What my addiction to Chinese painting made me do

My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection from America. The catalogue entries were supplied by the doyen of Chinese art historians in Britain, Michael Sullivan, who died aged 97 just a month before the opening of this latest exhibition of Chinese painting at the V&A. His particularly well-written and stimulating books on Chinese art, especially Symbols of Eternity, published in 1980, kept my addiction smouldering until at last I felt I had to do something about it and wrote a novel, The Ten Thousand Things. Its central character is a 14th-century Chinese landscape-painter, Wang Meng, whose ‘total absorption in the language of painting’ reminded Sullivan of Cézanne. Wang’s masterpiece ‘Dwelling in the Blue Bien Mountains’ struck me as an overpowering image, not only of the grandeur and seductiveness of nature, but also of the turbulent times he lived through, the decay and collapse of the alien Mongol regime established by Khublai Khan, years of near anarchy and civil war ending in eventual triumph for the native Chinese under the first Ming Emperor.

Not much noticed except by his friends in his lifetime, Wang became famous 200 years after his death as one of the ‘Four Masters of the Yüan’, four great innovators and leading practitioners of the so-called ‘literati painting’. Their paintings, whether in the form of long horizontal handscrolls or vertical hanging scrolls, were very different in style, but all four worked on paper instead of silk, and tended to avoid colour in favour of calligraphic brush strokes and ink washes. The change had been heralded in the early 12th century by a group of scholars led by the poet Su Shi. Essentially it took painting out of the hands of professional painters — mere artisans — and passed it to highly educated connoisseurs, who were also poets, government administrators and calligraphers, and in doing so changed the purpose of painting from the straightforward representation of nature to the expression of the artist’s mind and feelings.