I stayed at the Sanhe Hotel, just inside the old town, where the staff was more than willing to arrange a day trip to the famous gorge. The literati believed that painting was an expression of a man's character, of his very essence. I asked her if I could meet them, and the next day I followed Li Xiu home, threading my way through a labyrinthine housing development built into and out of the karst rock and reminiscent of the slums in Fellini's Satyricon. All this they expressed with the most minimal of materials, which they called the Four Precious Things: inkstone, ink stick, brush, and paper. I first discovered their ethereal artwork by accident when I stumbled across a Chinese landscape painting at the British Museum.d.Zhu Yang Hotel 24 Pantao Lu, Yangshuo; 86-773/882-1601; doubles $35. Her granduncle, Li Tian Guan—painter, calligrapher, and poet—awaited us. To get to Yangshuo, fly west to Guilin from Kunming and take a one-hour shuttle bus. Barbara Confino, a New York-based writer and photographer, is a consultant at the Asia Society. The perfect launching pad for an excursion to the gorge is the city of Lijiang, spectacularly situated at the base of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, in Yunnan province. Spotless, if spartan, rooms and a friendly staff. Nothing could have been more at odds with the ethereal terrain surrounding the town, especially at dusk, when the landscape begins to vaporize before your eyes. Everyone seemed young in spirit, if not in fact. That afternoon I took a stroll down Xi Jie, which is lined with Western-style cafés specializing in apple pie and Bob Dylan. It was almost impossible not to strike up acquaintanceships in Yangshuo; it's a haven for the more adventurous breed of tourist: beautiful Danes, massive Australians exuding outback vigor. Yangshuo's best hotel, with Western-style bathrooms and air conditioning. One day in Yangshuo, a receptionist at my hotel named Li Xiu approached me: she had heard that I was interested in landscape painting. Evenings can be noisy, however. In the eleventh century, Mi Fu traveled to Guilin to observe its mountains and rivers. Most of the hotels rent bicycles for a dollar or two a day. He started the visit by copying one of my favorite Du Fu poems for me, then went on to tell how he had been jailed by the Communists for having worked in Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government.
Then a Chinese acquaintance told me about Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan province. The resulting shanshui (literally, "mountain/water") paintings reflect his inclination toward what he called naturalness: they nut insert Company have a simplicity of design and brushstroke, a kind of easy spontaneity. Susanna's has the best food and the longest history, but I came to prefer Serena's Bar, where I quickly established rapport with Ebo, the sweet, helpful owner. And it was a good base from which to explore the countryside, which I did often during the week I spent there. Fishermen balanced on long, slender bamboo rafts, silhouetted against the blue wash of the hills.Susanna's 54 Xi Jie, Yangshuo; no phone; lunch for two $8. That was what led me to Beijing, about to embark on a journey in search of the landscapes portrayed by painters of the Sung dynasty, which prevailed between a. Before leaving China, I wanted to see at least one of the more rugged and heroic landscapes characteristic of the Northern Sung, painted between 960 and 1126. Legend has it that at this spot, a tiger once leapt the 100-foot-wide gorge, leaving his pursuers dumbfounded on the other side. "Everyone in my family is a painter," she told me.RestaurantsLisa's Xi Jie, Yangshuo; no phone; lunch for two $8. Today, the values and techniques that shaped Chinese land- scape painting are finding new life in a post-Mao China rooted in its past yet open to the next Mi Fu. Behind them, a star-filled sky was draped like a theatrical backdrop. Progressing as on a royal barge, we passed ducks, geese, and egrets., Lijiang; 86-888/512-0891; doubles $20. Ever since then, I dreamed of visiting the places that inspired this art. It was a perfect day for a river trip, the weather warm and dry, the sun bright but not searing." I was looking for an old China, a China of exquisite refinement, of spare, breathtaking elegance—the China of the poets and painters. I spent my first day poking around town, determining to set out on my landscape quest the next. Their wildness and grandeur brought to mind the paintings of Fan K'uan, the great Northern Sung artist whose monumental style is the antithesis of the intimate Southern Sung technique. Good banana pancakes, apple pie, and basic Chinese food. HotelsSanhe Hotel 4 Jishan Rd. Still, the government is rebuilding it in traditional style, as dictated by law. Using the dot technique subsequently named for him, Mi Fu conveyed the soft qualities typical of Guilin landscapes. I left him busily editing a book-length manuscript of his poems, and I carried away the conviction that modern China has its ancient sages still.Serena's Café Xi Jie, Yangshuo; no phone; lunch for two $10. I awoke the next morning in Yangshuo, disappointed to find it tacky, commercial, cast in concrete. Here was precisely the sort of scene that had inspired the shanshui painters, giving tangible form to the Taoist idea that nature is a cosmic, living force in which humanity occupies merely a foothold. Yet he is kind and patient—not just to me but to the stream of guests who visit daily, soliciting his advice on their poems, their paintings, their lives.d. Mr. From there you can take either a 45-minute flight to Lijiang or, as I did, an overnight bus, which has reclining seats and is quite comfortable. Although he worked in the period between the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties, Mi Fu painted gentle, misty landscapes, precipitating the soft style that Southern literati later adopted. From Beijing I would fly some 900 miles south to Guilin in Guangxi province, reputed among the Chinese to possess the "most beautiful mountains and rivers under heaven.. In the company of a sturdy Irishman, an even sturdier Australian, and, sturdiest of all, an Austrian clad in lederhosen, I departed the next morning by boat for a day trip to the Guilin countryside. Heading west out of town, the road winds through green terraced fields, past water buffalo, peasants in Mao blue, and stands selling grapefruit resembling huge drop pearls.
Though the city of Guilin holds a great place in art history, I'd been advised to avoid it and go directly to Yangshuo, a small town about an hour and a half by bus down the Li River, where the hills are more majestic, the prices more reasonable, the merchants less venal. I was relieved to discover that the commercialism of Yangshuo has not extended to the river landscape, which is still pristine: clear water, uncluttered riverbanks lined by delicate willow trees and stone walls., Lijiang; 86-888/512-8888; doubles $45. Sihai Hotel 73 Xi Jie, Yangshuo; 86-773/882-4070; doubles $13.Fly into Kunming, a pleasant, midsize city in Yunnan province, southwest of Beijing. Li spent most of his days in the unheated front room of the apartment, working and receiving friends. We descended the long, slippery path, then there we were: at the bottom of the chasm, white water whipping about us as the sunlight slanted sideways overhead. Li is still denied a government pension, so he lives on the small income provided by his paintings. 618907) remain. Our boat was large enough to pick up steam when necessary, small enough to give us a sense of being close to the water. And some of the stone bridges and adobe-and-tile houses dating to the Tang dynasty (a. The wondrous karst hills loomed on either side. Famous for great Tibetan coffee and video screenings. By not filling up his canvas, the painter had left room for me—as, I later discovered, he had intended.June 04, 2009 One of my most cherished, if illogical, fantasies is that I was one of those Chinese scholar-painters in a former life. Mr. While most travelers visit the famous Three Gorges in Hubei province, I had heard enough tales about water pollution and overcrowding to know that this was not the experience I sought. The crowds, dust, and noise of the capital could not have been further from the spirit I was after. Bands of skinny-dipping boys hallooed to us from shore, saluting us with a wiggle of their bare bottoms. At last I felt myself moving in a Mi Fu dream. Well-run and clean, but bathrooms are shared. They merely used earthly images to embody thoughts and feelings.Grand Lijiang Hotel Xinyi St." The East-West dialogue that began with the Post-Impressionist exploration of the flat, patterned space of Japanese prints and continued with the Abstract Expressionists' interest in the spontaneity of the Chan-Zen "flung-ink" tradition remains alive in China, where painters incorporate and discard Western techniques with equal abandon. 960 and 1279. Mi Fu was one of the greatest and best-known of these literati in Chinese history, as well as a calligrapher, art collector, and sometime imperial administrator. I was inside the painting, part of its atmosphere. According to a shanshui painter I met in Nanjing, the younger generation looked to Western art in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution; but having satisfied their curiosity, many have since returned to the Chinese tradition. Lijiang's newest hotel is sleek, attractive, even verging on luxurious. My guide and I hiked about half a mile on the dirt road that skirted its top, the black stone of the mountains towering over us. It carried me aloft from a damp, dreary English day into a land of mountains and rivers and, most important, empty space. He disdained the elaborate polish typical of court painters, aspiring instead to a technique that seemed fresh and unstudied. Still, Yangshuo is inexpensive and congenial, with enough approximations of Western food to satisfy the tentative traveler's palate. As a surprise coda to my shanshui journey, I had the good fortune to arrive in Hong Kong in time to see a major exhibition of 20th-century Chinese painting titled "Tradition and Innovation. A menu similar to Susanna's, but the owner will cook things to order. Starting with the Sung dynasty, there were two kinds of artists in China: the professionals, who were trained to produce academic paintings for the emperor, and the gentleman scholars, or literati, who wrote poetry and painted as a means of personal expression. As my bus rattled to its destination, I caught my first glimpse of the famous karst hills: strange, massive shapes lit by a stunningly full orange moon. In a single revelatory moment I had an entirely new aesthetic experience. Before it was devastated by an earthquake in February of 1996, Lijiang had the only well-preserved old town left in all of China. Restricted to monochromatic ink wash, the shanshui painter developed an elegant repertoire of brushwork, from the axe texture (a kind of slashing stroke) to the "Mi dot" ink blob (similar to the dots used in pointillism)
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