Paintings explore power of mountains

"Mountains, forest, ravines and hillocks are the sources of cloud, wind and rain, and are places where one encounters spirits; therefore they are all divine."

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

lu Academy of Arts from the Shanghai Museum.

This, the third exhibit on loan from the museum, testifies to the strength of a unique relationship between the two institutions that began in 1983. This is the only place in the United States where "Fantastic Mountains" will be seen. The exhibit features rare hanging scrolls, handscrolls, album leaves and fans.

These divine landscapes, both real and imagined, give rise to a sense of otherworldliness and cast doubts on our accepted visual language. As Chinese landscape painting has no real depth perspective, we are taken on a personal perceptual pilgrimage. With very simple artistic materials, these paintings stretch the mind's eye by presenting the magnanimous energy of mountains together with the minor scale of humans and architecture.

The exhibit explores the roles that mountains play in Chinese culture. They are sacred places of meditation and purification, utopias, "cavern-heavens" or gateways to paradise, topographical landscapes, landscapes derived from famous Chinese tales, retreats and sources of political power.

"In the ancient Taoist concept, the mountain is viewed as a living, breathing thing that is sacred," says academy director Stephen Little. "Sacred not in the sense that it is inhabited by gods or spirits, although many are believed to be, but sacred in the sense that the energy the mountain is made of is primordial. Refined energy that existed at the beginning of time is consolidated in the mountain, preserved in momentarily fixed but actually dynamic form. The mountain is something that connects with a phase beyond time and space, a phase of the universe before yin and yang emerged. That's what enables a god to live there. It's sacred not because the god is there but because of the structure of the mountain."

"The Chinese see a mountain as having a life like a human being," says Little. "It's born, it will die and there will be another mountain. We (Westerners) look at mountains as static, solid things, mass. This contemporary cosmological view of the world — that matter and energy are interchangeable — was well established by the 4th century B.C. in China." It was quite a while before Albert Einstein would give this ancient concept a formula: E=mc2.

The "four treasures" of Chinese painting include brushes, ink sticks, paper or silk, and ink slabs or ink grinding stones. Different brushes made from a variety of hairs and feathers are used for different aspects of the painting — a stiff, thin brush for pine needles and a longer, softer brush for swirling water, for example. The brush is held upright in six different ways.

The surrealistic "Reading under pine trees 1709" hanging scroll painting by Gu Fuzhen illustrates these brush strokes in the contrasts of clouds and water against sheer rock cliffs and tall pines.

Lampblack ink, made from pine resin or tung-nut oil, was ground on a stone with water added to achieve five shades: burnt, thick, heavy, light and clear. The dryness or moistness of the ink adds to the character of the painting.

"Pine Valley of Mount Huang" by Mei Qing (1623-1697), a hanging scroll, is a superb example of the range of color and depth that can be achieved with black ink alone.

Water-based pigments were sometimes used as expressive elements. Transparent colors were made from plant pigments such as vermilion, gamboges, ochre, cyanine, rouge and carmine. Opaque colors came from mineral pigments such as rust-colored cinnabar, blue lapis lazuli and green malachite.

"Gazing at the waterfall in an autumnal grove 1820" by Zhang Yin, a large and exquisitely painted hanging scroll with a lush section of trees in their peak carnelian-colored best, also exemplifies the Confucian teaching of water as a metaphor for a higher state of mind. Water is an important aspect in many of the landscape paintings. It is endowed with Taoist philosophical and poetic meaning, as well.

Calligraphy, poetry and the use and placement of seals give these works a greater complexity. The placards, as well as the exhibit catalog, will help to unravel some of the mystery of this pilgrimage if one takes the time to read through the translations of the inscriptions along with the explanations of the paintings' original owners and subsequent collectors.

Chinese painters from this period included both professionals (who sometimes didn't have a classical education) and literati or scholar/poets. If you connect the work chronologically, you'll find painters here who were contemporaries of Leonardo da Vinci and other masters. Whatever their orientation, one thing is clear: They had an extraordinary amount of self-confidence. In these paintings, every brush stroke is visible. Unlike oil paints on canvas, mistakes can't be painted over. One must begin again.

The painter Shitao (1641-1718) wrote in an essay that genius was the most essential quality of a painter, knowledge was secondary and "the single brush stroke is the source of all things."

The paintings in this exhibit are surprisingly well preserved. The reason, according to Little, is that they were hung or displayed only briefly and then stored in camphor chests to protect them from insects and humidity. The oldest painting, "Scenes of Mount Hua 1383" by Wang Lu, is an album of eleven leaves. Its pristine condition and transparent tones of blue-gray, sepia and deep-green pigments give these works a dream-like, contemporary and lyrical quality. Mount Hua is one of the Five Sacred Mountains. You may have seen it before, in the last scene of the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

"This is the kind of show you would expect to see in New York, but New York isn't getting this one," says Little. "Every conceivable variety of professional artist, scholar, monk and emperor is represented here, covering more than 500 years. Some paintings are more gestural, some abstract, calligraphic and expressive, while some are meticulously built up in layers. The quality does not get better."

You can't get closer to heaven by sitting at home on your couch. However, you just might be inspired by this exhibit to take a Chinese brush-painting class or climb one of Hawai'i's breathtaking mountains and grasp the essence of the eternal through your sneakers.

To add to this already phenomenal opportunity to experience ancient Chinese culture, the academy has scheduled an art and cultural symposium Sept. 10 and 11 in its Doris Duke Theatre.

At 7 p.m. Sept. 10, master John Thompson will give a concert of music related to the sacred mountains in China on the gu qin, a type of zither.

From 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sept. 11, symposium speakers will include Wan-go H.C. Weng, renowned collector and scholar; Stephen Little, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts; Kathlyn Liscomb, from the University of Victoria; Shawn Eichman, from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Liu Yang, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; and Susan Nelson from Indiana University, who will cover various topics related to Chinese art and culture. This event is free and open to the public; registration is recommended. Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information or to register, contact Lori Admiral at 532-6091 or write to symposium@honoluluacademy.org.