Art Reboot

109 into one seamless piece. The collaging of Chinese paper may be sensible to the fingertips, but is generally not to the eye. Only in the final stages did the poem by the famed wilderness poet Jia Dao (779–843) spring to mind as the explicit subject: Under the pines I ask the boy. He says ‘My master’s gone to gather herbs; I only know he’s on this mountain, But the clouds are too deep to know where.’ In the landscape, now concealed, now revealed by drifting cloud, we don’t see the master, but we learn that he is there from his young attendant ( shutong , ‘bookboy’), waiting patiently beneath the pines. The painting is charged with the master’s invisible presence, vast by contrast with the boy. Because he could be anywhere, we can see the whole landscape as the master, em- bodying the poetic idea. And all in four short lines of just five characters each. The poem offers a metaphor for the Daoist aspirations underlying much of Chinese culture, where art is a primary and highly efficient vehicle for achieving transcendence, and where painting offers a path to the Gates of Wonder, through which we pass beyond the intellect into the undifferentiated experience of the Dao. At heart, Chinese landscape painting is at once an affirmation of the integrity of Nature and humans, and an escape from the World of Red Dust, the storm of competing human interests and obligations. A meandering stroll through a handscroll is thus a draught of cool water to the parched. Indeed, many viewers gain