Painting the Dao

39 learning to paint I first be came interested in the Chinese ink-painting tradition to make good use of the copious wall space in my newly-acquired Mayfair gallery in 1970. I focused on living artists and exhibited and agented for some of the most important expatriate painters, none of whom had a global agent at that time. Learning directly from them deepened my understanding of Chinese painting. One of the artists I came to act for was CC Wang (Wang Jiqian, 1907–2003), whom I already knew as a collector of Chinese art and a client. It was his theoretical grasp and ability to explain that first led me to question western art theories of Chinese painting, but it wasn’t until I moved to Hong Kong in 1975 and expanded the group of artists for whom I acted that I entertained the possibility of accelerating the process of learning through painting myself. Visiting New York in 1980, I asked CC Wang how I should go about learning. ‘Paint,’ he replied. From the theoretical input of my artist friends I quickly understood that creativity was what art was all about and that it was necessary, whether as artist or audience, to climb the ladder from the easily accessible towards ever more esoteric meaning. I also realised that I already had a great deal of valuable training: for nearly three decades I had been collecting, studying and becoming deeply involved in Chinese art, including painting and calli- graphy. One of my early passions was strange stones. These natural or natural- istic sculptures, for garden, home or studio, had become as treasured as landscape painting by the aesthetic elite by the Song dynasty (979–1280). I had become familiar with them through paintings, where they often ap- pear in garden or interior scenes. They were typically Daoist, both in their elevation from the natural world to human aesthetics and in their nature as portals or meditational aids granting access to a transcendent reality – the Dao. The culture abounds with stories of individuals crossing the boundary ak24.4 126–7