AH 0102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Xia Gui, Mountain Path, Wu Zhen
12 May 2018
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Notes for Day 7: February 9, 2018
Announcements:
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Chinese Painting 3: Southern Song (1127-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) Dynasties
Today’s goals:
• Become familiar with concepts of connoisseurship and attribution
• Southern song and yuan
o Historical and political context
o Ma Yuan and Xia Gui
o Characteristic subjects, formats, styles and compositions
• Group painting analysis/thesis formations
1st painting by Ma Yuan:
• Southern dynasty
• Made to view right to left
• The brush strokes exhibit those in the vocabulary list
• The birds are off to the side, sort of exhibiting the meaning given in the poem written off
to the side
• The mountain seems to be morphed into the willow branch to give a sense of perspective
• The title of the painting: Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring
• There are two men in the picture: an old man who is standing high in nature and looking
thoughtfully into the distance and he appears to be a scholar based on his hat; the other
man is off to the side of the painting and seems to blends with the trees as if appearing
unnoticed, and he appears to be a servant because he is shadowed, hunched, and carrying
an instrument
• This painting seems to be the focus of the painting because the mountains are pushed off
to the side while the human seems very large to scale
• There is still a portion of the painting that moves off to the mist like in southern sung
painting
• The Poem: the southern poem uses paintings while the northern sung used colophons and
symbols
o Always refer to social and political contexts, especially scholars who had more
aesthetic pursuits in nature
o They acted as a form of political protest against the new dynasty and it’s want of
introducing an entrance exam to obtain more scholars even though less jobs were
available
o The birds shunning humans shows the purpose of nature shunning humans and
how the scholar shuns humans to focus more on nature
• The style: slight colors, no huge contrast, brush work, and the amount of ink placed on
one part of the page versus the other part of the page; less emphasis on nature in
comparison to the northern sung and more focus on the scholar; painted on silk
• This is academic (professional) painting, made by professional painters who are unknown
in southern sung dynasty, unlike the scholars in the paintings
• Perhaps the painter was given the poem to illustrate the vision produced by the poem that
was written by an Emperor or a scholar
For the thesis:
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
