Landscape Art in the Late Imperial and Modern Eras

With the fall of the Ming dynasty and the establishment of the Manchu (Qing) dynasty (1644-1911), China was again placed under foreign domination. As was the case in the Yuan period, many scholars remained loyal to the fallen dynasty, choosing reclusion over participation in official life and using their art as a vehicle to record their feelings and register their dismay.

The loyalist painter Hongren (1610-1664), for instance, created spare, empty, nearly lifeless landscapes that immediately evoke the tradition of Ni Zan, whereas the brooding and moody compositions of Gong Xian (1620-1689), with their extreme contrasts of dark and light, suggest an almost apocalyptic vision, "symbolic both of the condition of his native land raped by the Manchus and of his own desperate sense of having, literally, nowhere to turn" (Sullivan 1999, 254).

Many art historians, however, have dismissed the bulk of Qing painting as "stultifying and lifeless imitation" (Fong 1992, 497), although some recent scholarship suggests that such views are beginning to change and that Qing painting is being broadly reappraised. Certainly, with the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, painting was revitalized, in part because of the rapid introduction of foreign styles and techniques that accompanied the rush to modernization.

One effect of greater exposure to Western art was that painters had to grapple with the question of how "Chinese" their art should be. As a result, a movement known as "guohua" (national painting) evolved and stressed the use of traditional Chinese materials and themes, and this term continues to be used today to refer to the works of artists who consider themselves in some sense as heirs to China's classical past.

After the creation of the People's Republic in 1949, many guohua painters tried to follow Communist leader Mao Zedong's famous dictum that the past should serve the present and created a hybrid landscape that fused revolutionary values and history with traditional landscape styles.

Sunrise in Yan’an by Qian Songyari (1899-1985) features a towering pagoda, emblematic of the past, off in the distance, whereas a modern highway bridge with trucks and buses spans the misty gorge at the heart of the composition. "The whole is illuminated by the rosy glow of dawn, or perhaps—to those who wished to read it so—of Communism" (Andrews & Shen 1998, 234).

Landscape art has dominated Chinese painting for most of the past one thousand years, in large measure precisely because it proved to be such an elastic and flexible genre, capable of allowing artists to explore the natural world in a variety of ways while also permitting personal, political, social, historical, and other themes to be included within its domain.

Although landscape painting has been largely relegated to a somewhat peripheral role at present, if history is any guide one might assume that yet another "new" landscape mode will one day occupy center stage again.