Painting the Dao

11 twi sted p ines and crooked rocks Eccentricity and the Literati Eye in the Art of Hugh Moss Edward Luper I n the classical Chinese aesthetic tradition, eccentricity was not deviance but refinement. To be eccentric was not to seek attention, but to express an inward authenticity: the flowering of personality through brush and stone. As Michel Foucault argued, our admiration for eccentricity lies in our belief that there is a truth made inaccessible by our dependence on rationality. 1 From Daoist sages to literati painters, those who dwelt among crooked pines and strange rocks did so not as outsiders, but as connois- seurs of the irregular and the essential. Chinese connoisseurship developed not only an acceptance but a reverence for the idiosyncratic, especially in the world of guaishi ( 怪石 ), scholar’s rocks prized precisely for their asymmetry, strangeness and singular form. Hugh Moss, long celebrated as a dealer, collector and theorist, is also a painter. Under the name Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat, Moss has developed a body of work that speaks with subtlety and eccentric force as it transcends normal categories of East andWest. His ink paintings of scholar’s rocks and twisted pines are neither imitations of the past nor polite tributes. Rather, they are animated by the same aesthetic impulses that moved artists like Mi Fu (1051–1107), Bada Shanren (1626–1705) and Wu Bin (act. seventeenth century): an eye trained to the marvellous, and a brush that delights in strangeness. Two Chinese terms help illuminate this aesthetic. The first is qi ( 奇 ), a character with a wide semantic range: it can mean strange, marvellous, ingenious, rare or exceptional. 2 Qi was a prized quality in Chinese art, especially within literati circles, where it indicated not oddity for its own sake, but the presence of a certain refined and discerning spirit. A scholar’s rock might be described as qi because of its bizarre form, its suggestion of mountain ranges in miniature, or its resistance to easy interpretation. A brushstroke might be called qi if it revealed a hidden vitality or sudden ak24.109 148–9