Authors: Richard Weihe
Tags: #German, #Biographical, #China, #Historical, #Fiction
Sea of Ink (9 page)
49
The following day he sat down and wrote a letter to his long-dead master:
Today, Master, I, Bada Shanren, sit here trying to ask myself what lesson I still need to learn, a
question
I have shied away from answering. My answer is: the lesson of the first stroke. For is the whole drawing not contained in the first stroke? It must be considered long in advance, perhaps a whole life long, in order to bring it to the paper in one fluid movement at the right moment, without the need or ability to correct it. The first brushstroke is the foundation; it is the internal law of the external movement. All other strokes take care of themselves, so to speak. The interrupted flow of the black ink, the suspended movement, everything visible and palpable arises from this. Stones and pools, rivers, waterfalls and mountains, lotus flowers, roses, orchids, fuchsias, chrysanthemums and pines, bamboo, cedars, chicks, crows, eagles and fish. Substance,
fragrance
, vitality, softness, noise, weather, thought and feeling. All this is in the line. But the initial stroke is the most important thing of all. That is my answer. Do you accept it?
50
Bada’s right hand had become so weak and tired that he could barely hold the paintbrush any more. Now he was ready to set off on his final journey, without any luggage. Without brush and without ink.
When the last of his strength was relentlessly
vanishing
, he reached for his brush once more and opened the little pot containing ready-made ink.
With a clammy hand he dipped the brush.
The brush tip approached the paper.
One final, delicate caress of the paper, so soft as if he were dabbing the wings of a butterfly with ink.
His eyes closed. For a moment he could still see the darkness beneath his eyelids, then he lowered his head onto the pillow.
The paintbrush slipped from his hand and fell onto his white shirt. It rolled slowly across his chest, leaving a black trail. The material soaked up the liquid and the stain spread rapidly.
A tiny black star shone in the room in all directions of the compass.
51
·
Supposedly, the chronicles of the Monastery of the Green Cloud noted that its founder, Zhu Da, died in 1705 at the age of eighty. Apart from the years of his birth and death, little is known about the life of the Prince of Yiyang, who turned himself into the painter Bada Shanren. The few contemporary reports that exist speak of his madness; current research tends to take the view that he consciously manipulated his behaviour to avoid being co-opted by the hated regime. If Zhu Da was at the centre of one dynasty, he fell out of the frame of the succeeding one. Here I have told Zhu Da’s life story alongside the biographical information and anecdotes that have been handed down, but the narrative is my invention. Moreover, the account is not as broad as it might have been because I have neglected the work of Bada the poet. Today there are 179 dated pictures and albums with paintings and calligraphy by Bada Shanren. They show mountains, forests and rivers, many species of plants, birds and fish – and yet they always seem to be
self-portraits
.
Sea of Ink
is an attempt to get inside the paintings, to tease out their words, to let them talk. I should like to thank Tom Lawton, former director of the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, for the tantalizing private view of scroll paintings and pages from albums in the museum’s basement. Thanks are also due to Alexandra von Przychowski at the Rietberg Museum in Zürich for her help; and also to my brother Hugo K. Weihe for the scroll painting he gave me years ago: a bird sitting contentedly on an apple. Or is it a pumpkin? And why is the bird sitting on it as if on an egg? Is it trying to hatch all possible meanings? The picture is by Bada Shanren and actually the bird is sitting on an enigma in the form of an identifiable object. It was this that aroused my curiosity.
Richard Weihe
In several places I have made use of François Cheng’s monograph
Chu Ta (1626–1705): Le génie du trait
(Paris: Phébus, 1986) and his sensitive introduction to Bada’s visual imagery. In Chapter 21, for example, I have adopted the historically documented usage of metaphorical names for various brushstrokes. Cheng cites a short poem by Liu Yuxi (772–842), which I have worked into Chapter 25. In the description of the picture in Chapter 28 I use a quatrain by the poet Fei Sihuang from the eighteenth century, and in Chapter 36 some lines of verse from Wei Zhuang (836–910). A letter cited in full from Shitao to Bada Shanren served as the model for the letter in Chapter 43. For the description in Chapter 26 I have used Cheng’s interpretation of the thorns as ‘
sentinelles armées et vigilantes de la beauté
’. My description of the picture in Chapter 30 (
Fish and rocks
) also contains an idea from Cheng – ‘
Mais rien ne les presse à vrai dire: leur amitié a toute l’éternité devant elle
’ – while in Chapter 34 I have used his question in parentheses ‘
Arbres et rochers, voilés par le rideau de la pluie (ou par celui des larmes?)
sont
comme un geste d’adieu
’ as a starting point for my interpretation of the picture of the cut-off house. Chapter 42 contains a literal quotation from Cheng. ‘
Savoir partir: toute la science du sage,’ he writes, and then asks, ‘D’où vient pourtant que ce monde amer à tel point sache se faire aimer, à tel point soit dur à quitter?
’
Wang Fangyu and Richard M. Barnhart’s catalogue of the exhibition
Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren 1626–1705
(New Haven,
Connecticut
: Yale University Art Gallery, 1990) is the first comprehensive inventory of Bada Shanren’s work. In Chapter 25 I use some lines from one of Bada’s poems which Wang Fangyu cites in English. The translation of another original text, meanwhile, served as the basis for the letter in Chapter 35.
In his essay ‘Zur Biographie des Pa-ta shan-jen’ in
Asiatica: Festschrift Friedrich Weller zum 65.
Geburtstag
(Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1954), pp. 119–30, Herbert Franke has assembled historical documents in German translation relating to the life of Bada Shanren. In Chapter 32 I use excerpts from Shao Zhangheng’s recollections of a meeting with Bada. Chen Ting’s outline of Bada’s life has been an
indispensable
source, particularly his information about Bada’s madness and the various names he gave himself. Herbert Franke also provides translations of the most important passages from Chinese treatises on ink in his book
Kulturgeschichtliches über die chinesische Tusche
(Munich: Bayerische Akademie der
Wissenschaften
, 1962). This source provided the background necessary for Chapter 16, as well as assisting other places in the text.
I have allowed Bada Shanren himself or his teacher, Master Hongmin, to utter some of the theses from Shitao’s discourse on painting – ‘Shih-t’ao: Quotes on Painting’ in
Aesthetics: The Classic Readings
, edited by David E. Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 65–76. In Chapter 33, therefore, we have Shitao’s third thesis, which states that the best technique of painting is the ‘technique of no technique’. The fourth thesis, in which Shitao describes the painting process as a step-by-step transfer of the idea of the picture onto the paper via the wrist, the brush and the ink, has made its way into
Chapter
15, in association with ideas on the function of ink, paintbrush and the subject of the painting from thesis 18. The sublime significance of the function of water, taken from the same thesis, also crops up in Chapter 22.
The father’s sentence from Chapter 4, ‘A path comes into existence by being walked on’, is a saying taken from the work of the fourth-century-BC philosopher Zhuang Zhou, more specifically from the following edition:
Zhuangzi – Das klassische Buch daoistischer Weisheit
, edited and with a commentary by Victor H. Maier, translated from the English by Stephan Schumacher (Frankfurt am Main: Krüger, 1998). The question which concludes Chapter 7 is also taken from this work. The idea developed in Chapter 15 of a unity of different things takes up one of Zhuangzi’s central theories: ‘This is also that, and that is also this.’ The dream meeting at the end of Chapter 24 cites a short extract from the anecdote about the goldfish, while the brief dialogue about the joy of fish is my amended version of a conversation between Master Zhuang and Master Hui.
Page from an album, between 1689–92.
Ink on paper. Private collection, China. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Page from an album with eleven leaves, around 1681.
Ink on paper, 30.2 x 34 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Mrs George Rowley in memory of Professor George Rowley.
Photograph
© Bruce M. White.
Page from an album.
Ink on paper. Private collection, China. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Page from an album with sixteen leaves, in places dated 23/24 June 1693.
Ink on paper. Shanghai Museum. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Hanging scroll, dated 1696.
Ink on paper, 134.6 x 60.6 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford Jr, 1988, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, all rights reserved.
Page from an album with twelve leaves, dated 1699.
Ink and light colour on paper, 23.3 x 16.8 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford Jr, 1988, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, all rights reserved.
Page from an album with three leaves, dated 1691.
Ink on paper, 34.5 x 27.1 cm. Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai Collection. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Fred Fangyu Wang bequest.
Hanging scroll, dated 1694.
Ink on paper, 127.5 x 36.5 cm. Charles A. Drenowatz Collection, Museum Rietberg, Zürich. Photograph © Wettstein & Kauf.
Page from an album with twelve leaves, dated 21 December 1699.
Ink and light colour on paper, 21.3 x 16.8 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford Jr, 1988, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, all rights reserved.
Page from an album with twenty-two leaves, in places dated 1694 and 1702 (The Anwan Album).
Ink on paper. Sumitomo Collection, Sen-oku Hakuko Kan, Kyoto, Japan.
Page from an album with nine leaves, dated Spring 1691.
Ink on paper. Private collection, China. Photograph: all rights reserved.
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