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

36 37 times the World of Red Dust; a quasi-illusionary realm of meaningless objects and essentially unimportant details. Th at’s why stones were so attractive to me as painting subjects. My initial im- pulse to paint them in ink was not because ink allowed them to look like real stones, but because ink was the essential material of Chinese painting, a medium in which colour was o ft en incidental. But I was aware of the portal role of strange stones, and the inscriptions and stories behind the paintings began to develop in their own way. Th ese were never preconceived; they would always come to me as I was painting, as a series of interlinked tales of an alter ego, wandering immortal sta ff master and strange-stone a fi cionado spanning both the world of dust and the transcendent realm. Th e red stones arose naturally from two aspects: the previously discussed recogni- tion of the transformational alchemical role of painting and the understanding that in the transcendent realm there were no constraints. Th e reality of the dusty world was irrelevant there, so rocks could be any colour you wanted them to be. Th at’s where the alchemy entered the equation. Mercury, an essential ingredient of the alchemical process, is derived from a metallic ore called cinnabar, but cinna- bar itself does not come in pleasantly sculptable forms—apart from anything else, it’s alarmingly toxic to handle in large quantities. Th at’s why there are no red strange stone formations that would suit the Chinese aesthetic. Th e colour of cinnabar pig- ments, though, was immediately accessible. To me, it represented the emancipation from the world of dust. It was also a bundle of fun to mix. G So that’s where you got the colour from! It’s very distinctive. Is there some secret to the way it’s prepared? M Mixing colour is very satisfying, and somewhat meditational. I always mix this red colour in large batches, because I tend to paint red rocks as a series rather than one-o ff s. In one studio I do it in an old bronze bowl with heaven-soaring handles. In the other, I mix it in a big glass pot, and keep adding to it. I use a variety of Chi- nese watercolours, including cinnabar and vermilion, but add other red colours at random. Th en I add other colours such as blue, just a bit, and a little black or brown to tone it down a bit. On one occasion a careless knife stroke while opening some old dried-up tubes of cinnabar paint resulted in the addition of quite a bit of blood from the end of my fi nger. I’d probably throw in a little snake-bile if I could be bothered to source some—a secret ingredient in the inks of a famous late-Ming ink-maker, by some accounts. While working on red rocks I just keep the pot of colour going for weeks, changing it daily by adding whatever I think appropriate. G What’s the story behind the green rocks? I assume that the inspiration here is a di ff erent one—not least because I know that you have some green malachite rocks in your collection. M Indeed I do. In this case, the colour has a very di ff erent role to play. I happened across some pots of extraordinary green ink from Japan, as well as a blue which mixes with the green to create a wonderful range of colours from malachite green to azurite blue. I had long collected inlaid wood boxes made in Yangzhou from the sixteenth century onwards, which usually included richly coloured malachite and azurite—di ff erent colours of the same stone. Th ese two inks provided me with pre- cisely these colours, which I found very exciting. It is such a jubilant colour, one that seemed to integrate all the previous markings rather conveniently when I added it to anything. Such integration is a very important aspect of painting. C. C. Wang taught me that. He spent years experimenting with his wrinkled-paper printing techniques in the 1960 s and 1970 s, but wasn’t satis fi ed with just the natural markings. He insisted on incorporating the brushwork he had mastered from his own ancient tradition, epitomised for him by emulating the lo ft y, dry brushwork of Ni Zan ( 1301 – 1374 ). It was only when he managed to integrate the two that he was satis fi ed. Th ose works are his masterpieces. G So, to revisit my earlier question, it sounds as if a good deal of your work is stray- ing from the Chinese tradition—or building on it, at least, particularly as far as your collages are concerned. How much of your inspiration came from western innovation à la Matisse, do you think, and what was the general reaction in the community? M Somewhat to my surprise, I came in for a lot of criticism from several of my artist friends for using collage. Th ey seemed to think it was cheating. Not Liu Kuo-sung, of course—his breadth of vision allowed for any possibility in his art. Th at’s why he has come up with so many extraordinary new methods over his lifetime and learned to bring them under complete control—including, of course, collage, which he used freely. As far as I am concerned, if there is one lesson we learn from the modern western revolution it is that there are no longer any rules that govern art—there are only those that arise out of it, so I feel entirely free to use whatever techniques I like. As to western in fl uence, I’ve no idea speci fi cally. Any artist expresses the sum total of personal and to some extent cultural experience, much of it unwittingly, but it all seeps into the art in some way, however di ffi cult that may be to recognise. I suspect it wasn’t so much western innovation that prompted me to use collage as much as the complete lack of proper training in any art discipline—and a complete lack, as a result, of expectation or governing rules. But as time has gone by, even my artist friends seem to have stopped bleating about my ‘scissor-work’ and accepted it as a sort of extension of brushwork, which as far as I am concerned is the way to view it. I certainly never consciously emulated Matisse in using scissors. Nor do I fi nd any particular merit in artistic innovation simply for the sake of it. Th at’s really a surface issue once art becomes fully mature in a culture. In the West, the innovation of the past century or so was authentic, as it was part of the process of exploring the new realms of perception and expression thrown up by the revolution. But it is not a prerequisite of art in a fully emancipated, fully mature aesthetic culture. G So do you think that there’s been too much focus on innovation in the West over the last century or so?