Yuan Dynasty

From India, we're going to transition into China, and in China, we're really going to focus on two dynasties. We're going to start with the Yuan Dynasty, and the Yuan Dynasty arises in China out of a figure and event that you've probably heard of, even if you aren't very familiar with Asian history, and that is the conquest of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan himself does not become the Emperor of China, although his conquests do take him through much of China, and it's his grandson, Kublai Khan, that becomes the Emperor who begins the period we call the Yuan Dynasty in Chinese history. Kublai Khan really actually looked up to the Chinese and admired particularly their arts and culture, so unlike pop culture movie depictions that show the Mongols as utterly dismissive of everybody and everything in their way, the reality of the Yuan Dynasty is, as with real history, often more nuanced. However, we do see a major split in artistic production in the Yuan Dynasty. Some artists did choose to remain at the Mongol court, and there are elements of art that do change in the Yuan Dynasty. For instance, we see significant differences in the clothing and the fashion during this time, but Kublai Khan was particularly interested in promoting certain Chinese styles of art, so the artists that stayed at the Chinese court were often handsomely rewarded and respected. One of those artists is Guan Daoxiang, and she also has the distinction of being one of the few female artists in Chinese art history. She was married to an artist, Zhao Mengpu, who also was a painter. Her husband and eventually her three sons all were painters, primarily of animals. Her husband was also quite famous. You can find his work quite easily in the book and on Google. But Guan Daoxiang, I like to show this painting because it gives us a kind of contrast. With what we're going to see in the other half of the Yuan Dynasty, this particular painting is very traditional for China in this later period, after 1300 or so, in that it is made entirely with ink on paper, and the subject matter is bamboo, which is incredibly popular in Chinese history and Chinese painting. And bamboo can take on a number of symbolic meanings. In this particular case, the placement of the bamboo next to the water and the knowledge that it was painted by a female painter suggests that this is a painting that expresses the emotion of women who have lost their husbands, and this is a painting that evokes the grieving and the sorrow of widows. We also see something else in this painting, which is quite important, and that is the use of space. Chinese paintings often don't create a smoothly receding space the way we see in European paintings, particularly those after the Renaissance that use a linear perspective, and instead they present space as three distinct areas or three distinct zones. We often have a foreground where most of the action is that is highly detailed. There's a mid-zone, which we can see in the upper third or so of this painting, which is often ambiguous or in some way misty or hazy or foggy. In this case, Guan Da Sheng uses a kind of strip of water of the pond that we are next to to separate the foreground and the background, and then we have the far background. Often, these three sections may be seen from different points of view or different perspectives, and they may be at different scales or different sizes, so this is a slightly different way of looking at space and looking at art. The flip side to those artists who choose to remain in the Mongol court and to serve under the Yuan Dynasty is a group of artists we call the literati artists. Literati artists are typically wealthy individuals. They don't have to work for a living, so they're not compelled by reasons of money to stay at the court and to be a professional artist, and typically, they're very interested in preserving traditional Chinese culture and traditional Chinese styles of art. These are artists that withdraw from the Mongol court, and they paint largely for their own personal satisfaction. Their works are not originally intended to be shown to the public, but rather to be displayed or kept for themselves, or in some cases traded with like-minded friends, and literati paintings are really designed to show the painter as an all-around educated individual. They often combine elements of painting, poetry, and calligraphy, all done by a single artist. In Chinese art, the divisions between writing, painting, and drawing are much hazier, and those lines are much more porous than in the West, where those things are often seen as unique and distinct fields. But the ideal literati artist is educated, and he can make choices that make these pieces work together as a whole. So in this case, we see not only the sentiments and the ideas expressed in the poem, but things like the style of calligraphy that match the style of the painting. So if we look at this poem, we can see that it's quite contained, and then every now and again there will be a character that's much more broad and expressive. Similarly, if we look at the bamboo, bamboo is made up of a long stalk of thin segments, and then every now and again, there's an explosion of leaves or branches that's highly expressive. Wuxian, who painted this painting, is considered one of the masters of this style, and like I said, these artists didn't really intend for their work to be seen in public, but in the next dynasty, once the Mongols are pushed out and the Ming dynasty is established, their work not only starts to be circulated among highly educated and refined individuals, but these artists of the past generations begin to be venerated as great masters of a quote-unquote traditional Chinese style.