The practice of writing a poem on a painting was started in the Song dynasty by the poet, painter, essayist, and humorist Su Dongpo (Su Tung-P’o). He was talented at painting, poetry, and calligraphy so that he could combine the three arts on his paintings. A contemporary landscape artist, Mi Fei, followed the practice and decorated his paintings with descriptive poetry. The two artists set a fashion that became a lasting element of Chinese art.
Mi Fei was associated with the Southern School and was famous for the soft effects he created through horizontal blobs of paint since known as “Mi dots,” “Mi-Fei dots,” or “rice dots.” The fuzzy dots were dabbed close together to suggest distant vegetation on mountainsides. The effect of softness and distance was increased by the swirls of mists in the valleys and around the mountains.
The Southern Song Dynasty
In 1127, the Song lost control of Northern China to the Jin dynasty and moved the capital south of the Yangzi (Yangtze) River to Hang-zhou. The Court and scholar-officials migrated south over a period of eleven years. Emperor Huizong’s son, Gao Zong, became the new emperor. He gathered together in his Academy of Painting the available members of the earlier Academy that had been established by his father. Two of the most famous painters were Ma Yuan (1190– 1224) and Xia Gui (Hsia Huei, 1180–1230).
Although Ma Yuan was associated with the Northern School of Landscape because of his fine, delicate lines, he also developed a different type of brushstroke. He started to paint rocks with broad, angular, drybrush strokes now called “axe-cut” strokes. Such strokes gave spontaneous, free-form energy to otherwise precisely carved-out forms.
Together with Xia Gui, Ma Yuan also founded a new style of painting in terms of composition. They used fewer brush strokes to suggest the scene and reduced the solids in the painting to allow for large amounts of empty space at the borders and in the sky. The painted subject is less observed for its own sake and functions more to set off the open space.
Ma Yuan’s son, Ma Lin, took this style even further. His paintings suggest the stark minimalism characteristic of Japanese Zen Buddhist paintings. Indeed, the Japanese have been avid collectors of Southern Song paintings. The Japanese learned to paint in the Chinese style, mostly following the Northern School and favoring Xia Gui and Ma Yuan as their models.
This style no longer expresses the timeless and changeless aspect of nature found in earlier paintings. It conveys a sense of the transitoriness of a brief, intensely-felt moment in time. A sudden shower comes on, the sun sets, or a gust of wind blows the trees. The poetic equivalent might be a Japanese Haiku that evokes a feeling in the moment through a few carefully selected images. The sense of transitoriness seems to reflect the Buddhist emphasis on man and nature caught up in an endless chain of being, with a lurking sadness and suffering, from which they need to be liberated.
After the Tang dynasty, where foreign cultures were appreciated, the trend was away from Buddhism and back to Confucian classics. The philosophy had to account for the challenges put forth by Buddhist metaphysics and Daoist thought. After considerable debate, a new philosophic framework was developed based on the views of Zhu Xi (1130–1200). The new philosophy became known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. The Confucian concept of self-cultivation extended to seeking knowledge of the Great Ultimate (as in Daoism) and sudden complete enlightenment (as in Buddhism).
Such was the practical convergence of the three major philosophies by the time of the Song dynasty, that the tiny figure in the pavilion below the towering mountains in a landscape painting could be a Confucian scholar, a Daoist hermit, or a Buddhist monk. Indeed, the scholar-official often thought of himself as a Confucian by day, attending to government affairs, and a Daoist by night, engaging in his meditative painting.
Amateur Painting and Gardening
The fashion for painting as a hobby spread among literary men during the Song dynasty. They painted the Four Gentlemen—plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum—to express their gentlemanly character to the world. They invented a new style of painting orchids in ink, without color, which emphasized the starkness and linear quality of the plant. They spent time observing nature, the formation of petals and leaves, how a plant grows, to better know the spirit of the subject matter they painted.
The move of the capital to the milder southern climate of Hangzhou may have increased the interest in gardening. The nearby city of Suzhou grew as a convenient retreat for scholars, officials and merchants. Gardening increased during the Song dynasty and reached its height during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Landscaping became an art with established masters.
The Chinese scholar’s garden was the combination of a landscape painting and a poem with symbolic plants and architectural elements. The garden was a retreat to a stylized, miniature form of landscape where the scholar could reconnect to his spiritual nature. The plants represented virtues that reminded him of his own strengths. Bamboo is strong but flexible. Pine represents longevity, persistence, tenacity, and dignity. Flowering in the winter, plum blossom represents renewal and strength of will. Chrysanthemum symbolizes splendor and joviality. The chrysanthemum is also associated with a life of ease and retirement from public office. Retired scholar-officials bred different varieties of chrysanthemums and trained them to grow in different formations.
Like a landscape painting, a garden had rocks and water. The water was in the form of lakes and streams with bridges crossing over them and rocks with waterfalls. The rocks were mounds or decorative Chinese scholar’s rocks. The sculptural Taihu rock was especially prized for its fascinating shapes carved out by wind and water. It is only procurable from Tai Lake, just west of Suzhou. During the Song dynasty, Taihu rocks were the most expensive objects in the empire.
The architecture included pavilions for various purposes, inner and outer walls, and covered walkways for protection from sun, wind, and rain. The walls had moon-shaped doorways and lattice windows in the shapes of different objects, such as apples, pears, circles, squares, and pentagons. The pavement might consist of alternating black-and-white tiles. The principles of yin-yang and feng shui and the symbolism of objects and forms governed the design and placement of every element.
Literati Painting in the Yuan Dynasty
In 1215, the Mongols led by Genghis Khan defeated the Jin rulers in north China and captured Beijing. The watery terrain of south China and the resistance of the Southern Song prevented Genghis Khan’s son, Kublai Khan, from gaining control in south China until 1271. The last disappearance of Song rule in the far south was completed by 1279. In the new Yuan dynasty, the Mongols dominated the military and administrative spheres and did not trust the Chinese, who held mainly lower posts in the administration. This forced a large number of scholar officials into early retirement and to the bottom of the social scale.
In their leisure time, the literati did calligraphy, wrote poetry and literature, made paintings of birds and flowers that they had raised, practiced horticulture and flower arrangement, made and played musical instruments, and studied philosophy. They formed mutual support groups, where the wealthier helped those less well off. Paintings often served as a means of repaying a benefactor.
The literati brought the formal expressive qualities of calligraphy to their practice of painting. The eight basic strokes were adapted to depict the stalks, joint rings, and leaves of bamboo.