around 1020 - around 1090 · Northern Song China

Monumental mountains, moving mists and multiple perspectives make Guo Xi one of the great theorists and painters of Chinese landscape.

Guo Xi was born around 1020 in Henan province and became one of the major painters of the Northern Song dynasty. Called to the court of Emperor Shenzong, he created vast landscapes for palaces and official spaces. His art does not describe a place from a fixed point: he constructs a progressive experience of the mountain. The gaze rises, goes around the rocks, crosses the mist and discovers paths, pavilions or tiny figures. In his treatise on forests and springs, transmitted by his son Guo Si, the painter distinguishes several forms of distance - high, deep and flat - in order to organize a world that the eye travels mentally. Early spring, dated 1072, concentrates this language. Gnarled trees cling to the rocks, dark masses emerge from damp steam and streams connect the planes. The ink modulates texture, light and season without depending on Western color. Guo Xi also observes that the mountain changes with the hours and seasons: it almost has a breath. A large part of its monumental production has disappeared, but the preserved, attributed and copied works have had a profound impact on the literate tradition of the Chinese landscape. The "Guo Xi" selection notably compares Early Spring. His reading favors movement.

For Guo Xi, the mountain is not a setting seen from afar: it is a world to travel, whose passages the mist opens and whose breathing changes every distance.