The sound of silence - Chinese Painting - Between the Visible and the Invisible

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1990 by Francois Cheng, Nahal Tadjadod

SO0022

"THERE are painted landscapes that can be passed through or contemplated; others in which one can walk around; and yet others where one would like to stay or live. All these landscapes attain a degree of excellence. However, those in which one would like to live are superior to the others." Such was the view expressed by Kuo Hsi, a great landscape painter of the Song dynasty who lived in the eleventh century.

The painters of ancient China dreamt of a total communion between man and nature. Inasmuch as it partook of the mystery of creation, painting was considered to be an almost godlike activity. Underlying the practice of art, and indeed all Chinese aesthetic thought, was a philosophical vision based on the concept of the Void (that is, empty incipience).

The idea of the Void was already present in that seminal work of Chinese culture, the "Book of Changes" (I Ching). The philosophers who made it a central part of their doctrine were those of the Taoist school, the two founders of which, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu,* exercised an unfailing influence on most art critics.

To the Chinese mind the Void was not something vague or non-existent but a highly dynamic and essential dimension of human fife and of the life of the universe. Characterized by the perfect balance of the breath of life and of the Yin-Yang duality, at the heart of the interactions by which all things are governed, it was regarded as a. space in which true plenitude could be achieved. It was through the Void that human beings could arrive at an all-embracing view of the universe. For this reason, in classical China the idea of the Void provided a key to mastering the noblest pursuits, ranging from the various forms of an to medicine or warfare.

`Straw sandals visits Son of Heaven'

In music, for instance, the Void is expressed by certain syncopated rhythms that punctuate the silences. Breaking the line of development, the silence creates a space through which the sounds can reach beyond themselves and attain a kind a resonance that outreaches resonance.

In poetry, one way of introducing this Void is to miss out certain grammatical finks, known as "empty words". The linear, temporal progression of language is thus severed by the poet for the sake of an open-ended reciprocal relationship between the subject arid the objective world. No longer is there any distinction between the inner world and. the outer world.A kind of direct communion with things is thus established though the heart were speaking through them.

One day Tu Fu (712-7700, a famous poet of the Tang period (seventh-tenth centuries), appeared in rags before the emperor in exile. To point up the contrast between his pitiful state and the solemnity of the occasion, he left out the personal pronouns in the poem he then composed, declaring simply, not without a touch of irony, "Straw sandals visits Son of Heaven".

In a poem describing a farewell scene, Li Po (701-762), another famous poet of the Tang period, deliberately omits the words normally used to introduce a comparison: "Floating cloud peregrine mood/Setting sun spurned heart". He thereby "organically" links together human life and the world of nature, which does not serve as an external setting but forms an intrinsic part of the drama.

Those who have the dimension of emptiness within them efface the distance separating them from the outside world. The subject becomes at one and the same time absent and profoundly present. This fragmented language in which the Void is a driving force leaves room for the movements of the breath of life and thereby suggests the unsayable.

`By means of a slender brush, recreate the Void'

It is in painting however that the Void is given the most striking expression. In some paintings dating from the time of the Song and Yuan dynasties (tenth-fourteenth centuries), when Chinese painting was at its zenith, as much as two-thirds of the picture may be given over to the Void or, in other words, left unpainted. Emptiness is not an inert presence but is felt, on the contrary, to be charged with a vibrancy that links the visible world to an invisible world.

Even within the visible world (the painted area) the Void is still present. Thus between the mountain and the water, which are the two poles, the cloud represents the intermediate Void. The painter creates the impression that the mountain can be transformed into waves and, conversely, that the water can rise up in the form of a mountain. Both cease to be regarded as partial, opposing, unchanging elements; they embody the dynamic principle of reality as a whole.

By upsetting all linear perspective, the Void reveals this ever-present interaction between man and nature within the painting, on the one hand, and between the person looking at the painting and the painting itself on the other. The painting is thus meant to be listened to" even more than to be seen. Producing a painting, or contemplating one, becomes an act of participation, a form of meditation in which reality is eased out by truth.