Jing Hao

Jing Hao
Born	c.855 Qinshui, Shanxi, China
Died	915
Known for	Painting
Movement	Northern Landscape style

Jing Hao (Wade–Giles: Ching Hao, also known as Hongguzi) (c. 855-915) was a Chinese landscape painter and theorist of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in Northern China. As an artist, he is often cited along with his pupil, Guan Tong, as one of the most critical figures in the development of the style of monumental landscape painting which appeared near the end of the Five Dynasties period. Later this style would come to be known as the Northern Landscape style; it strongly influenced the tradition of Northern Song painters. As a theorist, he is the person most responsible for codifying the theories underlying the work of later painters, and his treatises on painting and aesthetics continued to serve as textbooks for Northern Song artists more than a century after his death.

Jing Hao began his artistic career during the later years of the Tang Dynasty. Initially he was influenced by the emphasis on monumental landscapes of Tang painters. Their goal to express the grandeur and harmony of nature was exemplified by the established masters such as Wang Wei. Following the collapse of the Tang, Northern China descended into a period of political chaos—the Five Dynasties—in which five separate ruling lines established themselves and were destroyed by factional infighting in rapid succession. An aversion to the turmoil of his era led Jing Hao to retire to seclusion in the northern Taihang Mountains. Here he spent the greater portion of his life in the pursuit of artistic development.

Taihang is an isolated region of dense cloud forests punctuated by jagged peaks. These unique geographical characteristics made the region particularly suited to Jing's developing interest in ink wash techniques. Jing was one of the earliest Chinese artists to employ ink washes (yongmo) to simulate depth and atmospheric perspective. Building on the approach initially pioneered by Tang painters such as Xiang Rong, Jing wrote that the principal aim of the yongmo technique was to “distinguish higher and lower [parts of objects] with a gradation in ink tones, and represent clearly shallowness and depth, making them appear natural as if they had not been done with a brush.” Of Xiang himself, Jing wrote that the earlier artist had “attained the secret of mysterious truth only through the use of ink wash”, but criticized Xiang for his lack of definition, lamenting that Xiang had “no bone in his brushwork”. Jing departed from such an approach by employing in his landscapes a mixture of atmospheric ink washes and bold brush strokes to accurately transcribe the Shanxi landscapes in which he worked. This technique, called cun fa, would characterize all of his major works as well as those of other artists who would study his work in later years.

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