Sunshine after the Rain|Horizontal hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, inscribed by the artist and signed Youfu, with two artist's seals reading Piao and Youfu.|26 1/2 x 52 1/2in (67.2 x 133.5cm)|賈又福 雨過雲開 設色紙本 橫軸Provenance Acquired August, 2006 As bands of orange and yellow light break through the dark, ominous clouds, an oxherd quietly makes his way under precipitous cliffs, the rocky faces rendered in ink. The timeless landscape portrayed is China's Taihang Mountains, a range of 250 miles that divides Shanxi and Hebei provinces. Beginning in the late 1970's Jia Youfu made numerous sojourns to the Taihang mountains, under the advice of Li Keran (1907-1989), with whom Jia Youfu studied while at the Central Academy of Art in the early 1960's. The flame-colored sky between the breaking clouds are a notably modern touch in this work of "contemporary ink". And, the textured applications of dark ink and contrasting untreated white spaces quietly nod to the influences of Li Keran, who advanced traditional Chinese landscape painting in the mid-20th century. Yet despite the contemporary aesthetics, the landscape also evokes the principles of the Five Dynasties and Northern Song painters Fan Kuan (d. 1023) and Jing Hao (late 9th -10th century). In this large horizontal hanging scroll, Jia Youfu captures the same awe and majesty of the monumental cliffs that defined early Chinese landscape paintings. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Jia Youfu's depiction of the Taihang Mountains recalls the great monumental landscapes of the Five Dynasties and Northern Song dynasty. For it was the same mountains that were also the inspiration for Fan Kuan and Jing Hao a millennium before. When Jia Youfu was shown this composition again many years after he completed, he remarked that it was a painting executed during a transformative time in the his career.