Guo Xi
Master of monumental Northern Song landscapes
Guo Xi (1023—around 1085), courtesy name Chunfu, was from Wenyang in Henan during the Northern Song dynasty (today's Wen County, Henan). He was a painter and a theory writer on painting. Born into a common family, he traveled in search of inspiration in his early years, then later joined the imperial painting academy, eventually holding the post of Hanlin Academy attendant director. He studied landscape painting under Li Cheng, and his representative works include 'Early Spring' and 'Studying Rocks and Distant Views,' which are kept in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Palace Museum in Beijing respectively. His theoretical work 'Lofty Ambitions in Forests and Streams' summarizes the principles of landscape painting creation. In the first year of Emperor Shenzong’s Xining era (1068), he was summoned to the imperial painting academy to oversee palace mural projects. His early painting style was meticulous and refined; later, he combined Li Cheng’s techniques with his own innovations, creating brush techniques like 'rolled cloud strokes' and 'crab-claw branches.' In his later years, his brushwork became more vigorous, and he excelled at painting large-scale landscapes. He proposed the compositional theory of 'high distance, deep distance, and level distance,' emphasized representing the scenery of different seasons and changes in spatial layers, and advocated extracting artistic meaning through careful observation of nature. During the Yuanfeng era, he was very active in creating art, with many works depicting the shifting clouds and mountains, and he was often mentioned alongside Li Cheng(李成) as the 'Li-Guo'(李郭) duo.