DONG QICHANG / 董其昌 (1555-1636)
Tianmushan / 天目山 (1,506 m -4,941 ft)
China
Tianmushan / 天目山 (1,506 m -4,941 ft)
China
In The Qingbian Mountains, 1617, ink on paper, hanging scroll, Cleveland Museum of art
About this painting
Dong Qichang radically transforms the landscape composition into a purely abstract design. He organizes the mountain forms to achieve an overall sense of structure, activating the flow of energy (qi) and the momentum of force (shi) throughout the pictorial design. In his art, brush and ink assume life independent of the depicted forms, so that the painting can be appreciated for “the sheer marvels of brush and ink.”
Dong Qichang / 董其昌 was a Chinese painter, scholar, calligrapher, and art theorist of the later period of the Ming Dynasty. His work favored expression over formal likeness. He also avoided anything he deemed to be slick or sentimental. This led him to create landscapes with intentionally distorted spatial features. Still his work was in no way abstract as it took elements from earlier Yuan masters. His views on expression had importance to later "individualist" painters.
He considered there to be a Northern school, represented by Zhe, and a Southern school represented by literati painters. These names are misleading as they refer to Northern and Southern schools of Chan Buddhism thought rather than geographic areas. Hence a Northern painter could be geographically from the south and a Southern painter geographically from the north. In any event he strongly favored the Southern school and dismissed the Northern school as superficial or merely decorative.
His ideal of Southern school painting was one where the artist forms a new style of individualistic painting by building on and transforming the style of traditional masters. This was to correspond with sudden enlightenment, as favored by Southern Chan Buddhism. By relating to the ancient masters' style, artists are to create a place for themselves within the tradition, not by mere imitation, but by extending and even surpassing the art of the past. Dong's theories, combining veneration of past masters with a creative forward looking spark, would be very influential on Qing Dynasty artist as well as collectors, "especially some of the newly rich collectors of Sungchiang, Huichou in Southern Anhui, Yangchou, and other places where wealth was concentrated in this period". He, together with other early self-appointed arbiters of taste, helped determine which painters were to be considered collectible (or not). As Cahill points out, such men were the forerunners of today's art historians.
The mountains
Tianmushan / 天目山 (1,506 m -4,941 ft) meaning "Heavenly Eyes Mountain" is a mountain in Lin'an County 83.2 kilometers (51.7 mi) west of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, in eastern China. It is made up of two peaks: West Tianmu (1,506 m - 4,941 ft) and East Tianmu (1,480 m - 4,860 ft). Twin ponds near the top of the peaks led to the name of the mountain.
China's Tianmu Mountain National Nature Reserve lies on the northwest portion of the mountain. It is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve as part of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Program. The mountain has a lush sub-tropical climate with an annual rainfall of 1,767 millimeters (69.6 in) and an annual temperature of 17.3 °C (63 °F).
Tianmu is known for giant Japanese cedars, waterfalls, Tianmu tea, peaks surrounded by clouds, bamboo shoots, temples and nunneries, and odd-shaped rocks. More than 2,000 species of plants grow on the mountain, including (on West Tianmu) the last surviving truly wild population of Ginkgo trees. Prominent among the Japanese cedars is the "Giant Tree King", named by the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing. The mountain is also home to hundreds of species of birds and animals, including 39 endangered or protected species. These include the clouded leopard and the black muntjac.
In Chinese, the name Tianmushan can also refer to the adjacent range of mountains, including Mount Mogan or ancient Quingbian mountains