Before starting to paint, the mind and heart of the artist should be like a bright mirror, reflecting the true nature of milliards of things and revealing the secret of their vitalities in a contingent celestial revelation.
As soon as the ink-stone cleansed and the Xuan paper prepared, the hand of the artist could inject the whole universe into a small drop of ink and reinvent the things of the world with the tip of a single brush.
When the painting is completed, hung in a small room against a humble wall, the casement of the mind-eye should be opened simultaneously toward a new frontier untrodden and yet to be discovered with ever changing views and endless surprises.
Sometimes appreciating a painting daily and casually will inspire the viewer unexpectedly with ideas beyond the painting, and a painting in one’s recollection will surely usher new intimations from time to time out of the tedious and mundane world. A few simple brush strokes could yield a blessed sublime ambience and scattered ink speckles gush a powerful creative spring.
About painting, size would be the least thing of one’s concern. The clarity of an artistic mind should be the fundamental. When the essence of the things captured and the humor of the subjects disclosed, wordy descriptions spared and gaudy colors avoided, a unique atmosphere and celestial realization is to be revealed upon even the most ordinary scene. Things that touch the deepest part of your heart are indeed often found unexpectedly lurking around behind you waiting for a serendipitous eye to detect. This is especially true in the vignette practice of Chinese ink-color painting.
Chinese vignette has become popular since the 11th century of the North Sung Dynasty in the forms of round fan and album-leaf covering subjects of all sorts including the popular idyllic landscape, poetic flower-and-bird and recluse figure. Its composition is simple and concise, one scene depicted in one painting with a sharp focus that is reminiscent of the short and terse lyrical poetry. During the 12th and 13th centuries, echoing the trendy Neo-Confucianism of its period, believing that the correct knowledge could only be obtained through the scientific investigation of the principles of things, the Sung painters have cultivated the lyrical vignette to its peak by combining poetry and painting together organically while the realistically painted images expressing and evoking lyrical meaning beyond colors and lines, and inscribed words beyond rhythm and rhyme. Both the verbal and graphic systems employed follow the same principle of implementing the part to suggest the whole, the less to symbolize the more.
After the Sung Dynasty, from the 14th to the 16th century, in the field of vignette, besides the round-fan and album-leaf, the painted folding fan emerged to dominate the scene. And in the same time, artists launched a search for new aesthetic approaches on the one hand conducting a graphic conversation with the past masterpieces demonstrating an unprecedented strong historical sense, and on the other, following the philosophy of intuition advocated by Wang Yang-Ming (1472-1529) the renowned Neo-Confucian idealist who affirmed that the true knowledge should occur within the mind rather than through actual objects and that knowledge and action are codependent. A great variety of art styles therefore bursting out during the 16th and 17th century witnessed the second flourishing phase of the lyrical vignette.
Now three hundred years have passed since the end of the 17th century. The contemporary Chinese ink-color painting now is developing in a three-fold context of the agrarian, the industrial and the postindustrial societies. Signs of postmodern conditions have been emerging everywhere in China. With novel artistic experiments, the Chinese contemporary artists will indeed reach out with their wide open arms to welcome the third phase of the lyrical vignette to come.
Lo Ch'ing
Poet/Art critic/Artist
