Painting the Dao

13 Moss’s paintings channel this same spirit of cultivated eccentricity. His rocks are not naturalistic but stylised and theatrical, their oddness ampli- fied, sometimes verging on caricature. His pines bend with expressive con- tortions, stylised into loops or jagged silhouettes. The compositions are often playful, but the playfulness has lineage: it echoes the visual liberties taken by artists like Bada Shanren, Shitao or Jin Nong. One of Moss’s more quirky gestures is his use of English text brushed in a calligraphic style mimicking traditional Chinese inscriptions. These lines – aphoristic, philosophical or gently ironic – appear as integral elements of the painting. They fold western language into eastern form, becoming visual and con- ceptual counterparts to the strange rocks themselves: unexpected and lay- ered. Moss’s work belongs to the tradition of eccentric innovation. At the heart of this lies his philosophy of painting, rooted in Daoist thought and the practice of wuwei ( 無為 ), or ‘non-action’. Moss’s essays often speak of spontaneity and spiritual freedom, of painting as an act that arises not from effort but from attunement. In this context, his eccentricity is not contrived. It is the natural result of a practice that seeks resonance over representation, spirit over likeness. His dual role as collector and creator further deepens this resonance. For decades Moss has championed objects that defy symmetry: strange stones, weathered roots, zitan brushpots with unexpected graining. His painterly imagination is in conversation with these objects. He does not merely depict the scholar’s rock; he thinks with it. In doing so he reanimates its ancient function: as an object of contemplation, a metaphor for individuality, a stage on which the drama of aesthetic strangeness plays out. In a world increasingly drawn to smoothness, polish and digital pre- cision, Hugh Moss’s art reawakens the eye. It resists the easy, the polished and the expected, and in so doing teaches us to look again closely. His art requires attunement, the kind cultivated over a lifetime of looking. In its refusal to conform it echoes a lineage that saw eccentricity not as an anomaly, but as a sign of truth. Moss does not merely celebrate the strange; he inhabits it. And in doing so he extends the literati tradition by living within its most essential value: the freedom to be marvellously, irreducibly eccentric . 1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London and New York, 2001) 2 Katharine Burnett, in her thorough examinations of the term qi ( 奇 , strange, orig- inal, eccentric), argues convincingly that within art and literary circles qi should be best understood to mean ‘original’ rather than ‘eccentric’. See K. P. Burnett, ‘A Discourse of Originality in Late Ming Chinese Painting Criticism’, Art History , 23/4 (2000), 530 Fish and Rocks , Bada Shanren, dated 1699