Age of Confucian Rule : The Song Transformation of China (9780674244344) by Kuhn Dieter

Author:Kuhn, Dieter [Kuhn, Dieter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674062023
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Fig. 5 A Solitary Temple amidst Clearing Peaks. Attributed to Li Cheng (919–967), Northern Song dynasty. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

In the Southern Song era, landscape artists preferred smaller formats, often album leaves and fans, and painted more intimate, selective scenes. Especially famous were the “one-corner” compositions of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, who were both active around the turn of the thirteenth century. Their works reflect the idea of a reduction to essentials, a purity of view. In an easily visible corner of the lower foreground, a few simple strokes depicting a group of trees, a scholar’s hut, or some other feature offer an initial focal point for the eye, thus creating a suggestive atmosphere of emptiness, a deep perspective articulated through mists and vapors, a striking openness within a very small format.

Just at the time when many Song painters were trying to capture the essence of landscape in a drastically reduced pictorial format, depictions of real life started to appear in pictures. This new receptivity to representation, as reflected in both the subjects and the execution of paintings, coincides with Zhu Xi’s Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi lu), which brought Confucianism back to a vital concern with daily life. Comparable to one-corner composition in painting, his Reflections illustrate that the structure and analysis of the details of everyday experience can provide essential insights.

This attention to the common detail resulted in a body of work that can be described as genre painting. Groups of artists with a special focus on painting flowers and birds, for example, were centered in Chengdu and Nanjing. The most renowned and influential painter living at the court in Chengdu was Huang Quan. He served the Shu rulers for nearly fifty years, and in 965 was appointed a member of the Academy of Painting in Kaifeng. Huang Quan’s life and work bridge the period between the end of the Tang period and the beginning of the Song, when phantasmagorical subjects gave way to real animals and flowers that could be observed in nature. His contemporaries judged his depictions of nature to be unsurpassable, and later connoisseurs like Shen Gua referred to them as “sketches of life” or, literally translated, “writing life.”38 His mastery is evident in the double album leaf ascribed to him and his son with the title Sketches of Precious Creatures (Xie sheng zhenqin), although the sketches still extant are probably from the early decades of the twelfth century (Fig. 6). His taxonomic approach to detail, which seemed in some ways more realistic than life itself, remained authoritative in the Academy of Painting until the mid-eleventh century.39

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.