Thinking About Muqi

Professor Richard BarnhartHistory of Art, Yale University

Preface

This conference and exhibition celebrate the art of Southern Song, an era of great culturaldistinction, and I hope it will inspire future research and writing about a period of art history thathas been too little studied. Southern Song saw the creation of a distinct artistic culture no lessadmirable or significant than that of the Northern Song that preceded it or the Yuan that followed.It is also half of the Song dynasty, an inseparable, unforgettable era of artistic achievement,comparable to the Renaissance in Italy and the golden age of Classicism, Romanticism, andImpressionism in France. The unique lyrical characteristics of Southern Song art have inspiredartists and poets all over the world.

I chose to speak about the Southern Song painter Muqi today for a number of reasons,including his very high stature among all Song painters; but I am also very fond of his art, whichformed an important part of my teaching of Chinese art history for many years. “Six Persimmons” may in fact have been the earliest historical Chinese painting I ever encountered; back in the 1950s it was a popular print on the walls of student dormitories, and was reproducedon the cover of Peter Swan’s Chinese Painting in 1958, as if to typify the essential nature ofChinese painting as a whole. We young students liked to think it represented an important Asianalternative to the loud, busy, self-promoting Abstract-Expressionist art that emanated from NewYork in those days, offering instead a quiet, reflective world that seemed to harbor many secrets.

The role that “Six Persimmons” and other similar “Zen paintings” played in Western culture during the first half of the twentieth century has been the subject of many essays in itself. Torecall the flavor of that earlier time, I note that in his 1923 Study of Chinese Painting, for example,Arthur Waley described “Six Persimmons” as “passion…congealed into a stupendous calm,” and in 1956 Laurence Sickman analyzed it as a masterpiece of Chan art and the essence of Zenphilosophy:

From the Ch’an point of view there is no difference in importance between the great [Guanyin] and this small study of fruit –both to be worthy must record a communionwith the Buddha-nature, and, as manifestations of the Great Unity, both are alike. Fewother Ch’an paintings are so convincingly the product of an instantaneous flash of inspiration or so perfectly illustrate the way the Ch’an painter can register his fleetingvisions in terms of ink splashes. There is a reality about Mu-ch’i’s persimmons that is final.

Soon after Sickman wrote the above, scholars began asking some very fundamental questionsabout the very existence of anything we might properly regard as Chan or Zen ink painting; thishorizon is well defined by the chapter of James Cahill’s influential Chinese Painting of 1960,“Literati and Ch’an painters of the Sung Dynasty,” in which wenren and Chan Buddhist painterswere shown to be much the same. And, ten years later, by the famous lecture delivered byProfessor Max Loehr on the occasion of the opening of the important exhibition, “Zen Painting and Calligraphy,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1970. Professor Loehr carefully demonstrated how there was in fact no Zen style of painting at all, only an eclectic mixture ofstyles and techniques drawn from the court and the scholars and professional painters and usedfor the representation of Chan subjects.

After I began teaching Chinese art history, Muqi’s “Six Persimmons” and other works of the artist became popular images among the students in my undergraduate classes. I usually endedmy surveys of the Song dynasty with Muqi, and enjoyed comparing his art with that of ZhaoMengfu to demonstrate how radically the great Yuan artist transformed Song “naturalism” into new artistic languages that aimed to bring classical ideals back into the art of painting. The termfugu replaced xiesheng.

All of that too is now of very little interest to me. Today, perhaps the most striking thingabout the overlapping lives and art of Muqi and Zhao Mengfu is precisely the fact of there beingtwo such brilliantly creative artists painting in such dramatically different ways living within fiftymiles of one another. And it has proven to be just as easy to speak of no change as of greatchange during the passage from Song to Yuan; in both cases the result is little more than areductionist simplification of the complex qualities of individual artists and their work. Myinterest now lies primarily in the ways artists actually functioned–not in the meaning of their art,historically or otherwise, but in the physical making of it. This, it seems to me, is an aspect of arthistory that is in danger of disappearing from the American academic world and the discipline ofart history.

In Japan, where nearly all important research on Muqi and his art has been done, many ofthe historical issues that once complicated any approach to Muqi were either clarified or forgottenwith further research and study. This state of knowledge was summarized by Professor TodaTeisuke in his volume of the series Suiboku Bijutsu Taikei devoted to Muqi and Yujian, which hepublished in 1978. We can look back to that book as a landmark in Muqi studies and ananticipation of much that would follow. In 1996 the Goto Museum exhibition and catalog had theeffect of establishing another horizon in Muqi studies.

The study of art history has changed dramatically since my retirement, and while many ofthe assumptions once held about the past have faded away with advances in research and thedevelopments of critical theory, we have also, I fear, forced ourselves into narrower and narrowercorners of theory and criticism; and, in the process of increasing critical refinement andtheoretical subtlety, we may have succeeded in losing sight of the larger reality of artists and art.

Things that might have been done long ago have still not been done. So it is also against thatbackground that I found myself wanting to look closely at Muqi on this occasion. I find thatnearly everything I thought about the artist fifty years ago has changed.

The Monk from Shu

Muqi’s signature and seal on the Daitokuji Guanyin deserves special attention: had there ever been so proud a proclamation from a Buddhist monk –or anyone else who was not theemperor of China? Certainly not among extant works or any reliable record known to me.Shuseng Fachang jin zhi, “Monk of Shu, Fachang, respectfully made [this]” and a large seal reading Muqi, is a maker’s mark unlike any before it. Only, I believe, the emperor of China –andI think especially of Huizong’s Tianxi yiren and the seal Yushu, “imperial writing”- had eversimilarly proclaimed both his status and his identity so proudly. This I find most interesting as aclue to the artist’s own concept of his position and identity, especially in contrast to typical signatures used earlier by painters, such as Liang Kai’s Yuqian tuhua, “Painted for the Emperor” and the more convention Chen, “Imperial servant” used by court painters. Muqi declares himself a servant of Buddha, not the emperor, and his respect is given to a foreign deity, not the Chinesesovereign. It seems to me that this clear self-identification as “Monk of Shu” also harbors another kind of unspoken pride, namely, that this painter is not one of the honored academicians servingat the imperial court such as Ma Lin, is not a celebrated professional painter of a Hangzhou orNingbo atelier such as Lu Xinzhong or Zhou Jichang, is not a scholar of noble birth with artisticambitions such as Zhao Mengjian (whose princely inscriptions on his elegant orchids might offerthe most appropriate contemporary parallel to Muqi), but is instead a simple Buddhist monk fromremote, provincial Shu who has earned the religious name of Fachang, and who paints as well asany of them. Perhaps strangest of all, for whatever reason, this signature is unique: nowhere elseis the identity of Shuseng, Fachang, seen again in any of the hundreds of paintings associatedwith the artist, only the name Muqi, “Oxherder Stream,” such as that seen here in the seal that accompanies the Daitokuji signature. This artist’s true identity is even more obscure than that of another great monk-painter, Bada Shanren.

This one-time-only signature nonetheless makes clear the extent to which Muqi identifiedhimself proudly with both Sichuan and the monastic community. Suzuki Kei’s exploration of literary material on the periphery of Muqi’s life suggests how the young monk received his primary training as an artist while still in Sichuan, a region with its own very distinctive artisticculture and history. This identification with Shu is indeed a matter of great interest; Muqi’s art is decidedly distinct from both the academic and professional traditions of Hangzhou, where helived in his maturity, and undoubtedly embodies traditions of artistic practice native to Sichuan –a subject to which I will return. Muqi’s signature and seal on the Daitokuji Guanyin is clearly intended also to be amaker’s mark, a form of brand-name, and a self-advertisement. It announcesa new artistic presence among the flourishing artistic communities of Hangzhou. Not only was it

never repeated again, however, the painter rarely if ever even wrote his name in any form on hispaintings.

Muqi–the Oeuvre

The Goto Museum’s Muqi exhibition of 1996 would have been the ideal opportunity to examine most of the important paintings attributed to Muqi. Unfortunately I did not see it. Overthe years I have only been able to examine some of the major works kept in private collectionsand public museums, as well as a few temple collections (though I have never seen “Six Persimmons”). And even these have most often been behind glass in display cases. This history disqualifies me from serious connoisseurship, and what I am doing instead might be thought of asgeneral observations about Muqi formed over the years.

Generations of Japanese scholars have offered their expert opinions over the years, and whatwe have learned from them constitutes the necessary base for further consideration. I haveespecially admired the judicious connoisseurship of Professor Toda Teisuke, and also the carefulstudies of Ebine Toshio and Ogawa Hiromitsu. Their scholarship builds on the tradition of theirown great predecessors, including professors Shimada Shujiro, Suzuki Kei, Tanaka Ichimatsu,and many others. Outside of Japan, Nancy Wey wrote a doctoral dissertation at the University ofChicago in 1974 that remains an admirable scholarly achievement. James Cahill has offeredinteresting observations on Muqi in his “Index of Early Chinese Painters and Painting” and elsewhere, while Yoshiaki Shimizu, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Muqi’s earliest known Japanese follower, Mokuan Rei’en, has written clear definitions of his own criteria ofconnoissership in reviewing a number of important attributions to the artist. I have studied themall and learned from them. But I am going to present a different perspective.

Let me apologize at the outset for saying very little about a group of the most beautiful andmemorable paintings associated with Muqi, the celebrated “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang.” While these glowing images of a world in flux are among the most vivid evocations of space,time, light, and atmospheric transformations in the entire history of art, and, in many ways,appear to be the most eloquent embodiment of the zeitgeist of their time, on the other hand, asJames Cahill has noted, “There is no basis, other than old attributions, for connecting [them] withMu-ch’i.” The entire set stands in my mind as one of the great artistic achievements of the Song dynasty–but I am still trying to understand how they may be related to Muqi. They might be theworks of Muqi, of course, and no other attribution has been found to be more compelling; but inthe meantime, I think of them as separate from better-documented works, and as somehowcomparable to that other great Song evocation of the Xiao-Xiang theme, “Dream Journey to the Xiao and Xiang,” in the Tokyo National Museum, which may or may not have been painted bysomeone named Li from Shucheng who was not Li Gonglin.

Consideration of the physical nature of Muqi’s painting generally begins with the famous set of three hanging scrolls in the Daitokuji, and moves from them to the Seikado Luohan, and thento other works which may become more problematic. Scholars have emphasized theconnections of Muqi’s Guanyin to the precedent and model of Li Gonglin, who may have been the first to paint a white-robedGuanyin seated in remote meditation by the sea. Muqi’s Guanyin might have resembled Li Gonglin’s – how closely we don’t know –but can be compared withmany later copies and imitations without ever finding anything really approaching it in qualityagain. Every other painting of the subject known to me appears trivial beside it.

How he achieved this is the question. I will speak below of the close connections betweenportraiture and Muqi’s art, and I believe that this is the central underlying reality of the Guanyin:Muqi’s bodhisattva appears to us as a human being, a rather beautiful one, caring, sympathetic, not godlike or distant at all. This effect begins with the physical plausibility of the representationin human terms; and, by subtly emphasizing the female characteristics of the bodhisattva anadditional element of sympathetic human identification is introduced. With this feminized andhumanized image of a god, we feel at once at ease, in the presence of an enlightened human being.As Osvald Siren wrote many years ago, “her face has the calmness of a mountain lake at dawn.” “Romantic” art historians like Siren –and me–used to write about art in that way.

The distinctive characteristics of Muqi’s techniques of drawing in ink and inkwash can be suggested through comparison with some of the well-known varieties of figure painting commonto the time. Compared to the polished virtuosity of court painters such as Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan,or Ma Lin, for example, Muqi’s brushwork is simple, slow and deliberate, and relativelyuninflected, with fewer sharp ends or hooks, and only slight modulation. Compared with LiangKai, a court painter with close affinities to the Buddhist community, the differences are equallystriking: Liang continues the dashing, active virtuosity of the old Wu Daozi tradition, besidewhich Muqi’s technique is plain, utterly lacking in anything we might think of as virtuosity. Nonetheless, it is worth noting, among the thousands of iconic Buddhist images produced overmany centuries in China, Liang Kai’s Shakyamuni and Muqi’s Guanyin –two masterpieces ofSouthern Song art –stand almost alone. Despite their great differences, what proves to be thecommon bond between them is the decision by these two very different artists to portray theotherworldly deity as a vulnerable human-being. There is nothing esoteric to be seen here.

Nearly every mark of Muqi’s brush appears to have been done unhurriedly, slowly and calmly. His outlines in pale wet strokes are slightly sharpened by the darker wash behind andbeside them; and lightly touched with a slightly darker wash in a few places such as the folds ofthe inner collar that fall below the neck. Muqi’s brushwork is like slowly flowing water, yet perfectly defines the subtle turns of falling drapery.

Seeming to represent a darker world is Muqi’s Luohan and Serpent in the Seikado Library. Ihave no difficulty in recognizing the same hand as that of the painter of the Daitokuji Guanyin, inthe plain contours, the slow, confident technique, and the general physical configuration of the

body, as well as the evocative landscape setting. Considering Muqi’s Luohan beside one example of precedent –by Zhou Jichang from the Daitokuji set of 500 Luohans –we see how he hastransformed popular entertainment into something both more human and darker. Thistransformation from magic to human life is so dramatic that it may cause us to wonder if we areeven looking at works of the same subject. I will not attempt to address the broad matter of thehistorical meanings of art here, but only observe that Muqi arouses speculation as to his motivesand intentions in painting such a disturbing, even haunting image of human life seemingly underthreat, seemingly withdrawing deeply into itself. Or is this what existence becomes whendivorced from desire? Forty years ago I would have loved making such arguments, but today Iwill only say that I don’t know: I have no idea what Muqi expected us to see in his art. And whatever I might have chosen to say about it, the image will always say far more, and say it farbetter. One thing is certain: Muqi may have painted all of the subjects expected of a monk-artistand needed by the monastic community, but he painted them differently from anyone else knownto us.

There is another painting from Japan that I would like to associate with Muqi in expectationof provoking a critical response. The “Red-robed Bodhidharma” in the Kogakuji is described as “One of the finest Buddhist paintings of the thirteenth century” by Jan Fontein and Money Hickman in their 1970 catalog Zen Painting and Calligraphy. As Fontein and Hickman go on tosay, “It occupies a position of isolated grandeur in the evolution of Zen painting; the artist is unknown, and there is no documentary or art-historical evidence to indicate its iconographical orcompositional sources. Yet it is clear that it represents the flowering of an accomplished artistictradition of a very high order, one which, in all likelihood, had its roots in China… While color is skillfully used in the painting, the overall indebtedness to ink-monochrome techniques is veryapparent.” Their analysis is a small masterpiece of art-historical detection, carefully puttingtogether all the pieces that lead directly back to China and, I propose, to Muqi. Even though wesee him here through the brush of a Japanese painter copying a Chinese model (presumably amodel brought to Japan in 1246 by the famed Chinese master, Lanqi Daolong, whose inscriptionis seen above, and copied by a Japanese artist later), set beside Muqi’s Guanyin or his Luohan Isee strong similarities in the patterns of orchid-leaf brushstrokes emanating out in slow wavesfrom structural junctures, the calmly settled weight of the body, and the pull of clothing overunderlying forms. The face, with its three-dimensional eyes and visible white teeth, is closelyrelated to portraiture, as Fontein and Hickman also observe. They also note that the sense ofvolume and three-dimensionality in the figure has suggested to some critics that a sculpturalprototype must lie behind the painting; my view, which I turn to below, is that sculpture andpainting were inseparable arts at this time, in both China and Japan, and the effects of thisinseparability are visible in all of the works of Muqi.

Moving on from more formal icons to Muqi’s unorthodox Laozi may seem to some a bridgetoo far, but if you follow the lines of analysis I’ve been sketching it should be easy to see Muqi in the solid structure of the head, the straggly teeth in an open mouth, and especially in the slow,

confident method of drawing, with lines emanating like flowing water from the closed hands ofthe aged sage. Only a supremely accomplished and confident painter could and would have madesuch strokes in so deliberate a manner. If we recall Zhuang Su’s scathing dismissal of Muqi’s art as “coarse and ugly, lacking ancient methods,” this Laozi might be the most effective supporting document for that view. What I see, however, beyond the artistic continuity with morepolished images, is evidence of the painter’s sympathetic familiarity with the appearances of the aging monks who lived all around him, with their gaping mouths and straggly teeth, their hairynoses and bald heads, old men suffering from dementia and palsy, the reality, in other words, ofaged monks approaching senility– I see in Muqi’s Laozi the truth of old age.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed over the years about the intersection between Muqi and Zhao Mengfu–and it would be interesting to explore this in itself - is the way Zhao appearsto have sometimes offered alternatives to Muqi’s work with paintings of his own. One instance of this is Zhao’s own painting of Laozi (in the Palace Museum, Beijing). This comparison too may illustrate by contrast some of the graphic realities behind the critical dismissal of Muqi by Zhao’s coterie: namely, a visceral disgust with such coarse ugliness. Zhao’s painting seems to function as a kind of lofty critique of Muqi, and a lesson for all. Which of the two most effectively conveysthe character of ‘the ancient one” may be a matter of opinion.

Muqi was especially skilled at using ink and inkwash alone to create spacious landscapesettings for his iconic figures. Earlier masters such as Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan, and Liang Kaiwere no less skilled at such compositions, but they typically used color; somehow, Muqi’s use of ink alone creates a different effect, a kind of mystery, and a sense of otherworldliness that colordid not allow. In any case, I find his large painting of Fenggan, Hanshan, and Shide to be anothercompelling example of his art, one quite different from the stillness of his Guanyin and Luohan:here his brushwork flutters and fluctuates actively, more like Liang Kai’s, echoing the sudden, jerky movements of Hanshan and his robe as he determinedly stretches out to inscribe his poemon a cliff. The shadowy cavern behind and the trees above function much as they do in the workswe have seen, and the curious, distinctive habits of the hand and brush are visible everywhere. Iregard this as one of Muqi’s great works, but if some prefer to see it as the work of a follower –or of his “school” –I can have no objection, since the existence of a monastic atelier is one of mysecondary interests in speaking of the artist here today, and it has proven very difficult tounderstand exactly when Muqi becomes Luochuang or another of his associates and followers.But I see him here clearly in the idiocyncratic patterns of his brush creating plausible forms, andin brush movements closely echoing configurations I’ve noted in his Guanyin and Luohan.

In addition to these formal icons, however informally they were sometimes painted, manypaintings were done within the monastic communities for a different purpose, that is, for use as awriting surface for other monks and abbots to inscribe with Chan poems and riddles. Most ofthese paintings have no seal or signature of any painter, and are of uncertain authorship. They areversions of what were sometimes called “apparition paintings” or wanglianghua, a genre that was

brought to our attention many years ago by Professor Shimada, and that became especiallypopular in the monastic communities of China and Japan. These paintings are valuable documentsin many ways, documents of Chan thought, teaching, and practice, and Yukio Lippit of Harvardwill soon publish a book on the subject; but they are artistically deliberately anonymous in waysthat other paintings associated with Muqi are not. I personally find it very difficult to know whatto think of them; some are clearly humorous, many have witty or provocative inscriptions, a feware virtuoso brush performances, but I follow Shimizu, who has been studying such paintings inboth China and Japan for many years, in thinking that most of them have little or nothing to dowith Muqi.

The general character of such paintings, and their overall anonymity, can be shown bystudying two versions of the popular theme, “Monk Mending Clothes in the Morning.” The version in Kyoto is attributed to Muqi, and has an inscription by Dongsou Yuankai (act.1314-1340). Shimizu comments, “The traditional association of the painting with the Muqi style requires revision. Muqi’s grasp of representational forms is missing in this work…” The Cleveland version has seals of the early Japanese imitator of Muqi, Kao (early 14th c.), who alsostudied in China, but could just as easily be attributed to Muqi otherwise.

Among the very few such paintings Shimizu finds plausible as the work of Muqi is the“Xianzi,” the shrimp eater, bearingan inscription and seals of Yanqi Guangwen (1189-1263),who loved to write on paintings of this kind, and a seal of Muqi similar to his seal on theDaitokuji Guanyin. James Cahill, however, thinks the seal of Muqi is a later interpolation and thepainting the work of someone else, a view that also has a long history in Japan; and Nancy Weyobserves that the seal is quite different from that on the Guanyin. I can sense the possibility ofMuqi in the sketchy candalabra-like pattern of brush strokes in the chest area, but whether this orother similar examples were actually painted by Muqi seems to me both difficult to determine andof relatively small importance, as this genre is self-effacingly anonymous and derives from atradition owing primarily to the “apparition” painter Zhirong and to some followers of Liang Kai; very few suggest the hand of any particular painter, and none possesses the striking originalityand freshness that I have come to expect in Muqi’s art. I would expect a painting of this kind byhim to be as striking among its peers as Liang Kai’s “Li Bo Chanting” is among all other Wanglianghua. Muqi may have painted hundreds of such things, but I have not yet seen one thatwas quite convincing.

Decorations for Monks’ Quarters

The largest group of paintings attributed to Muqi consists of birds and gibbons, beginningwith the Daitokuji pair of crane and gibbons. From cranes and geese to sparrows and mynahs, Icount approximately eighty extant paintings of birds and thirty-three of gibbons in the pages ofthe Goto catalog, and there are even more. As with the other groups of Muqi’s painting, it seems

relatively easy to separate the best from the others –whether the best means the authentic isanother question. Here I want to think only about Muqi’s practice of painting, and I turn again to the crane and bamboo grove.

Professor Ogawa has convincingly demonstrated how consistently Muqi drew his formsfrom existing forms, i.e., from the art of his predecessors such as Li Gonglin; his crane is takendirectly from one of the cranes originally painted by Xue Ji in the Tang period and later copied byHuizong. But this does not begin to account for the degree to which Muqi’s art is drawn from his own personal experiences of life and nature. It does not account for the mysterious, evocativequality that he attains by setting his borrowed crane in a dense, misty grove of bamboo andrepresenting both crane and grove with such perfect plausibility, so that we both see and imaginehearing the sound of the shrieking crane, and feel the heavy mist cloaking the bamboo. This cranebursts into our presence irresistibly; it is a dramatic force and a living presence.

Equally compelling in an entirely different way are the two gibbons flanking Guanyinopposite the crane. I don’t know whether Muqi ever sketched a gibbon from life, though he was born and raised in a part of China where they have always flourished, but it is clear that he hadlooked at them many times, knew exactly how they sat and moved, how soft their fur felt, andhow human - even disturbingly human they could seem. Part of what makes these gibbons socompelling is the way they both stare directly out at us. In his interesting notes on Chineseportraiture Waikam Ho noted that “[a] direct gaze often proves uncomfortable on the part of theaudience,” and there is no doubt about the effect this has on us. Their direct gaze brings them as forcibly into our presence as his galloping crane, and in an entirely different way. Comparing thisimage of gibbons with even the finest of earlier depictions known to us, such as the NorthernSong painting in this museum called “Monkeys in a Loquat Tree,” could suggest the difference between observing the natural world and understanding ourselves to be an inseparable part of thatworld. It might even suggest a fundamental difference between the Northern and Southern Songperiods. Muqi was not the only Southern Song artist who succeeded in seeing in monkeys andgibbons qualities that touch us emotionally: the rather sad, reflective “Monkey” in the anonymous painting in the Manjuin in Kyoto is as acute psychologically as any human portrait we have (asJames Cahill noted long ago).

There are many other interesting paintings of gibbons attributed to Muqi, but the only onethat seems to be an example of his art is the large silk composition of two gibbons on an old tree,in a private collection in Japan (included in the Goto exhibition as no. 37). Here, it is as if thepainter turned the Daitokuji animals around and shows them from the back; the baby still peersout at us from the shelter of its mothers body; the tree is no longer a pine, but is similar in itshoary branches. This, I believe, is another painting by Muqi, and its composition, so similar to theDaitokuji scroll, also helps me to draw connections with the artist’s paintings of birds, and to extend my personal understanding of Muqi’s unique manner of painting.

By way of example, if we put two of Muqi’s paintings of mynahs side-by-side, we can seetheir resemblance to the gibbons and can also compare their characteristics (Goto cat. no.24, andM-156, p. 120). First, let me note, neither of these paintings could easily be mistaken for anyother painter but Muqi. They relate closely to the Daitokuji gibbons in composition, the birdsplaced in the curving trunk of a pine tree like the gibbons and looking out at us; both have a sealof the artist, neither of which can be discounted; both are done in similar techniques. Are therefundamental differences that makes a single authorship unlikely? One may be more arresting,original, and confident in technique, but is this evidence of two hands? Not at all: a painter suchas Muqi–a painter so engaged in understanding exactly how mynahs looked and moved, and soconsistently engaged in creating striking compositions –would have depicted them in manydifferent ways. But if we continue to study his paintings of mynahs and similar birds we willprobably come to a point at which we begin to think, oh oh, is that a different painter, perhapseven a different century or a different country? In his most perfect paintings of small birds Muqicaptured so much life in so small a sphere that we can only believe that he scrutinized this levelof life habitually and systematically.

Monastic Portraiture

Over the years I have somehow gradually came to believe that Muqi was probably thepainter (or, more likely, one of the painters) of this well-known portrait of the Chan abbotWuzhun Shifan, whose Chan disciple at Jingshan he was. This is not the time to review thatpossibility in detail, but I would like to briefly reflect on the Wuzhun portrait in the context ofSong portraiture in general, and the importance of portraiture to the Chan monastic communitieswithin which Muqi lived. The conventions of all major venues of portraiture throughout theSong dynasty –that is, the imperial court, the professional ateliers, the secular scholarlycommunity, and the Buddhist and Daoist monasteries were clearly and firmly established at theimperial court in the early Song period. The cult of ancestral portraiture that evolved there in bothpainted and sculpted form has left ample textual evidence and sixteen painted portraits but,unfortunately, no sculpture. Emperor Taizu seated rigidly in a chair is not very different from aChan monk seated rigidly in a chair, or from the early Yuan scholar Li Qixian seated rigidly in achair, in his portrait by the celebrated portrait artist Chen Jianru. But while these basicconventions of Song portraiture were created at the early Song court, and practiced throughoutthe dynasty in its various forums, even a brief survey of Chinese (and Japanese) portraiture duringthe thirteenth century suggests that it was primarily the Buddhist monastic community –andparticularly the Chan community - that wanted and required from its image-makers what wewould think of as realistic portraits, realistic, at least, within the constraints of the tradition I’ve just briefly summarized.

The most important aspect of Southern Song portraiture to be aware of is that themanufacture of such portraits was one of the continuing necessities of monastic life in both Chinaand Japan, and constituted something akin to a manufacturing industry for two centuries. As T.Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf put it in their survey of textual references to Chan portraits,“For some abbots, and perhaps even the majority of them, dozens and even hundreds of portraits were produced by and for a variety of persons.” And again, “[T]he inscribed Chan abbotportraitseems to have been only a little more exclusive than the autographed photo of a movie star.” One typical Song abbot they discuss recorded 400 different self-inscriptions for his own portraits in asingle category of use among many (“requested by men of Chan and traveling evangelists” –thelatter referring to fund-raisers), meaning that many more than 400 portraits of him bearing hisown inscription existed during his lifetime. And he was just one abbot among the hundreds whoneeded portraits at the time.

Who do we imagine painted all of those portraits? The Tofukuji portrait of Wuzhun is notsigned, of course, and there are no documents associated with it that identify the painter, butneither is there anything either in the painting or outside it to indicate that Muqi did not paint it.But there are a number of peculiarities about this portrait that deserve attention, beginning withWuzhun’s own inscription. He dates the inscription 1238, Jiaxi wuxu, but Wuzhun’s reference to the making of the portrait indicates how little we actually known about the production of suchimages: toward the end of his inscription he notes that Ben’en “painted my illusory image,” xie yuhuan zhi. Since it is not believed that Enni Ben’en was a highly trained painter,this passage isusually read to mean Ben’en ‘had this image painted,’ or perhaps something as uncertain as ‘brought this portrait to me.’ But the Chinese text is unambiguous, in and of itself, so its implications are not self-evident. At the very least, this verbal ambiguity, if it was a commonconvention, seems to harbor some further implication, perhaps having to do with how suchportraits were actually made in monasteries, though it is impossible to know. How such portraitswere in fact painted, and by whom, are questions that remain largely unanswered. Through mostof the Southern Song period we rarely know the names of the painters of monastic portraits, andtheir actual physical making is hardly mentioned in the inscriptions on them. There is no doubtthat some that survive were done by professional painters such as those in the Ningbo ateliers, butin both China and Japan portraits of this kind were also sometimes painted by highly trainedmonk-painters, and even before the end of the 13th century they were occasionally being signedby such men.

I reached my understanding of the Wuzhun portrait mainly by thinking about it in thecontext of other, better documented attributions to Muqi, such as the Guanyin in the Daitokuji,and by learning what can be learned of the nature and extent of monastic portraiture during theSouthern Song period, but there are important historical elements bearing on the portrait and itsauthorship as well. One of the central facts of Muqi’s life, that his Chan master was thefamedand distinguished Wuzhun Shifan (1178-1249), is recorded only in Japanese monastic documents.Wuzhun, like Muqi, was a native of Shu who ended his life in the region of Hangzhou and West

Lake, and he was an amateur “Chan painter” as well. As a disciple of Wuzhun, Muqi was aclassmate of a very distinguished coterie of Chan Buddhist teachers and monks from both Chinaand Japan, and it is assumed (if not known with certainty) that Muqi and Enni Ben’en were together at the Wanshousi on Jingshan as students of Wuzhun during the period, 1235-1241, inwhich Enni Ben’en went from Japan to Hangzhou to study with Wuzhun and received the Tofukuji portrait from him before his return to Japan. The comet-like fame of Muqi in Japansuggests to me that this meeting of Ben’en and Muqi at the time of the painting of Wuzhun’s portrait was the inception point of the painter’s subsequent celebration in Japan. There does seem to have been an invisible bond connecting Wuzhun Shifan, Muqi, Ben’en, and the Tofukuji temple inKyoto, and it seems to have originated as early as the time of the painting of Wuzhun’s portrait. If, as was once thought, Enni Ben’en also carried back to Japan with him the Guanyin triptych in the Daitokuji when he returned to Japan in 1241, it would be even easier to believethat this was the case.

While the Wuzhun portrait is often said to be typical of dingxiang in the Southern Songperiod, and to take a leading place in a sequence of such portraits, it is in some ways quitedifferent from other monastic portraits done before this date. It is worth noting that the earliestknown dingxiang with an inscription by its subject and thus likely to have been painted from life,is a portrait of the Chan master Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163), recently on view in the ShanghaiMuseum’s Song-Yuan exhibition, and long attributed to Muqi. Dahui Zonggao was muchadmired by Muqi’s master, Wuzhun Shifan, who inscribed another portrait of the monk that was also taken to Japan. Whether this portrait is in any way actually connected to Muqi I cannot say(it could at best only be his copy of the original, given the discrepancy of dates), but it does allowme to note that at least in Japan, where almost all the documents of his art remain, Muqi has infact been associated with the making of formal monastic portraits.

Wuzhun’s portrait appears to me quite different from all of the Ningbo-style professionalpaintings, a typical example of which is the portrait of Yuanzhao with an inscription dated 1210,(a posthumous portrait based on earlier portraits). We note in Wuzhun’s image the distinctive brushwork, for example, in the drawing of the clothing, the sculpture-like monumentality of thefigure itself, and the curious, signature-like movements of the brush that are so different from thepolished and refined nuances of Ningbo. The proportions of the body are oddly unrealistic: armslong like the trunk of an elephant, upper body extended and lower body reduced; features thatseem to reflect old pre-realistic forms of Buddhist imagery, as if to connect Wuzhun to suchorigins. Compared with the Ningbo professional masters, the Wuzhun portrait appears slightlyrough or even sketchy, but energetic and vigorous; and, of course, the face, in its delicatelynuanced realism, painted from life, is the very definition of Song realistic portraiture. If weimagine the physical process required for the manufacture of such large, formal portraits (thepainting measures 125 by 55 centimeters), there is plenty of room to imagine a number of peopletaking part in the process, painting the decorative details of costume and accoutrements, forexample, or the slippers and stool. The head is also not attached quite plausibly to the body, as is

so often the case with formal portraiture done in workshops. The extraordinary demand for suchportraits, in fact, must have required communal participation, and there must have beensystematic procedures and physical arrangements always in place for their manufacture. LotharLedderose’s description of the operations of a typical Ningbo atelier is probably not far from thereality lying behind the making of such portraits.

Comparing the Wuzhun portrait to the documented works of Muqi proves to be moresuggestive of common authorship than you might expect. That Muqi was trained in portraitureand physiognomy is in any case perfectly evident to me from close examination of his iconicBuddhist subjects, such as his Guanyin and Luohan. Looking at details of these works besideWuzhun’s face reveals the similarities of structure and drawing that suggest continuities betweenone mode and the other, between one subject and another, in the contour of the nose, the drawingof the eyes and eye sockets, the curve of the lips and mouth. Similarities extend even to thepostures of these figures, the three-quarter view of arhat and bodhisattva growing directly fromthe common practice of formal portraiture. We see also the taut precision of the drawing ofdrapery and underlying bodies, the confident mastery of the complexities of clothing over humanform.

There are features of technique and practice in all three works that also seem to mesignificant, and suggestive of a common authorship. Muqi had interesting habits of drawing thatare seen in all of his work: he liked to avoid connecting his lines, for example, letting themfunction differently from tightly connected, polished contours. We notice, also, the interestingtechnique used at several places in the portrait –inside the dangling right sleeve of Wuzhun, forexample, and again across his lap, where rhythmic lines beginning with a slightly heavier impressradiate out like a living plant or flowing water. We can find the same technique in the drapery ofboth the Guanyin and the Luohan. And the odd, striking little calligraphic flourish at the bottomof the sleeve, like a personal identification, almost a signature, is closely echoed in the arhat, andless assertively but nonetheless visibly in the Guanyin. I find much to suggest a common sourcein these three works, and many echoes of them in other works that I also believe Muqi painted.When thinking of Muqi’s practice of painting from this perspective it encourages me to locate the beginning or basis of his art at precisely this point of contact between the artist and his model,between the painter and the living subject of his art, and quite possibly, as I intend now to suggest,even in the manufacture of realistic three-dimensional sculptured portraits. This form of Songreality is curiously equivalent to the practice of drawing from life in the European tradition ofimage-making. And, I believe, it underlies Muqi’s entire practice of painting.

Monastic Sculpture

Let me now briefly go a step further into what may seem to be the realm of fiction and add anote on monastic sculpture in these reflections on Muqi, since I am convinced that he routinelyengaged in the design and preparation of sculpture as well as formal iconic paintings and portraitsin his role as monastic image-maker. Song realism is perhaps nowhere better realized than inBuddhist sculpture of the kind once ubiquitous in Chan temples and monasteries; and when welook at such brilliantly conceived examples as survive I wonder, who do we imagine designedthese amazingly lifelike three-dimensional masterpieces, and how were they made?

That not a single Song imperial portrait statue of the countless examples that were certainlymade in the Song period has survived has an exact parallel in the monastic communities ofSouthern Song China, namely, the absence today of monastic portrait statues of the kind familiarto us from the many superb examples preserved in Japan. Portrait sculpture of this kind does notappear to have been semantically different from portrait painting in monastic communities: theterms used for formal monastic portraiture, such as dingxiang or chinso, and shouxiang or juzoappear to have applied equally to sculpture and painting, and both forms were producedextensively in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Japan. Despite the unexpected absence ofsurviving portrait sculpture from Southern Song China it is highly likely that the Japanesepractices in Kamakura Zen temples and monasteries were direct continuations of Southern Songprecedent in sculpture, just as they were in formal painted portraiture. The famous portrait of theblind Jianzhen, or Ganjin in Japan, dating to the eighth century, and that of the monk Hongbianfrom Cave 17 at Dunhuang, datable to the ninth century, establish the visible roots of a commontradition that probably ran parallel in China and Japan through the fourteenth century. Thefamous death-mask bronze sculpted portrait of the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, still preserved in theLiurong temple, Guangzhou, cast in bronze in the year 989 of the early Northern Song period,speaks for the tradition at the beginning of the Song, after which it disappears from present vieweven though we know with certainty that it continued throughout the three hundred years of thedynasty. We also know with certainty that the level of realism in Chinese monastic portraiturethroughout the Song period was directly comparable to that in Japan in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries, as exemplified not only by the bronze statue of Huineng, but by the glazedceramic statues of Luohans associated with Yizhou in the twelfth century, by the severalfragmentary dry lacquer heads of monks or luohans now existing in museum collections aroundthe world, and most dramatically by in situ Southern Song Buddhist statuary in Muqi’s homeland of Sichuan - and elsewhere. Especially impressive in terms of their realism –and the verymeasure of Song realism in sculpture - is the set of forty arhats in the Lingyansi, near Jinan,Shandong. This impressive corpus of Song realistic sculpture is directly comparable to theimpressive body of sculpted chinso in Japanese temples dating to the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies, and may still serve to represent the nature of monastic portrait sculpture in Chinadespite its disappearance otherwise.

While records of the making of sculpture of any kind are nearly nonexistent throughout theSong period, one exception that I believe speaks for the regular engagement of artists such asMuqi in the making of sculpture concerns the distinguished wenren and lay-Buddhist painter LiGonglin, who seems to have been a continuing inspiration to Muqi. According to the account leftby Huang Tingjian, Li designed the central image for the Great Hall of Fayun Chansi, amonastery presumably in Kaifeng, whose new abbot was an intimate of Li, Huang, and Su Shi,among others. According to Huang Tingjian, Li sculpted a central icon in clay in honor of theinauguration of the new abbot, and his clay model was subsequently cast in bronze. The subjectof Li’s sculpture was evidently Shancai or Sudhana visiting Guanyin at Mt. Potolaka. Li’s images of the white-robed Guanyin were celebrated during his lifetime and may have influenced Muqiand Yan Hui, but I would like to think that his sculpted image at Fayun Chansi, including Shancaiand his dragon, would have been a quite different composition.

Described by Huang Tingjian as “grave and stern,” zhuangyan, or “imposing,” I wonder whether Li Gonglin’s sculptural composition could be related to a striking image of Shancai and the dragon visiting Guanyin at Mt. Potolaka that is preserved in several full-scale copies, the mostimpressive of which is in the Boston Museum and seems to have been based on an earlierpainting going back to the time of Li Tang and Li Gonglin. Originally this figure of Guanyin wasrichly colored, painted front and back, and made still more brilliant with gold paint, now almostthe only original color still visible aside from some of the vegetable green color in the bamboobehind the main figure. The composition illustrates the encounter of Shancai withAvalokiteshvara as described in the Huayanjing. A second version of the composition, painted inink with light colors, is in the Nezu Institute, and is regarded as a fourteenth-century Japanesecopy. Whatever the uncertainties of authorship and date behind these paintings and the distinctivecomposition they preserve, what is of primary interest to me is that the great secular painter andlay Buddhist Li Gonglin sometimes shaped clay images of Buddhist icons for installation in Chantemples. How often he may have worked with sculpture is unknown, but it is my contention thatthe design of sculpture was a commonplace activity of many Song artists.

Three-dimensional versions of this composition, which may reflect the endurance andcontinuing popularity of Li Gonglin’s sculptural design, must have been quite common throughout China in the Southern Song period and their appearance can still be glimpsed, forexample, in sculptural compositions at the Anyue Grotto of Muqi’s birthplace, and at the Longxing Temple in Hebei province, among others. Many of the now free-standing Guanyinstatues housed in museums around the world were probably originally set againstthree-dimensional painted walls, bringing to physical reality the painted compositions that liebehind them. Such installations were basically three-dimensional paintings, and clearly dependedupon the efforts of both painters and sculptors. According to Deng Chun around 1167, “the central plains are full of Yang Hui’s sculpted landscape walls”; and during the Northern Song

period, as is well-known, the great landscape painter Guo Xi was associated with the making ofsculpted landscape “shadow walls” (yingbi). Throughout the Song monastic image-makers suchas Muqi were probably involved in all such projects, including the famous rocky setting forLuohans at the Baosheng Temple near Suzhou. We are reminded by such examples that from DaiKui and Dai Yong in the Six Dynasties period to Yan Liben, Wu Daozi, and Yang Huizhi in theTang, and on to Guo Xi and Li Gonglin in the Song, painting and sculpture were inseparable arts.Sculpture cannot be made without painting; as Li Song notes in his essay on sculpture, “In sculpture, it is said, 30 percent of the effort was devoted to carving [or molding or casting] and 70percent to painting.” All sculpture furthermore begins with two-dimensional designs.

To demonstrate the seemless connections between painting and sculpture, I would like torecall the general process of portrait making - whether painted or sculpted makes no difference.How effectively portrait sculptors work from existing paintings is illustrated by the sculptedportrait of Zhongfeng Mingben (1263-1323) in the Seiunji, made thirty years after the subject’s death from painted portraits of him. Portrait sketches were the first step of both painted andsculpted portraits, and the anonymous sketch portrait of Haku’un Egyo (1228-1298) in theTofukuji takes us very close to the first stage of portraiture of any kind. Another rare glimpse ofthis process is preserved in the beautiful line drawing portrait of Emperor Goshirakawa foundinside the wooden portrait statue of him, preserved in the Japanese Imperial Household collection.The most penetrating surviving portrait sketch is Bokusai’s sketch portraitof his Zen masterIkkyu. We note that Bokusai was not only a monk and accomplished painter but the appointedsuccessor to Ikkyu as abbot of their temple. Such sketches were no doubt highly valued by theartist or atelier that owned them, and making this kind of portrait sketch was probably an essentialand continuing practice of such skilled monastic image makers as Muqi. Polished formal chinzocould be made directly from them. Anning Jing’s research on the Nepalese image-maker Anige(1245-1306), who arrived in China in 1270, allows us to understand his portraits of Khubilai andChabi, painted in 1294, not as finished formal portraits but as carefully prepared portrait modelsto be used in transferring the portraits into other materials, such as embroidery–or into sculpturein any of various mediums. We may recall that the making of such portrait models, whether intwo dimensions or three, has been a common practice around the world since at least the time ofQueen Nefertiti, whose amazingly realistic portrait bust was found in the studio of a royal portraitartist, where it could serve continuously for the making of royal portraits again and again, in twodimensions or three. Similar models were probably kept routinely in monasteries such asWuzhun’s Wanshousi, where portraits were constantly in demand.

I cannot prove that Muqi ever painted a portrait or had any experience with sculpture, but Iam suggesting that my old assumption that he painted primarily as a graphic expression ofmystical and philosophical ideas such as those made famous by D.T. Suzuki and others iscertainly a less than complete or even adequate understanding of the artist. We should insteadlocate our considerations in the diverse artistic needs of the flourishing monastic communities ofSouthern Song and Yuan China and the uses for which art was actually made there. In that

context, Muqi appears to be the earliest example we can identify today in a sequence ofsemi-professional monastic image-makers extending from China to Japan. The best-understood ofsuch artists today is Kichizan Mincho (1352-1431), who made every kind of image required byhis community, the Tofukuji, from official portraits to patriarch images, and everything else,apparently, including landscapes. That Mincho was himself at the center of a flourishing atelier atTofukuji, established by Enni Ben’en and to which Ben’en took the portrait of Wuzhun in 1241, highlights the continuity that I find so intriguing. Making this adjustment from mystical master of“Chan painting” to monastic image-maker requires us to abandon the kinds of artificial separationwe have erected between painting and sculpture on the one hand and between the different groupsof painters and different genres on the other, and to think instead of the continuities that extendfrom Liang Kai and Liu Songnian at court to Muqi in a monastery, or from Ryozen’s “Heron” to his “Shakyamuni,” or, from Mincho’s formal portrait of Enni Ben’en to his “Red-robedBodhidharma.” For a long time we have endeavored withconsiderable success to distinguish onetype of artist, patron, and audience from another, with the result that we now must first think ofBuddhist art or Daoist art, or of Chan Buddhism or Tiantai Buddhism, or Lü sect or Linji sect, ofcourt painter or scholar-painter, of Suzhou or Hangzhou, of landscape master or bird-and-flowerpainter, or male or female –and rarely do we think of the artist as artist. Going back to LiGonglin and Liang Kai, both of whom were versatile masters of wide range with closeconnections to the monastic community, and to Wu Daozi and Yang Huizhi, the Tangpainter-sculptors who inspired a vigorous monastic tradition, and even to Dai Yong and Dai Kui,near the beginning of the history of Buddhist art in China, Muqi was in a lineage of master imagemakers whose example and influence within the Buddhist monastic communities of East Asiaextends continuously from the Six Dynasties to the Yuan period in China, and on to Ryozen,Mincho, and Sesshu in Japan.

“The Academy of Buddhist Images”

After we have done all we can to separate Muqi from all of the purported Muqis andimitation Muqis we are left with an interesting art-historical puzzle, and an interesting implication.Ninety years ago, in 1920, the Japanese scholar Saga Toshu, on the basis of documentsconcerning Mokuan, wrote an article about what he termed the “Liutongsi School of Painting” in which he described the early followers of Muqi as a school of painting. Arthur Waley followedthis lead in his Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting of 1923 with an essay on the“Liu-t’ung-ssu School,” founded by Muqi, and attracting as students such men, he thought, as Liang Kai, Li Que, Luo Chuang, Mokuan, and others. Waley was wrong about Liang Kai and LiQue on chronological grounds perhaps, but there is no reason to think these early scholars werewrong about the existence of an art school or atelier or monastic training program functioningunder Muqi’s direction.

Consider a typical Muqi painting, such as a paired dragon and tiger. This pair exists in manyexamples claiming to be from the hand of the master, including one pair with a signature, date,and seal, as well as numerous close copies, replicas, or imitations. Some of these duplicates bearthe seal of the artist, some do not. Several of the extant versions offer indications of dating fromthe late 13th to 14th century as an inseparable group. We cannot determine that some seals of theartist are forgeries. Rather, these paintings look as if they could have been produced at one source,over perhaps a century, and documented to represent that place, namely, the studio, atelier, orworkshop of Muqi. They appear to be products mass-produced for a flourishing internationalmarket –and one not limited to Buddhist affiliation, since tigers and dragons had becomeuniversal cosmological symbols.

While the few early biographies of Muqi emphasize his production of dragon and tigerpaintings, neither his tigers nor his dragons represent his art very well, and doubts about theirauthenticity certainly do not begin with me, having a long history in Japan and the west. Withperhaps an exception or two I would describe them all as perfunctory, and would like to attributemost of them to a workshop, i.e., to the members of an atelier or school. Possibly, Muqi paintedan original set which was then copied repeatedly by his students. We should note, though, thatnearly alone among Muqi’s subjects, the dragons and tigers could only have been derived from painted sources, since whoever painted these had never observed a dragon and knew nothingabout tigers.

It may have been in the context of Muqi’s teaching within an atelier such as that I am thinking about that we can locate the two well-known handscrolls of diverse subjects in Taipeiand Beijing attributed to Muqi. The general view is that both the Taipei and Beijing handscrollsare copies made in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century of many of Muqi’s favorite subjects from the natural world, flowers, vegetables, birds, fish, and fruits, perhaps as models to be copiedby other monk painters and used as visual enhancements of the monastic community.

Many scholars have described the differences between the Taipei and Beijing handscrollsand the several works – such as “Six Persimmons” –that some believe survive from the originalmodels painted by Muqi. I quote from James Cahill’s description of the differences between the “Rose Mallow” in the Daitokuji and the rose mallow that opens the National Palace Museum handscroll:

The Daitokuji painting exhibits varieties of brushwork that can be called scratchy, puddly,and so forth– undisciplined, “bad” brushwork in literati terms. In the copy every stroke is neat and distinct– and dead.”

Maggie Bickford’s analysis of the differences between the “Rose Mallow” and a similar flower from the anonymous late Song painting, “The Hundred Flowers,” takes us close to the moving hand of the artist:

The difference between these two Song monochromes is not simply that between neatand messy. In Muqi’s painting, the emphasis has shifted away from the objectivedepiction of subject matter through inkwash toward the investigation of the medium itself;the qualities and interactions of wet ink on soft paper. The absorption of the wash by thepaper, the bleeding of one wash into another, the blurring caused by wet brushwork onmoist ground are evident in and central to the completed work of art…

Apparently we see here some of the elements of artistry that might distinguish a master andhis pupils, or distinguish an original from a copy. Copying was of course the basic technique oflearning in every process of image-making, as it has always been in the history of art throughoutthe world. In this, China is exactly like Europe. When I went to art school we first copied casts ofGreek and Roman sculpture and only when we could do that competently were we allowed todraw from life; in Muqi’s time his students may have first copied his models, then perhaps sketched from life as well, I don’t know. And of course they always had before them the exampleof their master, whose paintings of birds, plants, animals, men, and even gods seem consistentlyto exemplify the term xiesheng, “sketching life.”

We must note, however, that none of the three paintings thought to be models for the twohandscrolls in Beijing and Taipei has even a seal of Muqi, and their historical character is unclear.The bluish ink used in the rose mallow, for example, is different from the sooty black ink used in“Six Persimmons,”making it unlikely that they could ever have formed parts of a single work, ashas been proposed; and the style of the rose mallow resembles Wu School painting more than anySong work known to me. The techniques differ so widely among the three that they appear tohave been painted by three different hands, though perhaps the “Chestnuts” comes closest to documented works associated with Muqi. All of which leaves ample room to wonder exactlywhat relationship they had to Muqi and which, if any, of them might have been painted by him.

We also take note of how easily two or three of the characteristic Muqi motifs from theBeijing and Taipei scrolls can be put together to create a typical Muqi composition –which mayhave been another of their original purposes. A lovely painting in Cleveland, “Swallow and Lotus,” formed from details of the two handscrolls, has perhaps the most unusual and most implausible seal of Muqi I have seen, but also demonstrates the adaptability and utility of theoriginal scrolls as they were used by his followers long after the master’s death.

In sum, despite the general affection felt toward them around the world, “Six Persimmons” and the other “copies” of Muqi’s sketches from life raise many more questions than they answer, and it is not at all clear which if any of them were painted by Muqi. The two handscrolls in Taipeiand Beijing are still our most important visual catalog of Muqi’s favorite subjects from the natural world. They are best compared with other documented works by the master, and comeclose to the latter in suggesting the naturalism and easy spontaneity I associate with Muqithroughout the range of his art. They also preserve many of the subjects he favored, such as fishand pheasants among many others, that we can no longer see elsewhere. Above all, these two

handscrolls take us very close to the painter who loved to observe and sketch the small andmundane living things of our common lives.

Muqi’s own teacher –or at least one of his teachers –was a man named Yin Jichuan,believed to have been a monk-painter and native of Shu, like Muqi. His works do not survive,apparently, but we know that he painted a set of twenty-eight “portraits” of the patriarchs of Chan Buddhism, beginning with Bodhidharma. This is where I would like to return to one of my earlierimages, the untrammeled portrait of the planet Mercury reproduced on the cover of Hui-shu Lee’s new book about Southern Song court art. Here is everything I admire in the art of Muqi, from thestriking originality of the image to the slow, deliberate manner of its execution, and the wonderfulsense of flowing movement created by the gesture of Mercury sweeping up her brush to beginwriting. But of course this is not Muqi.

What the painting suggests to me is the art of one of the greatest painters of Buddhist andDaoist icons native to and celebrated in Muqi’s birthplace, the old state of Shu, and that is Sun Zhiwei, or Sun Taigu, whose fame as a figure painter rivaled Li Gonglin, and whose famouspaintings of the stars, constellations, sun, and moon were the most popular and admired of thedynasty. As an indication of Sun’s continuing popularity through the Southern Song period we may note that Deng Chun, in juan 8 of his Huaji (ca. 1167), included a section he called“Unsurpassed works engraved in my heart,” Mingxin juepin, in which he listed the mostunforgettable paintings he had ever seen. Among the 136 titles he lists are six by Sun Zhiwei,including several large sets of multiple wall scrolls depicting the planets, the constellations, andthe “Eleven brilliant ones” (sun, moon, stars, etc.). Deng, a native of Shu himself, may have been biased, but the Xuanhe huapu of 1120 lists thirty-seven items by Sun of similar subjects,including multiple sets, and they are celebrated in poems written by scholars through the Songand into the Yuan era. Presumably the Boston painting is from just such a set, and in my mind ithas already come to represent the iconic imagery of Sun Zhiwei as it had evolved into theSouthern Song period and possibly the generation of Sichuan painters that included Muqi’s teacher, Yin Jichuan, or his teacher. Even in the absence of any documentation at all concerningthis reading of the Boston painting, it is still possible to reconstruct the distinctive manner of SunZhiwei, which flourished in the region of Shu well into the Southern Song period, and tounderstand why Sun Zhiwei’s art may well have been one of the reasons Muqi so proudly proclaimed himself “Monk of Shu.” Set beside Muqi’s Guanyin a harmonious relationship seems to evolve that we might associate with the distinctive artistic traditions of Shu.

Exactly which monastery or temple Muqi served in has been a much-discussed question, andI have used the name Liutongsi merely as a convenience. It is now generally agreed, in fact, thatthe monastery in which he lived and probably ended his life was a sub-temple of the Liutongsioriginally called the Changxiangsi but later renamed Faxiangyuan, an interesting name which canbe read to mean “The Academy of Buddhist Images.” It was here that Muqi’s formal portrait was still displayed in 1350, as recorded by Wu Taisu, and here, I believe, that the physical structure of

his working studio or atelier was located at least up until the time when it was visited by Mokuanaround 1325.

We know the names of one or two of Muqi’s immediate followers, but most are still known only as “Muqi.” There is Luochuang, of course, a monk at the Liutongsi whose work “shared Muqi’s ideas on painting,” according to Xia Wenyan’s Tuhuibaojian of 1365 (juan 4). His“Rooster” could easily be mistaken for the work of Muqi, if it were not otherwise so fully documented. Zhang Fangru, a late thirteenth-century painter recorded only in Japan is anotherChinese follower of Muqi whose extant works closely echo his teacher. It is possible that Zhangpainted two or more versions of a mysterious composition bearing the signature and seal of Muqi,and dated 1269. Another follower recorded only in Japan was Zhang Yuehu, whose white-robedGuanyin appears to be intermediate between Muqi and Yan Hui.

That the Faxiangyuan continued to produce students of Muqi well into the Yuan periodseems in any case to have been proven by Saga Toshu’s examination of documents concerning Mokuan Rei’en, the Japanese imitator of Muqi who was thought for many years to have been aChinese painter. He was given two seals of Muqi ca. 1325 by the then-abbot of Liutongsi whenhe visited there during his travels in China. We also learn from these accounts that when Mokuanvisited the monastery it was still training followers of Muqi. The Faxiangyuan had not onlycontinued to serve as a Muqi atelier continuously from the end of the Song well into the Yuandynasty, it had been bestowing Muqi’s seals upon successful imitators of the master such asMokuan for fifty years or so.

Conclusion

Having reached this point, I find myself reluctant to draw any conclusions at all, sinceeverything I have spoken of is still open-ended and unresolved in my own mind, still leading onto other things, and is based almost only on looking at works of art and thinking about how artistspractice their craft. You may say that I have thrown in a little of everything, including the kitchensink; and it is true. I apologize for the messiness, but my view is, when it comes to art history toomuch is better than too little, and perhaps especially in the case of the Southern Song period.There is so much beautiful art and so few textual documents that we need to think creativelyabout the continuities and interconnections among all elements of the visual culture of the periodand its various physical venues, from the glittering imperial court and officials’ mansions to the secluded monasteries. And we need to put back together the fragmented, splintered Song artist wehave created with our ever-more-limiting disections into something more complete, and moretruly reflective of the historical reality of the Song artist and image-maker, who was as often asnot a painter of everything from portraits and formal icons to birds-and-flowers, landscapes,figures, and miscellaneous ink-plays, as well as being a sculptor, designer, and even architect,when circumstances required it.

When the Nepalese artist Anige first spoke to Khubilai Khan around 1265 he said of himselfthat “I know roughly painting, casting, and carving.” He was also an architect, of course, without any need to mention it, and in 1279 designed the “White Stupa” in Beijing. Anige quickly recruited a team of painter-sculptor-architects to build a new capital and rebuild a countrydamaged by long warfare, and he found his his assistants among Southern Song and northernChinese artists already working in these arts by long tradition. Because this is the range ofactivity that defines the Song artist whether at the imperial academy, in a professional atelier,among retired scholar-officials, or in the Daoist and Buddhist monasteries, I believe. Who do weimagine designed the many structures and gardens in Li Gonglin’s famous Longmian Mountain retreat? Who directed the rebuilding and refurbishing of Muqi’s dilapidated Faxiangyuan when he took it over as abbot in the mid-thirteenth century?

When Wuzhun Shifan was elected abbot of the Wanshousi at Jingshan in 1232 he set aboutrebuilding the “sprawling temple compound,” which had fallen into disrepair, not finishing theproject until seven years later. But a few years later a fire ruined the compound again and afurther seven years were required to rebuild it all. These years of building and refurbishing werethe years during which Muqi would have been “studying” with Wuzhun; we can only try to imagine the extent to which the young monk’s study took the form of creating the structures and images that identified the greatest monastic complex of the time.

But without venturing further into that world, let me conclude this lecture simply with theobservation that much of what Muqi did as an artist seems to have become invisible to us, whilemany of the things most closely associated with him may not reflect him very directly. Thissounds like a Zen riddle, but it may also be a more general truth about the artists of the SouthernSong period as a whole.

Notes

Special thanks to Qianshen Bai, John Finlay, Shi-yee Liu, Kazuko Nakane, and Minoru Nishigami fortimely assistance.