MU-CH'I

flourished 13th century Pinyin Muqi, also called Fa-ch'ang, Pinyin Fachang one of the best known of Chinese Ch'an (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist painters whose works were influential in Japan. Toward the end of the Sung dynasty (9601279), Mu-ch'i found himself in political trouble and fled to a monastery near the capital city of Hangchou. His paintings on Ch'an themes stimulated many copies in Japan; thus, it is there that paintings likely to be authentic works by Mu-ch'i are now found, though the Japanese painter Mokuan (d. c. 1345) traveled to Mu-ch'i's monastery and is said to have received two of Mu-ch'i's seals from the abbot of the temple, making the paintings in Japan somewhat suspect. Mu-ch'i, like many other Chinese painters, painted a variety of subjectsincluding landscapes, flowers, still lifes, and more orthodox iconographic subjects. While there are various examples of each extant, indicating his diverse interests and styles, the most famous paintings associated with Mu-ch'i include Six Persimmons; a triptych with a white-robed Kuan-yin at the centre flanked on either side by a scroll of monkeys and a crane (all in the Daitoku Temple, Kyoto); and a surviving set of four sections (in various Japanese collections) of an original set of Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. However different the paintings in style and subject matter, there is throughout an appropriate sense of immediate vision and creation and a totally responsive hand, expressed with broad and evocative washes of ink.