WEN-JEN-HUA

Pinyin wenrenhua, English literati painting ideal of the Chinese scholar-painter who was more interested in personal erudition and expression than in either outward representation or an immediately attractive surface beauty. First formulated in the Northern Sung period (9601127)at which time it was called shih-ta-fu-huaby the poet-calligrapher Su Tung-p'o (q.v.), the ideal of wen-jen-hua was finally and enduringly codified by the great Ming dynasty critic and painter Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (q.v.), who identified two great lineages of painters. One was the Southern school beginning with the poet-painter Wang Wei (q.v.) in the T'ang dynasty and continuing with such masters as Tung Yan and Ch-jan (q.v.) in the Five Dynasties period, Mi Fei in the Northern Sung, the Four Masters of the Yan dynasty (q.v.), and the Wu school (q.v.) artists of the second half of the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries (Ming dynasty). The paintings of the artists in this grouping were characterized generally by subjective, personal, and expressive treatment of reality. In contrast were those artists more interested in precise and decorative paintings, beginning with Li Ssu-hsn in the T'ang dynasty and continuing with artists of the Southern Sung academy and their heirs of the 15th-century Che school (q.v.) in the Ming dynasty. According to the principle of wen-jen-hua, the completely literate, cultured artistlearned in all of the humane artswho revealed the privacy of his vision in his painting was to be preferred to the professional, whose paintings were more obviously pleasing to the eye. The contrast is overly categorical, but it is useful still in understanding the major interests and intentions of Chinese painters through the ages.