MA-HSIA SCHOOL

Pinyin Maxia, group of Chinese landscape artists that used a style of painting named after Ma Yan and Hsia Kuei, two great painters of the Southern Sung Academy, of which they were members in the last quarter of the 12th century AD and the beginning of the 13th. The aim of their landscapes was to create a feeling of limitless space, a vast atmospheric void out of which a few elements, such as mountain peaks and twisted trees, emerge with subdued drama. Ma and Hsia are credited with the fullest expression of this tendency in Chinese painting. Ma-hsia school compositions are of a type, called one corner, that is asymmetrical, with the design weight off to one side and the rest of the silk or paper left bare or slightly tinted. Ink tones are simplified to increase the dramatic impact of brushwork of a type called ax stroke, for the similarity of its brush marks to those left on wood by an ax or chisel. In general there is a preference for angular line expressed in abrupt, staccato brushstrokes.