Li Keran's Sketching Journeys and the Remaking of Shanshui

Look at a Li Keran landscape from the middle of the 1950s and the first thing you notice is how small it is. A sheet perhaps the size of a folded newspaper, worked in ink and a little colour, mounted later because it was never intended as a finished scroll. A roof, a bridge, a stand of trees, the light going flat behind a hill. These are working sheets, made outdoors in front of the thing itself, and they are the hinge on which his whole career turns.

This guide walks you through why Li Keran took to the road in the 1950s, where the journeys went and what they were meant to prove, the two seals he had cut to steady his nerve, the changes the sketching years made to his ink and his composition, and what to look at when a work from this period comes in front of you.

The problem he set out to solve

Li Keran was born in Xuzhou in Jiangsu in 1907 and died in 1989. He trained in oil painting as well as ink, taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and in 1947 became a student of both Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. That pairing matters: from Qi Baishi he took the discipline of the loaded brush, and from Huang Binhong the method of building a picture through layer upon layer of ink.

The problem was not personal but national. After 1949 traditional ink painting was widely argued to be exhausted, a repertoire of borrowed mountains copied from Song and Yuan models by painters who had never stood in front of a mountain. Landscape painting in particular was open to the charge of having nothing to say about the country as it actually looked.

Li Keran accepted the criticism and rejected the conclusion. His answer was that the tradition had lost contact with observation and could recover it by going outside. He put it in a line that has followed him ever since: enter with the greatest effort, come out with the greatest courage. The first half is the study of old painting. The second half is what the journeys were for.

1954: three painters, three months, the Jiangnan route

In 1954 Li Keran set out with the painters Zhang Ding and Luo Ming on a sketching journey of roughly three months through the south. The route took in the lake country around Wuxi, West Lake at Hangzhou, the canal towns, and Huangshan. They worked in the open, in ink on paper, in weather, in front of crowds, and they came back with a body of sheets that was shown as a joint exhibition in Beijing that autumn.

The exhibition is the point. Sketching from life, xiesheng, was not new in Chinese painting, but treating outdoor studies as finished works fit to hang was. Presenting them publicly made a claim: that observation could carry an ink picture without the scaffolding of inherited formulas, and that the result was still guohua and not a watercolour in Chinese clothing. The distinction between ink painting and watercolour was live at the time and Li Keran was arguing it with pictures rather than essays.

The two seals

Around the time of the first journey Li Keran had two seals cut that he used for the rest of his life. One reads keguizhe dan, "what is precious is courage". The other reads suoyaozhe hun, "what is required is spirit".

They read as a pair of instructions to himself. Courage to abandon a compositional grammar that had served for six hundred years; spirit, meaning the animating force behind the subject, so that abandoning the grammar did not leave him with mere topography. Anyone who reads Chinese painting through its seals and collector marks will meet these two often, and their presence on a work is part of how the sketching period announces itself.

1956: eight months on the road

The second journey was the larger one. In 1956 Li Keran travelled for about eight months, working west and south, up the Yangtze, through the Three Gorges, into Sichuan and the mountains beyond Chengdu. He came back with several hundred sheets.

What the long trip gave him was repetition. The Jiangnan journey produced pictures; the Sichuan journey produced habits. Rain and river mist, terraced hillsides, gorge walls that block the sky, buildings stacked up a slope, the particular quality of light in a wet valley at the end of the day. These are motifs he would use for the next thirty years, and they entered the work as observed facts rather than as inherited types.

A useful comparison is Fu Baoshi's handling of rain, arrived at in the same decades by a painter working from a different premise. Both men were trying to get weather into ink. Their solutions have almost nothing in common.

In 1957 Li Keran travelled to East Germany on an official visit and sketched there for several months. European towns, brickwork, church towers, riverbanks under northern light. The results are the least Chinese-looking things he made, and they confirmed something he already suspected: that his method could take any subject, because it was a method of looking rather than a stock of shapes.

What actually changed in the painting

Five things, and they are visible in any good example.

• Ink accumulation. Jimo, the building of tone by laying dry ink over dry ink until the paper is dense and still breathing, came from Huang Binhong and was used by Li Keran to model mass rather than to decorate surface. The comparison with Huang Binhong's late black landscapes shows two painters using one technique for opposite ends.
• Counter-light. He began composing against the light, so that a hillside or a stand of trees reads as a dark mass with light leaking round its edge. Nothing in classical shanshui does this. It comes from looking at real slopes in the late afternoon.
• Compression. The deep recession and the wandering viewpoint of the old handscroll give way to a shallow, frontal, packed picture space. A Li Keran landscape often has no distance at all, only a wall of hill with incidents cut into it.
• Scale by figures. Tiny white figures, buffalo, boats and roof gables are set into the dark to establish how large everything else is. They are the only clean paper in many pictures and the eye goes straight to them.
• Fixed viewpoint. Because the sheets began in front of the subject, they inherit a single standing position. Set against the principles Xie He laid down for judging a picture, the sketching work keeps spirit resonance and bone method and quietly drops the conventions of arrangement.

The mature manner that came out of all this is what the trade calls Li family landscape: black, wet, frontal, structurally solid, lit from behind. It is the basis of everything from the buffalo pictures to the red mountains of the following decade.

How the period feeds the later work

The sketching years are not a detour but a supply line. The buffalo and herdboy subjects get their willows, ponds and wet ground from the Jiangnan sheets. The red revolutionary landscapes of the 1960s take the packed frontal massing worked out in Sichuan and swap black ink for cinnabar over a black underlayer, which is why they hold together where lesser political landscapes of the same years do not.

Seeing the sequence is the most useful thing a collector can do with this artist. A later picture that looks arbitrary usually turns out to be quoting a sketch made thirty years earlier in front of a specific hill.

Looking at a work from the sketching years

Approach it as you would any twentieth-century ink painting, with the period's own habits in mind.

• Format and mounting. Genuine sketching sheets are small, often on a single piece of paper with no border allowance, and were mounted afterwards. A large, elaborately mounted hanging scroll presented as a 1950s outdoor study deserves a question.
• Inscription. Sketch inscriptions tend to be short and factual, naming a place and sometimes a date, in his blocky, deliberate hand. Long literary colophons in the classical manner are not the register of these works.
• Seals. The two seals described above, plus the name seals. Impressions should be crisp and consistently placed; compare against published examples, and read them properly, since identifying a seal step by step is a skill that pays for itself here.
• Ink behaviour. Accumulated ink built in layers looks different from a single dark wash. Under raking light the layers are visible as subtle changes of sheen, and copyists working quickly rarely reproduce them.
• What is faked. This is among the most copied bodies of twentieth-century Chinese painting, and the market also carries later reproductions sold as original works. The tests in the guide to spotting fake master prints and reproductions apply directly.

Provenance carries more weight here than connoisseurship alone. Works with a documented path out of the studio or out of an exhibition are a different proposition from works that surface with a certificate and no history.

Common questions

What were Li Keran's sketching journeys?

They were extended painting trips made in the 1950s, in which Li Keran worked outdoors in ink directly in front of the landscape. The first, in 1954, ran about three months through the Jiangnan region and Huangshan with Zhang Ding and Luo Ming, and ended in a joint exhibition in Beijing. The second, in 1956, lasted roughly eight months and covered the Yangtze, the Three Gorges and Sichuan. A visit to East Germany followed in 1957.

Why did sketching from life matter so much in the 1950s?

Ink painting was being attacked as a closed system of copied models with no connection to the country as it was. Working outdoors answered that charge on its own terms: the pictures were demonstrably observed, yet made with brush and ink on paper by a painter trained in the tradition. For Li Keran it also solved an artistic problem rather than only a political one, since observation gave him new structures to build with.

How did the journeys change his style?

They produced the manner he is known for. Tone built by accumulated dry ink, composition against the light so that hills read as dark masses, a shallow and densely packed picture space, and tiny reserved white figures that set the scale. The wandering viewpoint of classical landscape is replaced by a single fixed standing position, which is a direct inheritance from working in front of the subject.

Are the 1950s sketches collectable in their own right?

They are, and they are treated as significant works rather than as preparatory material, which is how the artist himself presented them. They are small, they are numerous by comparison with the late masterworks, and they are heavily copied, so documentation matters. Judge them on ink quality, the specificity of the observation and the plausibility of their history.

Further reading

• Li Keran: A Collector's Guide — the whole career in outline, with the sketching years in context.
• Li Keran's Buffalo and Herdboy Paintings — the subject that carried the Jiangnan observation for forty years.
• Chinese Landscape Painting: A Shanshui Guide — the tradition the journeys were arguing with.
• Huang Binhong's Late Black Landscapes — where the accumulated ink came from.

Browse the collection

Kiln & Ink publishes limited-edition archival giclée reproductions of the twentieth-century Chinese ink masters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity. If the black, back-lit hills of the sketching years are what draws you, the Li Keran selection is the place to start.