Wang Wei

701-761

Painter, poet, and calligrapher

Sources

Life. Known as Wei Mojie, after the popular Buddhist saint Vimalakirti, Wang Wei was a native of Taiyuan, Qi County, Shared Province. He passed the civil examination to become a jinshi (presented scholar) at twenty-one. Before he was thirty, he lived for a while as a recluse on Mount Song, near the eastern capital of Luoyang. Even after taking official positions such as minister to the right and censor, he often spent time alone at a villa in the scenic Chongnan Mountains near Chang’an, where he studied Buddhism. In 756, during the An Lushan revolt against the Tang, he was forced to work for the rebel government, which led to setbacks in his career after the success of imperial forces and further withdrawal from society.

Poet and Artist. In his early life Wang wrote many positive and high-spirited poems, but his mood darkened after the An Lushan revolt, and his interest in poetry dramatically declined. His lifelong devotion to Buddhism significantly influenced his creative output. Wang was a great poet, a scholar of Chan (Zen Buddhism), and a master of calligraphy. He also had an excellent command of music and once served as minister of music. The founder of the Southern School of painter-poets, he created the form of the monochromatic landscape painting in ink and wrote about his theory of painting in Shanshuilun (Formulas for Landscape). His paintings reveal his perceptions of Buddhism and had a major impact on later generations of landscape painters.

Sources

Marsha L. Wagner, Wang Wei (Boston: Twayne, 1981).

Dorothy B. Walmsley, Wang Wei, The Painter-Poet (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1968).