The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, Volume 3: Landscapes

Pages 9–10

A misty oar original: 煙櫂 (yanzhao) breaks the void, leaving a slight trace of pale white mist.

Billowing up from the dense woods.

A verse by Wu Yangao Wu Yangao (Wu Cheng, 1249–1333) was a prominent Neo-Confucian scholar and poet of the Yuan dynasty. interpreted through the methods of the two masters, Beiyuan Beiyuan is the honorific title for Dong Yuan (c. 934–962), the foundational patriarch of the Southern School of landscape painting. and Juran Juran (10th century) was a Buddhist monk and student of Dong Yuan. The "Dong-Ju" style is famous for its "hemp-fiber" texture strokes and "alum-head" stones..

It is enough to make one feel as though they are physically present within these many secluded

valleys.

Synthesis of the Southern School

This stunning circular landscape—designed to mimic the shape of a silk fan—serves as a practical lesson in stylistic synthesis. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual often teaches students how to combine "the three perfections": poetry, calligraphy, and painting.

Here, the artist evokes a poem by the Yuan scholar Wu Yangao to set the mood, but the visual language is strictly that of the "Dong-Ju" tradition. Look closely at the mountain tops; they are rounded and dotted with small, dark clusters of ink. These represent the "alum-head" rock formations and lush vegetation typical of the moist climate in the Jiangnan region of Southern China. The "pale white mist" mentioned in the calligraphy is achieved through liubai (leaving white space), a technique where the untouched paper becomes as meaningful as the inked lines, representing water or clouds.