Painting the Dao

20 the same time serving as agent for some artists and improving their lives immeasurably, for now these Taiwan artists found their works on sale in London art circles, and for prices they had never dreamed of. Regarding his so suddenly transforming their financial status, Hugh said, They are artists just as great as painters in London and New York. Should they sell for low prices because they use ink and paper rather than oils and canvas? I find their paintings beautiful, interesting and good, and often of deeper inner meaning than I can find elsewhere, so why shouldn’t I sell them by the same standards as works by western artists? All very true. Hugh introduced living Chinese artists to the West and they became an integral and active part of the international art scene, raised to the sphere of the exalted and no longer able to sell their works at the affordable prices that their Taiwan friends and admirers had enjoyed. Hugh quietly revolutionised the art market for contemporary Chinese painting and calligraphy, catapulting these millennia-old art forms into the urban- ised modern world of the West, gradually earning them equal value and winning the respect of viewers and buyers inTaiwan, London andNewYork. He saw and quickly grasped the import of these ancient art forms, their brushes and hand-ground ink, paper and silk, both widely used in China centuries before the West had them. Bringing these ancient arts practised by China’s elite intelligentsia into the modern world of commercial market- ing and open trading was a gamble, but Hugh had the passion and the courage to take it on, and in time his venture paid off. A new page was turned in the annals of Chinese art history. He may well have been the first art dealer to mix ethnicities and cultures in such a radical manner. And now, half a century later, it is no longer uncommon to see artists of distant cultures exhibiting in our popular international galleries. Like pearl divers brought up by generations of deep-sea divers, their lungs developed beyond the capacity of others, Hugh grew up with a wider scope of visual and tactile experience that enabled him to feel at home in any new sphere he wished to explore. And so came the great adventure into new realms of the soul. In Bang- kok, he once told me, he liked to go boating on the khlongs (canals) leading from the city out towards the sea. And on one memorable day in March 1983, he unexpectedly saw the invisible, experienced the unthinkable, knew the unknowable and understood the universe and its myriad realms and