Painting the Dao

18 who tried to bypass the ancient Chinese bureaucratic establishment and rule in their usual nomadic manner, which decision resulted in one of the shortest dynasties in China’s long history. A great many highly educated sons of the gentry remained confined to their homes, painting landscapes for self-amusement and self-expression with the high skill of their calli- graphic training. Since the early Ming, when gentry amateur painters like Shen Zhou ( 沈 周 1427–1509) began trying to show mastery of the ‘brush spirit’ ( biyi 筆意 ) of the four or five Yuan-dynasty ‘unemployed’ masters, since immortalised in the annals of Chinese art history, literati painting in China had become bound to the ideal of grasping the essential brush spirit of such Yuan or Song masters. This ideal was like trying to imitate the very voice of the master. Literati or wenren painting thus tied Chinese painting down to this second-hand exercise for the following seven to eight centuries, and to the present day. In China the curse of bound feet, that had imprisoned ‘well- bred’ women for a thousand years, was abolished with the overthrow of the imperial system by the Republic, but the bound mind that confined ideals of beauty in China to second-hand imitations continues to constrict the search for truth and beauty to this day. CC Wang, like all other Chinese painters, remained mind-bound in emulation of the old masters, the focus of delectation being on brushwork – bimo , brush-and-ink – the idiosyncrasies of an artist’s brush use. Since becoming self-revealing in the fourteenth century, brushwork served as the artist’s voice, instantly recognisable in connoisseurship. What is this fuss over brush spirit, CC? Here I am looking at a bird on a branch, which is interesting, and there, where you pine in ecstasy, I see only a boring branch, no birds. Now came CC’s mind-blowing reply that opened for me an entirely new world no one in our Princeton years of academic art history had ever mentioned: the tiny secret world of the literati circle of cognoscenti who focus mainly on brushwork itself. Ah, Xiaohu, you have missed the whole point of Chinese painting. You look at painting the way, doubtless, you ‘watch’ Chinese opera, enjoying all the acrobatics and swordplay. But in China painting is not for seeing its content, but for imbibing its quintessence, which is the brushwork. You go to the opera to watch the external action, but I go there to listen, eyes closed, fixed on the life in the voice of the singer. Brushwork is the voice of the artist! Look at these two branches you just mentioned. The brushwork of the branch with the bird you like is entirely flat, the