CHI N ESE P A I NT I N GSA T THE BIB LI 0 THE QUE NAT ION ALE
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"These painters are literati, says Monsieur Dubose. He adds: "Their painting is, however, the opposite of all literature. " The antinomy he indicates in these terms might well constitute the threshold that genuinely gives access to this painting-an antinomy which finds its "resolution" in an intermediary element that, far from constituting a balance [un juste milieu] between literature and painting, embraces intimately the point at which they appear most irreducibly opposednamely, thought and image. Here, we should speak of Chinese calligraphy. "Chinese calligraphy, as an art/' says the erudite Lin Yutang, "implies ... the cult and appreciation of the abstract beauty of line and composition in the characters, when these are assembled in such a way that they give the impression of an unstable equilibrium .... In this search for every theoretically possible type of rhythm and structure that appears in the history of Chinese calligraphy, we see that practically all the organic forms and all the movements of living beings that exist in nature have been incorporated and assimilated .... The artist ... seizes upon the stork's thin stilts, the hare's bounding contours, the tiger's massive paws, the lion's mane, the elephant's ponderous walk-and weaves them into a web of magical beauty."7 Chinese calligraphy-this "ink-play,>' to borrow the phrase that Monsieur Dubosc uses to designate the paintings-thus appears as something eminently in motion. Although the signs have a fixed connection and form on the paper, the many "resemblances" they contain set them moving. Expressed in every stroke of the brush, these virtual resemblances form a mirror where thought is reflected in this atmosphere of resemblance, or resonance. Indeed, these resemblances are not mutually exclusive; they become internlingled, constituting a whole that solicits thought the way a breeze beckons to a veil of gauze. The term xieyi ("idea painting"), which the Chinese reserve for this notation, is significant in this regard. An essential feature of the image is that it incorporates something eternal. This eternal quality expresses itself in the fixity and stability of the stroke, but it is also manifest, more subtly, thanks to the fact that the image embodies something that is fluid and ever-changing. It is from this blending of the fixed and the mutable that Chinese painting derives aU its meaning. It goes in search of the thought-image. "In China," says Monsieur Salles, "the art of painting is first and foremost the art of thinking." And thinking, for the Chinese painter, means thinking by means of resemblance. Moreover, just as resemblance always appears to us like a flash of lightning (since nothing is more transient than the appearance of l)