From the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty (Kaifeng) to the Southern Song Dynasty's Hangzhou, since the Song Dynasty moved south in 1127, the magnificent Northern School landscape painting style gradually faded out. After the Southern Song Dynasty established the capital of Hangzhou in 1138, painters began to create more sketches, such as albums, and more focused on capturing local natural landscapes.
One side of the water and soil nourishes the other, and the other side of the water and soil also nourishes a style of art. If the ancestors of the Northern Song Dynasty used a solemn and sharp perspective to make the slices of nature the most realistic depiction, then the Southern Song Dynasty "corner" painters represented by Ma Yuan made an ideal presentation of "domesticated" nature.
After the Southern Song Dynasty moved its capital to Hangzhou, painters were surrounded by the gentle mood that characterized Jiangnan. The lofty mountains and wind-eroded plains that were often painted during the Northern Song Dynasty could no longer show their mood, so the more poetic and subtle Southern Song Style gradually traveled.
Ma Yuan, who likes to make small scenes of corners, is the founder of this style.
Southern Song Dynasty Ma Yuan", "Gaoshi Guan Waterfall Map" album
Ma Yuan was born in the fourth generation of painting family, the Southern Song Dynasty Song Guangzong, Song Ningzong two dynasties to be edicted, is the Southern Song Dynasty painting academy is the leader of the Southern Song Painting Academy. Ma Yuan enjoys a high reputation in the history of Chinese painting, together with Li Tang, Liu Songnian and Xia Gui, known as the four masters of the Southern Song Dynasty, his landscape painting has the greatest achievements, unique, and Xia Gui, then known as "Ma Xia", becoming a great painter with originality in the history of painting.
Ma Yuan's great-grandfather, grandfather, uncle, brother, and son have been painters of the academy for five generations. Hangzhou, where the Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy is located, is incomparably beautiful, with pavilions, flower gardens and beautiful remains, all of which are part of its beauty.
This album depicts a scribe in a mountain view, jagged pine branches, and rugged rocks, in stark contrast to the scribe's journey of calmly gazing at the splashes of water stirred up by the fall of the waterfall. Ma Yuan shrinks the natural landscape into a very poetic geometric structure, showing the layout of one corner and the emptiness of the other. Diagonally cuts into "one corner" composition (worthy of the "horse corner"), with the transition from a well-defined foreground scene to a cloud-shrouded vista, a contrast between touchable rock trees and trees to a rushing stream that can only be heard, and an extension from a sensory world to an infinite space of consciousness.
Especially in the foreground, the thick contours of the rocks conspicuously set off the white-robed scribes, and they are in the same corner composition, and the sharp lines and precise outlines can better show the volume and quality of the scenes and figures than the complex depictions.
Southern Song Dynasty Liang Kai "Zepan Xing Yin Tu" Tuan Fan
From 1201 to 1204, Liang Kai served in Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, and waited for the painting academy. He later gave up this prestigious position and retired to a Zen temple to continue painting for a living.
Different from the "corner" composition method of the Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy, which is usually used by the Southern Song Dynasty Painting Academy to leave blank, Liang Kai uses an unsettling mountain diagonal line hanging over the top to trap the viewer's vision, and makes the distant scenery more difficult to reach and more illusory.
This painting is one of the most confusing paintings in the history of Chinese painting, which challenges our perception of the real world and reflects the Zen concept that all real existence is only a fantasy of "nothing in the original", which is probably related to liang Kai's later residence in the Zen Temple.
In the painting, a scribe strolls alone on the riverbank, opposite the riverbank, retreating along the reed-dotted flat embankment to the swampy depression and then to the peaks in the deep fog, instantly fading out of the picture. But this extended vista and the viewer's peaceful vision were disrupted by a cluster of upside-down vegetation under the overhanging rocks. The looming cantilever disappears into the fog, and in the distance, the peaks that struggle out of the haze and lock make the viewer not only wonder what kind of scenery is hidden in the fog.