Painting the Dao

21 conditions. His upbringing allowed him to recognise this experience as a union with the Dao rather than as one defined by the limitations of preju- dice, religious or secular. And so we parted ways, both happy and satisfied. I was happy for the artists whose lives I’d had a small hand in adjusting, not without a bit of drama. And Hugh, having found something in his life that opened to him unimagined vistas and possibilities, was happy beyond description. He had entered the inner world of the infinite, exponentially different from any- thing he had known by seeing or touching. And this opening was all- absorbing and all-consuming. His understanding of self now began to change in profound ways, as the new enlightened self became integrated with the ineffable power of meta- physical consciousness. This consciousness was not perishable, temporary, measurable, visible or controllable, but it was there, and this was his true self – observing, being, watching the busyness and myriad concerns of ordinary human life with detachment, gazing beyond trivial distraction into a greater world breathing beyond visibility. In the late twentieth century, intelligentsia the world over were reading books on freeing the mind, on transcending the confines of daily routine, wishing to break through the old cultures of East and West that for millennia had muffled their societies under beliefs and political agendas, and the thoughtful truth-seekers were hard at work searching for fresh air that breathed with life. From various types of meditation practices to drugs and medicines, humans, especially from the western world, sought ways to escape the oppression of values they no longer cherished, and the outworn social norms of centuries that now felt too tight, too restrictive and no longer viable. Now unshackled, Hugh strove heartily to share his new insight with the world. He reviewed the idea of art and its functionality as well as our responses to art stimuli, writing book after book trying to explain the inexplicable. And joining the artists he admired, Hugh began to show his paintings, following their modernist, phantasmagorical realism that turned trees into stones and rocks into habitats of imaginary beings and daemons. It is at this point in his interesting life that Hugh Moss has joined the more avant-garde Chinese artists in speaking their rarefied brush language, whilst expressing his own unique world-spanning consciousness. He para- phrases the deep love of strange rocks that the Chinese love to put on display stands, indoors or outdoors, and lets his original and intensely coloured rocks perch on openwork, vine-crafted stands, following the Manchu