Recreating Nangyue:Space,Pictures And Imagination On Mount Hengshan In The Ming And Qing Dynasties

The mountain is a multifaceted space,and the elements that make up these spaces are at once complex and sometimes overlapping,at once frightening and surprising.All of history is compressed into this space,shaped in different ways and with different ideas by successive generations of mountain dwellers,officials,believers and visitors.Mount Nanyue Hengshan,one of the Five Mountains,is similarly a space where chic images and ideas gather.In terms of surviving objects,Nangyue stands apart from the Five Mountains in the Ming and Qing dynasties,appearing in a variety of media.This paper examines Nangyue in the Ming and Qing dynasties,attempting to view the particular perspectives of the Ming and Qing dynasties from this dramatic mountain space.Unlike the physical landscape,the main elements depicted in paintings of Mount Hengshan are mountains,temples and rivers,which are constructed through painterly adjustments to a conceptual schema derived from the geographical features of the ’seventy-two peaks of the Southern Mountains’,as proposed by the Taoist priest Xu Lingqi in the Southern dynasty.This paper first discusses the process of forming the ’seventy-two peaks’ of Mount Hengshan,or the religious geography of Mount Hengshan,which formed the basis for an important portrayal of the landscape in the Ming and Qing dynasties,and was the first image of the landscape.The landscape of Nangyue in the Ming and Qing dynasties was not limited to the creation of Buddhist and Taoist buildings and vegetation,but was also transformed by human intervention,a dimension that cannot be bypassed when discussing the formation of real space.This paper attempts to explore the various issues between the real space of Hengshan and the various Nangyue images from a formal analysis,and to analyse the principles of Nangyue pictorial construction and the problem of pictorial dissolution,sorting out the main pictorial systems in the jumble of Nangyue pictorial strata as far as possible.The third type of Nangyue iconography includes images of real forms relieved of awe,images of the consecration of a high mountain,and imaginary trips to the gods,the reclining and the magnificent,among others.The study of Nangyue’s images is thus slowly unfolding.