Return to Nature World, Term Paper Example

Chinese landscape painting shows an appealing, cultivated elegance in natural beauty. These aesthetic values are rooted in ancient Taoist ideas concerning life and the universe. The Chinese Taoist philosophy places humans as one element in the universe, forming intrinsic relationship with all that exists. Learned people cultivate their character in natural settings, immersing themselves in the spirit of nature and feeling the flow and rhythm of Tao. Chinese landscape painting is an example of this cultivation. The artists paint mountains and rivers, flowers and birds, villages and human figures, seeking to know the Tao while living in harmony with nature. As Professor Alexander C. Soper, one of few scholars at that time to possess a command of both Chinese and Japanese and a breadth of artistic training, points out, “The Taoism of the Fathers is profoundly concerned with the forces and rhythms of Nature, and interested in the natural world as an antithesis of human society” (143). Fan Kuan’s paintings focus on the picture of landscape; this is how he achieved the idea of Taoism’s major principles of human and nature. This paper discusses the features of Chinese landscape painting and the Taoist philosophy underlying the aspirations of Chinese landscape painter Fan Kuan.

The artist-intellectual as a recluse in the mountains was an idea pioneered by Six Dynasty poets, who praised seclusion and Taoist notions of rhythms of Nature (Soper 143). In the tenth century, an artist Fan Kuan popularized paintings of rocky mountain passes on long, hanging scrolls (Kulper 195). The themes of space and monumental natural wonders took on great significance in Chinese landscape painting. Fan Kuan, a Taoist painter, was said to have settled in the mountains to study nature first-hand; whether this is literally true or merely a rhetorical tradition, his monumental paintings of vast looming mountains innovatively capture the insignificance of the humans who inhabit them (Kulper 195). Fan Kuan lives in a Northern Song Dynasty, nurtured in a hard, bleak countryside and his mood is well conveyed in the austerity of his style. Landscape art, thus, offers retreat, allowing one to satisfy the hearts’ longing without retiring from duties.

Patricia Buckley Ebrey (162) notes, although many of the great Northern Song masters worked for the imperial court, Fan Kuan was a Taoist recluse who shunned the cosmopolitan life Bianliang. He said to be active from about 990 to 1030 CE and considered to be the greatest landscape artists of Song Dynasty (ProQuest 12). He believed nature was a better teacher than other artists were, and he spent long days in the mountains studying configuration or rocks and trees and the effect of sunlight and moonlight on natural forms. Just centuries later Giorgio Vasari would credit Italian Renaissance painters with the conquest of naturalism, so too did Song critics laud Kuan and other leading painters of the day as the pioneering masters of the recording of light, shade, distance, and texture (Ebrey 162). Kuan did not aim to produce portraits of specific places. He did not seek to imitate or to reproduce nature. As Sharon Gu (104) suggests that landscape in the style of Kuan was neighter a realistic portrayal nor a romantic personal vision. Rather, it emphasized the vastness and complexity of nature. The style sought to capture the essence of nature and of its individual elements using brush and ink on soil. His paintings are tributes to nature, not representations of individual rock or tree formation (Gu 104).

In Travelers among Mountains and Streams, Fan Kuan painted a vertical landscape of massive mountains rising from the distance. In Chinese culture, mountains have been considered sacred from the earliest historical period, representing points of ritual and mystical contact with the powers of Heaven (Kulper 195).. To Fan Kuan, a Taoist artist, the most awesome mountains seemed like his spiritual home. Based on study about the early Chinese landscape painting, Alexander Soper claims that “the mountain is the principle theme of nature worship in China, a total concept of inconceivable richness and majesty, formed by contributions from every level of human thought, metaphysical, poetic, practical, superstitious…(p. 142). Soper finds that early Chinese landscape paintings made mountains a Taoist fairyland peak, with a picturesque, dynamic irregularity of contour. Majestic mountains are the focus of the earliest of these, a hanging scroll nearly seven feet tall by Fan Kuan (Ebrey 162). The foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes. Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. Ebrey (162) suggests that there is a subtle break between the foregound and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground.

The overwhelming natural forms dwarf the few human and animal figures (for example, the mule train in the lower right corner), which the artist reduced to minute proportions. As being one of the most representative work of Kuan, this picture of great power made with ingenious technique. Towering mountains make up nearly two thirds of the picture’s space. A waterfall rushes down the mountainside into a large pool hidden in a mist. Near the base of the painting a train of donkeys laden with merchandise travels by a winding stream, making viewers feel as if they are present to the scene. The nearly seven-foot-long silk hanging scroll cannot contain nature’s grandeur, and the landscape continues in all directions beyond its borders. The painter showed some elements from level ground (for example, the great boulder in the foreground), and others obliquely from the top (the shrubbery on the highest cliff). The shifting perspectives lead the viewer on a journey through the mountains. To appreciate the painted landscape fully, the viewer must concentrate not only on the larger composition but also on intricate details and on the character of each brush stroke. Numerous ‘texture strokes’ help model massive forms and convey a sense of tactile surfaces. For the face of the mountains, for example, Fan Kuan employed small, pale brush marks, the kind of texture stroke the Chinese call ‘raindrop strokes’ (Ebrey 162).

This painting was painted on silk by ink. It seems that Kuan has paid no attention to the traditional painting layout, which emphasized the depth of the scene. Instead, he put the steep precipice in the center, indicating the mountain’s ‘existence’ was of great importance to the recluse in the painting. For him, the mountain is what a philosopher would call “entity” and symbolizes the “spiritual enlightenment” that he pursues (Ebrey 162). The recluse sits in the mountains, completely integrating himself into the nature. Despite the use of ‘raindrop strokes’, which can be interpreted as an appropriate way to express his feelings, Fan devoted great attention to impressive details. He portrayed rivers in the valley, broad riverbeds and roads at the foot of the mountain, donkeys carrying firewood and wayfarers hurrying on their journey in a regular, scrupulous manner, like drying point works of European rural life in the seventeenth century (Ebrey 162).

Scenes of landscape under snow which had first become popular with Wang Wei inspired many of the painters of Northern Song, notably Li Ch’eng, whose works had become so rare by the twelfth century that Mi Fei claimed that such a mad had never existed at all (Gu 104). Perhaps the supreme exponent of this style was Fan Kuan. At first, like his contemporaries, he modeled himself on Li Ch’eng. Then it came to him that a Taoist belief that “nature herself was the only true teacher” (Soper 144), and he spent the rest of his life living among the mountains, often spending a whole day gazing at a configuration of rocks, or going out on a winter’s night to study with great concentration the effect of moonlight upon the snow. If one was to select one single painting to illustrate the achievement of the Northern Song landscape painting one could not do better than to choose his “Snowy Mountains”, in which one sees huge mountains. His painting Landscape of Snowy Forest, like most of his work, reflects the Taoist belief that human beings should be one with nature (Gu 104).

In Landscape of Snowy Forest, the long, horizontal hand-scrolls invite the viewer to wander through dream landscapes, from right to left as the scroll unrolls, following the path of some just-discernable Taoist scholar walking to meet his peers in their rustic studies. The composition is still in some respect ancient and archaic; the dominating central massif goes back to the Tang Dynasty, the foliage retains several early conventions while the texture-strokes are still almost mechanically repeated and narrow in range; their full expressive possibilities are not to be realized for another two hundred years. Nevertheless, having had a privilege of seeing this huge picture in the original, one can testify to its overwhelming grandeur of conception, to its dramatic contrasts of light and dark in the mist, rocks and trees. Above all to a concentrated energy in the brushwork so intense that the very mountains seem to be alive and the roar of the waterfall fills the air around as one stares at it.

As one explores every inch of this great painting, one can find no point where the artist has allowed his brush to slacken, or where his energy of hand and mind has failed him. In my own opinion, a skilled landscape painter can give the viewer the powerful impression. By looking at Fan Kuan’s landscape painting, we can understand his achievement of Taoism. Fan Kuan’s landscape paintings made mountains a Taoist fairyland peak, with a picturesque, dynamic irregularity of contour. His painting brings the individual into the whole natural world. Such works as this reminds that the history of art is the history not of pictures, styles, or movements, but of great achievements by supremely gifted man.

Works Cited

“Art as Maps: Influence of Cartography on Two Chinese Landscape Paintings of the Song Dynasty (960-1279)” Cartographica 37.2(2000): 43-55.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

Gu, Sharron. A Cultural History of the Chinese Language. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2011. Print.

Kulper, Kathleen (Ed). The Culture of China. New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2010. Print.

Soper, Alexander. “Early Chinese Landscape Painting”, The Art Bulletin, 23. 2 (June 1941): 141-164.