Two Works of Art of the Sung Dynasty

Two important works of art representing different styles from the same period of time in China are "Li Po chanting a Poem" and "Mother Monkey and Child." A comparison of the two will show the wide range of styles and expression in the Sung Dynasty and the similarities between the two artists. The works actually derive from similar impulses on the part of the artists but try to reach their goals through different methods. The works will be considered in terms of formal visual and content analyses, with some background on the artists, their circumstances, and their reason for producing these works.

"Li Po chanting a Poem" is a hanging scroll produced as ink on paper in the mid-thirteenth century, during the Sung Dynasty, by Liang K'ai. It is presently in Tokyo in the commission for the Protection of Cultural Properties Collection. "Mother Monkey and Child" was produced by Mu-ch'i in the same era. It is also a hanging scroll and is ink on silk. It is presently in Kyoto as part of the Daitokuji Collection. These works were selected because they are representative of different styles from the Sung Dynasty. They are comparable in terms of the medium selected by the artists.

The artists themselves held similar positions in their society. Liang K'ai was a Chinese painter of the Sung Academy, and during the second part of his life he became a Ch'an monk and developed an individual style known as chien-pi, or "abbreviated brush technique." The style stood between the

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ng lines of the robe belong to the non-descriptive brushwork of the amateur styles; their air of freedom and relaxation has nothing to do with the fabric they outline, but rather contributes to the whole aspect of the figure, outwardly calm but charged with an inner vitality. Like Mu-ch'i, Liang K'ai answers difficult-to-reconcile sets of criteria: those of the Academy, which required that the subject be convincingly portrayed and adequately characterized, and those of the amateur painters, who believed that the significance of the picture is inseparable from its formal properties, and that the brushstrokes which compose it must be independently meaningful. One difference between Liang and Mu-ch'i can be seen in the fact that Mu-ch'i was long a Ch'an monk while Liang would only become one after his time as a painter. They were heirs to the legacy of Chinese painting to their time and were subject to the general view of what art should be and accomplish. Until the second half of the eleventh century, the prevailing theory of painting in China hinged on the notion that a painting of a given object or scene should evoke in the viewer thoughts and feelings akin to those that the actual object or scene would evoke. In the last h

Category: Arts - T