The History of Ink Painting in Ink Landscape Painting

While ink landscape was still in the exploratory stage, the Li Tang regime died out in the fourth year of Tianyou (907), and China was once again divided. This objectively made the unfinished business of ink landscape painting of the Tang Dynasty take a dramatic turn in the Five Dynasties. The armed fragmentation of the feudal ruling regime strengthened the regional character of ink landscape painting with geologically different characteristics.

Inheriting the Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties ink landscape painting was divided according to the north and the south, forming two major schools of painting in the history of landscape painting. In the north, there was Jing Hao, a landscape painter who entered the Later Liang from the end of the Tang Dynasty. The Jiangnan ink landscape painting school opened by Dong Yuan was one of the two schools that confronted Jing Hao. This is a school of painting divided by geography, and is the earliest school of landscape painting in the history of painting, marking the further artistic maturity of landscape painting.

More than a thousand years ago, the Southern Tang Dynasty, one of the Ten Kingdoms of the Five Dynasties, owned a large area of imperial tea farms and gardens, and the person in charge of the gardens was a painter who had a good reputation at that time, Dong Yuan. He was the deputy envoy of the North Garden, the word Shuda, Zhongling (now Nanchang, Jiangxi Province). Known as "Dong Beiyuan", he was born at the end of the Tang Dynasty. It is said that when Li Jing, the middle lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty, moved his capital to Nanchang, Dong Yuan was recognized by the court, and with his rise in political status, his art of painting was given a good opportunity to be displayed in the court. His landscape paintings were favored by Li Jing. In the fifth year of Baodai's reign (947), on the first day of the year when it snowed heavily, Li Jing summoned his ministers to a banquet in a building to offer poems and poems. Dong Yuan, together with Gao Chonggu, a portrait painter of the time, Zhou Wenru, a lady painter, Zhu Cheng, a boundary painter, and Xu Chongsi, a bird and flower painter, painted the documentary masterpiece "Enjoying the Snow," which featured snowy bamboo and cold forests painted by Dong Yuan. Since then, there is no record of Dong Yuan's activities in the late Southern Tang Dynasty, and it is very likely that he died at the end of the Southern Tang Dynasty at the age of about seventy.

I don't know whether it was the lush green tea trees and misty clouds on the hills of Jiangnan that nourished this landscape painter, or whether he discovered the simple beauty of this unique landscape in Jiangnan. But we can be sure that Dong Yuan, who used ink and wash to paint the real mountains of Jiangnan, created what is now called the "Jiangnan School of Ink and Landscape Painting" (Mi Fu of the Northern Song Dynasty called it "Jiangnan Painting"). It is evident that among the many painting disciplines in which Dong Yuan excelled, landscape painting was his most accomplished, with epoch-making significance.

Dong Yuan was active in the region where landscape painting was born in the Six Dynasties. At the time of Gu Kaizhi in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, landscapes were merely a setting for figure paintings and lacked the correct proportionality and hierarchy of distance and proximity to the figures. By the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, Zong Bing's landscape paintings began to possess unique aesthetic content and aesthetic enjoyment, detaching themselves from figure paintings and forming their own genre.

Dong Yuan was able to serve as the patriarch of the Jiangnan ink landscape painting school. In addition to the artistic accumulation of his predecessors and geographic conditions, the political and cultural environment of the Southern Tang Dynasty also contributed to the development of his painting art. Compared with the Liang, Tang, Jin, Han and Zhou dynasties in the north, where there were frequent regime changes, the socio-political environment of the Southern Tang was much more stable, and the cultural foundations laid down by the Southern Dynasties in the south of the Yangtze River played a certain role in the Southern Tang. At the beginning of the Baodai period (943-947), Li Jing established the Hanlin Painting Academy, or Painting Academy for short, in the palace to paint directly for the fulfillment of the court's orders. Dong Yuan was often ordered to work with the painters of the Academy. At that time, the famous painters of the Academy included Wang Qihan, Wei Xian, Zhou Wenru, Gu Ma-zhong, Zhao Gan, etc., all of whom were good at landscape painting or at the same time. For example, Wang Qihan's "Survey of Books" scroll (a "picking ears", collected by the Department of History of Nanjing University) and Zhou Wenru's "Chess on a Heavy Screen" scroll (copied by the Song Dynasty, collected by the Palace Museum in Beijing) have landscapes in their paintings of figures. Wei Xian's Gao Shi Tu scroll (in the Palace Museum, Beijing) and Zhao Park's Jiang Xing Chu Xue Tu scroll (in the National Palace Museum, Taipei) are two landscape paintings with figures in them. Although their landscape painting style has its own small differences, but the overall style is basically the same, all to fine brushwork, ink-based, steep mountains and rocks, mostly in the northern part of the land: landscape features, has not yet demonstrated the unique style of the Jiangnan region. Only Dong Yuan, who was outside the Academy, was free from stereotypes and had a style of his own. Unfortunately, his style of painting failed to dominate the landscape painting scene in the Academy, but won admirers among the Taoist and religious painters outside the Academy, such as Shi Ju Ran and Liu Daoshi.

Dong Yuan was first honored by literati such as Shen Kuo, Mi Fu, and Su Shi in the middle and late Northern Song Dynasty. They were y impressed by Dong Yuan's frank and elegant style of writing.

The reason why Dong Yuan was favored by the literati during this period is that the founders of these literati paintings promoted the aesthetic interests of nature, liberality, and dashing, and the artistic connotation of Dong Yuan's landscape paintings is based on this.

Dong Yuan's life painting is extremely diligent, only the Northern Song Dynasty's "Xuanhe Painting Records" recorded in the House of his seventy-eight masterpieces, few survivors today. The name of the picture shows that Dong Yuan was fond of painting summer mountains and snowy cold forests, and the activities of the characters, such as fishing boats, hermits, cowherds, fishermen, and paddlers, all reflected the close connection between man and nature.

Five generations of painters painting, and predecessors, generally do not fall name, Dong Yuan is no exception. Today as Dong Yuan's landscape paintings have about ten, which is based mainly on the later reliable title trek argumentation and collection of prints, painting history records, although not all identified as Dong Yuan's authenticity, some of which may be a later imitation, but we can be sure that these are rich in the Dong Yuan painting style characterized by the landscape masterpieces, has a high artistic value.