Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Huang Gongwang withdrew from public office around 1329, took up the Quanzhen school of Daoism and adopted the sobriquet Dachi Daoren, Great Fool Daoist, a name that mocks the ambition he had left behind. Nearly twenty years later, in his late seventies, he began a handscroll for a fellow Daoist, a priest named Zheng Wuyong, painting intermittently over three to four years as he traveled the Fuchun River valley near Hangzhou. He finished it in 1350 and gave it to Wuyong as a gift, not a commission in the ordinary sense but an offering between two men who had each chosen withdrawal from the world over standing within it. The painting itself avoids topographical exactness in favor of loose, repeatedly reworked ink brushwork; Huang is recorded as caring more for expressing his own feeling toward the landscape than for reproducing it faithfully. That priority, expression over likeness, is itself read by later Chinese art historians as a Daoist commitment carried into technique: a painting that behaves the way its subject, harmony with nature rather than mastery over it, asks a person to behave. The scroll Huang handed to his friend in 1350 would go on to survive a fire, a forced division into two pieces, and six centuries of separate custody before either half.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By 1650 the painting had passed down through three centuries of owners to a collector named Wu Hongyu, who loved it enough that, dying, he ordered it burned so it could accompany him into the afterlife. His nephew pulled the scroll from the fire before it was destroyed, but not before it had already torn into two unequal pieces. The larger piece, later called the Master Wuyong Scroll after the Daoist priest Huang Gongwang had originally painted it for, eventually reached the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The smaller fragment, called The Remaining Mountain, went to what is now the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, on the Chinese mainland. For the rest of the twentieth century the two pieces existed on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait, in two museums shaped by the same political division that kept them apart, each holding a portion of one continuous handscroll that had not been whole since a dying man tried to take it with him. In 2011, the two institutions arranged a joint exhibition at the National Palace Museum, laying both fragments out together for visitors for the first time since 1650. The reunion, brief and logistically difficult to arrange, is now itself part of how the painting is discussed, alongside the brushwork Huang Gongwang actually intended anyone to see whole.