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Great Waves: Chinese Themes in the Arts of Korea and Japan
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Mountain Market, Clear with Rising Mist
Xia Gui (Chinese, Southern Song dynasty 1127–1279; active ca. 1195–1230)
Album leaf, ink on silk; 9 3/4 x 8 3/8 (24.8 x 21.3 cm)
Signed "Xia Gui"
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913 (13.100.102)
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Description
This album leaf presents a poetic evocation of one of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. The Eight Views became a popular subject for painters beginning in the late eleventh century after the Chan Buddhist monk Huihong (1071–1128) composed eight poems on these themes. His poem on Mountain Market, Clear with Rising Mist offers vividly specific images for painters to interpret:
Last night's rain is letting up, mountain air is heavy,
Steam rising, sun and shadow, shifting light amid trees;
The silkworm market comes to a close, the crowd thins out,
Roadside willows by the market bridge: golden threads play;
Whose house with flower-filled plot is across the valley?
A smooth-tongued yellow bird calls in spring breeze;
Wine flag in hazy distance-look and you can see:
It's the one west of the road to Zhe Tree Reidge Valley.
(Translation by Alfreda Murck in Images of the Mind, Princeton, 1984, p. 226)
In Xia Gui's interpretation, boldly executed brushstrokes and ink dots create an abstract language of visual signs rather than merely descriptive forms: the kinesthetic brushstrokes, which change effortlessly from outlines and foliage dots to wedge-shaped modeling strokes and ink wash, at once simplify and unify the landscape and human forms, breathing life into the moisture-drenched landscape. It was this brilliantly simplified ink wash and ax-cut brush idiom, which infused gesture with meaning, that prepared the way for the calligraphic revolution of expressive brushwork in the ensuing Yuan dynasty.
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