Beijing

The early years of the Qing Dynasty were not easy ones for the native Chinese. The Han majority which consisted of over 92% of the population was forced to submit to the rule of a little minority from the north east of China called the Manchus. The strong resistance to this foreign occupation led the new rulers to adopt extremely harsh and violent methods in order to consolidate their power. Once their rule became an undeniable fact, many people saw resistance as futile and preferred to lead a secluded life style rather than engage in social affairs and collaborate with the new invaders. The Four Great Monks of the Qing Dynasty, were all painters who turned into Buddhist monks as an outcome of China’s occupation. Kun Can was an exception since he was already a monk during the late Ming even before the arrival of the Manchu invaders, suggesting that his lifestyle was motivated by genuine religious sentiments and was not a mere act of resistance. It seems like the other three Monks, Hongren, Bada Shanren also known as Zhu Da and Shi Tao chose to turn to religion and relative seclusion for practical matters and as an act of defiance more than an outcome of real religious transformation. Their retirement was not total and most of them kept on interacting with intellectual circles in the urban centers and continued to play a role in secular life. It can be said that although their retirement was not an outcome of religious spirituality it nevertheless was sparked by a kind of spiritual sentiment that takes over during traumatic periods such as the one they lived through. In their art they all expressed their dissatisfaction with the Qing rule, they created alternative realities in order to stress their opposition to the reality the new rulers offered. 

 The Four Great Monks sometimes referred to as “The Individualists” lived roughly during the same time and are yet another climax in the history of Chinese landscape painting. They represent the Literati School’s most extreme expressionist trend and their departure from the depiction of reality was unprecedented. The interesting point is that unlike the The Four Wangs of the Orthodox School that are more loyal to the appearance of nature but nevertheless painted in their studios detached from nature, or the earlier Song masters that stressed realism but were mostly confined to the imperial academy in the capital city, the Four Monks show no or very little loyalty to the visual appearance of nature but still stress the interaction with it, nature was their direct source of inspiration. On the one hand, the Four Monks represent the progressive trend of Literati painting, an artistic movement that stressed the detachment of the painter from exterior subjects and the search for the feelings that dwell inside the heart and mind, while on the other hand the Monks advocate intimate interaction with nature and painting outdoors amidst wildlife. The art of the individualists is full of emotion and vitality, some of their works, especially Bada Shanren and ShiTao’s, posses a feeling of childish carelessness - mountains, clouds, animals and plants are deformed and twisted almost beyond recognition, all this serves as an extreme way to express the deepest and most indefinable emotions, indeed their art is full of uncompromising individuality, light years away from the once dominant school of professional painters.

 The Four Great Monks like The Four Masters of the Yuan Dynasty are masters of the tradition of “Xie Yi”, literally meaning “painting the meaning” (as opposed to “Xie Shi” painting reality), they don’t care what the outside looks like they care about what it evokes in them, they transformed the sensory data in front of them into individual modes of expression. Since they were not confined to copying old masters and old modes of brushwork they were free to experiment and develop unique painting techniques, their brushwork and methods of ink application were diverse and distinctive, they influenced their contemporaries as well as future generations and still represent an unsurpassable expressionist climax in traditional Chinese painting. 

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