dc.description.abstract | Tai Chin (1388-1462) was one of the leading painters of the Che School. In art history, Tai Chin was proficient in paintings of landscapes, figures, birds and flowers, bamboo and rocks, etc. However, according to earlier Tai Chin studies, we can merely establish the fact that Tai Chin was good at landscape painting and clarify the style used by Tai Chin in his landscape paintings. Furthermore, those earlier studies still did not provide a clear interpretation of Tai Chin’s painting background and did not explain the reason why Tai Chin had been to the nation’s capital several times throughout his life. One of the aims of this thesis is to study the early life of Tai Chin. By studying Tai Chin’s dealings with the tax system of the Ming dynasty, we can understand why Tai Chi excelled at painting Daoist and Buddhist figures. In addition, by examining Tai Chin’s extant paintings, we may be able to recognize the iconography and the style of Tai Chin’s Daoism and Buddhism painting.
The Six Patriarch of Ch’an, preserved in the museum of Liaoning Province in China, presents portrait series of the first six Ch’an patriarchs and their disciples which indicates the patriarchs were passing on the Law to their disciples. In the portrait series, Bodhidharma was passing on the Law to Hui-k’o. Hui-k’o was passing on the Law to Seng-ts’an. Seng-ts’an was passing on the Law to Tao-hsin. Tao-hsin was passing on the Law to Niu-t’ou Fa-jung. Hung-jen was passing on the Law to Hui-neng. Hui-neng was passing on the Law to his disciple. The Six Patriarch of Ch’an is one of the representations of Passing-on-the-Law-and-Selecting-Successor type of painting, which proclaims the authority of the Ch’an patriarchs selected as the subject of the painting. There are three pieces of Passing-on-the-Law-and-Selecting-Successor paintings from the Song dynasty: the Six Patriarhs of the Bodhidharma Sect, the Illustrated Scroll of the Transmission of the Law in the True School by the Invested Patriarchs, and the Long Roll of Buddhist Images’ patriarchs section. The three paintings are different in their formatting, the selection of the patriarchs, and the style of painting. However, those paintings indicate that Passing-on-the-Law-and-Selecting-Successor type of painting had gradually become an established theme.
Tai Chin’s the Six Patriarch of Ch’an was in mostly the same composition of those Passing-on-the-Law-and-Selecting-Successor type of paintings in the Song dynasty: every pictorial section of patriarch passing on the Law to his disciple is in chronological order, generation by generation. It means that Tai Chin was familiar with the theme and the genre of Buddhism painting. Nevertheless, by transforming the setting and the gesture of the figures in the painting, Tai Chin changed the symbolic portraits of patriarchs into narrative paintings, which tells particular stories of the Transmission of the Lamp. What’s more, by comparing with the remaining paintings of the Buddhist paintings from the Chekiang area, we can prove that Tai Chin’s drapery style and landscape style are considerably connected to Chekiang tradition.
Moreover, in the Chung K’uei’s Excursion at Night, in Palace Museum, Beijing, and the Lohan, in National Palace Museum, Taipei, Tai Chin presented the same techniques of using the similar pictorial schemes from earlier tradition and his old pattern was transformed into new styles. However, the “axe-cut” strokes and ink wash of the surfaces of rocks and trees, and the broad strokes of the drapery lines for the figures suggested that the two paintings were from the late period of Tai Chin’s life.
To sum up, besides Tai Chin’s well-known achievement in landscape paintings, this thesis proves his invincible talent in Daoist and Buddhist paintings. | en_US |