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Paths Easy and Daunting

Sun Zhi's mountains, painted on a hanging fan, arc and lunge like waves. ENLARGE
Sun Zhi's mountains, painted on a hanging fan, arc and lunge like waves. Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Los Angeles and New York

Peruse texts on Chinese ink painting and you will inevitably come across Dong Qichang (1555-1636), or Tung Ch'i-ch'ang as some transliterate his name. He is a towering figure in Chinese art history and the pivot around which two exhibitions—one in Los Angeles, the other in New York—turn, even though Dong's work makes only a modest appearance in one and none at all in the other.

A highly regarded calligrapher, Dong devoted a great deal of thought to art criticism in the early 1600s, breathing new life into an existing classification that separated a so-called Northern (read: inferior) from a Southern (superior) school of painting. The former he associated with professional and court paintings, the latter with literati or amateur scholar-artists who looked to the idiomatic brushstrokes of past masters and prized painting as an expression of one's inner self and life force.

The smaller of the two exhibitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Ming Masterpieces From the Shanghai Museum," focuses on the Northern school. It consists of 15 ink paintings by 10 artists from the 15th- to early-16th-century. They feature scenes with detailed architectural settings, engaging portrayals of legendary immortals, and charming depictions of scholars communing with nature. Many of the silk scrolls have darkened with age and this, combined with the gallery's low lighting and dark-brown walls, creates the feeling that we have stumbled into a hidden cache. Which, in some ways, we have. As popular as such works were in their day, Dong dismissed them as romantic, too elaborate and basically commercial—an opinion that shaped the tastes of the Chinese elite from the 17th century onward and, in time, informed that of Western collectors and scholars as well.

As a result, exhibitions of Chinese art sometimes include the occasional "Northern" painting but rarely showcase them exclusively. One of their hallmarks is that they are—or would have been to a member of the rising merchant class—readily accessible. One glance at, say, Wang Zhao's early 16th-century hanging scroll of a man crouched at the base of a rock tying his sandal, and such a viewer would immediately have "seen" the story of Li Tieguai, a handsome young man who learned to transcend time and space through Taoist practices. One day, Li set out to visit the founder of Taoism, Laozi, in the realm of gods and immortals. Since he had to leave his physical body behind, Li asked a student to watch over it, instructing him to cremate it if his spirit had not returned after a week.

Sound plan, except that the student's mother took ill and, eager to be by her side, the student cremated Li's body on day six, leaving the returning spirit no place to perch. Desperate, Li entered the sore-ridden body of a recently deceased beggar—a comedown if ever there was one. But Li accepted his new appearance, and Laozi rewarded him with an unbreakable staff and a gourd of healing potion. These also feature in the painting, making its meaning as clear as its form is engaging.

By contrast, virtually every work in "The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth Century China" warrants its own essay on the composition's literary or political allusions, the lineage of its brushwork, and the personal and historical context in which the painter dipped brush into ink. The composition is freighted with meaning in the same way that virtually every object in a Jan van Eyck painting operated as a symbol. And the brushstrokes themselves can allude to revered masters from past dynasties. These are the kinds of works that Dong Qichang valued and that predominate today in U.S. collections. Organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and currently on view at the Asia Society in New York, the show offers about 100 paintings made over a tumultuous century during which the Han Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) gave way to the foreign Manchurian rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). It was a time when seclusion and retreat, already tropes in Chinese culture, acquired multiple nuances. Some, like Dong—who is represented by two works—left for the countryside to ride out political upheavals. Others, for example, painted scenes with poems and inscriptions that proclaimed a disengagement from worldly affairs while they in fact remained very much in the fray.

Arranged chronologically, the show highlights the remarkable variety within this single theme. In one gallery, Xiao Yuncong's 1657 "Landscape" with its soothing, simplified forms in blue and green is displayed cater-cornered to Cheng Sui's monochromatic "Tall View of Streams and Mountains," where short, vertical strokes infuse a monumental composition with a buzzing sense of life. Elsewhere, mountains shoot straight up an 11-foot-tall hanging scroll by Mi Wanzhong (1570-1628) while, in the late-16th to early-17th century fan hanging beside it, Sun Zhi's mountains arc and lunge like waves. And, grouped in an alcove, 15 works by Bada Shanren (1626-1705) show him to be one of China's most abstruse and inventive artists. In "Crabapple Blossoms" (c. 1684), his branches burst from rock in dramatic brushstrokes, while he depicts "Small Fish" (1695) with almost translucent lines; in "Landscape" (c. 1705) he uses negative space to express the vastness of a mountain range within the confines of a hand-held fan. As for what these all mean—well, that has kept scholars busy for decades. As Hui-shu Lee of the University of California, Los Angeles writes in the catalog, "the viewer must follow a difficult path into a world where access is truly limited."

Such literati painting became emblematic of Chinese culture, and several works in the last gallery attest to Dong's posthumous influence on the taste of Qing art patrons. But two handscrolls displayed as a coda to the show remind us that Dong's classification has its limitations. Li Yin's charming "Flowers of the Four Seasons" (1649) and Xue Wu's exuberant "Wild Orchids" (1601) are by women artists who painted them to entertain and earn money. Along with a handful of others in the show, they complicate Dong's neat professional-amateur divide, as does a 15th- to early-16th-century painting in the Lacma show by Du Jin. In "An Autumn Grove" he depicts a tree pushing up from a rocky landscape, its branches semibare. To the right, close to the painting's edge, a scholar looks out onto a landscape we cannot see. A commercial artist has produced a literati work.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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