Nick Miller
First published "Chen + Miller : East - West" Model Arts & Niland Gallery. 2002.
East -West
For a
painter any attempt to explain the origin of work or an exhibition
is often unwise. In this case,
it is also as difficult as explaining how or why my co-exhibitor, Chen Zhongsen can
carve poems down the length of a single strand of silver hair taken
from his wife’s head. Words will not add to or take away from the
peculiar experience of engaging one of his meditative micro
carvings nor can they elucidate my surprise at the figurative watercolours I made
in response to some eastern learning. Despite this, I am compelled towards
some account, to clear my head and to point the curious viewer in
directions that they can explore alone.1 However,
as I am neither an academic or oriental specialist, I am thinking aloud: it is the bias of
my curiosity and thirst for learning in relation to painting that
has brought our two worlds together and led to these shows.
Trying to understand
eastern thought and what it offers is more an attitude to being
than an accumulation of information with answers at the end.
Defying de-construction, it stands and falls on human nature, not
an external God as creator or the analytical and logical reasoning
that are the foundations of western thought. It centres on an
individual’s ‘practice’ at ‘being’ to generate meaning. While this
is hard for the western scientific mind to comprehend, many artists
can recognise this relationship between practice and meaning. This
attitude is the very heart of difference between East and
West.
A similar difficulty of comprehension and illusive quality resides
at the centre of great art in the western tradition. That is where
we have guarded that energy, separate and focused in the internal
dynamics of painting, novel or symphony because it defies the
prevailing logic of linear progress. Great art in the Chinese
tradition is functionally different, inseparable from philosophy,
part of the ‘art of living’. So while traditional Chinese art may
appear exotic to the western eye, it reflects thousands of years of
‘non-linear’ wisdom emerging from Taoism, Buddhism and
Confucianism, all fundamental to Chinese civilisation and
culture.2
Scholars tell us that the oriental mind is characterised by a
symbolic imagination. It is rooted in the visual nature of the
written language, where word characters are derived from symbolic
depictions of the idea they represent. The resulting calligraphy is
as much a visual art as a conceptual communication. Chinese thought
is spherical or synthetic; no one part can be analytically
progressed as a separate to the whole (not so different from the
act of painting itself). This is the foundation of Taoism
and the principle of polarity
without opposition.3
In Chinese, the poles are known as
Yang (positive) and Yin (negative). In other cultures, good is seen
to be at war with evil, life with death, and the positive with the
negative, aiming to cultivate the former to eliminate the latter.
In Taoist thought this does not make sense, for as with an electric
current you must have both positive and negative poles to function,
different aspects of one system. Eliminating one would mean the end
of both. The universe is understood in terms of the mutually
responsive movement between polarities, the masculine in the
feminine, and the feminine in the masculine. Being emerges from
non-being, action from non-action, like sound from silence.
‘Non-action’ or ‘Wu Wei’ is a core concept of Taoism, described
here by Martin Buber as:
“The teaching that genuine
effecting is not interfering, not giving vent to power, but
remaining within one’s self. This is the powerful existence that
does not yield historical success, that is, the success that can be
exploited and registered in this hour, but only yields that
effecting that at first appears insignificant, indeed invisible,
yet endures across generations and there at times becomes
perceptible in another form”. 4
I believe that the power of the Chinese knowledge that is central
to understanding Chen’s work is in the practical paths it offers to
endlessly cultivate human potential with nothing other than the
self. Disciplines of meditation and movement aimed at achieving
full ‘awakening’ are focused on the relationship between mind,
body, and spirit. For the artist in any culture, consciously or
not, this is the daily ground of activity - the transformation of
material and energy through human action in response to the world.
So while there are chasm gaps between Chen and I in our respective
worlds and intentions; our strongest link is in the primacy of our
concerns with human energy - painting, carving or drawing with a
brush or simple tool as a direct extension of the body and
mind.
Proposition of calm: The work
of Chen Zhongsen
Chen’s landscape paintings propose art as nature.
All artifice, art, and human action are felt to be the same as a
natural or spontaneous action. The technique is one of no
technique, a discipline of the “controlled accident”, of doing
exactly the right thing without force or self-conscious intention
at the right moment. Our senses receive endless impressions and in
response, we experience continual desires and confusion. It is
Chen’s view from the Buddhist tradition that you can’t see a true
reflection in turbulent water and that you need to cultivate your
energy and train your heart for an internal stillness, peace and
calm, so that all reality can be clearly reflected. Painting
emerges from this stillness, more a natural emission than effort at
control or wilful construction: A proposition of calm.
In Chen’s paintings, the classical visual grammar of mountains,
rivers, bamboo boats, clouds and small animal or human presence
reflect the philosophy of Taoism, the natural flow of Yin and Yang
as The Tao (way/guide) for man to follow. They also reflect a real,
if partial, iconography of rural China where he paints. As an
artist, he wishes to create images of beauty, offerings, in which
your mind can find peace. Despite these strong roots, his work is
evolving in its use of paint and colour away from the strictly
traditional, slowly absorbing his experiences of the west and
seeking ways to extend the boundaries of his painting.
The extraordinary micro
carvings represent polar opposites to the technological logic board
of our most advanced microcomputer: ‘Hand made’, they rely not on
leaps forward in science and technology, but on leaps into the
interior world of human activity. They are executed with eyes
closed, using a fine steel engraver; there are no tricks, lenses,
or mechanics. It is an art, based in Buddhist meditation and
ancient Chinese breathing and energy cultivation exercises known
collectively as ‘Qigong’. These allow the practitioner to follow
and direct ‘Qi’ (breath/energy) along the paths described by
Chinese physiology (in Traditional Chinese
Medicine).5
Chen Zhongsen was introduced to
Qigong early, by a traditional doctor, an uncle, who taught him
exercises to cure a serious liver complaint. After regaining
health, he continued practising Qigong, finding a mental and
physiological state of extreme calm - slowing his heart rate and
breathing to almost nothing, so giving him the unique level of
control he has at this microscopic scale of activity. The nearest
technological equivalent would be a laser surgeon visualising his
work on a computer screen as he controls microscopic laser tools
inside the human body. For Chen however, the laser is his own
energy channelled through the body to the tip of steel, and the
screen, is the text or image he visualises during meditation.
Chen carves major
Taoist, Buddhist texts and classical poems on an incomprehensibly
small scale so as to be almost invisible to the naked eye and
certainly unreadable without strong magnification, even if you read
Chinese. This suggests both the power and intangibility of the
content, and reminds us that reading is only a small part of a
process of understanding that is simultaneously physical, mental,
and spiritual. On stones measuring only a few centimetres, he has
carved full versions of major texts including: The Tao Te Ching by
Lao Tzu,6 containing over 5,300 Chinese characters, The
Diamond Sutra7
with 5,200 characters and The Art of
War by Sun Tzu8
has over 7,000 characters
[plates 12, 6, &
14]. Other works such as
the remarkable Tang Dynasty poems carved on a human hair
[plate 1]
remind us with a sense of awe how
little we know of human potential. Seen enlarged, they are flawless
calligraphy and images of great intensity and strength. The
carvings of are not like miniatures, they operate as if the space
was immaterial, their intensity giving them an opposing sense of
the monumental. They speak with a purity that is oddly unacceptable
to contemporary art, in which we are still largely bound to notions
of progress and historical success.
Innocence: Tai Ji watercolours
(1999-2000)
As a
teenager in London, I bought a book on Tai Ji Quan (Tai Chi Chuan)
which is a Chinese martial art - type of meditation and practice
for energy cultivation.9I was
fascinated by the faded black and white photographs of elderly men
in the poses that make up these ancient sets of movement. At
fifteen, trying to decipher the complex indications of weight,
angle, and balance, I could briefly imagine Bruce Lee before losing
the plot in favour of the attractions of more ready
stimulation.
Much later, living in rural Co Sligo, I felt challenged by
the unavoidable implications
of facing nature. My accidental re-discovery of Tai Ji fitted like a strange old glove,
uncovering a system of knowledge that strengthened and renewed my
experience of living and painting. Like painting, the learning is
as much physical as philosophical and cultural, a daily practice
with occasional quantum leaps of enlightenment. It has many other
similarities: unforced self-discipline, endless return to the
beginning, awareness of flow and use of energy, and, the intuitive
adjustment of external form to accord with internal truth.
I have often asserted my need to paint in response to a direct
encounter with the ‘other’, working only in the presence of the
subject (be it a person or tree). In this process, I sometimes find
an intense reality or ‘wholeness’ that gives meaning to
life.10Tai Ji teaches that living this connection can be
practiced. This kind of intuitive knowledge that is felt rather
than thought is often the most exciting, It has a parallel
in sexual union, one of the few times
we intuitively
melt into a unity with the world beyond the self, and
are as nature.11It is no
coincidence that Taoism, by recognising “Jing” (sexual essence or
body) as our vital and creative energy, focuses on its cultivation
and transformation through “Qi” (energy
or breath) training for higher
purposes of “Shen” (mind - spirit).12
These watercolours owe many debts to
others, not least those people who, as ‘sitters’, endured their
making. However, the strongly visual teaching of Chungliang Al
Huang,13with whom I have intermittently studied Tai
Ji (and its energetic relationship to calligraphy), was
seminal. The ‘one-stroke’ circle and various other Taoist symbolic forms
which unexpectedly found their way into these paintings come
directly from his teaching and my learning [see opposite, p 12].
These works were my first attempts at a practiced relationship
between embodied energy and fluid line- a kind of ‘do-it-yourself’
figurative calligraphy.
In Chinese there is no separate
word-character for ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’, the actions and meaning
are one and the same. Moving in that direction, these watercolours
took me completely by surprise as radically different, oblique
progressions of earlier work concerned with drawing in close
physical proximity to the human figure.14 While
following my normal observational dynamic, these attempt a crossing
East to an openness and ‘natural’ response achieved through the
‘play’ of Tai Ji with the person prior to the execution of the
watercolours, a different way to achieve a ‘closer’
perspective.15
The form of energy interplay between
two people in Tai Ji Quan is known as ‘Push Hands’ or ‘Tui Shou’
and, although in the studio the parallel is not perfect, engaging
the ‘other’ in a circle of learning had a similar intention. These
works flowed without reservation with an ‘innocence’ (‘Wu
Wang’)16 and spontaneity unlike anything I had experienced
before. They go to the heart of my interest in the masculine and
the feminine, in the implications of energy inside and outside the
human body.
The human coin
In the
many discussions Chen and I had in the preludes to this show, the
similarities are more striking than the differences. Both of us
live in remote rural areas: Chen paints somewhere (that I don’t
think I could find again if I tried) in Fujian province in southern
China, and I on the western edge of Europe in Co Sligo, Ireland.
Yet when looking at a landscape in China, Chen will see the
philosophical strength of a bamboo boat crossing a river as I point
out my excitement at the powerlines receding in perspective across
a mountain range. Our different conceptions of beauty and art are
not mutually exclusive, but parallel certain polarities that exist
within and between East and West; the internal and the external -
two sides of the same human coin.
The long journey towards this exhibition began in 1998 at a Tai Ji
workshop I attended in Urbana, Illinois in the USA, where
Chungliang Al Huang first showed me a small Chinese chop (seal)
carved by Chen Zhongsen with the full 81 chapters of the Tao Te
Ching.17 It was like nothing I had ever seen or could
imagine possible. My curiosity and excitement to understand its
genesis led me deeper into Chinese culture than I ever intended
going. I made all the ‘Tai Ji’ watercolours in its wake between
1999 and August 2000, when I travelled to meet Chen Zhongsen for
the first time. We met at the ‘Lan Ting’ Institute in Oregon, USA,
where he was teaching calligraphy under the auspices of the Living
Tao Foundation.18
There we both met Brian Flaherty,
who, living in Beijing, has been a bridge across the vast language,
geographical and cultural barriers. None of these events would have
been possible without his insight, support, and subtle attention.
In November 2001 I travelled to China to finalise details for these
exhibitions and meet Chen on his own ground in Fuzhou city
where he carves and in Yang Jia Xi,
the remote northern area of Fujian province, where he paints. In
the realities of China, it is easy to wonder about the illusive Tao
or absent Buddha, until you recall the third, Confucian strand of
influence where the political mind holds court. Historical success
is largely a matter of survival, but in China it is measured in
centuries, always aware of the dynasties that come and go. When a
Chinese philosopher is asked what he thinks about democracy and the
French Revolution, he replies... “It is just too soon to tell.”
I remind myself as I fly home from Beijing, that while there is a
profound simplicity to eastern thought - nothing is
straightforward.
Nick
Miller
January
2002
Endnotes
1. The references provided are links to texts that
deal with concepts in much more depth than is possible in this
essay. Clear bibliographical references are sometimes difficult due
to different systems of translating of Chinese and difficulty in
finding the originals.
2. “The Importance of Living", Lin
Yutang, 1937, Quill/William Morrow & Company.
3. One of the most readable and clear writers on
Taoism in the English language is Alan W Watts, whose many books:
“Tao; the Watercourse Way", Arkana/Penguin 1992, which was
completed after his death in 1973 by Chungliang Al Huang,[ see note
13]. "The Way of Zen", Arkana/Penguin, 1990. Recent edited
lecture transcripts published by Eden Grove Editions include
"Taoism, the way beyond seeking", 1998 and "Buddhism, the
religion of no-religion", 1995. Also see the works and translations
of Thomas Cleary including "The Spirit of Tao", Shambhala,
1998 and "Vitality, Energy, spirit: A Taoist Sourcebook",
Shambhala, 1991.
4. From “The Way of Response" Martin
Buber, Schocken Books, 1966, page 171.
5. Qigong can be dangerous to health without
correct teaching. For a book in English see “Qigong
empowerment: a guide to Medical, Taoist, Buddhist, Wushu energy
cultivation", by Master Shou-Yu Liang & Wen-Ching Wu, Way
of the Dragon publishing, 1997.
6. The “Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu is the
primary text of Taoism and is second only to the bible in number of
translations around the world each with different qualities.
7. “The Diamond Sutra”, The
Vajracchedika-prajna-paramita sutra is a Buddhist text,
translations of which can be found on the Internet.
8. “The Art of War", by Sun Tzu, is
another major Taoist text to do with conflict resolution and
strategy with many translations and versions to choose from,
according to taste.
9. There are many books on the many styles and
forms deriving from Ta’i Chi Ch’uan. It is also written as Tai Ji
Quan or Taijiquan, Tai Ji or plain Ta’i Chi (see also notes 13 and
12).
10. See “I and Thou" by Martin Buber for
a source for this in western thinking (see also note 4).
11. See “Nature, Man and Woman" by Alan W
Watts, Vintage Books Edition, 1991.
12. A traditional and fascinating text is
“Ta’i chi Ch’uan and meditation" by Da Liu, Shocken,
1986.
13. Chungliang Al Huang is a long time authority
on East - West synthesis, based in the USA he is the founder of the
Living Tao Foundation, a forum for learning, he teaches an evolving
form of Tai Ji that developed as a response to both worlds. He is
the author of many books, including, “Embrace Tiger, Return to
Mountain: the essence of Tai Ji” , Celestial Arts 1973;
“Mentoring”(with Jerry Lynch) , Harper Collins1995
and“Quantum Soup", Celestial Arts,1991.
14. “Closer: drawings before the End,"
Nick Miller, 1999, Rubicon press(Rubicon Gallery, Dublin).
15. As note 14.
16. In this context, I use ‘Innocence’ as
a reference to ‘Wu Wang’ the 25th hexagram of the “I
Ching or Book of Changes" with its emphasis on strength in
naturalness and action without intention of gain. See Richard
Wilhelm translation with foreword by C.G.Jung, Arkana Edition
1989
17. See notes 13 and 6
18. See note 13
Chen ZhongSen
Mounted with needle for scale
Micro Carving on Shoushan stone, Fuzhou studio.
Calligraphy
Chen ZhongSen
Chen ZhongSen
Collection of Chester Beatty Library, Dublin
Yang Ch'eng-Fu
Nick Miller.1999