The Great Painters from China, No.1, 13th December 2008

Gu Kai Zhi, Chinese Brush Painter (344-405)

In the British Museum, displayed under low lighting and under glass, is an ancient handscroll painted on silk. It is called “Admonitions of the Court Instructress to Palace Ladies”. It is a Tang-dynasty copy of a much older work that has been lost or destroyed. An artist called Gu Kai Zhi painted the original.

Admonitions of the Court Instructress to Palace Ladies, British Museum. A copy of Gu Kai Zhi painting

He is a mysterious semi-divine figure in the history of Chinese painting and every introduction to Chinese Art includes a section on him. He lived from 344-405 AD during the Eastern Jin Dynasty and was a famous painter, scholar and poet. A contemporary of his, Xie Anping, once described his paintings as the finest ever produced in the history of mankind!

Gu Kai Zhi was well educated and cultivated and he was a philosopher too... however he looked like an idiot! He was said to have “three talents”, namely, talent itself, talent in painting and talent at being an idiot.

His most important contribution to the history of Chinese Painting was his theory on “conveying the Spirit”. Chinese brush painting teachers often say “give your pictures Qi or spirit” and it was from Gu Kai Zhi that this idea came, over 2,000 years ago. A good artist will imbue his objects not only with the spirit of those objects but with some of his/her own spirit too.

Painters through the ages in China have tried to apply Gu Kai Zhi’s theory of “conveying the Spirit” to their own works producing pictures that would be said to be “alike in spirit” as opposed to “alike in form”. It was easy to produce a picture that was “alike in form”, ie looked similar to the object, but much more difficult to paint an image that was rich in spiritual connotation and spoke volumes about the spirit of the artist as well as that of the object or subject.

When Gu Kai Zhi painted figures he would sometimes leave out the eyes. When asked why he had done so he said that it does not matter much whether the body was beautifully done or not if the spirit of the picture, the eyes, had been left out. According to him the key to conveying and portraying the spirit was in how to dot the eyes.

One of Gu Kai Zhi’s most famous paintings was a handscroll, painted in ink and colour on silk, called “The Nymph of the Luo River”. In it he depicts a prince of the Western Jin standing on the bank of the river Luo gazing at a beautiful nymph gliding through the waves. The scroll goes on to depict a series of images from the romance, ending with the prince departing in a chariot but looking back as if to recall his vanished dream.

This painting signified two important advances in Chinese painting. The first was the invention of a continuous pictorial story in which the characters keep appearing, and the second was the development of landscape art. Hills, trees, and streams etc. are not painted as isolated entities but as components of a coherent physical environment. More than that, it has been suggested by art historians that the landscape elements often served a double role as representation and visual metaphor. When the prince saw the nymph, for example, he described her through a series of analogies:

She moves with the lightness of wild geese in flight,

With the sinuous grace of soaring dragons at play.

Her radiance outshines the autumn chrysanthemums;

Her luxuriance is richer than the spring pines.

She floats as do wafting clouds to conceal the moon;

She flutters as do gusting winds to eddy snow.

From afar she gleams like the sun rising from dawn mists;

At closer range she is luminous like a lotus rising from clear waves.

The metaphors: geese, dragons, lotus, pines etc describe the nymphs’ beauty and the landscape is an integral part of that description: mists and clouds, winds and snow. For the first time beauty was described in both a poem and a picture and the landscape was used to illustrate and illuminate the feelings of the prince. The Tang dynasty artists that followed used this style to great effect.

Jane Dwight