Fan Kuan completed Traveling amid Mountains and Gorges about the year 1000. Save that Fan was a commoner who never sat the civil service exams and was still alive during the Tiansheng period (1023-1032) of Emperor Ren Zong's reign, we know little about him for certain. It is conjectured that he was a Shaanxi native, whose life spanned from the middle of the 10th century until early in the 11th.

What's in a name

Fan Kuan, whose original name was Fan Zhongzheng, was a flouter of convention who had a fondness for drink and for Taoism. In Shaanxi dialect, "kuan" was a term used to describe those who were bedraggled or down and out, and locals began to use the term to describe Fan. When Fan himself heard the moniker, instead of being angry, he happily embraced it.

As a native of Shaanxi, the site of such high peaks as Qinlin, Huashan and Taihangshan, Fan grew up surrounded by mountains. "Rather than taking people as your teachers," he liked to say, "why not take things?" To gain insight into the true nature of a landscape, he would often spend ten days or more alone in the mountain forests. Finding companionship from the wild mountains, he was able to convey the boundlessness of nature on a scroll just two meters long and one meter wide.

The first thing one notices in Traveling amid Mountains and Gorges is the huge mountain that covers some two-thirds of the painting. Its craggy rises of stone are capped by dense forest. The work cannot help but inspire a reverence for nature in its beholders.

A stream starts high up in the crevice of a cliff before winding its way down the mountain and bursting forth into the foreground of the painting. While the thin white waterfall occupies only a tiny slice of the painting, it makes the mountain appear even higher and lends vitality to the painting as a whole. Describing Fan Kuan's work, the Song dynasty painter and critic Mi Fu said, "The rivers come out of the depths of dark voids, and you can almost hear the water flowing." From high on the face of a cliff, the water falls into mist, which provides separation between the background of mountains and the foreground of foothills.

In the foothills in the lower right corner of the painting, there are some buildings surrounded by trees. Below them two bearded men drive a train of pack mules along a path. The one in front, who holds a whip, is bare-shouldered, and the one at the back is cooling himself with a small fan-details that tell us it is summer. The painting is able to convey both the grandeur and vastness of the mountains and at the same time capture individual details about the people and mules. Every aspect of the composition is well conceived.

Exploring the essence of nature

As far as most people are concerned, Chinese painting is synonymous with Chinese nature painting. Painters began to produce landscapes in the Tang dynasty, and the genre came to full bloom during the Song. In Fan Kuan's era, landscape painting overtook portraiture to become the mainstream of Chinese painting. Particularly during the Song dynasty, painters would make careful observations of the natural world in an effort to capture "the nature of things"-whether their topic was a sparrow or lotus, or nature's essence as found in a grand landscape. During the Five Dynasties, bird-and-flower painting split into the fugui (rich) school of Huang Quan and the yeyi (wild and leisurely) school of Xu Xi. It is said that the mural that Huang Quan painted of herons on a wall at the Houxu palace would attract real herons. Landscape painting too enjoyed a golden era as the four masters of the Five Dynasties (Qing Hao, Guan Tong, Dong Yuan and Ju Ran) passed the genre's torch to the four giants of the Northern Song (Li Cheng, Guo Xi, Fan Kuan and Mi Fu).

It wasn't as if great landscapes hadn't been produced before the Five Dynasties and Song era, but whereas painters had previously relied on outlining, now they were using two new kinds of brush-strokes to show texture: cun ("wrinkle" strokes) and dian (dots). In Traveling amid Mountains and Gorges Fan Kuan applied delicate and sharp cun to convey with great clarity the cracks in the rocks on the mountain face and the light mist.

Chiang Hsun, an art scholar, has written that the use of cun and dian brushstrokes allowed Chinese artists to diligently reproduce natural forms, both for the overall structure of a landscape and for smaller details like the texture of the soil or a mountainside's exposed rock. Through continual observation, painters were able to use these strokes to unlock the secrets of nature.

The hidden signature

The old painting has nearly made it through a millennium. In earlier periods it was always thought that the artist hadn't signed his name to it. But in 1958, Li Lin-tsan, who was then associate director of the National Palace Museum, discovered Fan Kuan's signature amid the woods in the painting's lower right-hand corner. Li felt that Fan Kuan must have held a sense of man's insignificance in the face of nature and thus intentionally blended himself into the vegetation, not wanting his name to interfere with the harmony of the landscape.

As we take another look at Traveling amid Mountains and Gorges, the travelers appear to be floating by on the river of time. In contrast, we raise our gaze to behold mountains that are millions and millions of years old. This landscape represents an exploration of the nature of the universe, of man's journey through life, and of the space that harbors the myriad things.

During the time of Fan Kuan, artists were neither too close nor too estranged from nature. They neither made dull and painstaking objective facsimiles of the natural world, nor showered their work with their own subjective feelings. Cun and dian brushwork, which were born out of naturalism, would-after Fan Kuan's day-be employed in works that were more and more subjective and abstract. Chinese landscapes, meanwhile, would become enveloped in a rarified atmosphere of quiet meditation, transcending painting to become philosophical expression.

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Amid the vast and majestic mountains, two travelers drive their train of pack mules. Fan Kuan's Travelers amid Mountains and Gorges gives people a sense of man's fleeting insignificance in the grand scheme of things. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)

Amid the vast and majestic mountains, two travelers drive their train of pack mules. Fan Kuan's Travelers amid Mountains and Gorges gives people a sense of man's fleeting insignificance in the grand scheme of things. （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）