ART REVIEW : China’s Artist of the Ages

In 1555, when Tung Ch’i-ch’ang was born in Shanghai, China, Michelangelo had just begun his Rondanini Pieta, Titian and Tintoretto were at work in Venice and Pieter Brueghel had lately returned from Italy to paint in Antwerp. When Tung died 81 years later, in 1636, the names of Rembrandt, Poussin and Velazquez were among those finding their rightful place as the most celebrated of European art.

As a painter, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang was their equal. What’s more, within the complex traditions of Chinese painting with ink and brush, he left a legacy that would reverberate through his culture more deeply than could be claimed by any single European in his. The radically conceived, immensely sophisticated hanging scrolls, albums, hand scrolls and calligraphies he produced in the second half of his long life influenced the course of painting in China literally for centuries, inspiring followers and inciting detractors but never being ignored.

Even more than Picasso for the modern West, Tung was, for the next 300 years, the standard.

A quietly astonishing exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chronicles the unprecedented art and influence of this remarkable painter and critical theorist. Organized by Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where the show had its debut last April, “The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang: 1555-1636” records a high-stakes drama of warring factions in a vigorous struggle for artistic dominance. And an exciting, strangely modern drama it is.

A scholar, tutor and Ming statesman born into a distinguished official family, Tung was an amateur painter and calligrapher, albeit one of unusual gifts. He understood the intricacies of traditional Chinese painting with brush and ink on silk or paper, in which writing and painting were bound together through sophisticated visual poetry.

The pictorial depiction of landscape was intimately connected to the graceful, energetic characters of hand-written calligraphy. A modest landscape was not so modest after all. For through its particular disposition of styles and forms and its deft allusions to some revered precedents and not others, it could write a visual history of China for the present day, which would set the course for the future.

At the age of 41, Tung the scholar-artist set out to challenge--and finally overthrow--what he considered the technically advanced but spiritually moribund painting of professional artists in his day. The show charts the seemingly sudden arrival of a controversial idea, and then its elaboration and dispersal throughout the culture.

“The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang” is a large exhibition, featuring exceptional loans from the Shanghai Museum and the Beijing Palace Museum, many of which have never been seen in the United States. In addition, works have been borrowed from a host of other public and private collections. A landmark show, it will likely generate considerable debate among scholars of Chinese painting, who have never before had the opportunity to examine so much of Tung’s work in one place, together with so many examples by artists who could not escape the pull of his powerful influence.

Because ink paintings are light sensitive, the show will be seen in two parts. Part I, which opens at LACMA on Sunday and continues through Aug. 16, focuses on Tung, with some six dozen of his remarkable paintings and a number by his most significant contemporaries. Part II, from Aug. 25 to Sept. 20, will examine the spread of his influence.

In all, 171 paintings will be shown. To assist viewers in this sprawling, often difficult exhibition, a useful, color-coded system of display has been devised. Tung’s paintings are mounted against red silk backing, those of his followers and contemporaries are mounted against blue. If Chinese painting is new to you, you might find it helpful to follow the red “silk road” first, getting a handle on Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and then go back to compare his paintings to those displayed on blue.

Tung’s earliest dated paintings are eight fan-shaped album leaves from 1596. For the most part, they carefully follow the exquisite styles of earlier masters, in traditional Chinese manner. The album displays Tung’s skill in an immensely difficult medium in which, once drawn, a line cannot be erased.

What happens next is shocking. Just one year later Tung painted a hanging scroll that feels like a manifesto. It too recalls assorted precedents, but now they’re mixed together in stark collisions of drawing styles, complete with daring leaps in scale, flickering shifts in space and a radical jumble of disjunctive planes.

Initially “Wan-luan Thatched Hall” seems brutish and ugly--until you learn to read its wild and unprecedented syntax. An illusionistic evocation of landscape has been joined by a pyrotechnic display of the means of painting--the limitless range of possibilities with line, form, shadow, light, composition and movements of the brush--a display straining toward the virtuosic.

Tung is happy to make a peacock-like show of his scholarly erudition, but he’s not just showing off. Instead, the boundless capacities and expansive refinements of the individual artist’s mind begin to be asserted as equal to landscape painting’s traditional emphasis on nature. In “Wan-luan Thatched Hall,” nature is portrayed as the physical embodiment of perpetual change--and as a projection of mind.

China, you could say, is now posited by Tung as the indivisible twin of the Chinese. The profoundly philosophical element of his art is matched by a deeply political thrust. This scholar-artist, who tutored two future emperors during his career in government service, makes one thing plain: As the people go, so China goes.

At least four layers reveal themselves in Tung’s extraordinary work. There’s the evocation of landscape, with its vitalist exaltation of Nature-as-change. There’s scholarly erudition, in complex allusions to artist-ancestors. There’s the eloquent presence of the individual artist, through his eccentric orchestration of the image. And, there’s the material beauty of painting itself, conveyed through the autonomy of the brush mark.

In his greatest work Tung holds this breathtaking repertoire together in dynamic tension. If a Western equivalent could be cited, it might be necessary to leap forward in time some 250 years, to the paintings of Paul Cezanne.

No painting in the exhibition is greater or more dynamic than Tung’s 1617 hanging scroll, “The Ch’ing-pien Mountain in the Manner of Tung Yuan,” from the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Ch’ing-pien Mountain” is Tung’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire.” It begins, at the bottom edge, with a feathery little tree standing on a hillock, which provides easy visual entry into the picture’s otherwise complex space.

The journey starts, crossing an open field and beginning the ascent into the foothills, passing a small cabin, then twisting up an ever-steeper mountain path across sharp ravines and around forested cliffs. Suddenly, halfway up the scroll, the space miraculously seems to turn inside out, as if you’ve gone inside the enveloping, crystalline structure of the rock itself, finally to emerge, at the top, on the mountain’s peak. There, as you look up farther still, the mountain through which you have just passed miraculously rises before your eyes, disappearing into the misty sky.

As with Cezanne’s art, the picture’s seemingly impossible, contradictory multiple views can at first be daunting, a visual brick wall that stops perception dead in its tracks. Soon, though, your eye busts through the barrier of habit to wander freely in the extraordinary space Tung has opened. It’s an exhilarating feeling--and probably just what Tung Ch’i-ch’ang had in mind.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000; closed Mondays.