Asian Art: 1108 to 1252

Wang Ximeng, a prodigy, is one of the most renowned court painters of the Northern Song period, and has been taught personally by Emperor Huizong of Song himself.

He will die at the age of twenty-three.

Wang's only surviving work is an 11.9 meter (thirty-nine feet) long scroll titled A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains.

The painting, finished by Wang when he was only eighteen in 1113, is one of the largest in Chinese history, and has been described as one of the greatest works of Chinese art.

The painting is in the permanent collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Corruption and intrigue have weakened Emperor Huizong’s government.

Huizong, the eighth emperor of the Northern Song dynasty of the Han, promotes Taoism, and is one of the three Chinese emperors to prohibit Buddhism.

Also a skilled poet, painter, calligrapher, and musician, he gains renown for his painstakingly rendered bird-and-flower paintings and for his so-called slender-gold calligraphy style.

An avid collector whose patronage extends to music, poetry, and the minor arts, Huizong acquires more than sixty-three hundred paintings for the imperial gallery and presides over a new imperial academy of outstanding painting.

A true artist, Huizong has neglected the army, and Song China has become increasingly weak and at the mercy of foreign enemies.

Li Tang has worked for most of his life as a painter at the court of Song Emperor Huizong in Kaifeng.

The highly influential Li, a pivotal figure in the transition from the monumentally scaled landscape tradition of the Northern Song period to the more intimate mode of the succeeding Southern Song period, is renowned for his so-called ax-cut brushstroke, which he employs to finely depict sharply faceted rock surfaces, as in his celebrated scroll painting “Whispering Pines in the Mountains”, executed in 1124.

After the Jurchen invasion in 1126, he had fed with the court to Hangzhou, becoming director of the imperial painting academy there until his death in 1130, at about eighty.

Zhang Zeduan, a native of Dongwu (present Zhucheng, Shandong), had been a court painter of the Northern Song Dynasty, and in the aftermath of that dynasty's fall, his paintings often convey criticisms of the social circumstances of the time.

Zhang’s most famous painting is Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a wide handscroll which depicts life in a city.

It reveals much about life in China during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Its myriad depictions of different people interacting with one another reveals the nuances of class structure and the many hardships of urban life as well.

It also displays accurate depictions of technological practices found in Song China.

For example, it depicts one river ship lowering its bipod mast before passing under the prominent bridge of the painting.

It shows ships in two major types, yet all of which have slung rudders for steering; the painting depicts freighters with narrow sterns or passenger boats and smaller craft with broad sterns, sailing upriver or docked along the banks while loading and unloading goods.

Large stern sweeps and bow sweeps can be seen on at least three of the river ships, worked by up to eight men each.

It also shows how personal gardens had begun to take root in China—in addition to the immense walled garden on the far left of the scroll, for example, one sees several private gardens with their man-made mountains and rockery (for example, the small private garden close to the city gate, squeezed between a chemist's shop and a large building selling furniture, consisting of a small pond surrounded by trees and bamboo).

The original painting is celebrated as the most famed work of art from the Song Dynasty, and will be a pride of the personal imperial collections of emperors for centuries.

Due to its high artistic reputation, it will inspire several works of art that revive and update the style of the original.

This painting will be made famous throughout China, as an emperor of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) will feel compelled to write a poem in praise of the artwork.

A popular remake of the painting will be made in the eighteenth century, during the Qing Dynasty.

Song dynasty artists, often working in wood, carve sophisticated images of the Bodhisattva Kuanyin seated in the Maharajalila position, or “Repose of the Great King.” Such wood-sculpted figures are usually gessoed before being painted.

Guanyin is the bodhisattva associated with compassion as venerated by East Asian Buddhists, usually as a female.

As a Chinese figure seated in the position of ease, Guanyin is carved in about 1168 of joined blocks of wood, then painted and gilded.

Its rounded curves convey the tone of serenity and calm, and emphasize fluidity and grace of line in both overall form and detail.

The seated wooden statue of Dainichi Nyorai at the Shingon temple of Enjō-ji in Nara is the earliest and best-substantiated work by Japanese master sculptor Unkei.

An inscription on the pedestal records that he began work on the piece in 1175 and brought it to completion the following year.

The sculpture has been designated a National Treasure.

Unkei's next documented works, from the early 1180s, commissioned by military leaders prominent in the ensuing Kamakura shogunate, for temples in eastern Japan, will be are physically more massive and powerful, as will be his giant Niō at Tōdai-ji.

By contrast, in this early work Unkei employs a more "gentle" or "tranquil" style.

Unkei, son of the great Nara sculptor Kokei and a leader among the Japanese sculptors commissioned to restore the Todaiji, the great Buddhist temple in Nara, works on this project from 1199.

The Nara school’s new style blends the naturalistic vigor derived from Nara-period antecedents with a humanistic realism, as exemplified in Unkei’s “Nio,” one of the enormous wooden guardian figures posted at the Great South Gate of the Todaiji.

Nizami's “Haft Paikar,” written in 1197, and “The Sikander Nama,” written in 1200, about the life of Alexander the Great, complete the five long dramatic poems known collectively as the “Khamsa.”

Liang Kai had worked as an academic painter in his early years, but leaves the Song academy for a Chan Buddhist monastery at the peak of his career.

Called Crazy Liang because of his eccentric personality, he develops a more subjective and intuitive approach to painting than that of the contemporary academic school.

The highly influential Liang executes a celebrated monochrome ink painting, the Huineng Chopping Bamboo, in the qianbi or abbreviated style.

He dies in about 1210.