The emperor’s failure to put his stallion to good use may be understood as a metaphor for a ruler’s failure to properly value his officials. Night-Shining White was the favorite steed of an emperor who led his dynasty to the height of its glory but who, tethered by his infatuation with a concubine, neglected his charge and eventually lost his throne. And they understood the poignancy of the image. They recognized that the horse was meant as an emblem of China’s military strength and, by extension, as a symbol of China itself. Their knowledge of art enabled them to determine that the image was a portrait of an imperial stallion by a master of the eighth century. These were the men who covered Night-Shining White with inscriptions and seals. And it was their poetry, diaries, and commentaries that constituted the accounts by which a ruler would one day be judged. It was their interpretations of the past that established the strictures by which an emperor might be constrained. It was their command of history and its precedents that enabled them to influence current events. Those who succeeded came to regard themselves as a new kind of elite, a meritocracy of “ scholar-officials” responsible for maintaining the moral and aesthetic standards established by the political and cultural paragons of the past. By the eleventh century, a good hand was one criterion-together with a command of history and literary style-that determined who was recruited into the government through civil service examinations. The practice of calligraphy became high art with the innovations of Wang Xizhi in the fourth century. Over time, the practitioner evolved his own personal style, one that was a distillation and reinterpretation of earlier models. (“clerical” script) their artful simplification into abbreviated forms (“running” and “cursive” scripts) and the fusion of these form-types into “standard” script, in which the individually articulated brushstrokes that make up each character are integrated into a dynamically balanced whole. (known today as “seal” script, after its use on the red seals of ownership) their gradual regularization, culminating with the bureaucratic proliferation of documents by government clerks during the second century A.D. He was also exposed to the way in which the forms of the ideographs had evolved: their earliest appearance on bronzes, stones, and bones about 1300 B.C. He copied the great calligraphers’ manuscripts, which were often preserved on carved stones so that rubbings could be made. The student was gradually exposed to different stylistic interpretations of these characters. Traditionally, every literate person in China learned as a child to write by copying the standard forms of Chinese ideographs. The discipline that this kind of mastery requires derives from the practice of calligraphy. Instead, he relied on line-the indelible mark of the inked brush. He also rejected the changeable qualities of light and shadow as a means of modeling, along with opaque pigments to conceal mistakes. Like the photographer who prefers to work in black and white, the Chinese artist regarded color as distraction. To accomplish his goal, the Chinese painter more often than not rejected the use of color. This is the aim of the traditional Chinese painter: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but its inner essence as well-its energy, life force, spirit. It does so because the artist has managed to distill his observations of both living horses and earlier depictions to create an image that embodies the vitality and form of an iconic “dragon steed.” He has achieved this with the most economical of means: brush and ink on paper. Miraculously, the animal’s energy shines through. Originally little more than a foot square, it is now mounted as a handscroll that is twenty feet long as a result of the myriad inscriptions and seals (marks of ownership) that have been added over the centuries, some directly on the painted surface, so that the horse is all but overwhelmed by this enthusiastic display of appreciation. The Chinese way of appreciating a painting is often expressed by the words du hua, “to read a painting.” How does one do that?Ĭonsider Night-Shining White by Han Gan ( 1977.78), an image of a horse.
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