‘I paint no portraits of ordinary people.’ Luo Ping
WIT AND NON-CONFORMIST, bohemian and connoisseur, devout Buddhist and self-proclaimed expert on the supernatural, the 18th-century Chinese painter, Luo Ping was all this and more. Luo was a native of Yangzhou, where the Grand Canal meets the Yangzi and the centre of a thriving salt trade. Destroyed in 1645, merchant patronage and increasing affluence during the nascent century of Manchu rule (1644-1911) turned it into a southern cultural metropolis, complete with scholarly and artistic pursuits. Home to more than a hundred renowned painters - according to Li Dou’s Yangzhou huafang lu (Record of the Flower Boats of Yangzhou, 1795), it was synonymous with the ‘Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou’, a loosely knit group of bold individualists. They subjected the traditional tenets of Chinese painting to much experiment, dwelling on the figurative genres of flowers, plants, rocks and portraiture. Labelled guai, ‘eccentric’ for their unconventional ways, they paid homage to no particular school. Luo Ping was the youngest proponent of the ‘Eight Eccentrics’, and although a timely representative of his age, has remained somewhat eclipsed.
Luo Ping (1733-1799): Eccentric Visions at the Museum Rietberg Zurich is an inaugural exhibition dedicated exclusively to the painter who is considered one of the most original of his time. Addressing the man are outstanding masterpieces, overlooked and unpublished works, as well as album leaves, complemented by representative works by his closest collaborators, family and friends. Drawn primarily from acknowledged but rarely seen paintings, they include ‘First Class National Treasures’, which have travelled especially from China. The four major Chinese museums: The Palace Museum, Beijing; the Shanghai Museum; the Tianjin Museum; and the Zhejiang Municipal Museum, Hangzhou have offered a grand total of 27 paintings. Others, no less important, have been assembled from public and private collections outside of China. The selection of Luo Ping’s oeuvre is unprecedented, and was initiated in the autumn of 2006 as a collaborative project spanning three continents. Dr Kim Karlsson, Curator of the Museum Rietberg Zurich and a specialist of Luo Ping, Dr Alfreda Murck, Consultant and Researcher at The Palace Museum, Beijing and Mr Michele Matteini, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University have focused on works of high quality, intended to give the relatively unknown ‘eccentric’ his due acclaim, so that his impact on later developments in Chinese painting might be understood.
Fundamental to Luo Ping’s output was the tutelage he enjoyed under Jin Nong (1687-1763), an elder ‘Yangzhou Eccentric’, who had taken the 23 year-old under his wing. Theirs was a complex bond, not unlike that between father and son. Under Jin’s six-year guidance, Luo’s precocious talent was nurtured as they engaged in an intense stylistic dialogue. Jin’s hallmark was an idiosyncratic, ‘archaic’ brush idiom imbibed from his study of Buddhist stelae and bronze inscriptions; reflected for instance in the religious and secular imagery of Figures and Landscapes (1759). Luo frequently deferred to his master by illustrating his verse; Figures and Landscapes, after Poems by Jin Nong being a fitting tribute of vivid brushwork. Master and pupil often collaborated together. Compelling evidence of a symbiotic relationship is offered by Handwritten Letters by Famous People of the Qing Dynasty, an exceptional document from The Palace Museum. Two leaves that Jin Nong had written to his protégé indicate that subjects Luo painted were occasionally signed with his master’s name: ‘Paint a vermilion bamboo with bright pigment. To be excellent, it must be luxurious and fresh with an antique flavour. Leave more empty space so that I can easily inscribe it. Paint another one: An ink bamboo using the other one as a model, but don’t do anything too surprising. For the ink bamboo, half a teacup of ink should be enough.’
In 18th-century Yangzhou, the plum blossom, Prunus mume, was a living subject. The precursor to spring and sign of renewal, it evoked many associations and sentiments. Jin Nong introduced the classical plum blossom in all its complexities to his pupil. During a six-week stay with the Luo family, he painted the monochromatic Plum Blossoms (1757), inspiring their devotion to the tree, which eventually earned them the accolade, the ‘Luo Family Plum School’. Another partner in Luo Ping’s work was his wife, Fang Wanyi (1732-1779), whom he had married at nineteen, in a ‘modern’ union of like-minded souls. One 10-leaf album, Figures, Flowers and Plants is a unique collaboration by Jin, Luo and Fang; the master painted the first five leaves, the next two are by the couple and the last three feature Luo’s finger painting techniques. In Leaf 3 (1760), Fang Wanyi’s orchids, symbol of moral integrity and female refinement are paired with Luo’s plum blossoms. The man honours his wife by inscription in Plum Blossoms, after Wang Mian (1763) because upon identifying a flaw, she mixed pigments from the sap of morning glories and applied them to the petals. The classical plum became Luo’s subject for inquiry, wherein he vacillated between abstraction and allegory. It implied contrast in Plum Blossoms in Two Tones, the simple clarity in the one suggesting purity and black ink drizzled onto the other, disarray. The transience of life is echoed in a six-leaf album, Plum Blossoms in Ink and Colour (1772): The first leaf, Lip-Rouge Plum Blossoms has erotic connotations; leaves dispersed by the east wind in the second, hint at adversity and the loss of youth; while the third, Plum Blossoms reflected in Water is a mirror of stark simplicity.
However the man’s affinity for the classical and loyalty to his master, was matched by a need to venture out on his own. Luo had an instinct for the irreverent, which bordered on caricature. He saw its fruition in the ‘free-hand’ form, where the time-honoured techniques of copying might be abandoned. The unconventional Portrait of Mr Dongxin, after Jin Nong’s style name, was made in homage after his master’s death in 1763. Jin is depicted as a luohan, a Buddhist deity or monk, complete with elongated head, hairy ears, rotund body and fleshy fingers, reading a Buddhist text with his mouth wide open. It is an emblem both to Jin Nong’s Buddhist leanings and to himself, the disciple, who later adopted the sobriquet, ‘Monk of the Temple of Flowers’, a persona culled from a dream. A profound Chan or Zen Buddhist bent was found in Luo’s spiritual quest, outlined in his life’s treatise, Record of My Beliefs. His personal dictum was ‘Everyone is a Buddha’. The Chan Buddhist ideal is epitomised in Portrait of Mr Bamboo Hat, a figure of a peripatetic monk whose face is characteristically hidden from view. A display of spontaneous dry brushstrokes, the monk’s spiritual purity is lauded accordingly: ‘A single recitation contains an ocean of errors; you can go on talking about enlightenment until you get a new head. Renounce the practice of piecemeal stratagems. When you come to make a clean sweep, you will finally be able to connect everything.’
Refusing to follow the established rules of portraiture, the non-conformist in Luo Ping was not averse to depicting his subjects as outlandish characters. Some were not amused. One work dedicated to Yuan Mei, a bon vivant, was returned with the inscription: ‘The picture as (being) unlike me, … is bound to be mistakenly identified as the old fellow … in the kitchen or the oldster who peddles drinks … someone will pull it down and hurriedly burn it.’ Luo also toyed with irony and satire. Two wayward Chan Buddhist adherents with unkempt hair and rogue-ish outlook in Hanshan and Shide appear to suggest the bohemian. In fact, their ‘devil may care’ nature might benefit state and society since they are the true patrons of marriage.
He saw no contradiction between his Buddhist affiliations and his otherworldliness. Defending his forays into the world of the supernatural and the bizarre, he said, ‘Whether you choose to listen in a frivolous way is up to you. What I am saying here is not frivolous.’ His most celebrated work, the Guigu tu, (Ghost Amusement Scroll’, 1766), painted when he was 33, provoked both outrage and admiration when it appeared. Measuring more than 25 m long, it is the highlight of the exhibition and is being displayed for the first time in 30 years. The scroll depicts supernatural phenomena that Luo Ping claims to have personally experienced in eight separate scenes. Intended to be individual paintings, they are unsigned and lack personal seals, and were only later mounted into a handscroll. One image is a nimble green spirit with long limbs. Another is a fat bald ghost followed by a skinny bare-chested ‘slave’ ghost wearing an official’s hat, referring to corruption. Luo Ping’s technique for painting ghosts was to soak sheets of paper in water, applying ink wash with colours while they were still wet. His images would ‘bleed’, their hazy outlines creating the eerie effect of ghosts evaporating into thin air. Their expressions however suggested uncanny human foibles, despair and fear of the unknown. In an unusual turn, Luo concluded the work with a pair of skeletons in a landscape setting. Skeletons rarely feature in Chinese painting; it is possible he used an European engraving in Andreas Vesalius’ book on anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), circulated by the Jesuits in Qing China. The Guigu tu became the most sensational painting of 18th-century China, and continued to attract until 1918 – more than 160 attached comments and inscriptions by renowned artists and scholars.
In a bid to expand his horizons, Luo Ping embarked in 1771 on the first of three journeys to Beijing. He was almost forty. The Manchu capital was the designated cultural and intellectual centre of Hongli, the Qianlong emperor (r.1736-1795). He had given instructions in 1772 to have assembled there all works worthy of his definitive imperial library, the Siku quanshu (‘Complete Library of the Four Treasuries). Luo made his debut at an opportune time. A bastion of conservatism, Beijing was hardly the bohemian metropolis of his birthplace. His well-chosen connections made him the toast of the local scholarly elite, with whom he shared cultural, artistic and social aspirations. Apart from painting, his antiquarian pursuits included the ancient tradition of seal carving, which went down well with his new hosts. The weight of Beijing’s past however, left Luo gravitating – as his stylistic repertoire expanded – towards more historical themes.
One phenomenon of late Qing China was the cult of Su Shi (1037-1101), the Northern Song (960-1127) statesman and cultural icon, also known as Su Dongpo, who was later banished to exile. His one single maxim, that painting did not require the likeness of representation, changed forever the appreciation of art. In the 18th century, intense interest in Su Shi was revived; paintings surfaced in his honour, his literary output was scrutinised and countless admirers named their studios after him. The Su Studio was owned by the renowned calligrapher, connoisseur and high court official, Weng Fanggang (1733-1818), also the most notable of Luo Ping’s patrons, who held Su Shi in high esteem. That their friendship went beyond that of patron and artist, is evident in three prominent paintings Luo dedicated to Weng. Painted in deference and respect was Su Studio of Weng Fanggang (1780) to commemorate the birthday of Su Shi, whose portrait is seen hanging on a wall. Another important work, Travel Sites of Immortal Po (1780) features four images, tracing in understated fashion, the failed career of Su Shi; the first to his success as an official and the other three to his distant exiles. Su Shi and the Two Miao (1795), a third work, is an allegory to the transmigration of souls, traced back in time. Weng is depicted as the reincarnation of Su Shi, and Luo is personified by the 11th-century monk painters, Miaoshan and Miaoying. It was specifically executed in the year Weng was demoted, a pointed reference to his failed career paralleling that of Su Shi’s.
Even at sixty, Luo Ping never lost his mastery of the classical landscape canon that was essential to his early stewardship. One unique interpretation of the genre, The Sword Terrace (1794) was dedicated to his friend, Zhang Daowo whose journey from Beijing to Sichuan would navigate the famous Sword Terrace mountain pass en route. Zhang is portrayed as a donkey rider, an allusion to his official status, near the bottom of a mighty composition, whose lofty peaks and winding paths affirm Luo’s full command of the subject.
Luo Ping’s fleeting friendships however left him impoverished in his final years in Beijing. His cadaverous appearance in the anonymous Portrait of Luo Ping at Age Sixty-Four (1797), was the result perhaps of his retreat to Buddhist meditation. A ‘butterfly shoe’ in the painting symbolises the halcyon days of Yangzhou. Luo remained attached to his birthplace and returned to die in 1799. His enduring, if eccentric vision was an effortless ease and fin de siecle daring which freed – for later generations the hitherto unchallenged constraints of tradition. Copying for one was consigned to oblivion, making advances in ‘modern’ Chinese painting, a real possibility.
Until 12 July, Luo Ping (1733-1799): Eccentric Visions is at the Museum Rietberg Zurich, Gablerstrasse 15, 8002 Zurich. www.rietburg.ch
