Interview with Robert Jacobsen
Curator of Asian Art
1. What is this small painting? What can we tell just from looking at it?
It's a Sung fan painting, "Corridor through the Pines." There is in fact a kind of covered corridor or canopy walkway that cuts right through this element of the painting, through the pine trees headed up towards what is probably a temple...most likely it is...yes, there's another double-roofed temple here in the background.(1)
2. Aside from being beautiful, what is significant about it?
Well, this to me is a classic Southern Sung school painting. Because of its form and its shape, we know that it's a fan painting.
3. Was it ever actually used as a fan?
Yes. Painted fans would have been used as items that only later in time were collected and mounted in books—pasted flat down on the pages of a book.
4. What else is known about it?
It's associated with the painting of Hsia Kuei and Ma Yüan. These were two artists—one working for the court, one as a professional artist—who evolved or developed this so-called one corner composition.
Most of the painted-in elements of the landscape will be pushed to one corner or the other, kind of a diagonal, leaving a great deal—typically—of blank silk. And we should keep in mind how important this void is to the total composition; it's almost half-and-half in fact—half painted, half open.
5. The silk itself suggests the scene as much as what's painted on it.
And how evocative that space is, in that it pulls our—in our imagination at least—our eye back into the extreme distance. The emptiness is a suggestion of sky or a suggestion of cloud bank, or mist coming in.(2) Even water somehow can be suggested with blank silk or paper. The Chinese become ingenious at this during this period and its carries forth in most styles of painting hereafter.
6. There's harmony in the composition. What about the subject matter?
Notice the finely orchestrated trees in the foreground, little elements of architecture, even a few people, again made very small. Keep in mind that we—humankind—are meant to be just a small part of this much larger universe.
The temples, again, suggest that this landscape is indeed occupied. I mean, it's inhabited by us, but there's a true harmony. I think there's almost a relaxed feeling. It's a very intimate, poetic, lyrical orchestration of nature's elements here in this design.
7. Is this a real place?
This is an imagined landscape. These artists certainly were aware of the world around them; they traveled, they journeyed, they kept textbooks and journals of what they saw—sketches. But they would orchestrate paintings like this typically in the studio.
8. How do these Southern Sung fan paintings differ from what came before them?
They are finely done, finely rendered, small, rather painstakingly created evocations of a kind of lyrical space or a lyrical view of nature.
And I think the word here, evocation, is an important one. We're moving away from the tight description, the more fully-detailed painting of Northern Sung in a work like this, towards the slightly loosened, more intimate, more poetic painting of a Southern landscape. Remember that the court had relocated farther south.
But also this is leading on to something that lends itself to that individualism of the Literati artists. Here we are moving from true descriptive detail into something that's a little more in the artist's mind and spirit.