filled in color. The image shows the Buddha on a platform throne flanked by arhats or Bodhisattvas and backed up by guardian figures. To the right we see the barbarian royalty in their various modes f coiffure and dress. One thing of great importance is immediately distinctive about the work. The level of naturalism provided by the style takes us from the realm conceptual representation within which we have remained up to this time. The Chinese had long tradition of elite painting and patronage of painting that resulted in a variety of stylistic sophistications few other cultures could manage. Here the use of perspective implied by the slight downward angle of vision on the Buddha’s group, and the complex of overlaps and foreshortenings creates a spatial effect more perceptual than any we have seen previously. Unlike the Indian and Central Asian painting that we have seen, the simplicity of the line and color in approach doesn’t fix our attention on the surface marks of decorative and virtuoso painting, but rather allows us to look more transparently through the technique to the subject matter.

Instead of a symbolic representation of a Buddhist subject we are now invited to visualize one. The psychological difference is considerable.

Lee recognizes five major Song styles: Courtly, Monumental, Literal, Lyric, and Spontaneous. The first three were characteristic of the Northern Song, and long revered by Chinese critics of later centuries. The last two are the creations of the Southern Song, and excoriated by Chinese critics, while they were, by contrast, quite highly appreciated by the Japanese, "particularly fifteenth and sixteenth century artists affiliated with Zen monasteries."

This is Lee’s Literal style, a continuation of the Tang court figure tradition. Wire line drawing a bright colors. A composition crowded with genre details.

Ju Ran paints in what Lee calls the Monumental style. It is the most highly prized of the five. It is notable chiefly for its steep, spare mountains in monochrome ink, and often at impressive sizes. Ju Ran was famous for his towering mountains. The scene is divided into two basic units: a fore and middle ground, below, and an upper background. Typical of the time, there is a relatively total break between the two. The background is created by repeated texture strokes, creating a flat peaked tower that drops ridges down through the middle of the composition. The lower section, by contrast has a number of different sorts of strokes and a good deal more detail, including gnarled trees and to the middle right a relatively geometric Buddhist temple. Like all well conceived Chinese landscapes, this one contains a clear path for the viewer to walk, albeit with her eyes. I this case it leads from the clump of trees in the immediate foreground, back to the Buddhist temple under the towering cliffs.

Is this a Buddhist painting? No, more correctly it is a fine landscape painting, with a Buddhist temple among its subjects. It does reveal, however, how integrated into Chinese culture was Buddhism by the Song period.

Here again we see the Monumental style in one of the finest surviving examples. And one you can see in the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Again you see the essentially monochrome image of the towering crag, flattened at the top, created by repeated texture strokes, articulated into ridges descending on both sides and the center. And once again there is a near-middle ground to be walked through, but separated by mists from the towers of the background. In the foreground are Li Cheng’s famous crab claw trees.

Is this actually a Li Cheng, identifiable after more than a thousand years? Not really likely, though it has been associated with his name for several hundred years, and it is a clear example of his style. So the text says "attrib[uted] to." The fact is most old Chinese painting attributions of the Song and Yuan are hopeful at best, even with pedigrees from the royal collection, dating back three or four centuries. Both this and the last painting were indeed in the Imperial collection (Chong Wen Yuan).

The architecture of the temple is as rational and clear as the landscape motifs. It represents a lower social peak, in harmony with the natural one behind it. As we work our way down from the temple tower on the middle ground peak, through the valley to the inn at the bottom, where you will meet a few visitors, before walking over the bridge to the other side of the river.

Though it is more closely associated with the Spontaneous mode in Japan and the West, the most peculiarly Chan Buddhist of the Song Dynasty’s styles was the Literal extension of the Tang figure style. The fact of Chan’s process of master to student teaching and succession is marked by the presentation to the student at the end of his studies with a portrait of the master. Because of the importance of the relationship these portraits are marked by careful likenesses of the sitter. Because of the visual tradition growing out of the court one, bright, decorative colors are also standard.

This Tang portrait mode was used by both Daoists and Chan Buddhists to record the likenesses of their great teachers in such "diploma portraits." Here is the standard iconography. An oversized chair acts as a throne. The chair is covered with a richly patterned brocade cloth. The monk himself sits in a Buddhist robe. Though the fabric may be of the finest cloth, it still simulates the robe of rags of the original monks. The priest Bu-Kong is still symbolically a Bhikshu or Beggar. so the blue pieces represent the quilting together of darker fragments of "rags." Bu-Kong’s hands sit in his lap as in meditation. His head and face appear newly shaven. The expression is one of equanimity. His slippers sit before him on a low stool, like the Buddha’s foot prints in the earliest, aniconic depictions.

cf., Master Wa- chun

Ink and slight color on silk, hanging scrolls 70" high

Both Daoism and Chan Buddhism had centuries old somewhat inter-connected traditions of spontaneous, intuitive, counter-rational expression. When branched off the Lyric tradition this produced in Southern Sung what Lee is calling the Spontaneous tradition. Though the Literal portrait style was formally a Chan style used in the most significant of Chan rituals, the master’s graduation of his student, an old an typical Indian social construction adapted by Buddhists, the spontaneous was a style attributed to Chan masters because it seems so clearly to exemplify their meditational and enlightening practices. Though, the fact is there is no documentation that this was a Chan practice, for outsiders looking back it seems a most appropriate expression. It seems a koan in paint. And yet we have no proof that it was!

The monk Mu Qi , or Fa Chang as he was better known in China, was the favorite of later Japanese critics, though he was seen as only a second rank painter by the Chinese critics. They represent a set of three favorite Chinese subjects in a uniquely puzzling combination. Though, indeed their assembly as a set in Daitoku-ji may be more a fortuitous later combination than the intention of the artist. Each individual piece has its own simple, if spontaneous structure. The Crane in a Bamboo Grove, on the left, can be taken to represent a gentleman scholar, or simply a crane in a bamboo grove. Unlike the literal realism of the Priest Bo-Kung, here the brushwork is quick, elliptical and brusque. The Monkey with Her Baby on a Pine Branch is another conventional piece, but produced here with her criss-crossed legs or arms and equally criss-crossed gnarled branches as if a question. She looks back at us as quizzically as we must look at her. (And , this is a an ape, not a monkey.) The looseness of the free brushwork on the branch draws us into the freedom of the spontaneous style. The central piece is the White Robed Guanyin. This, at least, actually looks like a Buddhist subject. But here again we have more the enigma of the koan than an outright Buddhist depiction. The Bodhisattva sits on a cliff above what? Beneath an unexplained branch. Even more than the other two, this painting is filled with the emptiness of mists. Thus however Buddhist the subject of the central painting is, it is the enigmatic combination of the three and the brusqueness of some of the painting style that seem most important to defining the works Chan for most observers.

Chinese character elimination and writing into painting in Chinese culture

Ink on paper 14 1/4"

This is perhaps Mu Qi’s most famous picture, in Japan or anywhere. It is a mastery of subtle understatement, control, and yet, spontaneity. And as Lee says, it "communicates the qualities that we associate with Chan Buddhism: It is intuitive, brusque, enigmatic." It is in its abbreviation what seems like pure spontaneity that conveys a great deal with the most spare of means. You can see exactly what the brush has done. Here is a combination of the two elements that seem to command Chinese ink painting: subtlety of touch and cogency of spacing. There is an even number of persimmons and yet and asymmetrical arrangement. Each one is of different tonal weight. The central one deeply dark, the one to its right a bit lighter the pair on the other side lighter still, with a bit of highlight to one edge. The outer one on right a mere outline, the one on the left lighter still. Their stems stand out like written characters.

That of course is one clue to the entire effort. This painting with the writing brush, in a culture whose language is written in a script with strong pictographic elements is as much calligraphy as it is representational painting. In a culture where one was measured by one’s handwriting not only according to its legibility and grace, but with the sense that in the West is attributed to graphology, where the personality is said to be visible in the mark, ones ink painting takes on a very powerful significance.

The last bit of information on this piece turns out to measure less the work itself than our response to it. After generations of judging the work as a fabulous triumph in compositional spacing, it has recently become clear that the Six Persimmons was not created as a single sheet to be seen as a hanging scroll , and the magnificently sensitive spacing that we see is not the work of Mu Qi at all. The work was originally painted as one scene in a long handscroll with a number of other vegetables. This doesn’t take anything away from either the sensitivity of the initial gestures that created it, or from the composition originally developed in the distance from the top to the bottom, or from the quality of the composition as it now stands. But it does tell us that this marvelous epitome of Chinese ink painting is the work of at least two people, the painter and whoever cut it out of the handscroll remounted it, As indeed even the koan must be. For there is no enigmatic expression but one that is put forward with the goal of prodding the mind to a leap of transformative insight and that is taken in by one looking for transformation.

So, in both the Western art world of the bourgeois period and in the art of Chan Buddhism, we look deeply into the spontaneous gestures of the painter for some sort of epiphany. We look across centuries and cultures to see why some people seem to have found such great pleasure and even Awakening in a few spontaneous gestures of brush on paper.

What was the original sound of one hand clapping? Or in the more formal state of the established question and response: "Who is he who has no companion among the ten thousand things of the world?" "When you swallow up in one draught all the water in the [Xi River], I will tell you." The answer, of course is more important as the question. And the response of the observer is of course the goal of the exercise.

The final element to be noticed here is the use of paper rather than silk. This allows a great deal more control for the artist and a much more deft record of the

"What is the meaning of the First Patriarch’s visit to China?" "The cypress tree in the front courtyard." Or as I have heard one student of Hua Yen Buddhism, one of Chan’s major roots, say: things are precisely what they are and it will only be when we understand that that we can be awakened.

Mu Qi was a monk, Liang Kai the other great Southern Song master of the Spontaneous style, though he frequented Buddhist temples, was not. Lee reproduces two of the best known works attributed to him. And they are of quite different styles. The first is a work we would place into the Lyric style in terms of its landscape. This is brusque and enigmatic in its energetically yet elliptically depicted trees juxtaposed with the ambiguity of the diagonal that represents either the outline of a mountain ridge outline to the right or some sort of mass leaning in from the left. Still, the figure style is of Tang- Buddhist variety. It is a planned and developed illustration.

We see Shakyamuni as a hermit coming down a path. From the title we shall suppose him leaving his meditation to preach, or at least to share his enlightenment with others. He appears with enough particular expression to be read as a person rather than an abstract type. A wind whips around him taking the edge of his robe. On his face is a weary if alert expression. Rather than a mudra his right hand comes up as if to ward off the cold. The ushnisha is rendered naturalistically more as a bald spot than an strong protuberance. He is bearded. It is a highly human and clearly gendered being than the normative abstraction we are accustomed to.

Ink on paper, hanging scroll 29 1/2"