IV. The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

       Painting in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms had continued Tang Dynasty’s style and charm, and taken on an effulgent panorama. Landscape, figure, and bird-and-flower paintings were all blossoming.

       Figure painting had changed from Tang Dynasty’s meticulous, bold, and magnanimous style to a sparse, graceful and leisure, and simple and elegant vogue, its expression was more abundant. There were many different images in painting of beautiful women, ones that are extant such as <Palace Concert> and <Life in the Palace> were representative works. At the time there also appeared in large quantity paintings that depict lives of literati and scholars, ones that are extant include Wei Xian’s <The Noble Scholar>, Zhou Wenju’s <To Play Chess with Friends>, Wang Qihan’s <Collating Texts>, Zhao Yan’s <Eight Worthies Strolling the Spring>, and Gu Hongzhong’s <Han Xizai Gives a Banquet>. Ink and wash figure painting technique rose gradually in the Five Dynasties period, the brushstrokes were sparse, broad, bold, and unconstrained, started the school of freehand figure painting of the later age.

       When landscape painting’s development reached Five Dynasties, the ink and wash school, which started in Tang Dynasty, constantly got rid of the stale and brought forth the fresh, and gradually became the mainstream, and formed two branches - the northern school and the Jiangnan (south of the Yangtze River) school. Jing Hao represents the northern landscape painting school, he took a panoramic composition to present the magnificent and grandiose northern mountains and rivers, he also originated the landscape painting technique of “there’s brush, there’s ink”. His work that is extant is <Mount Kuanglu>, which had a rigorous structure, clear gradation, and plentiful changes, was a vigorous and grandeur masterpiece. Another just as known artist of the northern school was Guan Tong, whose works that are extant include <Waiting for Crossing the Stream> and <Travelers at the Mountain Pass>. The most important artist of the Jiangnan School of landscape painting was Dong Yuan. In accordance with the features of water and mountains in Jiangnan, after assimilating both the techniques of blue-and-green landscape and ink and wash landscape, he invented a new technique which combines ink and wash with color, as well as pointillism and crosshatching, thus made his works full of the moist and graceful features of the misty and rainy Jiangnan mountains and waters. Dong Yuan’s masterpieces include <The Xiao and Xiang Rivers> and <Summer Mountains>. Monk Ju Ran was another celebrity of this school.　

       In the flower-and-bird painting realm, Huang Quan and Xu Xi represented the two big schools of the Five Dynasties. Huang Quan’s brushstrokes were very fresh and slender, and only washed with soft color. His extant work is <Studies from Nature: Birds and Insects>. Xu Xi liked to paint grass and wild duck, flower and bamboo, wild bird and insect, fish and crab, vegetable and herb, as well as tree branch in four seasons, bore a quite different style from that of Huang Quan’s. Their contemporaries had a saying “Huang’s from a wealthy family while Xu Xi led a wild and leisure life.”