Taiwan Today

Students and collectors of Chinese art history have long been familiar with the term "literati painting," commonly accepted as the briefest rendition of "painting by literary men," or in Chinese, wen jen hua—a term which first came into common use in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Wen jen hua, in turn, evolved as a variant from the Northern Sung (960-1127) notion of shih jen hua or shih tai fu hua—painting by scholars, or painting by scholar-statesmen.

The notion of erudite statesmen playing with painting, as a form of elegant expression, became a sort of articulated movement during the late 11th Century. These scholar-statesmen defined their hobby as shih tai fu hua; we, looking from a more detached vantage point, came to call it scholar­-amateur painting, and eventually, to save time, literati painting.

As we follow the ethos of these supremely artistic men with their high-caliber brushwork (and self-esteem), and as we become increasingly familiar with both their writings and paintings through the centuries, it is very easy to fall prey to their self-assessments and view the history of Chinese painting from their perspective: i.e. literati painting as the highest achievement of Chinese painters through the millennia—it alone adequately reflecting the souls of highly cultivated men. And behind all this, too: the premise that the highest function and highest spiritual aspiration (if not attainment) of art is to mirror.

As many close observers have subsequently discovered, this revelation of the soul (hsieh yi, the writing out of feelings) is all too quickly reduced to an exercise in brushmanship, or a competition disguised as perpetual adoration and involving a "brush-touch" brushwork excellence relying on variations of those brush-modes deemed most sublime. In effect, the main burden of the literati tradition, from the 14th Century onward, becomes keenly honed sensitivity to the brushmanship deployed in painting. One judged not the contents of the painting, but its brushwork, means, or skill—that is, craft: the creative energies of the literati were poured into the craft of brushwork.

Viewers can "replay" such painting, in the space/time continuum, in a psycho-physiological state virtually identical to that generated by listening to a record of artistic voice-deployment by Sutherland, Sills, or Caruso. One weighs the line, its fullness, roundness, internal variation, attack, staccato, vibrato, crescendo, etc, with physiological empathy as well as aesthetic enjoyment. To coopted brush-wielding Chinese collectors and critics, examining a piece of painting or calligraphy was no different: it was a participatory exercise, an "insider's art"—an accessible endeavor for the educated elite.

The exclusivity and high self-esteem which the evolved term implies, apply to traditions in both Chinese calligraphy and painting. This observer, having studied this phenomenon for the past twenty years, has closely examined its theories and practices. And there is certainly no doubt about its sublime realizations in the hands of a few exceptional artists. In the degree of pure self-expression possible (With the least reliance on anecdotal content), as in the high standards of brush-excellence established, it is, indeed, all quite singular in world history. But it is also but a fraction of China's artistic output.

The other side of the coin, however, almost overwhelms with the enormous quantity and diversity of artistic expression through painting alone. This actual achievement has—stunningly—been virtually obliterated for lack of written description and of theoretical and technical discussion.

Questions cry to be posed: Was this particular cultural outpouring of populations of hundreds of millions capable of producing only a mere handful of "great master painters" through twenty-five centuries? Is literati expression all that was outstanding in the history of Chinese painting? On a per capita basis, that would demand that the Chinese be the most impoverished, least artistic in the world.

 

 

 

As students of Chinese art history, distant from the scholar-literary-gentry elite of traditional Chinese society, we may freely review and freely reassess a phenomenon considered by its practitioners over the ages to be the greatest thing ever to happen to Chinese painting. We may note first-off that the terms shih jen hua (scholar painting) and wen jen hua (literati painting) were coined by a bureaucratic elite which doubled as practitioners of the said artform. We also note that there was no second voice, no uninvolved critic to record the points of view of those variegated consumers totally unversed in the craft of painting. On the contrary, critics and theorists were, most often, themselves painters or calligraphers of no mean repute and, without exception, members of an educated elite whose training in the art of brushwielding brought it full-circle, automatically, to be pungently insightful critics.

They could not help being deeply conversant with brushwielding and all the standards of good brushwork, making of literati painting an insiders' art. So far so good. But attendant on such amateur painting, especially from the 14th Century onwards, grew up a mammoth corpus of inscriptions and eulogies, records and catalogs wherein admirers and collectors added their impressions. And this body of literature fills shelves of the art historian's library, mightily testifying to the social, extra-aesthetic values which sprang up alongside this phenomenon of intensive painting by cultivated amateurs. Indeed, so much is cultivation (education, class, prestige) stressed in the texts, that the lack thereof, inexorably, became implicitly unacceptable.

The roots of China's art elitism go back to the days of imperial unification when contending feudal states, vying in artistic expression and techniques as well as power, were subordinated by the State of Chin (221-207 B.C.). A centralized government replaced the contending aristocracies and, with that, an attendant moral ethics and bureaucratic hierarchy (equipped with avenues for social mobility through book-learning and examinations) replaced more diversified (and perhaps more lively) forms of statecraft, society, and art. Alternatives in all spheres of human endeavor appear then to dwindle—to conform, and many erstwhile, viable artistic processes fall to the wayside one by one. In an insidious way, the Chinese began to close options to artistic expression until finally (by the 14th Century) only one mode, the brushwork-oriented linear mandate, "worthy of being in the libraries of gentlemen," ruled.

There still remained interesting "deviants." An innovator of the Chin period sprayed red ink from his mouth to create murals of dragons and other mythological animals. Chang Heng of the Eastern Han painted strange beasts and sundry demonic figures with his toes. In the Tang Dynasty (618-907), there were still artists like Wang Mo who painted with their head and feet, those who used their turbans, those who bran­dished from two to five brushes in one hand, and those who sprayed dragon clouds with inkwash issuing from their mouths.

Thus in the early period of Chinese Empire, alternatives still survived. We read mentions of those who painted with water, fire, lacquer, and embroidery, or those who created paintings with thick, raised lines (low relief), using iron or mud. But, already, the Tang Dynasty critic Chang Yen-yuan, writing in his Li Tai Ming Hua Chi (Records of Famous Paintings of the Ages, ca. 847 A.D.), gives the clear impression that by his time, such "excesses" had gone too far. Discussing the "blown-­cloud" spray method of painting, he declares bluntly: "This is a brilliant idea, but since the traces of the brush (emphasis mine) are not visible, it cannot be called painting....In landscape painting there is also the so-called 'spattered ink' method; but that cannot be called painting either." In one stroke, Chang relegates non-brushwork-oriented paintings beyond the pale.

From the time of Emperor Shen­-tzung in the 11th Century, painters in the Imperial Art Academy had to pass examinations in the belles lettres—were forced to be quite literate. The great poet-calligrapher-statesman Su Shih (1037-1101) contrasted the paintings of statesmen, shih jen hua, with that of artisans, hua kung, saying one captured the spirit in the subject, while the other merely copied its surface skin.

Surviving texts, obviously, should not be viewed as objective criticism from the outside, but as natural (if purposeful) self-promotion by members of the elite social group which comprised the scholar-bureaucracy. Indeed, it is notable that in texts surviving over the last two millennia, paintings by monks, or by illiterate craftsmen, are barely mentioned, and when they are, never discussed and argued over with that energy that the art theorists devoted to their own genre.

If we take surviving texts as reliable histories of Chinese painting and calligraphy, we are forced to conclude that there was no significant artistic development as a result of the "illiterate painting" of lacquerers, mural painters, book illustrators, textile designers, tile painters, bronze inscribers, writers on bamboo and wooden slips or pottery jars, artists who illustrated accounting books or temple structures. We would be constrained to believe that painting as an independent artistic activity (free of education, independent from calligraphic mastery) made no significant contribution to the arts of China.

Though, obviously, this is not the case, most surviving written (and studied) records from the 14th Century onwards converge on and around the literati. And like sheep, later writers follow suit.

Modern scholars, seeking enlighten­ment in such ancient texts, are quickly dazzled by the "unsurpassed" achievements of literati painting, notwithstanding the fact that it is easily seen that "illiterate painting" rose to unparallelled heights in the Warring States period and declined rapidly after the Tang Dynasty. And from the Yuan Dynasty onwards, there was a radical reduction in the diversity and vitality of nearly all the arts. This observer proposes that this constriction of Chinese artistic creativity is in direct proportion to the growth of writings on the arts and to the concurrent growth of concepts attaching values to styles or schools, regardless of individual performance.

Examining the giant, dark shadow which literati painting has cast over the potential history of Chinese art, particularly since the 14th Century, it is time to summon the objectivity to acknowledge its severe constrictions on what might otherwise have been a healthy development of Chinese painting and calligraphy. We have only to look at the multi-faceted brilliance of the Warring States arts to see the tremendous potentials of Chinese painting and calligraphy, not to mention sculpture—potentials which slowly eroded under mounting pressures and constrictions by members of the ruling elite. A more accurate term for this phenomenon than "literati painting," unflattering as it may be, is "elite traditions." A brief review helps, also, to outline the rise and tenacity of the linear (brushwork-oriented) forms in the brushwork arts.

Over the millennia of Chinese art since the Neolithic period, the art of the brush has occupied a singular and central position. Used on matte or burnished pots in black or red, the Chinese brush seems, from the start, to have been made with a tuft of pliant animal fur shaped to a point at the tip. And already, there is a marked preference for projecting in three-dimensional form, images long practiced in two-dimensional fashion, both brush-painted and "written."

The ancient pottery-decorator in China conceived his decor in horizontal bands, to be applied onto the rounded vessel body. That is, the experience of using the brush and of two-dimensional imagining outweighed any notion of integrating form and decor. The artist did not reveal as strong a sensitivity toward the sculptural, three-dimensional totality as he did toward linear decor in two dimensional bands. This is markedly evident from the earliest vessels excavated to date.

Whether from Panpo, Chingliankang, or Kansu, decor begins at the lip or neck, but never extends itself to the inside or the bottom of the vessel. This would suggest the recognition of another, independent and inviolable plane. Lower down toward the bottom of the object there is almost always a second margin separating decor from its remaining surface. The Neolithic potter in China arbitrarily worked in bands, making independent and sovereign zones. The imposition of a two-dimensional perception of space and decor over a realization of the vessel's three-dimensional potential may be cited as an ethnic trail.

While the earliest traces of the brush have not yet come to light, it is clear, however, that by Panpo times the ancient craftsmen were already following certain artistic parameters which were eventually to define the characteristics of Chinese brushwork as we know it today:

—The implement as a tuft of animal fur held firmly in a tube, where the hairs are so placed as to create a pointed tip.

—Pigments of black or red—from the then most-abundant soot and mineral oxides.

—Decor visualized in terms of two-dimensional designs.

—A dominant linearity—decor in planes (or silhouette) holds a notably minor place.

Some scholars believe that the markings along the rims of certain Panpo bowls represent writing, perhaps numerals. Whatever the case may be, they are clearly distinct in character from what may be termed pictorial motifs, either geometric or representational. Both the "writing" and the "painting," however, exhibit tendencies of brush-usage which appear to have continued into historical times, on down through the centuries to the present day. These brush-usage tendencies include the following:

—Images and signs generated by the pointed-fur brush.

—Lines either centered (with the brushtip running down the center during its course across the painted surface) or aslant (with the tip at one edge of the line and the belly at the other). These two main types would come to be known as "centered brush" and "slanted brush" wielding (chung feng and hsieh feng, respectively).

—Wrist pressure that is either steady (in which case the lines do not change in width) or shifting with an up­-and-down movement (in which case the lines swell and shrink during their course).

When the art of the brush assumed ritual significance, as has been documented with the emergence of oracle-­bone inscriptions in the Shang period (16th—11th Century B.C.), not only the script of the oracle, but the act of brushing on and carving the spiritual communication became enveloped in a magical aura. The diviner-calligrapher, whose social prominence is indicated by his signature on oracle bones, acquired a sacred status from his powers of supernatural communication. In early China, communion with spirits was not so much through dance, fire, or singing as it was through the art of the brush. The characters were first written out in black or vermilion with a fur-tipped, pointed brush onto bones or shells. Then they were carved along the brush-traces.

It may be assumed that during the oracle-bone periods of the Shang Dynasty, brushwielding diviners and mere craftsmen occupied unequal ranks—that the diviner enjoyed a social status unthinkable for the craftsmen who painted palace walls, tiles, and tombs. It may be further assumed that while diviners might indulge in painting for pleasure, the reverse was doubtless unthinkable. It may not be wrong to suggest that a degree of exclusivity and a certain social status became attached to this particular form of brush art as early as the Shang Dynasty; that this exclusivity and status formed a central part of the socio-religio-political sphere of the Shang world; and that it became deeply embedded in the Chinese consciousness as Chinese culture evolved, down to the present, without interruption.

If this hypothesis holds, it will be seen that a resumption of status and exclusivity in the post-Han era—in connection with a particular artform—needed no new stimulus, but required only a new standard, commonly admired. One may argue that precisely such social status and exclusivity were revived during the last two millennia of empire, first in calligraphy and then in painting. Although by Han times the sacred function of writing had long disappeared, age-­old association of particular artforms with status and exclusivity had not­— indeed, had become habitual.

From now on style and status would fuse and acquire a validity that was independent of any utilitarian function. Style became symbolic of class, and status. While for the period up to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) no case can be made for or against such hypotheses, the texts which begin to accrue after the Han Dynasty clearly reflect the sense of self-worth and superiority of those educated men who, by dint of their command of the written word, had joined the elite. These men were to launch and uphold China's elitist traditions in the brush arts.

In calligraphy, the elite tradition held sway for some fourteen-hundred years, from the time of Wang Hsi-chih (321-379 or 303-361, of the Eastern Tsin Dynasty), and his son Wang Hsien-chih (344-386), to the end of the Chin Dynasty. While there had been men renowned for calligraphy before, none claimed the universal appeal of the members of the Wang family, legends even in their own lifetimes; their works were objects of collecting...and of forgeries.

At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, the calligraphy of Wang Hsi­-chih rose to its highest pinnacle as Emperor Taitzung hunted down all available fragments of Wang's hand. By his decree, calligraphy also became a new subject in the Imperial Examinations, by which the promising talent of the land was chosen for public office. And now, the Wang style dominated calligraphy and was practiced by youths preparing for the examinations, aspiring to officialdom and social status.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the Wang style became the national style in officialdom and social status. And in spite of remarkable stylistic alternatives propounded by distinguished calligraphers thereafter, nothing could shake its preeminence.

Tracing copies of purported Wang fragments were made in great numbers, and many were further subjected to engraving in stone, from which rubbings became a tertiary form of his art. As the stones wore out over centuries of weathering and rubbing, many were often recut, and new collectanea were recompiled at intervals over the centuries. The sacred, reliquary value they have attained testifies to the fusion of style with status in the art of calligraphy—a singular fusion that may be considered a significant Chinese cultural phenomenon.

One may well examine the phenomena here termed the "elite traditions" and consider their practical, extra-­aesthetic value as symbols of social status. In the context of civil-service examinations, calligraphy had become a subject since the Tang Dynasty, and Taitzung's manic love of the Wang style had made it the style or avenue toward success. It would have been lunacy for aspirants to public office and social status to consider practicing any other style. In subsequent history, practitioners of the Wang style never "went wrong" in their choice of this mode. Needless to say, compelling alternatives were offered, and not infrequently, but their "drawing power" never rose above that of the Wang.

The later Sung period showed resistance to the increasing obsession with calligraphy methods and championed lively alternatives in individual styles wherein rigorous exertion was not so stressed, and wherein personal idiosyncracies were nurtured and developed. But after the Sung Dynasty, the greatest names in calligraphy were Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322) and Tung Chi­-chang (1555-1636), practitioners of the Wang style.

In view of the fact that the original Wang image had long been a matter of speculation, and one created one's own ideas of it through copies and copies of copies, its "aesthetic" in the history of Chinese art is a notable phenomenon. In short, the Wang style of calligraphy became a princely art, suitable not only for expression of one's command of the brush but, more important, for self-identification as a member of the elite tradition...a game of social status. The tradition of Wang calligraphy, and not Wangs' calligraphy, became the source and end of fourteen centuries of Chinese calligraphic art.

As the elite tradition evolved, succeeding generations of artists took part in a spiritual communion with the ancient master in whose name the tradition ruled. In time, the tradition gathered around itself the aura of history, that most sacred of all Chinese treasures. In this way, the elite tradition encased a fraternity across time, a club without walls that was, also, a self-perpetuating avenue to social status.

It was not till the end of the 18th Century that the beauty of ancient inscriptions on stone and bronzes of the Eastern Chou period (770-256 B.C.) was rediscovered. Now, for the first time, calligraphers embraced with genuine enthusiasm and confidence a liberator from antiquity.

These were cumbersome scripts, based on curvilinear configurations, up­right brushwielding, and rather slow execution. Already in the Chou period they had been relegated to a ritualistic function in the carving of seals (hence called the "seal-styles") and decoration of bronze vessels, or of pavilion plaques. But as the excavation of ancient bronzes was spurred by increased interest in antiquarian studies, a powerful new movement focusing on the study of early engravings emerged and finally liberated Chinese calligraphy from its fourteen­ century obeisance to the Wang style.

This period witnessed a dynamic flowering of vigorous and viable calligraphy from various quarters. Chao Chih-chien (1829-1844) infused new energy into brushwork—vigorous lines applied equally to his "new calligraphy" and to his paintings of flowers and fruits, which burst with a vitality unprecedented in Chinese floral painting.

This was the fountainhead of the dynamic school of painting whose lineage may be traced through Wu Chang-shuo (1844-1927) and Chi Pai-shih (1863-1957). The work of these masters is characterized by vigorous and full-bodied brushwork, equally deployed in calligraphy and painting. The vines, branches, and texture strokes on rocks, or animals, are nothing more than variations of their new-found calligraphy brushwork. These masters, then, may be termed the calligraphy-painters, and their work, "calligraphy painting."

Other modern painters emerged in an elite tradition in Chinese painting formed around the 14th Century, when the Mongols occupied China and the Han-Chinese scholar-gentry, hitherto the creme de la creme of society, lost their social status. Indeed, those living in south China were ranked ninth in a ten-class system, just above beggars.

Scholars of the south, including Chao Meng-fu, scion of the vanquished Imperial House of the Sung Dynasty, witnessed an abrupt halt in the production of bright scholar-statesmen from their special realm. Their well nurtured erudition and energetic drives toward success and achievement had to find release elsewhere: they turned inward, taking up their brushes in painting. By thus joining the confraternity of ancient masters of the brush, they would gain social status by default. Though they became almost full-time amateur painters, they unwittingly injected a spirit of exclusivity and narrowness of artistic focus (which was to intensify over the next six centuries). They sought—through high quality brushwork, brilliantly deployed—to express their feelings in a vocabulary borrowed from Sung landscape painting. That is, landscape became the medium through which Yuan amateurs expressed self.

This was the birth of the elite tradition in painting—the idealist, amateur, or wen jen movement. Its ideological genesis is to be found among 11th Century scholar-statesmen. The Yuan development of wen jen hua, however, belies the profound reversal of the values, spirit, and approach of their ancient idols.

Unlike the shih tai fu scholar-statesmen of the Northern Sung Dynasty, who advocated playing at picture-making with the brush as a hobby for spiritual release, these men devoted themselves nearly full-time to their artistically ambitious endeavors, cultivating a personal style while painting with the time and dedication of professionals. But they also propounded and developed an amateur look, characterized by the appearance of simplicity and spiritual loftiness, through highly refined brushwork.

Yuan wen jen painting is not, as commonly believed, a continuation and extension of ideals established in the Northern Sung Dynasty. On the contrary, the Yuan movement quite betrayed the Sung spirit of spontaneity in taking up the brush; in playfulness in applying brush to paper; and in truthfulness to the spirit of the things observed. That is, while Sung scholar-amateurs believed that one was not to paint like a professional—that one need follow no method, only capture the essence of the subject—the self was merely the incidental medium by which the subject was captured and presented.

Su Shih (1037-1101) discussed such painting by amateur scholar-statesmen, stating:

When Wen Tung painted bamboo,
He saw bamboo, not himself
Nor was he simply unconscious
     of himself:
Trance-like, he left his body.
His body was transformed
     into bamboo,
Creating inexhaustible freshness.
(Translated by Susan Bush)

Su had been one of those who rebelled against the Wang hegemony in calligraphy and the method-fixation of the Tang Dynasty. Already, in his own day, he was considered an untrammeled calligrapher, poet, essayist, and statesman extraordinaire.

However, his calligraphy departed from the faultless elegance of the Wang style in a radical fashion; he wrote practically lying on the table. Defying all taboos accrued since the Tang Dynasty, he hardly lifted his brush when writing, causing the characters to be lopsided—large on the left and small to the right. And yet his work remains unsurpassed and among the most beloved calligraphy of all time. In painting, he also proposes an untrammeled, utterly free attitude toward the art, declaring that it was not important to strain for verisimilitude, but that people good with the calligraphic brush are "born painters" who paint, rather than formal likenesses, the inner spirit (of things).

The self-styled eccentric Mi Fei (1052-1107) extolled the virtues of landscapes which were not ostentatious, but unassertive. Writing during a time when the bizarre and ostentatious were in favor, he effectively asserted his own quiet leanings.

Both Mi and Su stressed the spontaneous, the unlabored in art. Had their ideals truly taken hold, the wen jen tradition would not have become elite or exclusive, but full of invention and creativity. Lambasting the titans of his day, Mi exhumed, from relative eclipse, the southern masters Tung Yuan (10th Century member of the Southern-Tang Academy in Nanking) and his follower, the monk-painter Chu Jan.

These two masters painted the gently rolling hills of the Tungting Lake district in textured strokes, modeling the soft, moist, earthen slopes via a series of long, ropy lines later called "hemp-fiber strokes." These notably required less professional training than the so-called "axe-cut strokes" employed by the northern painters to model the granite cragginess of their precipitous cliffs.

Holding the brush aslant to achieve the broad axe-cut strokes without sufficient training, one was liable to create "flat strokes" without substance. On the other hand, the ropy hemp-fiber strokes required only a simple extension of ordinary brush-usage. If one had already developed a fairly good hand, it was indeed second-nature to paint well (that is, in the eyes of scholars highly sensitive to the quality of brushwork).

By the 11th Century, when Su Shih wrote, the connoisseurship of calligraphy had long been operating at its peak; inferior brushwork was not only discerned at once, but had become socially unacceptable. Good brushwork was required of all men of status, and excelling in calligraphy was a common goal.

Under these circumstances, brushwork became an index of one's cultivation. In the Yuan Dynasty, this same principle was applied to painting, while Su Shih and Mi Fei played with it in the 11th Century and wrote about "painting in (a scholar-statesman's) spare time," here in the 14th Century, would-be statesmen in self-exile in the south could, and did, devote full-time effort to the realization of what they thought were Su's and Mi's ideals. But while Su and Mi championed a free, untrammeled, individualistic expression, the Yuan masters developed the prototypes of what eventually became rather stereotyped (even unified) modes: all branches of the imagined Tung-Chu style and of the more flamboyant, more slanted brush style of the Lee Cheng-Kuo Hsi school.

Following Chao Meng-fu, many eremitic scholar-painters and monks in the chiang nan area (the entire area South of the Yangtze River) continued to paint in styles Chao had distilled (from the ancient landscape styles of Tung-Chu and Lee-Kuo as he had then known them) and developed variations on the brush-modes (mainly the ropy hemp-fiber strokes and moss and inky-moss dots).

Each Yuan master revealed his own distinct personality through his particular evocation of the Tung-Chu legacy. Each created a particular variant of the hemp-fiber stroke and laid down the foundation of a brush-mode tradition that was to equal those of the great calligraphers in artistic weight and social status.

Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354) painted the immortal Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains between 1347 and 1350. This legendary handscroll shows a process of abstraction beginning to replace that of description in painting. Instead of projecting the substance and grandeur of mountains, brushwork "flavor" is playfully performed, in a rich mixture to be savored the way one listens to a trained voice singing.

Here, the song or message is less important to the connoisseur than the quality of the voice itself. In this detail, one savors the rich interplay of brushwork, combining dark and light, wet and dry, long and short, straight and wiggly. A new idea of painting was thus established where one "read" paintings for their brushwork flavor at a very close range.

These were amateur artists who painted for the love of it—for each other only. They aspired neither to the market nor public renown. In spite of such exclusive eremitism, however, their art became widely sought after, emulated, and forged. And within fifty years of Huang's death, the wen jen movement was in full swing.

By the early 15th Century, the cult of the Four Great Masters of the Yuan Dynasty was firmly established, and the brush-modes of Huang Kung-wang, Ni Tsan (1301-1374), and Wang Meng (d. 1385) and Wu Chen (1280-1354) began to assume a function not dissimilar to the calligraphy copybook. Their "brush-spirits" were studied no less avidly than the "brush-spirits" of Tang calligraphy masters.

The artists' minds turned, now, from the study of Nature to focus on the ready-made models of previous painters. The brush-modes of the Four Great Yuan Masters served as standards from which to create variations, such as Shen Chou's (1427-1509) Landscape in the Manner of Huang Kung-wang, dated 1494, in the Shanghai Museum. Shen founded a Ming style of painting in the manner of the Yuan masters.

While Yuan wen jen painters were forced by Mongol control of China into a reclusive (and exclusive) lifestyle, Ming men were free to rejoin society and participate fully in its cultural endeavors. But instead, the gentry-coterie around Shen Chou in Soochow lived on in voluntary seclusion, perpetuating Yuan ways in lifestyle and in painting.

We may see this movement as the shadow of a shadow. Painting now was purely about painting, and not about Nature or other subjects directly apprehended. While Yuan masters lost touch with corporeal reality but worked from Sung models, Ming masters were nurtured (virtually) solely on Yuan painting. Their statements were about previous statements, much like the annotations of annotations so ubiquitous in compendia of the Chinese classics.

The focus moved toward the brush-modes of past masters, much as calligraphy. New compositions remained fairly stereotyped—hills across waters, some rocks, a few clumps of trees, and an occasional bridge, with or without a human presence. This was "read" just as one read the brush-movements in a calligraphic work: the viewer actually went through a psycho-physiological "replay" of the artist's actions. One began from the point of attack, weighing the artist's wrist pressure, brushtip angle, following through the strokes, replaying every subtle shift of weight and brushtip direction within a single line.

This sort of empathy and thorough understanding comes from a fellow practitioner, a fellow scholar schooled in calligraphy. In other words, the painting by those amateurs called wen jen hua was an exclusive, insider's art. No longer was anecdotal or representational con­tent of interest, only the brushwork of the individual artist in his particular rendition of the brush-mode of one of the Yuan masters.

When painting by the self-proclaimed elite of the art becomes exclusively preoccupied with excelling in a past mode, its parameters become increasingly narrow. New inventions in brushwielding, were now, of course unthinkable, and new pictorial models out of the question.

A hypothetical critic of art history might say of China's traditional literati-painters, "Let them paint in their elite tradition; the overwhelming majority of artists was free to be more creative and innovative..." This was not the case, however. Such freedom was out of the question. For patronage arose from the literate classes—from the Emperor, his ministers, officials, and the local gentry. Chinese society as a whole held the scholar class in the highest respect and awe. It seemed to be the Chinese tradition not to go against tradition—not to attempt artistic processes which had not been long tested (and certainly not those which had been belittled in print).

From the start the tufted, pointed brush held sway, and already by the 9th Century, the critic Chang Yen-yuan had declared that representations aided by "fire, spraying with the mouth, brushing with the hair, etc." were unacceptable as "paintings" and would not be discussed in his treatise on the art.

Even though Mi Fei, the "Mighty Mouth" of Chinese criticism, had been known to paint his "ink plays" using paper twists, lotus pods, and squeezed sugarcane, none of these works were recorded by the literati collectors, and tradition quickly reverted to brush-monopoly in the fine (or refined) arts. In this way the elite tradition developed its stranglehold on Chinese painting. Status-conscious painters could not dream of innovations.

The next six centuries were governed by the Orthodoxy, that is, the wen jen elite orthodoxy firmly founded on the lineage of the Four Yuan Masters—the school of Shen Chou and Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559) in the early Ming Dynasty, and of Tung Chi-chang (the "Big Mouth" of later criticism) and his followers in the Ching Dynasty: "The Four Wangs, Wu, and Yun".

While during the three hundred years of the Ming Dynasty there was some lively dichotomy between the professional painters of the Imperial Academy and the wen jen followers of the Yuan masters, in the Ching Dynasty, the fate of Chinese painting was sealed, the final screw turned: the amateurs' essentially non-pictorial, non-painterly (i.e. linear) style became the chosen style at the Imperial Court. The Manchu emperors, seeking to curry favor from among China's top intelligentsia, played the latters' eremitic, elitist and exclusive game along with them; they chose followers of Tung Chi-chang to lead the painting academy. This rang the death knell for creative or descriptive endeavors and forever confined painting to effete indoor pursuit of brush-modes and brushwork excellence in the manner of selected ancients.

The risen stars were now Wang Shih-ming (1592-1680), Wang Chien (1598-1677), Wang Hui (1632-1717), Wang Yuan-chi (1642-1715), Wu Li (1632-1718), and Yun Shou-ping (1633-1690). Their works are most abundantly represented in the Imperial collection in the National Palace Museum of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Though innovative painters did emerge during the Ming and Ching Dynasties, their impact was usually short-lived. Finger painting, original compositions, and new uses of water and colors arose but, one after the other, were rejected. For a while in the 17th and 18th Centuries, some brilliant as well as second-class painters flourished, encouraged by a Chinese social and economic upheaval which spawned a diversified patronage. But in spite of it all, the Orthodoxy could not be displaced.

The innovators were considered in their own day, and by posterity, crazy, wild—beyond the pale. Exceptions only proved the rule: Wang Yuan-chi of the elite tradition, for example, greatly admired the work of Shih Tao (Tao Chi, 1641-c.1718) and Chu Ta (Pa-ta Shan-jen, 1626-c.1710), members of the fallen royal house who had taken the tonsure for political reasons. Both monks actually evolved their styles from Tung Chi­-chang, Wang's own distant idol. Shih Tao had opened extraordinary but heterodox horizons in painting. In one album leaf, he demonstrated the possibility for free variations in the style of Wang Meng. But his untrammeled, freewheeling alternatives were largely ignored in China, where elite traditions had been given a reenforcing boost in Tung Chi-chang's powerful manifesto on painting.

Shih Tao's cousin, Chu Ta, was likewise a political-refugee monk. Chu was endowed with uniquely expressive brushwork and, like Tao Chi, contributed to the potential of Chinese painting by opening up vast spaces in his art, breathing new life into landscape painting styles which were becoming densely cluttered. His album leaf, Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan, exhibits creative uses of the elite mode, but, like Tao Chi, his pictorial alternatives were largely ignored till this century. In spite of their elite lineage and royal blood, their creative and original works placed them beyond the pale, setting them firmly apart from the elite orthodoxy. Clearly, conformity to the elite style outweighed even royal pedigrees.

A fundamental difference separates The Four Wangs, Wu and Yun (of an elite tradition now further confirmed by Imperial favor) from the oeuvre of the two imperial monks. The elite masters confined their works strictly to known images and techniques, while the monks applied their Tung premise to explorations of forms, colors, brush-modes, and space, the likes of which had not been dreamt of in the polite circles of Chinese art for a millennium.

Even deep into the 20th Century, dyed-in-the-wool members of the elite tradition would deny the artistic merit of Shih Tao and Pa-ta. Direct descendants of the Orthodoxy, from the Four Wangs and painter-theorists Tang Tai, Hua Lin, Hsi Kang, and Tai Hsi of the Ching Dynasty, down to men of the present century like Wu Hu-fan (1894-1965, and significantly, still much honored on the mainland), considered past innovators "not worth looking at;" Wu's coterie in Shanghai spent their life-energies pursuing works of the great orthodox masters of the Ching Dynasty.

Wang Chi-chien (b. 1907, better known as C. C. Wang) was a member of this bastion of conservatism and diligently bought and copied original works line for line, master after master, fusing his own aesthetic with those of the ancients in precisely the way they themselves had done, forever pursuing antiquity, refining past experience.

Meanwhile, Chinese painting was taking great strides toward modernization. Young artists with fresh visions abandoned their traditions (not without some sense of great relief) and went abroad in droves to seek new inspiration.

New schools of painting were established by artists trained in Japan. Kao Chien-fu (1879-1951) and his students built a strong Lingnan movement in Kwangtung Province; from Japan they brought back long-lost ingredients of Sung painting—masterful wash and shading, and poetic expressiveness. Fu Pao-shih (1904-1965) brought back a highly personal and evocative tradition, while Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) brought back the long-abandoned spattered-ink and provocative mineral-­blues and greens from the Tang period and imbued them with a bravado (in landscapes and lotus paintings) quite unseen in China before.

Turning to the West, Lin Feng-mien (b. 1900) transformed oils to a use resembling inkwash, while Hsu Pei-hung (1895-1953) used Chinese ink and brush to introduce European perspective and shading techniques.

In different ways, these pioneers attempted to reinvigorate an ancient and exhausted Chinese art. They each returned to a Chinese expression, but from experiences founded primarily in Western art and not Chinese traditions. It is in this respect that the collective image of early 20th Century Chinese painting reflects an odd vitality, a refreshing newness, even though the artistic attainment, in the long history of Chinese art, may fall below some of the exalted heights. Even the "National Master" (Kuo Shih), Chang Dai-chien, whose coterie spawned the great Shih Ta and Pa-ta revival, incorportated the mossy airiness of Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942) and other masters of Nihonga in his oeuvre.

On the other hand, the archly-conservative, orthodox group around Wu Hu-fan and the collector Pang Yuan­-chi (c. 1865-1949), with no eyes for anything new, not only staunchly revered the Four Wangs Tradition but resolutely castigated all the brilliant achievements of past innovators, including Shih Tao and Pa-ta. Moreover, they even looked down upon the contemporary painters involved in their revival.

Wang Chi-chien was the spokes­man of these elitists. He shared their fervor in collecting as well as their exclusive love of the elite tradition; he was inspired and nourished when making line-copies of Four Wangs paintings. Indeed, he was on the verge of becoming a distinguished exemplar of the elite tradition when civil unrest broke out in China and forced him into exile in America in 1949.

The subsequent, thoroughly liberating influence of living in America has been of signal value to the growth (or denouement) of the elite tradition. For Wang Chi-chien's development took a radical turn when he moved West; his visual horizons clearly expanded in the great metropolis of New York. But more importantly, his mental shackles, the honored shackles of the exclusive tradition, slowly began to crumble.

As Jackson Pollock stunned the West with his dribbles, he doubtless also reminded Wang of Tang painting anecdotes (of action painting, ink-splashing, rolling bodily in ink, etc). Wang gradually relaxed his constraints and invented red skies and black waters. He even spent some time studying Western art at the Art Students League, but determining that Western techniques had nothing to offer him, returned to his own tradition.

But, unlike his forbears, he ploughed through the history of painting far beyond the customary generation or two, back through the Ching masters. Not content with Wang Yuan-chi's version of Tung Chi-chang's version of Huang Kung-wang (as was customary in his tradition), Wang took up the challenge of direct study of the Yuan masters' works. Always a collector and connoisseur, he now challenged himself to produce works based more directly on the Yuan, cutting through the intervening six centuries. And by the late '60s, Wang's work broke through the brush­ hegemony of post-Yuan elitist aesthetics. He now incorporated into his landscapes elements of "texture-wrinkles" not made by the brush, but produced in a process resembling print.

Chinese artists in America have included brilliant experimental pioneers. The Western-trained architect Chen Chi­-kuan was a self-made artist utterly unencumbered by any traditional techniques in China, orthodox or otherwise. In America he had already experimented with alternatives for the laborious and modeling strokes, and had devised several methods for texturing landscapes. Chen—giving his mind free rein, since there was nothing he had been trained to abhor—was ready to examine everything with a fresh and open eye. He had mastered Western watercolors and architectural rendering. Now, in the U.S., he was ready to take another look at his Chinese legacy. He began to do Chinese painting with a Western freedom of innovation, with a hand trained since primary school in calligraphy but, most importantly, a fresh perspective unburdened by elitist prejudices.

In the 1950s', Chen often visited Wang Chi-chien and talked of painting. And soon Wang ventured beyond the fur-tipped brush for the texture "lines" in his landscapes—a method recalling a principle of natural effects propounded by the 11th Century master Sung Ti:

When you seek guidelines for your landscape compositions, glue a length of silk onto a stretch of broken wall. The cracks and fissures will (be impressed on the silk and) form mountains and valleys...

In this way, Wang pushed through the Yuan barrier, as it were, reaching out and bringing back elements and aesthetic approaches of the Northern Sung Dynasty and enlarging the parameters of the elite tradition by three centuries. He reincorporated values long abandoned and, by recycling them, breathed life into his dying tradition. It is clear that he never left it—but expanded it. Significantly, this achievement was possible only outside China.

Brought up in the strictest orthodox painting environment, Wang was a competent master by the time he left for New York in 1949. There his mental horizons were gradually widened by the abstract expressionist movement of the '50s and early '60s. Wang saw in this work a kindred spirit to the ancient Chinese masters whose interest had become increasingly focused in the painting process itself (in the Chinese case, on the interaction of brush, ink, water, and paper).

One of the foremost authorities on ancient Chinese painting, Wang is also a widely traveled citizen of the 20th Century. In Wintry Valley, dated 1972, he expands his own elite heritage and incorporates texture wrinkles which complement his brushwork. While this was taboo since the Yuan Dynasty, it was a common technique in the Northern Sung Dynasty, where the goal was to capture and inform one's work with the essential spirit of nature.

In Multiple Peaks, dated 1972, Wang introduces bold innovation in the uses of texture-wrinkles in ink monochrome. Here he recalls the long-shunned 'northern' or academic tradition of the Northern Sung Dynasty in granite peaks topped by dense growth. The monumental scale of the 11th Century distinguishes his oeuvre of the last two decades.

By 1982, Wang achieves complete mastery of both his Sung-inspired texture-wrinkles and his personal brushwork, matching those wrinkles in naturalness. In Landscape 415, a bird's eye view of a flat distance, Wang plays with 14th Century lake-scenery compositions. But Wang shocks the traditionalist with his bold colors and by using Ni Tsan's brush-mode in the construction of low-lying granite forms. Originally they had been the soft earthen forms of the Yuan Dynasty and their 17th Century variations. In incorporating granite mountains, Wang revived the tall craggy peaks which characterized works of professional academicians loudly decried by Tung Chi-chang. He fused the so-called Northern (belittled, academic) and Southern (elite, amateur) Schools of painting into a viable whole, breathing new life into ossified tradition.

To the specialist, Landscape 472 (1983) evokes the bird's eye view of a lake landscape characteristic of the 17th Century, when Pa-ta Shan-jen created free interpolations of the Ni style. Combining shading, wash, brush-modes, and texture-wrinkles, Wang imbues his works with a structural soundness missing from Chinese painting since the early Ming Dynasty.

But his biggest and most fundamental breakthrough came in early 1983, when he transcended the brushwork hegemony of the wen jen tradition. In obliterating his brushwork under layers of pigments brushed on over the entire painting, such as Landscape 462, Wang takes an extremely bold plunge into the unknown. From the standpoint of the elite tradition, of which he is the last genuine spokesman, he has flung the floodgates wide open. In the late 60s and 70s, he broke through the Yuan brushwork-oriented barrier to reach concepts and techniques of the Northern Sung Dynasty; in 1983 he touched base with Tang notions of primitive corporeality and, finally, Han aesthetics of direct, non-cogitative interaction between man and art. Not so much the process (brushwork), but the materials themselves now come into focus. While the works of 1983 are not artistically mature or "attractive", they pronounce the end of the elite tradition's 600-year stranglehold.

In Landscape 466, we witness the dissolution of the brushwork ideal and the triumph of a more tactile aesthetic. Wang has reached into the deep recesses of Chinese painterly processes, examining and reviving long-abandoned techniques, scales, and perspectives.

Rediscovering the adventurous spirit in coloration so characteristic of Warring States, Han, and Tang craftsmen and digging ever more deeply into China's own artistic legacies, he has transcended that brush-stroke (or linear) ingredient so central to his previous works.

It is a signal event: the last spokesman of the elite or linear tradition has transcended the artistic conduit of life-force for six centuries—the pulsing arteries through which artistic greatness was expressed and judged. Now in Wang's work, brushwork gives way to pure touch in an integrating interaction of paper, brush, and ink or pigment. Many of his 1983 paintings are freed from the confines of pre-ordained model-types or brushwork modes.

There have been many—and some brilliant—modernizers of Chinese painting. All bypassed the wen jen elite tradition and reapproached Chinese painting from foundations built in Japan or the West. But Wang, a dyed­-in-the-wool member of the elite tradition, has brought that tradition out of its "long and agonizing decline to new heights of expressive potentials, at no point abandoning his roots—not the case with many Chinese-turned-international artists.

By incorporating Sung methods which became Tang and Han aesthetics, Wang not only stretched and enlarged the artistic potential of his tradition, but refunneled it into the larger continuum of Chinese artistic processes, the Great Tradition (which is inclusive rather than exclusive; where not only the brush, but fingers, hair, lotus pods, the body, paper twists—anything—was legitimate. Wang's emphatic statement of 1983—"Brushwork is not restricted to the brush!"—rocks the foundation of traditional concepts of literati painting. Yet it originates fundamentally not from the West, but from deep within China's own Great Tradition, from aesthetics holding sway in the Northern Sung Dynasty, very much in the Tang Dynasty, and in the pre-Han era, so basic as to obviate utterance but absent from Chinese consciousness for nearly a millennium.

Future historians may disagree as to whether Wang Chi-chien ended the elite tradition, or enlarged it. It would appear at present that in refunneling it back into the Great Tradition, the river, as it were, has been rediverted into the ocean.

An Illustration List of Elite Traditions:

1. After Wang Hsi-chih (321-379), Sangluan Tieh. Tracing copy of Tang date(?) Numerous twists of the wrist—causing the tuft of animal fur at the tip of the brush to fold over this way and that during the course of a single stroke—achieve an aristocratic air. This typical image of Wang Hsi-chih, since Tang times has been highly prized for the reserved emotions and extraordinary grace of its brushwielding. The Wang (or Southern) style reigned supreme as the core of the elite tradition in Chinese calligraphy since the 7th Century.

2. Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322), East Mount Tungting. This Yuan master brought the Wang or elite tradition in calligraphy to new heights, seen here in the inscription in the upper right. He also distilled a calligraphic painting style, wringing out brush-mode formulae from ancient paintings attributed to 10th Century Southern masters Tung Yuan and Chu Jan, thus establishing a new elite tradition in painting.

3. Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Painted between 1347 and 1350, this legendary handscroll shows the process of abstraction beginning to replace that of description in painting. Instead of projecting the substance and grandeur of mountains, brushwork "flavor" is playfully performed in a rich mixture, to be savored the way one listens to a trained voice singing. Here the song or message is less important to the connoisseur than the quality of the voice itself. In this detail, one savors the rich interplay of brushwork which combines dark and light, wet and dry, long and short, straight and wiggly. A new idea of painting is thus established where, before, one "read" paintings for brushwork flavor at close range. These were amateur artists who painted for the love of it and for each other only. They aspired to no market, nor public renown. In spite of such exclusive eremitism, however, their art became widely sought after, emulated, and forged. Within fifty years of Huang's death, the wen jen movement was in full swing.

4. Shen Chou (1427-1509), Landscape in the Manner of Huang Kung­-wang, dated 1494, Shanghai Museum. Shen founded the Ming style of painting in the manner of the Yuan masters. While Yuan wen jen painters were forced by Mongol control of China into a reclusive (and exclusive) lifestyle, Ming men were free to rejoin society and participate fully in its cultural endeavors. Instead, the coterie of gentry around Shen Chou in Soochow lived in voluntary seclusion, perpetuating Yuan ways in lifestyle and in painting. We may see this movement as the shadow of a shadow. Painting now is purely about painting, and not about Nature or other subjects directly apprehended. While Yuan masters lost touch with corporeal reality but worked out of Sung models, Ming masters were nurtured virtually on Yuan paintings. The statements were about previous statements, much like the annotations of annotations so ubiquitous in compendiary of the Chinese classics. The focus moved toward the brush-modes of past masters, much as calligraphy.

5. Tung Chi-chang (1555-1636), Landscape in the Style of Huang Kung-wang. By the 1630s, the wen jen or elite tradition—here seen in its Huang Style—enters its third century. An overall tightening of the forms can be seen: brushwork becomes "ionized", gathering into "magnetic pockets" like iron filings.

6. Wang Meng (1308-1385), Dwelling in the Chingpien Mountains (detail of a hanging scroll dated 1366). The nephew of Chao Meng-fu, Wang was brought up amongst painting and, in his oeuvre, shows himself to be the most skilled of the Great Masters. This stunning work distills brush-modes of two great Northern Sung traditions and has inspired artists of all subsequent generations to this day.

7. Tao Chi, aka Shih Tao (1641-1720), Album Leaf. Ink and color share equal value in this liberating exercise. Traditional concepts of brush-modes were confined to the brush and the uses of ink. Brush-stroke application became increasingly rigidified as the decades and centuries wore on. Shih Tao demonstrates the possibility for free variations on the style of Wang Meng as seen in the detail in No. 6. But the untrammeled, freewheeling alternatives were largely ignored in China, where the Elite Orthodoxy had been recently given a reenforcing boost in Tung Chi-chang's powerful manifesto on painting.

8. Ni Tsan (1301-1374), Lakeside Mountains and Pavilion, hanging scroll dated 1372. The last decade of this refined and fastidious poet was spent wandering on the rivers and lakes, living the life of a destitute on his boat or lodging at friends. Regarded as the supreme exemplar of the elite tradition, Ni's languorous, graceful yet supple brushwork has been the despair of followers for six hundred years. Wang Chi-chien's transcendent interpretation of the style is seen in No. 13.

9. Detail of the above. Reading the painting up close, the Chinese connoisseur is captivated by the brushwork which in Ni's work reflects the divine touch of immortals. Never harsh, overt, or dull, it is the quintessence of the elite, tradition in painting.

10. Chu Ta, aka Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1710?), Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan, album leaf. A cousin of Tao Chi and member of the fallen imperial house, Chu Ta was endowed with a uniquely expressive brushwork and, like Tao Chi, contributed to the potential of Chinese painting by opening up vast spaces in his paintings, breathing life into landscape painting which was becoming densely cluttered. Like Tao Chi, his pictorial alternatives were largely ignored till this century.

11. Wang Chi-chien (b. 1907), Wintry Valley, dated 1971. Brought up in the strictest orthodox painting environment, Wang was a competent master by the time he left for New York in 1949. There his mental horizons were gradually widened by the abstract expressionist movement in the 50s and early 60s. Wang saw in that work a kindred spirit to ancient Chinese masters whose interest had become increasingly focused in the painting process itself (in the Chinese case, on the interaction of brush, ink, water, and paper). One of the foremost authorities on ancient Chinese painting, he is also a widely traveled citizen of the 20th Century. In this work he expands his own elite heritage in texture wrinkles which complement his brushwork. While this was taboo since the Yuan Dynasty, it was a common technique in the Northern Sung Dynasty, where the goal was to capture and inform one's work with the essential spirit of nature.

12. Wang Chi-chien, Multiple Peaks, dated 1972. Bold innovation in the uses of color mark Wang's work. Here he recalls the long-shunned "Northern" or Academic Tradition of the Northern Sung Dynasty in the granite peaks topped by dense growth. The monumental scale of the 11th Century distinguishes his oeuvre of the last two decades.

13. Wang Chi-chien, Landscape 413, 1982. In this bird's eye view of a flat distance, Wang plays with 14th Century lake scenery compositions. But Wang shocks the traditionalist with his bold colors, and by using Ni Tsan's brush-mode in the construction of low-lying granite forms. Originally they had been soft earthen forms (as in Nos. 3, 6, 8) of the Yuan Dynasty and their 17th Century variations. In incorporating granite mountains, Wang revived the tall craggy peaks which characterized works of the professional academicians loudly decried by Tung Chi-chang. He fused the so-called Northern (belittled, academic) and Southern (elite, amateur) Schools of painting into a viable whole, breathing new life into Chinese painting.

14. Wang Chi-chien, Landscape 472, dated 1983. To specialists, this works evokes the bird's eye view of a lake landscape characteristic of the 17th Century, when Pa-ta Shan-jen created free interpolations of the Ni style (No. 10). Combining shading, wash, brush-modes, and texture-wrinkles, Wang imbues his works with a structural soundness missing from Chinese painting since the Ming Dynasty.

15. Wang Chi-chien, Landscape 462, 1983. In obliterating his brushwork under layers of pigments brushed on over the entire painting, Wang takes an extremely bold plunge into the unknown. From the standpoint of the elite tradition, of which he is the last genuine spokesman, he has flung the flood gates wide open. While in the late 60s and 70s he broke through the Yuan brushwork-oriented barrier to reach the concepts and techniques of the Northern Sung Dynasty, here he has taken a giant step, touching base with Tang notions of primitive cor