When the artist begins to speak The Linquan Gaozhi: a tale of a painter and his son 1000 years ago

For this year’s seminar (AY 2018), my students and I have been reading a Chinese treatise on painting known as the Linquan Gaozhi (“The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams”). The Linquan Gaozhi is a collection of words of Guo Xi, a court painter of the Northern Song period, that was compiled by his son, Guo Si. The survival of Guo Xi’s masterpiece Zao Chun Tu [Early Spring] (1072, held by the National Palace Museum, Taipei) likely makes him the oldest artist from anywhere in the world whose words and actual works of art are both extant today. While I have personally read the Linquan Gaozhi any number of times since my graduate student days, reading it again now, I have found myself entranced by the appeal of its contents.

Guo Xi moved to the capital to become a court painter late in his life, and the Linquan Gaozhi contains a detailed record of his spoken remarks on the way of art as well as specific instructions on how to paint shan sui (“mountain water”) landscapes. Meanwhile, it was in fact his son whose destiny was forever altered by Guo Xi’s move to the capital, for it was there that Guo Si rose to unexpected prominence as a government official. It is in this context that Guo Si conceived the plan to compile and publish his father’s words. At a time when the concept of the “artist” was yet unknown, the arts placed more emphasis on embellishing the lives of patrons more than the individuality of a given painter. Nevertheless, the figure of his father, Guo Xi, as portrayed in the Linquan Gaozhi represents a complete departure. Guo Si, who as a Northern Song government official had joined the ranks of the cultured classes, clearly describes his father as an educated man of culture.

At the emperor’s decree, Guo Xi had been tasked with painting a vast number of murals on the walls of the newly built palace. The Linquan Gaozhi describes how he received special recognition from the emperor for these magnificent works, and how their creator would spend days in silent contemplation before undertaking a mural, at which point, having prepared himself mentally, he would produce entire paintings in a single burst of creation. The actual Guo Xi would likely have been harried by his workload day in and day out, without the leisure for such introspection. However, Guo Si describes his father’s works over and over as being imbued with spirit, insisting that they are not mere journeyman pieces but rather the “works” of an artist of the highest cultural refinement. Yet for all that Guo Si was proud of his father, he may have had a profound complex about being the son of a mere craftsman. Thus it was that Guo Si portrayed his father Guo Xi (with some embellishment, perhaps) as an ideal cultural figure – a parent worthy of his own career in government officialdom.