Liang Kai, Poet Strolling by a Marshy Bank
About this video
A speaker examines Liang Kai's thirteenth-century fan painting of a poet strolling by a marshy bank. What looks like empty space is actually a massive overhanging boulder, a metaphor for the poet's psychological weight, linked to the exiled poet Qu Yuan. Liang Kai, who left the court for a Buddhist monastery, plays with the idea that reality may hide behind what we see on the surface.
You'll be able to
- explain how Liang Kai uses unpainted space to suggest a solid boulder.
- explain the metaphor of the overhanging rock and its link to Qu Yuan.
- connect the painting to Buddhist ideas about the illusory nature of appearances.
Key words
- fan painting
- A painting made on a fan shape, later sometimes mounted as an album leaf.
- album leaf
- A single painting mounted as a page in an album.
- composition
- The way the parts of an artwork are arranged.
- metaphor
- Using one thing to stand for another, like a heavy rock standing for heavy feelings.
- illusory
- Not really what it seems; based on illusion.
Transcript
This is a small fan painting by the painter Liang Kai done in the first half of the thirteenth century. Now it’s mounted as an album leaf and depicts a poet strolling on the marshy land, across the river is a little embankment, and a few sketched lines of a distant peak.
It’s a very light, very airy composition. The subject matter is quite conventional, but the way it is treated here is very unusual. Many paintings of this time used lots of empty space, but if you look at it closely, there’s a diagonal across the middle of the composition.
The unpainted part is actually solid; it’s not just mist, it’s actually a massive boulder behind it. I think that there’s a metaphorical dimension to it, that reflects the psychological weight of the stroller beneath it. This kind of composition is very often associated with the poet Qu Yuan, a major court minister very devoted to the nation and to the ruler, but because of some slander he was exiled and he drowned himself in the river to show his loyalty.
And Liang Kai used this overhanging, massive rock above him to show his emotional state. Liang Kai may feel some affinity with the ancient poet. He was briefly a court painter, and then something happened. He left his prestigious position at court and went to live in a Buddhist monastery and he painted there very much in the Buddhist idea of an illusory nature of a phenomenon. He’s playing on the idea about the deceptive nature of what can be seen on the surface, and the reality may be behind the clouds, behind the mist.
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