Chapter three

Ink Landscape as Cultural Capital at Court

he court presence of great artists implied the rule of a sage-emperor, one so Tvirtuous that he attracted the services of extraordinary talents. was among a constellation of artistic personalities who would adorn the court with their brilliance throughout the . An emblematic court painter of ink landscapes, Guo Xi had begun his career painting for bureaucrats serving provincial posts and for scholar-officers at the capital. He arrived in the imperial city with an established reputation. His paintings then achieved unprecedented visibility at court as symbols of reform, within the spaces of central-government organs and as elements of the discourse on changing state rituals. Paintings clearly came to play an eminent role at court by the late eleventh century. Even so, for one to consider the capacities of statecraft manifested in ink landscape by a member of the inner court requires deliberation on a truism of Song monumental works: their role as rhetorical amplifications of cosmic and imperial power. Reconfigured and infused with courtly landscapes and their themes of change, the spaces of civil rule asserted an emperor’s ultimate power over the state and its officials. Having noted examples of past circumstances under which inner- and outer-court members negotiated to integrate the schol- arly genre of ink into imperial settings, we must conclude that the extent of Guo Xi’s role in the Yuanfeng-era reformations was unprec- edented. However, it was ink landscape’s association with the functions of the Hanlin Institute officers in the preceding century that made this metaphor for power exchange conceivable. This final chapter of Part I will identify one institutional form of imperial taste as further evidence of this claim. The notion of lineage in ink landscape is Ink Landscape as Cultural capital at court

key to understanding how this scholarly genre was articulated as part of Song aristocratic culture. Guo Xi was recruited as a follower of Cheng, but what did it mean in the Song court to be an artist in the lineage of Li? Court authors identified the style engendered by , the tenth-century master of land- scape painting, as the discriminating element of the Northern Song. With an alternative vantage on the long-standing problem of stylistic inheritance, this study recognizes Li Cheng as the progenitor of a courtly artistic legacy to which Guo Xi was the natural heir. This was the ink-landscape mainstream that the court perpetuated, by collecting and preserving its products, as distinctive of Song imperial visual culture.

“Li-Guo” as Analytic Frame

Chinese artistic traditions reveal strongly classicist tendencies, in which the past—characterized by F. W. Mote as both inexorable and liberating—is the main basis for authority in the present.1 Against this background one can see the originality of Li Gonglin’s paintings, in which his representations of Song practices resonated with references to the Zhou, Han, or Tang periods rather than illustrated ritual ideals of antiquity to claim the authority of classical texts. Akin to this is the notion of an artistic lineage in painting, and treating the master–disciple construct in theoretical treatises as an expression of this tendency yields important perspectives for interpretation. In landscape painting, an artist’s place of origin was significant since geographic experience affected artistic production and hence was usually noted by art critics. The early critics selected originating masters from various localities, to which chains of followers were affiliated, identified by geographic origin and/ or training. These fundamental lineages constituted a frame on which modern scholars have relied for diachronic analyses of developmental sequences—for instance, to clarify the iconography of shared pictorial features or to make conclusions about a period’s style in terms of brushwork and tonality or spatial illusion. In the Chapter 1 example of the tenth-century southern-landscape master and his follower, the monk , their style(s) accumulated political and sociocultural connotations: Li Cheng’s influence on Juran’s style at the Song court represented the mainstream northern style conjoined with an ancient southern style and symbolized the geographically reunified nation. Mi Fu’s expressed preference for the Dong-Ju manner was contrary to his cohort of

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