(3 of 6)
Longing for serenity and harmony, Sung emperors liked to turn for contrast to closeups of nature, developed a keen liking for small and intimate scenes. I Yuan-chi's Monkey and Cats, almost playful in both subject matter and execution, is an outstanding example. Such paintings so won the admiration of the Emperor that he awarded I Yuan-chi the commission of decorating a courtyard at his palace on the Yellow River plain.
"My Brother, the Rock."A painter who was to have an equally great influence on succeeding generations was Mi Fei, the ideal exponent of the wen-jen hua, or Literary Man's Painting. He was a great art collector, caustic critic, expert on ink-stones and a lover of fantastically eroded rocks (his favorite, placed in his garden, he addressed as "my elder brother"). His calligraphy (see cut) is one of the most famous in Chinese art history, marked by bold, strong characters that broke with the florid, decorative manner of his predecessors. Despite his eccentric habit of dressing in old-fashioned clothes from the T'ang period. Mi Fei was also a successful courtier, rose to become Secretary of the Board of Rites, and served as a military governor.
As a painter, Mi Fei kept his best work for his friends' appreciation alone, and even then never allowed them to touch the silk for fear it would become soiled. His painting pointed to a new direction. Originating a pointillist style of ink-splash dots (still known as "Mi-dots"), he produced in paintings like Auspicious Pines in the Spring Mountains China's first impressionist landscape. Its curious sugarloaf mountains are drawn in loosely applied brush strokes and washes, trees are carefully controlled blobs of ink. The human scale is merely suggested with the bare-bones outline of a lone pavilion.
Whirlwind Hand. When the fierce Chin Tartars ("The Golden Tribes") swept down over the Great Wall, captured the capital Kaifeng and took Sung Emperor Huitsung, along with 3,000 of his court, into captivity in Mongolia, about 6,500 paintings in the imperial collection dating back over 1,000 years were destroyed or dispersed. But the Sung Dynasty held out in the south for another 150 years—long enough to make their new capital. Hangchow, with its willows and delicately arched bridges, one of the most beautiful cities of antiquity.
To depict the bloody events of history was an affront to Confucian principles of restraint and propriety. When Painter Li
Ti, who had himself barely-escaped from the massacre in the northern capital, hinted at storms and trouble, it was in such bucolic scenes as Cowherds Fleeing Storm. An even more extreme reaction to the mounting threat of further Chin and Mongolian attacks was the withdrawal of the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist painters to secluded mountain retreats.
Believing with Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, that inspiration comes in a flash and cannot be long sustained, the Ch'an painter worked in monochrome "as if a whirlwind possessed his hand." Greatest of them all was Liang K'ai, who had won the Emperor's highest painting award, the Golden Girdle, before he retired to a Buddhist monastery. He dashed off such inspired sketches as his Ink Brushing of an Immortal, showing a monk tearing off his shirt to prove the indifference of the enlightened man to outward appearances.