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Chinese historians and critics speak of Fan K置an and the other Northern Sung landscape painters as superhuman. Through a consummate handling of ink monochrome technique, through new solutions to problems of representing space, mass and texture, they gave to their compositions a sense of vast order and coherence that reflects both the Taoist and the prevailing Neo-Confucian world-views. Human beings, placed in sharp contrast to the grandeur and permanence of nature, play only minor and transitory roles in these pictures.
It is very difficult to authenticate the paintings of the early landscape painters. Faithful copying by students and masters allows many paintings to exist which have long since deteriorated. The copying of paintings not only was a method of learning, but a demonstration of virtuosity, in the same way an accomplished musician would "play Mozart." This painting by Fan K置an is the only original masterpiece which has miraculously survived ten centuries.
In keeping with the ideas of Walter Benjamin as expressed in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, this painting was painted to exist in secret collections, cherished and preserved by generations of gentlemen scholars, the only people in the ancient Chinese world with the expertise in literary arts and philosophy to fully apprehend its presence, its aura. There was no crisis in painting. The connoisseur was at an extreme. The compelling realism transports the viewer to places within the picture. The Taoist symbolism and the ch段 which lifts of the painting痴 surface envelop the cultivated viewer in a quiet, meditative state. The painter engages the viewer directly, man-to-man. Because of its cherished and extremely individual existence, Benjamin feels the aura of its subtle energies. Through the great expanses of time, Fan K置an continues to whisper powerfully to his viewer.
Janet Harke, josegoez@
aol.com