There are two ways to paint weather with ink, and East Asian painters worked out both. The first is to leave it out: unpainted paper reads as fog, and the picture is finished when one more stroke would spoil it. The second — the tradition described here — is to paint the weather directly. Diluted carbon ink, laid wet on a prepared ground and allowed to gradate as the brush unloads, becomes mist, rain, smoke, flood and night; and because the wash physically covers what lies under it, the atmosphere in these pictures does something atmosphere rarely does in art. It eats the world. A roofline halfway up a cliff simply stops existing. A village dissolves and leaves two pine crowns behind.
The tradition begins in the imperial painting academy of the Southern Song, around 1200. It reappears in Japan in the splashed-ink landscape of the Muromachi period, and it returns to figure painting in Qing China and Meiji Japan — where the same wet grey that had swallowed mountains was turned on demons, waterfalls and exiled men.
How an atmospheric ink painting is made
The decisive material fact is the ground. Unsized paper drinks: a stroke sinks in, spreads a feathered fringe, and cannot be covered. Prepared silk does not — ink sits on it, dries, and can be covered by another pass. So the layered smoked dark is something a silk ground makes possible and a paper one does not, and the Southern Song album leaves and Kawanabe Kyōsai's Meiji leaves are on silk. A dark sky in this tradition is not one black; it is several pale washes laid over each other until the ground is smoked, which is why the darkness has depth and its edges stay soft. Where these painters do work on paper — the Qing figure paintings, the haboku sheet, Sesson's screen — the drama moves into the single loaded pass instead.
Ink is ground fresh from a carbon-and-glue stick against a stone with a little water; the painter mixes strengths in the wells of the stone and keeps a second brush loaded with clean water. Two operations do most of the work. In wet-in-wet, ink of one strength is dropped into a wash that has not yet dried, and the two bleed together so the boundary forms itself — the Japanese called this haboku, "broken ink". In the dry drag, a fast half-unloaded brush skips across the weave and the ground shows through the middle of the stroke, splitting a hem or a mane into individual hairs. A single robe often does both: loaded and pooling at the shoulder, frayed and skipping at the hem.
The formats matter as much as the methods. The handscroll is read a forearm's width at a time, so a passage of mist is experienced as duration. The album leaf is small, intimate and collected in sets, which is why a painter could devote twelve of them to water alone. The folding screen is architecture — a six-panel byōbu stands in a room, and its seams are part of the picture. And the finished painting is mounted by a specialist onto brocade silk, a craft whose creases and seams are visible on almost every surviving object.
The painters: Xia Gui, Ma Yuan, Sesson Shūkei and Kawanabe Kyōsai
Xia Gui and Ma Yuan, working at the Southern Song academy around 1200, are the tradition's source. Xia Gui's handscrolls let a wash run unbroken through a river passage until only rooflines and treetops survive it. Ma Yuan's twelve Water Album leaves take the more radical step: water alone, in twelve states, drawn as pure line and tone. On the two leaves examined for this article the only living things are two tiny waterfowl, and they are there to give the water a scale. Ma Yuan is also the master of the "one-corner" composition, in which the subject occupies a single corner and reserved silk does the rest of the composing.
In Japan, Bokushō Shūshō carried the splashed-ink landscape into the sixteenth century — the top third of the sheet left bare, a pale mountain half-surfacing at mid-height, one wet cluster of rock and tree bleeding through low on it. Sesson Shūkei went further than any of them: he painted the wind itself. On his tiger screen, broad diagonal wash-streaks with the bristle marks still in them sweep across the sky while bamboo whips sideways, and the tiger crouching under it has a face drawn whisker by whisker.
The Qing painters brought the wet brush back to people. Luo Ping painted ghosts — his Zhong Kui rides the shoulders of pale attendants whose faces are individually characterised. Min Zhen built figures out of one loaded mass apiece: his exiled envoy Su Wu wears a robe that pools wet at the raised sleeve and shoulder and frays into dry skips at the hem. Ren Bonian staged martial tales against layered grey rock and pine, with a single red-robed rider as the one strongly saturated note against grey-and-ochre wash. And Kawanabe Kyōsai, in Meiji Japan, closed the tradition at full volume: mist-eaten cliffs, waterfalls in loaded vertical pulls with monkeys clinging inside them, a Daruma whose hood is a handful of loaded black strokes above a face modelled in countable hatch-lines, and a seventeen-metre theatre curtain of parading demons painted freehand in four hours.
Afterlife: Hong Kong wuxia cinema and the comics page
The grammar outlived the tradition. Fu Baoshi and Qi Baishi carried the wet atmospheric manner into twentieth-century Chinese figure and landscape painting, and the mists of Hong Kong wuxia cinema — the title sequences, the posters, the smoke standing in for distance — are descended directly from it. In comics the same physics reappear wherever a page wants weather rather than background: rain, smoke and dust rendered as gradated tone instead of drawn shapes, with the figures modelled inside them. What survives, in every case, is the founding proposition of the Southern Song academy: that atmosphere is not the space between things, but a thing in its own right, with the power to take the others away.
From the scroll to the chessboard
Everything above was read from the objects themselves — album leaves, screens and handscrolls held in museum and public-domain collections, eight of the objects behind it arriving under the Metropolitan's and Cleveland's CC0 open-access programmes — and written up plate by plate as this style was defined: twenty-one plates opened and measured, sixteen that carry the register in full, four that carry one point each, and one thrown out. What came out is a comic style that paints a chess game in this manner: wash that swallows a roofline, storm energy with figures inside it, faces modelled in hatching, and one crimson accent at most. If you want the artifact rather than the history, see our Storm Ink style.
