体道之所，造化之境丨“笔法记——林海钟作品展”将于9月2日在北京开幕

汴河桃园图卷纸本水墨 Ink on paper340x30cm2020

In the Confucian classics, “truth” is replaced by “sincerity”. In The Ruling of the State (Zhongyong), “Sincerity is the way of heaven, hence the way of man. A sincere person does not have to force himself to be reasonable and does not have to think about the rightness of his acts and words, reaching the Middle Way with ease and grace. Such a person is sage”. The life of the universe as conceived by the two Qi’s, i.e., Yin and Yang in the Zhouyi, is also close to the concept of truth in the original sense. “The endless becoming is called Yi(易), and the interplay of Yin and Yang is called the Tao”, and the endless becoming reflects a real world, while the Qi’s become the vital energy at the origin of all things. According to Chinese scholar Fang Wen, “For the ancient Chinese, painting was like the image in the Zhouyi, with the magic of creation, and the painter’s goal was to grasp the vitality and change of creation, not just to imitate nature”.

黄山雾松始信峰所见纸本水墨 Ink on paper68.5x33cm2014

At the end of the Tang Dynasty, Southern Zen was in full bloom. In saying that “the place where one stands is the truth” and that “truth is reality, and reality is truth”, the Zen also pointed to the fact that the “truth” is the existence itself. This mind is Buddha, and the mind is Buddha. Lin Hai Zhong has been influenced by Zen for many years，often uses the six touches of experience to describe the state of painting. In the moment of painting, the senses are extremely close to the subtle, and the instantaneous moments are infinitely elongated in the experience, with nothing outside the mind and the concentration of the mind on the one. Others view his painting as if the camera is fast-forwarding, while he himself is like an old monk mending clothes, with a clear understanding of the needlework. It is exactly what is said in the Brushwork Notes: “It is Qi that allows the mind to follow the brush, with no confusion in acquiring the image. And it is Yun that hides the traces of the shape, with the representation that is not vulgar”. How to be “not vulgar”? Jing Hao also says that “lusts spoil life. Men of intelligence and integrity indulge themselves in music, books and paintings by which replace miscellaneous desires”. Music, books and paintings as a self-technology, through the daily self-management, remove all kinds of extravagant desires, cumbersome decorations, and the remains of the self, return to the realm of harmony with nature, wash the heart into the state of non-I. As in Grasping the Purpose of Life (Zhuangzi), the rickety old man who sticks cicadas with a bamboo pole, the young man who swims in the water in Luliang, and Ziqing who chisels wood for his instrument, all of them talk about the inability to put the external evaluation system before paying attention to the self and the objective, and it is a kind of subversion and limitation of the external right system, and the only way to obtain the real freedom is to be connected with the internal and truth system that controls the self.

In his Examination and Explanation of Tang Dynasty Paintings, Weibin says (Chapter 5), “But how is the truth of painting? The truth of man is to follow nature, and the truth of object is to get its primitive matter, and the truth of painting is said to be ‘prevailing in both its Qi and Matter’. Then we know that painting is based on Qi and ended in Form. Why? It turns out that what we call Matter is Form. The real is Qi. Therefore, the debate of Chinese painting, the difference between authenticity and likeness, are all attributed to Qi”.

密林寻幽图纸本水墨 Ink on paper31x81cm2016