Chinese Landscape Painting

The Act of Seeing

How do you see? What does it mean when we say I see? How does the Act of Seeing connect with Art and transform the subject matter, the pictorial image we see, into the feeling it evokes?

Think about it as a comparison with the Act of Listening. Think about listening to classical music. Music never asks for explanations or interpretations; we listen to Bach because it makes us feel a certain way, a unique way for each of us.

This magic happens simply by the Act of Listening. We don’t need to know the name, read the composer’s biography, or dive into the historical precedents of the time when the music was created. We could do that, but that’s not what makes us sweat, cry, feel happy or miserable. No, only the Act of Listening has this magic power that can completely shut down the mind.

The Act of Seeing possesses no less magic. It is to see the world from submergence, to sink below the surface, to plunge underwater. This is the Act of Seeing.

Below the surface, you can no longer recognize what is visible and what is invisible, and only at that moment will you no longer ask for any interpretations.

Magritte said, Art evokes the sense of Mystery. Without it, the world would not exist.

The Mystery is the invisible forces below the visible world. But without it, the world would not exist.

One of these mysteries I witnessed at the Metropolitan Museum in the Gallery of Asian Art is Chinese Landscape Painting at the Met.

This is poetry, and it is only possible when you plunge underwater. Calligraphy was a part of the pictorial image. The painting itself becomes a continuation of the poetry. Painting and calligraphy merged, even created with the same materials: the same brush, the same ink.

Kandinsky said, Those who could speak have said nothing, and those who could hear – have heard nothing. In other words, everything starts with an act of listening or looking. Into the invisible from the visible, into the silence from sound.

The Chinese landscape is the point when the Act of Listening becomes the Act of Seeing. In other words, a pictorial image becomes poetry – something we cannot imagine in the Western Tradition. The term “landscape” in Chinese is made up of two words, meaning “mountain” and “water.” Looking at the mountains in China is a scared, religious experience there because they are reaching the sky, reaching the Heavens. Landscape painting is influenced by Daoism, what can be called China’s indigenous religion, pursuing the harmony between humanity and nature. It is called the religion of unity, which always constitutes two opposing forces: yin and yang.

What is most fascinating is that there is no supreme power in the face of humans over nature. Unlike in the Western Art tradition – humans dominate nature and are more significant. We keep nature under control because we are more important. Think about the canons of Western Art – Nature becomes subordinated by Humans. Consider Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog or even Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Nature becomes subordinated by our existence. We are supreme to Nature. Like in the Mona Lisa, nature is a part of the background, merely decoration. The Human dominates

in the Western Tradition. Now go and look at the Chinese Landscape painting galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Try to listen to the sound of the air. There are no humans, tiny silhouettes of our existence, like a mirage vanishing into the horizon, into Time, and we see this world from submergence.

We are captivated by the idea of Time in Western Art, Literature, and Music. The driving force for us to create is our madness, our curse to capture our existence in Time; some of us were able to transform it into infinity. The same condemnation can be made of Gaspar Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for being superior to Nature, being superior to Time, or in other words, recognizing that we are so desperate to leave our name in Time.

The agony and rivalry with Time that started in the Renaissance is still a big part of what we are and who we are in Western culture. We can’t see the empty space on the canvas and accept it as a continuation of who we are. In Chinese Landscape painting, we rarely see humans; it is entirely devoted to Nature and represents the passage of Time, where a human’s silhouette vanishes below the horizon.

The empty space is where the real story unfolds; we dive underwater, and the pictorial images become poetry. The rest is the shadow, like these tiny silhouettes of human figures vanishing below the horizon. I kept asking myself because I could not tell if this human figure existed or if it was just a ghost of my imagination below the surface.

To gaze at a river made of time and water

And remember Time is another river.

To know we stray like a river

and our faces vanish like water.

To see in every day and year a symbol

of all the days of man and his years,

and convert the outrage of the years

into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face

that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.

Art must be that sort of mirror,

disclosing to each of us his face.

The Art of Poetry

By Jorge Luis Borges