送交者: WaterFire 于 November 14, 2002 16:50:14:
One of my neighbors, an old lady, was an artist. She did watercolor paintings. In some tea parties, I heard a lot of prizes from the party goners on her works. Then she would recall how she did some of her works.
“Oh, you are talking about that one,” she would started, “It was a winter snowing day, I stood at my window and look at my neighbor’s door. Somehow the tree in front of the door and the snow background caught my attention. I did a sketch and it turned out not bad. Then I painted it. It turned out not bad either.” Her face became young and her voice full of satisfaction.
Heard that she does not paint any more, I asked her why?
“It is too much for me now.” She said with regret. Painting for her is really a labor. Averagely, it took a day or two for her to finish a painting. “I could not handle even the phone ring. Watercolor, you know, if you break and the water dries out, you can never fix it.” She told me.
One or two days for a painting: It is really to much for a thin, old lady.
I paint too. I use acrylic. However, usually only takes one or two hours for me to finish a painting. I am target to the enjoyment, not the labor.
One day, I invited her to my place and asked her take one of my paintings as gift. I gave her three choices: bird duck, playing fish and puppy dog.
She might lose her energy, but certainly not test.
She picked the playing fish: three big fishes, playing in the water grass. It would be my choice too. I used a few lines to curve out the fishes, a few color dots to shade them. Each has its attention point, yet as a group they build certain pattern. Between them, the water grass, moving with the water, which turned by the fishes. Then I used light blue to wash out the water.
Many days later, she told me she admirers my ability to break the restriction: “I am to restrict, to detailed and I wish I could achieve more yet do less work.”
She got the point: Chinese art stresses use less to achieve more. One big point in Chinese painting or Calligraphy is leaving empty space. The full and empty should work together. There is saying that “When full, so full that wind cannot pass, when empty, so empty that horses can walk through”.
I did not fully understand this until I practiced Christmas tree decoration: you have to put as much stuff as possible. Only when the tree is fully stuffed, the decoration is considered done. Imaging a typical Chinese artist, who must think the Christmas tree can only be a folk art, cannot be listed as true art.
Not only decorate Christmas tree, usually, western painters turn to over paint their work: the job is not done until every corner is fully painted. Empty spaces make they feel uneasy. Or maybe they do not feel at all, but so use to no empty places in painting.
Chinese feel quite comfortable with empty spaces. Viewers take the painted part as hint supplied by artists and empty spaces as their own fields to create an art work together with the hint. After the invention of camera, this point of view got full recognition: camera could take care of detail much better that human. Human’s advantage is in creativity not extreme attention for details: machine is much better in taking care of details. Too much detail actually kills viewers imagination.
This loose or easy point view has great implications: take an example, language. Compare to western languages, Chinese has very loose grammar. Actually, the very idea of grammar was imported from out side. In ancient time, there is almost no difference between noun and verb. Usually a noun can be a verb. The very concepts of “noun”, “verb” etc., were imports too. (It is hard to provide examples when I do not know how to input Chinese here. But I am sure you will find a lot of trace example.)
This loose grammar structure made Chinese the perfect media for artist. Chinese poets use it created a lot of amazing work. There are a lot of “empty spaces” in these works. Readers get hint from the poems but there are a lot of free space for readers’ minds to wondering around. For example:
Small bridge running water family
Ancient road west wind thin horse
…
The relations of the above are loose, the poet did not say too much. There are a lot of questions (empty places) on the picture painted: what kids of family? Which side of the bridge was the family? And so on.
Modern film technique borrowed the idea: so called Montage: combine individual pictures to make a point yet let a lot of questions unanswered: to achieve more with less.
The draw back is that Chinese is really good for artists but bad for scientists. A scientific article in Chinese is really hard to read partially due to the usage is stretching the limits of Chinese: when you answer all the terms and relations in the article, the article is trestles and automatically boring some. Of cause, the same thing would happen to other languages, but not as oblivious as in Chinese.
For thinkers, the news is double sided: one can easily write something no one understands, including the author, and still get a lot of applause. Due to there could be a lot of empty spaces, readers may thought they understand something, but actually it was not what the author intended. (Sometimes, the author did not know either.) We have a very strong tradition.
Tolerant loose relation, tolerant empty space, our philosophers lost a lot of chance to find deep results.
For example, people like to talk about Zhuang Zi’s dream of being a butterfly. “Is Zhaung Zi dreamed being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming being Zhuang Zi”. Zhuang Zi posted the question, but he did not go deep and provider a better answer. Thousands years past, it has been an Chinese classic. But it is only limited to arts.
Thousand years after Zhuang Zi, Descartes, the French philosopher had a less romantic but similar dream: He also could make differentiation between dream and reality. But he did not stop there: his dream did not end up as literature classic, but became a philosophy classic. He was not comfortable with loose relations, empty spaces (for artists). He introduced God to his system and found a solution he could live with. The argument run as follows:
Yes, I could not differentiate dream and reality by myself.
But, I could think
More importantly I could think the concept of God
The concept of God has perfect in it
As a perfect being, God would not deceive me
Therefore, I could not the things around me do exist.
That was the famous “I think, therefore I am.”
Based on this foundation, Descartes built a great philosophy system, which influenced generations to come.
I often puzzled: If our Zhuang Zi was not only romantic, but also did not tolerant lose end in his thinks, what kind of Chinese history would be?
Zhuang Zi was not the only example. Qu Yan ibn his “Ask Heaven” posted a lot of interesting questions on the origin of universe. But all treated as arts. There is no scientific fruits.
Being Chinese, we have a beautiful language, but also, we are very easy to get lost in its beauty.