In much the same spirit, and around the same time, a friend of Dr. Sun sought to revitalize Chinese painting. Kao Chien-fu (1879-1951) went first to France to study drawing and later won a scholarship enabling him to enroll in the Imperial College of Arts in Tokyo. As a youngster, he had studied Chinese painting with the master of flower-and-bird painting, Chu Chao (d. 1899). In his maturity, he attempted to combine "the superior aspects of all traditions, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign"—an aim that became the battle cry of the Lingnan (Kwangtung) School of painting and Kao's legacy to Chinese art. It was the very first time an accomplished Chinese artist had consciously incorporated new, foreign influences into his art in a direct attempt to mold a new and vital mode of painting.
By 1935, when Ou Ho-nien was born in Kwangtung Province's Maoming district, the Lingnan School was already well established in Chinese painting tradition, and it has remained not only one or the most popular influences, but also one or the most criticized. At the age or 17, when Ou began to study painting with the Lingnan School's best known spokesman, Chao Shao-ang (b. 1904), he was subjected early to the open-minded approach or that school. He learned to be sensitive to effective artistic processes, regardless or their date or tradition, and to integrate them into his own works.
Relishing his early training, Ou, today, likes to talk about the catholicity or the Lingnan School, and rinds even the words "school" and "tradition" too narrow for its ever-sensitive, ever-watchful approach to painting. Here is the school's outlook as synopsized by its famous exponent:
"We don't just close our eyes and say, 'Okay, that's it. We use these brush-idioms and not those, these colors and not those; we paint these subjects and not those.'
"On the contrary, we may use the Northern School's famous axe-cut stroke (fu-pi-tsun) to describe a rocky mountain, and its generous background washes for a particular part of a painting. And yet, we may at the same time adopt the Southern School's practice of leaving the center of the composition void, putting the landscape elements on the edges. On the other hand, we may also build a mountain with the Southern School's characteristic brush-mode, the hemp-fiber stroke (pi-ma-tsun), and yet place the mass solidly in the center of the painting, like a Northern School composition.
"Some people say we merely stress gorgeous colors, or that we have only managed to introduce a superficial view. Live, descriptive, and at the same time expressive coloration is only a part of our endeavor. We also stress brushwork, as do the best of the other traditional schools. For us, each contact between brush and paper must make sense—be alive, descriptive, and expressive. We pay particular attention to the weight of each stroke, to the attack of its entrance, and the movement of its exit.
"Look at the other schools, which limit themselves to a few brush-idioms, their hallmark brush strokes. In our case, we use also the hemp-fiber pi-ma-tsun strokes of the Southern School. And we use wet strokes, dry strokes, splayed, and 'flying white' fei pai strokes. We do not lock ourselves into brush-idioms or school traditions. Rather, we use whatever works, whenever it is effective in our painting.
"I love inkwash shui-mo painting. Infinite shades of ink are made possible by control of the water in the ink. And I would not, for instance, avoid the use of colors and stick for inkwash, merely to appear to belong within the idealist painting orthodoxy of the wen-jen tradition. They claim that colors are cheap and seductive, that ink alone is high-brow, scholarly, lofty. I think this is wrong and feel sorry that they have so limited their own artistic potential, so restricted their possibilities in painting.
"There are even those who don't dare to use extra water! But we are not afraid to use anything. There are wonderful things you can do when you wet the paper, or when you use a great amount of water in your brush—areas the Lingnan painters have not been afraid to explore, to develop.
"Tang Yin (1470-1523) associated with idealist painters in the elegant circle of Shen Chou, and yet he dared use much color and Northern School brush-idioms at the same time he was painting in the idealist manner of the Soochow painters. He had the courage to use whatever suited him from the past.
"We admire all the creative geniuses of the past—Tang Yin, the brilliant Lin Liang from Kwangtung, the inventive monks of the late-Ming (Shih-tao, Pa-ta shan-jen, Hung Jen, and Kun-tsan), and the so-called Eight Eccentrics of Yangchou, who brought a new freshness into flower-and-bird compositions as well as landscapes. We are inspired by Southern Sung master Liang Kai's spattered ink po-mo figures—that wonderful spontaneity—and the extremely fine hairs on the ox paintings of various Southern Sung masters.
"We seek exciting, inspiring, new compositions, unusual and heroic in mien. We avoid blindly repeating formulae—being constricted in our choice of brush-modes, color, or themes by external considerations, such as their reputation in the eyes of Tung Chi-chang (the late critic of Ming works) or anyone else. Whatever makes a moving, effective picture we will adopt. We seek to renovate, to create and recreate, constantly, and we hope that the day will come when all people will understand the truly creative, truly thoughtful nature of the Lingnan School."
Lingnan painters bravely (hard traditionalists say brazenly) explore the two extremes of wet and dry brushwork in a single painting. They give much importance to atmospheric mist and distance. The wet strokes on a bamboo or banana leaf glisten moistly in a shimmering light—hallmark Lingnan School effects that, however, can often be slick, without the ponderousness so treasured by traditional connoisseurs. Such strokes, made on the slant with brushtip half-charged with water, can be and are often executed with swift, superficial flips of the wrist by lesser artists, who seek, first of all, the glistening effect, giving lesser weight to the intrinsic quality of the brushwork itself. Orthodox conservatives roundly criticize them for achieving only "cloying, decorative wet hues."
Another aspect in which Lingnan painting is criticized by diehard orthodox connoisseurs is its emotive quality, decried as "saccharin sentimentality." For not only are all Lingnan elements depicted as full of life, be they mountains, tigers, herons, peonies, or the moon, but they invariably project palpable moods, or as detractors are wont to say, "sentimental aspects" (long shunned by orthodox idealist wen-jen painters as foreign, un-Chinese). Such connoisseurs have forgotten how very important emotion or emotionality was in Tang and Sung painting, because since the Yuan period, idealist wen-jen painters have developed a painting tradition based on brush-modes distilled from ancient masters. This tradition, however, became increasingly dry, abstract, and intellectual; emotionality was entirely displaced. The Yuan masters treated painting on a par with calligraphy, making of it, in James Cahill's words, "a performing art." That is, painting had ceased to be a pure dialogue between artist and viewer. Now, the viewer, through the artist, was to experience the art of some ancient master—Tung Yuan, Chu Jan, or Kuo Hsi. It is as if Tung Yuan were Bach or Beethoven, and all post-Yuan painters merely players.
The idealist wen-jen aesthetic has dominated the last 600 years. But in the Northern Sung period, candidates for the Imperial Painting Academy (Han-lin Hua-yuan) had to portray in painting the "sentiments" of poems. Students were judged on the basis of being able to "portray not only the likeness, but the emotional feeling of the subjects, depicted in full accordance with nature." That is, not only were human figures expected to project emotions, but all things in nature as well. This highly sensitive attunement to nature typified the Sung world view, and is eminently Chinese. Although displaced by the dry aesthetic of the Yuan, it was transmitted via the Chan community to Japan, where it took root and grew into a strong and viable painting tradition, still vital today.
Responding to poetic emotionality, Japanese artists of the 12th Century devised a means of projecting that emotionality, even in compositions which were formally subjected to the utmost restraint (such as in the courtly Yamato-e style paintings). They allocated the more overtly emotive values to amorphous elements placed in the periphery of the painting, in the sky, on the ground, or wafting across houses or trees, a device I have identified as the "emotive cloud."
Accomplished with sprinkled or washed ink or pigment, this presence acts upon the unconscious like a blush, a rush of sentiment, a tinge of life. Through the millennium while styles changed, the emotive cloud remained. In Meiji painting, it was removed to the background of central figures as highlight or back-lighting, but functioned effectively in the same way: to quicken the scene, imbuing it with feeling and life.
And it was in Meiji Japan, under masters like Yokoyama Tiakan (1868-1958) and Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942), that Chinese artists like Fu Pao-shih (1904-1965), Chang Dai-chien (1889-1983), and Kao Chien-fu and his younger brother Kao Chi-feng (1889-1933) rediscovered Sung techniques and values—and that long lost life element: the emotionality which quickened the painting and brought it to life with vibrant immediacy. The Chinese also rediscovered through Nihonga (Japanese style painting) another long lost spatial tension between not only human figures, but between twig and rock, blossom and leaf, bird and branch. Nihonga itself was a deliberate amalgam of these traditional values and new Western realism and perspective. Chinese artists found a model of "modernization" and saw, also, how Japanese artists kept Western elements in check, adopting them only in moderation and maintaining, on the whole, a Japanese quality in their painting.
Curiously, though Ou Ho-nien has never studied in Japan, of all Chinese artists who have ever exhibited there, he is among the best known. His works are always sell-outs, at exorbitant prices. Why should this be so? Perhaps because through works created in the true Lingnan spirit, Japanese viewers can more fully relate to "Chinese painting," for here are Southern Sung elements which, though treasured in Japan without interruption, were abandoned in Chinese painting for about 700 years.
The emotive cloud is used effectively in Ou's animal portraits—tigers, fish, egrets—and his landscapes as well. He achieves highly poetic moods, for example, in Hermit Fisherman in Bamboo Grove Stream and Boating to Peach Blossom Spring. The darkened washes in the foregrounds not only add depth to the water, but mystery to the journey. It is the use of such atmospheric wash and subtle shading which distinguish the best of Ou's paintings from the intellectual exercises of run-of-the-mill dry-brushwork paintings on blank paper. While the wen-jen communication is an intellectual one, a display of good brushwork in a playful mood (almost regardless of the purported subject of the painting, be it bamboo or landscape), Lingnan School paintings, and Ou's works in particular, seem to transmit, on the one hand, eye-catching, striking visual imagery, and on the other, a poetic and emotional flavor. The emotive contrast between fishermen in a chilly, mysterious atmosphere and the warm, glowing mood in Morning Sail are both achieved by none other than the emotive cloud device, using different configurations and hues.
Technical mastery of water and wash enables Ou to produce stunning evocations of Southern Sung style landscapes, such as the misty valley portion of Mountain Village. To the left, seeping pale inkwash in changing tonalities forms conifers of ghostly apparition in the thickly misty valley. Each shade of pale inkwash is considered, not blindly applied, and the spatial effects are brilliant.
In a way, Ou Ho-nien has surpassed his teachers. His brushwork in flower painting is spontaneous, but not overly "exposed." His peonies and pumpkins have that bit of restraint, han-hsu, traditionally treasured by great masters. He has developed a panoramic landscape style based less on handed-down copybook models than on personal experience outdoors. Huge, stunning vistas of Yosemite or Taiwan give his oeuvre a grand, heroic quality that is at once contemporary (because of their perspective), and ancient in feeling, recalling the Northern Sung masters' love of China's majestic mountains and rivers. And all of this is just as it was "programmed" long ago by the founding fathers of the Lingnan School: That each generation should outdo the preceding one, and that no one should be passively nurtured on mere tradition, bur do his best to fuse aspects of Eastern and Western, traditional and contemporary painting into a personal statement. This, clearly, Ou Ho-nien has done.