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Shen Zhou's legacy -- Wen Zhengming's "Old Trees . . . "

Shen Zhou was only one of tens of thousands of literati painters, but the wide variety of works he produced in his long life and his universally acknowledged sensitivity and gentleness of spirit gave his work added influence. So also did the fact that he numbered among his pupils outstanding artists who established a regional "school" of painting to carry forward and develop in different ways the inspiration of Shen Zhou -- both his absorption of prior tradition and his many innovations and original ideas. One of Shen Zhou's most prolific and celebrated pupils, Wen Zhengming (1470-1553), painted the work pictured below.  It exemplifies in a striking way principles of literati painting. 

Wen's painting, "Old Trees By a Wintery Brook," appears at first to be a depiction of nature -- but it is clearly not. Tree branches end abruptly, with no apparent reason (reminding us of Su Shi's Song era painting); the brook flows uphill; the landscape to the left trails into what seems to be mist, but on the right, there is nothing behind the rocks but empty paper.  

Wen Zhengming's work is not a depiction of nature -- it is an idea about nature and about ink and paper.  The painting makes no effort to fool us into thinking we are looking into a world beyond the paper -- it makes a strong statement that it is nothing but ink and paper, and the artist's hand and mind. By renouncing any attempt whatever at focusing on the objects of the painting, and instead foregrounding the medium and the technique, Wen Zhengming has produced a work that is remarkably "modern," even as in its brushwork and the motifs of nature it selects it seems to fit easily into established literati tradition.

Wen's work expresses perfectly the central theme of thousands of literati paintings -- painting was a medium that, in Confucian manner, borrowed tradition in order to perfect self-expression and communication. And the vehicle for self-expression, in Daoist manner, was most often images of nature and the theme of the solitary man, or group of friends, alone in the vastness of the natural Way.

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