1. Landscape as an Image of the World

As a non-occidental art, how do we discuss the historicity and contemporaneity of “Shuimo” or ink landscape? Regarding contemporary ink landscape and its theoretical division, there have been four theories posited between traditionalism and modernism in the field of ink landscape – the cultural revivalist, the medium preservationist, the interdisciplinary eclectist and the survivalist. Moreover, regarding the changing “view of nature” in ink landscape, there have been a wide range of creations and depictive perspectives, including metaphysical landscape, discursive landscape, archaic landscape, national landscape, symbolic landscape, pictorial landscape and metaphoric landscape. 

The landscapes of these heterogeneous spaces evolved from painting from life and delineation of sceneries based on personal observation to indoor imitation; therefore, the view of nature in ink landscape disappeared, and ink landscape entered the world of semiotics and iconography. Artists did not necessarily paint the landscape of real places; instead, they created compositions with landscape elements drawn from art history to produce the myriad forms of landscape with rolling mountains and multiple waters. Such a process of development transformed ink painting into a production of cultural context as well as the image of touring one’s spiritual world. 

In terms of the mainstream development, the post-war development of Taiwanese ink painting can be chronologically divided as the following: from the 1950s to the 1960s, the representative style was the “abstract ink”; from the 1970s to the 1980s, the predominant style was the “native ink”; and the 1990s were characterized by the “new literati painting.” Afterwards, the way that ink artist viewed the form, content and spirit of ink painting entered the field of “secular ink” informed by folk and everyday qualities. With “anti-orthodox” aesthetics, the “phenomenon of depicting the floating world” in the Taiwanese ink art scene could be viewed as a shift in ink practice from the elitist to the public. This phenomenon in the 1980s engaged in a dialogue with the folk living culture. On the one hand, content-wise, artists digressed from the otherworldly attitude of “man and nature”; and on the other hand, they constructed a new context of ink painting through visualizing landscape and imaginary fantasy, bridging the traditional and the innovative with multilayered historical materials. 

Comparing to the abstraction of modern ink painting, the secular and folk expression of ink space mainly retreated from beyond the sky and the earth back to that of the in-between. In the “anti-orthodox” movement, this type of ink work reveals two major features. One is that its form is no longer confined by orthodox ink aesthetics but instead adopting an innovative starting point comprising freewheeling techniques of drawing, dotting, texturizing and rubbing to create repeatedly layered, dense and solid self-created ink style and composition that are not based on the principle of “three distances.” The other one is that the context of landscape is severed from realistic depiction of geography and the freehand expression commonly adopted by the literati, giving rise to an indescribably illusory realm of memory landscape. Through the construction of “consciousness space,” “imaginary space,” “living space” and “reflection space,” this type of artists not only inscribed the migrating memory of ink culture to represent the Taoist culture that has been part of the folk society and not purely of the literati world, but also manifested an attitude of deconstructing traditional landscape, with an attempt to reconstruct the landscape image informed by art history.

During the painting process, landscape as representation of cultural memories and worldviews consequently developed an aspect of “iconology.” The German scholar and a modern iconology pioneer, Abraham Moritz Warburg (1866-1929), built a unique classification system encompassing various issues and levels based on the expressive forms, theories and historical changes of art, and proposed in his later days the concept of the “Atlas Mnemosyne.” He viewed works of art as the collective memories of humankind and culture as the merged feelings of social members. Using a wide range of icons and images as his materials, he expounded the historical meaning of works of art based on a background of diverse knowledge. Positioned between the traditional and the innovative, the exploration of contemporary ink artists mostly demonstrates this concept of “iconology.” Rather than simple modern appropriation or juxtaposition, their action of revisiting history to copy and imitate the ancient forms has given birth to a new type of image landscape that indicates the translation of historical paradigms. 

2. Texturizing as the Symbol of Image Landscape

As image landscape became a composite portrait of nature and history, texturizing was also turned into the symbol shared by geographic terrain and time. While the concepts of “ink style follows the form” and “the form created from sketching” interwove, an important personal objective for ink preservationist painter has been to create an individualistic texturizing technique or ink style. The existence of texturizing methods then served as a crucial transitional symbol of ink painting between traditionalism, modernism and even post-modernism.

Different from the Western concept of sketching, texturizing is a unique painting vocabulary constituting of line and dot in Chinese ink landscape. It is a type of expression that creates images from forms based on the combination of the three basic material of ink painting – brush, ink and silk or Xuan paper. Due to the geological characteristics of rocks, ancient ink painters in a relatively generalizing way created different texturizing strokes based on their intuitive understanding of mountains and rivers. Seeking the Tao in Autumn Mountains by Ju Ran of the Five Dynasties used hemp-fiber stroke; Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan of the Northern Song dynasty used raindrop stroke; and Early Spring by Guo Xi used cloud-head stroke. Yuan dynasty witnessed the bourgeoning of different texturizing strokes: Zhao Mengfu used unraveled rope stroke in Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains; Wang Meng used ox-hair stroke in Thatched Cottage in Autumn Mountains and skeleton stroke in Forest Chamber Grotto at Ju’ou; and Ni Zan (also known as Ni Yunlin) used break-belt stroke in Bamboo and Tree. Until the Qing dynasty, Zheng Ji already wrote that “texturing strokes by ancient painters are divided into sixteen methods” in his The Essence of the Painting Technique of the Menghuanju Studio: On Texturing Strokes. The sixteen texturizing methods indeed indicated sixteen types of mountain and rock drawings.

Texturizing methods of depicting mountains and rocks are not only used to portray geographic terrains, they are utilized to formulate personal symbols when serving as a way of stylistic expression. In terms of expression, Huang Bin-Hung (1865-1955) in the early modern period created a brush style that looked like seal characters, and preferred a mixture of amass ink, splash ink, broken ink and over-night ink to visualize a dark, dense, thick and heavy style. His ink style was no longer based on texturizing but a unique way of linear expression. Fu Bao-Shi (1904-1965) painted ink landscapes with mulberry paper and split brush and created the “Bao-Shi stroke” in the split brush style. The specific stroke has been viewed as another breakthrough since the invention of painting with “a horizontal brush and in a sideway manner” invented by Li Tang of the Southern Song dynasty. Method-wise, Fu not only painted with the tip and sides of the brush, but also made use of the root and split tip of the brush. The messy split brush texturing seemed disorderly, but the disorder showed a certain style as well. Moreover, the texturizing method can also be divided into scattered wood stroke, scattered hemp stroke, lotus leaf stroke and rice spot stroke.

In the context of the 20th-century Taiwanese ink painting, there have been ink painting artists who maintained a traditional style while developing different texturizing methods. Yu Cheng-Yao (1898-1993), who was not academically trained and a military veteran, drew his inspiration from his memory of natural landscape and used thin, fragmented short lines to delineate mountains and ravines, creating a rhythmic spatial arrangement. Instead of the simple blankness in literati painting, he replaced texturing strokes with dotting to depict layered texture of rocks and dense mountains. His short-stroke texturing that resembled short nails has inspired some Taiwanese artists as well. After retiring from the National Palace Museum in 1987, Chang Kuang-Pin (1915-2017) had pursued fresh creativities in ink calligraphy and painting, and invented the method of replacing traditional layering and shading with single-layered lines of dots, creating the style of scattered dotting stroke and dot-to-line ink stroke with charred ink. After retirement, Shia Yi-Fu (1927-2016) dived into the world of artistic creation and extensively studied distinctive texturizing methods used by painters of the Northern Song dynasty. He then converted their methods into the techniques of thirsty brush and intricate brush to delineate the texture of mountain rocks and cloud waves with dry brush and charred ink. Space-wise, the artist incorporated the Western concept of the perspective and used repeated layers comprising fine brushstrokes to reconstruct the volume of mountains and rocks as well as elusive clouds and mist. The attention to reinventing the layering technique gave his work a deep, expansive sense of space. 

Although the early modern genealogy of “charred ink” is built on the charred ink tradition from Huang Pin-Hung to Chang Ting, the common feature between the three abovementioned ink painters, who migrated southward to Taiwan from China, lies in the fact that they not only primarily used thirsty brush and intricate brush to create their paintings but also delineated rocky mountains with repetitive layering. The landscape and geographic terrains that they depicted chiefly stemmed from cultural memories and art historical concepts. As to the interpretation of their works, due to their expression of dry brush and dark shades of ink, their works are often described to be conveying a sense of modern angst. Meanwhile, because of the lines created with dry brush, the term “sketching” has been used to describe their works instead of “calligraphy painting.” The use of thirsty brush and intricate brush has gradually given rise to a quality of sketching in contemporary ink painting. 

Hsu Yu-Jen (1951-) was born after the war. His Thin-brush Ink Painting Series uses dry ink and comprises rigid, thin dots and short, broken lines. Lee Mao-Cheng (1954-), though prefers texturizing methods used in traditional landscape, also uses dry brush to draw small dots and lines in high density. His painting begins with layering details and gradually unfolds an elaborate, spreading space of mountains and forests that look orderly. In the creative context of thirsty brush and intricate brush, the two artists adopt the theme of nature and retain the topographical context of the literati style. In comparison, Teng Pu-Chun (1957-), who received a traditional training and was a dealer of antiques and scholarly playthings, depicts mountains and rocks with the “rolled wrinkle stroke,” a texturizing method created by the artist after having stopped painting for more than a decade and has its root in the variegated texturing expression of rubbing, dotting, shading and delineating found in the Northern-style landscape.

The artist utilizes repetitive delineation to create the rigid, hard texture of rocky mountains in his work as a way to possibly recreating traditional landscape. In his overbrimming and seemingly surreal space of fantasies, the rocky mountains produce a sense of volume like that of a construction project as well as a magical view of a formless realm. Because he does not leave any blankness, in the oppressively layered space, the painter makes use of a cold palette for depicting white clouds, green lakes and trinkling waterfalls, which seem to be painted with the technique of flat application when looking from afar, constructing an illusory, ethereal dimension. Traditional blankness is replaced with space painted with the technique of flat application; and the composition segmented with vertical and horizontal planes also renders his landscape more modern. The review of the creative context of the ink painters mentioned above aims to demonstrate the heritage and variations of ancient texturizing methods in contemporary ink painting as well as the formation of different research directions of ink image. 

3. The Magical Realm as an Imaginative Link that Crosses Time and Space

Although Teng places an emphasis on the co-construction of texturing, linear expression and plane, his landscape is neither the classical landscape of the Northern Song dynasty nor the literati style of the Southern Song dynasty. While revisiting the tradition of searching for immortals epitomized by the theme of “Towers and Pavilions in Mountains of the Immortals” throughout different dynasties, he also employs the form and style of pure offering paintings popular in common households and shapes this imaginary landscape into an iconological world. Building upon the iconographic foundation, his landscape is at the same time embedded with an elusive worldview.

The popular idea of ink artistic conception can be traced back to the relationship between immortal ideology and ink landscape in China. Before the birth of ink landscape, the imagination of the “spatial concept of object and I” was already concretely, visually and descriptively delineated in the poem “Yuan You” (Travel Afar) attributed to Qu Yuan during the Pre-Qin period. In poem, the poet wrote about an imaginary journey in the heavenly realm, which signaled the idealization of the mundane world. As a literary example of touring the ethereal realm related to the artistic conception of Chinese landscape, “Yuan You” provides an early literary text depicting the transition from folk religious culture of the public to elitist culture of the literati before the emergence of Chinese landscape painting and the artistic conception of ink landscape that came afterwards. Through “Yuan You” based on “the theory of spirit,” the poet represented a space of integrating religious belief, the cosmos and subjective consciousness, which was accepted by the society of the time. The visually descriptive writing could be viewed as a process of producing the spirit of creation before the formation of the ink spiritual space. 

The archetype of using “fantastic landscape” as a spatial belief of an artistic nature can be found in the artistic thinking of landscape in “Yuan You.” The objective of “fantastic landscape” is to pursue the spiritual space outside of reality. It mainly employs the construction of magical realms in heaven and on earth, along with metaphysical symbolism, to unfold a conceptual space informed by the Taoist ideology. With such approach as a foundation, artists often move between reality and the imagination of the great void to structure their relation to the world, such as being this-worldly, other-worldly, retiring from the world or even departing from the world. In the contemporary cultural domain permeated with modernity, the genealogy of seeking immortals and the Tao has never disappeared. Throughout the derivation and alternation of ink concepts, Taiwanese contemporary ink painting has evolved from the world of forms and imageries observed by literati to a fantastic realm that is dynamic and folk. The Taoist world of deities and immortals is not only a part of the folk religious belief and culture but also a haven and an aspiration that allows one to escape reality.

With the way of the immortals serving as a horizontal link, the landscape production of the fantastic realm still shows differences between artists. Engaging in the folk culture of the immortals, Huang Chih-Yang (1965-) utilizes a non-linear presentation of proliferation to unveil an organic world characteristic of the traditional Taoism and the folk belief of animism. His Phallicism features objective images, stepping away from the artistic conception of ink painting while displaying contents that objectify deities and worship objects. Ambiguous World by Yuan Hui-Li (1963-) reveals a type of fantastic landscape that is closer to the imagination of the Taoist immortal world filled with rocky mountains and gardens. In the 2010s, she also used the material elements of “water” and “fire” to reveal an ink dialectic in the state of breathing. Her Fiery Ink series belongs to the genealogy of “charred ink,” and demonstrates the ink aesthetics of “dryness.” From the Dry Landscape series to the Fiery Ink series, Yuan’s ink world tends to visualize a Taoist vision of the immortal way imagined by the literati. Pan Hsin-Hua (1966-) lives in eastern Taiwan. After the 1990s, he has started imitating ancient murals and colored ink landscape, giving a sense of history to the image; and at the same time, he also draws inspiration from the environment. He gave up the perspective, habitual logic and necessary texturization to create a type of image at the eye level similar to historical maps and an approach to space that directly faces the viewer. Also, his work features cultural relics, figures, animals and insects, rare flowers and plants, folk patterns as well as natural sceneries and architecture. Amidst bizarrely shaped rocks and peculiar-looking trees, human beings are placed in a scenario of verdant landscape echoing the immortal world. Furthermore, his subject matter is taken from the everyday life and depicted in a spatial arrangement similar to the style of the “pure offering painting” or “table of the eight immortals” to produce a symbolic space associated with fantastic realms and genre painting.

The fantastic realm serves as a link to the immortal way. In comparison to the ink worlds created by the aforementioned three artists, Teng’s ink world offers a worldview rooted in time and space. Depicting a surreal world with realistic techniques, his landscape of “otherworldly terrains” – the world of rocky mountains that looks like potted plants and offering tables, the rugged stones that look like perforated sponges, the entwining floating clouds and uneven rocks, the airflows of the ethereal realm – creates the three fictional and metamorphosed worlds of “the underworld, immortals and fantasies" that seemingly float in a cosmic void. As for the form, the artist continues the spatial concept of painting scroll and places his fantastic landscape within the view of the pure offering painting and in the form of potted plants with a horizontal foundation, creating a state of cultivating heterogenous spaces that surfaces as “scenes within scenes.” These potted landscapes or framed landscapes therefore deliver multidimensional spatial references and observations through “the objectification of the subject” and “the subjectification of the object.”

The reason why Teng’s densely texturized subject and flatly painted landscape cannot be entirely typologized as the immortal landscape is because the artist does not one-sidedly produce a world of religious beliefs. Nor does he fabricate a landscape space that crosses different time and space with the symbolisms used in the landscape paintings of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. His landscape stemming from cultural memories, in a manner of a digitized, image-like spinning Wunderkammer of ink paintings, orderly unfolds an ethereal realm of fantasies that is “heterogeneous but not chaotic” with a harmoniously dramatic, pictorial and standardized method and layout. The mountains, rocks, springs, trees and woods are elements from natural ecology but in metamorphosed appearances that do not exist in reality. Formed and joined in a repetitive, proliferating and unending way, they give rise to subsidiary spaces from the space of the depicted subject and generate scenes formed with the perspective from an aerial view. The management of these spaces shows that the artist has employed a new imagination of this era to provide a theoretical base to the spatial arrangement of his landscape rather than the simple wandering through an imaginary realm. 

Consequently, Teng’s image surfaces as a site of juxtaposition in a parallel dimension, revealing a non-linear temporal interstice. These heterogenous spaces, in forms of caves, frames or moving tablets, simultaneously create a contradictory “unity of non-unity” in the image. The space arrangement of multi-dimensional segmentation, intersection and juxtaposition also imbues Teng’s landscape with a modern quality of post-editing image, a quality that departs from the literati charm. Among the Taiwanese contemporary ink landscape painters, Teng’s fantastic realm is an amalgamation of the primal chaos, the orderly immortal world and a treacherous, peculiar space informed by his non-literati imaginative power that moves through space and time. 

4. The Disguised Form, A Spatial Context from Landscape Creation to Mirror Reflection

In Buddhism, the disguised form denotes the use of artistic means, such as painting and sculpture, to reveal the forms of divine transformation. Through the spectacular site constructed with rational logic, Teng’s peculiar peaks and curious rocks transformed from emerald mountains and green waters formulates a structural and decorative landscape of metamorphosis in its progress between the primitive and the futuristic. In addition to its painterliness, his work also displays the expressive qualities of sculpture and image.

Traditional ink landscape mainly highlights the charm of ink and brush as well as the spatial arrangement of the three distances. While dissolving Western and Eastern concepts of the perspective, Teng creates a world of illusory scenes characterized by diverse viewpoints, two-perspective, compressed aerial views and juxtaposed collages. As for the construction of space, his work visualizes an alternative perspective with multiple layers, and even employs the compressed “three distances” and the method of hard-edge separation in Western modern painting to create the effect of collaged montage and juxtaposition in the space. Similar to the composition of classical ink landscape paintings of the Northern Song dynasty, his main subject is usually placed at the center of the image, producing a sense of oppressiveness and orderliness. The self-disciplined classical composition, with rhythmic lines and still planes in the enclosed and full composition, forms the treacherously peculiar world of images. The form of the subject, placed at the center of the landscape, is depicted as a portrait of the disguised landscape. 

With fine brush techniques, decorative expression as well as the incorporation of pattern drawing or the concept of design, Teng’s image shows a folk quality that comes closer to the sentiment of making offering and worshipping pursued by common people. Transforming everyday objects such as cups and vases into potted landscape is itself an expression of conveying emotions through the world of scholarly playthings. The artist has somehow moved away from the taste of literati and revealed another charming aspect of viewing cultural relics. The landscape of the immortal world and objects of offering longed by common people, delineated with the technique of intricate brush and the disguised form, also displays a visual effect resembling reliefs and etched prints. The quality of carving in the image comes from the lines of hard-pen delineation, the design of modular space and the mass space stemming from the combination of structures. The arrangement of an unusual realm developed from this approach has retained an upward and controlled classic aesthetics as well as the decorative grotesque aesthetics, both of are the result of the neat and fine execution of the work.

Teng’s fantastic world also demonstrates a quality of post-edited image. In terms of incorporating the history of landscape, in his Colossal Mountains in Ethereal Clouds evolved from the “mirror-surfaced blue lake,” Teng embeds various landscape styles from different dynasties in the form of small windows in a vast world of rocky mountains, juxtaposing the scenes of landscape with the history of landscape and producing the effect of image processing. These fragmented scenes are like film rolls cut into frames, surfacing as severed and floating elements of landscape. The strangely formed and heterogenous landscape echoes the imaginary scenes in Ang Lee’s film, Life of Pi. In the movie, the surface of the magical sea looks like a boundless mirror, and the drifting scene is not only in the external world but a metaphor of inner self-reflection. Through the mirror reflection and the metaphor of overlapping images, the realm of dreams and reality become intertwined. The life view and worldview are able to be visualized in the image. In the second half of the movie, the protagonist arrives on a magical island. In the novel, the horizontally expanding “Algae Island” is replaced by the vertically extending “Marabutan Island.” Different from ordinary trees that grow upward and spread out, the aerial roots of the marabutans continuously stretch downwards and become entangled with the tree trunks. The characteristic of growing in two directions becomes a metaphor comprising the nature above and the water below, which serve as the mirroring reflection between reality and the spiritual space. With the flat, smooth mirroring surface as a transitional space between dreams and reality, the blue water that resembles a sink hole in the film also reveals an illusory, fantastic ecosystem. Comparing this scene in the movie to Teng’s ink world, one can see the duo context similar to post-edited images.

Therefore, on the relatively enclosed east coast of this southern island on the Pacific Ocean, facing the boundless sea with rising mountains at the back, the ethereal world emerging from the artist’s incessant ink strokes on paper is like the vicissitudinous images as well as the epitomic pictures of the disguised ink landscape. Are these disguised landscapes the result of the artist’s gratitude towards the blessings of nature conveyed by the verse, “a thousand rivers reflect a thousand moons in the water; a thousand miles without white clouds reveal the unbounded sky”? The answer, perhaps, lies right on the paper between the artist himself and his working desk.