Extract from: Beyond the Stage of Time, Volume I Realised Realms. The Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat

17 When it came to the extensive rockwork, he would show me how to do it and then hand me the brush to continue it. If I wasn’t doing it quite right, he’d grab it back and give me another brief demonstration before letting me take over again. By this method we completed the entire rock over two days. I added an incense burner and, as I recall, we added its dri ft ing smoke between us as the rock progressed—the exact sequence has become somewhat blurred in my memory, not least because of the wine we consumed while doing it. It’s something of a miracle that the painting itself isn’t blurred. I fi nally gave up the agency business when I moved back to England in 1996 . By that time most of the artists were well established and I had long since given up running a gallery. I didn’t feel that I could do much for them in England that they couldn’t manage on their own, although I remained friendly with them all and treas- ure still those who are still alive. I also acted as agent for Li Hua (later Li Huayi; b. 1948 ), also a good friend and generous teacher. We did some joint works from time to time which were always instructive—once, memorably, dangling rather drunkenly over the water’s edge at a friend’s house in West Vancouver. Before I met him, I had visited the Roberta English Gallery in San Francisco, and saw a group of his early paintings done in China before moving to America. Th ey were all inspired by the various Buddhist cave sites along the Silk Road out of China. I was so impressed by them that I bought them all. I only then found out that he lived in San Francisco, where I was subsequently introduced to him. In Hong Kong I met Hong Hoi (b. 1957 ), whose works I greatly admired. I agreed a deal with him whereby I would buy many of his paintings each year to allow him to give up teaching, which he found a diversion, and to paint full time until the market caught up with his artistry. As part of this deal I would sometimes put in a request, o ft en for handscrolls. I rather overdid it once by asking him for a very long hand- scroll; which is exactly what I got. It remains the longest handscroll I have ever seen, by far—it could be displayed on the Great Wall of China with little room to spare— and to this day I have never been able to get through it in a single sitting. It is a true tour de force , one of the many masterpieces he created in those years. Every one of its hundreds of thousands of tiny brush strokes is so utterly compelling and commit- ted that one cannot rush through it to ‘see what happens’; instead, one is constantly drawn into the inner languages to become lost beyond the details. He never gave me a formal lesson and I never saw him paint, although I visited his studio many times and saw half- fi nished works on the painting table in his tiny home studio. Th e pas- sage of time is marked forcefully by the fact that his son, who was in short pants and about 3 feet tall when I fi rst met him, is now an established ink-artist in his own right (Hong Fei, b. 1988 ). Although I was never their agent, I also collected the works of Cheng Weikwok (b. 1920 ), and Irene Chou (Zhou Yulun, 1924 – 2011 ). Th e former was always rather ignored by the local artistic community, but I was entranced by his works and his method. I bought as many of his masterpieces as I could lay my hands on, but he painted excruciatingly slowly, so there are not many of them in existence. He was a schoolteacher who, as I understood it, painted in a suit and tie! He would create ex- traordinary images made up of powerful, coloured abstractions of real scenes (Bryce Canyon, the Lion Rock Tunnel) made up of endless, tiny lines of Western watercol- our. When sent to the mounter, these would o ft en be partly washed away as they are not as permanent as Chinese watercolour; the image would thus pale, so he would simply start again and add thousands more tiny strokes of colour to the mounted work. Th e results are an extraordinary, satiny amalgam of powerful colours and stunning images, a testament to his patience and commitment and his meditational approach to painting. G Th at’s quite a cast of characters, and they all clearly in fl uenced your thinking in many ways. Can you tell me a bit more about how your reasons for painting changed as you began to immerse yourself more fully in this world? M Ah, yes. As I became more deeply involved, and equally deeply intrigued, my rea- sons did change. Painting gradually became exciting in its own right rather than as a means to an end. As I became more competent—and as a result, more con fi dent— I became entranced with the process, and that became the impetus. I found the process immensely intriguing and absorbing—not just the process of producing paintings, but that of understanding them too, on a level that transcended both the skills and the images. Th ere was something immensely profound and meaningful in gradually moving from one rung of the artistic ladder to the next across all of the aspects of the process. It was my fi rst experience of fully integrating the theoretical aspects of art with the practical ones. G How are you de fi ning process here? You’ve already talked about the visionary as- pect, but can you expand on what else you include in this term? I assume that there’s a lot more to it than vision. M Indeed there is! Broadly, the process includes all aspects of artistic creativity, including but not at all limited to the fi nal product. In the case of visual arts such as painting or drawing, the art object itself is a fi nite, isolated physical entity. Th e pro- cess is more all-encompassing. It includes the artist’s vision, hopefully always in the vanguard, but it also includes every other aspect of production and response to the object. hong hoi Huangshan ( Yellow Mountains ), 2001 Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, 21 . 1 . 1438 zhou yulun Internal and External , 1975 Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, 21 . 1 . 773 cheng weikwok Last Rays on the Lion Rock , 1982 Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, 21 . 1 . 1104 li huayi Longmen Buddha , 1980 Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, 21 . 1 . 854 liu dan & the master of the water , pine & stone retreat , Joint work, 1991 / 1992 Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, 21 . 1 . 1516