Daoism in Chinese Painting
How can Daoist ideas help us look at Chinese painting? In this second talk, I want to move from the stories of the first article towards the brushwork, space and movement of a picture. My particular interest is xieyi: painting in which what is suggested can matter as much as what is described.
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Returning to the First Talk
In the first talk, Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream and my goldfish asked us to reconsider the position of the observer. What do we bring to an image when we name its forms? And what happens when those forms begin to slip away? These questions are more useful to my painting than a formula claiming that everything is simply “nothing”.
The Topic of the Series
This is an approach through painting, rather than a dictionary of philosophical terms. Definitions have their place, but a definition of Dao alone will not tell us how a brushstroke moves or why an empty area feels alive.
Readers may wonder why I write about Daoism and then bring in Zen, Buddhism or Confucianism. We love our little boxes of “-isms”—from eclecticism to rheumatism. Yet individual works and artists need not fit neatly inside them. These traditions have different histories and ideas, while Chinese painting has drawn on more than one of them. I would not label every great Chinese painter a Daoist.
Zhuangzi on Dao
In chapter twenty-two of the Zhuangzi, someone asks where Dao can be found. The answer moves through deliberately ordinary examples, including an ant and a roof tile: it is not confined to elevated things.[1] For me, that is an invitation to look closely at what is already before us.
I see a relationship here with questions that also interest me in Zen: how we distinguish observer and observed, and how practice can change that relationship. This is a point of contact in my own reading, not a claim that Daoism and Zen are interchangeable.
Gongbi and Xieyi: Two Approaches to Chinese Painting
A useful distinction is between gongbi (工笔), with its meticulous handling of line and detail, and xieyi (写意), a freer, more suggestive approach. These are broad ways of working, not two sealed compartments containing all Chinese art. My focus here is xieyi.
The two characters help explain my interest: xie means to write; yi points towards idea, meaning or intention. In this approach, the brush does more than record an outline. Its pressure, speed and rhythm belong to the expression. The close relationship with calligraphy helps explain why a painter may speak of “writing” a picture.[2]
For me, yi also concerns what holds the whole painting together. A tree should have more than a recognisable shape: the strokes should give us a sense of its presence. That takes practice. A brushstroke that looks effortless need not have been easy.
Daoism in Chinese Art: Nature, Yin and Yang
My working definition is this: Daoist ideas can help a painter give form to the relationships and processes of nature. The painter is part of those processes, rather than an observer standing entirely outside them.
Yin and yang are particularly useful to think with. They are complementary aspects of changing relationships, not simply good and bad or two forces locked in combat. Chapter forty-two of the Daodejing connects the “ten thousand things” with yin, yang and the harmonising action of qi.[3] In a painting, I look for such relationships in light and dark, density and openness, movement and rest. These are ways of attending to the picture, rather than a code that every work must obey.
Chinese and Western Approaches to Nature in Art
The comparison below puts a small figure in Shitao’s landscape beside the prominent figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. I read the first as an invitation to enter the landscape and the second as an encounter with someone looking out across it. The contrast interests me, but two paintings cannot stand for all Chinese and Western attitudes to nature.
A landscape can also lead the eye through several areas without fixing us at a single viewpoint. I am interested in that wandering movement: how one passage opens into another and how brushwork carries the eye across apparently empty space. I discuss composition further in The Essence of Chinese Painting (III).
Poetry and Music
Painting, calligraphy and poetry have long been closely connected in literati art. Music, including the guqin, belongs to the wider world of cultivated practice that interests me here. These connections help explain why the painted image was not always treated as a self-contained object.
The Confucian ideal of the junzi, a cultivated and ethically responsible person, also informed that world. Scholar-painters could distinguish their work sharply from commercial painting. That historical claim to status should not become a rule that wealth or occupation determines whether someone can understand art.
Su Shi’s Wood and Rock is one striking example of the value later placed on literati painting. Christie’s sold it in Hong Kong in November 2018 for HK$463.6 million, including the buyer’s premium—about US$59.5 million.[4] The price is a market result, not a measure of how deeply any particular viewer experiences the painting.
One final term: wu wei (無為), often translated as non-action or effortless action. In my painting practice, I associate it with working without forcing a result. This does not mean doing nothing or dispensing with skill. It means becoming responsive enough to let a stroke develop without imposing a rigid plan on every movement.
Two Further Examples
In the album leaf by Yun Shouping below, I am drawn to the relationship between the two banks and the open water. The accompanying diagram suggests how I read that movement through yin and yang. It is a compositional interpretation, not proof that the painter intended to reproduce the familiar symbol.
Dong Qichang’s landscape offers a more complex route. The mountains, paths and trees resist being taken in at once. Rather than looking for a hidden philosophical label, try following the shifts of density and the spaces between the forms. Where does your eye pause, and where does it find a way through?
Footnotes
[1] See Zhuangzi, chapter 22: Knowledge Rambling in the North, Chinese Text Project. ↩
[2] For the connection between calligraphy, expression and scholar-painting, see Chinese Painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My account here is a painter’s introduction, not an exhaustive classification. ↩
[3] See Daodejing, chapter 42. ↩
[4] Christie’s: Wood and Rock by Su Shi. The result refers to the 2018 sale, not a current valuation. ↩
Related articles: Daoist Talks (I): Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream in Ink Painting · Xieyi Painting · Daoist Talks: Series Index
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