One of the most important Chinese works on the technique of painting is the Chieh-tzu Yuan Hüa-chuan, the painters' manual called The Mustard-seed Garden. This was published between the years 1679 and 1701 and has become famous in the West mainly because of its beautiful colored woodcuts. It has been translated into French by Professor R. Petrucci, and those portions he omitted as possibly being additions of a later date are included in the German translation by Victoria Contag. There is also an English translation by Mai-mai Sze titled The Tao of Painting.
The Mustard-seed Garden has often been taken to be a code of laws for Chinese painting, a set of hard and fast rules which could not be broken. This is certainly wrong. Admittedly The Mustard-seed Garden is a compilation of all the elements and techniques of Chinese painting known at the time, a sort of collective expression of the traditions of Chinese painting. But it would be an almost fatal misunderstanding to treat it as a rigid code of laws which had to be obeyed. In fact it is exactly the opposite. The Mustard-seed Garden in a way makes suggestions as to methods: methods which had developed and proved themselves over a period of a thousand years. But the stating of such methods surely limits no one who feels the urge to be creative, and numerous Chinese painters who worked after the compiling of The Mustard-seed Garden have demonstrated that the creative spirit can transcend rules or—and this is far the more common case in China—that the creative artist, while seeming to abide by the rules, really produces something quite new.
It is precisely here, in this delicate balance between abiding by rules and remaining free, that one encounters an important problem of Chinese art. For reasons to be explained later, the stylistic differences between periods, and also between individuals, are much subtler than in the West; and it is almost impossible for a Western expert, unless extremely experienced, to distinguish the individual style in the style of the period.
This, then, provides yet another reason why it is essential to study the techniques of Chinese painting in the minutest detail. It is only when one has an intimate knowledge of how a certain painter in a certain period applied his brush stroke or his wash, his outlines or dots, letting them flow from the brush onto the painting surface with a unique fluency, only when one's eye is trained to the point of distinguishing the "big-axe cut" shaping lines of a Ma Yüan, Ma Lin, or Li T'ang, or the dots of a Mi Fei or Mi Yu-jen—only then can he hope to undertake with meticulous care the enormous task of judging the genuineness of a painting and of pinning it down to this or that period, to this or that painter.
If in addition one remembers that one of the six principles of Chinese painting laid down by Hsieh Ho (of which more later) is: "Copy the old masters"; that almost all the great painters have carefully copied the great masterpieces of the past or of their own times; and that, generally, Chinese painters did not feel impelled to produce original work but rather to emulate the great ones of the past; it then becomes clear how difficult it must be to recognize stylistic differences. For the copying was not confined to an approximate imitation of composition. The attempt was often made to follow in the most exact detail the brush technique of the originals. One can safely state that Chinese painting hardly ever tried to create a new style, usually basing itself instead on the past. If a painter left the main stream of tradition, he was looked upon as an oddity, a fate which overtook the great Pa-ta Shan-jen. But since he was a monk and loved solitude, Pa-ta Shan-jen could defy his critics with roars of laughter.
Whenever in the history of Chinese art a new style emerged, it was usually without any conscious idea of breaking away from tradition. Innovations in style were sometimes made so gradually—deriving as they did from the conditions of the period and education—that neither the age nor the individual painters were aware of them. It was not until later that these developments could be recognized in their proper perspective.
For example, today we can look back over many centuries of Chinese art and realize what an enormous influence the revolutionary work of the painter Mi Fei had on his and subsequent ages. As will be explained later, he gave a kind of sanctity to the dot, using it rather than the traditional shaping line for his magnificent mountain ranges. But dots had been used earlier, though in a much more limited way, and thus, in those days before the technical rules of Chinese painting had been so elaborately codified, it was possible for Mi Fei and his contemporaries to regard his radical innovation as a technique already sanctioned by tradition.
The Mi Fei technique must indeed have answered a real need of the time, because it was adopted immediately, and from then on, almost every great painter would employ the Mi Fei dots at some period of his artistic career. The "shaping lines like the dots of Mi Fei," if one may for once cite this paradoxical and therefore typically Chinese expression, thus became a generally accepted technique, even a style, in Chinese landscape painting.
This example shows how the inevitable individuality of a single person can—if at the same time it foretells the latent ideas, aspirations, and possibilities of an age—unintentionally produce a lasting impression and bring with it changes in style, even when the age and the artist are both convinced that they have only been guided by the past.
To Western eyes, there has seemed to be an extraordinary sameness about Chinese painting, both in style and in subject matter, and this has been considered a weakness. But it can only be classified so if judged according to Western standards of what art and painting ought to be. Originality, whether in technique or composition, in outlines or in colors, in the extent to which it is realistic or abstract—originality of this kind is not absolutely unknown in the East, but it is not felt as an urgent need by the painter, nor is it taken as a mark of worth. On the contrary, the Chinese painter usually tried to suppress the originality of which he was undoubtedly capable. Otherwise he would have been departing too much from the master on whom he modeled himself. A further deterrent to radical originality lay in the fact that the painters of those days were always scholars and often poets at the same time, occupying an honored position in society, and no one wanted to be shunned by his colleagues as a man lacking in taste. Because the Chinese painter repeated the same motifs and themes time and time again with only minor variations, the Westerner may come to the conclusion that he had no creative imagination. But the most important issue for the Chinese painter was to express, within the strict limits imposed by tradition, his motif or theme in an immediate, personal yet universally recognized way. The "Pavilion on the Riverbank," which made the fourteenth-century painter Ni Tsan immortal, has been repeated thousands of times in Chinese landscape painting. And some of these repetitions, like that by Wen Cheng-ming, are perhaps as good as the original. The untrained Western observer will find it very difficult to tell these two, and other similar ones, apart, or even to suggest the name of a likely painter. An Eastern expert will at once be able to distinguish them, although the differences between them may seem very slight. He looks at the two paintings, so identical to Western eyes, and finds them as diverse as a Caravaggio and a Rembrandt.
Inevitably one is reminded of the analogy of music. A Chinese painting is like a piece of music brought to life again by a brilliant pianist or violinist—coaxed out of an orchestra by the conductor's baton, as splendid and beautiful as ever, but in clumsy hands painfully bad. Chinese painting is often nothing more than a new rendering of a well-known piece, a variation on a theme, or even simply an etude. The important thing is the quality of the performance.
And at this point there is a second analogy between Chinese art and music: only when the technical problems have been mastered will the artist be able to express himself lucidly, for only then will the material differences which hinder pure expression have vanished. Of course, original compositions have also been produced in Chinese art at all times, but, once created, they became part of the repertoire of all painters, to be reproduced again and again with new variations.
It is certainly possible for a Westerner to get something from a Chinese painting by applying, consciously or not, criteria which are familiar to him. But if he does this, he will absorb only a fraction of the total idea of the painting and will be unable to claim that he has gained anything even resembling a complete understanding of it. One might almost say that the expressiveness, the wealth of associations, the subtle undertones which go into a Chinese painting are all wasted on the Westerner who will not take the trouble to delve into the secrets of technique.