China and the West

Snyder, Gary. The Brush
The elites of premodern China's high civilization were urbane, bookish, secular, arty, and supremely confident. The Imperial Government rested in a ritualized relationship with Great Nature, and the seasonal exchanges between Heaven and Earth—sun, rains, and soils—were national sacraments conducted at elaborate Earth and Heaven shrines. (The most powerful of rituals were conducted in solitude by the Emperor himself.) Nature and its landscapes were seen as realms of purity and selfless beauty and order, in vivid contrast to the corrupt and often brutal entanglements of politics that no active Chinese official could avoid. The price an intellectual paid for the prestige and affluence that came with being a member of the elite was the sure knowledge of the gap between humane Confucian theory and the actual practices of administering a county or a province—with multiple levels of graft, well-cooked books, and subtle techniques of coercion. And the higher one rose in the ranks, the more one’s neck was exposed to the deadly intrigues of enemies. The mountain horizons were a reminder of the vivid world of clear water, patient rocks, intensely focused trees, lively coiling clouds and mists—all the spontaneous processes that seemed to soar above human fickleness. The fu poet Sun Ch'o said of these processes, "When the Dao dissolves, it becomes rivers, when it coagulates it becomes mountains". Tsung Ping, an early fifth-century painter whose work does not survive, is described as having done mountain landscapes when ill and no longer able to ramble the hills he loved. He wrote the perfect program for a recluse: Thus by living leisurely, by controlling the vital breath, by wiping the goblet, by playing the ch'in, by contemplating pictures in silence, by meditating on the four quarters of space, by never resist-ing the influence of Heaven and by responding to the call of the wilderness where the cliffs and peaks rise to dazzling heights and the cloudy forests are dense and vast, the wise and virtuous men of ancient times found innumerable pleasures which they assimilated by their souls and minds. He also stated a philosophy of landscape painting that stood for centuries to come: "Landscapes exist in the material world yet soar in the realms of the spirit... The Saint interprets the Way as Law through his spiritual insight, and so the wise man comes to an understanding of it. Landscape pays homage to the Way through Form, and so the virtuous man comes to delight in it." Half a century later Hsieh Ho declared the first principle of landscape painting to be "spirit resonance and living moment"—meaning, a good painting is one in which the very rocks come alive, and one yearns to go walking in it. The basic aesthetics of the tradition had been articulated, but it was almost a thousand years before the implications of these statements were fully realized in painterly terms. The art of painting "mountains and waters" slowly unfolded through the centuries. The concept of ch'i—a rich term that translates as indwelling energy, breath, and spirit—is a rich sophistication of archaic East Asian animism. Joseph Needham calls it "matter-energy" and treats it as a proto-scientific term. Contemporary people everywhere tend to see matter as lifeless. The notion of a rock participating in life and spirit—even as metaphor—is beneath adult consideration. Yet for those who work for long amid the forms of nature, the resonating presence of a river-system or prairie expanse or range of hills becomes faintly perceptible. It's odd but true that if too much human impact has hit the scene, this presence doesn't easily rise. Archaic art worldwide is often abstract and geometrical. The spiral motif is widely found—from tattoos on the cheek to petroglyphs on a canyon wall. This representation of the ch'i of things becomes a design of volutes in early Chinese decorative art. Artists started tracing the lines of energy flow as observed in the clouds, running water, mist and rising smoke, plant growth—tendrils, rock formations, and various effects of light, in their patterns. They went on, according to Michael Sullivan, to draw images of fantastically formed animal/energy-bodied nature spirits, and this provided a main bridge from archetypal being to archetypal land- form. The lines finally twisted themselves into ranges of mountains. The word for civilization in Chinese is wen-ming, literally, “understanding writing." In the time of Confucius people wrote on slats of bamboo with a stylus. When paper and the soft-haired brush came into use, the fluidity of calligraphy became possible. In China calligraphy is considered the highest of the graphic arts. The painter uses the same equipment as a writer—the "four treasures" of brush, ink, inkstone, and paper. The brush usually has a bamboo handle with rabbit, badger, goat, deer, wolf, sable, fox, and other hairs for the tip. Even mouse-whiskers have been tried. Everything from a broken roof-tile to rare and unusual stones have been used for grinding the ink. Paper, which is said to have been invented in the first century A.D., is commonly made from paper mulberry, hemp, and bamboo. The paper preferred by Sung and Yuan dynasty painters was called "Pure Heart Hall" paper. It was smooth, white, and thin. Paintings were also done on silk, but paper lasts longer. Ink was made by burning dry pine logs in a kind of soot-collecting kiln. The soot was mixed with glue, one famous glue being made of donkey skin boiled in water from the Tung river. Fragrance was added, and the whole pressed into an inscribed stick. Grinding the ink with a slow steady back-and-forth stroke, softening the brush, spreading the paper, amounts to a meditation on the qualities of rock, water, trees, air, and shrubs. The earliest surviving landscape paintings (early T'ang, the seventh century) are more like perspective maps. Wang Wei's Wang Chuan Villa is a visual guide to a real place, with little labels on the notable locations. These first painted mountains are stark and centered, and the trees look stuck on. The painting might be a guidebook scene of a famous temple on a famous mountain. They are still half-tied to accounts of journeys, land- use records, or poems. Then, with the Sung dynasty, in the eleventh century, paintings open out to great space. The rock formations, plants and trees, river and stream systems, flow through magically realistic spatial transitions. The painter-essayist Kuo Hsi reminded us that the mountains change their appearance at every step you take. Paintings distinguish the wider drier mountains of the north from the tighter, wetter, mistier valleys of the south. These vast scenes, with a few small fishing boats, little huts—cottages— travellers with pack stock—become visionary timeless lands of mountain- rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas. People are small but are lovingly rendered, doing righteous tasks or reclining and enjoying their world. Painters moved between extremes of wet ink-dripping brushes and drier sparser ink on the brush. From hard-boned fine-detailed meticulous workmanship leaf by leaf and pebble by pebble they moved to wet-flung washes of lights and darks that capture a close hill, a distant range, a bank of trees with an effect that can be called impressionistic.
The Sung dynasty painters ot large scale, including the horizontal handscrolls of a type sometimes called "Streams and Mountains without End," didn't always walk the hills they portrayed. With an established vocabulary of forms and the freedom of the brush they could summon up mountains that defied gravity and geomorphology, that seemed to float in mist. But these invented landscapes were somehow true to organic life and the energy cycles of the biosphere. The paintings show us the earth surface as part of a living being, on which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each other—the rocks under water, waterfalls coming down from above clouds, trees flourishing in air. I overstate to make the point: the cycles of biosphere process to just this, stream vertically through each other. The swirls and spirals of micro- and macrocli¬mate ("the tropical heat engine" for example) are all creations of living organisms; the whole atmosphere is a breath of plants, writhing over the planet in elegant feedback coils instructed by thermodynamics and whatever it is that guides complexity. "Nature by self-entanglement," said Otto Rossler, "produces beauty." The mountains and rivers of the Sung dynasty paintings are remote. Yet they could be walked. Climbers take pleasure in gazing on ranges from a near distance and visualizing the ways to approach and ascend. Faces that seem perpendicular from afar are in fact not, and impossible-looking foreshortened spurridges or gullies have slopes, notches, ledges, that one can negotiate—a trained eye can see them. Studying Fan K’uan's "Travellers Among Streams and Mountains" (about A.D. 1000)—a hanging scroll seven feet tall—one can discern a possible climbing route up the chimneys to the left of the waterfall. The travellers and their packstock are safe below on the trail. They could be coming into the Yosemite Valley in the 1870s. Southern Sung and Yuan dynasty landscape painting (especially with the horizontal handscroll format) tends to soften the hills. In the time of the evolution of the paintings, the mountains become easier, and finally can be easily rambled from one end to the other. As Sherman Lee says, the landscapes are no longer "mountain-and-water" but "rock-and-tree-and-water."
The cities of the lower Yangtze became a haven for refugee artists and scholars during the Southern Sung dynasty, in the twelfth century, when the northern half of the country fell to the Khitans, a forest-dwelling Mongol tribe from Manchuria. The long-established southern intelligentsia had always been closer to Daoism than the northerners. At that time Ch'an Buddhism and painting both were popularly divided into a northern and southern school. In both cases, the southern school was taken to be more immediate and intuitive. This large community of artists in the south launched new styles of painting. Lighter, more intimate, suggestive, swift, and also more realistic. Some of the painters—Hsia Kuei, Mu Ch'i, Liang K'ai, were much admired by the Japanese Zen monks and merchants, so many of their works were bought by the Japanese: traded for the exquisite Japanese swords that the Chinese needed to fight off the northern invaders. Many of the paintings ended up in the Zen Honzans ("Main Mountains"—headquarters temples) of Kyoto, where they are kept today. The fact that some scrolls were landscapes of the imagination should not obscure the achievement of Chinese artists in rendering actual landscapes. The most fantastic-looking peaks of the scrolls have models in the karst limestone pinnacles of Kuangsi; misty cliffs and clinging pines are characteristic of the ranges of southern Anhwei province. The painting manual Chieh-tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, "Mustard-Seed Garden Guide to Painting" (about 1679), distinguishes numerous types of mountain formations, and provides a traditional menu of appropriate brush stroke- types for evoking them. Geological identifications of the forms indicated by different brush-strokes are described in Needham: Glaciated or maturely eroded slopes, sometimes steep, are shown by the technique called "spread-out hemp fibers", and mountain slopes furrowed by water into gullies are drawn in the bo yeh ts’un manner ("veins of a lotus-leaf hung up to dry"). "Unravelled rope" indicates igneous intrusions and granite peaks; "rolling clouds" suggest fantastically contorted eroded schists. The smooth roundness of exfoliated igneous rocks is seen in the "bullock hair" method, irregularly jointed and slightly weathered granite appears in "broken nets", and extreme erosion gives "devil face" or "skull" forms... cleavages across strata, with vertical jointed upright angular rocks, looking somewhat like crystals, are depicted in the "horse teeth" (ma ya ts'un) technique. The Ta Ch'ing T'ung Chih is an eighteenth-century geographical encyclopedia with an illustrated chapter on "mountains and rivers". These woodblocks, based on the painting tradition, not only give a fair rendering of specific scenes, but do so with geological precision. Needham notes how one can identify lwater-rounded boulder deposits, the Permian basalt cliffs of Omei-shan, the dipping strata of the Hsiang mountains near Po Chii-i's tomb, U-shaped valleys and rejuvenated valleys.
Huang Kung-wang (born in 1269) was raised in the south. After a short spell with the civil service he became a Daoist teacher, poet, musician, and painter. He said to have recommended that one should "carry around a sketching brush in a leather bag" and to have called out to his students "look at the clouds—they have the appearance of mountain tops!" His handscroll "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains" came to be one of the most famous paintings within China. He started it one sum¬mer afternoon in 1347, looking out from his house, and doing the whole basic composition on that one day. It took another three years to finish it. It's a clean, graceful painting that breathes a spirit of unmystified naturalness. The scene is not particularly wild or glamorous; it has the plain power of simply being its own quite recognizable place. This is in tune with the Ch'an demand for "nothing special" and its tenderness for every entity, however humble. From around the Ming dynasty (1368 on) China had more and more people living in the cities. Painting helped keep a love of wild nature alive, but gradually many paintings were done by people who had never much walked the hills, for clients who would never get a chance to see such places. At the same time, there were painters like Wang Hui, who was a master of all historical styles, but also an acute observer of nature. His "Landscape in the Style of Chii-jan and Yen Wen-Kuei" (1713) carries the hills and slopes on out to sea as the painting fades away, by a portrayal of sea-fog twisting into scrolls and curls of water vapor / wind current / energy flow that faintly reminds us of the origins of Chinese paintings, and takes us back to the mineral and water cycle sources. Chi¬nese painting never strays far from its grounding in energy, life, and process.