monochrome ink washes that produced softer and subtler effects. The paintings of the Southern School are less literal and more poetic and imaginative, allowing a greater freedom for the qi energy to express itself. It was said of Wang Wei that his pictures were poems and his poems were pictures. The Southern School was also known as the Literary School as the natural scenes aimed to convey the mood of the dreaming poet.
Before the Tang dynasty, painters did not sign their works. In the early Tang period, artists became individualists as painting came into its own. The artists added modest signatures in very small characters in an inconspicuous place so as to not mar the design. Later, the Song dynasty artists became bolder and signed their name and the date on the base of the painting at the extreme edge.
Into the Song Dynasty
The Tang dynasty gave way to the short Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era (907–970), which was succeeded by the long reign of the Song dynasty (960– 1279). From the late Tang and into the Song dynasty, people turned away from the military tradition, hiring mercenaries instead. Rather than military men, the policy leaders were scholar officials interested in polite learning, poetry, and the fine arts. The Imperial Examination System was regularized and extended to draw in more candidates for civil service and thus became less aristocratic and more bureaucratic.
In the later Tang dynasty, painters had started to specialize in singular subjects, such as bamboo, chrysanthemum, or horses. During the Five Dynasties, flower and bird painting became popular, and new painting styles emerged. Xu Chongsi (Hsü Ch’ung-Ssu) created the Mo-ku or “boneless” style (without outlines), which has continued up until the present day. The boneless style developed out of calligraphic strokes, which are not of uniform thickness and are shaped more like forms than single lines. This led to a new mastery of the line contour and new graded effects when a brush was loaded with two or three values of ink for a single stroke.
The Northern Song Dynasty
The Song dynasty is known as the golden age of landscape painting. Many emperors were artists themselves and gave considerable patronage to painters. In the Northern Sung dynasty (960–1127), Emperor Huizong (Hui Tsung) was a great painter, poet, and calligrapher. He painted mainly birds and flowers on silk in a realistic, detailed, outlined style filled in with colors. He was famous for the “slender gold” style of calligraphy he developed that looked like twisted wire.
Emperor Huizong wanted court officials to be artists, so the imperial examination required the candidate to illustrate a line from the classics or a well-known poem. Poetry was the “host” and painting was the “guest.” A painting could only win praise if it expressed the poetic idea well. The Chinese painter had to be a student of literature, and he was likely to be a poet also, as was Wang Wei.
With the rise of landscape painting and the waning of figure painting, poets started expressing their thoughts more in nature imagery that captured a mood, such as the sadness of departing. The mingling of poetry and painting also led artists to express more moods in their paintings beyond the contemplative, awe inspiring scenes of earlier artists. Paintings became more introspective and individualistic. In evoking the indwelling spirit of their subject matter, the artists also sought to harmonize that spirit with their own thoughts.
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
