Red Jade and Coral

From She-hsien in Anhui province, Cheng-I was a close friend of the famous Anhui artist, Ch'eng Sui (1605-1691). A landscape painter and also inkmaker, he wrote a two-volume history of ink. His seal, impressed here, refers to the thirty-six peaks of Huang-shan (Yellow Mountain), the magnificent Anhui range that inspired so many paintings and poems. Deceptively modern in its impact, the construction of this stark composition recalls the reductionist compositions of the Anhui masters. The brushwork, however, is more calligraphic with its long, moist, modulated brushstrokes than is most Anhui dry-line painting. Red Jade and Coral; a tall angular rock formation with red fu-sang flowers (red hibiscus), can be read as either a towering mountain peak or an oversized garden rock. Ch'eng's prose inscription states that he combined the brushwork in a painting he saw by Hsu-wei (1521-93) called White Rock, with a work by Ch'en Hung-shou (1599-1652) of red fu-sang fruit. He states, Here I have combined my imitations of these two works into this painting of Red Jade and Coral