Gu Kaizi

Chinese

Gu Kaizhi (348–409), courtesy name Changkang, childhood name Hutou, was an ethnic Han from Jinling Wuxi (now Wuxi in Jiangsu Province). He was an outstanding painter, art theorist, and poet of the Eastern Jin dynasty, later revered as the 'Founder of Chinese Painting' and the 'Founder of Landscape Painting.' Together with Cao Buxing, Lu Tanwei, and Zhang Sengyou, he is known as one of the 'Four Masters of the Six Dynasties.' Gu Kaizhi came from a southern gentry family. In his early years, he served as an aide to Huan Wen and Yin Zhongkan, and during the Yixi era, he was promoted to Tongzhi Sanqi Changshi. He once wrote the "Eulogy on the Tusks" for Liu Yu's northern expedition against Southern Yan. He was highly learned and versatile, skilled in poetry, prose, and calligraphy, and especially excelled at painting. He was known at the time for his 'three perfections': unmatched talent, painting, and obsession. The famous scholar Xie An once appraised his artistic achievements as 'unseen by the world since the beginning of man.' Gu Kaizhi advocated a painting approach that 'conveys the spirit through portraying, all seen in the eyes,' focusing on capturing a person's essence through the fine details and subtle physiological features of the eyes. When painting Pei Kai's portrait, he even added three tiny hairs on his cheek, making viewers immediately sense a lively spirit. His brushwork was meticulous, with lines that were firm and continuous like silkworm threads, and together with Lu Tanwei, they were referred to as "Gu-Lu" in art history, belonging to the "dense style," as opposed to the "sparse style" represented by Zhang Sengyou and Wu Daozi. Gu Kaizhi broke with the Han dynasty tradition of painting primarily to promote moral values, expanding the scope of figure painting by emphasizing scholars' words, demeanor, and spirit, thereby broadening the artistic vision of traditional painting. He left behind three treatises on painting: "On Painting," "Appreciation of Wei and Jin Master Works," and "Record of Painting Yuntai Mountain," putting forward core ideas like 'moving thought to marvelous perception' and 'capturing spirit through form,' which laid an important theoretical foundation for the development of traditional Chinese painting. Gu Kaizhi's work covered a wide range of subjects, but all surviving works are later copies, with the most representative being "Nymph of the Luo River," "Admonitions of the Court Ladies," and "Carving the Qin." "Nymph of the Luo River," adapted from Cao Zhi's famous poem, is one of China's ten greatest surviving paintings; the Tang dynasty copy of "Admonitions of the Court Ladies" was originally kept in the Qing palace, looted by the British army in 1900, and is now in the British Museum, with a Southern Song copy held in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Gu Kaizhi's artistic status has been widely recognized since the Tang dynasty. Art historian Zhang Huaigan once commented, 'Zhang Sengyou gets the flesh, Lu Tanwei gets the bones, Gu Kaizhi gets the spirit.' His creative philosophy and style became a classic, deeply influencing the development of Chinese painting.