Su Shi’s Painting Philosophy by Derek Zobel

One of the most dynamic figures in Chinese history is Su Shi. Along with being a prolific painter, he was a calligrapher, politician, poet, letter writer, and wine maker. Born in Meishan in 1037 CE, Su Shi lived as a scholar of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 CE). Often falling in and out of favor at court, his life was split between a man at court and a traveling exile. Arguably his pinnacle of a character of Chinese painting philosophy came with the formation of, along with some of his friends, the idea of wenren hua, literati or amateur painting. Several of his poems and essays discuss this approach and the few paintings of his that survive exemplify it.

Su Shi thought his art and calligraphy to be of a new meaning: one that strayed away from the ancients and sent scholarly art in a new, better direction. No longer concerned with the idea of expressing what others thought of in the past, Su Shi thought it important to focus on the present and on expressing himself as an artist of any medium. The phrase used by Su Shi is “chu xinyi”, which translates into English as “expressing new meaning”. He, along with his contemporaries Huang Tingjian and Mi Fu used this phrase in their writings on calligraphy. Both of them agreed with and supplemented Su Shi’s new stylisti

c way of thinking.
His short writings on “poems and paintings” (tihua shi) were an exploration of the worldly purpose of painting in addition to its relationship to other forms of artistic expression. The primary idea pushed forward by Su Shi was the argument that painting should not be concerned solely with formal likeness, but must include of touch of individuality. He once commented “Anyone who judges painting in terms of verisimilitude / Has the understanding of a child.” Indeed, the distinction between the “yi”, or “mood and meaning”, and the “xing”, or the form that is being depicted was rarely written about before the times of Su.

Another notable separation Su made was that between the art of the scholars (shiren) and the professional painters (huagong). He believed that the differences between the mindsets of the artists affect their paintings. Scholars, who possessed a broader artistic background, had the edge over the painter, whose sole job was to paint. The knowledge of poetry, prose writing, and calligraphy allowed the scholar to place more meaning into his painting than a man who lacked the knowledge of such arts.
Asserting the dominance of the yi over the xing is found throughout Su’s writings on painting. However, Su did not mean to place the importance of the personal in the representation of things in a manner familiar to the western style, but rather that that personal touch add to the accurate portrayal of nature. For example, if a scholar painted a bird flying in a manner in which it is impossible for the bird to do in reality, then he has failed at his attempt to capture nature accurately. Su believed that there was a higher form of natural representation that could be detailed. In various writings, he has named it “tian” (nature), “yisi” (thoughts, intellect, personality), “zhen” (truth, essence), “huo” (liveliness, animation), and “qi” (breath, vitality). Su never settled on one name for this escalated sense of nature, thus showing how complicated it was to the philosopher himself.

In regards to the relevance of the object(s) painted, Su believed that certain items represented particular emotions or qualities, good or bad, of the artist. Certain pieces of nature were thought to possess specialized attributes that could in turn be tied to the underlying meaning of a painting. Su Shi’s favorite subjects to describe himself are found in one of his works entitled Bare Tree, Bamboo, and Rocks. The bare tree, bamboo shoot, and the Chinese rock are common throughout the surviving works of Su Shi. In this particular work, the tree is crooked and prickly, the rock in the bottom center is oddly shaped, and the bamboo surrounding it all on the ground is still standing tall. To Su and his close contemporaries these three primary objects represent prickliness, contempt for ingratiation, steadfastness amid hardship, and proud aloofness.

Some of these characteristics can be directly tied to events in Su’s life. The contempt for ingratiation explains how Su was constantly falling in and out of favor with the court because he would not follow the orders of those in power. The steadfastness amid hardship insinuates his time spent as a traveling scholar because of his exile from court. Finally, the proud aloofness alludes to the fact that he was physically and emotionally distant from most of the people around him and also the fact that he, even though he married twice in his life, was a practicing homosexual. The life of such an influential man as Su Shi cannot be ignored. Revolutionizing the principles of painting, calligraphy, and poetry brought awareness to a part of China that had long been following the masters of and before the Tang Dynasty. Su Shi died in Changzhou in 1101. Kong Wuzhong, a close friend of Su Shi, once wrote, upon observing one of his paintings, that “everyone knew he [Su Shi] was a rare man.”