TUNG CH'I-CH'ANG

born 1555, Hua-t'ing, Kiangsu province, China died 1636 Pinyin Dong Qichang Chinese painter, calligrapher, and theoretician who was one of the finest artists of the late Ming period. The most distinguished connoisseur of his day, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang set forward ideas that have continued to be influential on Chinese aesthetic theory. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang was born to a poor but scholarly family, and, though he at first failed the government examinations, he passed the chin-shih (advanced scholar) examination at the age of 34 in 1589 and was appointed to the first of a series of official positions within the Ming government. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang is perhaps best known for his writings on Chinese painting. Dividing it into Northern and Southern schools as first suggested by his older contemporary and friend, Mo Shih-lung (d. 1587), he traced the lineage and analyzed the traditions of both branches. He maintained that the Southern school emphasized sudden, intuitive realization of truth, whereas the Northern taught the more gradual acquisition of such insight. Painters associated with the Southern school were then those literati (wen-jen), sensitive poets and scholars who were also gentlemen painters, who painted intuitively (like an amateur) without conscious thought of function or beautyappealing to a similarly sensitive lite rather than popular taste. In contrast, the professional painter of the Northern school worked to create a handsome surface of immediate visual appeal with little suggestion of his own inner nature. At the very centre of the scholarly ideal of the Southern school was the art of calligraphy. It expressed abstractly the real nature of the individual who wielded the brush without interposing any pictorial description. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's calligraphy followed the eminent calligraphers Chao Meng-fu and Wen Cheng-ming and ultimately masters of the Chin and T'ang dynasties. Like those two artists, his creative approach was conscientious, disciplined, scholarly, and systematic, seeking out the spirit rather than slavishly reproducing the outward appearance of his models in trying to recapture antiquity. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang especially favoured the Four Masters of the Yan dynasty (Huang Kung-wang, Wu Chen, Wang Meng, and Ni Tsan), who had both the selfless personality and personal style indicative of the artist-scholar's highest ideal. His own paintings reveal his debt to them in both style and motif, yet he went considerably beyond them in banishing all immediate attraction from his art and stressing instead stark forms, seemingly anomalous spatial renderings, and clumsy handling of ink and brush. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's writings appear on his paintings as well as in various compilations of his writingsincluding the anthologies Hua-yen (The Eye of Painting), Hua-chih (The Meaning of Painting), and Hua-ch'an-shih sui-pi (Notes from the Painting-Meditation Studio [of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang]).