Pine (Song)

Hongren was among those deeply affected by the unthinkable fall of his native Ming dynasty to the "barbarian" Manchus. As a young man in Shexian, Anhui province, he studied classics and reached the xiuzai degree in the state sponsored examinations system. This would normally have set him on a career as an official in the imperial bureaucracy. The fall of the Ming dashed all such hopes. He fled to Fujian province where remnants of the Ming court and many loyalists had taken refuge. It was there, in Wu'yi, that he took Buddhist vows, signaling his retreat from the world of affairs. Hongren is his monk's name; it connotes sensitive, expansive kindheartedness.

The development of Hongren's art responded mainly to two things: first, to the geometric, lithic geological formations of nearby Mt. Huang, whose spectacularly precipitous spires marveled travelers from afar; and, second, to the search, shared by many other painters of his day, for ways to recapture the monumentality of Northern Song (960-1127) landscape painting through the creation of new stylistic means that would also yield the intense graphic effects and emotional charge we find today in the leading "Individualist" masters of the time.

This album of studies represents the full development of Hongren's stylistic repertory just before his unexpected death a few days later. There are no poetic inscriptions, only a single word on each leaf denoting a particular landscape element: cliff, pond, etc. Without sacrificing monumentality or convincing solidity, he has been able to pare his vocabulary to a bare minimum of dry, pale strokes that produce fractured, crystalline rocks and mountains, more insubstantial and more empty, unpainted paper than form modeled of layered ink and texture strokes. Nature seems barren. Pines grow from cliffs at odd angles. Spatial contradictions are deliberately explored and given center stage for artistic effects of ambiguity and visual excitement. The leaf titled Cliff is an extreme example. In all, he presents us with a visionary world - remote and disembodied - yet believable.