Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Chang Lin-sheng of the Palace Museum said of those who would advocate an autonomous Taiwanese art, “These are rootless people. Did you know that the aboriginal tribes the localists love so much have no word in their language for art?” She paused dramatically. “Democracy is not good for art.” She wrung her hands and laughed. “Communism is worse. Capitalism is a good approximation of an imperial system and is very good for art. There is no Taiwanese culture. It’s not like the racial problem in the US—we are all Han people, and our culture was at its greatest in imperial courts.” The Palace Museum, she insisted, was the best answer to the Taiwanese search for dignity.

The greatest landscapes of the Song dynasty will not be on view in Splendors of Imperial China, but masterpieces of calligraphy and later painting will be. It is fashionable to note the failure of Western medicine to reconcile the mind-body split, and to look to the East for holistic cures. The Western division of word and image, sundering literary and artistic history, is no less troubling a split. It does not exist in China, where the character is at once a verbal representation and a visual language, and where the components of a painting are almost as iconic as literary vocabulary. Calligraphy is still the hardest of the Chinese arts for most Westerners to grasp: language is not metaphor but object, and what is signified is to some extent the process of signification. The writing and the content are harder to dissever than the dancer from the dance. It can be epistolary and spontaneous, with an ink trace that is entirely expressive, or it can be formal and ritualistic.

Visitors to the Met will see Huaisu’s Autobiographical Essay, a self-congratulatory drunken celebration of cursive forms, dated 777. In it, Huaisu explains that he writes best when inebriated. As he grows drunker, the text becomes less literary, but the quality of the calligraphy is exalted. The characters flow into one another as the brush charges forward, making fluid patterns of line—rhythmic, pulsing, almost erotic. Zhao Mengjian, writing in the thirteenth century, said that Huaisu “grasps his pen grandly like a frightened snake, rings it about roundly, and yet is very strangely spare.” Huaisu himself wrote, “Good calligraphy resembles a flock of birds darting out of the trees, or startled snakes scurrying into the grass, or cracks bursting in a shattered wall.”

Every student of Chinese art studies Su Shi’s Poems Written at Hangzhou on the Cold-Food Festival of 1082 as the apotheosis of calligraphy, and the most powerful part of Wen Fong’s masterful catalogue for the Met’s exhibition is his close reading of this work. An essayist beloved of Emperor Shenzong (to whose first triumphs Early Spring alludes), Su Shi became a policy critic at court, narrating contemporary problems through historical analogy. Given a series of provincial appointments, he became increasingly concerned about the life of the people and petitioned the court constantly to reduce taxes. This enraged the emperor’s chief adviser, and in 1079 Su Shi was convicted of having slandered the emperor and was banished to Huangzhou. He became a poet, turned to Buddhism, and wrote some great classics of Chinese literature, including Ode to the Red Cliff, to which later artists often alluded when they wanted to make indirect criticisms of government. His poems were disseminated throughout China by his powerful friends, and in exile he became a hero of the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, until in 1084 he was finally invited back to the court—only to be banished again a few years later.

At the height of his exile, Su Shi wrote Poems Written at Hangzhou on the Cold-Food Festival—a notion of spring almost opposite to Guo Xi’s:

Since coming to Hangzhou,

Three Cold-Food Festivals have come and gone.

Each year I wish to prolong the springtime,

But spring departs without lingering.

. . .

All in secrecy spring is stolen and wasted,

Wreaking vengeance in the middle of the night.

How does it differ from a sickly youth

Up from his sickbed, his hair already white?

. . .

Dead ashes blown will not stir to life.

The calligraphy is a study in balance and line, each character shaped and angled, the brush moved with an exquisite self-assurance and constancy. This is not the madly exuberant curling writing of Huaisu; it is as graceful and intricate in its structure as the branching of a tree. Su wrote, “My writing swells up like ten thousand gallons of water at the wellhead, erupting through the ground, spilling over the flat valley, and running unchecked for thousands of li a day.”