荆浩

Jing Hao (Chinese: 荆浩; Wade–Giles: Ching Hao; c. 855–915), courtesy name Haoran (浩然), art name Hongguzi (洪谷子), was a Chinese landscape painter and art theorist of the Tang and Later Liang dynasties.

As an artist, he is often cited along with his pupil, Guan Tong, as one of the most critical figures in the development of the style of monumental landscape painting which appeared near the end of the Five Dynasties period. Later this style would come to be known as the Northern Landscape style; it strongly influenced the tradition of Northern Song painters. As a theorist, he is the person most responsible for codifying the theories underlying the work of later painters, and his treatises on painting and aesthetics continued to serve as textbooks for Northern Song artists more than a century after his death.

Life and career

Jing Hao began his artistic career during the later years of the Tang dynasty. Initially he was influenced by the emphasis on monumental landscapes of Tang painters. Their goal to express the grandeur and harmony of nature was exemplified by the established masters such as Wang Wei. Following the collapse of the Tang, Northern China descended into a period of political chaos—the Five Dynasties—in which five separate ruling lines established themselves and were destroyed by factional infighting in rapid succession. An aversion to the turmoil of his era led Jing Hao to retire to seclusion in the northern Taihang Mountains. Here he spent the greater portion of his life in the pursuit of artistic development.

Taihang is an isolated region of dense cloud forests punctuated by jagged peaks. These unique geographical characteristics made the region particularly suited to Jing's developing interest in ink wash techniques. Jing was one of the earliest Chinese artists to employ ink washes (yongmo) to simulate depth and atmospheric perspective. Building on the approach initially pioneered by Tang painters such as Xiang Rong, Jing wrote that the principal aim of the yongmo technique was to “distinguish higher and lower [parts of objects] with a gradation in ink tones, and represent clearly shallowness and depth, making them appear natural as if they had not been done with a brush.” Of Xiang himself, Jing wrote that the earlier artist had “attained the secret of mysterious truth only through the use of ink wash”, but criticized Xiang for his lack of definition, lamenting that Xiang had “no bone in his brushwork”. Jing departed from such an approach by employing in his landscapes a mixture of atmospheric ink washes and bold brush strokes to accurately transcribe the Shanxi landscapes in which he worked. This technique, called cun fa, would characterize all of his major works as well as those of other artists who would study his work in later years.

In his writings, Jing described cun fa as a way of allowing the heart to follow after the brush. He wrote, “The image is to be seized without hesitation, so that the representation does not suffer. If the ink is too rich, it loses its expressive quality; if too weak in tone, it fails to achieve a proper vigour.” In other words, he sought to allow denser forms to take shape spontaneously out of the ink wash, like rocky crags jutting forth from misty basins. This embrace of spontaneity is readily apparent in his surviving works, such as Mount Lu.

Bifa Ji

Although admired as an artist during his own time and beyond, Jing Hao achieved his greatest fame as a theoretician, and it was during his seclusion in the Taihang that Jing Hao produced what is perhaps his most lasting contribution to Chinese arts, a treatise on painting humbly titled Bifa Ji (筆法記 “Notes on Brushwork”), which would provide the theoretical basis of the Northern Song school for more than a century to come.

In Bifa Ji, which is written as a narrative, Jing Hao's theories on art are presented in a fictional conversation he has with an old man he meets on a road while wandering in the mountains. The old man, a sage, gives the artist a lecture, in which he describes six underlying essentials of painting: the first is vital energy (qi 氣), the second rhythm, the third thought, the fourth scenery, the fifth brush, and finally the sixth, ink.……

节选，摘自英文维基百科「Jing Hao」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。