Painting the Dao

41 The outcome of all of this was the realisation that ‘essence’ was what it was all about, not only in art but in refining consciousness, and that creative response to experience was the crucial metalanguage involved. Essence is the foundation stone of vision, authenticity and all other aspects of painting and comprehension, an insight which follows the recognition that they are all faces of a single quest. Which brings us to the question of what the essence of art and the ink-painting tradition is. es sence Once aesthetic focus shifts from object to process, the search for essence becomes a matter of refining our interpretations of meaning conveyed by the art object as messenger rather than message. Once we recognise an image of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus as propaganda for a Christian interpretation of meaning, we can move beyond that to the art that underlies the surface meaning. Local interpretation of the surface message gives way to the inner meaning of the creative process. Different perspectives give rise to interpretations of meaning, and those can be conflicting. Europe calls its eighteenth century the ‘Enlightenment’, a rational culture antithetical to the enlightenment of Chinese mysticism. One was based on an outward objective reality, the other, on inner sub- jective reality. This difference is reflected in how creativity in the arts evolved inWest and East, and explains why traditional western art theory is inadequate to understand Chinese art at any depth. For centuries before the modern revolution, the West primarily sought essence in art at its surface. Surface skill in expressing the western mindset was paramount. In China, on the other hand, essence was sought in the inner meaning of the process, which was a far more efficient approach to self-realisation. In short, until the modern revolution, the West used art as a means of pointing the self towards religious or philosophical paths towards self-realisation. In China art was seen, in its own right, as a direct and efficient vehicle of self-realisation. In the West art was a signpost to a circumscribed Enlightenment governed by monotheism, its ultimate pur- pose to enforce the culture’s rules and supervision in order to fulfil evolving consciousness. In China art became a direct assault on such Enlightenment. In the twentieth century the two cultural mainstreams finally began to come into confluence, but global misunderstanding and confusion soon separated them again.