Author’s Note:

Huang Binhong described his own painting practice as ideographic, one that was inspired by the Six Scripts of Chinese characters’ formation. “All mountains,” he said, “manifest their strength downward and their spirit upward, as recorded in Shuowen Jiezi (100 CE, literally ‘Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters’). My calligraphy borrows its strength from mountains, wherein strokes manifest their strength downward and their spirit upward, through a restrained brush tip straight and tight. All waters, even cascading from heaven like the Yellow River, with all its meandering twists and turns, would invariably appease and flatten, which, again, is based on Shuowen Jiezi. My calligraphy emulates this feature of waters, whereby I start my strokes with tremendous concentrated energy and end them with resolute tranquility. Therefore, the brush always begins toward the opposite direction as intended and concludes with a gradually appeased energy.” This exhibition of Shanshui, titled “Xuan Yan” (literally “Manifesto”), is thus inspired by this calligraphic philosophy of Huang Binhong above.

This essay does not fall into the category of formal academic articles and contains many highly personal and sometimes radical opinions. My audacity of doing so arises from my enduring passion for Shanshui, a passion so great that I don’t hesitate to lay bare my personal thoughts and feelings so that greater ones would follow. My constant discontentment with the highly stylized and formulaic paintings of “fake mountains and fake waters,” a sentiment shared by many of my colleagues and friends within the circle of fine arts, is emblematic, I believe, of the conspicuous lack of gravitas cherished in the Chinese intellectual tradition and the decline of authentic Shanshui experience. Within the Shanshui tradition which genuinely resonates with the Chinese audience are the Confucianist “love of the intelligentsia,” the spectacular sceneries depicted in Chu Ci and Han Fu, the profound spirit and emotion in Tang Poetry and Song Ci, and more importantly, the rich variety of mountains and waters created by painters across different dynasties. Underlying this convention of Shanshui is a unique world view, a worldview. Shanshui is a uniquely Chinese art of worldview which embodies Dao or logos by shapes, the heavenly by forms. The essence of Shanshui experience is not reducible to the subject-object relationship but lies in the boundaries between the human and the heavenly.

“The humans and the heaven compete and emulate with each other and so progresses beyond time itself, ancient and modern.” Such is the affective and spiritual profundity that the Chinese see and feel in the world of Shanshui. Now we live in an era of changes that are unprecedented during the past three millennia. Or to put it more precisely, in the second century of this era of changes, we’ve already lost our coordinates for the boundaries between the human and the heavenly. How, then, do we live our lives in such an age? How do we anchor our heart and soul? “Heaven and earth remain as they are, and the rivers flow on nonstop.” Cao Mengde writes, “mountains never tire of height; the seas never tire of depth.” Liang Qichao writes, “The world is infinite, and the will endless; the space of seas and heaven stand in eternity.” These are the kind of spirit and vision we need to revitalize today. In this essay, I tentatively propose two visions, “Heaven and Earth in Primeval Times,” and “The Years and Days of Mountains and Rivers,” so that the metaphysical mythos and monumental pathos in Shanshui experience could be enlivened, and the study of the human with world-defying breadth and depth be restored to its due place.

Living in the 21st century, it behooves us, as Chinese, to revitalize the intellectual legacy of Chinese painting so that it can be shared by the world. In this sense, Shanshui remains an essential path toward the worldview of the Chinese art and it calls for both the artists’ relentless inquiry and a spiritual revitalization for everyone.

The boundless and obscure heaven and earth separate the minds far apart; a life of labor and achievement, those years of poverty and exile we didn’t hesitate to start; the vast mountains and rivers and the blossoms everywhere would sustain with the eternal lamp in our heart.

The demerit of contemporary Shanshui paintings consists less in the degradation of painting techniques than in the weakening of Shanshui experience. The mission of Shanshui was to revitalize the spirit of the country as well as that of the mountains and rivers. The greatness of painting lies in its artistic expression modeled upon the cosmos, which defines the spiritual essence of traditional Chinese painting. The purpose of painting, as Zhang Yanyuan writes in the opening of Famous Paintings throughout History (Lidai Minghua Ji), is “to enable education, to establish ethics, to explore the divine, and to sound the dark and obscure.” More than a millennium has passed and the Chinese painting has deviated from this ancient ideal. Wang Yanshou once described the paintings in Lingguang Palace as capable of “encompassing heaven and earth, engendering genera and species.” Today, this capacity is taken over by the National Geographic Channel, which produces a mode of visual perception through advanced technologies and vast capital investment, a visual ideology based on scientific positivism, observing and documenting in full details the world we live in. In essence, it is an objectification and technologization of the world, while the spirit of Shanshui today strives to be a Shanshuification of the world.

The kind of “nature” that Shanshui artists attempt to emulate is the created world, not one of ancient mountains and rivers composed of iconographic patterns. The Chinese philosophy of nature has been fatally changed during the past century. The artistic forms of Song Shanshui and its mode of perception have already ceased to be part of our felt experience but become a spiritual puzzle we need to decode. Chinese paintings seek “to emulate the world externally, and to cultivate the heart internally.” “To emulate the world externally” fundamentally differs from Francis Bacon’s attempt “to read the Book of Nature.” The so-called “world” concerns neither individual, specific mountains and rivers nor all of them collectively. It involves the grand evolution and operation of things, their genesis and cultivation, creation and change. And in this world, there’s the Dao but no ultimate, fixed formula. The emulation of the world purports to grasp the underlying mechanism of the world’s generation and evolution. In the “world” in Chinese paintings, the primitive and fundamental relation between “me” and “things” is not one of imitation but one of inspiration. Inspiration arises from concrete, affective encounters with things and sceneries, wherein the symbiotic relation between “me” and the world is born. The world, seen in this light, is not the natural world observed by positivistic sciences or the object of knowledge for epistemologists. It is heaven and earth in their indistinct yet holistic entirety, born within the spontaneous flow of inspirations, within a world where everything flows through “me.”

Tsung Ping, in China’s first essay on the theories of Shanshui painting, pointed out that “Sages, harboring the Dao, respond to things; the virtuous, purifying their thoughts, savor images.” This is the sort of affinity and attachment that makes possible the spiritual communion with heaven and earth. Tsung also said, “As I unroll paintings and face them in solitude, while seated I plumb the ends of the earth. Without resisting a multitude of natural dangers, I simply respond to the uninhabited wilderness, where grottoed peaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in depth. The sages and virtuous men shed reflected light from the distant past, and a myriad delights are fused into their spirits and thoughts.” This is “unimpeded spirit” inspired by encounters with Shanshui, the “travel” of the sages and the “joy” of savoring the appearances. Underlying such “travel” and “joy” is not an objectified observation and mimesis, or “drafting upon exhausting peculiar and bizarre mountains” proposed by Shi Tao, not the laborious attempt “to construct a spiritual ambience,” but an ineffable correspondence. Commenting on Li Longmian’s painting titled “Shanzhuang Huajuan” (literally “The Mountain Villa Roll”), Su Dongpo wrote,

 

Longmian’s “Mountain Villa Roll” endows all mountain-climbers with a freedom to walk, to track their own paths, as if in a dream, or transposed back to their previous lives. All the springs, rocks, grass and trees they encounter in the mountain, they know their names without asking; all the fishermen, lumberjacks, and hermits, they know intimately without knowing their names. Is this because they all have an unfailing memory? Of course not. He who paints the sun often dwells upon the cake, not that he forgets the sun. He who’s drunk wouldn’t drink with his nose, and he who dreams wouldn’t play with his toes. All this is natural and innate, not forced by memory. For those who live in the mountains, the spirit focuses not on individual things but on all things therein, and the intellect connects with all sorts of workmen. There is the Dao, and there is the craft. For painters who practice the Dao without being restrained by the craft, things would imprint upon their heart, not upon their hands.

 

Shanshui concerns the great things. It’s heaven and earth by another name. Shanshui painting, or more broadly, Shanshui art, records our experience with the world, or as what the ancients said, it mediates between men and nature. It’s a quintessential form of Chinese art with a worldview in it. The world of Shanshui as depicted by the intelligentsia, with the progress of modernity, has already been thoroughly disrupted, both visually and intellectually, if not completely dissolved altogether. Shanshui painting no longer bears the spiritual ethos envisioned by Tsung Ping and Su Dongpo. It becomes a designated motif, a stylized pattern, a ready-made in art history, devoid of its fundamental connection with worldview. Shanshui painting has fallen into a state of intransitiveness, mired deeply in the brush-ink gimmicks and an ontological crisis.

Ancient Shanshui paintings are mostly travelogues in nature, a vehicle for reminiscence. As Su Dongpo pointed out, its function as reminiscence lies not in an unfailing memory. The uniqueness of Shanshui painting as an artistic category lies instead in its capacity to incorporate the spirit and energy of mountains and rivers onto the canvas, whereby the audience would be able to vicariously experience the “Shanshui spectacle,” effecting a spiritual affinity and communion between the audience and Shanshui. All the ancients’ travels and joys find their ultimate expression in this spiritual affinity and communion within Shanshui and the painting canvas. Tsung Ping’s “unimpeded spirit” arises from the unfettered meditations when “unrolling paintings and facing them in solitude.” Song Shu (The Book of Song) records how Tsung Ping laments that, “With all the diseases of old age, I’m afraid that it would be difficult to visit all the famous mountains. Yet by purifying my heart so that the Dao can be accessible to me, I’d travel in my bed…It’s all the paintings in my chamber that I travel to. As they say, when I play my Gu Qin at home, all the mountains echo and become my instrument.” Tsung Ping suggests a spiritual return to the mountains and forests when we appreciate Shanshui paintings, travelling among the lively spirit of Shanshui, “travelling in bed” and “savoring images.” Tsung Ping in fact established the isomorphism between travelling among Shanshui and the appreciation of Shanshui paintings for their joint focus on the spirit and the somatic experience of Dao. Immersing oneself within the canvas and feeling the ecstasy of the creator replicates the travels of the sages and joys of savoring images. Yet throughout the millennium, especially after the radical changes in Ming and Qing Dynasty as well as in our own contemporary period, this primal, original function of Shanshui painting has gradually faded into oblivion.

The metaphysical approach to Shanshui, the joy at the canvas. These two are symbiotic and isomorphic with each other. They correspond and connect with each other. So are the metaphysical viewing and the unimpeded spirit. Shanshui painting is a kind of reminiscence, in which the artist paints not so much through immediate observation of the scenery as from memory. The specific configurations of memory are recorded onto the canvas so that memory itself emerges from the white void in its embodied, visual form. The viewer also experiences the memory in front of the painting, inspired somatically and spiritually, bed-travelling to the end of the world, reflecting on the experience of travelling among Shanshui, feeling the spirit and energy of Shanshui, all within the study. Both the painter and the viewer reminisce. The former visualizes memory, and the latter actualizes or contextualizes it. The former incorporates the created world unto the canvas, while the latter returns to the created world through the canvas.

Originally, Shanshui painting focused on individual things, which concerns both its artistic method and its fundamental mission. The increasing attention to Shanshui painting by scholars and intelligentsia in later generations, in the form of “bed-travelling” and viewing with “unimpeded spirit,” has evolved into an appreciation of artistic works themselves. Jing Hao seeks “authentic Shanshui” in paintings, while Zhou Mi sees the “perfect brushstroke” in solitary mountains. For the ancients, the painting is the medium whereby they reminisce about Shanshui experience; for the moderns, the Shanshui experience is the medium whereby they seek to understand the meaning of paintings. Practitioners of Shanshui painting nowadays all aspire to achieve a disciplined artistic creation, boasting of brushing techniques and visual sensations, without knowing that they’ve deviated far from the original mission of Shanshui.

On the path toward Shanshui, it seems as if all the painters throughout history had the same canvas for imitation, a millennia-old canvas that had been worn and corroded by time, yet had left visible, enduring traces and clues among this chaos of changes and obscurity. This canvas is the created world itself, with mountains and rivers in it. Shanshui refers not merely to the sceneries seen, the woods, springs and mountains visited. It is unity of all these. All the images and phenomena before our eyes are equal. The form embodies the spirit. And all things are images. There’s an innate, natural integrity to Shanshui, with a sustained continuity among the corporeal images, extended in all directions, indivisible, without boundaries and measures, infinite.

The essence of such a canvas is beyond words, beyond the critical distinction between “perfect brushstroke” and “authentic Shanshui.” The painter who wields this canvas has the ability to emulate the power of the creator, to grasp the generative and evolutionary mechanisms of all things, however minute and elusive they are. The art of emulating the world consists in copying and imitation. Those who copy live in the mountain before their eyes; those who imitate imbues the scenery with their spirit, with their body fully integrated with it, as if the painter and the image were seamlessly glued together, or as the knife cutting and rubbing the stone. Through all this cutting, rubbing or grinding is a worldview articulated: the light of heaven, the shadows of clouds, the flying dragons and dancing snakes, miracles and changes without end, darkness and obscurity without measure. The painter stands in the cosmos and philosophizes about its infinite changes, seeks rich meanings in ambiguities, and explores into the dark recesses in time eternal. The “secret” of the world is thus laid bare through the convergence and display of these infinite images.

Shanshui is an art of worldview. Its fundamental principle “the law of the Dao is its being what it is” (from Tao Te Ching) enables it to manifest the secret of the world. On this, Wang Bi commented, “Men do not go against the earth so that a complete and safe life is possible. Such is the earth as law. The earth does not go against the heaven, so that its completeness and fullness can be achieved. Such is the heaven as law. The heaven does not go against the Dao so that a complete protection is achieved. Such is the Dao as law. The Dao does not go against nature so that its essence can be acquired. Such is nature as law. That which takes nature as law comply with the square within the square and comply with the circle within the circle, and would do nothing against nature. As for nature itself, it is ineffable, beyond words.”

Nature is “ineffable, beyond words.” If the Dao follows nature as law, then what law should nature follow? The “law” becomes law through expressing itself through nature. And nature not only creates the world but also points toward the ineffability of “the unknowable being.”

“It is the way of heaven to diminish superabundance and to supplement deficiency.” Such is the universal good. “It is the way of men to take away from those who have not enough to add to his own superabundance.” Such is personal good. “The way of heaven” as proposed by Lao Tzu has more profound meanings than this. “Heaven and earth do not act from any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.” The “nature” which the way of heaven takes as law does not regard family love, personal good or emotions. Perhaps this “law of nature” could serve as the spiritual foundation for the Chinese Shanshui experience. Shanshui painting strives “to emulate the world externally, and to cultivate the heart internally.” “The world” concerns less those individual mountains and rivers than the generation of changes. “The heart” refers to the spirit not of the subject, but of heaven and earth. Admittedly, heaven and earth do not have a heart. The painter makes use of the infinite treasure of nature and creates a heart for heaven and earth. This is the “law of heart” for Chinese Shanshui painting. Painters since Ming and Qing Dynasty have confined themselves within the scholarly study, dwelling upon the superficial veneer of the ancients. The natural law of heart has been left in neglect for long. This is not only a misfortune for painters but also a profound regret for thinkers.

The recent “Shanshui crisis” involves not only the crisis of Shanshui painting but also the crisis of Shanshui itself. The first thing to do, facing such a crisis, is to break free from the narrow confines of the convention of Shanshui painting. Many solutions were proposed through the modern history of China, ranging from “western applications under Chinese principles,” to a reconciliation between Chinese and Western paintings, to the outright conservatism and antiquarianism. Looking back after a century, the Shanshui crisis is in fact part of the progress of China’s modernity. It entails both the decline of traditional natural philosophy and the dissolution of historical philosophy. Gone is the moon in ancient times. Gone are the days when “guests of Tianlao Mountain come and dwell in the house of clouds, overseeing the moonlit mountains and rivers below.” What remains in the 20th century Shanshui painting is fragmentation and disruption of mountains and rivers under the clash of civilizations. Our mission today is to reestablish order out of all this isolation and chaos of Shanshui, to retrace among historical relics the vastness, silence, fullness and grandiosity when heaven and earth was first born.

The Dao does not alienate people. It’s people that alienate the Dao. Despite the gradual decline of our Shanshui experience and perceptive power, such decline is not irreversible. It is my belief that the revitalization of the world experience of Shanshui is not to be achieved by a return to ancient utopia, by seeking the calibers of memory in the constant flow of history, nor by the self-deceptive argument of cultural genes. Such revitalization requires a new learning under the current circumstance, a new exploration, a new becoming of ourselves through a battle against the ready-made. In this sense, all inheritance of tradition is a reinvention.

In this sense, I believe Shanshui remains an open, growing initiative today.

The ideal Shanshui in my vision is nothing short of the vast world itself. It is not a place where one can travel and inhabit as depicted in traditional Shanshui paintings. Shanshui, with its silence, vastness and obscurity, does not welcome human entry. Shanshui in this light could perhaps serve as an antidote against the Confucianist doctrine that “The wise find pleasure in waters; the virtuous find pleasure in mountains.” It is more challenging and meaningful to echo what Lao Tzu said, “Heaven and earth do not act from any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.” “Heaven and earth are the furnace, and the world the worker; Yin and Yang are the coal, all things the copper.” Spring sees the blossoms, autumn the fruits. This is how life grows and thrives. People harvest in autumn and hoard in winter to guard against the decay and perishing of things. To understand Shanshui in the cosmic sense and scale calls for a transcendence beyond mountains and rivers in their individuality and a grasp of the natural order of life and death in the created world, as well as of the fundamental mechanism of change underlying such order. Representative works from the Five Dynasties and Northern Song Dynasty constitute a significant source of inspiration in this respect.

Shanshui, as I envision it, also speaks to the years and days of mountains and rivers. During the last days of Pan Tianshou during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards brought him back to his hometown for public denunciation. On the train to Hangzhou, Pan picked up a cigarette pack and wrote down three poems on it. These were the last written words of Pan and one of them goes as follows, “in the deepest of the mountains, there lies the life-nurturing spring of water.” The “shan” (mountains) and “shui” (water) embedded within this line reveals a vital source of spiritual upbreeding. All the human, mundane affairs and sentiments, all the vicissitudes of life, and the constant and enduring vigor of ordinary people, all find their expression in the years and days of mountains and waters, combining the spirit of all things with the mundane life itself. Incorporating history into Shanshui connects the latter with the national destiny, creating an evolving national landscape in the uncertainties of years and days. This is a different kind of Shanshui that connects itself with the human destiny, imbuing the uninhabited mountains and rivers with human sentiment, with the forgiveness and generosity after trials, with a metaphysical inquiry toward heaven after seeing all things and people. “There was the millet with its drooping heads. How would heaven answer?”

Heaven and earth transcend the boundaries of history. The history of nature documents the change of the world. For the former, the painter strives to manifest the image of the ineffable, to enliven the spirit of the incomprehensible, to grasp the mutable and obscure in the convergence of winds and clouds, to make the world in nothingness, and to seek the secret of the Great Expansion (Da Yan, from Yi Ching) in the world; for the latter, the painter strives to feel the full spectrum of human emotions through the trivialities of the quotidian, to reveal the existential absurdity and powerlessness among the changing mundane world, to see the miraculous in the commonplace.

“The world was clean and pure. How come that all these mountains, rivers, and the earth came into being all of a sudden?” This is the question from Zen. “Heaven and earth remain as they are, and the rivers flow on nonstop.” This is the answer from Confucianism. History goes on nonstop, while certain things remain unchanged. In every historical period, there are things that can and do change, and things that can’t and don’t. The Great Expansion of the universe operates in an eternal recurrence like the flowing water. The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. All we can do is to “grasp the way of now, and wield what there is now.” The years and days of the mountains and rivers would eventually become unrecognizably fragmentary. Dynastic changes are almost as frequent as the winds and rains in mountains. What remains constant and unchanged are but the travelling clouds in the sky, and the loafing moon upon the mountain ridges. These meditations typical of a political exile or a hermit express the utopian ideal of the Chinese intelligentsia. As mediocre and vulgar as I am, even hermitage is utopian for me. In the world of mortals, I shall exhaust all my strengths to carry forward. The true way remains obscure, and the Dao is still far away. I frown upon the hypocritical, bitter complaints of being contaminated by this world of mortals. Instead, I roll the world of mortals as I roll a canvas. I wonder if I can emulate the life philosophy of Yang Tinglin, who once said, “I’ve been fighting with myself for long, till the break of dawn.”

 

2016

Translated by Zhang Bo

Author’s Note:

Huang Binhong described his own painting practice as ideographic, one that was inspired by the Six Scripts of Chinese characters’ formation. “All mountains,” he said, “manifest their strength downward and their spirit upward, as recorded in Shuowen Jiezi (100 CE, literally ‘Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters’). My calligraphy borrows its strength from mountains, wherein strokes manifest their strength downward and their spirit upward, through a restrained brush tip straight and tight. All waters, even cascading from heaven like the Yellow River, with all its meandering twists and turns, would invariably appease and flatten, which, again, is based on Shuowen Jiezi. My calligraphy emulates this feature of waters, whereby I start my strokes with tremendous concentrated energy and end them with resolute tranquility. Therefore, the brush always begins toward the opposite direction as intended and concludes with a gradually appeased energy.” This exhibition of Shanshui, titled “Xuan Yan” (literally “Manifesto”), is thus inspired by this calligraphic philosophy of Huang Binhong above.

This essay does not fall into the category of formal academic articles and contains many highly personal and sometimes radical opinions. My audacity of doing so arises from my enduring passion for Shanshui, a passion so great that I don’t hesitate to lay bare my personal thoughts and feelings so that greater ones would follow. My constant discontentment with the highly stylized and formulaic paintings of “fake mountains and fake waters,” a sentiment shared by many of my colleagues and friends within the circle of fine arts, is emblematic, I believe, of the conspicuous lack of gravitas cherished in the Chinese intellectual tradition and the decline of authentic Shanshui experience. Within the Shanshui tradition which genuinely resonates with the Chinese audience are the Confucianist “love of the intelligentsia,” the spectacular sceneries depicted in Chu Ci and Han Fu, the profound spirit and emotion in Tang Poetry and Song Ci, and more importantly, the rich variety of mountains and waters created by painters across different dynasties. Underlying this convention of Shanshui is a unique world view, a worldview. Shanshui is a uniquely Chinese art of worldview which embodies Dao or logos by shapes, the heavenly by forms. The essence of Shanshui experience is not reducible to the subject-object relationship but lies in the boundaries between the human and the heavenly.

“The humans and the heaven compete and emulate with each other and so progresses beyond time itself, ancient and modern.” Such is the affective and spiritual profundity that the Chinese see and feel in the world of Shanshui. Now we live in an era of changes that are unprecedented during the past three millennia. Or to put it more precisely, in the second century of this era of changes, we’ve already lost our coordinates for the boundaries between the human and the heavenly. How, then, do we live our lives in such an age? How do we anchor our heart and soul? “Heaven and earth remain as they are, and the rivers flow on nonstop.” Cao Mengde writes, “mountains never tire of height; the seas never tire of depth.” Liang Qichao writes, “The world is infinite, and the will endless; the space of seas and heaven stand in eternity.” These are the kind of spirit and vision we need to revitalize today. In this essay, I tentatively propose two visions, “Heaven and Earth in Primeval Times,” and “The Years and Days of Mountains and Rivers,” so that the metaphysical mythos and monumental pathos in Shanshui experience could be enlivened, and the study of the human with world-defying breadth and depth be restored to its due place.

Living in the 21st century, it behooves us, as Chinese, to revitalize the intellectual legacy of Chinese painting so that it can be shared by the world. In this sense, Shanshui remains an essential path toward the worldview of the Chinese art and it calls for both the artists’ relentless inquiry and a spiritual revitalization for everyone.

The boundless and obscure heaven and earth separate the minds far apart; a life of labor and achievement, those years of poverty and exile we didn’t hesitate to start; the vast mountains and rivers and the blossoms everywhere would sustain with the eternal lamp in our heart.

The demerit of contemporary Shanshui paintings consists less in the degradation of painting techniques than in the weakening of Shanshui experience. The mission of Shanshui was to revitalize the spirit of the country as well as that of the mountains and rivers. The greatness of painting lies in its artistic expression modeled upon the cosmos, which defines the spiritual essence of traditional Chinese painting. The purpose of painting, as Zhang Yanyuan writes in the opening of Famous Paintings throughout History (Lidai Minghua Ji), is “to enable education, to establish ethics, to explore the divine, and to sound the dark and obscure.” More than a millennium has passed and the Chinese painting has deviated from this ancient ideal. Wang Yanshou once described the paintings in Lingguang Palace as capable of “encompassing heaven and earth, engendering genera and species.” Today, this capacity is taken over by the National Geographic Channel, which produces a mode of visual perception through advanced technologies and vast capital investment, a visual ideology based on scientific positivism, observing and documenting in full details the world we live in. In essence, it is an objectification and technologization of the world, while the spirit of Shanshui today strives to be a Shanshuification of the world.

The kind of “nature” that Shanshui artists attempt to emulate is the created world, not one of ancient mountains and rivers composed of iconographic patterns. The Chinese philosophy of nature has been fatally changed during the past century. The artistic forms of Song Shanshui and its mode of perception have already ceased to be part of our felt experience but become a spiritual puzzle we need to decode. Chinese paintings seek “to emulate the world externally, and to cultivate the heart internally.” “To emulate the world externally” fundamentally differs from Francis Bacon’s attempt “to read the Book of Nature.” The so-called “world” concerns neither individual, specific mountains and rivers nor all of them collectively. It involves the grand evolution and operation of things, their genesis and cultivation, creation and change. And in this world, there’s the Dao but no ultimate, fixed formula. The emulation of the world purports to grasp the underlying mechanism of the world’s generation and evolution. In the “world” in Chinese paintings, the primitive and fundamental relation between “me” and “things” is not one of imitation but one of inspiration. Inspiration arises from concrete, affective encounters with things and sceneries, wherein the symbiotic relation between “me” and the world is born. The world, seen in this light, is not the natural world observed by positivistic sciences or the object of knowledge for epistemologists. It is heaven and earth in their indistinct yet holistic entirety, born within the spontaneous flow of inspirations, within a world where everything flows through “me.”

Tsung Ping, in China’s first essay on the theories of Shanshui painting, pointed out that “Sages, harboring the Dao, respond to things; the virtuous, purifying their thoughts, savor images.” This is the sort of affinity and attachment that makes possible the spiritual communion with heaven and earth. Tsung also said, “As I unroll paintings and face them in solitude, while seated I plumb the ends of the earth. Without resisting a multitude of natural dangers, I simply respond to the uninhabited wilderness, where grottoed peaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in depth. The sages and virtuous men shed reflected light from the distant past, and a myriad delights are fused into their spirits and thoughts.” This is “unimpeded spirit” inspired by encounters with Shanshui, the “travel” of the sages and the “joy” of savoring the appearances. Underlying such “travel” and “joy” is not an objectified observation and mimesis, or “drafting upon exhausting peculiar and bizarre mountains” proposed by Shi Tao, not the laborious attempt “to construct a spiritual ambience,” but an ineffable correspondence. Commenting on Li Longmian’s painting titled “Shanzhuang Huajuan” (literally “The Mountain Villa Roll”), Su Dongpo wrote,

 

Longmian’s “Mountain Villa Roll” endows all mountain-climbers with a freedom to walk, to track their own paths, as if in a dream, or transposed back to their previous lives. All the springs, rocks, grass and trees they encounter in the mountain, they know their names without asking; all the fishermen, lumberjacks, and hermits, they know intimately without knowing their names. Is this because they all have an unfailing memory? Of course not. He who paints the sun often dwells upon the cake, not that he forgets the sun. He who’s drunk wouldn’t drink with his nose, and he who dreams wouldn’t play with his toes. All this is natural and innate, not forced by memory. For those who live in the mountains, the spirit focuses not on individual things but on all things therein, and the intellect connects with all sorts of workmen. There is the Dao, and there is the craft. For painters who practice the Dao without being restrained by the craft, things would imprint upon their heart, not upon their hands.

 

Shanshui concerns the great things. It’s heaven and earth by another name. Shanshui painting, or more broadly, Shanshui art, records our experience with the world, or as what the ancients said, it mediates between men and nature. It’s a quintessential form of Chinese art with a worldview in it. The world of Shanshui as depicted by the intelligentsia, with the progress of modernity, has already been thoroughly disrupted, both visually and intellectually, if not completely dissolved altogether. Shanshui painting no longer bears the spiritual ethos envisioned by Tsung Ping and Su Dongpo. It becomes a designated motif, a stylized pattern, a ready-made in art history, devoid of its fundamental connection with worldview. Shanshui painting has fallen into a state of intransitiveness, mired deeply in the brush-ink gimmicks and an ontological crisis.

Ancient Shanshui paintings are mostly travelogues in nature, a vehicle for reminiscence. As Su Dongpo pointed out, its function as reminiscence lies not in an unfailing memory. The uniqueness of Shanshui painting as an artistic category lies instead in its capacity to incorporate the spirit and energy of mountains and rivers onto the canvas, whereby the audience would be able to vicariously experience the “Shanshui spectacle,” effecting a spiritual affinity and communion between the audience and Shanshui. All the ancients’ travels and joys find their ultimate expression in this spiritual affinity and communion within Shanshui and the painting canvas. Tsung Ping’s “unimpeded spirit” arises from the unfettered meditations when “unrolling paintings and facing them in solitude.” Song Shu (The Book of Song) records how Tsung Ping laments that, “With all the diseases of old age, I’m afraid that it would be difficult to visit all the famous mountains. Yet by purifying my heart so that the Dao can be accessible to me, I’d travel in my bed…It’s all the paintings in my chamber that I travel to. As they say, when I play my Gu Qin at home, all the mountains echo and become my instrument.” Tsung Ping suggests a spiritual return to the mountains and forests when we appreciate Shanshui paintings, travelling among the lively spirit of Shanshui, “travelling in bed” and “savoring images.” Tsung Ping in fact established the isomorphism between travelling among Shanshui and the appreciation of Shanshui paintings for their joint focus on the spirit and the somatic experience of Dao. Immersing oneself within the canvas and feeling the ecstasy of the creator replicates the travels of the sages and joys of savoring images. Yet throughout the millennium, especially after the radical changes in Ming and Qing Dynasty as well as in our own contemporary period, this primal, original function of Shanshui painting has gradually faded into oblivion.

The metaphysical approach to Shanshui, the joy at the canvas. These two are symbiotic and isomorphic with each other. They correspond and connect with each other. So are the metaphysical viewing and the unimpeded spirit. Shanshui painting is a kind of reminiscence, in which the artist paints not so much through immediate observation of the scenery as from memory. The specific configurations of memory are recorded onto the canvas so that memory itself emerges from the white void in its embodied, visual form. The viewer also experiences the memory in front of the painting, inspired somatically and spiritually, bed-travelling to the end of the world, reflecting on the experience of travelling among Shanshui, feeling the spirit and energy of Shanshui, all within the study. Both the painter and the viewer reminisce. The former visualizes memory, and the latter actualizes or contextualizes it. The former incorporates the created world unto the canvas, while the latter returns to the created world through the canvas.

Originally, Shanshui painting focused on individual things, which concerns both its artistic method and its fundamental mission. The increasing attention to Shanshui painting by scholars and intelligentsia in later generations, in the form of “bed-travelling” and viewing with “unimpeded spirit,” has evolved into an appreciation of artistic works themselves. Jing Hao seeks “authentic Shanshui” in paintings, while Zhou Mi sees the “perfect brushstroke” in solitary mountains. For the ancients, the painting is the medium whereby they reminisce about Shanshui experience; for the moderns, the Shanshui experience is the medium whereby they seek to understand the meaning of paintings. Practitioners of Shanshui painting nowadays all aspire to achieve a disciplined artistic creation, boasting of brushing techniques and visual sensations, without knowing that they’ve deviated far from the original mission of Shanshui.

On the path toward Shanshui, it seems as if all the painters throughout history had the same canvas for imitation, a millennia-old canvas that had been worn and corroded by time, yet had left visible, enduring traces and clues among this chaos of changes and obscurity. This canvas is the created world itself, with mountains and rivers in it. Shanshui refers not merely to the sceneries seen, the woods, springs and mountains visited. It is unity of all these. All the images and phenomena before our eyes are equal. The form embodies the spirit. And all things are images. There’s an innate, natural integrity to Shanshui, with a sustained continuity among the corporeal images, extended in all directions, indivisible, without boundaries and measures, infinite.

The essence of such a canvas is beyond words, beyond the critical distinction between “perfect brushstroke” and “authentic Shanshui.” The painter who wields this canvas has the ability to emulate the power of the creator, to grasp the generative and evolutionary mechanisms of all things, however minute and elusive they are. The art of emulating the world consists in copying and imitation. Those who copy live in the mountain before their eyes; those who imitate imbues the scenery with their spirit, with their body fully integrated with it, as if the painter and the image were seamlessly glued together, or as the knife cutting and rubbing the stone. Through all this cutting, rubbing or grinding is a worldview articulated: the light of heaven, the shadows of clouds, the flying dragons and dancing snakes, miracles and changes without end, darkness and obscurity without measure. The painter stands in the cosmos and philosophizes about its infinite changes, seeks rich meanings in ambiguities, and explores into the dark recesses in time eternal. The “secret” of the world is thus laid bare through the convergence and display of these infinite images.

Shanshui is an art of worldview. Its fundamental principle “the law of the Dao is its being what it is” (from Tao Te Ching) enables it to manifest the secret of the world. On this, Wang Bi commented, “Men do not go against the earth so that a complete and safe life is possible. Such is the earth as law. The earth does not go against the heaven, so that its completeness and fullness can be achieved. Such is the heaven as law. The heaven does not go against the Dao so that a complete protection is achieved. Such is the Dao as law. The Dao does not go against nature so that its essence can be acquired. Such is nature as law. That which takes nature as law comply with the square within the square and comply with the circle within the circle, and would do nothing against nature. As for nature itself, it is ineffable, beyond words.”

Nature is “ineffable, beyond words.” If the Dao follows nature as law, then what law should nature follow? The “law” becomes law through expressing itself through nature. And nature not only creates the world but also points toward the ineffability of “the unknowable being.”

“It is the way of heaven to diminish superabundance and to supplement deficiency.” Such is the universal good. “It is the way of men to take away from those who have not enough to add to his own superabundance.” Such is personal good. “The way of heaven” as proposed by Lao Tzu has more profound meanings than this. “Heaven and earth do not act from any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.” The “nature” which the way of heaven takes as law does not regard family love, personal good or emotions. Perhaps this “law of nature” could serve as the spiritual foundation for the Chinese Shanshui experience. Shanshui painting strives “to emulate the world externally, and to cultivate the heart internally.” “The world” concerns less those individual mountains and rivers than the generation of changes. “The heart” refers to the spirit not of the subject, but of heaven and earth. Admittedly, heaven and earth do not have a heart. The painter makes use of the infinite treasure of nature and creates a heart for heaven and earth. This is the “law of heart” for Chinese Shanshui painting. Painters since Ming and Qing Dynasty have confined themselves within the scholarly study, dwelling upon the superficial veneer of the ancients. The natural law of heart has been left in neglect for long. This is not only a misfortune for painters but also a profound regret for thinkers.

The recent “Shanshui crisis” involves not only the crisis of Shanshui painting but also the crisis of Shanshui itself. The first thing to do, facing such a crisis, is to break free from the narrow confines of the convention of Shanshui painting. Many solutions were proposed through the modern history of China, ranging from “western applications under Chinese principles,” to a reconciliation between Chinese and Western paintings, to the outright conservatism and antiquarianism. Looking back after a century, the Shanshui crisis is in fact part of the progress of China’s modernity. It entails both the decline of traditional natural philosophy and the dissolution of historical philosophy. Gone is the moon in ancient times. Gone are the days when “guests of Tianlao Mountain come and dwell in the house of clouds, overseeing the moonlit mountains and rivers below.” What remains in the 20th century Shanshui painting is fragmentation and disruption of mountains and rivers under the clash of civilizations. Our mission today is to reestablish order out of all this isolation and chaos of Shanshui, to retrace among historical relics the vastness, silence, fullness and grandiosity when heaven and earth was first born.

The Dao does not alienate people. It’s people that alienate the Dao. Despite the gradual decline of our Shanshui experience and perceptive power, such decline is not irreversible. It is my belief that the revitalization of the world experience of Shanshui is not to be achieved by a return to ancient utopia, by seeking the calibers of memory in the constant flow of history, nor by the self-deceptive argument of cultural genes. Such revitalization requires a new learning under the current circumstance, a new exploration, a new becoming of ourselves through a battle against the ready-made. In this sense, all inheritance of tradition is a reinvention.

In this sense, I believe Shanshui remains an open, growing initiative today.

The ideal Shanshui in my vision is nothing short of the vast world itself. It is not a place where one can travel and inhabit as depicted in traditional Shanshui paintings. Shanshui, with its silence, vastness and obscurity, does not welcome human entry. Shanshui in this light could perhaps serve as an antidote against the Confucianist doctrine that “The wise find pleasure in waters; the virtuous find pleasure in mountains.” It is more challenging and meaningful to echo what Lao Tzu said, “Heaven and earth do not act from any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.” “Heaven and earth are the furnace, and the world the worker; Yin and Yang are the coal, all things the copper.” Spring sees the blossoms, autumn the fruits. This is how life grows and thrives. People harvest in autumn and hoard in winter to guard against the decay and perishing of things. To understand Shanshui in the cosmic sense and scale calls for a transcendence beyond mountains and rivers in their individuality and a grasp of the natural order of life and death in the created world, as well as of the fundamental mechanism of change underlying such order. Representative works from the Five Dynasties and Northern Song Dynasty constitute a significant source of inspiration in this respect.

Shanshui, as I envision it, also speaks to the years and days of mountains and rivers. During the last days of Pan Tianshou during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards brought him back to his hometown for public denunciation. On the train to Hangzhou, Pan picked up a cigarette pack and wrote down three poems on it. These were the last written words of Pan and one of them goes as follows, “in the deepest of the mountains, there lies the life-nurturing spring of water.” The “shan” (mountains) and “shui” (water) embedded within this line reveals a vital source of spiritual upbreeding. All the human, mundane affairs and sentiments, all the vicissitudes of life, and the constant and enduring vigor of ordinary people, all find their expression in the years and days of mountains and waters, combining the spirit of all things with the mundane life itself. Incorporating history into Shanshui connects the latter with the national destiny, creating an evolving national landscape in the uncertainties of years and days. This is a different kind of Shanshui that connects itself with the human destiny, imbuing the uninhabited mountains and rivers with human sentiment, with the forgiveness and generosity after trials, with a metaphysical inquiry toward heaven after seeing all things and people. “There was the millet with its drooping heads. How would heaven answer?”

Heaven and earth transcend the boundaries of history. The history of nature documents the change of the world. For the former, the painter strives to manifest the image of the ineffable, to enliven the spirit of the incomprehensible, to grasp the mutable and obscure in the convergence of winds and clouds, to make the world in nothingness, and to seek the secret of the Great Expansion (Da Yan, from Yi Ching) in the world; for the latter, the painter strives to feel the full spectrum of human emotions through the trivialities of the quotidian, to reveal the existential absurdity and powerlessness among the changing mundane world, to see the miraculous in the commonplace.

“The world was clean and pure. How come that all these mountains, rivers, and the earth came into being all of a sudden?” This is the question from Zen. “Heaven and earth remain as they are, and the rivers flow on nonstop.” This is the answer from Confucianism. History goes on nonstop, while certain things remain unchanged. In every historical period, there are things that can and do change, and things that can’t and don’t. The Great Expansion of the universe operates in an eternal recurrence like the flowing water. The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. All we can do is to “grasp the way of now, and wield what there is now.” The years and days of the mountains and rivers would eventually become unrecognizably fragmentary. Dynastic changes are almost as frequent as the winds and rains in mountains. What remains constant and unchanged are but the travelling clouds in the sky, and the loafing moon upon the mountain ridges. These meditations typical of a political exile or a hermit express the utopian ideal of the Chinese intelligentsia. As mediocre and vulgar as I am, even hermitage is utopian for me. In the world of mortals, I shall exhaust all my strengths to carry forward. The true way remains obscure, and the Dao is still far away. I frown upon the hypocritical, bitter complaints of being contaminated by this world of mortals. Instead, I roll the world of mortals as I roll a canvas. I wonder if I can emulate the life philosophy of Yang Tinglin, who once said, “I’ve been fighting with myself for long, till the break of dawn.”

 

2016

Translated by Zhang Bo