A Separation - The Writing out of the Self

离 li A

SEPARATION

The Writing Out of The Self

Jiehui Avery Chen Diploma 14 Tutors: Mark Campbell and Manoulis Stavrakakis

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But are the longing for forests and streams, the companionship of mists and vapours, then to be experienced only in dreams and denied to the waking senses? It is possible for subtle hands to reproduce them in all their rich splendour (in painting). Without leaving your room you may sit in your heart’s content among streams and valleys… This is the ultimate meaning behind the honour that the world accords to landscape painting.

Guo Xi (c. 1020 – 1090), at the beginning of his essay on landscape This is but one example of the many statements made by scholars regarding the Landscape painting as a site of reclusion.

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Old trees, Level distance Guo Xi (c. 1020 – 1090)

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Guo Xi’s Style of Painting Trees Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, Mustard Seed Garden manual, p. 22.

A. Kaiming Ch’i

ABSTRACT

The Thesis illustrates the landscape genre’s conformation to tradition and forms of the past, that exerted pressures on individual painters to remain within the binds of convention. Within the system of order, memory and repetition that was inherent within the practice of calligraphy and the almost mechanic abstraction of landscapes into brushstroke sequences; underlied a potential for lapse, in the unconscious slippages and mnemonic failings of painters in the overwhelming reproduction of standard landscapes, that engendered the emergence of true authorship within the painting-- the self; and more crucially, the expression of personal subject matter that was unfamiliar to the landscape painting genre. In this, the writing out of the self was not so much a conscious, descriptive one where one’s personal qualities and desires were listed out; rather it was unwittingly revealed through both consistencies and discrepancies within the usage of specific tropes and symbols by different painters.

PREFACE

Chinese Landscape painting has been constantly reiterated by art historians and scholars as a place of reclusion and ‘untrammelled nature’1; replete with other similar mutually reinforcing statements2 that virtually overlook the tendency of repetition and order associated with its translation and evolution throughout China’s dynastic history3.

The Thesis acknowledges the Literati’s theory and rhetoric that held a reverence for the Gushi5, or styles of old masters; this exerted a massive influence over the methods in which these Calligraphic compositions were constructed; which generally constituted a mechanical practicing of brushstroke techniques. The painter’s tendency for an instinctual craving for order, to construct a pattern of the world translated to an abstraction of the landscape on paper; was enabled and facilitated by the genre’s orthodox method of Calligraphy, a writing system that was rooted in pictograms and images6, that subjected the genre to a standardised and didactic order of endless repetition. This in turn served as a form of the technical facilition of memory, not only in terms of the visual but also internalised within the painter’s muscle memory. Furthermore, underlying the notion of taste that was predicated on a familiarity with earlier paintings, was a ‘scientific’ method of connoisseurship similar to the one adopted by Morelli7, that recognised and extracted the authorship of a painting from brushstrokes within paintings that divulged the author’s unconscious slips and mnemonic failings in his reproductions of the constant object; that of shan shui, or mountain-water landscapes. The conscious ‘copying’ of brushstrokes of old masters to adhere to general standards of taste followed in this manner in the dynastic duration of the genre, firstly based off paintings of masters, followed by studio sketches that were based on fragments of old paintings, and later in the form of widely distributed lithographic manuals, such that the painter’s conception of self was gradually dissolved or forgotten, as suggested by Immanuel Kant.8

This pattern of order and how it affected memory instigated the ineluctable substitution of a formative impulse with an informed academic pedantry, exemplifying the paradigm of literary symbolism where elements of nature within paintings formed an esoteric, standardised index of emblems whose nostalgia was derived from cognition rather than based in sentiment and intuition.

The formalisation of these literary devices within the genre diluted, to the point of almost discrediting the emotions that artists were trying to express due to the arbitrary and repetitive use of metaphorical devices within their paintings; this further echoes the implications of the constant repetition within the genre, that facilitated a process of remembering, but more crucially engendered a form of forgetting and filtering.

The distortion of symbolism within Chinese Landscape painting, and the shift towards an allusive system of meaning that was inaccessible to the general population of the culturally unacquainted, was remedied by the handling of these symbols by a few literati painters, whose work imbued personal meaning back into the landscape emblems that they adopted, which not only served to strengthen the prescribed meaning of the metaphor, but more crucially, sought to subvert and reappropriate the symbolism and meaning contained within these metaphors. dotting like small eddies. dotting like a sprinkling of pepper. dotting in the form of qie

dotting like the foliage of the red-leaf tree. dotting like the foliage of the cedar of cypress. dotting like water grass.

dotting in the form of split brush points. dotting like grass blades raising their heads. dotting like flat heads.

dotting like mouse tracks. dotting in the form of plum blossom. dotting in the form of ge.

dotting in three strokes coming together. dotting like another kind of water grass. dotting in blobs, like a whirlpool.

dotting like fir needles. dotting like sharp pine needles. dotting in groups of three and five strokes.

dotting like pine needles. dotting like hanging vine. dotting in the form of a chrysanthemum.

dotting like blades of drooping grass. dotting like the leaves of the Wu Dong Tree. dotting in sharp points.

dotting in the form of foliage pointing upwards. dotting in the form of ge with a hook added. dotting like a handful of loose red-leaf leaves.

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Book of Trees, Section Mustard Seed Garden manual, A. Kaiming Ch’iu

1. See Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 7-8.

“Untrammelled”, meaning “free of stifling restraints” is a common term of praise in Chinese painting criticism, applied generously in the later centuries to the works of literati painters.

2. See Clunas, Fruitful Sites, p. 12. “an expression of artistic ideas and conceptions that have emerged from an intimate feeling for nature”,“the Chinese garden has retained a more intimate contact with untrammelled nature” ‘’the imperial gardens were an image of Daoist freedom, spontaneity, and humility before ‘great nature’“a space essentially outside social life”“a place of refusal of the ties of the political life and even of kinship.”

3. China’s Imperial Dynastic History stretched from c. 2100 BC - 1912 AD. 4. Clunas, Fruitful Sites, p. 12. “‘the garden’ was a space essentially outside social life, a place of refusal of the ties of the political life and even of kinship, a calm place and a quiet place...”

“In gardens, thoughtful chinese sought release from the irritations, frustrations, discord and cares of life. The repetition of this image has manifested itself through scholarly work and through popular articles in newspapers.”

5. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 185.

Evidenced in “The other type of painting album popular in this period, the type made up of a succession of landscapes in old styles, inspired in its viewers pleasant feelings of recognition, of belonging to a community of cultivated people who were familiar with the styles of old masters and could appreciate allusions to particular famous works.”

6. Murck and Fong, Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, p. 75.

7. Ginzburg, Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm, p. 101.

8. Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.

CONTENTS

I. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | MEMORY AND THE SELF Mechanism of Ordering of Memories into Patterns Screens of Reconfiguring Memory Patterns

II. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | WRITTEN CHARACTERS AND THE SELF Calligraphic Brushstrokes: Order and System Calligraphic Brushstrokes individual to each person: The Self

III. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | REPETITION AND THE SELF The Self revealed through Unconscious Repetition The Self determined by Conscious Repetition The Self forgotten through Conscious Repetition Elimination of The Self from Conscious Repetition

IV. 梅 蘭 竹 菊 M E I L A N Z H U J U | FORGETTING AND DISTORTING MEMORY Construction of Metaphor and Meaning into Memory Distortion of Meaning through Metaphor

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 竹 Z H U | BAMBOO Guan Daosheng (c. 1262−1319 AD) 蘭 L A N | ORCHID Ma Shouzhen/ Ma Xiang Lan (c. 1548–1604 AD)

VI. F O R G E T - M E - N O T | WRITING OUT OF ONE’S LOSS An Epilogue and Revisitation

APPENDIX 園 Y U A N | THE GARDEN SHOWCASING ONESELF Origin of Paradigmatic Chinese Garden, Y U A N (garden), rooted in memories of S H A N S H U I (mountains and water)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | MEMORY AND THE SELF Mechanism of Ordering of Memories into Patterns

Landscape is a creation of the mind and is intrinsically a superior art.

One of the early scholar-amateur artists, Mi Fu10

The landscape genre, for the most part of its history, was an endless series of reconfigurations of its two principle elements; mountains - shan, and water bodies - shui, punctuated by clusters of trees set within the compositions; that were almost never specific depictions of actual scenery.11 Freud’s elucidation of the relationship between the act of remembering along with its technical facilitation, that of repetition; or in different terms, the recording of the mnemonic image through the establishment of “reproducible mnemic images”.12 These images formed by “the mechanics of reproduction” justified the painter’s conscious breakdown of what was initially seamless landscape scenes, consisting of wild and indistinguishable elements of nature within the Chinese paintings, into repeated unit blocks that could be continuously copied, varied slightly, and ordered according to a certain logic. Victoria Contage observed a parallel between the formulation of such schemata in chinese painting and a similar process within Confucian theory13 in which knowledge is acquired; both of which filter and reduce the multiplicity of raw sensory data to a comprehensible, manageable order as recurring patterns are recognised and conceptualised.

Through the externalization and conscious manifestation of the painter’s memories as paintings, constituting a process of recall, preceding the ‘writing out’ of physical memory, the painting space becomes unconsciously invested with the desires and emotions of the painter, replete with a series of slips and lapses that expresses a less than orderly pattern of the painter’s mind. This in turn was circumvented by the painter, through a conscious translation of natural landscape forms into organisable, architectural, systemised patterns, almost as if this process was his way of making sense of what his eyes and mind registered as wild, untameable nature, that furthermore mirrored the disorder and volatility of life as he knew it. The tangible architectural ideal was achieved by the painter through constructing an abstracted pattern of the world within the world as he perceived it to be, expressing an instinctual craving for order that was the tendency of the human mind.

This disposition defined the landscape painting genre, which had originally started out as content with representing the reality of nature; typically being composed of a visual continuum of tree foliage, groves of bamboo and smooth mountain surfaces that were integrated into their surroundings, just as they were in nature. The painter would mentally process visuals through the didactic medium of calligraphy, abstracting and neatening wild and disorderly landscape elements, and ordering them into visually distinct, schematic clusters of appropriate type forms. Trees were designated as compositional markers, and an architectural system was established by constructing mountains out of repeated ridge units, punctuated and accentuated by rows of dark trees, instead of rendering it as continuous surface.

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Zoom in on Mount Qi Xia, Zhang Hong (c. 1577-1652)

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Zoom in on Mount Qing Pian, Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555-1636)

10. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 64.

11. Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, p. 224.

This is exemplified by a statement by prominent literati critic Su Shi (c. 1037-1101) who relegated “Xing Si, [or] ‘likeness in form’ [to a] lowly value in the hierarchy of painting criticism from the late ming onwards, [criticising as] childish anyone who judged painting on the basis of faithfulness to the thing represented.”

12. Freud, Screen Memories, p. 315-316.

13. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 36

I. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | MEMORY AND THE SELF Screens of Reconfiguring Memory Patterns

Following the idea that the act of painting provides a mental interface that filters and processes within the mechanism of memory, the scroll can be correlated to a screen. Freud suggested that the distortion of our memories, and with it, our conception of spaces, occurs through the processing of its conscious manifestation,14 with this representation evidencing a “means of disguise” in the form of the aforementioned “screen”,15 which serves to sublimate the harsh and practical realities of the reality. He theorised that this screen was formed by the unconscious as a barrier between itself and the conscious material world. More crucially, he noted that the memories composed within the screen are merely the residues of memory,16 appearing at the moment they are recalled, rather than the moment that they had entered into a person’s memory, displaying no fidelity to experience.17 This observation stemmed from his realisation and acknowledgement of the limitations of memory; being only too susceptible to substituting one illustration for another similar, slightly divergent visual; or the blending of one memory into another, thus mutually contaminating each other with mnemonic associations and slippages.

The imperfect mechanism of memory premeditates on the formation of indistinct composites of memories that have not fully faded away, but simply bleed into each other; a mnemonic coagulation. Freud observed that screen-memories are “compromise-formations”, and went as far as to deem the moment of recollection as a “work of fiction”. By this he meant that in that instant of recollection, images drawn up to memory showed “no concern for historical accuracy” in their displacement of “unwanted images”.18 This was mediated through a process of filtering in which the painter assimilated his memory of the landscape into the body of ideas he had already possessed regarding the Chinese landscape; this body was an accumulation of the painter’s other personal experiences of landscape assembled over the years, as well as his encounters with landscape paintings done by older masters.

Dong Qi Chang’s (c. 1555-1636) painting of Mount Qing Pian exemplifies this; while passing by this mountain on a boating trip, he recalled seeing depictions of it by two Yuan Dynasty masters, Zhao Mengfu19 (c.1254 - 1322) and Wang Meng (c. 1308 - 1385); superimposing memories of both paintings with his own actual experience with the mountain within his mind.20 The complex relationship of the painting to past paintings had conditioned it within Dong Qi Chang’s perception, more than any memory of the actual mountain or near-accurate sketch he could have made of the real scene. Morever, considerations of space, atmosphere, and scale were subordinated to an overriding concern with brush and ink configurations that were derived in part from the earlier paintings; for instance the scale and style of the trees, as well as the rolling, almost dynamic ridges of the mountain that Dong Qi Chang paints, is clearly borrowed from that of the elements within Wang Meng’s painting. His painting of Mount Qing Pian is nothing like painter Zhang Hong’s (c. 1577 1636) rendition of Mount Qi Xia, even though Mount Qi Xia and Mount Qing Pian are very similar looking mountains in reality. Zhang Hong’s atypical style of painting using unassertive strokes was content with depicting the mountain as faithfully as he possibly could; while Dong Qi Chang’s was contaminated with his mnemonic association of the mountain with memories of paintings that his mind was preoccupied with.

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Mount Qi Xia, Zhang Hong (c. 1577-1652)

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Mount Qing Pian, Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555-1636)

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Dwelling in the Qing Pian Mountainss Wang Meng (c. 1308-1385)

14. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 190. Freud observed that dreams constituted a “wish fulfillment” that attempted to create a “pattern of the world” within the material world. This patterned desire was distorted through its emergence in representative form.

15. Freud, Screen Memories, p. 320-322.

16. Freud, The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness, p. 290-291. Freud articulates a theory that follows when a memory is repressed, an unusually vivid image often appears in the conscious; one not of the repressed memory itself, but rather an image that is closely related to the repressed memory. The following year, Freud called this phenomena “Screen Memories” in his 1899 paper of the same name.

17. Freud, Screen Memories, p. 307, 315-316.

Freud observed that “what is recorded as a mnemonic image is not the relevant experience [but] another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one,” with this slight divergence of memory as a mechanism that served to “fix important impressions by establishing reproducible mnemic images.”

18. Freud, Screen Memories, p. 307, 315-316.

19. Painting has been lost, and cannot be found as a reference.

20. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 2-5

II. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | WRITTEN CHARACTERS AND THE SELF Calligraphic Brushstrokes: Order and System 1

Integral to the Chinese landscape painter’s method of reproduction from memory and mnemonic association was the medium of Chinese calligraphy. Calligraphy is primarily a form of writing, and in its capacity as a language could be conceived as a system whose prime function is that of ordering; which it does so through consistent repetition and translation. It is however an exception to textual languages in that it stems from imagery and form instead of following a typical phonetic alphabet logic; Chinese characters, or xiàngxíngzì, which literally translates to ‘words that look like forms’, have an underlying form-based logic, stemming from the language’s roots in pictograms,21 a form of writing which conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object, similar to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing. Chinese tradition attributes its invention to a high official, Cang Jie, who had observed bird tracks on the sandy banks of a river. Herein lies an interesting parallel; in that the first Chinese characters to be deciphered or read were animal tracks, that were essentially leftover traces of events that were not directly experienced by the observer, and could thus be perceived as written records, or physically manifested ‘memories’ that required a certain translation in order to communicate a certain imagined visual to its reader. In this case, Cang Jie, on noticing the bird tracks, correlated it in his mind to a visual of a bird walking across the sand; this initiated the beginnings of the mind’s cognitive mechanisms of abstraction.22

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Chinese Calligraphic characters were thus inextricably linked to forms in nature, in that elements such as trees and mountains were abstracted into pictographic text mu and shan respectively.23 Other forms of nature were represented as logograms, a combination of a few of these elements; for example forests, or lin were represented as two trees next to each other.24 The index of Chinese characters was standardised into a regular script by the mid-Han Dynastic period (c. 206 B§C–220), that not only emphasised an order in terms of the arrangement of characters in a vertical line, but also established an inherent system of order within each individual character as well; in terms of an established stroke sequence which dictated that a character was written exactly the same way each time, taking into account where each stroke should start, pause and end.25 This rhythm and change of flow of the brush was also manifested physically in the character as well, as characters tend to have a wider, fatter body at points where the painter’s brush pauses or exerts pressure at, and a slim, almost stroke-like appearance at points where the painter’s brush goes by quickly and lightly.

The repetitive motion of practicing calligraphy not only eased the formidable task of memorizing each character, but ensured that the calligraphy would be executed consistently with a sense of balance and proportion,26 that allowed one to write with an uninterrupted flow and rhythm.

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xiàngxíngzì, characters inextricably linked to forms in nature

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木 mu (wood) pictogram 林 lin (forest) pictogram 山 shan (mountain) pictogram

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Repetition in the Form of Calligraphic Consistency, in terms of an established stroke index

5 stroke sequence which dictates that a character is written exactly the

same way each time, taking into account where each stroke should start, pause

and end.

21. Murck and Fong, Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting.

22. Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 104.

23. See Illustrations (1) and (3) on Facing Page 24. See Illustration (2) on Facing Page 25. See Illustrations (4) and (5) on Facing Page 26. Delbanco, Chinese Calligraphy. link: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chcl/hd_chcl.htm

II. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | WRITTEN CHARACTERS AND THE SELF Calligraphic Brushstrokes individual to each person: The Self

Calligraphy was seen as an expressive art form despite its repetitive nature and ordered methodology, one that necessitated sheer repetition to internalise stroke sequences into muscle memory. However characters were always unique to and thus rendered the identity of the calligrapher visible on paper;27 apparent in small details such as the proportion of the words painted by each calligrapher; similar to the manner in which the handwriting of latin-based languages is unique to individuals, maintaining a certain degree of personal consistency in the heights and widths of characters despite their slight variations. In this sense, Calligraphy was an exception with regards to other text-based sources, for example English poetry and literature, which could have been mass-reproduced, distributed in standardised type form, or even communicated through word-of-mouth, and whose quality and experience was not derived from their written appearance. Calligraphy’s authorship and its appreciation was by contrary rooted in its appearance, and akin to painting was by definition unique and impossible to reproduce.28 The painter asserted his presence and identity within paintings through distinctive and consistently repeated brushworks, employing landscape forms as a vehicle through which he could lodge his thoughts and feelings.

Mancini observed that the controlled, steady, even strokes, most easily found within the straight lines and right angles of architectural forms within paintings, were the most easily forgeable of all painterly forms, stating that ‘the painter’s mechanical tracing of these lines erased any personal characteristics’.29 The importance Mancini attributed to decorative elements within paintings testified to the emphasis he placed within the salient features of Italian handwriting models prevailing from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, his considered study of written “characters” revealed that the identification of a master’s hand should be looked for in the parts of a painting executed most rapidly, and thus potentially freed from the representation of reality.30 This was especially evident within personal signatures at the bottom of contracts, noted by the abbot Lanzi, whose eighteenth century work Storia Pittorica devoted to the methods of connoisseurship, expounded in one passage on the inimitability of individual handwriting, which he speculated was intended by nature “to safeguard... civil [i.e., bourgeois] society.” 31 A similar parallel can be made with Chinese Calligraphy, characterised by the staccato, disjointed articulation of its pomo, or ‘broken-ink’ strokes, which made paintings extremely difficult to forge; thereby achieving a completely opposite effect to the aforementioned smooth, even strokes within paintings. The unfinished, sketchy nature of the Calligraphic brushstroke, similar to the “simplicity of a sketch, [in] the comparative rapidity with which it is produced, the concentration of meaning demanded by its rigid economy of means, [rendered] it more symbolical, more like the hieroglyph of its maker’s mind, than any finished work.”32 This was uncannily similar to the “inadvertent little gestures” within Italian Renaissance paintings; moments within paintings that were highlighted by the art critic Morelli, who defined these ‘gestures’ as features which inadvertently divulged the painter’s identity. He proposed that these quick, uncontrolled brushstrokes “constituted the instances when the control of the artist, who was tied to a cultural tradition, relaxed and yielded to purely individual touches, which escaped without his being aware of it”,33 suggesting that a focused empirical analysis of these specific moments within paintings would render the authorship of the paintings apparent, conceding that while recognising authorship might not have had the ability to decipher the personality and character of individual painters as he had initially hypothesized; such an method would have at least distinguished the authorship of each individual painter from his peers and contemporaries who were producing similar work. Wind as well supported this theory, positing that while it may “seem odd that personality should be found where personal effort is weakest... modern psychology certainly supports Morelli: our inadvertent little gestures reveal our character far more authentically than any formal posture that we may carefully prepare.”34 Yuan Dynasty (c. 1279-1368) painters wrote doctrines that continually espoused this, affirming landscape paintings as personal expressions and quasi-autobiographical statements.35

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Couplet by Wang Wei Emperor Li Song (r. 1224 to 1264)

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Couplet by Su Shi, Emperor Hui Song (r. 1165-1189)

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feng, calligraphic character for wind

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yu, calligraphic character for wind

27. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 53 “This stood in contrast to previous academy landscape paintings that were devoid of the artists’ identities; painting styles were ideally uniform, and the artists’ authorship was virtually untraceable within the painting because of their indistinctive strokes.” Also, “The song academy artist typically adopts no personal voice and displays no very distinctive hand in his paintings; on the contrary, he deliberately conceals himself, creating a world without occupying it.”

28. Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 107.

Ginsberg describes a general tendency in various cultural histories of the “progressive dematerialization of the text, which was gradually purified at every point of reference related to the senses; even though a material element is required for a text’s survival, the text itself is not identified by that element.”

29. Mancini, Considerazioni, vol. 1, p. 134.

“And these features in a painting are like strokes and flourishes in handwriting, which require the master’s boldness and resolution. The same can be said about bold strokes of brilliance which the artist executes with masterful touches impossible to imitate” 30. Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 111 31. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 119. (Lanzi, Storiapittorica, 1:15.)

32. Barkan, Michelangelo : A Life on Paper, p. 1 33. Morelli, Italian Masters, p. 71 34. Wind, Art and Anarchy, p. 38 35. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 53.

III. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | REPETITION AND THE SELF The Self revealed through Unconscious Repetition

The screens of Chinese Landscape canvases and the painter’s calligraphic strokes thus worked in tandem to compose the Chinese painter’s personal perspective or aspirations of the world, materialising as a series of consciously constructed mnemonic landscapes. The construction of these mnemonic images inherently contained a certain artfulness in forgetting, as alluded to by Freud who listed a repertoire of varying methods of doing so; in the form of repression, repetition, transference, or sublimation.36 Through the employment of a spatial metaphor, he suggested that the smallest of mnemonic slights would affect the mnemonic recollection of the image as it was remembered, thus concluding that the only way to recall accurately was through a reordering of elements that rearranged and reconfigured the mnemonic objects to conform to a narrative, rather than a historiographic, sense. Considered in this manner, the Chinese painter’s ordering and patterning of elements accorded a representational legibility to the composition of the image that facilitated the process of remembering, but simultaneously engendered a certain forgetfulness.

The painter Ni Zan37(c. 1301-1374) for example, repeated obsessively a simple compositional formula; composed of rocks and pine trees in the foreground, amongst a vast expanse of water, with a cluster of mountains in the background. His elements were used sparingly, leaving great areas of the canvas untouched in his flat, planar compositions; these areas of blankness suggested an expanse of water. With the exception of a single rustic hut, there was always little suggestion of human presence, and correspondingly, social relationships within his paintings. His paintings varied more in design and configuration of his elements rather than in subject or theme; one could argue this was a form of repression, in which he processed and externalised certain emotions through a heavily nuanced exercise of repeatedly rearranging and ordering his elements within a single unsaturated scene. His paintings and calligraphy appear very relaxed and sketchy; this characteristic was not by accident but consciously sought. Ni Zan himself was recorded to have said “Try to do things in a sketchy manner. Develop forms with a free hand . . . by following your ideas and feelings.”38 A fellow painter, Juan Yuan’s response to Ni Zan’s consistent style of painting is indicative of the carthartic, almost ‘numbing’ effect that they exerted, remarking that “If one were to enter bodily into this world, he would find it without flavour and would be emptied of all thought.” 39 This further illustrates how repetition constituted a mode of forgetting40 within both painter and viewer, that facilitated the filtering and processing of boredom due to nostalgia; wherein the past is always idealized in the efforts of refuting the present, and mundane details are ineluctably forgotten. This unconscious processing was correlated by Walter Benjamin with the mark of distinction, he perceived it as “the external surface of unconscious events”41; considering the lull of boredom as “the threshold to great deeds.”42 The importance placed within the repetitive order of calligraphic brushstrokes and correspondingly, the physical act involved in its execution, is akin to the training of the eye that is associated with the musical training of the hands through repeated fingerings and movements of tuning;43 the act of sheer repetition internalises the visual and vocal production of art to become a choreography of unconscious acts that relies on muscle memory. This implicitly connotates connoisseurship with a more mechanical, an ‘intuitive’ rather than intellectual ‘cognitive’ basis, contrary to the views that most Chinese art historians such as James Cahill have traditionally ascribed to the Landscape genre and its literati theory.44

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Enjoying the wildnerness in an autumn grove, c.1339 Rongxi Studio, c.1372 Six Gentlemen, c. 1345 Water and Bamboo Dwelling Wind among the trees on the Riverbank, c.1363

36. Phillips, Freud and the Uses of Forgetting, p. 31, 24-25.

37. One of the four Yuan Dynasty ( (c. 1279-1368) great Masters of Chinese Landscape Art. 38. Met Museum online collection, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/41154 39. Cahill, Hills beyond a River, Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty, p. 119.

40. See also Phillips, Freud and the Uses of Forgetting, p. 22-38.

41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, D2a,2.

42. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, D2, 7.

43. Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, p. 185-186.

44. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 185. “The other type of painting album popular in this period, the type made up of a succession of landscapes in old styles, inspired in its viewers pleasant feelings of recognition, of belonging to a community of cultivated people who were familiar with the styles of old masters and could appreciate allusions to particular famous works.”

See also, Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 127.

“The albums after old poems aroused in an equivalent way the pleasurable sensations of recognising the poems and their authors. both types offered to their audiences the satisfactions of exercising acquired cultural skills.”

III. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | REPETITION AND THE SELF The Self determined by Conscious Repetition

The mechanical nature of connoisseurship and transference of memory was further exacerbated by the Literati’s reverence for the Gushi;45 or styles of ancient masters, which dictated that the conception of a painting of divine standards presupposed the painter’s meticulous analysis and mimicry of the brushstroke styles of ancient masters. Dong Qi Chang’s technical ability to closely imitate the styles of old masters was elevated in his theory,46 in which he stated “A painter who takes the ancient as masters has already achieved superiority”; and correspondingly legitimised his position as one of China’s most celebrated painters as well as the most eminent Ming Dynasty Literati connoiseur. This rhetoric delineated the outlines of memory to ascribe to collectivized, nationalistic terms, where the individual was predisposed to remain subject to custom and tradition, constraining his individuality to express itself within the forms and conventions set by the past.

The precondition of adhering to this set of conventions entailed not only the painter’s familiarity, but a concentrated visual study of paintings done by past masters. This in turn parallelled the terms of Morellian connoisseurship; one that relied on a concentrated visual study of paintings and comparative analysis that interpreted details such as earlobes, fingernails, or the shapes of fingers, as “inadvertent little gestures,” or unconscious clues.47 Similar to Morellian Connoiseurship, the Literati painters equated this ability to recognise and discern authorship through deciphering brushstrokes within paintings, with the academic capacity and dispensation to critique and judge the aesthetics of paintings. The Literati painters used these skills to paint landscapes ‘in the manners of’48 particular old masters, that they equated to being poetic because of moral value associated with these styles. This is evidenced in the vast number of painters49 who authored landscapes titled ‘Paintings in the manner of (Famous Yuan Dynasty Painter)’, implying that the reference of the precedent master was of larger significance than the subject matter of the painted landscape itself; for instance, the painters Zhang Hong and Dong Qi Chang composed paintings that were titled after the aforementioned Yuan Master Ni Zan.

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This paradigm parallelled Leonard Barkan’s analysis of Renaissance painting, wherein eminent artists such as Michelangelo50 were constantly mimicked by lesser painters who aspired to paint in ‘the manners of’ Michelangelo, and whose methodology to achieve this neccessitated constant practice, to the point that was verging on mechanical, in order to internalise a similar brushstroke.

More saliently, celebrated artists such as Michelangelo were also harbouring certain anxieties due to the constant pressure to consistently produce paintings that would match up to the standards and authorship of their previous critically acclaimed work and style.

The saying, Ogni pittore dipinge sè, or Every painter paints himself51, proverbialised the painter’s subconscious automimesis, but the painter’s conscious realisation of this innate, personal style of working, and consequent pressure to consistently harness it in his work, engendered an attitude in accordance with “a far greater consciousness of the unconscious”52 that shifted the notion of an artist ‘creating’ himself involuntarily in his work to a heightened conscious mental level. The incorporation of past forms of the ‘unconscious’, in terms of visual ‘inadvertent gestures’ from earlier paintings within the consciously developed framework of newer pictorial landscapes, was similar to Morelli’s method;53 governed less by the objectives of science, than by the subjective, conscious gestures of later painters who sought to adopt the aforementioned ‘inadvertent gestures’, and furthermore, the conscious expectations, ambitions, and desires of the connoisseur scholar art-critic.

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Morelli’s attribution of the ‘unconscious details’ within paintings to painterly gestures that lay beyond the artist’s conscious control54 in order to determine authorship, and the uniqueness of the paintings were found in the moments where the painters literally forgot themselves, was thus unwittingly subverted by Chinese painters who were constantly subject to external pressures to produce work in accordance with the accepted canon, but also to retain a certain sense of individuality; in other words to ‘paint himself’. This was particularly pronounced in periods of prosperity and great socio-economic mobility, such as during the late Ming Era ( c. 16th century) which had initiated a new awareness of the self and its representations, further precipitating a sense of self-consciousness within individuals that recognised “the fashioning of (the) human identity as a manipulable, artful process”,55 which in turn exacerbated the anxiety within painters to paint themselves on a consistent basis.

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After Ni Zan Anonymous, Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1279–1368)

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Landscape in the style of Ni Zan Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555 to 1636)

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Landscape after Ni Zan, c. 1625 Zhang Hong (c. 1577-1652)

45. Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 12-13. “[The Literati] compiled the histories and wrote the books, thus establishing themselves as the supreme cultural authority of China. The acquaintance with old styles they gained through the privileged access to painting collections qualified them as connoisseurs and critics, and permitted them to include cultivated references to those old styles in their own artistic works.”

46. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 37-38.

47. Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 96.

48. Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting, p. 63 49. Cahill, The Compelling Image, p. 158-159.

50. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance from Florence Italy. (1475 - 1564) 51. Zöllner, Ogni pittore dipinge sè, link: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/32978340.pdf “Ogni pittore dipinge sè”, which translates to “Every painter paints himself”, or “automimesis” is a Tuscan proverb which was first published in Italian literature between 1477 and 1479. \ 52. Barkan, Michelangelo : A Life on Paper, p. 13 53. For more on Morelli’s Method, see Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 96-101.

54. Ginsberg, Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm, p. 101.

55. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning, p. 2.

III. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | REPETITION AND THE SELF The Self forgotten through Conscious Repetition

Chinese Landscape painters practice of copying and mimicking the styles and brushstrokes of old masters was displayed in the overwhelming evidence illustrating how revered ancient paintings functioned as templates which dictated the methods in which painters were trained, as well as their methods in forming their compositions. The constant concern and anxiety to reproduce a referential painterly signature formed the unwavering basis of all future pictorial landscapes, precipitating the genre’s transformation to became one of “art-historical art where pictures are signifiers purely of other pictures made and yet to be made”.56 James Cahill also commented on this trend of repetition that governed the practice of Landscape painting; “Landscapists, even those who were in some sense portraying real places, did so mostly by putting together learned conventional forms into more or less conventional compositions.”57 Instead of relying on nature as the basis for their abstraction of natural forms into calligraphy, painters consulted scrolls or albums of sketches of common landscape painting elements such as trees and rocks as standard examples. The process of codifying natural elements into sketches on scrolls and the constant mechanical copying and reproduction of sketches on other paintings engendered a certain forgetfulness that was not simply associated with the primitivism of a terminal decline, in which it became impossible to remember the Chinese landscape as it once was in the past, but more crucially an intentional, conscious forgetting, in terms of the narrowing of the Landscape genre;58 through the deliberation of what should have been painted and conversely, what was dismissed as vulgar and trivial, as well as what should have been preserved as ‘canonical’ work, and correspondingly, what should have been discarded.59 1

The abstraction of natural elements into codified forms was no longer up to the artist’s personal interpretation; but constituted instead the knowledge and application of standard codifications that had already been established by old masters. This was exemplified by a hand scroll belonging to Dong Qi Chang titled Sketches of traditional tree and rock types; this painting of sketches functioned as an intermediatary screen that mediated between elements he had studied in various old paintings by revered masters and his own, rather than between actual trees in nature and those in his paintings. The scroll no longer manifested the the relationship between the act of remembering and its technical facilitation, that of repetition as theorised by Freud; but was instead a canvas that displayed the mechanics of recording, or rather the process of copying and reproducing of the supposedly mnemonic image of the landscape, through the sketching out of “reproducible mnemic images”. This in turn precipitated the genre’s forgetting of the natural landscape as it was but instead, remembering and internalising a standardised, painted version of it that had been abstracted, refined and fine-tuned by the Chinese Landscape canon. A short note appended to Dong Qi Chang’s scroll written by his friend, another literati landscape master Chen Ji Ru (c. 1558-1639), corroborates this, attesting that “Whenever he made a large composition, he copied from these sketches.”60 Art Historians who have rigorously studied Dong Qi Chang’s work have also observed that his compositions were “not drawings after nature, but of practice sketches of rocks and trees presumably intended for incorporation into paintings.”61

The practice of incorporating the “inadvertent little gestures” and brushstrokes from old paintings into one’s own constituted a long, arduous process which necessitated a form of identification with the old paintings to the point of immersion; this extent of involvement that was required by the painter in his process of identification with the object could have possibly precipitated a certain ‘disinterestedness’62 within the painter, one where the painter’s conception of self was dissolved or forgotten, as postulated by Kant.

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Sketches of traditional tree and rock types Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555-1636)

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Rocks Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555-1636) Inscription by Gao Shi Qi

56. Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, p. 18.

57. Cahill, The Painter’s Practice, p. 95.

58. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 77-79.

“Poetic painting as James Cahill is defining it permitted artists an escape from the excessive narrowing of acceptable subject matter that is the affliction of much later chinese painting.”

59. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 17.

Evidenced by quote on 13th century poetic painting, that “Literati critics were so dismissive that examples [of paintings] survive only in Japan.”

See also, Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 2.

“Chinese painting has been severely censored by his same elite, the chinese male educated class, who have exercised control over its transmission, deciding which painting should be preserved, remounted and repaired when they need to be, and passed down through collections, and which others deserved to be neglected and lost.”

60. Ho, Wai-kam ed., The Century of Tung Ch ‘i-ch ‘ang, vol. 1, p. 172-173.

61. Tomita and Hsien, Album of Twenty sketches of Landscapes, Rocks, and Trees. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.

62. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.

III. 山 水 S H A N S H U I | REPETITION AND THE SELF Elimination of The Self from Conscious Repetition Inscription reads: His brushstrokes were kept to the minimum so that it was like looking into deep pools and voids…

In his pictures, even in the parts where there are no brushstrokes, form exists, and it is certainly impossible there to hide any defects.

His outlining of rocks was in squared forms…

Ni wielded his brush in the Se Song (side and relaxed) manner, which was not merely using the flat of the brush as though it lay on the paper, nor is it using the tip; it signifies a handling of the brush easily and with superb vitality.

[thus it is unimitatable and strong in authorship]

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Landscape painters from the Late Ming Dynasty were particularly susceptible to forms of repetition, because of the invention and distribution of print that enabled forms of reproduction on a much larger scale; One seminal publication during this era was Master Gu’s Pictorial Album, or Gu Shi Hua Pu63 (c. 1603), that distributed easy-to-identify versions of iconic works of more than a hundred painters from the origins of the pictorial tradition down to contemporary Ming era work. The subsequent Mustard Seed garden manual of painting, or Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan,64 (c. 1679), which was a woodblock-print publication of a traditional painter’s manual or repertory book that had previously served the private uses of masters and their pupils; also contributed to the commodification of painting. The reproducibility of calligraphy could be perceived as “a sort of entropy within the public text ..., where more and more writing led to less and less effect”,65 symbolising the ‘thinning’ of the very texture of culture itself.

Significantly, the lithographic translation of brushstrokes into woodprint form flattened the strokes and removed any subtle variations in width of line, tone and amount of ink, eliminating any semblance of speed, or ‘flourishes’, and thus traces of authorship from the manuals. This was pertinent, as the manuals claimed to serve as a preliminary guide that would familiarize the reader with the basic uses of the brush, as well as how to draw forms and compose scenes, but the lithographic nature of manual somewhat blurred and diluted the relationship between forms of the composition, despite its efforts in formalising a logical system to coordinate the disparate components in a real composition. Furthermore, the instruction written on the pages of the manual was not, as calligraphy character manuals were, a comprehensive guide to what constituted a standardised stroke order, implying a methodology of a repeated act of writing, that would consequently internalise the character in terms of its stroke sequence into muscle memory. Instead, the instructions were vague, lacking precision and rigor, imbued with a certain moral attitude as well as a presumption that the reader was literate and knowledgable enough to understand its casually inserted moral implications. For example, in the introduction to the Book of Grasses, Insects and Flowering Plants, the author wrote, “The life movement engendered by the spirit, Qi should animate the whole picture.” 66 In this context, the Qi referred to was the principle life component of Daoist ideology. This statement is but one of countless similar passages within the manual, which often described the state of mind one should have been in while painting, or what sort of spirit the painting should exude; but had little elaboration or explanation on the means to achieve this.

That is the reason one sees along the outlines of his rocks only a sharp edge and points.

He used his brush with great rapidity; its point was sharply tipped and exhibited strength of spirit (qi li)

[ here the Daoist principle of Qi is being referred to]

This method is very difficult… [even when] becoming throughly familiar with all the various brushstroke methods, It is impossible to attain that stage at which he evoked form in places where there were no brushstrokes.

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Ni Zan’s Rendering of Perspective in Height

2 Ni Zan’s Rendering of Perspective on the Level

The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual

A. Kaiming Ch’iu

63. Gu, Bing, Gu Shi Hua Pu / Gu Bing mo ji. fl. 1594-1603.

64. Ch’iu, The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual, p. 55-69.

65. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 77-79.

“The decline [of literati landscape painting] was blamed on the prevalence of forgeries among the antique paintings that the suzhou masters took as their models, and also on their commercialisation and lack of literati credentials.”

66. Wang and Sze, Mustard Seed Garden Manual, p. 471.

IV. 梅 蘭 竹 菊 M E I L A N Z H U J U | FORGETTING AND DISTORTING MEMORY Construction of Metaphor and Meaning into The Self

Aside from the instructions that were lacking in didactism, such that they were slightly redundant; the Mustard Seed Garden Manual also had chapters of pages containing fragments within landscape compositions that were extracted and removed from their original contexts. Each isolated fragment in the manual was translated into a pattern of one or more landscape elements of rocks, mountains, trees, etc. that was emblematic of a certain moral condition or ideal. This was further articulated within the text on the same or adjacent page that was meant to provide instructions on how the elements should be painted, seamlessly blending in the moral, symbolic value of these elements of nature. These moral concepts were characterized by a smattering of philosophical ideologies, largely Daoist, but also Confucian in nature. For example, at the beginning of the section within the book titled Book of Trees, the author stated, “Mark well the way the branches dispose themselves, the yin and yang of them; which are in front and which are in the back.”67 In another section entitled The Fundamentals of Bamboo Painting, it is written, “ Each movement of turning, bending, drooping, or rising holds a specific idea and principle, li that must be observed and felt through the heart for full understanding of the expressiveness of bamboo.”68 In the first excerpt, the Daoist principle of yin and yang was highlighted, and in the latter excerpt, the Confucian principle of li, the law that governed the inherent reason of things was cited; philosophical allusions were seamlessly woven into the textual instruction without further elaboration in both cases. This presupposed the adoption and internalisation of a certain moral attitude by its reader in order to render the true nature of the emblem on paper.

Inscription: Mark well the way the branches dispose themselves, the yin and yang of them; which are in front and which are in the back. [ Highlighting the Daoist principle of yin and yang]

This was in parallel with the genre’s shift towards a more esoteric system of symbolism; the gradual omission of overt, and universally familiar religious architecture such as temples within landscape paintings in favour of a subtler, metaphorical symbolism embedded within elements of nature. This system was partly predicated on the usage of imagery in Tang poetry,69 where natural elements such as birds and different types of plants were inextricably linked to, and thus alluded to certain Confucian morals and values.

As such, the usage of motifs that allegorised values and traits was almost always incorporated into landscape painting; the Bamboo for example was one of the four scholarly gentlemen,70 or Confucianist junzi of Chinese gardens, that embodied scholarly virtues such as longevity, steadfastness and modesty.71 The embodiment of these traits in various motifs were socially constructed metaphors that were developed and constantly revised through both poetry and painting, and were employed in paintings to convey the artist’s emotions or to project certain moral virtues. Christopher Bollas suggested that the compilation of an index of emblemic characters, or metaphors, defined as the transcription of an object into another unrelated mode of language; would aid the subject’s unconscious utilization of these details in constructing reality, while also endowing these objects with further “psychical meaning”.72

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Inscription:

This notion is probably most applicable to the Bamboo plant, a commonly used masculine motif that had an almost ubiquitous presence not only within the Chinese Landscape tradition stemming back centuries, but can also be seen everywhere in contemporary China; veritably, it is arguably an emblem for the Oriental. It’s metaphorical meaning and symbolism was rooted in its physical form, and was obvious and immediately understood, presupposing a true and reliable translation and abstraction of its physical characteristics that was devoid of literary conceit.

Each movement of turning, bending, drooping, or rising holds a specific idea and principle, li that must be observed and felt through the heart for full understanding of the expressiveness of bamboo.

A pure person is like a tall bamboo, a thin bamboo is like the noble man.73 Wen Zhengming

[ Thus citing the Confucian principle of li, the law that governs the inherent reason of things. ]

The Bamboo’s evergreen and plentiful nature was correlated and associated with longevity and steadfastness, and its physical ability to bow and bend without breaking associated it with the desired gentlemanly trait of rectitude; or facing challenges without ceasing to be loyal and morally proper. Most of the literati painter’s metaphoric devices and symbolism within Chinese Landscape painting however, were not as apparent or immediately understood solely on the basis of an individual’s familiarity with its physical form, but rather necessitated not only the individual’s literacy and possessing of a certain education, but furthermore a familiarity with certain literary work.

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Book of Trees, First Section The Fundamentals of Bamboo Painting Mustard Seed Garden manual, A. Kaiming Ch’iu

67. Wang and Sze, Mustard Seed Garden Manual, p. 18.

68. Wang and Sze, Mustard Seed Garden Manual,p. 383.

69. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 74 70. For more on the Four Gentlemen, see link: http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-four-gentlemen.php The Four Gentlemen (junzi)also called the Four Noble Ones, in Chinese art refer to four plants: the plum, the orchid, the bamboo, and the chrysanthemum.

71. For a more elaborate description of symbolism that the Bamboo represents, see Ju, The Book of Bamboo.

72. An expression used often by Bollas, in Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992) 73. Inscription by Wen Zhengming (c. 1470-1559), Listening to the Bamboo, A Hanging Scroll Painting

IV. 梅 蘭 竹 菊 M E I L A N Z H U J U | FORGETTING AND DISTORTING MEMORY Distortion of Memory through Metaphor

A problematic tendency in the metaphorization of natural elements within Chinese Landscape painting was the literati’s equating of their codification of natural forms and elements into a mode of language; in other words a metaphorical poetry, that they corresponded with the sensorial poetic. This blurred and slowly eliminated the distinction between the universality of literary meaning and a yet-to-be determined sensorial language. For example, the Orchid, another of the Four Scholarly Gentlemen, has a history dating back to Confucius (551−479 BC), who employed it as a literary trope in Songs of Chu, or Chuci 楚辭.74 In a few passages in the book, he likened himself to an orchid flourishing alone in a field, alluding that he had an almost regal character that served as a companion to the common grass surounding him.

Indeed the orchids are the perfume of kings, even if now they grow dense in solitude, they are companion to common grass.

It can be compared with the virtuous men, when they cannot meet, they relate with common people. 夫蘭當為王者香，今乃獨茂，與眾草為伍，譬猶賢者不逢時，與 鄙夫為倫也.75

The phrase ‘the perfume of kings’ functioned as a synonym of the orchid; an emblem of nobleness and tenacity of character.

Moreover, Confucius deployed the image of the fragrant orchid to symbolise real friendship76, as he had declared that “to befriend a man of virtue was to enter a room fragrant with orchids.”77 While orchids were common in dynastic China, and the fragance of orchids was an experience familiar to the layman, a person’s logical understanding and correlation of the orchid with its emblemic traits; that of humility and nobility, was predicated on his or her prior familiarity with Confucian literature. For instance, a visual of an orchid flourishing alone in a field retained within an individual’s memory, following Freud’s notion of the mnemonic process that facilitates memory, would be further layered with a series of mnemic reproductions of direct personal experiences, as well as indefinite and associative meaning found in other visual materials containing the orchid, for example in the form of literature, other paintings, or even more superfluous artefacts such as clothing and ornamentation. This usage of metaphoric literary devices presumed that the outcome of the mnemonic layering of memories within an individual would translate to the individual’s recognition of the orchid’s metaphorical meaning and usage within paintings, ineluctably substituting a formative impulse with an informed academic pedantry.

The mechanism of assigning metaphor whose meaning could not be derived solely from form or a familiarity with the object, but rather predicated on a deep understanding of literature concerning the object; entailed a higher level of education and connoisseurship that the literati reasoned would sharpen an individual’s aesthetic appreciation of the painting, and furthermore raise the qualitative level of the work itself. This implicitly intellectualised a mental faculty which was previously based on intuition, or as Hume postulated, "obvious to the most careless enquirer".78 The individual’s intellectual apperception of the art-work corresponded with Bourdieau’s social critique on beauty and taste, such that “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.”79

The prerequisite knowledge of literary references acted as set of criteria that excluded people from lowly backgrounds and lower education levels from fully appreciating Chinese Literati painting, as well as women, who were generally regarded as lesser entities throughout China’s Dynastic History. The Confucian code of ethics that severely repressed women and reinforced their lower place in Chinese society80 translated to misogynist attitudes within Literati circles as well, as women were mostly excluded from the male world of connoisseurship. This is exemplified by Dong Qi Chang’s listing of five conditions under which calligraphy and paintings should not be shown: the fifth, following bad weather and vulgar guests, was “in the presence of a woman”.81 Two woman painters used this exceptional status accorded to them due to their gender to subvert and surpass conventional Chinese Landscape Painting methodologies and constraints, appropriating the usage of metaphors and layered symbolism within the genre to express a unique sense of self that contextualised memories of their loved ones and emotional moments within the pictorial landscape.

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Orchids, bamboo and rock, Ma Shouzhen, c. 1572 two out of

Four Gentlemen of Chinese Painting,

梅蘭竹菊

plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum

74. Verses of Chu, Warring States Period (475 BC - 221 BC) The early (pre-Qin dynasty) Classical Chinese poetry is mainly known through the two anthologies, the Chu Ci and the Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry or Book of Songs).

75. Luo (ed.), Han Yu Da Ci Dian, An Unabridged Chinese Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 4, p. 459A. 76. For the interpretation of orchids as a symbol of friendship, see Zhang, Politics and Morality, ch. 6.

77. Kutcher, ‘The Fifth Relationship: Dangerous Friendships in the Confucian Context’ 78. Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, p. 203.

79. Bourdieau, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p. 2.

80. Guo, ‘The Historical Track of the Chinese Ancient Female Personality.’ p. 2.

81. Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure, p. 228, quoting Dong Qichang, originally mentioned in Yunxuan Qingbi Lu, p.25

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 竹 Z H U | BAMBOO Guan Daosheng (c. 1262−1319 AD)

Guan Daosheng82 (c. 1262−1319 AD), was the wife of the renowned painter, Zhao Mengfu83 (c. 1254-1322 AD) and a well known woman painter in her own right, famed for her ink bamboos, ‘with delicate and elegant strokes’.84 She was very likely taught and inducted into Literati painting theory by her husband, as records show that their marriage in 1286 preceded her earliest paintings, which were dated around 1296, as well as her earliest calligraphy scrolls, in 1299. Though it was not known whether he directed her to specialise in painting bamboos, an atypical object for a female artist to paint, it was almost certain that he approved of this specialisation. This was particularly evidenced by his likening of the bamboo’s beneficent effect to that of the Lady of Wei85 playing state airs rather than popular tunes in antiquity;86 illustrating his opinion that bamboo was an appropriate subject for a woman to paint, despite his status within the Scholar literati circle that would have suggested otherwise. Guan Daosheng was clearly conscious of her seeming ‘invasion’ into a male tradition as she inscribed a bamboo handscroll which she painted in her husband’s studio, in 1310, with the following playful couplet:

Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain, 1308 Guan Dao Sheng (c. 1262−1319)

To play with brush and ink is masculine sort of thing to do, yet I made this painting.

Wouldn’t someone say that I have transgressed? How despicable; how despicable.87 At Guan Daosheng’s time during the Yuan Dynasty, bamboo was particularly significant to many painters as a symbol of resilience. Its characteristic of bending implied a certain persistency under the overwhelmingly superior force of the barbarian non-chinese Mongol rulers, and was regarded as a national symbol of hope during China’s state of humiliation and despair. Its symbolism of steadfast companionship in literati tradition as well was exceptionally applicable to Guan Daosheng, who had a close relationship with her husband. Landscape painting and its accompanying poetry tied their relationship together, through their shared profession of painting and many artistic collaborations.88 Furthermore, the general preference of woman painters; that is the usage of singular, allusive imagery to full, majestic but also unspecific landscapes, could possibly be attributed to the specificity of the emblem and imagery, that they felt was more effective as a vehicle for their means of self expression. Through the painting and reappropriation of traditionally masculine elements that were emblematic of scholarly traits, or what was deemed as ‘noble’ attributes for a male to have, woman painters could assert and redefine their own feminity, rewriting the cultural meaning of prescribed landscape emblems as a flexible combination of masculinity and femininity.

Guan Daosheng’s tendency to paint bamboo not as an isolated plant but as a fragment, a zoomed-in detail that was part of a larger, typical shanshui landscape painting, was prudent on her part, as full landcapes that were regarded as ‘the highest of literati subjects in painting’89 and were probably in Literati’s opinion, beyond the capabilities of most woman painters who they would have considered to be on a lower level of painting mastery. She however distinguished her work from the less highly-regarded bamboo, or ‘Bird and Flower’ genre of painting, setting herself apart from the craftsmen painters of lower social and cultural status that typically composed that genre. These ‘Bird and Flower’ bamboo paintings would conventionally be set as isolated bamboo branches pressed close to the picture plane.

Bamboo Groves Guan Dao Sheng (c. 1262−1319)

Guan Daosheng’s successful reintegration of the bamboo into a landscape setting was accomplished by painting them as a part of the thickets in which they had naturally grown. She rendered bamboo in scenes composed of groves that were highlighted at the base of a series of staggered mountains covered in mist, this effect was created by her variations in ink tonality. By subjecting the bamboo to the effects of the landscape and atmospheric setting in which it was located, through manipulating the skills and painting techniques that she had learnt, she was able to reinduct the bamboo back into its natural setting, In doing so, she had transgressed, as she had claimed in her couplet, into the esteemed genre of literati landscape painting, albeit in a very modest manner. Furthermore, her decision to paint bamboo along waterways could possibly be attributed to a conscious deliberation to associate the bamboo, a traditionally male element, with a more feminine, sinuous image.

Crossing Rivers and layered mountains Zhao Mengfu (c.1254-1322)

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Orchids, bamboo and rock, Ma Shouzhen, c. 1572 two out of

Four Gentlemen of Chinese Painting,

梅蘭竹菊

plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum

82. Purtle, ‘The Icon of the Woman Artist’, p. 290-319 83. Zhao Mengfu was a famous Yuan Dynasty (c. 1279-1368) Painter who was a patron of the Yuan Dynasty Emperor and was well-known for his paintings of shanshui landscapes as well as horses.

84. Siren, Chinese Painting, p. 97.

85. he subscribed to a reference for the Gu Shi and ancient works.

86. McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China, p. 281-282.

87. Weidner et al.,Views from Jade Terrace, p. 67-68.

88. Purtle, ‘The Icon of the Woman Artist’ “Guan’s “Rhyme-Prose” was first anthologized in Zhao Mengfu’s Collected Works of the Songxue Studio, where its author is not named; subsequently, it was recorded in the Shiqu Catalogue of the Qing Imperial Collection (Shiqu baoji sanbian) as inscribed on a bamboo painting by Guan, thus complicating clear understanding of authorship and gender.”

89. Rawson (ed.), The British Museum Book of Chinese Art, p. 112.

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 竹 Z H U | BAMBOO Guan Daosheng (c. 1262−1319 AD)

Guan Daosheng’s paintings were often accentuated by poetry, as an accompanying text within the space of the scroll, in order to communicate her intentions and feelings. Poetry was often employed by many landscape painters to communicate certain emotions in words that could not have been expressed as visuals, however it should be noted that this was very restrained as there was a limited range of subject matter and manner of poetry that was acceptable within landscape painting theory. Guan Daosheng’s couplets were much less restrained, perhaps due to her status as a woman which allowed her to be an exception to the rule, and enabled her to allude to distinctly feminine emotional states. For example, a poem inscribed on a painting, entitled ‘Xie zhu ji jun mozhu’, or A Bamboo Sketch Sent to My Husband visualises her longing and pining for her husband’s return and furthermore, correlates the duration of this longing to that of a bamboo’s growth. In this manner, her painting subject; the cultivation of the bamboo grove, symbolises the effect that the absence of her husband has on her, and acts as a medium that somewhat ameliorates and sublimates the lengthiness of her pain and melancholy, aiding her process to forget her pain and to externalise her boredom of nostalgia.

On the day my lord left, the bamboo was first planted; The bamboo has already formed a grove and my lord has yet to return.

Once my jade visage has faded, it can hardly be restored – Unlike a flower, which falls to bloom again.90 “Inscribed on a Painting” (Ti hua) As Spring is fair, today is also fair, Casually I stroll with my children under the bamboo.

The sense of spring is recently much stronger; Leafy, leafy my children grow by the side of the stone.91

The poem illustrates Guan Dao Sheng’s maternal values, articulating her subsummation of the bamboo as a mirror of her maternal self, through the adoption of the bamboo as her children in her transition from the first to second couplet of her poem. She thus asserted her emotional and maternal relation to a plant that was integral to her expression of self. By adopting the bamboo as a personal emblem, she re-invented the traditionally gentlemanly and musculine plant as one that was more feminine, but similarly virtuous and morally upright. It is significant as well that while her paintings of Bamboo were critically acclaimed among literati critics, who were astonished by her “strong, masculine brushstrokes”, they also alleged that this “did not betray the fact that a woman had made them,”92 implying that while she was accepted into their ranks, she would always be somewhat apart, and more saliently, at a lower level than them, owing to her inconcealable identity as a woman.

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Bamboo and Rock Guan Dao Sheng (c. 1262−1319)

90. Weidner et al.,Views from Jade Terrace, p. 67-68.

91. Purtle, The Poetry of Guan Daosheng and the Emblem of Bamboo, p. 128 92. McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China, p. 104.

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 蘭 L A N | ORCHID Ma Shouzhen/ Ma Xiang Lan (c. 1548–1604 AD)

The Bamboo was not the only one out of the Four Scholarly Gentlemen that was adopted by an esteemed women painter; the Orchid as well became associated with Ma Shouzhen (c. 1548–1604 AD), a cultured courtesan who lived in the famous pleasure quarter in Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty, and was held in high esteem by members of the literati despite her lowly status in society. Scholar’s liasons with prostitutes and courtesans were common occurences in Chinese Dynastic history,93 and illicit affairs, as a way of circumventing rigid Chinese marital attitudes, had been the very model of romantic love since the Tang Dynasty, when the caizi jiaren,94 or ‘talented scholar and beautiful woman’ ideal gained popularity. This was however, not apparent or illustrated in any scholar literati calligraphy or paintings, at least as far as surviving evidence indicates. It is probable that if there were any such paintings, that they were probably deemed too facile or vulgar to be preserved, as romantic love was not an acceptable or fashionable theme within the narrow repertoire of literati landscape painting genre.95 Ma Shouzhen’s many poetry-paintings subverted this concept as they recorded her experiences and memories of multiple love affairs with different men, but simultaneously remained modestly within the range of acceptable subject matter of the literati. Rather than depicting her passions through erotic imagery of relationships between men and women in a literal manner, as her vocation might suggest, her method of visualising and manifesting her emotions and memories on paper was instead subdued and implied within her calligraphy and poetry in symbolic form.

Ma Shouzhen used the Orchid, a traditionally masculine motif as a personal emblem, a representation of herself within her work, subsuming the Orchid as a mirror of her self and in the expression of her social relations. This not only negotiated her own position within society, but also played a larger role in redesigning the contours of gender and its expression. Her work was greatly influenced by Guan Daosheng; following in the tradition of a reverence for precedent painters, she painted after Guan Daosheng’s style. This could be seen in two of her paintings where she explicitly inscribed that she was painting in the manner of Guan Daosheng, for example, in her scroll ‘Following Lady Guan [Daosheng]’s three friends’ (1572). The style as well as the composition of this scroll, in which a tall and thin bamboo dominated in its verticality, closely resembled a detail within a hanging scroll she made in 1563 that was not present in her later work, thus it was probable that while she had initially seeked to emulate Guan Daosheng’s style, her calligraphy deviated from Guan Daosheng’s as her skill matured.

Nevertheless, she also followed in Guan Daosheng’s tendency to paint plants not as isolated branches, as per the standard of vernacular ‘Bird and Flower’ Paintings, but as a fragment; a zoomed-in detail that hinted at a larger, shanshui landscape context. The Orchid plant was employed obsessively and repeatedly in her painting, in order to fashion herself as ‘The Orchid of the Xiang River’, and to elevate herself symbolically to a level of friendship with men; specifically the scholar-literati that she associated herself with. Her association with the plant was officialised through its incorporation into her courtesy name, Ma Xianglan, 馬湘蘭, that was bestowed to her at adulthood, and was the name she inscribed most of her work with.

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Following Lady Guan [Daosheng]’s three friends, 1572 Ma Shouzhen, (c. 1548-1604)

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Orchids, 1563 Ma Shouzhen, (c. 1548-1604)

93. Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 150.

94. See Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, p. 99-159.

95. Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 4.

“Respectable painting in China had long ago narrowed its range of acceptable subjects to rule out, with few exceptions, scenes of daily life, scenes that seem to convey the real feelings of the people portrayed, and scenes that explore human relationships in more than the stiffest and most moralistic ways.”

秋老妝樓雨似塵。 筆牀書卷鎮相親。 一枝寫出湘皋影。 仿佛凌波解珮人。 癸巳閏月齋頭坐雨。 閱馬姬畫蘭走筆戲題。 王穉登。

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 蘭 L A N | ORCHID Ma Shouzhen/ Ma Xiang Lan (c. 1548–1604 AD)

Orchids were favourable to Ma Shouzhen’s self-image due to their strong association with fragrance and scent that insinuated a notion of feminine beauty; firstly in the translation of the olfactory senses to the visual imagery of rouge and powder, and secondly of the body’s natural scent fresh after a bath. Such visuals facilitated the departure of the symbolism of the Orchid as a landscape motif into the realm of the erotic. This was consistent with the vocation of the courtesan, that was characterised by the nature of her sexual availability. Like many other courtesans of Ma Shouzhen’s time, paintings were employed as a tool to enhance her personal attractiveness, as cultural accomplishments were more attractive than seductiveness and sexual skills in gaining her popularity amongst the scholar-literati, who made up the bulk of the pleasure district’s clientele. The Orchid’s multiple meanings and implications complemented her image and branding, serving as a double innuendo that conveyed specific hidden messages in paintings and poetry that she gifted to her admirers.

Deep into the autumn, rouge-and-powder buildings in a rain thin like dust.

The brush-pot, the scroll and the paperweight guard their mutual affection.

One brush writes the calligraphy, while Xiang (Ma Shouzhen) praises their shadows.

As if fairies walked over ripples, while dispelling jade ornaments to people.

Composed in the leap month of the renchen year [1593] while sitting in the rain by the side of the building.

I look at Lady Ma’s painted orchids and quickly write this for fun.96 Wang Zhi Deng

This text was from a scroll that was a collaborative effort between Ma Shouzhen and Wang Zhideng, not unlike those by the Scholar-literati who wished to reify and make visible their relationship to enhance both their social positions. It defined and publicly consummated their social and intimate connection, one that was already well known within the Jiangnan community of literati.97 A distinctive feature of this scroll was that Ma Shouzhen’s signature orchids took a far bigger portion of the scroll than Wang Zhideng’s calligraphy; which implied a hierarchy which was not only aesthetic, but could also have been social. The reason why this is peculiar is because calligraphy was traditionally considered to be more valuable than paintings, due to the appended implications of a higher social and educational status of its authors; in this context the scroll could be perceived as a subversion of traditional hierarchies.

Moreover, Wang Zhideng was a male poet-scholar well known amongst the literati, and was thus indubitably of a much greater social standing than the courtesan. His inscription on the scroll further transgressed traditional roles as he attributed the authorship of the painting to Ma Shouzhen, who otherwise did not leave a signature, thus putting a further emphasis on Ma Shouzhen’s painting portion over his calligraphy, while at the same time reiterating his powerful position as a male scholar, and corresponding ability to claim authenticity.

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1 Orchids, 1593

Ma Shouzhen, (c. 1548-1604)

Wang Zhideng, (c. 1535–1612)

96. Guan, Sanqiu ge shuhua Lu / Sanqiu Studio’s Record of Painting and Calligraphy,1.54-1.55.

97. Merlin, The Late Ming Courtesan Ma Shouzhen, p. 242 This relationship was “well known to the Jiangnan community of literati and also publicised by a drama which satirised it.”

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 蘭 L A N | ORCHID Ma Shouzhen/ Ma Xiang Lan (c. 1548–1604 AD)

蘭房 L A N F A N G | Orchid Chamber / Boudoir 閨閣. Orchid Chamber / Boudoir Filled with emotions In the bamboo bed clear of dreams, The flowers’ fragrance charms the drinking cup.

I awake in the delightful serenity of seclusion, The moonlight fills the boudoir.98 有懷 竹榻清人夢，花香媚酒杯。 覺來有幽趣，明月滿妝臺。

Ma Shouzhen materialised the most private, and feminine sphere of courtesan’s everyday life in the form of the boudoir 蘭 房,99 the space in which courtesans spent most of their existence, and was thus translated to a metaphor that symbolised herself in her poetry. This defined the female gendered dimension of her work, while simultaneously setting the spatial frame and physical context for her painted orchids. While narratives or events described in her poetry might not have taken place in the boudoir in majority of cases, the origins of the feelings she expressed belonged to life within the space of the boudoir. In the poem above, Ma Shouzhen marked the boudoir as a space belonging to herself and as an expression of her identity, and, in the positive, pensive tone she adopted for the poem; this challenged the common trope of the boudoir in the Chinese vernacular painting tradition as a space where the abandoned woman longs for her man to return.100 The boudoir − a liminal place between the woman’s private and public self, between the intimate interior and the outside world of the city and nature − assumed the architectural form of a window, both real and metaphorical, from which she contemplated her feelings and observed the world.

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Lady Red Thread 紅線女109 It is relieving to entrust [myself] to painting, my pure heart is placed in between secluded orchids and thickets of bamboo. 用是托諸丹素， 見氷心於幽蘭叢竹之間.

‘Sitting at night’ 夜坐 Jade dew floats in the sky, remote at nightfall; In my boudoir facing the wine, I feel in deep joy. Golden flowers set off one another, the moon above the Qinhuai River.

The regular sound of the stick for washing clothes breaks [the silence], [it is] Jianye [Nanjing] autumn.

The autumn moon high in the sky brightens up the residence of immortals, The waterclock suppressed all the sounds, it is quiet and silent.

The flowers’ scent enters the room where I sit and its touch is inebriant, I don’t mind the clock’s beats or the river sound.118

蘭室 L A N S H I | Orchid Studio

Ma Shouzhen sometimes lent the Orchid and consequently, her boudoir a masculine expression through the substitution of the term 蘭室, or ‘Orchid Studio’, in place of the boudoir to represent her personal quarters in some of her poetry. This added an emphasis to the ‘study, studio’ component of the courtesan’s residence, rather than the boudoir functioning merely as her bedroom; this new term elevated her to the level of a scholar, due to the intentional appropriation of the male quality and space that was commonly associated with the literati activity of poetry writing. This conveyed the idea of ‘dignity and solitude’101 usually attributed to orchids, echoing the dichotomy of the symbolism embedded within the Orchid as an emblem; firstly as an erotic symbol associated with the bedroom and the woman’s fragrance, and secondly as a symbol of personal erudition and frustration for unrecognised scholarly talents.

Ma Shouzhen’s usage of the Orchid Studio to depict herself as an erudite, intellectual scholar is particularly explicit in her poem ‘Sitting at night’ 夜坐, which conveyed the idea of ‘seclusion’, a common literati trope to express the scholar’s high-mindnessness and a disconnect from worldly affairs;102 in this Ma Shouzhen likened herself to a literati-scholar not only in terms of intellect, but also with the display of other conventional scholarly virtues. At the same time, she also asserted her gender through her usage of fragrance and aroma, through statements such as “the flowers’ scent” that was strongly associated with the feminine erotic allure.

玉露浮空入夜悠，蘭齋對酒興偏稠。 金華掩映秦淮月，砧杵頻摧建業秋。 秋月當空玉宇明，漏殘萬籁寂无聲。 花香入座扶人醉，一任疏钟隔水鳴。

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Orchid and Bamboo Ma Shouzhen (c. 1548-1604)

98. Ma Shouzhen, Ma Xianglan shiji, 2.21b.

99. Berg and Starr (eds.), The Quest for Gentility in China, p. 16 “The boudoir was the space in which women spent most of their existence and for this reason, it became a metaphor for the woman herself, as the term commonly attributed for literate woman was guixiu ‘elegance of the boudoir’ often translated as ‘talent of the boudoir’ or ‘gentlewoman’” 100. Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, p. 19 “Ma Shouzhen gave voice to a reappropriation of the boudoir as a space belonging to herself and, in so doing, challenged the notion of it ‘as a space of emotional withdrawal and imprisonment” 101. Hsiao, ‘The Allusive Mode of Production’, p. 65-66 102. Specifically, This started around the late Ming Period, c. 1368–1644 AD

V. 蘭 竹 L A N Z H U | WRITING OUT OF THE SELF 蘭 L A N | ORCHID Ma Shouzhen/ Ma Xiang Lan (c. 1548–1604 AD)

On a more somber note, Ma Shouzhen used the space of the boudoir, or ‘Orchid Room’ to externalise a certain anguish and pain of separation. This was exceptional within the genre of landscape painting, as the trope of farewell to a lover was virtually absent in traditional literati painting, but conversely held a constant and familiar presence within the poetry inscriptions of paintings done by women.103 Heartbreak was an emotion that courtesans were familiar with experiencing and dealing with in their vocation, due to the nature of the pleasure quarter, which guests regularly visited and departed. Ma Shouzhen connotated the Orchid with the boudoir, a physical space that as mentioned before, was culturally perceived as the woman’s inner realm,104 manifesting and occupying this space symbolically in her description of her boredom and deep anguish. The explicit term that she used within her poetry was shengui, 深閨, which literally translated to ‘deep boudoir’, but could also mean ‘deep Orchid’. While the vivid imagery of the lonely courtesan coping with the sadness of solitude while waiting for her lover’s return conformed to the common and overused trope of the abandoned woman within Chinese vernacular painting,105 Ma Shouzhen’s work was singular and distinct in her internalisation of the regal and elegant Orchid as a personification of herself, elevating the woman embodied in her work above the typical lower-class, frail and hapless woman that many would associate with the vernacular painting trope. The Orchid’s visual also lent the poetry an eroticising element, that made her expressed sorrow seem almost manipulative and controlled; to cultivate an image of a lonely, seemingly vulnerable woman in order to increase her seductive allure to other admirers.

Nonetheless, the recursive themes of parting and heartbreak within Ma Shouzhen’s plethora of lyrical compositions that accompanied her paintings reveal a palapable desperation and genuine melancholy; constantly reiterating her stigma of partings as emotionally distressful moments, her recounting of the time spent together with previous lovers, as well as her wistful dreams of having a loyal companion. This could be ascribed to what Freud defined as a ‘work of melancholy’,106 a mechanism of repetition undertaken by a mourner to deal with loss and to internalise pain into nostalgia, accompanied by his or her increasing lack of interest in the external world following traumatic loss or pain. He theorised that the perpetual reproduction of this image of loss as a process of detachment and catharsis -- in Ma Shouzhen’s case this was evident in her constant reproduction of the Orchid motif -- such that the pain of loss and its associated memories would be repeatedly focused on and written out to the point that the person would “sever this attachment to the object.” Following this idea, Ma Shouzhen’s continual and repeated scrutiny of the Orchid and retreating into the metaphorical space of the boudoir within her work could be perceived as a form of carthasis; dealing with constant loss and numbing her capacity for coping with her pain. This thus induced a translation, or sublimation of the excess of melancholia into a form of nostalgia, which manifested through the layering of slightly different, but ultimately similar images of the object of her obsession; the Orchid, which she correlated to her loss. In this way, the pain of loss that she constantly had to tackle was mitigated through a process of forgetting and through dealing with the boredom of nostalgia.

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Heartbreaking farewell 愴別110 Sick bones dragged in the long days, Mr Wang loved me tenderly.

Time after time we faced orchids and bamboo, Night after night we collected poetic works. 病骨淹長昼， 王生曾見憐。 時時對蘭竹， 夜夜集詩篇。

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Orchid; Bamboo; Calligraphy In Running Script, 1562 Ma Shouzhen (c. 1548-1604); Gui Zhuang (c. 1613-1673); Du Yuhuang (c. 1611-1687)

103. For more on Poetic tropes in parting and the abandoned woman, see Merlin, The Late Ming Courtesan Ma Shouzhen, p. 194-200.

104. On the space of the inner quarters, see Fong, ‘Writing and Illness’, The Inner Quarters and Beyond, p. 10-15.

105. Literati poetry in the female voice constructed fixed female stereotypes, whose femininity and erotic allure was expressed in the reclusion of boudoir and mirrored the authors’ own feelings, desires and frustrations. See also, Fong, ‘Engendering the Lyric’, p. 107-144.

See also Bell, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, p. 1-2, 99.

“Since the Tang, but especially from the Song dynasty when the genre was established, the male-authored female voice took mainly the compositional shape of ci.”

106. Freud, Mourning and Melancholy, p. 243-258.

See also Laplanche and Pontalis, “Work of Mourning”, The Language of Psycho-analysis, p. 485-486.

V I. F O R G E T - M E - N O T | WRITING OUT OF ONE’S LOSS An Epilogue and Revisitation

The most influential literati critique and theory enamoured the literati community with an aesthetic of the spare and plain107; this rarefied connoisseurship perpetuated the banal repetition of compositions and elements, that robbed many works of their immediacy and impoverished the genre. The incessant and somewhat arbitrary usage of symbolism within the landscape painting genre created a set of constraints which governed painters’ writing out of self, and the sheer repetitiveness that was engendered as a result of an almost religious adherence to these constraints unwittingly diluted and negated the expression of identity and self in majority of these paintings.

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The two aforementioned woman painters, Ma Shouzhen and Guan Daosheng, were exceptions to the landscape painting tradition owing to their gender and societal status, and were successful in subverting the arbitrary symbolism represented by the landscape elements that they had adopted as their niche, specifically the Orchid and Bamboo, two out of the four Scholarly Gentlemen. This accomplishment could perhaps be in part due to their dealing with singular elements at a much smaller scale, within their alloted capacity to paint plants as zoomed-in fragments that hinted at a much larger landscape. The shift in scale and reduction of the number of elements considered within the frame to a singular one would have entailed focusing and zooming-in on the most mundane of details. This, coupled with an almost mechanical method of reproduction through repetitively painting the respective plants that each had chosen as her niche, correlated the painting to a screen; a device that Freud used to demonstrate how the human mental interface filtered and processed within the mechanism of memory. Following this idea, the singular or few elements projected onto the painting scroll, for example Guan Daosheng’s bamboo along the waterway, were the painter’s conscious manifestation108 of her memories, or at least the residual fragments, that one could argue constituted what the painter considered to be her most valuable and personal ones. In other words, the mundanity of repetition was what precipitated the emergence of nostalgia and feelings that were intimate and extremely personal to each woman.

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Revisiting and zooming in onto Ni Zan’s work, as well as the timeline of his life explains certain patterns and tendencies that were extremely prevalent within his paintings. His life was plagued by troubles, as evidenced by this poem Shuhuai, or “Speaking my thoughts”, that he wrote: Pity me that I lost my father in childhood. I was raised by my eldest brother.

I was determined to pursue the life of a scholar.

To live by righteous deeds and to uphold pure principles...

Noble positions and great wealth I disdained: I wished only to leave behind a good name.

Suddenly my eldest brother died, And our mother soon followed...109

The poem is an insight not only into what Ni Zan’s moral aspirations were, which were in line with the standard ‘noble, high-minded’ ambitions of the typical scholar-painter, but more crucially reveals his constant dealings and struggles with loss and separation. This might explain the constant presence of pine trees in his compositions; they were easily visible features in the foreground of his paintings, and well known in Chinese culture to symbolise farewell, as the pine tree’s chinese character is a homonym for song, or to send away.

Ni Zan’s growing sense of isolation had a staggering presence especially in two of his later works, “Wind among the trees on the Riverbank” 110 , painted the same year in which Ni Zan’s wife had passed away111; and “Rong Xi Studio”112, painted in the last few years of Ni Zan’s life. The pine trees in these two paintings were rendered fainter and sparser in contrast to the lusher, leafier ones in previous paintings, and the angle of perception from which the landscape is viewed also shifted such that the vast, empty spaces within took a larger, more pronounced portion of the composition.

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Enjoying the wildnerness in an autumn grove, c.1339 Rongxi Studio, c.1372 Six Gentlemen, c. 1345 Water and Bamboo Dwelling Wind among the trees on the Riverbank, c.1363

107. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 77-79.

108. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 190 109. Wang Bin: Yuan Chushi Yunlin Ni Xiansheng Lüzang Muzhiming, in Zhu: Ni Zan Zuopin Biannian, p. 13. Translated by Fong in Images of the Mind, p. 108.

110. See Illustration (5) on facing page. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Online Museum, Asian art. link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/41154 111. Fong: Images of the Mind, p. 112 112. See Illustration (2) on facing page.

V I. F O R G E T - M E - N O T | WRITING OUT OF ONE’S LOSS An Epilogue and Revisitation

In “Wind among the Trees on the Riverbank”, which Ni Zan had painted for his friend, fellow scholar-painter Yu Kan (active 14th century), the poem that he inscribed on the painting particularly underscored his feelings of loss and isolation: On the riverbank, the evening tide begins to fall; The frost-covered leaves of the windblown grove are sparse.

I lean on my staff—the brushwood gate is closed and silent; I think of my friend—the glow is nearly gone from the hills.

I think of my friend—the glow is nearly gone from the hills.

Ni Zan’s preoccupation with pine trees, coupled with the vast, spaces that he left empty within his compositions that alluded to large, still, almost numbing water bodies, were the conscious manifestation of the way in which he mitigated his pain of loss, through a process of forgetting and boredom of repetition. Seen through the lens of Freud’s theorised mechanism, which defines a “work of mourning”114 as one in which pain undergoes a form of repression, Ni Zan processed and numbed this thoughts through a heavily nuanced exercise of endlessly rearranging his elements within a single unsaturated scene in his various compositions.

A “work of mourning”, characterised by a person’s increasing lack of interest in the external world following the traumatic loss of his or her beloved, could also be seen in Zhao Mengfu’s later work, in the period following the passing of his wife, bamboo painter Guan Daosheng. This event had an irreperable and devastating effect on him, plunging him into a state of “alcoholic delirium”.113 This is supported by historical records that show that his painting subject and theme altered drastically in the remainder of his life following Guan Daosheng’s demise, in that most of his paintings were of bamboo115 rather than the full shanshui (mountain and water) landscapes that he was much more well-known for, and that his repertoire consisted of prior to this period. Freud conceived that the mourner’s immersion within the repetition of the visual object, in this case Zhao Mengfu’s bamboo, would have brought about a form of mnemonic arrest, in that the melancholic person discovers his or her inability to divorce his or her conscious self from the lost object, which results in an unconscious pathological identification with it. Freud further described the obsessive repetition of ‘melancholia’,116 in the form of the perpetual reproduction of this image of loss, as a process of detachment and catharsis, such that the pain of loss and its associated memories would be repeatedly focused on and written out to the point that the person would “sever this attachment to the object.” In this manner, Zhao Mengfu’s continual and repeated scrutiny of the bamboo, or at least its abstracted form in brushstrokes, would have resulted in his losing, or at least numbing his capacity to cope with his pain. This would have in turn induced a translation, or sublimation of the excess of melancholia into a form of nostalgia, that manifested through the layering of slightly different, but ultimately similar images of the object of his obsession; i.e the bamboo, which he correlated to the loss of his wife.

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Zhao Mengfu’s manner of painting might not have commemorated his wife Guan Daosheng directly or literally, in a way that painting a portrait of her would have had, but was done so in a way that was a compromise, adhering to the landscape genre’s conventions of subject matter, allowing his work to remain acceptable within the literati scholar elite’s canon. An interesting painting that stands out from his repertoire of landscape work, “Crossing Rivers, Layered Mountains”117 shows a panorama across a vast landscape; this itself is rather similar to his other work, except perhaps that the mountains are rendered with lesser detail and strokes as some of his more iconic work. What was remarkable about this painting were the two types of plants at the opposite ends of the painting in the foreground-- the bamboo by the water, painted unlike most bamboos in typical Chinese landscapes, but in the style of Guan Dao Sheng’s; and the pine trees at the other end of the painting, that symbolised the separation and farewell he bid to his beloved wife.

2 113. McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China, p. 104.

114. Freud, Mourning and Melancholy, p. 243-258.

See also Laplanche and Pontalis, “Work of Mourning”, The Language of Psycho-analysis, p. 485-486.

115. See Illustration (1) on facing page 116. Stafford, Separation and Reunion in Modern China, p. 3.

See also, Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness, p. 63-65 117. See Illustration (2) on facing page

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Bamboo, c.1319 - 1322

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Crossing Rivers, Layered Mountains Zhao Mengfu(c. 1254-1322)

APPENDIX

園 Y U A N | THE GARDEN SHOWCASING ONESELF Origin of Paradigmatic Chinese Garden, Y U A N (garden), rooted in memories of S H A N S H U I (mountains and water)

Chinese Landscape painting has been constantly reiterated by art historians and scholars as a place of reclusion and ‘untrammelled nature’;1 replete with other similar mutually reinforcing aphorisms2 regarding the Chinese Garden that have been rehearsed, refined, and endlessly regurgitated in Chinese Dynastic history. These statements assert that the practice of Landscape painting, and consequently the paradigmatic Chinese Garden that was fundamentally the reification of landscape painting, was a space of exception outside social life and hierarchy3 that rigidly organised Chinese Society. The Thesis postulates rather that the Landscape painting practice and the Gardens it represented was by contrary, a space entrenched in a didactic order. The genre precipitated the formation of a cultural heritage that ascribed to collectivized, nationalistic terms, by exerting canonical pressures on individual painters to remain predisposed to and subject to tradition in expressing their individuality; within the constraints of convention and forms of the past.

The paradigm of the quintessential Chinese Garden and Landscape that exists in our shared imagination today is premised on Wang Wei’ s (c. 699–759 AD ) Wang Chuan Villa during the Tang dynasty, around the time where the genre Landscape Painting originated. (c. 618–907 AD) The garden was set within natural landscape as a ‘place of recluse’,4 encircled by the surrounding mountains, creating spatial cells of man-made architecture. The translation of this garden over the course of China’s Dynastic history has culminated in the Chinese Garden that exists in our shared imagination today, and in the vageries of Chinese’s recollections, is one that is congruent to the chinese character yuan; visualising the garden as one with a rectangular walled enclosure defining its boundaries, containing within it three pictograms that define the garden; a small square representing a pond, small mountains or rocks and a tree. Even then, landscapes were not exact representations but were by contrary, a combination of the painter’s quick sketches,5 that were made on site during excursions, as well as the painter’s lingering memories of the landscape, thus subject to the limitations of memory, “riven with mnemonic associations and slippages” as posited by Freud, and further complicated and layered with remnants of other similar memories and encounters of the landscape.

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This process of remembering also embodied a sense of loss, and a pleasurable pain associated with the loss, arousing in both the painter and the painting’s audience memories and feelings that imagined a reconciliation of harmonies with the physical world.

This was especially pertinent during the Six Dynasties period (c. 220 - 581), when hard-pressed officials and intellectuals regarded the paradigmatic Garden as a microcosm of landscape away from society and reality; a place of rustic retreat where they could escape, however temporarily, from the cruel and harsh realities of famine, war and conflict that was rampant during that era.6 The subsequent period of growth and urbanisation within the Song dynasty7 (c. 960 - 1279) further incited a different feeling of nostalgia within the general population; one that adopted a more melancholic tone that lamented the loss of the rural and connection to nature that had characterised China’s idealised past. Herein lies the core of the importance of the Garden in Chinese heritage with regards to its connection to past tradition; the memory and nostalgia within it that one associates with the loss of an aspect of his or her identity.

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The Wang Chuan Villa Stone engraving rubbing Anonymous, after Wang Wei, (c. 699 to 759)

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園 yuan visualised the plan of the garden

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a rectangular walled enclosure defining the garden’s boundaries

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木 mu (wood) representing a tree

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口 kou (mouth / hole) representing a pond

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山 shan (mountains) representing rocks / miniaturised mountains

1. See Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, p. 7-8.

“Untrammelled”, meaning “free of stifling restraints” is a common term of praise in Chinese painting criticism, applied generously in the later centuries to the works of literati painters.

See also Clunas, Fruitful Sites, p. 12.

“A collection of essays originally published in 1940, that includes one (much cited) on the theme of ‘man and nature in the chinese garden’ by the eminent historian of thought, Wing Tsit Chan.”

2. See Clunas, Fruitful Sites, p. 12. “an expression of artistic ideas and conceptions that have emerged from an intimate feeling for nature”,“the Chinese garden has retained a more intimate contact with untrammelled nature” ‘’the imperial gardens were an image of Daoist freedom, spontaneity, and humility before ‘great nature’“a space essentially outside social life”“a place of refusal of the ties of the political life and even of kinship.” 12. “ ‘the garden’ was a space essentially outside social life, a place of refusal of the ties of the political life and even of kinship, a calm place and a quiet place...”

3. See Clunas, Fruitful Sites, p. 12.

“In gardens, thoughtful chinese sought release from the irritations, frustrations, discord and cares of life. The repetition of this image has manifested itself through scholarly work and through popular articles in newspapers.”

4. Chan, Conformity and Divergence: Perception of Garden Spaces link: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48549026.pdf 5. Fong, Beyond Representation: Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, p. 481. As exemplified by Yuan Dynasty Master Ni Zan, who stated, “When I first learned to use a brush, Seeing an object I tried to capture its likeness. Whenever I travelled, in country or in town, I sketched object after object, keeping the sketches in my painting basket” 6. Department of Asian Art. Landscape Painting in Chinese Art. link: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/clpg/hd_clpg.htm 7. Cahill, The Lyric Journey, p. 56.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Stafford, Charles. Separation and Reunion in Modern China Wang and Sze, Mustard Seed Garden Manual (Princeton University Press) Weidner, Marsha; Johnston, Ellen; Irving, Laing; Lo, Yucheng; Chu, Christina, and Robinson, James, (eds.) Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300–1912. (New York: Rizzoli, 1988) Zhang, Ying, Politics and Morality

Barkan, Leonard. Michelangelo : A Life on Paper (Princeton University Press, 2010) Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992) Bourdieau, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (Routledge, 2010, originally published in 1979) Freud, Sigmund. trans. and ed. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. “Draft G. Melancholia” (7 January 1895), Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985) Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. (1899) Freud, Sigmund. ed. Strachey, James. “Mourning and Melancholy” (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974) Freud, Sigmund. ed. Strachey, James. “Screen Memories,” (1899) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974) Freud, Sigmund. ed. Strachey, James. “Studies in Hysteria” (1895), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning Hume, David, Of the Standard of Taste, Part of the Four Dissertations. (Originally published in 1757) Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. (1790) Kutcher, Norman. ‘The Fifth Relationship: Dangerous Friendships in the Confucian Context’, (The American Historical Review, vol. 105, n. 5, Dec 2000) Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J. B. trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. “Work of Mourning”, The Language of Psycho-analysis, (London: Hogarth Press, 1973)Mancini, Considerazioni, vol. 1 McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China. (HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2011) Morelli, Italian Masters, Ruskin, John. The Lamp of Memory. (1849) Phillips, Adam. “Freud and the Uses of Forgetting” On Flirtation: Psychoanalytical Essays on the Uncommitted Life Scott, Geoffrey. National Character of English Architecture. (Nabu Press, 2013, originally published in 1908) Scott, Geoffrey. The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (second edition; London: Constable, 1924) Wind, Art and Anarchy, Chan, Yuen Lai, Conformity and Divergence: Perception of Garden Spaces by Gong Xian and Yuan Jiang from Nanjing in Early Qing Dynasty. link: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48549026.pdf Cartwright, Mark. “Tang dynasty art”. Ancient History Encyclopedia. (11 Oct 2017) link: http://etc.ancient.eu/author/markzcartwright/ Kojiro Tomita and Hsien Chi Tseng “Album of Twenty sketches of Landscapes, Rocks, and Trees.” Portfolio of Chinese Paintings in the Museum (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1961) China Online Museum link: http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-four-gentlemen.php Department of Asian Art. Landscape Painting in Chinese Art. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.) link: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/clpg/hd_clpg.htm (October 2004) UNESCO. link: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/813 Delbanco, Dawn. Chinese Calligraphy. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.) link: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chcl/hd_chcl.htm Merlin, Monica. The Late Ming Courtesan Ma Shouzhen (1548-1604): Visual Culture, Gender And Self-Fashioning In The Nanjing Pleasure Quarter (The Queen’s College D.Phil, 2013) Metropolitan Museum of Art, Online Museum, Asian art. link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/41154 link: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/catalog/uuid:0da584bf-16fc-4372-8a1b-b97afd3bcf8a/download_file?file_format=pdf&safe_filename=Thesis_complete_ora.pdf&type_of_work=Thesis p. 244-245 Zöllner, Frank. Ogni pittore dipinge sè; Leonardo da Vinci and “automimesis” link: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/32978340.pdf

LIST OF CANONISED PAINTERS

Six Dynasties. (c. 220-589 AD)

Ming Dynasty (c. 1368-1644)

Gu Kai Zhi (c. 345-406 AD) Zhang Zi Qian( c. mid to late 6th century AD)

Wang Fu (ca. 1362-1416) Dai Jin (c. 1388-1462) Sheng Mao Ye (c. 16th century) Shi Rui (c. 15th century) Shen Zhou (c. 1427-1509) Wen Zhengming (c. 1470-1559) Chen Chun (c. 1483-1544) Tang Yin (c. 1470-1524) Qiu Ying (ca. 1494-1552) Lu Zhi (c. 1496-1576) Wen Jia (ca. 1501-1583) Qian Gu (c. 1508-unknown) Li Shi Da (c. 16th century) Ding Yun Peng (c. 1547-1628) Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555 to 1636) Zhang Hong (c. 1577-1652) Chen Hong Shou (c. 1598-1652) Wang Jian (ca. 1598-1677) Wang Shimin (c. 1592-1680) Lan Ying (c. 1585-1652) Wang Shi Min (c. 1592-1680)

Tang Dynasty. (c. 618-906 AD) Li Si Xun (c. 651-716 AD) Li Zhaodao (c. 670-730 AD) Wang Wei (c. 699-761 AD) Lu Hong (c. 700-725 AD)

Five Dynasties. (c. 907–960 AD) Jing Hao (c. 855-915 AD) Li Cheng(c. 919-967) Dong Yuan (c. 932-962) Guan Tong (c. 906-960) Juran (c. 10th century)

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Tang Dynasty. (c. 618-906 AD)

Song Dynasty (c. 960-1279)

Northern Song Dynasty (c. 960-1127) Fan Kuan (c. 990-1030) Guo Xi (c. 1020-1090) Li Tang (c. 1050-1130) Zhao Shi Lei (c. 12th century) Li Gong Lin(1049-1106)

Qing Dynasty (c. 1644-1911) Gong Xian (c. 1618-1689) Kun Can (c. 1612-1674) Zhu Da ( c. 1626-1705) Xi Gang (c. 1746-1803) Wang Yuan Qi (c. 1642-1715)

Southern Song Dynasty (c. 1127-1279) Ma Lin (ca. 1180-after 1256) Liang Kai (c.1140-1210) Liu Songnian (c. 1174-1224) Ma Yuan (c.1160-1225) Xia Gui (c. 1195-1224)

Yuan Dynasty (c. 1279-1368) Zhao Mengfu (c.1254-1322) Ni Zan (c. 1301-1374) Huang Gong Wang (c. 1269-1354) Sheng Mao (c. 1271-1368) Wang Meng (c. 1308-1385) 1

Sailboats and Pavilions.

Li Si Xun (c. 651-716 AD)

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Emperor Minghuang Journey to Shu Travelers in Spring Mountains

Li Zhaodao (c. 670-730 AD)

Six Dynasties. (c. 220-589 AD)

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Five Dynasties. (c. 907-960 AD)

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Mount Kuanglu Travelers in a snowy landscape

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Nymph of the Luo River Admonitions of the court instructress

Jing Hao (c. 855-915 AD)

Gu Kaizhi (c. 345-406)

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Spring Excursion Zhang Zi Qian (c. 581 AD)

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Autumn mountains Travellers in Guan Mountain

Guan Tong (c. 906-960)

Five Dynasties. (c. 907-960 AD)

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1 Awaiting ferry at the foot of the

mountains in summer 2 Riverbank 3 Wintry Grove and Layered Banks

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Dong Yuan (c. 934-962) Inscription by Dong Qi Chang

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Anonymous Landscape with Secluded Chess players 10th century tomb, Fa Gu Ye Mao Tai

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Reading the Stele Solitary Temple Wintry Forest Travelers in a wintry forest

Li Cheng (c. 919-967)

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Asking about the Dao in Autumn Mountains Buddhist Monastery by streams and mountains Storied Mountains and dense forests Xiao Yi acquiring the orchid pavilion preface by deception

Juran (c. 10th century)

Song Dynasty (c. 960–1279)

Five Tang Scholars Liu Songnian (c. 1174–1224)

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Lohan Liu Songnian (c. 1174–1224)

Snow Mountains Liu Songnian (c. 1174–1224)

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Small Scene on the Xiang River Zhao Shi Lei (c. 12th century) 4

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Early Spring Snow Mountains

Guo Xi (c. 1020 - 1090)

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Wind in pines among a myriad of valleys Li Tang (c. 1050 – 1130)

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Landscape Anonymous ( c. 1117)

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Dream Journey on the Xiao and Xiang Fishing in the Clear Stream Landscape with Geese and Other Birds

Anonymous (c. 12th century)

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Reading the Stele Solitary Temple Wintry Forest Travelers in a wintry forest

Li Cheng (c. 919-967)

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Asking about the Dao in Autumn Mountains Buddhist Monastery by streams and mountains Storied Mountains and dense forests Xiao Yi acquiring the orchid pavilion preface by deception

Juran (c. 10th century)

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A crisp autumn in streams and mountains Composing poetry on a spring outing Enjoying the moon Pine and Longevity Singing while dancing A Banquet with brilliant lights

Ma Yuan (c.1160-1225)

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Viewing the Moon under a Pine Tree

Anonymous, Style of Ma Yuan (c. 12th century)

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A Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains Hermitage by a Pine Covered Bluff Boat in Rainstorm Setting off on a stroll

Xia Gui (c. 1195-1224)

Song Dynasty (c. 960–1279)

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Boating on an Autumn River Boating Past a Pavilion Hermitage by a Pine Covered Bluff Village on a Pine Hill Gazing at a WaterFall Reading in the Open Pavilion Recluse’s House beneath a Cliff

Anonymous (c. 12th century)

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Autumn Landscape with Figure A Military Official Departing at Daybrea Landscape with Man in Boat

Anonymous (c. 12th century)

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Strolling on a Marsby Bank Travelers in a Winter Landscape

Liang Kai (c. 12th century)

Yuan Dynasty (c. 1279-1368)

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Awaiting the ferry at an autumn riverbank Enjoying fresh air in a mountain retreat

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Sheng Mao (c. 1271-1368)

Anonymous (c. 14th century)

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Portrait of Yang Chi Xi

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Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains Rivers and Hills before Rain The Stone Cliff at the Pond of Heaven Nine Peaks clearing after the snow Jade trees at cinnabar cliff Nine Pearly Peaks in Green Visiting Dao on the shan stream Fuchun Ranges

Ni Zan and Wang Yi (c. 1363)

Huang Gong Wang (c. 1269-1354)

Portrait of Ni Zan

Ming Dynasty (c. 1368-1644)

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A Mountain Hermitage Retreat at the Foot of Hui Mountain Mount Taibai Dwelling in a summers day Thatched cottage in autumn mountains Forest Chamber Grotto Moving to the Mountains

Wang Meng (c. 1308-1385)

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Boating Past a Pavillion River Landscape in Rain Living aloft Contending greenery among thousands of cliffs Guests arriving at a mountain villa Graceful gathering at Orchid Pavilion Song of pipa Hu Xi Thatched Cottage Myriads of Valleys Old trees by a cold waterfall Shady Trees Thatched Cottage under the shady trees

Wen Zhengming (c. 1470-1559)

Ming Dynasty (c. 1368-1644)

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Woodblock Prints 1

Mount Ji Xing Anonymous, Gu Qin Du Su Ji Cheng, c. 1725

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Buddhist Temples at Mount Tian Mu after a painting by Zhang Xi Lan Anonymous, c. 1621 to 16283

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Gazing into the Streams Anonymous, Tian Xing Tao Mao c. 1597

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Literary Gathering Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove Chen Hong Shou (c. 1598-1652)

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Landscape with Figures after a Wang Wei Poem Chen Chun (c. 1483-1544)

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White Lotus Society Li Gong Lin (c. 1049-1106)

Landscape with Taoist Retreat Ming Dynasty Anonymous, c. 15th Century

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Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, Qian Gu, c. 1560 (c. 1508-unknown)

Qi Xia Temple Anonymous, Jin Ling Du Yong, c. 17th century

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The Orchid Pavilion Gathering Sheng Mao Ye, 1621(c. 16th-17th century)

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8 1 Landscape 2 Landscape in the Manner of Wang Meng 3 Landscape in the Spirit of a Wang Wei Poem 4 Landscape in the style of Ni Zan 5 Mount Qing Pian 6 Drawing water in the Morning 7 River and Mountains 8 Rocks with Inscription by Gao Shi Qi

Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555 to 1636)

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1 Autumn Landscape 2 Landscape 3 Tree in Summer with the shadow 4 Calligraphy of Cursive and Semi-cursive 5 Eight Scenes in Autumn Album leaf, c. 1620 6 Seeking Ancient in Feng Jing 7 Wanluan Thatched Hall, c. 1597

Dong Qi Chang (c. 1555 to 1636)

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Fisherman Recluses in Autumn Mountains Lofty recluses in cloudy valleys Kun Can Landscape with Recluse, c.1663 A Gentleman celebrating his Birthday

Lan Ying (c. 1585-1652)

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Leaf from Shih Chu Chi Chin Pu Letter Papers from the Ten Bamboo Studio, (c. 1644-1645)

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Landscape Designs for Ink Cakes From Fang Shi Mo Pu Morning Sun Over the Mountain of Heavenly Citadel Landscape, c.1585

Ding Yun Peng (c. 1547-1628)

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Mount Chi Xing Lu Zhi (c. 1496-1576)

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Landscape after Dong Yuan Landscape after Wang Meng

Wang Shi Min (c. 1592-1680)

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A party in a residential garden Western Garden gathering Divine Realm at the Peach Blossom Spring Waiting for the Ferry in Autumn

Qiu Ying (c. 1494-1552)

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Gazing out from a Pavilion in the Mountains Palace of Immortals

Li Shi Da (c. 16th century)

Ming Dynasty (c. 1368-1644)

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A Graceful Gathering at Wei garden Fuchun Mountains Kun Can Landscape with Recluse, c.1663 Lingzhi Orchid Magnolia Rock Mount Lu for Chen Kuan, 70th birthday Peach Blossom Study Reluctant Departure at Tiger Hill Sitting Alone at night Poet on a Mountain top Poetic Feeling of Fallen Flowers Visiting Friends Wind and snow at the Ba Bridge

Shen Zhou (c. 1427-1509)

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Landscape after Wang Meng, c. 1580 Wen Jia, (ca. 1501-1583)

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Landscape with Houses and Figures after a Poem by Xu Hun Wen Jia, c. 1580 (ca. 1501-1583)

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Peach Blossom Spring Shi Rui (c. 15th century)

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Farewell Meeting at Feng Cheng Wang Fu (ca. 1362-1416)

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Fishermen in Reclusion Eight album leaves of landscapes The Courtesan Li Presenting a Peony to the Poet Chang Ku Contemplating on a donkey ride home Clearing after snow at the Han pass Strolling by the stream Thatched cottage covered by snow Misty trees at Zhen Ze, life without worldly ambition with good friend Whispering pines on a mountain path parting gift for Li Jing Wu Yangzi in self-Cultivation Scholar Hermits in the Autumn Mountains

Tang Yin (c. 1470-1524)

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Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion c. 1616 Landscape after a Poem by Xu Hun Landscape after Ni Zan Landscape after Xia Gui The Hua Tzu Hill Mount Qi Xia Mount Shi Xie Wind in the Pines at Mount Ko Qu

Zhang Hong (c. 1577-1652)