TAI CHIN

born 1388, Ch'ien-t'ang, Chekiang province, China died 1462 Pinyin Dai Jin, also called Tai Wen-chin Chinese landscape painter of the Ming dynasty. Tai Chin was one of the leaders in the early Ming revival of the Ma-Hsia (after Ma Yan and Hsia Kuei), or academic, style of landscape painting of the Southern Sung (112779), which came to be called the Che school (after Chekiang province, in which Hang-chou, the Southern Sung capital, was located). The Che school was later placed within the lineage of professional painters and held in lesser regard in contrast to the school of literary amateurs, who were more concerned with personal expression and who were then represented in the Wu school in which Shen Chou held an equivalent place of leadership. The Che school artists did not merely repeat the patterns of the Southern Sung academy but rather, like other artists of other schools and traditions of the time, saw the past as providing motifs for further elaboration. Tai Chin did this with something of the same pictorial virtuosity, but the former compositional unity was replaced by a new additive and even fragmentary sense. The grouping called Che school is, like other such groupings, somewhat tenuous, and the artists within it (such as Wu Wei) often created special achievements. Paintings of the Che school probably had a major impact upon the perceptions of Japanese ink painters of the contemporary Muromachi period (13381573) who sought the Ma-Hsia tradition on the Chinese continent.