YÜN SHOU-P’ING

(1633–1690)¹

Yün Shou-p’ing (Cheng-shu; NAN-T’IEN, TUNG-YÜAN TS’AO-YI-SHENG, PAI-YÜN WAI-SHIH, YÜAN-K’O, SHOU-P’ING-TZU), poet, calligrapher, and painter, was a native of Yang-hu, Kiangsu province. (His native place is sometimes given as Wu-chin, which together with Yang-hu constituted Ch’ang-chou prefecture in Ch’ing times.) And his original name was Yün Ko. Together with Wu Li (1632–1718) and “The Four Wangs”—Wang Chien (1598–1677), Wang Shih-min (1592–1680), Wang Hui (1632–1717), and Wang Yüan-ch’i (1642–1718)—Yün is known today as one of the Six Master Painters of the Ch’ing dynasty, and his reputation as a poet is often forgotten for this reason.

Yün Shou-p’ing was a typical product of the artistic milieu of his time. At fourteen, he and an elder brother followed their father, Yün Jih-ch’u (1601–1678), an ardent Ming loyalist and member of the Fushe, into Fukien. The father had disguised himself as a Buddhist monk in order to join the forces loyal to Prince Chu Yi-hai. The following year, 1648, when Chien-ning fell to the Ch’ing army, under the command of General Ch’en Chin (d. 1652), the father was separated from his two sons and presumed both of them dead. Actually, only his older son had been killed, and Yün Shou-p’ing was adopted by the wife of General Ch’en. One day in the famous Ling-yin Monastery in Hangchow, the father chanced to see his son visiting the monastery with his adopted mother. But because General Ch’en was then the governorgeneral of Fukien and Chekiang, the father dared not claim his son; instead, he resorted, with the help of the abbot, to a ruse whereby the governor’s wife was told that the boy would die an early death unless he was tonsured as a monk. Thus, left in the monastery, the son was later reclaimed by his father, whom he supported all his life with earnings from his paintings.

As a filial son of a Ming loyalist, Yün refused to enter the service of the Ch’ing government but spent his time learning to paint and to write poetry. He became the friend of many poets and artists, and developed a special relationship with the painter Wang Hui, under whom he studied the art of landscape painting. Soon he came to acknowledge his friend as a supreme master, one he could never excel. So he abandoned the painting of landscapes for flowers and developed the method known as mo-ku fa, or “the boneless method,” in which genre he won high acclaim. As an exponent of the orthodox school, his friend Wang Hui was known to have painted some rather pedestrian works, and only those landscape paintings of his with the colophon written by Yün Shou-p’ing were treasured as “The Three Perfections” (san-chüeh). Meanwhile, the flower paintings of Yün Shou-p’ing were assiduously collected, even by the Ch’ing emperors, and they are still forged to this day.²

Yün Shou-p’ing’s poems were first printed in 1716, under the title Nan-t’ien shih-ch’ao, as part of this collected works, P’i-ling liu-yi chi. An expanded collection of his poetic works, entitled the Ou-hsiang kuan chi (Collection from the Studio of Teacup Fragrance), was printed in 1844. Most of his poems belong to the variety known as t’i-hua shih (poems inscribed on paintings), and quite a number of them involve metrical variations written in a mixture of three-, five-, and seven-word lines in a single poem. His works are generally characterized by a certain amount of freedom and spontaneity, coupled with the frequent use of synesthetic imagery.

(Irving Lo)

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1. Chao-ying Fang, ECCP, 2:960.

2. Ibid.