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Southern School

For Southern School of Chan Buddhism, see Chan Buddhism § Southern School – Huineng and Shenhui.
Kuo Hsi, Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys, Northern Song Dynasty c. 1070, detail from a horizontal scroll.[1]
Dramatic landscape by the late Ming painter Dong Qichang, who invented the term, with the seals and poems of appreciation of later collectors

The Southern School (Chinese: 南宗画; pinyin: nán zōng huà) of Chinese painting, often called "literati painting" (文人画; wén rén huà), is a term used to denote art and artists which stand in opposition to the formal Northern School (北宗画; běi zōng huà) of painting. The distinction is not geographic, but relates to the style and contents of the works, and to some extent to the position of the artist. Typically, where professional, formal painters were classified as Northern School, scholar-bureaucrats who had either retired from the professional world or who were never a part of it constituted the Southern School.[2]

According to William Watson, while the Northern School contains "the painters who favour clear, emphatic structure in their compositions, with the use of explicit perspective devices", the Southern School "cultivate a more intimate style of landscape bathed in cloud and mist, in which pleasing calligraphic forms tend to take the place of conventions established for the representation of rocks, trees, etc. The painter of the Southern School was interested in distant effects, but his colleague of the Northern School paid more attention to the devices of composition which achieve the illusion of recession, and at the same time more attentive to close realism of detail. ... some artists hover between the two".[3] A more philosophical distinction is that the Southern School painters "were thought to have sought the inner realities and expressed their own lofty natures" while the Northern "painted only the outward appearance of things, the worldly and decorative".[4]

Never a formal school of art in the sense of artists training under a single master in a single studio, the Southern School is more of an umbrella term spanning a great breadth across both geography and chronology. The literati lifestyle and attitude, and the associated style of painting, can be said to go back quite far to early periods of Chinese history. However, classification of the "Southern School" as such, that is, the coining of the term, is said to have been made by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555–1636), who borrowed the concept from Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which also has Northern and Southern Schools.[5]

  1. ^ Sickman, 219–220
  2. ^ Sickman, 334
  3. ^ Watson, 86
  4. ^ Sickman, 334
  5. ^ Sickman, 334
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