Jing Hao

As a theorist, he is the person most responsible for codifying the theories underlying the work of later painters, and his treatises on painting and aesthetics continued to serve as textbooks for Northern Song artists more than a century after his death.

Following the collapse of the Tang, Northern China descended into a period of political chaos—the Five Dynasties—in which five separate ruling lines established themselves and were destroyed by factional infighting in rapid succession.

The piece most frequently held as a template of his style is Mount Lu, an ink painting on silk scroll which gives a rather fantastical rendering of one of Jiangxi's natural landmarks.

[2] The work is a tight, vertical composition, employing Jing's newly developed cun fa technique to compress the landscape into layers of jutting rock-pillars between chasms of mist.

Humans and buildings, though drawn with remarkable realism in a manner that contrasts sharply against the atmospheric landscape surrounding, are reduced to an almost unnoticeable scale, clustered at the foot of the mountain at the very bottom of the scroll, further conveying the intimidating grandeur of the natural world over the transient activities of man.

In Bifa Ji, which is written as a narrative, Jing Hao's theories on art are presented in a fictional conversation he has with an old man he meets on a road while wandering in the mountains.

The old man, a sage, gives the artist a lecture, in which he describes five underlying essentials of painting: the first is spirit, the second rhythm, the third thought, the fourth scenery, the fifth brush, and finally the sixth, ink.

Art historians have pointed out that these are almost certainly intended as a counterargument to the “six principles” of the famous pre-Tang theoretician Xie He, which emphasized the technical basics of painting—brush strokes and the application of color.

Most obvious is his influence on his pupil, Guan Tong, who spent many years studying with Jing in the mountains of Shanxi Province, and who later expanded upon his theories of hua and shi by extending the concepts not only to landscapes, but to seasons, animals and people as well.