Learning from Mount Hua

Learning from Mount Hua: A Chinese Physician's Illustrated Travel Record and Painting Theory examines a unique travelogue written and illustrated by Wang Lu, a late-fourteenth-century Chinese physician and painter. Transformed by the experience of scaling Mt. Hua, the Sacred Mountain of the West, Wang struggled to free himself from the existing pictorial vocabularies of mountain forms as well as from the established conventions for travel paintings. The result is an album of forty unusual paintings and a moving travel record, translated here for the first time. In reconstructing the original sequence of the paintings, Kathlyn Liscomb relates the landscapes to the travel record and guides the reader through Wang's experiences as he crosses treacherous chasms, visits famous Daoist temples, and analyzes geological lore. Wang Lu formulated his highly original ideas about painting in a preface accompanying the Mt. Hua album. An important primary text in Chinese art history, it has been translated, along with another of his essays on landscape painting, in full by the author. Liscomb also discusses these texts in relation to contemporaneous and earlier art theories and connects the Mt. Hua preface with Wang's participation in the discourse of medical scholarship. Moreover, she interprets the responses of later critics to this material, analyzing the factors in late Ming criticism that fostered, as well as inhibited, an understanding of Wang's ideas. A compelling account of one of the most interesting painting cycles in Chinese art, Liscomb's study also contributes to our appreciation of fourteenth-century Chinese theories of painting and their relationship to other aspects of the cultural and intellectual milieu.