Li Cheng ( 919–967) was a Chinese painter during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms and early Song Dynasty. He became known as "the three great rival artists" together with Fan Kuan, and Guan Tong. He did many landscape paintings with diluted ink, known as "treasuring ink like gold", which gives the appearance of being in a foggy dream or rendering the scenery like in a filmy mist.
A Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks is one of the very few surviving examples attributed to his hand. It is a monumental mountain landscape with a temple near its center and a flurry of human activity near the base of the painting. The artist conceived and executed the picture with a precision and expertise that convey the scene’s weight and volume. The brushwork captures the animation found in nature, and the artist’s control over the ink allows the architectural elements to be interdependent with the surrounding contorted trees, streams and mist-covered mountains.
The arched rooflines of the temple, in the center of the composition, are echoed in the lower buildings and in the craggy branches of the trees at the left and right. The verticality of the composition is reinforced everywhere, as the mountain in the upper portion of the painting rises higher and higher, echoing the height of the pagoda-pattern rooftops. The contrast of descending water and rising mountain is an essential part of the composition. Humans, in the lower houses and near the bridges, are dwarfed by natural forms. The lines of the painting are crisp, the shading is exact, and the entire scene is rendered with clarity.
The fine brushwork and monumental composition in this 10th century Chinese landscape make it a world-class masterpiece. It belongs to hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, its size is 111.8 x 55.9 cm, and it’s now collected in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
（Picture source: Huicui Painting and Calligraphy）
