Where is the Baseline?

By Zhao Xucheng
(Deputy Director of Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture, President of the Traditional Chinese Painting Academy in Jiangsu)

Where is the baseline for traditional Chinese painting? I'm not very sure. It's hard to clarify it in a few words. Yet, undeniably, the baseline does exist.

In a macroscopic sense, as with all the other artistic branches, the baseline of traditional Chinese painting should be beauty and spirit. Beauty and spirit as the baseline is, no other baseline should be expected. Just think of the diversity and abundance of macroscopic beauty, the commonness human reaction towards beauty and spirit, the boundlessness in beauty, and the artistic pilgrimage human beings have gone through for the realm of aesthetic and spiritual experience. Beauty contains no baselines. Beauty admits no national boundaries. Beauty requires no uniform standards. It is ever in a state of flux and never refuses innovation. Art being open to exploration, it doesn't matter what you paint, how you paint, or with what kind of materials you paint. What is before us is a boundless universe, knowing no limits at all.

In a microscopic sense, however, beauty and spirit do have a baseline. They are restricted by aesthetic individuality in different times, of different nations and from different countries or areas. Considering the uniqueness of individual beauty and spirit, the divergence of aesthetic tendency of different nations in different countries or areas, and the development of the human understanding of beauty and spirit, beauty then has its limits. It recognizes national boundaries, and is subject to some standard. Variations and innovations in beauty have to meet their bounds, too. What to paint, how to paint and with what kind of materials to paint-these question are to be confined by the corresponding time, country and nation. You prefer to embrace absolute freedom. You'd like to do away with all chains. For sure you can. But your time and society would not recognize you. That is also their freedom. What can you do about it?

Therefore, as will be readily seen, the baseline of traditional Chinese painting seems to come between dance and chains, between freedom and fetters, between individuality and commonness, between nationality and internationality, between conventions and innovations, between boundaries and breakthroughs, between Chinese and Western, between the presence and the absence of formality, between wash painting and color-wash painting, between objective nature and subjective feelings, between the presence and the absence of the baseline. In one word, this baseline consists of the proper adjustment of the foregoing "betweens." It is a dance with chains. Unlikely is it for us to dance an absolutely free dance without chains; nor would it do to submit oneself totally to the chains, endeavoring not the least to go beyond its bound and dance as freely as possible. That is a dilemma that has been assigned to us human beings since the Creation of the World-a persisting joke played upon us by the Creator.

The history of traditional Chinese painting has seen several controversies. The crux of the problem is this: one side wants only freedom, and the other, chains; or, to put it mildly, one desires more freedom than chains, and the other, more chains than freedom. Thus come up the controversies. There is nothing to be surprised at in it. Nor is it a bad thing. As the saying goes, the more intensely discussed, the more manifestly the truth stands out. Controversy does no harm but good to the development of traditional Chinese painting.

Controversy will continue. Believe it or not, no matter how controversy goes on, traditional Chinese painting would keep dancing a free dance with chains between the presence and absence of the baseline. Considering the current development and the overall situation of traditional Chinese painting, however, we should lay more emphasis on casting off burdens and allowing more liberty in dancing. According to Maozedong Thoughts, this should be the major aspect of the contradiction.

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