Art Reboot

113 rational, the special-case; they are fluid, temporal, experiential, and embody art emancipated from external control. Any mark – on paper, on a wall, on a mind – suggests space. An ink brush- stroke is both a flat mark and a suggestion of space and form. At its most sophisticated, this idea is embedded as an essential part of Chinese painting, which can be summed up as the efficient expression of profound aspiration, the surface concerns of subject matter, symbolism, painting mode or format no more than a gateway to underlying languages of form, line, colour and texture, and underlying those, confidence and sagacity. The West’s idea that it discovered abstraction – a major global first which left everyone else looking like children – is childish. A syncretic view – one which embraces contradictory ideas (in this case, depiction and abstraction) – is mature. In China the brush is central to culture, used in the same way to write and to paint. Its adjuncts – ink stick, ink stone, water ves- sel and spoon – are objects of the scholar’s affection. Calligraphic training hones the writer’s character as well as the characters written; it is a discipline of the hand and of the self. There is scant analogue in the West, where the pen prevailed and the paint- brush was always a distant cousin. Both are now much displaced by the keyboard, but all is well as long as we do not lose any of the options of the past. The inscription tradition in Chinese art is rich and powerful. The painter may write an original text, may quote earlier painters or poets or philosophers, and subsequent collectors may do the same. When an ancient poet is quoted, friendship arises across time and space, just as the world’s great writers, when known and