Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907 – 960)

       At the fall of the Tang, China plunged into a state of political and social chaos. The north was ruled by five short-lived dynasties. The corrupt northern courts offered little support to the arts, although Buddhism continued to flourish until persecution in 955 destroyed much of what had been created in the 110 years since the previous anti-Buddhist campaign. The 10 independent kingdoms that ruled various parts of southern China, though no more enduring, offered more enlightened patronage. At first the Former Shu (with its capital at Chengdu) and then, for a longer period, the kingdoms of the Southern Tang (with the capital at Nanjing) and Wuyue (with its capital at Hangzhou) were centers of relative peace and prosperity. Li Yu (李煜), the last ruler of the Southern Tang, was a poet and liberal patron at whose court the arts flourished more brilliantly than at any time since the mid-8th century. Not only were the southern courts at Chengdu and Nanjing leading patrons of the arts, but they also began formalizing court sponsorship of painting by organizing a centralized atelier with an academic component and by granting painters an elevated bureaucratic status—policies that would be followed or modified by subsequent dynasties.

       In northern China only a handful of painters were working. The greatest of them, Jing Hao (荊浩), who was active from about 910 to 950, spent much of his life as a recluse in the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi. No authentic work of his survives, but it seems from texts and later copies that he created a new style of landscape painting. Boldly conceived and executed chiefly in ink with firmness and concentration, his precipitous crags, cleft with gullies and rushing streams, rise up in rank to the top of the picture. Jing Hao’s importance lies in the fact that he both revived the northern spirit and created a type of painting that became the model for his follower Guan Tong (關仝) and for the classic northern masters of the early Song period (960–1279), Li Cheng (李成) and Fan Kuan (范寬). An essay on landscape painting, Bifaji (筆法記, Notes on Brushwork), attributed to Jing Hao, sets out the philosophy of this school of landscape painting, one that was consistent with newly emergent Neo-Confucian ideals. Painting was to be judged both by its visual truthfulness to nature and by its expressive impact. The artist must possess creative intuition and a reverence for natural subject matter, trained by rigorous empirical observation and personal self-discipline. Consistent with this, in all the major schools of Song landscape painting that followed, artists would render with remarkable accuracy their own regional geography, letting it serve as a basis for their styles, their emotional moods, and their personal visions.

       In contrast to the stark drama of this northern style, landscapes associated with the name of Dong Yuan (董源), who held a sinecure post at the court of Li Yu in Nanjing, are broad and almost impressionistic in treatment. The coarse brushstrokes (known as “hemp-fiber” texture strokes), dotted accents (“moss dots”), and wet ink washes of his monochrome style, said to be derived from Wang Wei, suggest the rounded, tree-clad hills and moist atmosphere of the Jiangnan (“South of the Yangtze River”) region. The contrast between the firm brushwork and dramatic compositions of such northern painters as Jing Hao and his followers and the more relaxed and spontaneous manner of Dong Yuan and his follower Juran (巨然) laid the foundation for two distinct traditions in Chinese landscape painting that have continued up to modern times. The style developed by Dong Yuan and Juran became dominant in the Yuan (1271–1368), Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, preferred by amateur artists because of its easy reduction to a calligraphic mode, its calm and understated compositional nature, and its historical affiliation.

       While the few figure painters in northern China, such as Hu Gui (胡瓌), characteristically recorded hunting scenes, the southerners, notably Gu Hongzhong (顧閎中) and Zhou Wenju (周文矩), depicted the voluptuous, sensual court life under Li Houzhu. A remarkable copy of a work by Gu Hongzhong depicts the night revelries of the minister Han Xizai. Zhou Wenju was famous for his pictures of court ladies and musical entertainments, executed with a fine line and soft, glowing color in the tradition of Zhang Xuan (張萱) and Zhou Fang (周昉).