Art Reboot

30 in particular, with its focus on eremitism and peaceful seclusion, was seen as an efficient meditational aid. We see the same trend across all the other arts. Calligraphy had been recognised as a high art since, nearly two thousand years ago, it broke free of the primacy and literalness of its lexical content to focus on the abstract qualities of brush-and-ink marks. The balletic dance of the brush was not merely lexical, but highly self-expressive. Calligraphic art was seen as requiring a high order of sensibility and aesthetic appreciation, not just in producing it but in appreciating it, too. Painting’s depictive role also became secondary to that of exploring and expressing consciousness-enhancing profundity. Indeed, there was virtually no difference in the manner in which painting and calligraphy were judged and appreciated; both prized brushwork and formal qualities over surface meaning. Perhaps the most intriguing indication of the precocity of Chinese art is found in music, one of the earliest of the arts to be recognised as such. The concept of silent music was already being flirted with at the time of Confucius (551–479). The qin , a kind of seven-stringed zither, became the quintessential mus- ical instrument of the literati, but there was no need to actually play it. Legend has it that the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming (365–427) owned a qin which was left unstrung. In a famous couplet, he wrote: If one grasps the deeper meaning of the qin , then why string it or try to make sounds?