Painting the Dao

17 The move from spirituality to materiality gradually and steadily enlarged the presence of houses and humans, shifting focus from being in nature to doing human things and to man-made environments, as it were moving from heaven to earth, from creators to creatures, until the twenty-first-century focus stiffened to machines and machine-generated images and activities. In this manner, over the centuries painters thickened the spacetime-deepening transparent perceptual experience of living space with ever more opaque cloud forms, and by the Qing dynasty these clouds acquired silken linings that, in the long reign of the Qianlong emperor (r.1736–1795), gained total independence to dance and pirouette across otherwise stone-still scenes of troop review or imperial gardens. This Manchurian emperor grew up learning Han Chinese, and diligently practised Chinese calligraphy and poetry, wishing perhaps to out-Chinese all Han officials at court, displaying his deep familiarity with the highest layers of traditional Han culture and filling his collections with all the famous works ever praised in ancient texts. Hugh Moss’s father was the famous London art dealer Sydney L. Moss, and he grew up surrounded by Chinese antiques, meeting many experts in the field as a child. These objects were not only the merchandise that sustained the family in England; they also spoke of traditions that although far distant were alive. And more than most sellers of exotica, Hugh became increasingly fascinated by the spirit behind these interesting objects, fam- iliar to him and yet speaking such a different music. I first met Hugh in the early 1980s whilst teaching Chinese and Japan- ese art history at Taiwan University, having been positioned into the Dep- artment of Foreign Languages instead of History. Hugh was by then much interested in contemporary Chinese painting, which I thought odd for a dealer in Asian antiques. He was becoming increasingly engrossed in brush-painted works, delving into the process of creativity, the nitty-gritty of values and techniques in contemporary Chinese painting and calligraphy. In this manner, Hugh’s attention and learning shifted from products to processes. By then I had met the great New York collector of Chinese literati painting CC Wang (Wang Jiqian 王季遷 / 王己千 1907–2003), a major painter of the literati or wenren ( 文人 ) school who, to my mind, had reached the pinnacle of the genre beyond all his predecessors. Here literati painting is understood as ‘emulating the quintessence of past masters’, notably the eremitic Daoist masters who had been trained for public office using top-notch calligraphy but were denied such by the Mongol conquerors