(jazzy piano music)
- [Kristen] Here we are in the Shanghai Museum
looking at a landscape painting by Wang Shimin.
- [Beth] And this is a hanging scroll.
- [Kristen] And the hanging scroll
is a very public art form.
It's something that hangs on the wall.
The painting itself is mounted onto silk.
So we have this opportunity to look
at this entire landscape in one view.
- [Beth] Unlike a hand scroll,
which would've unrolled a arms length at a time.
- [Kristen] These would've been taken out, discussed
and at times they could be used for decoration.
They could hang for a little while longer,
but the idea here is a lot of people
could look at this at one time,
as opposed to a hand scroll or even in an album leaf,
which only three or four people could see
at any given time.
You couldn't fit that many people around the painting.
Here we've got a larger, grander view
and that was something that gave way
to these large landscape compositions.
Landscape paintings as a genre developed
in the Five Dynasties period.
So we see the emergence of landscape painting
as its own genre, not just as a setting for narrative
or a background for events,
but something that is taken as a subject in its own right.
- [Beth] This is 600 years later,
and in some way this is late
in that moment of landscape painting.
It's a time of reflecting back on landscape painting
and its importance in Chinese art history.
- [Kristen] That's what Wang Shimin is doing here.
He's interested in the theories, the principles,
the brushwork, the composition,
the elements that make for landscape painting
- [Beth] Instead of the earlier landscape painters
who are immersing themselves in nature
and responding emotionally to nature,
he's studying art and making his painting about that art.
- [Kristen] Here, he's looking at the brushwork
of Huang Gongwang, this Yuan Dynasty painter
who's famous for his "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains."
- [Beth] The Yuen Dynasty had the Mongols, foreigners,
taking over and ruling China.
Here during the Qing Dynasty which is just emerging,
we have the Manchus coming in and ruling China,
and so the response by artists is similar.
Historically many artists serve the court,
and if you are feeling politically ambivalent
about the new rulers who have come in,
you might wanna distance yourself from that court.
- [Kristen] Wang Shimin was one of several artists
who was active in the south, in this area called Jiangnan,
or south of the Yangtze River.
And that is a place that was a little farther
from the court in Beijing that had
a scholarly literati culture established
through several of the major cities,
Nanjing, Suzhou included.
Wang Shimin painted among other artists,
wrote poetry among his friends.
They shared these works amongst each other
and they were interested
in studying that brushwork of the past.
And you can see here that the work is monochromatic,
meaning there's no color.
The brushwork here is like a signature.
He's looking back at the forms,
specific boulders, the way that Huong Gongwang
used the dry brush technique,
this idea of scraping the contour lines
of each ridge of the mountain.
- [Beth] So to suggest the rock,
the granite and the face of the mountain
and then distinguishing that between different kinds
of trees that we see on the right foreground,
some with short leaves with dark short brush strokes,
another tree where the leaves are more washy,
and then the tree just to the left
where there's a sense of the ink dripping down.
So you have a sense of the movement
of the hand of the artist.
- [Kristen] And you can see that telegraphic link.
And we've also got a scholar sitting in a pavilion
where he's gazing out over this pond and over the bridge.
But you can also look up and trace a little path
up to another group of huts and imagine
that that's another little retreat
nestled into the mountains, this idea of reclusion,
something that was a Yuen Dynasty theme,
here done again in the Qing Dynasty.
The difference here though, is that in the Qing Dynasty
we see a lot more figures.
- [Beth] This relies on a formula
drawing our eye from the foreground with this diagonal
that moves from lower left to upper right.
We encounter a stream that then wanders its way down
into the body of water we see below.
The mist that separates the peaks of the mountains,
and then the sky above.
It is clearly drawing on this tradition.
- [Kristen] Those foreground trees anchor
the entire composition and one large peak at the top.
The flavor of this work is subdued.
And when you see even just the atmospheric details of it,
that's something that you would expect
in any landscape painting.
Misty ravines separating out the peaks,
but here you can see
that there's absolutely nothing painted.
It's just this empty void.
- [Beth] It's amazing to me that that empty paper
is what suggests the mist around the mountains.
- [Kristen] It starts to blur your view of the trees
in the distance as your eye travels up
towards that central peak.
- [Beth] So we can see areas where the mountains
are painted with wash, ink that's been dissolved in water.
- [Kristen] Yes.
- [Beth] And then other places where the ink is very dry
on the brush and has been used to create
contours of the mountains.
- [Kristen] And then on top of it all,
of these rich details, these textures
that unite the entire composition.
- [Beth] So you have these artists who are reclusive.
They're in the mountains, they're in the landscapes.
And that history that distinguishes those artists
from artists who are working at the court,
who are doing more work that is for the emperor.
And there is a hierarchy that has developed
where that scholar artist is seen as a truer artist.
- [Kristen] What we call the literality bias.
The irony of that all is that these artists,
Wang Shimin and several of his cohort,
also did paint works at the court.
But here you can see that this is
a very intellectual approach to art.
- [Beth] It's an art that's made
for educated like-minded artists.
(jazzy piano music)