The Colors of Ink

By ROBERT HUGHES

For Americans, the suddenly fashionable area of Chinese painting has long been dominated--in terms of taste, scholarship and accessibility--by two great public collections: the Freer Gallery in Washington and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The current show at Manhattan's Asia House is, in effect, a tribute to Cleveland and its director, the eminent connoisseur of Chinese art Dr. Sherman Lee. Entitled The Colors of Ink, it is a selection of classical Chinese black-to-white paintings on silk and paper lent from Cleveland's collection and dating from the 10th century, when the colored paintings of the T'ang dynasty were superseded by a new monochromatic style, to the 18th century. One could not hope for a more succinct introduction to what one of the artists represented on the walls, Tung Chi'i-ch'ang (1555-1636), rhapsodically called "the sheer marvels of brush and ink" wrought by the wen-jen or gentlemen scholars.

Western criticism has borrowed some of its words from Chinese art, but paintings like these make one realize how the terms have suffered in transit. To speak, for instance, of the "calligraphy" of a Western artist--Pollock's dripped skeins of paint, or the brisk rhythmic jotting of a Rembrandt sketch --is to use a metaphor. In classical Chinese painting, it is not. The wen-jen used the same brush for painting and writing, the same ink, the same habits of mind. The distinction between word and image, which is one of the sharpest divisions in our culture, barely existed for them at all; they expressed their thoughts with characters, not words, and these characters, having evolved from pictograms, were both sign and idea. A mark of the brush could both mean and represent a mountain; as Sherman Lee notes in his catalogue, "Since one designed and wrote a character with the care demanded by art and one's own personality, it was natural to think in terms of ink and brush ... The artist could not approach nature as other than a concept, an abstraction in black and white."

Mysterious Allusion. Painting, therefore, was a more natural extension of thought for the Chinese than it is for us, and its special value lay in a harmonious spontaneity: knowledge without spadework. A 9th century scholar, Chang Yen-Yuan, described this ideal:

"He who deliberates and moves the brush intent upon making a picture, misses to a still greater extent the art of painting, while he who cogitates and moves the brush without such intentions, reaches the art of painting. His hands will not get stiff; his heart will not grow cold; without knowing how, he accomplishes it."

There is, of course, a difference between the lucid gray washes and quick flecks of ink with which the painter Chii-jan, at the end of the 10th century, painted a Buddhist Retreat by Stream and Mountain, and the clumsy spatterings that often declare "spontaneity" in the West. It is partly a difference of insight --Chii-jan's mountain, breathed into serenely vertical form, layer by stratified layer, is as mysterious in its allusions to geological time as any Leonardo landscape. It is also a difference of discipline. The wen-jen served no apprenticeship, and the idea of being "professional" painters would have appalled them. Nevertheless, it was recognized that one could hardly attain mastery of the brush before the age of 50.

The least mark found its place in a (to us) bewildering set of classifications, each with a name: lutestring stroke, olive (pit) stroke, spring-silkworm-spitting-silk stroke; hanging-creeper dots, rat-foot dots, and some 21 kinds of ts'un or "texture wrinkle," including something called the tan-wo-ts'un or "pellet (as dropped into mud) whirlpool (eddies) texture." If this sounds pedantic, it should be seen in context: the Chinese belief that any stroke (like any character) was a unit of meaning, virtually a work of art; and that the picture could be as much a manifestation of the tao as nature itself.

If there is any common factor that unites the diverse styles and schools in this exhibition--the misty gray impalpability of Ma Lin in the 13th century with the dark stormy flood of ink from which Mu Ch'i's tiger rises, or the epigrammatic beauty of the late 15th century P'eng Hsue's plum branch--it is the pursuit of what Taoist scholars called

ch 'i-yuen:

literally, "spirit resonance."

"Rhythmic vitality" comes close to its sense, for the Chinese considered a painting to manifest ch'i if the "spirit" of its subject was translated into the movements of the artist's hand and then to the ink marks. The idea is that of Confucius: "Only the truly intelligent understand the principle of identity. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves subjectively, but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed."

The artist becomes what he beholds. It is not a familiar posture for Occidentals, but at least one can marvel at the subtleties of experience it left in the unperturbed tradition of Chinese monochrome painting. .Robert Hughes

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