China Daiy offers a comprehensive essay on the painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) titled “Paradise Found.” Wen Zhengming was noted for “the public perception of him as a man of high moral standards who disavowed the seedy side of politics in favor of a secluded existence in the garden abode he built for himself.” In the tradition of reclusion, however, “Wen Zhengming’s self-imposed exile, as those orbiting around him might wish to call it, was lived out not in sheer harshness, but amid the many enjoyable things that Jiangnan had to offer, including its spring.” Jiangnan was a region of the southern Yangtze River Delta.
A clear inspiration for both Wen Zhengming’s artistic depiction of this paradise but also of the life of deliberate reclusion is the famous hermit Tao Chien or Tao Yuanming (365-427). In a fable, Tao Yuanming described Peach Blossom Spring as an idealized paradise . Wen Zhengming evokes this paradise in paintings of contemporary Xiaoxiang, as the region came to be known. In his paintings, he, too, presents “a place of reclusion and longing in view of its natural beauty.”
URL; https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/06/WS6598b0b9a3105f21a507adcd_1.html