Grandeur, abundance, panache
Awe and pleasure – large landscapes (some in small formats)
| A large album, polished and luxurious. The vision is large, as if we are glimpsing remarkable views from a mountaintop window. The thrill in this deluxe production is the mastery of technique and the ability to conjure up visionary, bejewelled spaces. One of the most entrancing of these is a scene of a temple island set in a large river. Tight, quick strokes render architecture and trees, surrounded above and below by hallucinogenic waves, painted with light and dazzling effect. It might be compared to an image in words – indeed it seems not unlike the bittersweet recollection of the late Ming/ early Qing writer ZHANG Dai 张岱 (1597-1689). In the course of handful of pages in 陶庵梦忆 (Reminiscences in Dreams of Tao An, ca. 1665) Zhang speaks of the time before the Qing conquest when he travelled on a great river with his own private theatre group. Under a full moon, they landed on a temple island, set up and performed for themselves, then slipped away, leaving the monks to ponder whether they had seen a company of ghosts or men. |   |   YUN Shouping 惲壽平 (1633-1690) Landscapes after styles of ancient masters Album of 10 leaves Ink and colour on silk, 41.5 x 33 cm Private collection |
Another of Yun's pages evokes 'peach blossom spring' (桃花源記). With a few conventional props – a fisherman in a boat, pink flowering trees, a somewhat lonely setting – he recalls the iconic story of TAO Yuanming 陶淵明 (365–427). Here is the man who hazards into a hidden place, outside time, finding people continuing to live in an idyllic golden age, a Shangri-la. The style of the painting gestures to the archaic, with loopy simplifications, dense pools of colour. The pink dots of the flowers are scintillating above this.