Bamboo and Rocks by the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (潇湘竹石图)

Bamboo and Rocks by the Xiao and Xiang Rivers is a Northern Song dynasty ink handscroll on silk, measuring 28 by 105.6 centimeters, attributed to the poet-official Su Shi (1037–1101) and now held in the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. The composition shows a weathered, wind-bent stand of slender bamboo rising beside an angular outcrop of rock, rendered entirely in monochrome ink with no color. Su Shi applied the same calligraphic brushwork he used in his writing to the painting, so that the bamboo stalks are built from strokes resembling seal and clerical script, while the rock's jagged contours echo the rhythm of running-script calligraphy; contemporaries such as the painter-critic Mi Fu remarked that the hard, angular lines of the rock reflected Su Shi's inner distress at the time. Scholarship holds that Su Shi painted and gave the work to his friend Sun Jue while living in enforced exile in Huangzhou between 1080 and 1085, following his political disgrace in the "Crow Terrace Poetry Case." The scroll subsequently passed through many hands, and its mounting accumulated twenty-six colophons and roughly three thousand characters of commentary from Yuan and Ming dynasty collectors and scholars, spanning from 1334 to 1561, including an inscription by the Yuan-dynasty collector Yang Yuanxiang. One Ming-dynasty colophon by the scholar Wu Qin records that "Su Shi, while at leisure in Huangzhou, often visited Sun Xinlao [Sun Jue]; he once painted bamboo and rock and gave it to him — this ink relic remains a true treasure today." The painting is regarded by scholars as one of only two surviving works attributed to Su Shi, the other being held in Japan. In the twentieth century it entered the collection of the journalist and art collector Deng Tuo, who donated it along with over 140 other paintings to the National Art Museum of China in 1964, where it remains a signature holding.