The Spirit of Chinese Painting

(Santiniketan)

Like the physiognomy of the average Chinaman, there is something changeless in the Chinese landscape. Yet these people are not afraid of change. A life lived in close association with the tranquil spirit of cosmic nature has endowed them with a serenity difficult to disturb. Throughh long centuries of patient living, they have learnt the art of humility and harmony, a non-aggressive ethos. Their view of life and art is not obscured by the assertiveness of individual extravagance. Incidentally, this may be one of the reasons why the Chinese have not been able or willing to adopt oil-colour, for the use of oil brings in a note of strident separativeness, violating the subtle laws of man’s oneness with nature,–an offence against universal rhythm.

Chinese painters are generally divided into two schools, Northern and Southern. The Northern school of painters tried to keep up the exactness of the subject-matter. This verisimilitude may go to prove the power of the brush, but it gives a rather photographic impression. The Southern school of painters attempted a rhythmic composition expressed through line. While painting realistic pictures, they would avoid the process of assimilation through geometrical lines, and seek to give expression to the inner idea. Outwardly we perceive different types and shades of a landscape in the morning or evening, but to our inner vision they take on a different shape in their entirety.

Chinese art, in the history of its gradual development, was thus divided into two schools. The style of Ku K’ai-Chih (346-407 A. C.) was developed by Li Tsu-Hsun (651-716 A. C.) into the Northern or traditional school of painting and it was to take a definite shape in the paintings of Wu Tao-Tse (700-760 A. C.). This was further developed and the Southern school of painting took its form in Wang Wei (699-759 A. C.), the poet-painter, also known as Mo-Chih Or Mo-Chieh. When he was deeply lost in the meditation of painting, he would make no difference in the four seasons (China’s seasons are Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter). He would paint a cherry and a lotus in the same picture. Herein lies the difference between an ordinary painter and a poet painter. Such style of art has been known as Scholars’ Painting. Su Tung-Po, an exponent of this school, once painted a bamboo without any joints. When asked to explain the extravagance, he said that the bamboos do not grow by adding pulps one after another. To these painters ‘Conception’ is greater than mere ‘Form’. They distinguish between ‘Hsing’ or the ‘physical form’ of the object, ‘Li’ or the ‘inner law of spirit’, and ‘Yi’ or the artist’s ‘conception’. Scholars’ Painting, in spite of its being once sarcastically called ‘Mo-hsi’ or ‘play with ink’, deals with the spirit of artistic conception. To these painters, the outward materials and laws of painting are no necessary guides. When inspiration comes, they paint with anything on earth,–whether a roll of paper, a piece of cane-stick, or bare fingers (Chang Tsao of the T’ang Dynasty had the gift of painting with two brushes taken together, one of which was usually blunt–otherwise one of his fingers). Here, art is not a photograph of a material object, but an impression of internal conception. Chinese painting is ‘Hsieh-yi’ or ‘writing out a conception’.

The glory of the Southern school of painting was Su Tung Po (1036-1101 A. C.), who may be held responsible for ‘Scholar-Painting’–‘Shihjen hua’ as the Chinese term it. With its emphasis on ‘rhythmic vitality’ and a ‘controlling subjective conception’, it is an unacknowledged precursor of the modern impressionistic art. Chinese calligraphy may also be called a form of abstract painting. For, its characters are drawn from nature. So, to a Chinese painter, the lines are not merely static, they are vital–with a rhythmic grandeur in them. As in Chinese calligraphy a minimum of strokes expresses the meaning of the word, so also in Chinese painting of the advanced group the fewest lines or the minimum of shades would express the maximum of thought and idea. Hence the term ‘Shieh-yi’–writing out a conception.

Impressionism is a revolt against photographic accuracy. As Sa Tung-Po said, ‘to judge a painting by its verisimilitude is to judge it at the mental level of a child. Commenting on a painter, he said ‘... What you want to look at is the spirit of a horse. The professional artists often see only the skin and hair...that is why the paintings of professional artists are lacking in spirit, and after seeing a few paintings, one is bored.’

Every painting is an unconscious reflection of some attitude of philosophy. ‘Chinese paintings unconsciously express the one-ness of man with nature and the essential unity of the great mystic procession of life in which the human being occupies but a small and transitory part.’ (Lin Yatang–Gay Genius). Here, ‘...man is not the centre of the world, he is only a detail in the Great Whole; the life of the Universe infinitely surpasses his life, and it is the echoes, gleams, apparitions from this vaster life which haunt the mind of the Chinese painter.’ (Emile Hovalaque–China).

While the northern artists accepted a stern tradition of classical sobriety and restraint, the south gave colour and form to feeling and imagination. The complete identification of such painters with the object to be expressed may be seen in the following poem of Su Tung-Po:

‘Receiving the moisture of wine,
My intestines sprout and fork out,
And from out my liver and lungs
Shoot rocks and bamboos,
Surging through my breast, irresistible,
That find expression on your snow-white wall.’
(Lin Yutang-Gay Genius)

The Chineee artist Hsieh Ho (6th century) said that the painter’s effort must strive to render ‘the Life-movement of the spirit through the Rhythm of things.’ It is this profound reality, the creative essence, not the thing created, the soul and not the outward form which the artist should portray. To a Chinese painter, the important factor is not in what he is looking at, but what mystery lies behind that outward vision. ‘Chinese art does not (like Western art) aim at an exact and complete representation of reality; still less does it attempt to imitate Nature; in no case does it aim at giving the spectator the illusion that he sees the thing itself in the manner dear to so many in the West.’ (Emile Hovalaque –China).

In the eyes of a Chinese artist, spirit is everything; in all things it is the invisible spirit within them which must be set free and expressed, and not their visible reality. A Chinese artist does not merely compose colours, he also composes the portions to be kept blank and vacant for making the suggestion intense and complete. In Western art, the painting is usually limited to the scope of the eye and brought towards the spectator, while in Eastern art, since the picture transcends such limitations and exists only in mind, it is reflected on to space. The former has a fixed point of view, while the later has a moving or more than one point of view. Western art is limited in time, and hence depicts arrested action, but Asian art represents a continuous condition, indifferent to transient effect.’ (Shio Sakanishi–The Spirit of the Brush).

The three simple characteristics of Chinese painting may be enumerated here; (l) Abstractness (painting a landscape by rearranging, without following faithfully the original form or composition; (2) Comprehensiveness; and (3) Symbolism (e g. pine tree symbolizes longevity, bamboo–nobility of character, plum blossom–endurance, etc). ‘Since the Chinese avoided the Western approaches to the mystery of artistic creation, either through science which investigated the mechanics of representation, or through aesthetics which questions the nature of the beautiful, or through psychology which explores the motivations of expression, the terms used by us (Westerners) to define the essential qualities of painting, such as unity, balance, scale and empathy, together with the aesthetic types of the beautiful, sublime and so forth, are all slighted in Chinese critical writings. In their places, the Chinese employed terms taken from the associated arts of poetry and calligraphy, or when specifically trying to express the in-expressible of painting, they resorted to the terms of mysticism, which is as it should be.’ (George Rowley- Principles of Chinese Painting)

Though like the painting of all countries, Chinese painting also centres around Man, yet it either takes him or sees him against a wider scheme of relations, of the philosophy of mankind. The details of form or the scientific knowledge of material things are no pre-occupation of the artist of the East. He views the world from some spiritual altitude, whereby man, material reality and nature become all inter-dependent on one another to make a complete realization of the Universe possible. The matter-of-fact life of ours today has made us separate and self-assertive. Realism in its crude sense seem to be the keynote of art and literature today. But the obsession with inferior realism is perhaps ended or ending. We visualize some kind of a border-line between realism and idealism. The modern ground must give a new tone and temper to the Chinese painting of today. India once, with the conflict and influence of the West, achieved a great revival of genuine Indian art. Let us hope hrough a synthesis of modern European and Chinese art, China too will emerge with a new art, Chinese in spirit, but alive to the new moods and situation of a later and perplexed humanity. The spirit in which modern Chinese artists solve this problem will be a test of their culture.