Bada Shanren, a Few Points of Ink and the Rest of the Paper

One

The paper is tall.

Low in the middle there is one fish.

It was made with a few passes of ink.
One stroke for the body, two or so for the fins.

There are no scales.

There is an eye.

Inside a round rim there is one point.
That point is not in the middle.

It is pushed upward.

So it looks as if it is glancing sideways.

The fish is looking at a person.

There is no water.

No ripple and no weed.
No floor.

The fish is simply on the paper.

It is neither floating nor lying.

The rest is all empty.

Nine tenths of the upper part is empty.
The lower part is empty too.

High on one side there is a little writing.
It is a signature.

The characters of that signature are strange.

Read, it is a name; in shape it looks like something else.
It looks like laughing, and it looks like weeping.

There is very little gradation in the ink.

A few places of dense ink and a few of thin.
Almost nothing in between.

There is little bleeding.

It is not a wet brush.
It is a brush suitably dry.

Different from Sesshū's surface in the last part.

Sesshū let it bleed.
Here it was kept from bleeding.

The same ink, used differently.

Two

Bada Shanren was born in 1626 in China.

He was a descendant of the Ming royal house.

A distant branch, but royal.
There were paintings and calligraphy in the house.

He composed poems young and wrote characters.

In 1644 the Ming fell.

He was eighteen or nineteen.

At that age he watched a dynasty disappear.

He went into the mountains and became a monk.

He stayed in temples more than twenty years.

He used many names.
He had a great many sobriquets.

The name Bada Shanren was one he used late.

Before he used it there were several other names.
That he kept changing his name is itself a record.

They say that for a time he did not speak.

It is said he pasted the character for mute on his door.
It is also said he only laughed or wept.

There are stories that he lived for a period like a madman.

Much of this was written afterward.
How much of it is fact, no one knows.

Only one thing is clear.

He did not take office under the new dynasty.

He might have been able to.
He did not.

Not speaking and not holding office are the same act.

Late in life he painted a great deal.

Bird and fish and lotus and stone.

He did not paint large.
He did not paint many things.

He set one thing on one surface.

He died in 1705.

He was around eighty.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

His void is both a void left empty and a void emptied.

Two things are laid over one another.

Left empty is method.

Literati painting has a tradition of the void.
Not painting everything was held to be the higher grade.

He was inside that tradition.

Emptied is circumstance.

The fish has no water.

This cannot be seen as technique alone.

A fish without water is a fish with nowhere to live.
A bird without a branch to sit on is a bird with nowhere to go.

He was a man without a country.

The dynasty he lived under vanished and another country stood in its place.
He did not become a person of that country.

This void is the form of a man with nowhere to belong.

It is not that the background was not painted. The background was gone.

Three things follow.

First, when one thing remains, that one grows large.

There is only a fish on the surface.

Its size is small.
And it is heavy.

With nothing beside it there is nothing to measure against.
With nothing to measure against, it becomes everything.

The void makes the one remaining thing large.

This resembles O'Keeffe's case in Part One.

With no background the standard of scale disappears.

But the direction differs.

O'Keeffe painted a bone as large as a mountain.
She painted it large and so made it large.

Bada Shanren painted small.
He painted small and emptied the rest and so made it large.

One enlarges by filling and the other by emptying.

Second, the void makes time.

With one fish on empty paper the eye stays a long while.

It seems there is little to see and so it would be quick, and the reverse is true.

When there is much to see the eye moves about.
When there is one thing to see the eye stays there.

The time of staying grows longer.

The void makes a painting slow.

Before a slow painting the mind of the viewer moves.

It is like a person who does not speak being long remembered.

Third, the signature becomes a form.

His signature is both read and seen.

It is a character and it looks like a picture.

He hid the name in the writing of the name.

On a surface with a wide void a signature is easily noticed.
Because there is nowhere to hide.

So he made the signature itself part of the surface.

Writing set in an empty place becomes picture.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

First look at what is alike.

Both have a very wide void.

Both leave only one thing.

One fish.
One old man.

They set nothing beside it.

And both paint that one thing small.

They do not fill the surface.

There is a second likeness.

Both passed through an age in which one could not speak.

Bada Shanren lived after the dynasty changed.
What could a descendant of the former house have said.

Byun Shi-Ji passed through another kind of age.

He painted the storm.

And later, in the oral history, he said the storm was not weather but resistance.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, p. 171)

He did it with a painting instead of with speech.

In a time when speech is dangerous, painting takes the place of speech.

The two men used the same method.

There is a third likeness.

Both made separate names for themselves.

Bada Shanren made many sobriquets and kept changing them.

Byun Shi-Ji called himself a man of wind and cloud.
His pen name was Useong.

Making a name and attaching it is a way of setting oneself down again.

Now look at the difference.

The nature of the void is reversed.

In Bada Shanren's void there is nothing.

There is no water.
That is the point.

It is the void of what is absent.

In Byun Shi-Ji's void there is wind.

It is not painted, and it is there.

It is the void of what is present.

One empty area points at loss and the other points at force.

Where does this difference come from.

What Bada Shanren lost was an institution.
Dynasty and station and place.

When an institution vanishes, its place goes empty.

What Byun Shi-Ji faced was nature.
Wind and sea.

Nature does not vanish.
It is only not seen.

The absence of an institution and the invisibility of nature are not the same.

In the last part we saw Chusa.

Chusa too was in exile, and Bada Shanren lost a dynasty.
Both had loss.

And in Chusa's void that loss is not there.
It is only paper.

In Bada Shanren's void the loss is there.

The same literati void, and one is form and the other circumstance.

This distinction is the heart of this part.

The bearing of the figure differs too.

Bada Shanren's birds and fish glance sideways.

The pupil is pushed off center.
They look at a person without facing him.

It is the resistance of a glare.

Byun Shi-Ji's old man lowers his head.

He does not look at us.
He looks at the ground.

It is the resistance of a bow.

Both postures are resistance.

One does it with the eyes and one with the neck.

The glare looks stronger, and it is not.

Bowing can be done a long time.
Glaring cannot.

The length of the endurance differs.

Five

There is a fish on the paper.

There is no water.
What should be there is not.

The fish glances sideways.

On the surface of a distant island there is an old man.

There is no wind.
What is there is not seen.

The old man lowers his head.

In both, the rest is empty.

The meaning of that emptiness differs.

Empty because absent, and empty because unseen.

The two surfaces do not explain each other.

Only that, set side by side, one sees that the void has kinds.

The ink is not yet dry.