Among the Fragrant Snowy Mountains of Lan Garden

The painter and calligrapher Mi Wanzhong was a scholar-official who served the imperial court in Beijing and worked in the style of the famous 11th-century literatus master Mi Fu, with whom Mi Wanzhong claimed distant family ties. This hanging scroll is not a depiction of a particular geographic location, but is instead a kind of aesthetic demonstration piece of the amateur painting tradition current in late Ming China (1368–1644).

In the upper half of the image, Mi Wanzhong paints a sequence of three cone-shaped mountain peaks in wet, rounded brushstrokes. Below, the upper stories of two buildings emerge from the surrounding mists. In the lower half of the painting, five gnarled pines near a stream stretch upward, their branches twisting and turning under the force of Mi’s sharp, inky strokes. The lively contrasts of scale, soft and sharp brushstrokes, and range of ink tones all contribute to the vividness of the painted image.

In this work, Mi Wanzhong plays on the slight eccentricity of the elongated shapes of the mountain peaks and pines, and the peculiarity of the orientation and placement of the trees reaching into the clouds. Even the branches of the pines are exaggerated in their shapes and the mists are strange in their configuration. Such idiosyncrasies constitute Mi’s personal adaptation of a highly traditional art form. For Mi Wanzhong and other Chinese painters of his generation, landscape painting forms shift away from realism towards a new understanding of nature and its representation in art. For this group of artists, it was the vivacity rather than the appearance of nature that was significant.

Artist’s Inscription Inscribed on the fifteenth day of the twelfth lunar month of 1621 for Ming Zhang [Fan Jingwen] among the fragrant snowy mountains of Lan Garden. [signed] Mi Wanzhong