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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.
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. I was intrigued because at that zoom level it looked very ordinary, almost as if it was documenting the landscape, like some illustration you would expect in a very 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 the profundity of the work you experienced. So you walk in the space with the understanding that this will not incapacitate you from the profundity and so you are only allowed a small sip of profundity from each individual work. Thus you are unable to actually examine any individual work, since you have accepted that there is not much you can gain from it, or anything in this hedonistic aggregation of profundity.
I feel like i was able to appreciate this work because it was put next to none. I came across it while not looking for art, and it caught me unprepared to only take a sip of profundity. I zoomed into the work, as much as I could and then I realized. I first noticed the texture of shading on the mountain, the light gray strokes that cover the top of the mountain, how they were soft and curved. This made the mountain appear like a giant lying down, perhaps living, perhaps sleeping. Yet it was clearly a mountain, part of the nature of the village. 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. I realized that the painter must have used only a few brush strokes when painting them. But 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 steel but the trees are passing in front of us in great speed. To me this feels like the evocation of memory, as if we are supposed to be seeing a memory of a place, not the direct depiction of the place as it currently is. This takes me back to thinking about the viewers of this painting that actually live in the region. Modern viewers, and maybe those from the painting’s time, would already nostalgically look at this painting, imagining that the region used to look like this in the past. Therefore we are accessing the collective memory of this place, through this painting, which is evoking the visual feeling of memory through its visual style.
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 to the idea of recollection rather than depiction (on a second layer). Then we read about how the reproducer ended up writing 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 (though perhaps fictional) given that it is reflected in the visual language of the work itself. I then realize that the work itself is massive, and, even at its currently damaged form, it is particularly wide. Perhaps even the damage it received is part of the fictional (?) story of its production. I am delighted to have received so many thoughts form even small part of the surviving painting. I look forward to seeing the rest, and reading a translation of the text on the work.
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.