Painting the Dao

16 This sense of overwhelming awe could not be expressed in European painting, which focused largely on visible material forms and visages – divine, royal or aristocratic subjects – the compositions mainly narrative in nature and painting’s purpose being the satisfactory depiction of specific human-based moments or events to serve a didactic end. Art patrons aimed at elevating the viewer’s soul to a higher level of faith (as in iconic church murals), or towards deeper visual enjoyment when looking at themselves disporting in particular activities (like modern snapshots). In European painting of the medieval and Renaissance periods we see technique devel- oping in stages, the art always commissioned by patrons with stipulated subject matter, allowing artists little creative room to develop their inner vision. In ancient China patrons had higher respect for painters, who used the same pointed and pliant fur-tipped brush that they, the elite and highly educated gentry serving emperors in high office, used in their imperial work. They all knew the fifth-century treatise on the irreplaceable spiritual benefits of landscape painting ascribed to artist-writer Zong Bing ( 宗炳 375–443), which described how unrolling a landscape painting and travel- ling through its misty mountains and dales could revitalise the spirit, the viewer’s now aged body climbing up and down different sections of the painting, walking through dappled light or passing windy cliffs to breathe gusts of refreshing mountain air. The experience made viewers feel that they had actually traversed these beautiful bits of wild uninhabited nature and had come to experience existence itself. This famous essay was often cited and the Chinese intelligentsia acquired a taste for eremitism that can be compared to spiritual sojourning, especially in the Daoist world where adepts would vanish into the distant high ranges seeking ways to prolong physical well-being in order to stay alive for centuries. By the Northern Song dynasty, the imperial court had raised landscape painting to primary status, above figurative painting, giving artists complete freedom to roam wherever they fancied, with full power of expression. From the later tenth century onwards, landscape painting supplanted portrait and figurative painting, which had dominated before then. The act of painting changed in nature and quality from being a second-hand exercise of copy- ing known three-dimensional objects or subjects to a direct first-hand ad- venture in sheer creativity, manifested as the metaphysical spirit (or law) of creation itself, beyond all visible details grasped by the eyes. Art shifted from depiction to expression, from doing to being, from second-hand to first-hand, from seeing to feeling, experienced in the heart, not the mind.