Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures From the National Palace Museum, Taipei
Western art at its best proudly announces its presence, filling space with its forms and imposing itself on its environment. A Renaissance sculpture incises the space surrounding it; an illusionistic European painting cuts a virtual hole in the wall, creating a window onto another world. But the best works here are profoundly self-effacing. While Chinese artists often spoke of finding a personal style, they also spoke of losing themselves in their subject. The 11th-century poet-painter Su Shih wrote of a colleague whose paintings he admired: “When Yu-k’o painted bamboos he was conscious only of the bamboos, and not of himself as a man.” Many Chinese writers speak of pictures as unified wholes expressing a spirit that inheres in all things, and often the works in this exhibit cannot be “parsed” in the way a Western painting can, as being built of related parts. Though these pieces are incredibly detailed at times, they are not built on inner tensions or conflicts. Rather, the longer one looks at separate lines and tones and shapes, the more they seem manifestations of some hidden unity. The writer Huang T’ing-chien, a friend of Su Shih’s, wrote that he didn’t understand painting until meditation helped him realize “the state of no-vexation….Then I entered into the mysterious.”
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While the exhibit’s first room begins with bronzes from the 13th century BC, many centuries are not represented; the historical evolution of Chinese art is traced continuously beginning in the second room with works from the Sung dynasty, the first phase of which began in 960 AD and is called Northern Sung. (At the insistence of the Taiwanese lenders, the show uses an older system of transliterating Chinese names than the one now in general use; thus “Song” is here called “Sung.”) Under the Sung, government officials were selected on their merit rather than for their aristocratic ties; older art began to be studied, inventoried with wood-block prints, and even copied; and Sung landscape painting reached such heights that centuries later it was still emulated.
The idea that the visible world is an illusion is Buddhist. Hui-neng, a seventh-century Buddhist master, came across some monks disputing why a pennant flutters: one argued that “the wind…makes it move,” while another thought it couldn’t really be flapping. Finally Hui-neng replied, “It is neither wind nor pennant but your own mind which flaps.” Taoism offers another unifying vision, in which all things are manifestations of the Tao, or “way.”
A number of Ming landscapes border on the awe inspiring, displaying towering mountains that dwarf the few human forms below. But the wall labels inform us these are either direct copies from or painted in the style of Northern Sung monumental landscapes. The scenery is majestic in T’ang Yin’s Whispering Pines on a Mountain Path, with waterfalls coursing down and impressively vertical rocks, but I experienced the painting as an overall design devoid of mystery. The repeated waterfalls are almost decorative, and the rock surfaces relatively flat, lacking the textural detail of, say, Li Ti’s Kitten.
Yet the danger of succumbing to surface effects was known to Chinese artists as early as the tenth century. In one manuscript, a dialogue between an old master and a young painter, the master teaches: “One should not take outward beauty for reality. He who does not understand this mystery will not obtain truth, even though his pictures may contain likeness….Likeness can be obtained by shape without spirit….He who tries to express spirit through ornamental beauty will make dead things.”
