Small Landscape (Landscape with Scholar’s Hut)

Wang Jiqian was one of the central figures of Chinese painting in the second half of the 20th century. Wang combined a centuries-old lineage of orthodox Chinese landscape painting—designated as the “Southern School” by late 16th-century Chinese connoisseurs and gentlemen-painters—with elements of recent Western art to create a highly original achievement in landscape painting.

In the late 1940s the Chinese-born Wang relocated to New York. He gained first-hand knowledge of the gestural or action painting faction of American Abstract Expressionism (exemplified by the early Kenneth Noland painting in the adjacent modern art gallery), and it is clearly a source of inspiration for his later hybrid ink painting style. By the late 1960s, a few years after he created this mature example of his acclaimed landscapes, the very guardian of orthodox Chinese brushwork of his generation was experimenting with accidental, non-brush applications of inks in developing his compositions.

This process is already in play in this work from 1962, in which Wang has employed colorful diluted washes of wet ink and random spatters of thinned pigment in creating the foundation of mountains and other landscape features in his composition. The semi-random configurations produced in these ways were turned into powerful mountain images through the addition of discrete calligraphic contours, black and colored washes, and descriptive details of recognizable natural and manmade forms. In recognition of Wang’s creative imagination and improvisational technique, scholars have termed these images “mountains of the mind.”