Mountain landscape
Dong Qichang1617
National Gallery of Victoria
Melbourne, Australia
In this work Dong Qichang has created a highly original and revolutionary work. Dong Qichang inscribed this painting in elegant calligraphy, which says that he painted the landscape to give it as a present to a friend, a scholar-official. The inscription translates: `In the dingsi year (1617), the 15th day of the 9th (lunar) month, I painted (wrote) this as a gift for the envoy Xuayin in the Lezhi garden at Wulin’.
In this arid, lofty landscape, Dong consciously renounces decoration, narrative interest and display of technical skill, which were characteristic of paintings by professional and court painters. It reflects the ideals of scholar-amateur painting – unassuming, bland (pingdan) (subtle), childlike awkwardness and concealment of brilliance.
The human figure, a reminder of the banal and dusty world, is also excluded. In their place, Dong emphasises the tonal and textural gradations of ink and the dynamic movements of form and line, abstract qualities found in calligraphy, and regarded by Chinese scholars as the highest form of visual art. The austere, solitary, semi-abstract landscape does not so much represent an actual place as express the artist’s inner spiritual world. The uppermost mountain peak seems punctured by a blank hole, as if torn away from the landmass, creating a disturbing dissonance in the landscape.
The close relationship between calligraphy and painting is illustrated by Dong’s comment on nature and art:
Painting is not equal to ‘mountains-and-streams’ for the wonder of scenery; but `mountains-and-streams’ are not equal to painting for the sheer marvels of brush and ink. (Dong Qichang quoted in Mae Anna Pang, Mountains and Streams from the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2006, p.51)
Text by Dr Mae Anna Pang © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
- Title: Mountain landscape
- Creator: Dong Qichang
- Creator Lifespan: 1555 - 1636
- Creator Nationality: Chinese
- Creator Gender: Male
- Date Created: 1617
- Location Created: China
- Physical Dimensions: 167.5 x 53.0 cm (Sheet)
- Type: Scroll Paintings
- Rights: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1978, =A9 National Gallery of Victoria
- External Link: National Gallery of Victoria
- Medium: ink on paper
- Biography: Dong Qichang was a prominent scholar-official and a brilliant scholar who was influential as an art connoisseur, collector, critic and historian as well as a calligrapher and painter. Dong was born in Shanghai but later moved to Huating, Songjiang prefecture, Jiangsu province. As a young man, he passed the civil examinations and became an official, rising to such high positions as President of the Board of Rites and tutor to the heir-apparent of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). His life as an official was interrupted by long intervals of retirement in his home in the south of China. Escaping from the political turmoil at the imperial court in Peking, he took a stand of non-involvement in politics and chose to play a dominant role in the world of art. Through both his paintings and writings, in which he restated the literati (scholar-amateur) theory of painting, he exerted great influence on his contemporaries and later Chinese painters. Dong advocated a creative approach to painting by transforming the styles of the ancients into an individual style of one’s own.
- Additional information: From the third century B.C. to 1911, China was governed by a civil bureaucracy of scholar-officials, who were recruited by a system of examinations under the Emperor. The scholars were educated in the moral teachings of the Confucian classics and thus supposedly endowed with inner virtue and outward refinement, for example, versed in the fine arts of poetry, music, painting and calligraphy. Since the eleventh century, Chinese scholars adopted the art of calligraphy and painting as a means of relaxation and self-expression. Unlike the professional and academic painters of the court, scholar-amateur painters were not trained in the art of representation but were disciplined in calligraphy, which shares with painting the tools of paper, brush and ink, as well as artistic expression. Scholar-amateur painters did not depend on their art for a living. Their paintings were not for sale but were ideally given away as presents to like-minded friends. Like the arts of poetry, music, and calligraphy, painting became a form of self-cultivation.
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