Painting the Dao
Control of the Uncontrollable

November 2024 

 

Cultural recognition of the highest role of art as a vehicle for self-realization leads to a number of refinements in our approach to art. The shift from a focus on the products of art to the overall process changes everything. The boundaries between the arts blur into each other and, with the understanding that art approached efficiently can radically change our lives, any boundaries between our other main vehicles for evolving consciousness also tend to blend into each other. Again, we can look to Chinese culture to explore what this means.

By the Song dynasty (960-1279) the literati had taken the concept of the Three Perfections a stage further in integrating the three into life in general. Art and the natural world became merged, as we can see in both landscape painting and the literature, and in the three doctrines of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism as they became somewhat integrated over the last two thousand years – although not without ongoing struggles, occasionally even provoking brief spells of violence, as the imported Buddhism was Sinicized to better accord with Daoism, and the lower-level religious structures of both borrowed from each other. There is a well-known analogy between the three doctrines and the lotus:

This syncretism extended to the visual arts, where the natural world became a self-sufficient subject for exploring the meaning of nature and self as a unified exercise. Landscape paintings may have been representational on the surface, but its inner languages of line, form, colour and texture (and, underlying those, confidence and sagely comprehension) became foundational, breaking down the barriers between visual art and religious interpretation. As the Three Perfections allowed the understanding that in Wang Wei’s poems we see paintings, and in his paintings, poetry, so the landscape became an expression of ideological conviction. From the Song dynasty onwards the loftier reaches of the visual arts as defined by the literati who, alone, fully understood its deeper meaning, were involved in painting the Dao. It is one of the ironies of imposing western preconceptions on a far more advanced aesthetic culture that over the past century we have come to define Daoist art by its surface, by it images of Daoist patriarchs, or illustrations of Daoist concepts, not by its inner meaning. It was a Daoist world-view that prompted Chinese artists to adopt nature, and particularly the landscape, as eternally self-sufficient subject matter. Artists weren’t painting the particular, they were reaching beyond it to explore and express fundamental, foundational meaning, they were painting the Dao.

Mountains have attracted religious focus pan culturally, as the home of the gods and other-worldly creatures. China abounds with sacred mountains and those mountains with Daoist and Buddhist monasteries and the retreats of lay hermits – known as Shanren   (‘Mountain men’). In an aesthetic culture that no longer seeks surface novelty of either means or meaning, landscape became an infinite resource and eternally contemporary. Once again, fully mature aesthetic culture based on at least acknowledgement of the full bandwidth of consciousness, throws up an answer to a question that would have seemed paradoxical when asked of the intellect alone: ‘Is ink landscape painting traditional or modern? It is both; and remains as relevant today as it did in the Song dynasty.

With creativity expanded to limitless horizons and its many disparate forms blending into each other comfortably in the process, even if not in the products, it will come as no surprise that the materials and formats of Chinese painting not only became similarly sophisticated, but also an integral part of overall meaning. The media itself joined the dance of creativity with materials designed not just to impose or be imposed upon by the artist, but to become full participants in the artistic act. Brush and shades of ink on absorbent xuan   paper, or cotton papers, materials that instead of being simply tools for the artist, evolved to be active partners and, by doing so, more efficiently contributed to the artist’s self-realization.

Fig. 1. Ho Huai-shuo (b. 1941). Calligraphy in running script. 2013. 59 x 68 cm.
Water, Pine and Stone Retreat collection. (21.1.1629)

The many different responses between medium and artist are readily recognizable in calligraphy. In fig. 1, we can see with some of the paler lines where the water has spread a little beyond the original brushstroke – most evident on the lower part (of the central character at the top, zi   字), but evident elsewhere on some of the wetter, darker strokes. Loading the brush with pale ink dipped on one side or at the tip in darker ink, adds to the variation, as does the speed at which the brush is moved - faster movement skates across the surface of the paper leaving ‘flying white’ streaks in the lines. Manipulation of the brush during a stroke also gives some random markings that add energy and excitement. In the hands of a master of both calligraphy and painting these effects are under some degree of control arising out of years of practice and familiarization with the medium, but always remain unpredictable to some extent. That is part of the excitement of the process, for both artists and audience.

Fig. 2. Ho Huai-shuo (b. 1941). Sitting Chan.  1989. 136 x 34 cm.
Water, Pine and Stone Retreat collection. (21.1.1585)

In fig. 2, the same artist has used a technique he mastered many years ago of mixing dark ink markings, then before they dry and become permanent, adding water and glue to let the mixture spread across the absorbent paper, lifting the surface of the darker markings to make random patterns to form rocks or other elements of the landscape. The artist is in control of the technique but not of the precise results. He could never precisely repeat the random markings, but in any case, wouldn’t need to; the excitement of the process of dancing with the materials is part of the wonder in the process, so there would be no point in trying to exactly match an earlier random pattern even if it were possible.

Fig. 3. Demonstration. Ink, water, xuan  paper.

Another quality of xuan  paper is that when you lay down watered ink, it instantly sizes the paper, again leaving a halo of water seeping beyond the dark markings. In fig. 3, the upper stroke was applied first, but by dominating the surface it sized, when the second and third strokes were overlaid, they look as if they were done first and lie beneath the initial stroke. This allows for some intriguing and, again, somewhat unpredictable markings, but it also serves a purpose beyond the potential for surface markings. It indicates the confidence of the artist in the brushstroke and use of ink, bringing a calligraphic message to the pictorial art, as in the Three Perfections.

Fig. 4. Liu Kuo-sung, (b. 1932). Mountain Light Blown into Wrinkles.  1985. 46 x 26.5 cm.
Water, Pine and Stone Retreat collection. (21.1.935)

A similar exploration of the potential of the dance of the medium was perfected by Liu Kuo-sung with his ongoing series achieved by manipulating ink and colours, and sometimes oil, onto the surface of water then dropping a sheet of xuan  paper onto it to pick up the image, instantly printing it on the paper. Figs. 4 and 5 are both examples of his mastery of this technique and its exciting potential. The latter is one of his earlier masterpieces of the method. At some stage it has been published with an alternative title, Returning Sail,  but when I acquired it from the artist in 1981 he called it Penetrating Promontory.  Perhaps someone, possibly the artist himself when publishing it later, decided to see the foreground as water and some of the random splashing as sailboats. Liu’s paintings of this type are an ideal example of the inner abstraction of surface subject matter.

Fig. 5. Liu Kuo-sung, (b. 1932). Penetrating Promontory.  1981. 42 x 91.5 cm
Water, Pine and Stone Retreat collection. (21.1.802)

My own works incorporate the understanding arising out of my experience in March 1983 (see Enlightenment ); the blending of nature and art; the other-worldly realm beyond the Stage of Time evoked by the subject matter and echoed in the integral inscriptions with their stories of mystics and timelessness, and the joy of the dance of brush and ink on sophisticated papers and formats. For me, ‘Painting the Dao’ sums up the entire body of works since the 1980s.

The Dao may be inexplicable, but it is not inexpressible.

 

Hugh Moss
At the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat.

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