Guests of the Hills
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| Detail, Traveling through Hills and Streams by Qiu Ying (ca. 1494-1552) |
A scholar-recluse is a strange and mysterious man. He flees the city for reasons political, ethical or personal, with an inkstone for poems and grass for a pillow.
He builds his hut in a wilderness of rocks and pines. There he may play the qin, watch the ducks, or best of all, lean against a tree and lose himself in the view.
For the petty bureaucrat of pre-modern China, this vision of retirement was as close to earthly paradise as it gets. I shared it last month, or tried to, at the Freer-Sackler Galleries in Washington.
The exhibit “Guests of the Hills” filled a quiet shadowy room that people seemed to pass through on their way someplace else. The hanging scrolls and framed fans didn’t dazzle with color or promise instant readability. Most were black ink on pale-brown silk or paper. Glancing at them from several feet away, the eye simply didn’t know where to go. It floundered over what looked like stone cloudscapes and pine-tree swooshes.
They hardly seemed like welcoming landscapes. Yet they rewarded the kind of quiet contemplation that the recluses themselves enjoyed among the scrubby pines.
The eye skimmed the rocky contours for signs of people, and they were always, somehow, there; tucked away in a corner, crossing a bridge. Even the scrolls without people had open gazebos that seemed to invite the viewer to enter the frame. It may be a human instinct to look for signs of men wherever we go, and there’s sort of an a-ha! feeling when we stumble upon the traces.
The idealized landscapes of this era were, to my surprise, largely inspired by actual trips to the hills and mountains. Later painters tended to base their landscapes on previous works in a self-consciously artistic way, according to a sign on the museum wall.
On display was a memento painted during a roadtrip with friends, each of whom wrote a poem at the top. Others made scrolls in the style of a great painter of the past and dedicated them to their pals. Later poets who appreciated a good painting could dash off a poem on the top. Recluses or no, a sense of artistic community and collaboration pervaded the exhibit.
Besides paintings, scholars often kept stones carved with cloudy mountain retreats on their desks. I wondered if they were the 14th-century equivalent of computer wallpaper of a tropical beach.
What was it about the life of a scholar-recluse that appealed to the gentleman? Poet Tao Chien (365-427 CE) describes the ideal:
Quiet and of few words, he does not desire glory or profit. He delights in study but does not seek abstruse explanations. Whenever there is something of which he apprehends the meaning, then, in his happiness, he forgets to eat. …
His house with surrounding walls only a few paces long is lonely and does not shelter him from wind and sun. His short coarse robe is torn and mended. His dishes and gourds are often empty, yet he is at peace. He constantly delights himself with writing in which he widely expresses his own ideals. He is unmindful of gain or loss, and thus he will be to the end.
Click here for a slideshow of images from the exhibit
