Painting the Dao

33 the old with the new, was transformed into a widespread and no longer pertinent search for surface novelty at all costs, resulting in widespread banality. Those still shouting slogans and waving banners in the rubble of a revolution already won become not only irrelevant but tiresome. Confusion crept into the art world for both artists and audience, and was not confined to the West. China, having recognised the overarching role of art as a metalanguage more than two thousand years ago, was aesthetically far ahead of the West but augmented the confusion by crediting the western export. 5 For more than a century in China there has been a debate about the relevance of its art at a time of accelerating globalisation. The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the tumultuous years of the Republic prompted reformers in China to look to the West to reconsider their politics, educational systems and technology, in the wake of national humiliation since the OpiumWars of the mid-nineteenth century. Aesthetics had always played an important role in Chinese culture, so art was also called into question as cultural self- doubt coincided with growing knowledge of modern western art and the West’s military might. China made the fundamental mistake of assuming that it also had to play catch-up aesthetically, and it set about modernising what had been effectively modern for millennia, leading inevitably to con- fusion. Weasel words borrowed from the West further confused matters. The word ‘modern’ created a dichotomy with ‘traditional’, implying that China’s traditions were aesthetically outdated and irrelevant. 6 ‘Abstract’ was another. Abstraction in China was firmly established more than a thousand years ago, but without the need to eschew depiction. For the Chinese to discard subject matter in order to explore abstraction would have seemed as silly as deciding which leg to walk on. The abstract languages of visual art – form, line, colour and texture – are perfectly capable of functioning and being appreciated within depiction. The surface abstraction of the modern West had in China long been a more subtle abstraction. 7 Chinese artists also saw no need to keep introducing new subject matter to the visual arts; novelty of surface was incidental to the overriding purpose of creativity. The natural world became a self-sufficient subject for exploring the meaning of nature and self as a unified exercise. The majestic landscape painting of the tenth century – masterpieces depicting the grandeur of nature as a microcosm of the Dao, the source of nature and the creative universe – began to turn inward by the twelfth century, a development fore- shadowed long before. A well-known eighth-century summation of it came