Painting the Dao

49 persistence; it was in his private collection. After at least a decade of this, I walked into his shop and he told me his daughter was getting married and if I paid for the wedding he would give me the staff. I obliged. Despite the obvious and millennial association of walking staves with the elite, no connoisseurship existed, though they were occasionally men- tioned in poems: ‘Walking staff in hand . . .’ Everything else that intrigued the elite attracted complex connoisseurship and interpretation, but not walking staves. So I set about inventing staff connoisseurship: taxonomy, categories, history. A summation of that connoisseurship then prompted the largest series of paintings of staves I ever embarked upon, two of the most ambitious with multiple panels of staves and texts. The first, in ink, included the invented history; the second, consisting of nineteen sheets of paper with ten staves in cinnabar red interspersed with text, was first exhibited at the Qintai Art Museum in 2024 in my first one-man museum show. ak14.75 Apart from strange stones and their natural or naturalistic wood equi- valents, ruyi sceptres, incense burners, fly whisks and other scholar’s objects became my focus. As an adjunct to my collecting, I painted literati trappings without the constraints of reality or French weddings. I also began to unify western and Chinese media. I had used French Arches and Italian Fabriano Artistico paper, both rough and smooth sur- faces, and came to realise that the effects achievable on Chinese papers could, through different means, also be realised on western papers. Very heavy Arches paper, 640 or 850 grams, is remarkably strong, so I could wash and scrub back layers of colour to create softer, unexpected marks. In ak18.12 the background consists of some ten layers of subtly different washes, selectively scrubbed back under running water to create the effect of shifting incense smoke. I also use a technique developed by CC Wang in which he crumpled a sheet of paper, dipped it in ink, printed with it and then integrated the accidental marks with brushwork and colour washes. But in this case, instead of adding colour to the crinkled paper, I used it to blot the still-wet colour on the surface of the paper to leave paler wrinkled marks ideal for landscape elements or clouds. Liu Kuo-sung, a key contributor to breaking free of the brushwork orthodoxy of the ink-painting tradition without abandoning the tradition itself, invented his own paper as part of his revitalisation of the tradition. It has large threads on its surface that can be pulled out at various stages of painting to create a natural ‘brushwork’. From time to time he sent me some of a new batch of paper to experiment with. From one batch I created a ak14.75 Jungle-born One of a set of 19 hanging scrolls Ink and watercolour on cloud-dragon and xuan paper, each sheet 248 × 61 cm Sussex and Hong Kong, 2014–15 ak18.12 The Censer’s Dream (image only) Ink and watercolour on Arches paper Sheet size 57 × 76 cm, Hong Kong, 2018 Nanshun shanfang Collection, Singapore