Abstract:

Why did HUANG Gong-wang paint Fu-chun River? Why did the painting of Dwelling in the Fu-chun Mountains take up so many years? According to HUANG Gong-wang’s another annotation written in the same period, the connotation of “Fu-chun River” in HUANG’s mind is related to the tradition of poetry. From the two important collected literary works, that is, The Collected Works of Yanling in the Song Dynasty and The Collected Works of Diaotai in the Ming Dynasty, we can see that the legend about the eminent person YAN Zi-ling starting from the East Han Dynasty became the long-lasting core value in the writings of Fu-chun River, the landscape literature represented by XIE Ling-yun, SHEN Yue, MENG Hao-ran and LI Bai condensed images, established traditions and created the “textual landscape”, which triggered later generations’ enriched discourse seeking for truth in beauty and embodying principles in poetry, and FAN Zhong-yan’s new statements about YAN Zi-ling represented the self-consciousness of the moral subject and the understanding of landscape from a perspective of Neo-Confucianism. In the new situation of being ruled by aliens, HUNAG Gong-wang provided a new interpretation of the image of Fu-chun River with his masterpiece: with the dissolution of the ethical subject, scholars and literati’s traditional anxiety of getting along with rulers was transformed into the new issue of their getting along with themselves and the universe. With the discard of rulers and scholars and literati on the one hand and the dissolution of self and others on the other, the image of Funchun River achieves a super realm of Dao. It is not the point whether HUANG’s painting is really about YAN Zi-ling; rather, it is the spiritual similarity between the painting of Dwelling and YAN Zi-ling, i.e., Dao’s being more significant than worldly power, that secure the honor and dignity of scholars and literati. In this way, we can understand better the value of the painting of Dwelling in the cultural history of China, and it is also in this way that we can see the intellectual connotation of literature and art.