Mu Xin: A Wanderer With Roots

By David Ake Sensabaugh

Half Thousand Li of the Ruo River By Mu Xin (b. 1927) Ink and gouache on paper Height 20.3 cm, length 32.7 cm The Rosenkranz Foundation

In 1977, when he was under house arrest, the writer-artist Mu Xin began a suite of paintings to mark his fiftieth birthday. By 1979, painting at night in order to avoid detection, he had completed 33 small landscape pictures. He subsequently grouped them with 66 pages of notes that he had written earlier in the 1970s when he had been confined to an abandoned air-raid shelter turned `people's prison' during the Cultural Revolution. The Prison Notes, written on paper supplied to him for self-criticism and secreted in the lining of his clothing, had miraculously survived his earlier period of imprisonment. He came to think of the two series as a `Tower within a Tower' - an `ivory tower' created while he was incarcerated in his own `Tower of London'. The landscape paintings and the prison notes are practically the only surviving works of the artist that predate his emigration to the United States in 1982. Together they comprise the exhibition The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes, co-organized by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Viewing the paintings is perhaps the best introduction to Mu Xin and is in accord with the artist's own approach. In an interview, when asked directly `Who is Mu Xin?', he responded with a quote by Gustave Flaubert: `Reveal art; conceal the artist.' The paintings are small: each is only about 33 by 20 centimetres. They are executed in ink and gouache on sturdy Western watercolour paper. Some are oriented horizontally, others vertically. When seen in sequence they are like an album of leaves of slightly varying sizes assembled together. They bring to mind the more than forty leaves of Wang Lu's (b. 1333/4) depictions of Mount Hua. Like Wang Lu, Mu Xin is exploring topography, but his topography is cultural as well as geographical.

The first image, entitled Pure Bamboo by a Cool Stream, is a sombre view of bamboo seen across an expanse of water. The dark, almost melancholy mood is created by the use of black and grey tones. The surface of the paper has been rubbed and blotted, the ink smeared, and then the bamboo has been added on a level line through the middle of the composition. The image is reminiscent of a Dutch landscape of the seventeenth century, of Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-82) or Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709). It has the same horizontal orientation of Dutch landscape painting with an overlay of Italian Renaissance perspective. The time of day, the weather, and the appearance of the sky so important to the Dutch masters are also important factors in Mu Xin's work. Like the Dutch painters, the view that Mu Xin presents could be an allegory of transience. It is a stable composition, but the surface of the cool stream is anything but placid.

Another painting, the nineteenth in the series entitled Half Thousand Li of the Ruo River, is also horizontal. The tones are again black and grey. The composition appears to have a high horizon line. With the title in mind, the image takes on the appearance of an expanse of terrain with the Ruo river seen in the distance. A boat appears to be near the shore with several others further out. Like the first landscape, yet another seventeenth century painter is brought to mind, this time Chinese. The high river with just-visible boats recalls album-leaf compositions of Shitao (1642-1707). But this is to read into an image what is only barely there; the technique is definitely not Shitao. There is little apparent brushwork; rather the surface is blotted, sponge-like, and the ink appears to have been deliberately dripped and allowed to run. It is like the decalcomania of the Surrealists. The texture of the surface gives the appearance of having been consumed by decay.

By comparison, Autumn Colors at Jinling, a vertical landscape and the seventh in the series, is decidedly Chinese. It is a mountainside created out of a rubbed surface with a few deft strokes to suggest conformations of the land rising from the bottom of the picture plane. Trees are superimposed one above the other, gradually decreasing in size toward the top. A pagoda surmounts a peak in the distance. Unlike the previous two pictures, the colours are warm, building from greys and browns to the rich ochre of the foliage. It exhibits the same interest in textured surface that one finds in the works of Fu Baoshi (1904-65).

Looking through the whole suite of paintings, the same blending of West and East, East and West, seen in these three landscapes becomes even more apparent. This effortless melding of East and West, past and present is what makes Mu Xin unique among Chinese modernists. The titles Half Thousand Li of the Ruo River and Autumn Colors at Jinling add further layers of cultural meaning. In Han (206 BCE-CE 220) and pre-Han times, the Ruo river, literally `weak water' (ruoshui), was part of the mythical geography of the west. Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, was thought to live beyond the Ruo river, which was so named because it was said that nothing would float in it. Jinling, an ancient name for Nanjing, brings to mind the cultural florescence of the Southern Dynasties (317-589), when artists such as Wang Xizhi (303-79) and Gu Kaizhi (c. 345-c. 406) produced a truly aristocratic art and when ideas of eremitic withdrawal from the world of affairs became more widespread. Such associations, which evoke specific times and places, are typical of the titles in general. For example, Spring Shade at the Su Embankment or Reminiscences of Wangchuan recall the great Song statesman, poet, and painter Su Shi (1036-1101) and the Tang poet and painter Wang Wei (701-61) in addition to season and locale. When reflecting on the images and their associations, it is well to remember that they were created in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution when Mu Xin was under house arrest. They are a testimony to the life of the mind and the will to survive through art.

After having looked at the paintings, the artist, as is his wish, is still `concealed'. The facts of his life are few. He was born Sun Pu in the village of Wuzhen, Zhejiang, in 1927. He came from a prominent family that had business connections in Shanghai, and was thus exposed to the cosmopolitan life of the city from an early age. He recalls having been given a book on Renaissance art by a missionary when he was hospitalized as a child. He received a classical education at home, and during the years of the war against Japan he had the extraordinary experience of being able to use the private library of the famous writer Mao Dun (1896-1981). Mao Dun, a Wuzhen native and a relative by marriage, had a library that contained many masterworks of Western literature along with personally annotated copies of Chinese classics. As a leading intellectual, he had also collected literature of the May the Fourth Movement and of the debates on modernism. Mu Xin went to school on these books, visiting the library as often as he could. His grounding in Chinese and Western literature from this period became the foundation of his later career as a writer. After the war, he chose to study Western painting at the Shanghai Fine Art Institute and later in Hangzhou where he met Lin Fengmian (1900-91). Lin had studied in Europe, and his ideas on the integration of Chinese and modern European art had a profound effect on Mu Xin. It may well have been Lin's pioneering use of ink and gouache that inspired Mu Xin to make the experiments that he did in the Tower Within a Tower series of landscapes. It is also not surprising to find that Mu Xin owned a copy of the 1954 Phaidon Press edition of Ludwig Goldscheider's Leonardo da Vinci. Many of the paintings in the series recall Italian Renaissance landscape and seem to reproduce the quality of photogravure images. Mu Xin communed with Leonardo through the illustrations in the book arriving at his own understanding of the Renaissance master.

Mu Xin has not discussed the pseudonym he has used in recent years. The two characters mu (tree, wood) and xin (heart, mind), also resonate with several concepts in English. The two characters are literally `heartwood', the core of a tree and the finest wood surrounded by the sapwood. It is also suggestive of the heart of a tree that has sunk its roots deep into the earth, in Mu Xin's case perhaps best thought of as the strata of cultures past and present. Such explanations can only suggest something of the creator of these astonishing paintings. Although a wanderer, his roots are deep, and they have provided him with sustenance through times of adversity.