Xia Gui
Pioneered half-empty landscape composition
Xia Gui, from Lin'an (Hangzhou), lived during an unknown period, styled Yuyu, was a famous Chinese landscape painter and one of the Four Masters of the Southern Song, on par with Ma Yuan, Liu Songnian, and Li Tang. In the Southern Song painting world, he and the famous painter Ma Yuan were collectively called 'Ma-Xia'. He never held an official post, but he did work at the Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy as a court painter. Xia Gui started out learning figure painting, but soon switched to landscapes, which became his main focus. He studied the landscape techniques of Li Tang, Fan Kuan, Mi Fu, and Mi Youren, mainly building on the foundations of Li Tang and Fan Kuan. In terms of brushwork, Xia Gui favored a style that was strong, bold, and powerful, yet also showed a beautiful sense of fluidity and richness. In landscape painting techniques, there’s a texture method called 'di li ba ding cun', which Xia Gui was the first to use. This method involves first laying a base with light ink, then, depending on the wetness, using dark ink to create texture, achieving an ideal blend of light and dark ink and giving the painting a rich sense of layers. Xia Gui is especially praised for his composition style. He often only painted on part of the canvas, leaving the other part empty. The advantage of this is that it emphasizes the focal point and gives the viewer a stronger sense of immersion. People call this approach 'half of Xia', which, along with Ma Yuan's 'one corner of Ma', is famous in the Southern Song painting scene. Many of Xia Gui’s works have survived, and some of the famous ones include the long scroll 'Clear Distance in the Verdant Mountains'. There are also other hanging scrolls and square paintings, such as 'Endless Vista in the Stream and Mountains', 'Spectacular View in the Stream and Mountains', 'Mountains and Rivers in Harmony', 'Snowy Mountain', 'Chatting by Pine Cliffs', 'Clear Distance in the Verdant Mountains', and more. Most of these works are collected by well-known institutions like the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei.