Chih Lo Lou
– 至樂樓藝術發揚(非牟利)有限公司- CHIH LO LOU ART PROMOTION (NON-Art Review
After Conquest, Subtle Emblems of Protest
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 8, 2011
It’s hard to see, when you walk into the Chinese painting galleries at the Met these days, that you’re entering a scene of catastrophe, with lives about to be lost right before your eyes. All seems calm in the show called “The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art from the Chih Lo Lou Collection.” There are no smoking ruins among the bamboo groves in a 17th-century handscroll painting, no anguished cries emerging from columns of calligraphic script.
Chih Lo Lou Collection, Hong Kong
“Pines and Rock” (1634), a hanging scroll by Huang Daozhou, has a rueful, inscription: “Even if I turned into rock, I wouldn't be obstinate.”
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Chih Lo Lou Collection, Hong Kong
Top, a poem by Li Ruiqing; above, “Fish,” by Zhu Da.
Only one scroll, hanging in the center of the first gallery, hints at disturbance. Unusually long in format — you have to crane your neck to see the top — it has no human figures, just an image of two fantastically tall, thin pine trees standing side by side, with one tree twisting around the other as if on the verge of collapse. To the left, barely visible at the picture’s edge, is the profile of a high rock cliff.
The painter, Huang Daozhou, lived toward the end of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). He was one of countless artists to take state-sponsored scholarly exams, earn an advanced degree and qualify for a career in civil service. His rise was swift; he was soon appointed minister for education. But the times were inauspicious. Non-Chinese forces were poised to invade the country from the north. A rich rural gentry within China had created a power elite to rival the Ming court.
Peasant rebellions were erupting across the land. The imperial response to all this was slack and inept, and Huang, fulfilling his duty as a public intellectual, said so directly to the emperor. Abruptly his government job ended. He found himself shuttled in and out of jail and ended up spending the bulk of his time teaching and writing far from the court.
Such was the situation in 1634 when he painted “Pines and Rock,” slightly undercutting the traditional emblem of steadfastness and endurance with a rueful, go-with-the-flow inscription: “Even if I turned into rock, I wouldn’t be obstinate.”
Yet as it turned out, he was morally obstinate, and that cost him his life.
In 1644 rebel armies finally seized the imperial capital at Beijing, and the Ming emperor took his own life. The northern foreigners, called Manchu, swept over the Great Wall and chased the remnant court southward. Scholar-artists were faced with a mortal choice: They could either join the newcomers or stay loyal to the Ming. For Huang Daozhou, the answer was clear: He stood fast with the old order and died defending it.
Many of his contemporaries, including artists in the show’s first gallery, acted with comparable resolve. One artist, Ni Yuanlu, hanged himself. Another, Wang Siren, starved himself to death in an extreme gesture of passive resistance. The painter of the bamboo handscroll, Gui Changshi, gave himself over to inconsolable regret at his early diffidence toward imperial service, and he wasted away.
Gui Zhuang, his son, also a painter of bamboo, took up more positive forms of activism, simultaneously organizing a counterinsurgency and excoriating the old regime for having so miserably failed the Chinese people. A 1658 painting by him is the one work in the opening gallery that postdates the Manchu takeover. It introduces the rest of the show and the wide range of responses by loyalist artists — known as yimin, or leftover subjects — who through their art were trying to deal with social and cultural trauma.
Some, like Xiao Yuncong (1591-1669), devised subtle emblems of protest and mourning. His “Ink Plum” depicts a single plum tree, a symbol of ethical purity, as little more than a graceful but insubstantial twig. It floats unplanted in midair, as if it had been chopped off at the bottom or torn away from its roots.
Xiao’s friend Hongren became a Buddhist monk when the dynasty dissolved, a move with practical advantages. As a member of a religious order he was absolved from answering to secular authority, and he neatly avoided submitting to one particularly onerous demand made by China’s new rulers, who called themselves the Qing dynasty. Under their dispensation all men were required to adopt a Manchu hairstyle: a shaved head with a patch of long, braided hair left at the back. But since monks traditionally shaved their heads completely, loyalists like Hongren could avoid declaring political allegiance through appearance.
The monastic life also offered physical retreat, which could be further deepened with a retreat into art. Calling on the revered model of earlier yimin figures like Ni Zan (1306-1374), who had gone into principled seclusion at the time of the Mongol invasion, Hongren traveled the countryside and developed increasingly abstract styles of landscape imagery based on utopian themes.
A lot of yimin art was consciously escapist. Painting after painting makes reference to the fable of the Peach Blossom Spring, in which two fishermen accidentally wander into a hidden Eden where life is perfect, and the perfection never ends. All is well until they leave to fetch their families, and then return becomes impossible. They can’t find the way back to paradise.
Despite the patriotic emotion generated by its demise, the late Ming dynasty was never paradise by any stretch, as some artists recognized. And in general the further the art gets in time from the initial, violent midcentury crisis, the more complex its messages become. This is clear in the work of the exhibition’s two star figures, both descendants of the Ming royal line, both Buddhist monks, both singular, snappish personalities. Zhu Da (1626-1705), better known as Bada Shanren, took monastic vows to escape persecution. Decades later, after experiencing (or faking) psychotic episodes, he returned to secular life as a professional artist.
Crazy or not, he produced exceptionally inventive art, outsiderish in its oddity but formally sophisticated and ripe with historical allusions. He’s best known for his portraits — which could be taken perhaps for self-portraits — of birds and fish, solitary creatures with eyes fixed in a baleful, mistrustful stare as if alert to trouble approaching.
Less conspicuously eccentric, though, are landscapes that anticipate Cézanne’s in the way they transmute nature into an abstract idea of nature by cutting its forms loose from space and space loose from gravitational logic. If his fish and birds have an uneasy, monomaniacal bite, funny and scary, his landscapes can be delicate beyond belief, mist-muffled detonations of tone and line.
His younger contemporary, Zhu Ruoiji, known as Shitao (1642-1707), was also a Ming prince by descent. But because he was only an infant when the dynasty ended, he may have felt somewhat detached from his imperial identity, free to acknowledge or deny it. His ambitions for advancement within the Buddhist hierarchy brought him into the Qing court. When he failed to find sufficient patronage there, he converted to Daoism and to a life of relative solitude.
In one thing he was consistent: his brilliance. And part of that brilliance lay in his never staying still. The exhibition — which comes from the Hong Kong Museum of Art and was organized in New York by Maxwell K. Hearn, the curator in charge of the Met’s Asian department — gives a sense of Shitao’s restlessness. It moves from a big, emphatic painting, all spritzes, swipes and spiny rays, of a sinewy pine tree and a thundercloud of a rock to a suite of vegetable still lifes (Shitao referred to himself as “a bitter gourd,” only for the discerning palate) to a dozen album paintings illustrating poems by Huang Yanlu, a patron and friend.
The album is a tour-de-force compendium of the graphic possibilities the landscape genre offers and of the qualities that made Shitao so gripping: sensationally outré brushwork, narrative verve, a ready command of art history and a symphonic sensibility, all seen in the way he unites the 12 images (the full album has a total of 22) through the play of empty, unpainted space in each. By the time this album was finished in 1702, the Ming-Qing transition was long over. The Manchu rulers, astute politicians and ardent Sinophiles, had restored a sense of normalcy. The pain of traumatic injury had healed; the end of the world hadn’t happened. The event that changed everything hadn’t changed much.
Certainly it hadn’t changed art, at least not in a permanent way. Ming themes and styles, whatever their dissident implications, smoothly entered the Qing mainstream. An album of paintings by the Suzhou artist Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673) called “Journey in Search of My Parents” is a kind of docudrama account of the artist’s 1,400-mile trek to find his aged mother and father in the chaos that followed the Ming collapse. Huang’s story is a moving one, but his telling of it, with wind-whipped brushwork and cinematic effects of scale, has a grandstanding air.
A pristine set of 12 ornamental hanging scrolls of colored landscapes on gold leaf, at the end of the show, doesn’t pretend to be anything but high-end commercial fodder. Painted by Lan Ying (1585-1664), who worked in Hangzhou, it appears to be an uncommissioned job done for the market and must have gone for a bundle.
The only surprise is its early date: 1650, when the dynastic struggle was still active and raw. So even during an apocalypse there was private money around to buy luxury art, and artists able and willing, unprotestingly, to produce it. Whether this speaks of art’s timeless resilience or of its endless willingness to please for a price, disasters be damned, is a question as pertinent to New York in 2011 as it was to China centuries ago.
“The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art From the Chih Lo Lou Collection” remains through Jan. 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
石濤是有開創性的一代宗師。他自號苦瓜和尚，餐餐不離苦瓜。甚至還把苦瓜供奉案頭朝拜。他對苦瓜的這種感情，與他的經歷、心境有密不可分的關係。
石濤生于明朝末年，十五歲時，明朝滅亡，父親被唐王捉殺。國破家亡，石濤被迫逃亡到廣西全州，在湘山寺削發為僧。以後顛沛流離，輾 轉于廣西、江西、安徽、江蘇、浙江、陜西、河北等地，到晚年才定居揚州。他帶著內心的矛盾和隱痛，創作了大量精湛的作品。最為人推崇的，是他畫中那種奇險 兼饒秀潤的獨特風格，筆墨中包含的那種淡淡的苦澀味。 一種和苦瓜極為近似的韻致。
黃道周（1585年－1646年），字幼玄（又作幼元[1]、幼平），又字螭若、細遵，號石齋，人稱石齋先生，閩南、台灣尊稱為「助順將軍」，福建漳浦銅山（清屬詔安，今東山縣）人[1]，學者、書法家、藝術家、明朝官員，明亡後抗清，被俘殉國。
目錄[隐藏] |
[編輯] 生平
道周於明萬曆十三年二月初九生於東山深井村，出生世家，年少家貧，在福建銅山（今屬東山縣）島上石室刻苦攻讀，曾在閩南漳州和廣東潮州收徒講學。有「閩海才子」之譽。
天啟二年（1622年）進士，與倪元璐、王鐸同期。崇禎時任右中允，崇禎十一年，因指斥大臣楊嗣昌等私下妄自議和，七月初五日崇禎帝在平台召開御前會議，要楊嗣昌與黃道周當場辯論[2]，連貶六級，謫戌廣西。遂辭官，於鄴山講堂開壇講學。
明亡後，任南明禮部尚書，「嚴冷方剛，不偕流俗」，楊廷麟曾力薦他充講官兼直經筵。弘光帝亡後，至福建福州。隆武帝封武英殿大學士兼吏、兵二部尚書。但兵權落入鄭芝龍手中，時清廷頒布剃髮令，江南人民求救於南明隆武朝廷，芝龍養兵自重，不發一兵一卒[3]。黃道周只得返鄉籌兵籌糧。
隆武元年（1645年）九月十九日，道周募眾數千人[4]，馬僅十餘匹，另有一月糧，出仙霞關，與清兵抗擊。施琅曾一度與他前往，不久卻徑自返回福建[5]。夫人蔡氏嘆道：「道周死得其所了！」。十月初抵達廣信（今上饒），募得三個月兵糧，分兵三路，向清兵發起進攻，一路向西攻撫州（今臨川），另兩路北上分攻婺源、休寧，不久三路皆敗。十二月六日，黃道周率隊向婺源出發，至童家坊，得知樂平已陷，二十四日，抵明堂里時遇伏，參將高萬容逃，於是全軍崩潰，道周被徽州守將張天祿俘獲。
道周俘後，至金陵獄中，獄中吟詠如故，清廷派明舊臣洪承疇勸降，黃道周寫下這樣一副對聯：「史筆流芳，雖未成功終可法；洪恩浩蕩，不能報國反成仇。」將史可法與洪承疇對比。承疇頗愧，上疏請求免除道周死刑， 清廷不准。後絕食十二日，期間其妻蔡氏來信：「忠臣有國無家，勿內顧」。隆武二年三月五日就義，臨刑前，盥洗更衣，取得紙墨，畫一幅長松怪石贈人，還給家 人留下了遺言：「蹈仁不死，履險若夷；有隕自天，捨命不渝」。至東華門刑場上，向南方再拜，道周撕裂衣服，咬破手指，有血書遺家人：「綱常萬古，節義千 秋；天地知我，家人無憂。」最後頭已斷而身「兀立不仆」，其門人蔡春落、賴繼謹、趙士超和毛玉潔同日被害，人稱「黃門四君子」。
[編輯] 著作
著有《儒行集傳》、《石齋集》、《易象正義》、《春秋揆》、《孝經集傳》等，現存詩兩千餘首，被俘後「見三光」的牢室中所作三百多首詩，出自憂憤，最為感人。
[編輯] 成就
道周博學多才，不僅精通經學、史學、詩賦，甚至天文、曆法、數學，且能書畫。明史贊：「學貫古今，所至學者雲集」。乾隆帝亦說他:「不愧一代完人」。
藝術方面，道周書法妙絕，清初宋犖說：「石齋先生楷法尤精，所謂意氣密麗，如飛鴻舞鶴，令人叫絕。」（《漫堂書畫跋》）道周亦能繪畫，徐霞客評他「字畫為館閣第一，文章為國朝第一，人品為海內第一，其學問直接周、孔，為古今第一」。
[編輯] 評價
崇禎十一年（1638年），楊嗣昌、陳新甲、方一藻皆有家喪，崇禎帝依舊「奪情」起用。對此，黃道周連上三疏，指責此三人不忠不孝。顧誠《南明史》評價劉宗周和黃道周皆非棟樑之材。他們「守正」而不能達變；敢於犯顏直諫而闊於事理；律己雖嚴而於世無補。
因其忠義，閩南人、台灣人頗為崇敬，並改尊稱為「助順將軍」，避免被清朝查獲。位於西門町的台北晉德宮和淡水的晉德宮等，皆祀奉助順將軍。其他廟宇之助順將軍，則多為國姓爺鄭成功配祀神。
[編輯] 參考資料
- ^ 1.0 1.1 《閩中理學淵源考·卷八十三》
- ^ 《閩中理學淵源考·卷四十八》
- ^ 鄭達《野史無文》卷十二《鄭成功傳》記：「道周與芝龍隙，請督師援廣信府，芝龍給贏弱卒三千以往，至則敗績。」
- ^ 李世熊《再上石齋黃老師書》中說：「先生之行也，召募市人才三千耳，餉不給於國帑，而資於門生故友之題助，此一時義激慷慨耳。朝廷才給空門扎百十道以當行 銀，兵事歲月未可解，義助能歲月例輸乎？空劄可當衣食易死命乎？就令士馬飽騰、人人致命，三千未教之卒可枝住諸道分進數十萬之方張之寇乎？」見黃宗羲編 《明文海》，補遺第五二三七頁。
- ^ 李光地《榕村語錄續集》卷八。
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