Painting the Dao

19 brush is clearly slanted to one side and the stroke is lifeless, whereas this branch is three-dimensional, rounded, full of tensile strength that gives it life throughout its length. CC told me this great secret after I’d come back from four years in Japan as a professional art critic and had looked at many ancient works at close range, something impossible in our Princeton classroom with only small and fuzzy black-and-white photos in the Siren volumes, or slides on a screen. I talked about CCWang as the last literati painter as well as its greatest ever exponent with Hugh. Although CC was already selling his paintings to friends in New York by himself, I thought it would be interesting for him to be represented by a London art dealer. I also urged Hugh to meet Ho Huai-shuo (He Huaishuo 何懷碩 b.1941), whom CC Wang told me had mastered excellent brushwork, both in writing and painting, saying that I should study with him if ever I moved to Taiwan. We went to visit Huai-shuo and met his vivacious calligrapher wife Tong Yang-tze (Dong Yangzi 董陽孜 b.1942), whose dynamic flourishes of the brush instantly impressed Hugh. He took on both artists, representing them worldwide, and very quickly became agent for some of the more colourful new lights in the contemporary art world of Taiwan. He studied with them avidly, beginning with the more athletic aspects of modern Chinese brush arts. Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong 劉國松 b.1932) was a revolutionary type wishing to modernise Chinese painting and free it from the millennia of brushwork reverence that had made literati painting a precious ‘secret garden’ appreciated only by seasoned aficionados, incomprehensible to the untrained eye for centuries. Liu was creating dynamic works, inventing textured papers with natural fibre marks which seemed ‘made in heaven’, an instance of the natural, unfettered naivety so treasured in Chinese art. Hugh found Liu an exciting artist from whom to learn more about Chinese painting. Other artists I introduced to Hugh included the silent genius architect- painter Chen Chi-kwan (Chen Qikuan 陳其寬 1921–2007), who revo- lutionised (without intention) the values, scope, technique and functionality of Chinese painting, but who has yet to be accepted as a supreme painter in the annals of Chinese art history. Hugh has often greeted me with the happy announcement that he was pursuing the best of contemporary Chinese painters, and was on the way to fathoming something of their tradition, their inner goals and methods. And he has been true to his word, following as best he could, whilst at