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

38 39 M I think that we’ve misinterpreted its importance, although it’s easy to see how we got there. It was an interesting irony that caused western artists to emancipate art from intellectual tyranny, if you like, by largely intellectual means—a result of the western mindset, the inherently mental bias. Like scientists, we dissected the compo- nent parts of art, took them apart and tried to understand them and deal with them individually in order to understand the whole. We set about analysing the various languages of art as if laid out on a scientist’s bench. Th at led to some important and astonishing art, of course, but the innovation involved was real and meaningful because it arose naturally out of the revolution itself. By not recognising the underlying aim of the revolution—and critically, also not recognising when it was essentially over, with its fundamental goal achieved— we made the mistake of seeing surface innovation as the essence of modernity. It may have been, but it is not the essence of fully mature art. Th e only vital innova- tion there is individual creativity, regardless of whether it is in a long-standing mode of expression or not. In the West modernity was involved, naturally, in innovation— our artists were suddenly faced with a new, in fi nite realm of perception and expres- sion to explore—but maturity in art does not demand surface novelty. Indeed, surface novelty for its own sake is o ft en antithetical to profundity. G What lessons should we learn from the end of our own revolution? M As usual, it’s instructive to look at the Chinese experience. Once any revolution achieves its purpose, the focus shi ft s from conquest to comfortable dwelling in the new realms—in the case of art, realms of perception and expression. Th at’s why the Chinese felt no need to spend the last thousand years constantly coming up with something new on the surface of art, or even new subject matter. Th e art shi ft ed to the inner languages, now free to become powerful independent languages in their own right: line and form, particularly, but also endless possibilities of colour and texture, both on the paper and in the paper itself. When fully mature Chinese landscape paintings fi rst came to the attention of the West, they tended to look very much the same; landscapes of towering mountains, long waterfalls, trees clinging to cli ff s, tiny fi gures enjoying the wilderness and so on. Looked at as subject matter, they were similar; and given the dazzling surface inno- vation we were encountering in the West, seemingly boring. But the key point here is that they weren’t primarily intended as subject matter. Th ey were intended as inte- grated symphonies of all the languages of art, and they succeeded in that intention. If we look past the strolling scholar to the brushwork, the languages of line and form, of ink-tones and texture, each is excitingly di ff erent. Again we encounter the di ff er- ence between the western and eastern mindsets: in western explorations of the new realm of perception and expression of fully mature art, we chose either surface sub- ject matter or abstraction. In China, though, the syncretic mind I described earlier saw no contradiction in continuing to depict surface subject matter made up entirely of abstract form and abstract expressive brushwork. To them, choosing one or the other seemed as silly as choosing which leg to walk on. So they simply evolved to create wildly formal and linear paintings, for example, made up of fi gurative subject matter. What you get out of them depends on how you see them. G I suspect that western artists might struggle with the idea that something can be both fi gurative and abstract. Is there room for these apparently incompatible oppo- sites in western art theory? M Th e words in western aesthetics are used as opposites because of the western bi- nary bias, but words are only our own interpretation. We invent names for things and ideas in order to discuss them; they are analogies devised by human consciousness, and they are open to change and interpretation as consciousness evolves. If we all understand quite clearly what is meant by a particular word such as brick —allowing for di ff erent kinds—everyone knows exactly what we mean, and the analogy works e ffi ciently. But if we use words like truth , love or cruelty , far more context is needed to understand their intention. We become, in e ff ect, suspended in our languages. If we deal primarily with a single surface level of meaning in art, then we can gen- erally understand what is meant when we say fi gurative or abstract . It’s either a pic- ture of a recognisable object, or it’s an abstraction of some sort which is not intended as mimesis. Th at shi ft of surface intention is obvious. But to the syncretic mind, or a mind attuned to the idea of a process-based aesthetic—with all that implies for its broader signi fi cance, as we’ve discussed—there are many layers to be dealt with, from the obvious to the obscure, from the banal to the indescribably profound. Words may have very di ff erent meanings at any of these di ff erent levels. Here’s a good example from the western canon. If you look at Gainsborough’s portrait Th e Blue Boy in the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, you’ll note that the folds in his clothes are primarily mimetic; they provide a very literal visual rep- resentation of light falling on wrinkled material. In another of his paintings, Th e Blue Page, formerly in the A. Alfred Taubman Collection, he treats the wrinkled clothing in a noticeably more abstract-expressive manner, as mimesis gives way to expressive brushwork. Both are fi gurative paintings, both of similarly posed boys wearing simi- larly creased blue out fi ts, but the second relies on greater abstraction in the means of depiction. If we accept that one fi gurative painting by one artist can be more abstract than another, then we can accept that in Chinese painting, a balance has existed be- tween subject matter and the languages of line and form for over a thousand years— not just across two di ff erent paintings, but in the same one. Take Hong Ren ( 1610 – 1664 ), for example, for whom formality was a main focus. His landscapes are made up of carefully constructed formal shapes, whose balance de fi nes the main elements of the landscape. Th ese are then outlined with expressive brushwork. Large areas of almost blank rock, or cli ff s, depicted in energetic line, are balanced against small ones; dark against light, large against small, orchestrated in exquisite juxtaposition. Th e point here is that while Hong Ren was focused on land- scape, he was not constrained by it. By inventing his landscapes from the sum total of past experience of the landscape, he could focus on abstraction too. So he—and all the other artists he represents in this case—felt no need to dispense with fi guration, because it didn’t get in the way of the main intent. Th e pre-modern western tradition, however, so focused throughout history on literal representation, could only break free by completely rejecting it in favour of abstraction. It was a case of one or the oth- er, rather than both together; a prime example of the di ff erence between the binary mind and the syncretic mind.