Chinese Ink Art and Global Changes

Abstract

We began with questions about the present-day value of Chinese ink-wash painting and the relevance of traditional principles of Chinese aesthetics. The results here suggest that traditions of Chinese aesthetics and the medium of brush, ink, and paper can be used by synthesizers and interrogators to make authentic images of a field of visible emptiness that reveals the unification of self with nature, others, and a larger universe. Jizi’s art shows how one may acquire a microlevel awareness of embodied union with visible life and a meditative awakening to one’s own true inseparability from nature. Awareness of one’s own true nature can lead one as a painter “to illuminate things,” to transform them, and to make spiritual paintings about the macrolevel that manifests the spirit of the universe. Thus, Jizi’s artistic practice can be interpreted as a sequence of transformational steps: contemplation of external things, illumination of the internal, awareness of one’s own true nature as a sentient being, and a nonrational glimpse or image of the great universe and the spirit of the whole. It is the relation between these dimensions that he expresses with his extraordinary compositions. Ultimately, his compositions suggest that the existence of natural phenomena and the larger universe cannot be separated from the utterly unique sensuous existence manifest within the senses of each individual human being.