Mi Fu

Mi Fu (, also given as Mi Fei, 1051–1107 CE) was a Chinese painter, poet and calligrapher who was born in Taiyuan during the Song dynasty. He became known for his style of painting misty landscapes. This style would be deemed the "Mi Fu" style and involved the use of large wet dots of ink applied with a flat brush. His poetry was influenced by Li Bai and his calligraphy by Wang Xizhi.

Mi Fu is regarded as one of the four greatest calligraphers of the Song dynasty, alongside Su Shi, Hung Tingjian and Cai Xian. His style is derived from calligraphers in earlier dynasties, although he developed unique traits of his own. His son, Mi Youren, also became a well known painter. He followed his father's artistic style, adopting his use of large dots of wet ink, a technique later nicknamed "Mi Dots".

As a personality, Mi Fu was noted as an eccentric; including a mania of cleanliness. At times, he was deemed "Madman Mi" due to his obsession with collecting stones. He was also known to be a heavy drinker. His son, Mi Youren, also became a well known painter following in his father's artistic style.

Biography


According to Yao Weiyuan, Mi Fu was a fifth-generation descendant of Mi Xin, a Later Zhou and early Song dynasty general from the Kumo Xi tribe that descended from the Xianbei. However, according to other scholars, his family probably was of distant Muslim Sogdian heritage. His surname "Mi" is of Sogdian origin, and he was born after a long period in which the Sogdians intensively migrated deep into China and established flourishing communities there, and he referred to himself as "descendant of huozheng," "fire priest" (according to Jiang Boqin), having a seal with this inscribed on it. However, other Chinese scholars reject Jiang's interpretation, saying that huozheng referred to "Fire virtue" and was related to the Zhao family, and that he had other seals claiming different things.

Mi Fu showed early signs of interest in arts and letters, as well as unusual memory skills. His mother worked as a midwife and later as a wet-nurse, looking after the Emperor Shenzong.

Due to his familial connections to the imperial family, Mi Fu was allowed the privilege of living in the royal palaces. Here, he began his career as Reviser of Books, Professor of Painting and Calligraphy in the capital, Secretary to the Board of Rites, and Military Governor of Huaiyang. He openly criticized conventional regulations of the time, causing him to move between jobs frequently.

Mi Fu collected old writings and paintings as his family wealth gradually diminished. Over time, the value of his collection grew. He also inherited some of the calligraphy in his collection. His collection was arranged in two parts, one of which was kept secret (or shown only to a select few) and another which would be shown to visitors.

In his later years, Mi Fu became very fond of Holin Temple (located on Yellow Crane Mountain (黃鶴樓)). He later asked to be buried at its gate. Today the temple is gone, but his grave remains.

Historical background
After the rise of landscape painting, creative activities followed which were of a more general kind and included profane, religious figure, bird, flower and bamboo paintings besides landscapes. It was all carried out by men of high intellectual standards. To most of these men, painting was not a professional occupation but only one of the means by which they expressed their intellectual reactions to life and nature in visible symbols. Poetry and illustrative writing were in a sense even more important to them than painting and they made their living as more or less prominent government officials if they did not depend on family wealth. Even if some of them were skilled at ink painting and calligraphy, they avoided the fame and position of professional artists and became known as "gentleman-painters." Artistic occupations such as calligraphy and painting were seen as leisure activities from official duties or practical occupations. Nevertheless, the foundation of their technical mastery was in writing and calligraphy, which allowed them to transmit their thoughts with the same easiness in symbols of nature as in conventional characters. Their art became therefore a very intimate kind of expression, or idea-writing as it was called in later times. The beauty of this art was indeed closely connected to the visible ease with which it was produced, but which after all could not be achieved without intense training and deep thought.

Mi Fu was one of the highly gifted gentleman-painters. His talent for artistic observation, his sense of humor, and his literary ability helped him establish a prominent place for himself among Chinese art historians. His contributions to the field remain in high regard due to their basis in direct, first-hand observation as opposed to relying on what he had heard or learned from his forerunners. Mi Fu would often express his own views even when they differed from prevailing beliefs or official opinions. Art historians still maintain interest in his notes on painting and calligraphy–these writings are believed to be spontaneous expressions of his own observations and independent ideas which aid in the characterization of Mi Fu and the other artists he would write about.

Art


Mi Fu is considered one of the most important representatives of the Southern School (南宗畫) of landscape painting. Presently, many works are attributed to Mi Fu and most of them represent a type or pictorial style which also existed in later centuries. The accuracy of their attribution remains in question due to difficulties in verification. Mi Fu is now remembered as a skilled calligrapher and an influential art critic and writer rather than a skilled landscape painter.

For Mi Fu writing or calligraphy was intimately connected with the composing of poetry or sketching. It required an alertness of mind and spirit, which he thought was best achieved through the enjoyment of wine. Through this he reached a state of excitement rather than drunkenness. A friend of Mi Fu, Su Shih (蘇軾) admired him and wrote that his brush was like a sharp sword handled skillfully in fight or a bow which could shoot the arrow a thousand li, piercing anything that might be in its way. "It was the highest perfection of the art of calligraphy", he wrote.

Other critics claimed that only Mi Fu could imitate the style of the great calligraphers of the Six Dynasties. Mi Fu's son testified that his father always kept some calligraphic masterpiece of the Tang or the Qin period in his desk as a model. At night he would place it in a box at the side of his pillow.

According to some writings, Mi Fu did most of his paintings during the last seven years of his life, and he himself wrote that "he chose as his models the most ancient masters and painted guided by his own genius and not by any teacher and thus represented the loyal men of antiquity."

Paintings currently attributed to Mi Fu represent ranges of wooded hills or cone-shaped mountain peaks rising out of layers of mist. Bodies of water and clusters of dark trees may appear in the foreground of his compositions. One of the best known examples of the "Mi Fu style" is a small picture in the Palace Museum known as Spring Mountains and Pine-Trees. It is in the size of a large album-leaf and there is a poem at the top that was said to be added by Emperor Gaozong of Song.

Some paintings attributed to Mi Fu are likely imitations. They may be from Southern Song period, or possibly from the Yuan period, when some of the leading painters freely utilized the manner of Mi Fu for expressing their own ideas. It is likely that many are from the later part of Ming period when a cult of Mi Fu was started, its followers viewing him as the most important representative of the Southern School. Mi Fu himself had seen many imitations and he saw how wealthy amateurs spent their money on great names rather than on original works of art. He wrote that they "place their pictures in brocade bags and provide them with jade rollers as if they were very wonderful treasures, but when they open them one cannot but break out into laughter."



Mi Fu's own manner of painting has been characterized by writers who knew it through their own observation or through hearsay. It is said that he always painted on paper which had not been prepared with gum or alum (alauns) instead of silk, and he never painted on the wall. In addition to using a brush when painting with ink, Mi Fu also utilized paper sticks or sugar cane from which the juice had been extracted or a calyx (kauss) of a lotus.

Mi Fu was principally a landscape painter, though he also created portraits and figure paintings. It is likely that he spent more time studying samples of ancient calligraphy and paintings than he spent producing work of his own. His book, Huashi ("History of Painting"), contains practical hints as to the proper way of collecting, preserving, cleaning and mounting pictures.

General references

 * Barnhart, R. M. et al. (1997). Three Thousand years of Chinese Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07013-6. p. 373.
 * Rhonda and Jeffrey Cooper (1997). Masterpieces of Chinese Art. Todtri Productions. ISBN 1-57717-060-1. p. 76.
 * Xiao, Yanyi, "Mi Fu". Encyclopedia of China (Arts Edition), 1st ed.