Painting the Dao

53 Notes 8 See ‘The Riven Reality of Consciousness’, one of many essays on transculturalink.com . Also covered in Art Reboot , op. cit. 9 See ‘Authenticity in Art’, ibid. 10 I should make it very clear at this point that I do not denigrate any art from any culture because of a lack of maturity in that culture’s aesthetic response. In the West, for instance, premodern artists were doing what artists have always done; the only difference is that they had to do so with certain constraints imposed by religion, philosophy and science. That never stops an artist being an artist, or inhibits great art. Once we learn to look past the surface subject matter, an ancient western masterpiece carries all the lofty meaning in the inner languages of line, form, colour and texture as a modern or ancient Chinese masterpiece. The impulse, focus and emphasis may differ, but the artistic vision does not. 11 Some of the most highly valued calligraphic examples from the past are acknowledged as inauthentic objects, as with the famous Lanting Preface of the fourth-century artist Wang Xizhi. The original is said to have been buried with the emperor several centuries later, who had it stolen from its reclusive owner in the Tang dynasty. But tracings and other copies survived and were copied over and over again, and were frequently carved into stone so that rubbings could be widely disseminated. All carry some weight of meaning for the process, and are valued accordingly. 12 Ed. Josh Yiu, Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2009), 90 13 Another Chinese term for the idea is ‘Strange Gates’ ( Qimen ), the ‘strange’ being the same concept as in ‘strange stones’. 14 It is my conviction that at some level creativity involves abstraction; the artist is ab- stracting reality. The level at which this takes place may vary depending upon perspec- tive, but the fundamental process of reinterpreting reality is to reach for essence, which inevitably involves abstraction in the broader sense. 15 Here I must acknowledge the seminal contribution to my art and life of Nicolas Chow, the creative genius who became the driving force of Sotheby’s Asian Art department in the 2000s. His grandfather, the epic dealer and collector Eddie Chow, was one of my earliest mentors, so we had a connection. It was Nicolas who first took my paintings seriously and encouraged me to do the same. 16 I’m sure someone, possibly Picasso, came up with that little aphorism long ago, but it is a fairly obvious one for a truly creative artist, even if left unexpressed verbally. Overleaf ak13.41 81