Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Bluesky, 10/21/24] I was talking with the graphic novelist Wendy Xu about Dunhuang art and the history of copying in the Chinese painting tradition, which led me to some thoughts on outline and color, cartoons/graphic novels and Chinese painting. Much of the first modern research into Dunhuang painting was done by artists, and their main mode of research was to reproduce the paintings by copying. The Dunhuang Research Institute still maintains an art department to do this kind of work.

The Institute was originally named the Dunhuang Art Institute, and its longtime director, Chang Shuhong 常书鸿 (1904-1994), was a classically trained oil painter who studied in Paris between the wars, like many painters of his generation. Chang was one of a number of 20th century Chinese painters for whom the inland migration in response to Japanese invasion of coastal cities led to their discovery of new landscapes and new artistic models in central and northwest China.

They were primed for this discovery by their sense that the literati painting tradition was in deep decline and needed revitalization, plus a nationalist dissatisfaction with the Western oil painting tradition for this purpose. Ancient mural paintings from cave temples along the Silk Roads, including Dunhuang, were seen as a wellspring of entirely new, but authentically Chinese source material, by artists like Chang, Wu Zuoren 吴作人, Zhang Daqian 张大千, and others. At the Dunhuang Research Institute, Chang and his colleagues established a tradition of copying that is still practiced today. Close copies of murals are sometimes made for documentation purposes, or for traveling exhibitions.

But all these artists are also heir to a more expansive sense of “copy” which is familiar from the classical Chinese painting tradition, in which copying is a method whose aim is to digest and to master the brush manner of a great artist. In this context the aim isn’t to reproduce the original work precisely, but to capture the essence of the master’s style for incorporation into one’s own work, as shown here in Wang Hui’s 1673 copy of Huang Gongwang’s 1350 original: 

As you might imagine, “the essence of the master’s style” is rather hard to define here, and yet it constitutes the central claim underlying the practice of copying. Sometimes it is genuinely hard to figure out what is essential in such a copy. Some artists produce copies (临摹) of Dunhuang paintings that alter the underlying color scheme or riff on the basic forms of the original, to the extent that they may arguably become original artworks.

In the classical Chinese painting tradition, although it is tricky to pin down the essential style of a given painter, which a copy attempts to capture, it’s pretty clear that “the essential” was understood in terms of brush manner (笔法). That is, in this view, it is qualities of line and brushstroke which constitute the essence of a painting, rather than qualities of composition, perspective, light, or color. Brush manner is thus seen as the central measure of style.

It follows from this that ink – black ink – is the dominant medium, even in paintings which use color liberally. This is in fact a very old idea, reaching back to some of the earliest surviving paintings from China, like the Warring States painting of a man from Zidanku tomb #1. In Han paintings, a black ink outline is almost the entire substance of the painting, and color is used decoratively, for accents or for visual interest. And in the immediate post-Han period, paintings which are not dominated by ink outlines (many of them from Dunhuang, actually) are seen as evidence of outside influence from Central Asia. 

Anyway this made me think about the process of producing comics art, in which the line work and the coloring are two distinct processes, potentially even involving two different hands, and the line is clearly dominant. And it makes me wonder to what extent we can apply the critical language of Chinese painting to contemporary comics and graphic arts, given that they share this quality – the dominance of line and brushstroke over color. I’m obviously too ignorant of contemporary comics art to take this further – there are bigger questions like, where is the “hand of the artist” if the tools are digital? But I love the idea of this connection and think it’s worth considering.