This small handscroll demonstrates the splashed ink-and-colour technique that Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) used widely in his landscape paintings after the late 1950s. The technique derives from the traditional mogu ‘boneless’ blue and green landscape style of earlier periods, and at the same time indicates Zhang’s encounter with abstract art in the west in the 1960s. Another splashed ink painting displayed here, the Blue and green landscape [LI2022.62], was painted in the same year. The inscription reads ‘[I] Painted this in the summer of the sixty-fourth year [of the Republic, 1975]. Wishing Madam Khoan [Sullivan, 1919-2003] peace.’
Sullivan, Michael, Modern Chinese Art: The Khoan and Michael Sullivan Collection, revised edn (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2009), no. 154 on p. 155, illus. p.155 fig. II.154
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