I See Mountains and Water

Art Weekly: Some say that landscape painting is the spiritual home of the Chinese. What do you think?

Yan Changjiang: For me it is a home, though I am not sure it is one for everyone. Most painters and calligraphers today may not have truly returned to it; much remains surface display. The mainstream is still rather familiar and conventional. After a whole gathering, cleverness shows on the page while commercial intent hits you in the face. The artist may not feel it, but I, an outsider, can see it clearly. Calligraphy and painting become social performance—obligations, wine, and verse— and I rarely see people or works that pursue the essence of art and nature.

Art Weekly: Well—what do you think is the essence of Chinese landscape painting?

Yan Changjiang: Everyone sees it differently. Some look from an aesthetic angle, others from a social one. Aesthetic judgment is not purely formal; it is also a comprehensive orientation, sometimes a social one. Much arises from interest and tacit understanding; it is hard to fix a single doctrine. For myself, I first think of Mencius: "I am good at nourishing my vast, flowing spirit." In China, nature and humanity interact and merge; we read life through nature and nature through life, until self and world dissolve and heaven and humanity become one. Often "mood" can only be felt, not stated—so I value that vast spirit. I want a strong work to carry a worldview and a view of life, so that one painting can hold the whole world and the whole person. What is it more precisely? I think of a very high aesthetic realm: literally one character "high" and one "ancient." "High" is looking up to mountains; "ancient" is a long source flowing down. My friend Mr. Luo Jie argues that China has no "sublime"—the term does not appear in the Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry. Sublimity is the central aesthetic concept of Western classical art since Greece; China has "vigor and depth" and the like instead. Yet from a modern view, the "high" in "high antiquity" carries something of the sublime. I keep wondering whether there is something like sublimity in the Chinese spiritual lineage. Literati painting, in my view, shows a flowing artistic pattern. In some sense, a peak at which Chinese landscape painting breaks through is exactly that spirit. We look to the Song and Yuan, where time itself offered a kind of answer. In the Song, how did people seek solutions? Our value world has many problems—food, clothing, a need for spiritual life—yet we lack a systematic set of values; many live in a daze. We need, to some degree, to solve this through art and form a reasonable scale of values. Sometimes, expanding imagination on the page, I ask: where do I come from? I think of Li Bai: "We gaze at each other without tiring—only Mount Jingting." When we possess the finest cosmic and religious feeling, some choose to give themselves wholly to nature; others to a sublimated substitute, such as Chinese landscape painting—

Art Weekly: What work do you think best embodies the spirit of landscape?

Yan Changjiang: I can only speak from my own view and that of some friends. Facing the landscape tradition, we find that stopping at Bada Shanren and Shitao is not enough. Using it to cultivate temperament and escape reality is possible, but facing reality is harder. Strangely, we can trace back to the Tang–Song transition—the first great peak of landscape painting: Jing, Guan, Dong, and Ju. How do they differ from the Four Monks? I see two paths. Literati painting is neither simple inheritance nor natural evolution; sometimes I think they are two arts.

Art Weekly: You mean the theory of the Southern and Northern Schools?

Yan Changjiang: Dong Qichang's account may not be scientific, but it is meaningful: elevate the Southern School, suppress the Northern. Art relates to geography, yet geography cannot dictate every genius—not entirely. I clearly feel that painters Dong Qichang classed as Northern carry, for me, an air of "high antiquity," even a strong sense of the sublime, and deserve a fresh look.

Art Weekly: You hold that landscape between the Tang and Song is one art, and later literati painting another. How do you divide them?

Yan Changjiang: In Chinese art, I think the great Northern masters attack head-on; literati painting circles around the flank. Head-on attack is confrontation, dialogue, an older way of thinking—like the Warring States facing social change. Literati painting is like Chan: we need not think; understanding by intuition is enough. Literati painting stresses "brush and ink." Is brush and ink the same as brush method? I do not think so. Brush and ink is personal endowment. I have read *Tracing Painting Theory Upward*. We can speak of brush method, but not always of "brush and ink." The beautiful line of form and the later so-called brush method are tactile, not only visual. That tactile brushwork is a spiritual touch, self-sufficient in spirit. I care about the image of Chinese dialogue with nature; literati painting found a means of liberating personality and spirit, stressing not exchange with the object but "I." Interestingly, the so-called Northern Song may have a contemporary relevance; photography, sculpture, and installation may all learn from it. We live in an age short of sublimity. In Jing, Guan, Guo, and Fan we see a worldview—a huge painting answering the whole world. The core is sublimity, which in spirit approaches Western art and contemporary art.

Art Weekly: What is the difference between real Song landscape, painted landscape, and photographed landscape?

Yan Changjiang: Faithful depiction of landscape is looked down on in literati terms, but when my friend reached the Taihang Mountains, he felt that Jing Hao, Dong Yuan, and their peers were working from life, in awe of nature. You cannot reduce them to "landscape"; they describe nature and merge with it. They seem to have little personal style, yet they tell us that something in the world absolutely commands reverence. Such painters are solemn and grave; the human figure stands upright. I often take that as philosophical activity. Literati painters are self-centered, playful; they too can hold deep philosophy, yet many feel Fu Baoshi should not strain for philosophical display. That philosophy is often taught, inherited, not from the heart. Among Chinese painters I can name Fu Baoshi and Li Keran as strong. A younger friend, Li Zhi, is also a photographer. Once he went to Huangshan, stayed a day or two, then suddenly drove more than a thousand kilometers to the Taihang range and began shooting in the south, producing personal series such as *Mountain Journey* and *Honggu Valley*. Simply put, I see a run from Southern Song toward Northern Song. Alone in the Taihang, Li Zhi uses photography to dialogue with Jing Hao. This exhibition interests me because I see two layers: my angle shifts. I am not looking at Guo Xi's Taihang figures. In these images we see "I." Li Bai again: "We gaze without tiring—only Mount Jingting"—only facing sublime nature. Luo Jie explained that "sublime" also has a side of struggle. In Fan Kuan's *Travelers among Mountains and Streams*, we feel not the highest or deepest, but solemnity. So my view is not only autobiography; it is also a specimen, mostly in photography.

Yan Changjiang: Put the above in contemporary terms and the Northern Song looks even more remarkable. In photography, there is a kind of landscape work—what I have called "cold face" for a decade—without expression, without discriminating mind. People with little artistic cultivation often say it merely copies the world; any amateur could do it. Very quiet, very plain. What I call "God's eye" also fits a Buddhist view: all beings equal, all things equal. *The Society of the Spectacle* has had huge influence; related art from German New Objectivity to the Bechers shows a real need now, especially in China. What is wider or deeper than "God's eye"? What artist is colder? Whoever reaches that state—spiritual creation ends there; breadth and depth end there. Look up and stop! What is time zero? Such work is solemn and still; it makes time vanish or collapse to a point. It is a great image of an instant—one might say the face of eternity. Laozi's "One," Shitao's "one stroke"—thinking of this I feel released. Zhuangzi too: freedom; this consciousness is like eternity in an instant. One form can hold a large logic. To speak of Laozi so highly makes sense; it raises the Chinese spirit. Beyond that, I do not know where the highest lies; it is hard to go further. I feel a restrained awe—not a personal demand, not brush-and-ink first, but law first. The soul feels reality. These two poles connect slowly; only existence itself can paint true deconstruction. These two points let landscape painting speak; through breath and rhythm it can run and speak.

That was their posture when they first faced the world—nothing more. Does Chinese painting at its height still have this awareness, this gift? Hard to say. Many evade the question. Those with true spirit in landscape painting should place themselves within contemporary art and reposition themselves—it will help.