Bamboo and Rocks

Zheng Xie, a native of Xinghua, Jiangsu province, became a jinshi in the 1st year of the Qianlong reign (1736) and was subsequently appointed as District Magistrate of Fanxian and then Weixian in Shandong province. Honest and righteous, he was nonetheless forced to resign for ruffling some dignitary’s feathers over disaster relief matters. In his 60s, he began making a living by painting in Yangzhou and is known together with other masters as the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou”.

As much as he defied the prosodic rules readily observed in the early Qing, the artistic polymath blended together the running and clerical scripts for his unconventional calligraphy, which he termed the semi-clerical script. As for painting, Zheng was skilled in flowers, especially orchids and bamboos, which he described with extended vertical and slanting strokes appropriated from the running script. To capture bamboos in ink, he observed the shadows that the plant cast on whitewashed walls and paper windows instead of drawing references from ancient masters. Building on the idea of “having the bamboo completed in the mind” put forward by Wen Tong and Su Shi of the Song, he further theorized that there were three stages in the painting process: observing with the eye, contemplating in the mind and painting with the hand. The emphasis, he said, was to become one with the bamboo for infinite possibilities.

Intended to be hung in a hall, this large painting is a masterpiece among Zheng Xie’s bamboos. Varying in height, the stems are in different phases of their life, some fully grown while others still seedlings. At the back on one side is a leaning rock in light ink to convey the relative distance. In front, the stiff leaves in dark ink sprout from erect and extenuated shoots, both executed in brisk brushstrokes. In the upper right is a seven-character quatrain on bamboos shooting in the night rain inscribed by the painter, endowing the painting with lyricism. Elsewhere, the ancient poem had been frequently copied out by Zheng’s teacher Lu Zhen, a frustrated man who feigned madness half his life and whose unruliness is said to have a huge influence on his student. The teacher’s fondness for the poem might have prompted the student to inscribe it time and again on his own bamboo paintings.