Painting the Dao

22 court’s eighteenth-century attachment to the rococo. Here and there in these stands, Hugh has camouflaged a lupine muzzle, half-open and ready to pounce. Strange faces emerge in staves and stones, thrust forward in the crest of a wave or at the tip of a branch, haunting and barely revealed. Hugh paints beloved convoluted rock forms strangely frozen mid-dance with their telltale Taihu Lake holes boring across temporal dimensions. There are also ancient trees that twist through eternity, as well as the obligatory literati component of poetry written in well-practised calligraphy. In three vertical scrolls of islands, he shows expertise in three-dimen- sional rendering, suspending the delectable glowing Swiss-cheese-like yellow islands above an aquamarine sea, both filled with pits and holes. We read them easily as islands over an ocean, so deeply accustomed are we to reading colour as substance. In the English calligraphy, something more than half a millennium distant is imported as a fresh breeze in Anglophone timespace, reinforcing the oneness of our global village, new yet warmly familiar in unfamiliar environments and curiously intimate. Why not? Is it not like enlarging our palate by including tastes from the farthest corners of the world? And what could be more delightful? In all creation we are one, and have always been, and yet we like to ignore our own truth and pretend always to be in hopelessly uncomfortable situations. But those who experience the ubiquitous and inalienable heavenly unity have been working hard to spread this unified and unifying heartset in any and all ways they can. And they find the most effective conduits in walking, in food, in music. And in art. Thank you, Hugh. Joan Stanley-Baker, 2025