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This is the first time I have appreciated a piece of visual art. I actually finally get it. Any time I have had this feeling described before I assumed that other people were more sensitive to this feeling and I was not, but I could intellectually describe it. Now is the first time that I spontaneously felt it without trying to. I am 27 years old.
It’s not that I have not seen a beautiful painting before, or remarked upon its visual quality, or even understood the visual language of the piece, but in the past this process was intellectual, not subconscious. When I find myself in museums I know I need to find something to appreciate and usually this process is fatiguing.
After seeing a poster for a movie (The first taste of loneliness by gu xiaogang) I came across the wikipedia page for “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains”. I have never heard of this painting before, and I saw it described as a famous masterpiece which intrigued me. I saw a tiny part of the painting on the wikipedia page. At that zoom level it looked ordinary, almost like it was documenting the landscape, some illustration you would expect in an old travel guide.
The problem with museums and galleries is that they aggregate these pieces of art, all of which are supposed to move you or to give you something profound, but there are all collected together in the same space, next to each other, as if their moments of profundity are interchangeable and commodified. Walking into an exhibit you may experience 87 pieces of profundity by the time you walk out. Clearly if that were to happen you would be carried out comatose incapacitated from your experience. So you walk in the space with the understanding that this will not incapacitate you and so you are only allowed a small sip of enlightenment from each individual work. You are unable to actually examine any individual work once you have accepted that there is not much you can gain from it in this hedonistic arrangement of instruments of profundity.
I was able to appreciate this work because it was put next to none. I stumbled upon it unprepared. I zoomed into the work and inspected it. I first noticed the texture of shading on the mountain, the light gray strokes that cover the top, how they were soft and curved. This made the mountain appear like a giant lying down, perhaps living, perhaps sleeping. Then, my eyes were drawn downwards, to the little houses in the center, and the houses on the left. I thought, the people from this region must look at this painting with pride. Perhaps they may look at the little houses on the center and think, I wish I could live here in this solitude, this clarity of nature. Then I would visit others in their nearby houses, at my own time, but when I wished I could have peace.
My eyes drifted further down, and I noticed the trees, how coarsely they were drawn. The painter must have used only a few brush strokes when painting them. The painting itself was not small so he didn’t really need to. He could have picked up a smaller brush and added more detail but he used larger and fewer brush strokes for this part of the painting. He did not use this technique elsewhere, as other things are drawn in more detail. He achieves two things in this way.
One is that he reminds us that he is playing with the ink, not trying to convey the reality of a place. You are supposed to understand that he is a master of his craft, and therefore nothing on this paper is there by accident. He demonstrates his control of the technique to assure you of his intentions. This invites the viewer to spend more time with the work.
Two is that he achieves a visual effect of blurriness on the trees, as if one caused by movement. The rest of the painting is still but the trees are passing in front of us in great speed. To me this evokes memory, as if we are supposed to be seeing a memory of a place, not the direct depiction of it as it currently is. This takes me back to thinking about the viewers of this painting that actually live in the region. Perhaps they would already nostalgically look at this painting, imagining what the region looked like in the past. The rest of us are accessing the collective memory of this place through this painting. Aptly then, it is drawn like a fleeting memory.
I subsequently turned my attention back to the wikipedia page. I read about the history of the work, how it was gifted, lost, and reproduced, then found again. How its reproduction from memory adds another layer to its visualization of recollection rather than direct representation. Then I read about how the reproducer himself wrote the story of the reproduction on the original painting, and understand that not only is the drawing itself the work, but the story surrounding it. I begin to wonder if the story is fictional given that it is mirrored in the visual language of the work itself. Reading on, I learn that the work itself is massive, and, even at its currently damaged form, it is particularly wide. But did the damage actually occur or is that in itself also fictional? I am delighted to have received so many thoughts form even small part of the surviving painting.
I realize that part of the reason I have not been able to appreciate a work of art before is because my mind tends to anxiously attempt to absorb information, without slowing down to absorb visual work in a linear fashion, rather choosing to keep track of as many details as possible from the image it perceives, then move on. With this slower mode of ingesting information I am now able to observe the information of the piece, rather than miss it because it passes through my brain too quickly. I had a similar revelation last time when I read a textbook while slowing down and realized I could actually learn things better that way – but in more aspects of life I need to slow myself down so that I allow my brain to perceive the information better than rush through it.