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

34 35 went through three stages as a guru, or sage—the words of the story were written on the paintings themselves. All the elements except the story and other inscriptions were cut from various pieces of old, randomly coloured sheets of paper. (See AK 8 . 111 , 8 . 112 , 8 . 113 pp 64 – 69 ) To answer one part of your question, these were indeed collages in the western sense, using the same sorts of techniques as Matisse with his cut-outs. Th e second reason I turned to collage was to solve a speci fi c problem when painting two of my favourite subjects at the time, strange stones and walking staves. I wanted to use the cloud-dragon paper, but it was di ffi cult to get both the e ff ects I wanted and sharp edges—the threads and the cotton paper tended to let the colour bleed too much. So I took to trimming the rocks and staves and sticking them down on pristine sheets of xuan or other papers, before adding inscriptions and seals. I liked the editing potential of this too, but this led to the third reason. I am not the most careful of painters when I’m ‘in the zone’, as they say; had I painted the im- age directly and been able to get a sharp edge on the paper I wanted to use, and then added calligraphy and seals, the chances of keeping it pristine were slim. Th at’s because for me, the process is distinctly meditational. As I’ve described, I step o ff the Stage of Time and become the process, o ft en disappearing into the world I’m painting for long periods of time, certainly for entire layers of a painting. Once I start a layer, however complex or time-consuming, I tend not to look up, or stop to think, or worry about what I’m doing. I just completely immerse myself in it, so I’m not really focused on being careful about anything except the act of adding this par- ticular layer to the painting. Sometimes I take o ff my glasses and deliberately paint unfocused in order to ignore detail in favour of the abstract qualities of a layer. Splashing about with ink, colours and water on large sheets of paper in this state is an invitation to accident. But once I started using the scissors, I found that far beyond achieving a sharp edge where I needed one or keeping the image free of acci- dents, it gave me a new kind of control and an additional sculptural dimension. I was able to take a rock which might have ended up as one shape and re- fi gure it, re-cut it, change it to suit. So instead of being strictly collage in the western sense, it became a sort of two-dimensional sculptural work as well as a painting. Th at opened up all sorts of exciting new possibilities. It allowed me to take the various elements of a painting—a rock, or a sta ff , or a group of objects—and lay them out on a backing sheet on the table (or on the studio fl oor for some of the much larger paintings of this group I did a few years ago), and keep rearranging them until they were precisely where I wanted them—on a pristine sheet of paper, with no com- promise involved. Th at too was a sculptural exercise to some extent, and fun to play with. Th e sense of composition was also inevitably helped by years of displaying sculptural objects in my gallery in Bruton Street in London, o ft en under pressure for exhibition openings. I’d drive the sta ff nuts; every time they’d set everything out, I’d go around just before the opening and rearrange everything formally until it was per- fect in my eyes. It is also one of the methods I use in teaching painting to beginners occasionally. I give them a blank sheet of paper and a few shapes of di ff erent colours, and ask them to organise them over and over to get di ff erent results and re fi ne their sense of composition. As I mentioned, I also applied this to handscrolls, by taking strips of an existing work and rearranging them in a long horizontal format. In traditional Chinese mounting, the length of a handscroll was made up of separate sheets of paper which were joined together in equal widths with a straight vertical join. By using scissors and editing sculpturally, I could build handscrolls with overlapped areas instead of vertical joints. (See AK 11 . 55 pp 96 – 97 ) G While we’re talking about your own methods and techniques, let’s talk about stones for a moment. Looking through your works, the trappings of the in fl uential minority of Chinese culture fi gure strongly from the outset—rocks, staves, ruyi sceptres and so on. I notice your early stones were mostly painted in ink, so that they looked believable as real rock formations. But then they began to get a bit more col- ourful, and there’s a series that is not only bright red and green but of o ft en impres- sive and somewhat overpowering size. Can you explain that transition? M I’ve collected strange stones since around 1960 . I found them both fascinating and powerful as sculpture. Th ere was something about the act of taking a stone shaped by nature (in theory, anyway; I’ve since learned that many were also ‘edited’ to look that way) and setting it on a beautifully carved stand, as if it were a precious carving in jade. Th en I learned that although the aesthetic that valued them was almost lost in the twentieth century, they were for centuries considered among the highest sculp- tural expression in the entire culture. I sort of understood that from the outset. As and when they did turn up in the West in the mid-twentieth century, they were all treated much the same—practically given away, whether they were masterpieces or banal lumps of rock. In most cases, I could buy them for less than it would have cost to have the stand carved anew at that time. So by the time I came to painting them seriously a couple of decades or so ago, I was thoroughly immersed in the aesthetic. I had all the books on the subject, in- cluding facsimile copies of ancient Chinese compendia of strange stone collections, and had studied the genre for years. I understood the roles they played beyond the purely sculptural; their ability to act as a portal, for instance. Th e scholar class is o ft en shown in Chinese art strolling in the wilderness with a walking sta ff , boating on majestic lakes, or enjoying the delights of like-minded company in wonderful gardens. But many of these people were in fact o ffi cials, and were kept pretty busy with their bureaucratic functions. Even when delighting in music, poetry and company, they were largely inhibited from disappearing into the real wilderness for long. It was an ideal as much as a pastime, but their paintings and these strange stones acted as portals. Th ey could gaze into them, meditatively bond with them, and disappear into another realm, a realm where their ideal was realised. It’s a similar concept to their idea of immortality in the blink of an eye; you could enter a timeless realm free of constraint, in brief moments in the studio or one’s own garden, simply by ‘entering’ the stone. In real time, that would have been a fairly brief sojourn. Beyond the Stage of Time, however, time in the ‘real’ world does not apply. Indeed, the transcendent realm was o ft en considered to be the ‘real’ one. Th e realm in which scholars toiled for their emperor was known as the world of dust, or some-