A Companion to Chinese art by Powers, Martin Joseph Tsiang, Katherine R

176 KATHERINE R. TSIANG

London: The British Museum Press in Association with Percival David Foundation of
Chinese Art, pp. 108–121.
Wu Hung (1989). The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Wu Hung (2003). The Admonitions Scroll Revisited: Genre, Iconography, Narratology,
Style, Dating. In S. McCausland (ed.), Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll. London:
The British Museum Press in Association with Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art,
pp. 89–99.
Wu Hung (2010). Art of the Yellow Spring: Rethinking Chinese Tombs. London and Hon-
olulu: Reaktion Books and Hawaii University Press.
Xi’an shi wenwu baohu kaogu suo (2008). Xi’an Bei Zhou Kang Ye mu fajue jianbao.
Wenwu, 6: 14–35.

Further Reading

Lopez, D. S., Jr. (2001). The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to its History and Teachings.
New York: HarperCollins.

8

Landscape

Peter C. Sturman

A recent exhibition at the National Palace Museum in Taipei brought together two
long-separated pieces of the single most celebrated landscape painting in the history of
China: Huang Gongwang’s (1269–1354) Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (National
Palace Museum, Taipei, www.npm.gov.tw/en). A long handscroll painted over more
than three years as the artist traveled along the Fuchun River in Zhejiang Province,
Huang Gongwang’s painting was recognized as something special even as he dallied
over it. Huang had promised the painting to a friend, a monk by the name of Wuyong,
whose patience finally ran out and, according to the artist’s inscription, insisted that
Huang bring his painting to a close. Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Moun-
tains gained famed over the next two centuries, admired by some of the most renowned
painters and critics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who added inscriptions to
the scroll’s mounting and end. Then, near tragedy: in 1650 an overly possessive owner
of the scroll ordered from his deathbed that Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains be
burned so that it could join him in the afterlife. Barely saved from the flames by a fam-
ily member, the slightly damaged scroll somehow became divided, with a short initial
section (minus a few inches lost to the fire) traveling its own path to the present day
and ultimately a different home in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum. Precisely 361 years
after that near disaster Huang Gongwang’s painting was reunited, though it would be
more accurate to say the two sections were brought in close proximity: that short initial
section of Huang’s painting, only some fifty centimeters in length, has since grown into
its own imposing scroll replete with a title (“A Corner of the Fuchun”), an imaginary
portrait of Huang Gongwang, and about twenty-five feet of trailing inscriptions. The
two scrolls made a very interesting, not to mention historic, pairing.1

The strange journey of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains says much about land-
scape as a subject of Chinese painting. For one, the status accorded Huang Gongwang’s
painting is extraordinary, especially considering the casualness with which the painting

A Companion to Chinese Art, First Edition. Edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

178 PETER C. STURMAN

was first conceived and then made. What accounts for the painting’s high value? The
landscape along the Fuchun River is highly scenic but not awe-inspiring, and Huang’s
painting of it no doubt would appear plain to those unfamiliar with the esthetics of
the Chinese media of “brush and ink” (bimo) Moreover, the end of the painting not
only appears unfinished, its final mountain—rising abruptly and speckled with strong
dots of ink—is strange, to say the least. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is ostensibly
nothing more than a pictorial record of one man’s journey up and down a pleasant
stretch of river, yet somehow the painting, by historical agreement, embodies the high-
est achievement of Chinese art. It behooves us to ask why, though our focus is less
on Huang Gongwang’s artistry than the capacity of his painting’s subject to convey so
much that is intrinsic to Chinese culture.

Landscape, literally “mountains and waters” (shanshui), has been the dominant sub-
ject of Chinese painting since the tenth century, though its roots go back more than
a millennium earlier. By definition, landscape is the external world, the mountains and
waterways that contrast with the built world of human structures and activities. Depic-
tion of that world assumes an interest in its reality, but this is not to state that the
painter’s goal was a re-creation of the visually perceived world. The fallacy of verisimil-
itude was evident in a secondary exhibition of Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the
Fuchun Mountains at the National Palace Museum that was intended to bring Huang’s
fourteenth-century painting into the twenty-first century and appeal to modern audi-
ences. Fifty projectors helped create a multimedia display in which Huang’s painting,
blown up and projected onto a large wall, magically morphed into a photorealistic ren-
dition of its composition created from thousands of photographs of landscape artfully
stitched together with the aid of computer graphics programs. The “realistic” Dwelling
in the Fuchun Mountains was visually compelling, especially in concert with animation
and sound effects, but it was also disquieting in the manner it reduced Huang’s paint-
ing to the simple assumption that its primary, and perhaps only, function was to convey
what Huang Gongwang saw as he roamed the fourteenth-century landscape. In the
overview of landscape as a theme in Chinese art that follows, emphasis is placed on
the subjectivity that underlies the experience of mountains and waters. The importance
placed in the painter’s role as subjective agent, as opposed to transparent medium, is
traceable to the inception of landscape as a subject of cultural expression in China.

In 1962 Michael Sullivan published The Birth of Landscape Painting in China, a land-
mark effort to trace the beginnings of an artistic heritage that was widely recognized
for its importance. A significant achievement of his book was the systematic gathering
of available images, many from objects of Han dynasty date and earlier, which Sullivan
considered relevant to what would gradually be revealed in later paintings. However,
Sullivan’s task revealed a conundrum: without an initial definition for what constituted
landscape it was impossible to know not only what to look for but also when to stop
looking. Does an outdoor setting, as seen, for example, in Han dynasty molded tiles
from Sichuan Province, equal landscape? Do plant or tree motifs? How about simply
the depiction of space, outdoors or not, since solving the thorny problem of represent-
ing three dimensions in two was ultimately one of the primary concerns of landscape
painters? Paralleling the formalist’s dilemma of deciding what was relevant was that
of the textualist, who sought evidence in recorded documentation. The earliest texts
devoted to landscape painting date to the fifth century, but if one is looking simply for
things related to the natural world, as some scholars have, then the search goes back to
the ancient collection of poems Shijing (Book of Songs), if not earlier.

LANDSCAPE 179

The quest for origins is less important than recognition of a key early moment, when
various circumstances resulted in the emergence of an experience of landscape that has
suggestive ties to the later tradition. That moment was the third and second centuries
BCE, an important transitional period in Chinese history during which a unified realm
was forged by the Qin and Han dynasties out of the fragmentation of the Warring States
period. Heightened awareness of territorial reach and control, coupled with increased
contacts to the western regions, may have helped foster a growing fascination with
unknown and unexplored places. A burgeoning of the imaginary is distinctly visible in
objects and decor from tombs, especially those corresponding to the reign of Emperor
Han Wudi (r. 141–87 BCE). These include incense burners of conical shape designed
as mountains known as boshan lu (universal-mountain censer). Made of both ceramic
and cast bronze, sometimes elaborately with inlaid gold and jewels, the top portion of
the censer opens to allow placement of a burning aromatic, the smoke of which rises
through perforations in the mountain lid to give the appearance of clouds and mist
rising from peaks. The boshan lu is often associated with the legendary islands of the
Eastern Sea. These islands, according to textual records, were both difficult to spot,
their peaks entwined with mist and clouds, and impossible to reach, in part, because
they were continually drifting.

The immortal islands of the Eastern Sea were one of two imagined paradises at cardi-
nal extremes. The other was Mount Kunlun in the Tibetan Himalayas. Later in the Han,
Mount Kunlun became closely associated with the female deity Xiwang mu (Queen
Mother of the West), but before the growth of the Queen Mother cult, Kunlun was
already noted as a platform for attaining immortality. A passage from the Huainanzi,
a philosophical anthology of the second century BCE, describes three progressively tall
peaks, the ascendance of which would result in, respectively, becoming an immortal,
attainment of magical spirit status, and lastly entrance directly into heaven to become
a divine spirit in the palace of the highest emperor of heaven (Tseng 2011: 189). In
what is surely the single most important archaeological discovery from this period, the
tomb of Marquise Dai (d. ca. 168 BCE) unearthed at Mawangdui (Hunan Province),
are the three nested coffins that held the well-preserved body of the marquise. On the
second coffin there are portrayals of abstracted mountain peaks as central motifs of
the ornament: one on a side panel flanked by roaring dragons, the other on one of
the ends, coupled with a pair of cavorting white deer. Both renderings of mountains
on the ornately painted coffin are highly stylized, but the manner in which they are
depicted is less important than its semantic function as an intermediary space between
heaven and earth, like Mount Kunlun. Pervading throughout the marquise’s tomb, in
both its decorative schemes and pictorial narratives, are the themes of ascension and
transformation. These are explored most spectacularly in the famous painted silk ban-
ner (often identified as feiyi, or “Flying Banner”) that was draped directly over the
innermost coffin that held the body of Marquise Dai. The T-shaped banner is divided
between a long vertical section that has been interpreted as describing the ascension of
the marquise and a horizontal section descriptive of the celestial realm and symbolic of
Marquise Dai’s transformation to divine spirit.2

The silk banner from the tomb of Marquise Dai bears no obvious reference to land-
scape. Nonetheless, I would argue that it presents an important early template for what
might be called the landscape experience. The point is best illustrated with one of the
common types of vessels found in Han dynasty tombs, the hu, used for storing grain or
wine to accompany the deceased into the afterlife (Figure 8.1). Like many of the Han

180 PETER C. STURMAN

FIGURE 8.1 Hu vessel. First century BCE, Western Han dynasty. Earthenware with painted
decoration, H 56.2 × Dia 34.6 cm. Source: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Tang Gift, 1986.

tomb objects, the ceramic hu were often painted with decor suggestive of the journey
to the celestial realm (Sturman 1988). However, it is the shape and symbolism of the hu
that first merits attention. Modeled after the homophonous calabash or gourd (hu), the
hu vessel’s bulbous, contained space matched one prevalent cosmological model that
viewed the world as existing within an enclosed matrix. The stars in the sky, according
to this outlook, are arrayed on a giant celestial fabric likened to the canopy of a car-
riage or the lid of a container. As noted years ago by sharp-eyed scholars focused on the
Mawangdui painted silk banner, various components of its vertical lower portion clearly
constitute the image of a squared version of the hu vessel (fanghu), its walls formed by
the two addorsed dragons, its handle suggested by the large jade disk in the center. The
lid of the banner’s hu resembles the canopy that served as a metaphor for the sky. A
plausible explanation for the hu vessel’s presence is that this lower section of the banner
represents the phenomenal world through which the Marquise Dai ascends on her way
to the celestial realm represented by the banner’s upper portion. The painted ceramic
hu possesses the same symbolism, though with a slight variation: along the neck of
the vase rise swirling multi-hued forms that should be understood as an amalgam of