The East’s blue, black and white
There are many exquisite pieces in this exhibition of treasures from the National Museum of Taipei.
The history of modern China could have been very different. Following the death in 1925 of Sun Yat-sen, who had founded the Republic of China (1912), civil war broke out between the communists and the forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. For several years the outcome was not clear; in 1934, the Red Army was cornered and survived to fight again only by withdrawing from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, in what became known as the Long March, one of the founding legends of the Chinese Communist Party.
During the war, communists and Nationalists co-operated in the struggle against Japan, but in its aftermath, and especially from 1948, the communists regained the upper hand. When I visited Taipei many years ago, there was a museum commemorating these events, in which various victories of the generalissimo over the communist rebels were celebrated; but the location of these victories kept getting closer to the coast, until finally the government of China withdrew to the island of Taipei, leaving the whole of the mainland in rebel hands.
It is interesting to reflect on how different China would be if the communists had lost. The millions who died in the subsequent disastrous efforts to impose communist ideology, and then to modernise the economy, might have survived, although some would have died in the famines to which China used to be subject. The country would probably have modernised and industrialised in any case, inspired by the example of the Japanese miracle, but maybe not with the same speed as under a ruthless dictatorship with a complete disregard for human life.
Perhaps the greatest difference can be seen in the comparison with Japan, whose radical modernisation has been accomplished while preserving a large part of its traditional culture and values. In China much of this was destroyed during the disasters of the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966- 76), and the scholars and others who epitomised the great traditions were persecuted and humiliated. The revolution favoured the rise of peasants and an illiterate populace who, in recent years, have become the nation’s new plutocrats.
Counterfactual historical hypotheses are most plausible in circumstances that were dominated by powerful men whose influence could not easily be replicated by any of their contemporaries: without Napoleon, for example, the sequel to the French Revolution would not have been the same, even though Edmund Burke rightly foresaw that the revolution would end in dictatorship. Conversely, the futile and self-destructive turbulence in France today would be very different if any part of the political spectrum produced a great leader.
Such hypotheses are less cogent when circumstances are driven by seemingly irresistible tides of ideology or religious belief. The spread of religions, for example, owes more to promises of salvation and so on than to the charisma of its teachers and leaders. The 20th century was, in hindsight, the great age of totalitarian political ideology, which took root among the masses in countries without mature traditions of liberal democracy. Once the communist idea had taken hold in China, therefore, it was probably irresistible, like the spread of an epidemic.
The movement had a cult figurehead in Mao Zedong, but he was not a great man like Napoleon; it is conceivable that another party leader could have played the same role. At the same time, the subsequent history could not have been foreseen, especially the radical changes that have taken place since the collapse of Western communism: China alone has found the way to harness the dynamism of a capitalist economy while developing a uniquely invasive totalitarian state in which most of its population seems compliant.
On the other hand, Taiwan, free of communist ideology, did in fact develop its own economic miracle long before mainland China, and has also evolved democratic political institutions, even in the face of decades of threats and intimidation. And arguably the island state has maintained a greater continuity with classical culture than the mainland. At any rate, the National Palace Museum in Taipei preserves many great masterpieces of Chinese art, rescued from the communist advance and removed to Taiwan in the final withdrawal.
There are many exquisite pieces in this exhibition, but the two fields in which classical Chinese art excelled were ceramics and painting, in which we can include calligraphy. Two reflections arise from this fact. The first is that Chinese aesthetic sensibility extended across the classes, since potters were craftsmen and the most highly regarded classical painters were refined and educated civil servants, or “scholar-gentlemen” as they are often called.
The second is that the Chinese did not have anything like the post-romantic Western idea of the artist, either as a disaffected outsider or a full-time professional. All the great artists were scholars or monks, inevitably amateurs, and painted chiefly in black ink; professional painters who executed meticulous portraits and other images in colour were considered craftsmen and not at all in the same category.
Oscar Wilde, in his aesthetic period, memorably joked about the difficulty of living up to one’s blue and white China. The quip was effective because it touched on something real and powerful — the way that very beautiful objects move us and invite us to emulate the qualities that make them beautiful: not just the skill and technical mastery evident in the visible form of the piece, but deeper still the presence, stillness and care that enabled the acquisition and performance of mastery.
There are fine blue and white wares here, but although for centuries the most famous of Chinese ceramics, these are not the most quintessential. Blue and white was in fact originally produced for export to Persia, and was made using cobalt blue imported from the same land. It was only during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) that the Chinese themselves developed a taste for these wares. Soon afterwards, the opening of global ocean-going trade by European seafarers allowed China to develop a huge and very profitable export trade of blue and white porcelain to Europe, which did not discover how to fire these hard fine wares until the 18th century.
But although the Ming dynasty corresponds to our Renaissance and baroque centuries, it was comparatively late for China, whose deep roots and beliefs go back to antiquity; its characteristic arts had begun to take shape in the Tang synasty from the 7th to the 9th centuries, and reached their full flowering in the Sung from the 10th to the 13th centuries and, after the disastrous Mongol invasions, the Yuan dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries.
It is these simplest, non-figurative, almost monochrome wares that are the most absorbing of all, like the two tea bowls from the Northern and Southern Sung periods. The enjoyment of tea is traditionally surrounded by ceremony. One treatise that is almost contemporary with the earlier of these bowls declares that we drink water to slake our thirst, wine to assuage our melancholy and tea to clear our minds. Other texts evoke the servant boy bringing the water to just the point of ebullition while the master and his friends pore over ancient scrolls of painting or calligraphy.
The bowls are simple but of the utmost refinement, balancing the utmost mastery of the potter’s craft with the use of effects in the glaze that embrace the organic and unpredictable forms of nature: a leaf-pattern in one, flecked “partridge-spot” pattern in the other. The leaf pattern is made by fixing a mulberry leaf to the inside of the bowl before applying the glaze; the leaf burns away in the firing, leaving only a ghostly form behind — an image evoking the contrast between inorganic mineral forms and the perishable world of living things.
The exhibition contains many examples of Chinese painting but, as already observed, the category that was traditionally most highly esteemed, and which remains the most remarkable, is the black-and-white ink painting practised by amateur gentlemen-scholars. What is most clearly distinctive about this style of painting, and different from most painting practised in the West, is that it is executed on silk or paper with the brush and ink used in calligraphy. If we also consider that Chinese characters remain pictographic, we can see why images and poems, painting and calligraphy, co-exist in the Chinese tradition in a way that is inconceivable in our own tradition.
The painting includes a famous scroll by an 18th-century Jesuit, Giuseppe Castiglione, who, in the spirit of his order’s immersive approach to missionary work, had become so acclimatised in China that he not only spoke the language fluently but had even taken a Chinese name, Lang Shining. His charming Eight horses (1759) at once jumps out from any group of Chinese paintings for its distinctively European use of perspective and modelling in the bodies of the horses. In contrast, the tree on the right and other landscape elements, painted by an assistant, are completely Chinese.
What is most characteristic of Chinese painting can be seen in a number of notable works, including Mi Fu’s horizontal scroll Cloudy mountain, which is from the Sung dynasty and thus almost 1000 years old; Viewing the spring, by Zhao Mengfu, one of the most famous masters of the Yuan dynasty; Hermit-fisherman of Flower stream (c. 1360) by Wang Meng, also of the Yuan dynasty; Parting at Jinchang by Tang Yin of the Ming dynasty (16th century) and Landscape in the manner of Ni Zan by Dong Qichang, another Ming artist.
The title of this last picture in itself tells us much about the nature of Chinese painting: it is a homage to Ni Zan, a 14th-century artist who came to be considered one of the four great masters of the Yuan dynasty, although he lived into the beginning of the Ming period. He was known for a light and spontaneous style, with much use of open space and frequently clumps of trees silhouetted in the foreground, as they are here. He also tends to omit the human figures which in other artists, even in diminutive form, help to guide the viewer through the landscape and to prompt a sense of wonder at its vastness.
It was common for Chinese painters, as for poets, to imitate the style of their predecessors in the production of their original works. For Dong Qichang, the style of Ni Zan is perfectly suited to the sense of airy spaciousness and contemplative stillness that he seeks to evoke. The light gestural language of the brushstrokes, so closely related to the strokes with which the accompanying inscriptions are written, effortlessly expresses the life of leaves and trees, the spirit of rocks and water; while the allusion to his great precursor overlays his own work with a layer of recollection, a patina of memory, aesthetic piety and even nostalgia.
Treasures from National Museum of Taipei
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