Muqi was a Chinese monk who lived from roughly 1210 to 1269 AD, during the southern Song dynasty. So far as we can tell he spent most of his life in a monastery in Sichuan, where he practiced the stripped-down form of Buddhism the Chinese call Chan, known in Japan and the US as Zen. Now he is known for his paintings, but he did not leave very many works and we don't know that he would have described himself that way.
He is in the news (
Artnet, NY Times) because his most famous work,
Six Persimmons, has traveled from its home in a Japanese temple to San Francisco for a brief show. This was originally painted into a simple scroll with other images, but a Japanese collector who bought it in the 1500s decided it was a masterpiece, cut it out, and gave it the masterpiece treatment. It became hugely famous for somehow embodying the minimalist spirit of Zen: the close attention to detail that allows us to see each fruit as a unique individual, combined with an almost cursory rendering that gives only the amount of detail we need to see the distinctions the artist saw.
There are too many interpretations of this little composition for me to even list them, so it's probably best to think of the painting as a koan, one of those riddling phrases that serve as a starting point for Zen meditation.
As for Muqi's other work, this is
Chestnuts, cut from the same scroll as
Six Persimmons but not nearly as famous.
His other truly famous painting is this one,
Guanyin, Crane, and Gibbons.
His landscapes look to me much more like more traditional Chinese work, although experts see some of the same minimalist spirit as in
Six Persimmons.
I just learned recently that when Chinese intellectuals got to arguing with Christians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of them thought they had to answer allegations that China was not as spiritual as the Christian west. One of their responses was that Chinese spirituality showed in landscape paintings. These landscapes, they said, were their equivalent to western paintings of Christ on the cross. I found this to be an arresting thought; these landscapes all look kind of alike, just like crucifixions look kind of alike, because their main function was to inspire meditation along certain paths.
3 comments:
It became hugely famous for somehow embodying the minimalist spirit of Zen: the close attention to detail that allows us to see each fruit as a unique individual, combined with an almost cursory rendering that gives only the amount of detail we need to see the distinctions the artist saw.
It certainly is fairly minimal, but I'm surprised you make no mention of the hànzì / kanji-derived "stems" of the persimmons.
My familiarity with such characters is far too poor to place the meaning accurately, but just good enough to note that they seem to resemble "子" - "Radical 39", an element that means "child" or "stem", and which is one half of "柿子", the word for persimmons.
It's not an exact shape match, and I'm not sure what that distinction in shape properly means - sometimes characters had different forms in the past; other times, elements get modified according to certain linguistic rules that are far beyond me; and still other times, you encounter simple aesthetic / stylistic modifications, ligatures, etc.
Presumably, to someone who can properly read Chinese characters, the art comes across far differently, as the letters no doubt leap out to the mind, and the characters are an obvious and integral part of the work's actual meaning.
Yeah, there is a lot of discourse about what the character resemblances mean, but from what I could tell there is no agreement.
I think you shouldn’t mention Guanyin without a nod to the gender shift worship thing going on with him/her. Where is this Guanyin in the gender spectrum?
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