Painting the Dao

31 some perceived tyranny, but the surface excitement of the isms diverted attention from identifying their fundamental purpose and meaning. A revolution must either succeed or fail; perpetual revolution is an oxymoron, which can only, ironically, lead to a revolution against perpetual revolution. The heat of the modern western art revolution was so intense that we lost sight of what it was all about, and therefore whether it had been achieved, and if so, when. As I tried to reconcile the aesthetics of the two cultures, I gradually came to the conclusion that what took place in the West had, essentially, taken place in China thousands of years ago. So the impact of the western revolution should have been seen as regional, the overthrow of tyranny in the western aesthetic domain. Its impact, however, was global and widely misunderstood, leading to the present confusion in the art world. Any radical change in theory, in any domain, tends to require the re- evaluation of cultural prejudices. The West’s modernism – a word and idea that was wildly inadequate and utterly confusing when applied to Chinese art – was exported globally as if it was the necessary foundation upon which all future art would rest. That assumption was wrong, however unpalatable such a judgement may be for the art world. The excitement of the surface of art seemed revolutionary, but even that was misleading. We made the mistake of taking thousands of years of reliance upon art’s subject matter and immediate message, the surface of the art object, as still governing the new art. That was also wrong. The great achievement of the revolution was the shift from object aesthetics to process aesthetics. Given my interest in two conflicting cultural perspectives, it was inevi- table that my new theory would be transcultural, capable of being applied to the art of any culture at any time, and given the underlying purpose of creativity, it was necessary that it be not just a theory of art but a theory of art and consciousness. 3 The traditional western understanding of art was as a separate domain, its function being to create art objects. Artistic vision was transformed through acquired skill into a finished work of art, its purpose largely being propaganda for religious or philosophical ideas. In China the surface had long been incidental to the overall process of art. The result of all creativity in an aesthetically mature culture isn’t an art object or performance, it is the evolution of consciousness, a view which shifts the emphasis from art object to the entire process of expanding consciousness through art, which includes the audience and its creative input. For millennia in theWest we got along very well with an object theory of art focused on surface meaning. The question ‘Is this a work of art or not?’