Two Paintings, Two Ways of Looking
Daoism and Zen Buddhism meet in my painting through questions that words do not easily settle: movement and stillness, control and spontaneity, what takes form and what remains open. These traditions have interested me for more than fifty years, first through my study of Chinese art and later through my own painting and calligraphy.
I do not regard the paintings below as illustrations of a doctrine. They show two ways I approach a picture. The movement “from Daoism to Zen” in the title describes my own path, rather than a rule that every painter or viewer must follow.
Chinese painting cannot be divided neatly into Daoist, Confucian and Buddhist styles. The traditions interacted, and artists could draw on more than one. For me, Daoist ideas of transformation and complementary forces offer a useful way into the relationships within a composition. The freedom associated with xieyi painting (寫意畫) belongs in this discussion, without making xieyi an exclusively Daoist practice.
An Approach to Zen
In this painting, dark marks interrupt veils of turquoise, grey and muted red. A pale opening near the centre gives the eye somewhere to pause. The surface is worked throughout; its openness does not depend on leaving large areas of paper untouched.
I associate this unresolved space with aspects of Zen. The forms never quite settle into identifiable objects, and I do not want to explain them away. A luminous passage can remain an opening rather than become a named thing. The picture asks for looking before interpretation.
This is a different visual language from the historical works I discuss in Liang Kai’s Eight Eminent Monks and Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons. They interest me as points of comparison, rather than as formulas for what a Zen painting should look like.
A Daoist Reading of Contrasts
The second painting begins, for me, with relationships between contrasting qualities. On the left, upright forms suggest the quiet density of a forest. On the right, dark curves and pale descending passages bring a more forceful movement. Neither part stands alone: each changes how the other is experienced.
Here is the left-hand detail. I read these layered vertical forms as a forest—a place of stillness and quiet. The rounded brown mass holds its ground among them.
The right-hand detail feels louder. It may suggest falling water or an avalanche; I hear it thundering down. That is my association, rather than a claim that the painting depicts a particular landscape.
Distance shifts as well. The upper right opens towards something far away, while the lower part seems to descend into depth. Elsewhere, a form comes close to the surface. Stillness and movement, near and far, density and openness work through one another. I think of this interplay as an affinity with Daoist thought.
Xie He and Qiyun Shengdong
Xie He (謝赫), active around 500, placed qiyun shengdong (氣韻生動) first among his Six Principles of Painting. It is often rendered as “spirit resonance” or “spiritual resonance and lifelike motion”. [1] No short English phrase quite captures its range.
I understand it as pointing towards what makes a picture feel alive. Technique alone is not enough: brushwork, rhythm and the relationships between forms have to come together. In my own work, the interplay of contrasting forces can help create that vitality. This is a way I approach the principle, rather than a literal translation or proof that Xie He was setting out a Daoist doctrine.
My study of Daoism over decades has been a way towards the kind of openness I associate with Zen. I needed to work through these relationships before I could begin to let them go. That is how it has been for me; another painter may find a different route.
Daoism, Chan and a Personal Path
Historically, Chan (禪) developed within Chinese Buddhism and later spread through East Asia; Zen is its Japanese name. Its encounter with Chinese traditions, including Daoism, matters, but Chan retains its Buddhist roots and practices. Emptiness in Buddhism should not be equated simply with a blank area in a picture. [2]
Nor does a reduced composition by itself make a work Zen. What continues to interest me is the experience of looking: how a picture can remain precise without closing its meaning, and how much I can leave unresolved without losing its life.
Footnotes
[1] The Smithsonian’s Chinese Arts of the Brush guide discusses Xie He’s Six Principles and the first principle’s sense of inner liveliness. The interpretation through contrasting forces here is my own. ↩
[2] For the Buddhist origins, Chinese development and wider East Asian transmission of Chan, see Chan Buddhism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
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