Nature as a catalyst

The Fantastic Mountains, an international travelling exhibition on show in Singapore, presents an astounding array of hanging scrolls, handscrolls, leaves of albums and fans that represent all the distinguished schools in Chinese art history.

THE "Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from the Shanghai Museum" is a display of the ways in which overpowering natural phenomena sustain and challenge the human creative strengths. An amazing range of mountains, streams, groves and reclusive scholars inhabit a virtual space in the landscapes.

Wu Bin's "Landscape along the Shanyin road" (1608) exemplifies one such incredible space through a vast stretch of mountains that is laid out on a handscroll measuring 31.8 cm x 862.2 cm. The intricate and meandering range of mountains spreads all the way in a fitful visual rhythm. It is a match only to the awe-inspiring breadth and scope of a natural scene in which "a thousand peaks rival in height, ten thousand rivulets compete in flowing forth", in the words of Gu Kaizhi (A.D. 345-406), a major artist of the Jin dynasty (quoted from the catalogue to the show).

The work presents natural phenomena at once as a play of, say, rich tonal variations and an expression of the potent intellectual and emotional energy that are beyond visual/verbal simplifications. The astounding breadth and depth of this unique space is defined variously by a mind-blowing array of hanging scrolls, handscrolls, leaves of albums and fans.

Consider, for instance, the ways in which the elongated scrolls direct our attention to the awe-inspiring enormity, expanse and range of nature without a settled focus. It is a constantly shifting centre of interest reinforced by abrupt changes in visual rhythm. Often, the forms become dense in texture only to articulate the white of the ground as in Wang Yuanqi's "White stones amid an unadulterated stream after Huang Gongwang" (1696).

The unpainted surface of the paper represents simultaneously streams of water that meander through a range of mountains and trees and the mists over the mountains at the far end. Depending on the forms adjacent to this unpainted negative space, the latter acquires a vibrant horizontal or vertical gesture to suggest earth, water, or sky. Even the album leaves, such as Dong Bangda's "Eight views of Mount Gehong" (1761) in ink and colour on paper, are no exception since they do not depict nature in the ways post-renaissance easel painting would encourage a one-point perspective.

To be sure, the land is often identified in the respective titles to the works as, say, the "Pine Valley of Mount Huang" or, "Two ravines in Mount Emei". Moreover, the Five Sacred Mountains that were part of the Daoist sacred geography offer an abiding source of inspiration to a number of artists here. However, the mountains are more than mere geographical entities. They provoke and challenge moral, intellectual, emotional as well as aesthetic responses. They are "grotto-heavens" denoting "a world beyond the mortal realm, a world with its own sun and moon, or, in other words, space and time" in the words of Liu Yang, the curator of the show.

As a result, the paintings render the actual land nearly incidental to a unique vision to which the artists give form. They privilege an interplay of inscribed poetry and calligraphy apart from a distinct emphasis on lines, tones and textures instead of descriptive details about a mountain. In fact, the artists' wide-ranging extra aesthetic concerns involve several kinds of eremitism or reclusion, including political protest as in the case of Lan Ying (1585-1664), a late Ming painter. Although submitted as objects of gaze, the landscapes in this memorable exhibition reveal the ways in which nature and, in turn, art are potent transformative agents. This is evident in the ways in which the landscapes here point emphatically towards certain unique states of mind rather than the visible nature.

The display is quite thoughtful, considering the challenges posed by the subtle diversity of the material on view. Considering the enormous size and the mind-blowing panoramic scope of a number of handscrolls and hanging scrolls such as L Huancheng's "Retreats in West Stream" (1689) and Yuan Yao's "The Jiucheng Palace" (1778), the exhibition space at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore is rather limited. Often the distance from which one can view a hanging scroll is less than half the height or length of the work. While the first of the two works cited above measures 46.2 cm x 605 cm, the second measures 324.2 cm x 675.6 cm total. Since a number of other works are displayed in glass cases in the middle of the hall, it is hard to view these scrolls from a comfortable distance. However, the wall display brings together diverse formats in such a way that the movement from one work to the next offers a pause between two visual adventures, from one overwhelming range of landscapes to the next.

The "Fantastic Mountains" is an international travelling exhibition, "co-organised by the Shanghai Museum and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. After a display at the Art Gallery, it is currently being held at the Asian Civilisations Museum (Armenian Street, Singapore, until July 18) and will travel to the Honolulu Academy of Arts (Honolulu, Hawaii). The show consists of 79 landscapes and represents "all the distinguished schools in Chinese art history through a span of some 500 years from the early Ming to the late Qing", in the words of Chen Xiejun, the director of the Shanghai Museum, in the accompanying catalogue.