Landscape Painting and the Li River

The Li River attracts tourists in their thousands. For centuries artists have recorded the visual splendour that makes China's Guilin region such a magnet for visitors.

Where the Li River winds through the mountain landscape of Guangxi Province south of the city of Guilin, its waters are littered with the daily routine of the tourist trade. Vessels filled with camera-toting visitors from China and abroad take in the breathtaking scenery that is quintessentially China. Tourists have been coming for hundreds of years, imaginations captured and spirits lifted by the spectacle, having been drawn by the art that has long inspired.

Birthplace of Chinese Landscape Art

The Li River journey known to so many travellers is that short stretch that starts in Guilin and ends in Yangshuo, both famous in themselves as tourist destinations. Not surprisingly Guilin is where many fine Chinese artists have begun their careers. It is also popular as a temporary home of others drawn to the rich lode of subject matter all around. Little wonder that Guilin has been called ‘the birthplace Chinese landscape art’.

The limestone karst landscape that dominates the region’s geology has resulted in a stunning array of individual mountain peaks set in river flats of fertile green, around and through which the ever-present river and its tributaries flow. A typical Li River scene adorns China’s 20 yuan note.

Today, many artists continue the fine traditions of Chinese landscape art by featuring the Li River and its mountains in their works. An example is Chen Chun Zhong, who was born in Guilin in 1964. Chen creates bright landscapes focussed on the Li River and its mountainous backdrop using a bold ink wash style. His award-winning work has become very popular in China and abroad.

Foreign Artists also Paint the Li River

The landscape artists of China are not the only painters compelled to put aspects of the splendid Li River vista down on canvas. In 2008 Netherlands-born New Zealand artist Gerda Leenards visited China to capture the river and its mountains in a series of works – a personal account of just one more artist’s impressions of the famous scenery. The geographical features themselves duly impressed Leenards, but what captured her artist’s eye was the way they interacted - the peaks reflecting in the “silk-like shimmering waterways beneath them”.

The interplay of earth, water and sky is presented in Leenards’ exhibition 'Following the Blue Ribbon', recently concluded at the Hirschfeld Gallery, Wellington. The format used is varied – frieze-like panorama, concertinaed and connected panels on canvas and antique screen. The representation of light is critical to the work, collectively described as “heightening illumination to saturation point, and bringing us to a place which feels wet with light”. The water in Leenards’ art is “both the subject, and activates the panoramic installation”.

Leenards’ landscapes strive to generate idea as much as depict reality. Her mountains tend towards the indistinct and fog-shrouded, regularly disappearing into mist and cloud. Meanwhile their reflections in the river stands out more clearly, appear if anything more real. The style suggests an almost ghostly aura hanging over the worldly scene, which is very still and very languid.

Such is the pulling power of the Li River that it should attract a contemporary New Zealand artist who draws on her heritage and centuries of Dutch landscape painting, focusing the qualities of light, atmosphere and water to produce another perspective on this particularly famous and most well-tried of landscape art subjects.

Art and Tourism

For many visitors to the Li River, only on seeing the scenery for themselves do they truly know that those paintings that drew them here are in fact of real mountains and rivers. In Guilin and Yangshuo there are an infinite number of imitations and reproductions on offer to the tourist wishing to take away their own piece of Chinese art. The souvenir shop commodity is based firmly on a fine and long tradition of quality artwork rendered with great passion by talented people with depth of feeling for and appreciation of the mighty work of mother nature.

Source: landscape-painting.suite101.com