Art Reboot

97 17 learning to see chinese paintings In a painting by Hongren (1610–1664), the main subject is not the landscape. His paintings offer an ever-changing, abstract for- mal balance made up of the constituents of landscape. Cliffs, boulders, streams and waterfalls, ancient trees and other foliage double as landscape and abstract formal elements, all composed of mature, expressive, calligraphic brushwork consisting of care- fully balanced ink tones, dry and wet strokes adding to the tex- tural language of the work. Once we grasp this, and look beneath the surface subject matter to the inner languages, traditional land- scape paintings come alive, excitingly different and immensely powerful. Once we learn to look at Chinese paintings in the way we would look at, and see, a Mondrian or a Pollock, we can get beyond the western, premodern prejudice that favoured sur- face subject matter and begin to see the paintings within the framework of meaning the artists who created them intended. This view is confirmed in theory. In Guhua pinlu ( Record of the Classification of Old Painters , c.550 ce), Xie He outlined six principles in order of importance. He didn’t get around to men- tioning likeness until the third principle. The six are open to