I have always been intrigued by Chinese landscapes. Even as a kid, seeing Chinese art for the first time, I found myself in a poised, extraordinary environment in which each line seemed to have meaning and depths which extended beyond the world I knew. The first time I ever met any Chinese, I was seven, in a ship on the way from Melbourne to Brisbane. I was taught a little Cantonese, and met a group of good humored, well mannered, people whose lives seemed to contain some element which was always with them. I was introduced to the small pieces of China which follow the Chinese people like kindly relatives throughout the world.
The Chinese like their culture. It is home. Understandable, in that it isn’t the sort of brutal, mindless, mercantile thing that ours has become. No Chinese in history or present would describe the last 5000 years of Chinese history as a purely cultural event, some form of applied aesthesis, but they’ve managed to bring with them a cosmos of staggeringly beautiful ideas and the arts that portray them. Through a ferocious series of interesting times, this has survived.
I’m the son of an artist, and when my genes first demanded that I paint, I’d been looking in awe at Chinese art, both as a physical fact and as an idiom. I’d learned that the West really had a lot to learn from the demands of an art form that created a spiritual dimension, a link to a culture of ideas that ours has buried in the endless snivelings of the Culturati.
My father used the word chiaroscuro only once, to my recollection, to explain what it meant. It wasn’t part of his daily vocabulary. The unpretentious elegance of the Chinese art therefore appealed to me for its lack of verbose innuendo. The hacking prose of the insufferably arty was a bit beyond a joke to my father and his friends, a sort of confirmation of ignorance. I’ve since learned exactly why.
The Chinese approach their art commentary in a better informed way. A lousy rock in a Chinese landscape is a lousy rock. If it lacks the proper degrees of form and harmony, it’s just a rock, and a dispensable rock. I have on my living room wall a print of a picture by Wang Ximeng, (1096-1120) called A Thousand Li Of Rivers And Mountains. It is a stunning, vibrant aquamarine and green picture of flying mountains against an Oolong sky. It has a sort of mass to it which dwarfs the mind. This gentleman, who was no more than 24 when he painted it, epitomizes the courage of the Chinese landscape painter.
Anyone who’s ever seen pictures of the Yellow Mountains, and the fabulous shapes of the southern mountains, the chromatic hues of the land, and the enigmatic soils and rock formations, could guess that painting them might be a bit demanding. Add to this several thousand years of intelligent criticism, and you might gather that the Chinese know what they don’t like. Now, to make the task a bit more daunting, add the ideas of Feng Shui and Taoism, Confucianism and a cultural history including the Tang and Ming periods, when Chinese art outshone even most of the Renaissance masters. If Da Vinci had got to China, he’d have been a landscape painter, because the degree of difficulty would have represented a real challenge, even to him.
To use some very basic ideas; the gnarled trees of Chinese landscapes, the Chinese pines, usually, really do look like that. Anyone who’s ever attempted to paint a tree could tell you that it can be a particularly irritating process. The Chinese, however, have another perspective. There was a Taoist, called Master Useless by himself, who likened himself to those trees, because he said the good upright trees were felled and used for furniture, while the gnarled pines grew in peace in their own way, and lived to a ripe old age. This is a very Taoist idea, and the various concepts of the culture do show up in Chinese art in a lot of different ways. These concepts are at least a possible element of interpretation at any point of looking at the works.
You get the idea. The significance of the trees can be used for meanings not necessarily confined to the painting. The same applies to the rivers, mountains, and other features which can have a true spiritual significance. The mountains can be dragons, and the rivers can take in a range of concepts so vast that modern art seems rather taciturn. So it does take a certain quality of personal commitment and courage to try to take on these possible themes on their own terms. Particularly when you have over a billion people able to tell you what they think you’ve got wrong.
There was historically another danger. If you were so careless as to write or paint something which could antagonize someone, you could get yourself and your family exterminated, if you were lucky. That’s how seriously the interpretation of cultural meanings could be taken in China. Even the Cultural Revolution, the deformed bastard child of ignorance incarnate, would have had a hard time living up to the ancient horrors. It was true enough, by the way, that a lot of symbolism did have political meanings, and that one of the more effective ways of remaining alive and in one piece was to make those meanings as obscure as possible. However, even so, the opportunity to remove unwanted people by using the most bizarre interpretations, to slander the artists and their friends, was frequently used. A historian called Ssuma Chien was made to suffer a lifetime of misery purely because his book offended someone. After several decades in prison as a eunuch, he did finish it. I’ve read the book. You’d really have to work hard to be offended by anything in it. We definitely did not invent spin.
The other, less horrifying, dimension to artistic courage is a meeting between artist and subject which I think deserves a mention: The sheer beauty of some of the Chinese landscapes. To dare to paint them, either in abstract or as pure landscape, really takes guts. Confrontation with something so powerfully willful and elemental is no minor epiphany. Yet generations of Chinese artists, literally, have picked up this gigantic weight.
Despite the last few centuries of Western ignorance, there’s not a lot mystical about Chinese metaphors. Most of them are literary analogies, and if you don’t understand them or think them meaningless, you’re considered an ignoramus. Much like not recognizing quotes from Shakespeare. This is actually a pretty fair assessment, because a lot of Chinese words and ideographs are based on metaphors, and it equates to a form of conceptual etymology in regular use. Chinese metaphors are still used as a more economical method of expressing an idea, as they once were in the West, rather than personal pretension, so that probably makes it a bit more incomprehensible to the modern Western dilettante. (Suggestion from experience: if you don’t speak Chinese, read the stuff written by native Chinese speakers. Some things just don’t translate at all well into English unless it’s done by someone who knows the idiomatic meanings as well as the literal meanings. 4000 year old slang can be a bit… vague.)
One thing the Chinese artists have working in their favor is the art of calligraphy. The degree of brush control required for Chinese calligraphy, another art form at its highest level, is a perfect training ground for a painter. Inks and paints aren’t the same thing, but the process of handling the brushes makes the difference between an artist and a monkey with a stick. There’s an element of intense practicality in Chinese use of strokes in characters; you can quite literally produce either the wrong character, or something so scrawled and illegible it’s offensive to have to read it. Accuracy isn’t negotiable. Even I can be appalled by some of the informal scratchings of Chinese characters, even when I don’t know what they mean. They look poorly done, inadequate.
The artists needed the ability, too. The truly ancient landscapes are microcosms of accuracy. It seems that the ancient Chinese weren’t overly impressed with slash-and-daub techniques, and preferred to see what they were looking at, rather than merely guess what it was supposed to be. It’s a safe bet that the works that sold were the clearly technically superior ones. Later forms during the Qing (Manchu) period became highly stylized, and with a few notable exceptions the techniques lost quality. Interesting to see that modern Chinese versions of the traditional styles are becoming a lot closer to the brilliant precision of their forebears.
Then there’s the use of color. There is a range of greens, for example, purely Chinese greens, like Wang Ximeng’s painting, jades, and blue greens, colors which didn’t get a mention in the contemporary European art of the time. There are green yellows, and other hues which only a dedicated artist could find. Some colors, including Lucky Red, a combination of red and gold, and a precursor by centuries of the bright colors of the 20th Century’s belated meanderings, have a meaning outside their given schema. Need I say that for Chinese landscapes the wrong color could be like painting Ireland beige, and about as popular.
A further point about this group of artists: Their bravery wasn’t purely personal. It was the saving heroism of an entire culture. During the 5000 years of the incredible human dynamic which is called China, life has generally not been easy for most of its citizens. China has had more or less continuous famines, floods, wars, droughts, plagues, invasions, and social crashes. Unimaginable poverty and harshness has formed an uninvited entourage for the Chinese people since the beginning of recorded history. The entire spectrum of human hardship has been an integral part of its history. Compared to some parts of Chinese history, most of Europe’s darker hours have been bright summer days. Even the Hundred Years’ War wouldn’t have been particularly unusual. In this environment, art is a vocation for the truly inspired, those able to survive their inspiration.
I’m not Chinese, and I haven’t yet been to China. I’ve just spent over 20 years being dazzled by the scope of the art, and have found a deep affection for the land and culture it represents. China endures partly because its culture is indestructible, and lives in the souls of her people as well as the minds of her artists.