Starting out

how light is the heaven the workshop is already dark

I worked on the year-end bookkeeping all day long. How many beautiful journeys are evoked by the madeleine scent of the hotel bills! I place them in air-tight bags, so in my old age they will provide me with the fragrance of Sicily and Georgia. It is two o’clock in the morning, the tabletop is bare. I drink strong Yunnan tea. In two hours I leaving for Rome, and from there, further on. It is only in the years of grace that the roads go in two directions, other years they just carry you away, like the rivers. I am leaving the year behind me.


Wu Zhen (1280-1354) was not particularly famous or successful in his life. Only after the years of Mongol rule, during the Ming era, will he be discovered by painters, and lifted up into the ranks of the Four Masters to be followed. He never obtained an office, he lived a hermit’s life, retreated to his small estate. He painted mountains and rivers, and the one small, cartoon-like figure appearing in his pictures over and over again is a lone fisherman (who, of course, is not as simple as he may seem: the old fisherman did have a social-critical connotation in the Taoist tradition). And in the emptiness, so characteristic of Chinese pictures, he wrote his own poems.

红叶村西夕照余， 黄芦滩畔月痕初。 轻拨棹，且归与， 挂起渔竿不钓鱼 Hóngyè cūnxī xìzhào yú huáng lú tān pàn yuè hén chū. Qīng bō zhào, qiě guī yǔ guàqǐ yúgān bù diàoyú. red leaves shining with the last light golden reed’s shadow cast by the early moon touching his paddle, it’s time to leave putting away his rod, catching no more fish

The large empty space, which is to be filled with the viewer’s imagination, was already a convention in the Yuan era. It is nice how Wu Zhen plays with this convention. He does not put his figure in the middle of the space, as it is usual, but down to the bottom of the picture, so that the entire invisible spaciousness is above him. Only a small visible space remains in front of the figure, but, due to the convention, we imagine under him a spaciousness of the same large size. We do not see it, but we know for sure that it is there, just as the figure knows it, and entrusts himself to it when starting out.

Magpies on plum tree

The rich Chinese houses are usually encircled by simple white-painted, gray-tiled high walls. Their only glory is the huge gate, which is especially decorated. It is a two-storey building, with slightly curved tile roofs on the top and on the two gateposts, decorated with frescos and calligraphs on every surface, which reflect the rank, richness and well-being of the house. At every lunar new year, this permanent decoration is also complemented by a changing décor, which remains there all year round: wise sayings vertically on the gateposts, the sign of happiness above the gate, and the images of the two giant gatekeepers (門神 ménshén), Shenshu 神荼 and Yulei 鬱壘, who originally stood in the Strait of the Western Hills, on the Path of the Dead, and every time a ghoulish spirit wants to get up out of the underworld, they grab it and throw it before the tigers. Because of this, they are also often portrayed tiger-headed, or rather charmingly cat-headed, on the apotropaic pictures attached to the gates, also becuase the cat, by keeping off the rats, is another apotropaic animal, and its portrait is also a common element of the permanent decoration of the gate.



The two inner sides of the gate are generally decorated with two lovely genre pictures in the light-handed, sketchy style – 文人畫 wénrénhuà – of the erudite calligraphers, including the name-giver of our blog, Wang Wei. One of them mostly depicts a beautiful mountain landscape, with twisted old pine trees, and with a hermitage between the mountains, where the weary soul can find relief, just like in this house. In the other, we often see birds, standing on floral branches, or landing on them, chatting with or standing close to each other. The birds are magpies, and the flowers are branches of plum trees.

Xu Beihong: Magpies on blossoming plum tree

The “bird-on-flower” genre, one of the most important topoi of Chinese painting, was developed in the 10th century, during the Five Dinasties (907-960). Its greatest master was Huang Quan (黃筌, 903-965) from Sichuan, and it is in his famous “catalog painting” that we find the first Chinese mapgie.

Huang Quan: Birds, insects and turtles after life (寫生珍禽圖). Beijing, Palace Museum

Of the many winged creatures, the magpie excels not only with its long tail, but also with its name, 喜鹊 xĭquè, meaning “happiness bird”. In fact, its first syllable is identical with 喜 xĭ, “happiness”, attached to the door of every house at the Chinese new year. This is what we see in the opening picture of this post, on the gate of one of Shaxi’s richest houses the Ouyang merchant house (about which we will write more later). The same syllable is part of 喜欢 xĭhuān, “love”, of which thus it becomes an intermediary and a messenger. For example, acording to a popular legend, two famous separated lovers could meet again at certain times through a gate formed by magpies. Therefore, the name of a magpie couple, 双喜 shuāngxĭ, also means “double happiness”, displayed in the sign of a double 囍 xĭ on the red flags of Chinese restaurants decorated for wedding.

Xu Beihong: Double happiness. Observe the similarity of the two figures to the 囍 sign

Happiness is a big word. Double happiness is unspeakably big. How can you further enhance it? By planting the two magpies on the top of a blossoming plum tree. In fact, the plum tree is called 梅 méi, which is homonymous to the word 眉 méi, “eyebrow”. Thus, 喜上梅 xĭshàngméi, “magpie on plum tree” is homonymous to the good wish  喜上眉梢 xĭshàngméi(shāo), “happiness to the top of your eyerows!” That’s why we see a magpie couple flirting on a plum tree as a pendant of a landscape in the gate of most old city palaces. For example, in this ancient merchant house in Shaxi, which, in spite of the unhappy times past since 1949 – the term is paraphrasing the famous film by Zhang Yimou – still resist to the temptation of depression.


Guo Gan: Himalaya. Erhu solo

Fragrant flowers

In the exhibition Hazy mountains, fragrant flowers – Traditional Chinese ink painting in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Kogart House in Budapest, nearly a hundred scroll paintings and calligraphy are on display from the Three Gorges Museum of Chongqing until 30 March. Almost all the paintings lent from China are from the late Qing era, academic works of conservative taste, which carefully imitate the great classical models. Perhaps only the three images by Liu Xiling (刘锡玲, 1848-1923) are truly original and exciting: their ragged brushwork and abstract forms already foreshadow the expressiveness of contemporary Chinese ink painting, as well as its ironic relationship to the classical canon.

This illustration is a different work by Liu Xiling; his exhibited works do not figure in the catalog.

However, nature compensates us for the low-key intensity of the paintings. The four magnolia trees in full bloom at the street front of the Kogart House reveal with explosive force what the masters at the end of the imperial era tried to sublimate from the paintings of an earlier century they deemed happier. The visitors stop in the garden, just like the passers-by outside the fence. They happily photograph each other in front of the sea of flowers.

Circular Time

Dragon

“My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity and value, and how value relates to current political social understandings and misunderstandings.”
Ai Weiwei

Bear/Tiger

From the “Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads” exhibition by Ai Weiwei, in the Edmond J. Safra Fountain courtyard of Somerset House, London, 12th May to 26th June 2011.

“Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads … re-creations of the traditional Chinese zodiac sculptures which once adorned the fountain-clock of Yuanmingyuan … Designed in the 18th Century by two European Jesuits at the behest of the Manchu emperor Qianlong, the fountain-clock featured the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, each spouting water at two-hour intervals. In 1860, the Yuanmingyuan was ransacked by French and British troops and the heads were pillaged. Today, seven heads – the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, horse, monkey and bear [!] – have been located, the whereabouts of the other five are unknown.” (Exhibition description).

Two original statues from the Yuanmingyuan’s fountain

Just as the two Jesuits reworked European motifs into the Chinese culture of Emperor Qianlong, Ai Weiwei creates anew rather than reproduces, reworking in time and place the heads pillaged in the Yuanmingyuan. He „focuses attention on questions of looting and repatriation while extending his ongoing exploration of the ʻfake’ and the copy in relation to the original.”

“Our whole condition was very sad, but we still feel warmth, and the life in our bodies can still tell us that there is excitement in there, even though death is waiting. We had better not enjoy the moment, but create the moment.”
(Ai Weiwei, Exhibition description).

Another photo set of the same statues, exhibited in New York’s Grand Army Plaza

For comparison, a different yet complementary reworking of the twelve zodiac animals may be found in the work of Shanghai-born Li Huayi:

Chinese cats

Julia has attempted to find a name for her new cat via an internet poll, and we have recommended to her the name Chifu which, although rather popular in Spain, sounds quite Chinese. On this occasion it came up whether the Chinese have traditionally kept cats.


Naturally the Chinese have kept cats, and primarily for catching mice (and, er, for consumption). Already the Book of Rites, attributed to Confucius, remembered about the hosts of cats defending the granaries against the mice and rats, to whom the emperor offered a sacrifice each year. Buddhist monasteries also kept cats for the protection of the holy scripts. Emperor Ming-Ti (A.D. 58-76) had them directly brought from India for the Temple of the White Horse where the first Chinese sutra translations were preserved. And Lu Yu (733-804), author of the Book of Tea has even dedicated a poem to the cats protecting his library and tea collection.


Cats being kept as pets are first remembered by the sources from the Tang period (618-907). This was an age when China was extremely open to the outside world, and the Iranian merchants arriving in large number from the West brought at this time the long-coated Persian cat to the country. This race became the favorite of the noble ladies, as it is attested both by classical novels and the paintings left to us from the Song period (960-1127) and later.

Classical cat paintings of a thousand years from the Taiwan National Museum

Demand generates offer, and Chinese painting, which has been traditionally differentiated by themes – bird and flower painting, mountain and water painting, horse painting, bamboo painting – also created the genre of cat painting. Cat painters were provided by special manuals – such manuals are being published and widely used even today –, and the rules of the new genre were summarized by such authoritative books like the 相貓經 Xiāngmāojīng, The Classic Book of Cats or Cat Painting, included among the great classic books (經 jīng). This latter has even used special terms for different fur colors and defined their order of rank:

至於毛色，以純黃為上，所謂「金絲貓」的就是。其次純白的，名「雪貓」，但廣東人不喜歡，叫它做「孝貓」，主不祥。再次是純黑的，叫「鐵貓」。純色的貓通名為「四時好」。褐黃黑相兼，名為「金絲褐」。黃白黑相兼，名「玳瑁斑」。黑背白肢，白腹，名為「烏雲蓋雪」。

As to the color of fur, the perfect yellow ones are called “golden cats” after their color. The second place is for the perfectly white ones, called “snow cats”. The Cantonese do not like this kind. They call it instead “the cat of filial piety” and consider it a [bad] omen. After this follow the perfectly black ones, called “iron cats”. The cats with a perfectly homogeneous color are called “excellent in all four seasons”. The yellow-brown-black cats are called “golden brown”. The yellow-white-black ones – like the one Julia has [translator’s note] – are called “turtle shell spotted”. And those with a black back and with white legs and belly are referred to as “black cloud covering the snow”.

Cat, crab and quail from the animal painting model book of Shen Zhou (1427-1509)

The establishment of cat painting as an autonomous genre was also supported by the fact that the word 貓 māo cat is a homonym of 耄 mào “eighty-ninety years old”, so such paintings were a perfect gift for a birthday. Especially if they also represented a 蝶 dié butterfly, because then the names of the two figures, pronounced loud, also had the meaning 耄耋 màodié “very long old age”.





The late Qing court painter Shen Chenlin (active between 1850 and 1870) composed a whole album with the title “Cats” or “Elders” which became an estimated coffee table book of the last emperors. The twelve pages album was published as a wall calendar by the Taiwan National Museum. It is worth to observe how much the last page follows the four hundred years earlier model page of Shen Zhou.



The tradition of the classical cat painters has been continued by Gu Yingzhi, professor of the Tianjin Academy of Art, one of the greatest authorities of cat painting in contemporary China.



The modern cat paintings by Wu Guangwei already trespass the border separating the stylized figures of classical Chinese painting from Western hyperrealism, so fashionable nowadays in China.


But the word 貓 māo cat is not only a homonym of “old age”, but also of the name of Chairman 毛 Mao. Even their meanings are somewhat close to each other, for the latter means hair or fur. No wonder that some contemporary Chinese avant-garde pictures, inspired by pop art, occasionally represent Chairman Mao with a cat’s face, perhaps as a kind of a shock therapy.

Qiu Jie: Chairman Mao, 2007

Qiu Jie: Chairman Mao on the lands, 2006

And finally Classical-inspired modern Chinese art also uses the motif of the cat without any secondary meaning, just for the sake of the gracious and elastic lines which are so akin to Chinese calligraphy.

Chen Yang

Din Yanyong

Tien Yuchang

Vlad Gerasimov is a Russian painter, but his pictures, inspired by Chinese art,
are very popular on Chinese sites as well.

Taipei, switchboard of the Cat 107 coffee bar imitating a shelf with classical Chinese books.
The titles of the books are: Seeing cats. Dreaming cats. Home with cats. Cats,
friends of the virtue. The cat has left for a coffee. The cat has come.
Cats around the world. One town, six cats. Encounter with cats.
On the switcher: Second volume, which, when pro-
nounced, also means “Switch it on”.