Learning from Mount Hua: A Chinese Physician's Illustrated Travel Record and Painting Theory.

• Author: Lachman, Charles

Until very recently, Chinese art history encompassed few monographic treatments of individual artists, despite the fact that such works have traditionally served as the basic unit of art-historical analysis in many other areas of the discipline. Over the past decade, however, a number of "life and works" volumes devoted to specific Chinese painters (e.g., Tang Yin, Zhu Da, Hongren, Dong Qichang) have appeared, as have several volumes that focus even more particularly on a single pictorial project or program (e.g., the Wu Liang shrine, Li Gonglin's "Classic of Filial Piety," and Ma Hezhi's "Odes"). Historians of Chinese art may still be a long way from producing anything equivalent to, say, the several new book-length studies of individual European icons such as Van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait" or Manet's "Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere"; nonetheless, Kathlyn Liscomb's Learning from Mount Hua exemplifies an important critical turn the field has taken toward producing sustained, carefully circumscribed, contextualizing analyses of Chinese pictorial art.

The immediate subject of Liscomb's study is a set of album leaves painted by the Ming physician Wang Lu (romanized in most sources as Wang Li) as a visual record of an arduous journey he undertook in 1381 to the summit of sacred Mount Hua. She also translates his travel diary from this same trip, as well as several other writings, in an attempt to reconstruct and explicate Wang's theory of painting. Although the parameters of the book may sound rather narrowly conceived, one of the many virtues of Learning from Mount Hua is the way in which its discussion of Wang Lu opens out very naturally to consideration of broad and fundamental issues in Chinese art criticism and aesthetic theory.

Learning from Mount Hua is divided into four somewhat unequal sections. Part I consists of a brief introduction to Wang's biography and to the "Mount Hua" album, and it is characteristic of Liscomb's scholarly modesty that her important contribution to reconstructing the album is almost entirely glossed over. That is, the leaves of the album are divided between the Palace Museum (Beijing) and the Shanghai Museum, and it has long been thought that only a few of the forty original illustrations had survived. Liscomb, however, has convincingly reassembled and re-ordered the series, and by reproducing the complete album she has thus made it possible, once again, to view the sequence in its entirety.

The three chapters of...