A single rock, a tangle of bamboo, and a distant mountain, all heavy with snow on a frigid winter’s evening. At right, a Chinese poem. The only materials: ink and a touch of gold paint on paper. Yet embedded within this seemingly simple composition is no less than a thousand years’ worth of Chinese and Japanese painting and poetry involving a Japanese painter, seven Zen priests, a courtier, and a smattering of poets and painters from Chinese antiquity.
The artist, Kaihō Yūshō, trained in the academic style of the Kano school, a network of painting studios that held sway over Japanese painting for nearly 500 years. He later rejected the Kano style in favor of freer, increasingly nonrepresentational brushwork.
To depict the foreground boulder, Yūshō applied layers of increasingly dark ink-wash, brushing on each successive layer before the previous one had time to fully dry, resulting in a wet, pooled effect.
What our eyes read as snow- covering the background mountain, weighing down the bamboo, and capping the foreground boulder- is the unmarked paper surface. The remaining paper is covered in a layer of light ink-wash.
Yūshō added several horizontal bands of washy gold paint (kindei) across the surface of his image- suggesting the lingering light of a wintry dusk?
This scene is one of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a popular theme in East Asian painting and poetry celebrating a region in southeast China where the Xiao and Xiang converge and flow into Lake Dongting. The views are not actually of the rivers or even specific locales but the overall beauty of the region's misty environment.
Now mounted as a hanging scroll, this painting was once pasted alongside seven others on an eight-panel folding screen, a format called "oshiebari byōbu” in Japanese. The other seven panels remain in Japanese collections.
The original eight-panel folding screen depicted all of the Eight Views, with each panel featuring a painting by Kaihō Yūshō and a poetic inscription by a different Zen priest. This was the last panel in the series.