Painting review | distant clear clouds

Distant Xiu Qingyun Diagram Song Mi Youren

"Distant Xiu Qingyun Map", ink and color on paper, 24.7 cm in length and 28.6 cm in width, works by Yujin Mi of the Southern Song Dynasty, now in the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.

Distant mountains are misty and cloudy, and nearby trees are sparse, and there is a chill after the rain. The stream meanders down, connecting the mountain stones with the cold forest, and the water color crosses the mountains and stones, and the flexible breath is suddenly born. Mountain stones, forest streams, and rain clouds are all common scenes, but Mi Youren's "play" is both realistic and full of vitality, showing the deep scenery of cloud smoke and psychedelic, cold mountains and stones, and the movement is suitable for calming people's minds. The brushwork of the painting is particularly commendable: the mountains are sharp like knives, staggered, and mostly use light ink to express clouds and mist, and the contrast between light and dark is clear. The trunk is painted from thick ink, the light ink dots are dyed into leaves, and the slope stones are slightly hooked, "replacing the lines with points, and accumulating points into surfaces". At the top right of the picture, there is the words "Yuanhui Drama", and "Yuanhui" is the word of Mi Yuren.

Mi Youren was the eldest son of Mi Fu, known for his noh shu shan paintings, known as "Xiaomi", and his landscape paintings "slightly changed what his dignitaries did, becoming a family law", and was called "Mi's Cloud Mountain" by later generations. "Distant Xiuqing Cloud Map" shows the charm of "Mi's Cloud Mountain". The late Ming and early Qing dynasty painter Yun Ge commented as follows: "Mi Youren's painting Yun Shan changes extremely naturally, and the pen and ink are simple and wet, elegant and vulgar. ”