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the approaches of the scholar painters to ‘transform tradition through innovation’ and yet stay true to the humanist principles of the past. New scholar painting’s biggest break with the past is the abandonment of the orthodoxy of copying. Copying the masters and learning through copying are the ways in which Chinese traditional visual culture reproduced and continues to reproduce itself, and this is a theme that will be repeated throughout the other sections of this book. It is a system that worked well when the material circumstances of an agrarian society remained much the same from one generation to the next. However, the repetition of ideas in this way is noncritical, and it means that the practitioner of received skills is often ill prepared for change and how to respond to it. The impossibility of perpetuating tradition in a traditional way in an industrial society reinforces the validity of Wang Huangsheng’s introductory theoretical model, and Wu Jinchuan’s history of recent innovations in brush and ink painting suggests that a critical engagement with Western practices can be productive in securing a Chinese visual culture that is, nevertheless, still rooted in tradition.
The role of nature and art as a central tenet in understanding Chinese visual culture is further developed by Yu Lizhan’s essay on the use of rocks in Chinese gardens. It is not just in brush and ink painting, but across all Chinese visual practices, that the artful and sometimes ironic simulation of the natural world occurs. Su Shi’s admonition that judging a painting by likeness alone shows an unsophisticated intellect is an adage that crosses forms in traditional culture. The Chinese admiration of rocks in the past still informs the present, as can be seen in Yue Minjun’s painting Backyard Garden (currently held in the Saatchi Collection in London). In this painting, some of his characteristic grinning figures emerge from a Taihu rock and, in so doing, convey the broader cultural commentary about man, art, and nature that this book examines.
The last chapter of this section draws on the interrelationship between the maker and his work and how this establishes a sense of self. A sense of self identity created through dialogue with the natural world resonates in traditional culture because, as Tsung Ping suggested (in his preface to Landscape Paintings, written in the fifth century), a painting enables the