Meaning in Landscape Painting of the Northern and
Southern Song Interval
Chen Yunru
Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Calligraphy, National Palace Museum
The history of landscape painting in the Northern and Southern Song can be
roughly divided into two chronological phases. The first phase was dominated by the
style of the Northern Song Li Cheng and Guo Xi tradition, as emblemized by the Guo
Xi’s monumental landscape Early Spring. The second phase was dominated by the
Southern Song imperial estate landscapes of such artists as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui.
Between these two phases can be inserted the figure of Li Tang, who fled Bianjing
and moved south in the wake of the Jurchen invasion, and who has been seen as an
intermediary in the transmission of landscape painting across the temporal and spatial
boundaries of the Northern and Southern Song. Li Tang’s transitional landscapes
inherited what came before and influenced what came after, while simultaneously
revealing a discrete agenda that is wholly distinctive. The landscape paintings from
this period not only reveal formal stylistic changes, but also seek to communicate a
different kind of meaning. Combining textual and visual evidence, the present essay
clarifies the nature of this “pictorial idea,” and how in changed, in the development of
landscape painting from the late Northern Song to early Southern Song. It then
attempts to explicate the contextual significance of these changes.
Keywords: Northern Song, Southern Song, landscape painting, painting in ink and
color
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