How Did Landscape Become a Portrait of the Chinese Spirit?

About the Topic

In his Preface on Landscape Painting, the Southern Dynasties painter Zong Bing describes the sage embodying the Way and responding to things, and the worthy person clearing the mind to appreciate forms. Landscape, through form, makes the Way perceptible.

In one sense, scholarship on the origins of landscape painting begins with this passage.

Today we may see mountains and water as scenery, glimpsed while traveling. For Chinese scholars after the Wei and Jin periods, landscape meant more.

It could provide a space for thought and a way of situating one’s life.

Chinese landscape painting emerged as an independent genre nearly a thousand years before Western landscape painting—a difference worth considering.

Landscape theory appeared in the Southern Dynasties, but the genre flourished independently only in the late Tang and Five Dynasties. In that sense, an answer to why one should paint landscape preceded its full development as a genre.

Why did Chinese painters turn from human figures toward landscape so early?

Why did mountains and water become places for scholars to situate their lives and thoughts after the Wei and Jin periods?

Why are so many major works in Chinese art landscapes rather than figure paintings?

The first half returns to Wei–Jin thought to consider why people painted landscape, tracing its intellectual beginnings and its growing importance in Chinese culture.

In the second half, we will unroll a full-scale reproduction of A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains and discuss ways of viewing landscape:

How should we understand Guo Xi’s ideal of landscapes one can walk through, look upon, wander in, and inhabit?

Why does Chinese landscape painting not use single-point perspective in the Western sense?

How do the three distances construct pictorial space?

How does the pursuit of meaning beyond form appear in brushwork, color, and composition?

We will examine the mineral pigments and traditional techniques of blue-and-green landscape painting.

Unrolling this Northern Song landscape, we may see more than the achievement of an eighteen-year-old painter or a high point of blue-and-green painting.

We may also encounter a continuing artistic question: how people meet nature and find their place between heaven and earth.

Landscape makes the Way perceptible through form; a clear mind attends to it.