How Qi Becomes Visible in a Painting
This was my last post before a summer break in July 2023. Not quite a holiday in the usual sense: I was about to spend three weeks at a health resort. The name of the place amused me—REDUCE, just as I was trying to reduce my paintings. Quiet, thermal water and food from local farmers sounded like a good change of pace.
For three weeks, then, I planned to have my old fur brushed, enjoy some local wine, work through my pile of books and attend to the calligraphy I too often neglect. Which brings me to the subject of this post.
When speaking of the “flow of Qi” in a painting, I do not mean that Qi can be located somewhere on the paper. What interests me as a painter is the way forces within an image communicate: how one brushstroke calls for another, how a dense form is answered by an open space, and how the eye is led through the composition.
In that sense, Qi is not something added to a painting. It becomes perceptible through relationships.
Two New Works
I want to show two recent works and follow the composition of one of them in some detail. First, a comparison: André Masson’s Pinien und Felsen, reproduced below as a drawing dated 1953. His engagement with Chinese painting and Zen is documented in MoMA’s catalogue. [1] I am interested in the difference between the freedom of a gesture and the relationships that hold a whole picture together. Calligraphic practice has made that distinction especially important to me.
When I think back to my first years with ink and brush, establishing those relationships was among the hardest things to learn.
Reduction and Open Space
The final work in my reduction series has the working title Another Attempt to Touch the Idea of Zen. A broad dark mass stands at the right, a smaller broken form at the left, with an ochre mark between them. The gap is extensive, but it does not feel inactive to me. The directions of the strokes bring the separated forms into relation. Here I think of kāi–hé (開合), opening and closing: movement expands into the sheet and gathers again. [2]
The empty space is part of that movement. It can lead the eye beyond an edge or allow a connection to continue where no mark has been made. The challenge is to make a few elements respond to one another without closing off the open ground.
I discuss some of these compositional functions in The Essence of Chinese Painting (III). In the next painting, they become more crowded and the route less immediately apparent.
Wandering Through a Painting
Many Chinese landscape paintings allow the eye to move between different spatial zones, rather than fixing it at a single viewpoint. Beginning, development, turn and resolution—qǐ, chéng, zhuǎn, jié (起、承、轉、結)—offer one way to discuss that movement, as in my earlier article. They describe relationships within an image, not a compulsory order of brushstrokes. The diagram later in this post uses its own four labels: entry (入), rising or beginning (起), turn (轉) and closing (合).
Floating
In Hike along the Nothing, the dark forms can initially seem heavy. The long stroke near the bottom, the clustered marks at the left and the darker upper area all assert themselves. To give the eye room to travel, the openings between them matter just as much. A route becomes interesting when movement meets resistance, changes direction and finds another opening.
These relationships connect painting with calligraphy. A brushstroke describes a form, but it also records an action: pressure, speed, a change of direction or the fading of ink. To me, that is part of why a painting can feel “written”. The expression concerns its movement, not a requirement that it resemble legible script.
The first marked version above brings out small intervals within and between the dark forms. The paired diagrams below then make larger directions and open passages easier to follow. The grey and white overlays are analytical aids. They are not additional elements in the original painting. Try returning to the unmarked image and giving those pale passages more attention: the heavy forms may begin to feel suspended in the surrounding space.
Traditional vertical Chinese calligraphy is commonly read down columns, moving from right to left. A painting need not follow that order. Reading it is a metaphor for tracing relationships, and a viewer may find more than one convincing entry.
Let’s Take a Walk
Let’s try one route through this picture. The four-part diagram shows how I imagine the walk, rather than prescribing the only way to see it.
I enter at the lower right, marked 入 (rù, entry). The long dark movement draws me leftwards. Smaller opposing marks interrupt the momentum without stopping it altogether. At the left, the clustered strokes turn the route upwards: this is the panel labelled 起 (qǐ, rising or beginning). The climb feels more resistant than the first movement across the bottom.
Higher up, the composition opens around the darker central mass. The directions divide towards the upper left and upper right, creating the turn marked 轉 (zhuǎn; written 转 in the diagram). Following the upper marks rightwards, I meet further interruptions before the movement returns towards its starting area. The last panel is marked 合 (hé, closing or gathering). The return is suggested across open paper, not enclosed by a continuous outline.
An ox-cart offers a useful analogy for this alternation: the ox pulls against resistance until the wheels come free, and the movement changes at once. In the painting, a compressed passage can make the next release feel stronger. I am using the image as an analogy for looking, rather than as a literal account of a force on the paper.
The arrows help me describe a route, but the real test comes when I remove them. Do the separate marks still respond to one another? Can the eye make the journey through the unpainted intervals? That is where I begin to sense the picture’s vitality. [3]
For a fuller, later discussion, see my German-language essay Der Fluss des Qi in der chinesischen Malerei, published by BACOPA in September 2026.
Footnotes
[1] André Masson, Eine Kunst des Wesentlichen, Limes, Wiesbaden, 1961, is the book cited in the original post. For his encounter with Chinese painting and his study of Zen, see William S. Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson, MoMA, 1976, p. 185.
[2] Kāi–hé (開合) means opening and closing or gathering. The China Academy of Art’s account of its 2022 Pan Tianshou exhibition discusses brushwork, empty space and qǐ–chéng–zhuǎn–hé (起承轉合). My earlier diagram uses jié (結) for resolution. These are compositional functions; the overlays here propose a reading of my own painting.
[3] Qì (氣), associated with breath and vitality, is a different word from qǐ (起), beginning or rising. For its philosophical range, see Metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy. Xie He’s first painting principle, qiyun shengdong (氣韻生動), is discussed by the Smithsonian’s Chinese Arts of the Brush guide in terms of resonance and inner liveliness. Translations vary; “energy” here should not be understood as a measurable physical quantity.
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