Concept and Sign: some non-exhaustive observations vis-à-vis Chinese painting

The recent reading of a book on the history of China 1 prompted me to read or re-read a couple of books I happen to have on Chinese art and specifically, on Chinese painting 2. From these latter I gather that, for a very long time, the approach to painting in China was of a deliberately, so to speak, spiritual leaning; that is to say, whereas in the West the approach had been largely (although not exclusively) based on the more or less close imitation of the appearance of nature (also for spiritual ends), including and especially human beings, the Chinese painter-poet (often but not always associated with the court) eventually aimed more at an interpretation and representation of nature (landscape in particular) through a kind 'spiritual' symbiosis. It seems that Chinese painting is not imitative in the way that Western art is, even if, when appropriate, Chinese painters (like Egyptian ones) were fully capable of drawing 'realistically' all sorts of things, especially animals; it also appears however, that they were not particularly interested in human beings per se, except perhaps to contrast their often diminutive size (in pictures) with the massiveness of the Chinese landscape. One exception to this general trend seems to be portraits of Emperors and certain other officials, some of which strike me as virtually modern in their refinement of skill and economy of means (at least in the faces).

However, the point of this discussion is not to describe Chinese painting, nor is it to make a detailed comparison with Western painting but rather, to make some observations concerning ideas (concepts) and their visual realisation as paintings, as pictures. As others have noted, art works generally and perhaps pictures especially, can be described as 'signs'; frequently, these signs are seen as metaphors and analogues of various sociological (as they pertain to a society) or personal states (as they pertain to the particular artist). What interests me is how the artwork, and the attitude which produced it, reflects the way an artist - and often therefore a culture - conceives of the visible world.

Western art has passed through many periods and many manifestations, the majority of which have been closely or distantly related to what the artist could see in the natural world around him- or herself. Some periods were more attached to the physical reality while others were less so, leading in some cases to a highly symbolic expression which, while it contained clear references to that physical reality, treated it however as a source of symbols of the non-material, spiritual or occult worlds; real objects were there, in the image, but their combination, their grouping, their apparently heterogeneous nature rendered the image fundamentally incomprehensible from a naturalistic (art) point of view. Of course, even in those periods in Western art where the content of the pictures was completely comprehensible and clearly dependent on a close imitation of nature, those pictures could also operate on a symbolic level, especially in religious art; although the individual 'objects' in a Renaissance painting could be enumerated and described in mundane terms, the particular combination of those specific objects, together with the overt theme or subject of the image, might still have been symbolic (that is, of religious 'truths'). And, as we know, all kinds of seemingly 'realistic' images can be highly symbolic for those able to decipher the more arcane references.

In the 20th century however, for many reasons and developing out of various 19th century spiritual movements, Western art did become more interested in overt self-expression of the individual artist, a self-expression very often incomprehensible to anyone else, with the possible exception of poets and some other artists. Much Western art is however, dependent solely on itself, by which I mean that it is, in terms of the image in and of itself, a closed world, normally not requiring words as an adjunct or complement to its meaning. At this point, some readers of my articles may protest that I have in fact written already about the relationship between images and words, but allow me to explain further! As casually hinted at above, Chinese artists were very often actively poets as well as painters and, even more, were calligraphers to boot! Traditional (a word I use with caution) Chinese paintings are almost never without a short poem, often composed by the painter him- or herself, and equally important, written or - better - painted with a calligraphy whose expertise and beauty were as significant to the Chinese critic as the painted image was; indeed, the relationship between calligraphy and painting is akin to that between father and son, in so far as ink painting is believed to have evolved out of calligraphy. Calligraphy was important in Western art as well, in illuminated manuscripts and so on, and while the calligraphy was - and still is - highly prized, there was not the same intimate interdependent relationship between the illustrations and the text as there appears to be in Chinese art.

But, more to the point, it is the concept of 'reality' and its realisation as an image - together with its poetry in the Chinese case - that interests me. Speaking very broadly and with many exceptions, it can be said that the Western artist looked (or looks) at the real physical world and attempted to imitate what it looked like to him or her, obviously depending on many social and cultural factors; for many periods in Western art, the more closely an artist could copy what he or she could see - the facts of the matter (no pun intended) - the better! Naturally, individual temperament produced different results; even two artists living at the same time and in the same city (Florence), Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, while avowedly aiming at the imitation of nature, for instance in their studies of human anatomy, produced unmistakably different works: Leonardos are not mistaken for Michelangelos and vice versa! Nevertheless, what does this tell us about the Western artist's concept of physical reality; and if that concept is the more proximate to the appearance of reality itself, what does the Chinese artist's picture (objectively less proximate) tell us about his or her concept?

One answer which comes to mind is that the concept of 'reality' is not the point for the Chinese painter, but rather, it is his or her concept of art which is important. The Chinese painter, very often a refined 'gentleman' or 'lady' scholar-artist, was imbued with certain Confucian ideals, sometimes mixed with Buddhist or Taoist teachings, of correct behaviour, of the correct way to do things; for example, at certain times, it was regarded as bad taste to 'show-off' your skills, so that paintings often had a kind of unschooled look about them, this quality itself then becoming a sign of a good painting! However, the critical thing was what might be called the self-expressive element, an element visually manifested through a kind of transcendental identification with the overt subject of the artwork (landscape), and then that itself being augmented with the expressively painted calligraphy of the accompanying poem. A similar attention to a sort of unskilled or untutored aesthetic did not come into Western painting until the mid-19th century (Le Douanier Rousseau for instance) followed by, in the early 20th century, a positive rejection of overt skill (in the Academic sense) in movements such as Expressionism.

One particularly interesting type or format of Chinese painting is the so-called 'hand scroll'; what is interesting is the format itself, a rolled-up paper scroll containing a sort of continuous narrative painting. These scrolls were apparently read as a continuous unfolding, that is, the scroll was never fully opened, only that part being visible which was open between the left and right hands at any given moment. The format meant that the scroll's painting could only be viewed horizontally and was not able to be taken-in at a single glance - such as is the case, in a very general way, with pictures which are hung vertically; naturally, this is a simplification because most vertically hung paintings, whether Western or Chinese, are too complex to be comprehended in only a glance. But the aspect of the hand-scroll which is intriguing is that its way of being 'read' resembles the way we might see a landscape as we look at it from the window of a moving train: it is a sequence, a continuous sequence, of intimately connected images; in other words, the hand-scroll contains, even in its physical form, the notion of time. Our visual life is not perceived as a series of staccato images or discrete visual perceptions: rather, these are understood as moving seamlessly and, normally, logically, from one to the next, that is, a continuous and continuing 'film' of perception, of visual perceptions of the world around us. The hand-scroll format therefore implies a conception of the world which includes the passing of time; the movement so to speak, of time is the concept and the hand-scroll - and its painted narrative - is the sign. 

Although in Western art a similar or related concept might be implied in the form of the frieze, the very nature itself of the frieze format - its static quality - contradicts the 'motion' of time, not to mention that a frieze, like vertically hung pictures, can in a general sense be taken-in, as it were, at a glance; each part of a frieze, for example Egyptian tomb frieze paintings, is like a separate 'event' and, even though the events can be read as a sequence, that static quality is obviously at odds with the hand-scroll way of 'reading'. This Western conception (in fact, not restricted to Western art at all) of the relatedness of events in time does not however include the 'format' of time, that is, its continuous motion; the sign is not related to the nature of the concept. The originally Western form which most closely approximates the hand-scroll is the motion picture (note the name!).

From what has been said already, it is probably clear that, in relation to Chinese painting, we are discussing principally representations of the landscape; although representations of landscape have existed in Western art at least since Roman times, and although it appears in paintings from the Renaissance onwards, it was not treated in its own right (that is, independently of a formal subject, such as a religious one) by most Western artists until relatively recently. I would say though, that the 'transcendental' aspect or quality of the landscape was noticed at least from the Renaissance onwards 3, even if it was not dealt with per se until Corot, Turner and others (the German Romantics) got to work. However, until then, the Western artist's approach to landscape paintings was more or less the same - or, at least similar to - his or her approach to the human body for example: to imitate, or copy, more or less closely what he or she could see; the physical reality was the impetus. In Chinese painting of landscape, the artist's internal or spiritual condition was the impetus and the painted imagined landscape was the manifestation 4. 

This last point is important as, generally, from roughly the mid-18th century until the late-19th, Western painters stood in front of their landscape subject and drew or painted what they could see, they did not imagine it; interestingly, prior to that period, Western artists did in fact imagine their landscape backgrounds, but normally with a quite different attitude to that of their Chinese brothers and sisters: that is, still imitative and not explicitly expressive of personal internal states. As mentioned, from the beginning of the 20th century however, even Western artists began to mix direct observation with 'poetic' interpretation, as well as expression of their individual spiritual or psychological states. How far though this suffusing of a personal expression into a figurative image can be read as sign reflecting concept is unclear; is the concept to do with comprehension and reflection of the physical data in front of the artist, or is it to do with the psychological states within the artist? This remains a conundrum as the discernment of one element from the other is a bit like separating the ingredients of a cake mixture once they are already in the mixing bowl! As far as I can see, the problem is simpler when considering traditional Chinese landscape painting, because the imitation of nature per se was not the objective.

1 The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin, published by Black Inc, 2021

2 Chinese Paintings of the Ming and Qing Dynasties 14th - 20th century, written by Edmund Capon and Mae Anna Pang, a catalogue for a touring exhibition held between April 1, 1981 and mid-January, 1982 in various States of Australia. Copyright: International Cultural Corporation of Australia Limited; and

  Chinese Painting by Mario Bussagli (translated by Henry Vidon), published in English by The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1969

3 Here I might refer to the backgrounds of some pictures by Perugino (for example) which had stuck me as being 'transcendental', to such an extent in fact that, speaking personally, I should have been perfectly happy with the landscape part alone, that is, without the religious references (saints, Virgin Marys, etc.)! Perugino's ability to capture a sort of 'sublime' quality, aided perhaps by his preference for clear sunsets, is remarkable but I think, not much acknowledged today.

4 To illustrate the point a little, a comparison between a late Turner and Ingres' Odalisque is instructive! As suggested, the situation in Western art changed in the late-19th and early-20th century under the influence of the earlier acceptance in the first place of landscape as an independent subject in its own right; but also under the influence of various (often protestant) religious movements, even affecting people such as Mondrian, whose 'spiritual' Dutch landscapes are a case in point. During this early part of the 20th century, 'self-expression' gained ground as a valid 'subject' for modernist artists, freed at last - for the preceding 150 years or so - from the dictates of formal Academic painting. 'Self-expression' covers a wide gamut of conditions, ranging from a metaphysical response to the landscape (which may include a religious response), through to a personal emotional release, or a psycho-physical catharsis on canvas (Pollock), with perhaps landscape as the pictorial vehicle (that is, the putative motif). 

* I should point out that I am in no way any kind of aficionado of Chinese painting although I did take-up Japanese sumi-e (black ink painting) when at art school, a style derived from Chinese models I believe.