Mount Nanping

Huang Binhong was a highly accomplished artist, collector, connoisseur, and educator who combined deep knowledge and understanding of China’s artistic past with a determination to modernize the Chinese painting tradition.  Drawing from ancient aesthetic values, Huang Binhong focused on the relationship between painting and calligraphy, emphasized the necessity of capturing the spirit of his painting subjects, and was deeply interested in the expressive qualities of ink.  This painting depicts the Nanping mountains near Hangzhou after rain and drew, in part, on Huang’s frequent travels.  It was created in 1952, when the artist was 89 years old, still robust in energy but suffering increasingly from cataracts.  Living and teaching in Hangzhou at the time, Huang’s paintings show a new experimental phase.  As we see in this landscape of the Nanping mountains, as well as his Dry Brush Landscape 渴笔山水图 in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum from the same year, Huang Binhong explored the effects of building up his painting with numerous layers, so that the composition consists of many closely rendered mountain forms that are created with many small strokes of wet ink.   The result is a unique style of dense imagery that both depicts a dynamic landscape and explores the rich visual impact of ink.