From Ink Heritage to the Global Context: Teacher Luo Yanzi on Breakthroughs and Adherence in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Painting

Edited interview transcript 5

If, in tracing the path from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, we saw Chinese painting continually recalibrating its spiritual center in response to different historical moments, then in the modern and contemporary period the question becomes even more complex. On the one hand, Chinese painting continues its own internal lineage; on the other, it must confront the reality of meeting Western art head-on within a globalized context. Following our earlier discussion, I asked Teacher Luo Yanzi: after the Qing dynasty, what exactly was carried forward in modern and contemporary Chinese painting, and what counted as a genuine breakthrough?

In Teacher Luo’s view, any discussion of modern Chinese painting must center on two key figures: Huang Binhong and Qi Baishi. They are often paired together as “Southern Qi and Northern Huang,” not only because of their comparable stature in the history of modern Chinese painting, but also because both underwent a particularly meaningful phase in old age: shuainian bianfa, or “transformation in later years.” In other words, they did not become more conservative as they aged. Quite the contrary: it was in the final stage of life that their artistic language underwent a deeper transformation, opening their painting onto a renewed horizon.

Teacher Luo believes Qi Baishi deserves particular attention. Most people know him best for his flower-and-bird paintings: insects among grasses, red leaves, plum blossoms, shrimp and crabs—subjects drawn from ordinary life, which makes his art feel intimate, accessible, and appealing across different audiences. Yet she noted that she herself is especially drawn to Qi Baishi’s landscapes. Although his landscapes no longer pursue the panoramic monumentality of Song painting, they are still able to convey an expansive realm through remarkably concise brush and ink. He does not rely on elaborate construction to create grandeur. Instead, with an ease that feels relaxed and unforced, he allows a vast inner force to settle naturally onto the paper.

I found myself in strong agreement at this point. Qi Baishi’s paintings may seem simple at first glance, but in fact they possess an extraordinary power of condensation. He is not reproducing nature point by point. Rather, he seizes its essential energy, delight, and life force, using the fewest possible strokes to contain the broadest possible realm. Teacher Luo invoked a famous remark by Li Keran to make this point: Li once said that the towering peaks he painted could not rival a single blade of grass from his teacher’s hand. What this reveals is one of the most important ideas in Chinese art: greatness does not depend on literal scale. The cosmos can be disclosed within the smallest thing. The saying “Mount Sumeru is not large; a mustard seed is not small” expresses precisely this concentrated union of Eastern aesthetics and philosophy.

Teacher Luo went on to say that what is most moving in Qi Baishi lies beyond technical mastery of brush and ink; it lies in the spiritual state he attained in old age. He lived into his nineties, yet his brushwork grew younger rather than older, taking on something almost childlike in its innocence, candor, and exuberance. Traditional Chinese thought has long valued this return to uncarved simplicity. Daoist thought speaks of honoring the infant, and Su Shi wrote of “being adjacent to children.” Both suggest that truly mature art does not necessarily become heavier, more seasoned, or more solemn. After passing through technique, it may return to the most fundamental state of life itself. Qi Baishi’s greatness lies precisely here: the older he became, the less aged his brushwork seemed, and the less aged his mind.

At this point I naturally thought of Picasso in the context of Western modern art. Picasso famously said that it took him only a short time to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to draw like a child. There is indeed a resonance between this statement and something in Qi Baishi’s late work. Neither master remained satisfied with surface realism; both turned toward a deeper form of truth—not whether something looked like its object, but whether it truly reached the vitality, candor, and primal immediacy of life itself.

I then asked Teacher Luo a further question: if we place Qi Baishi back into the broader modern context, when Chinese painting first entered a global visual field on a large scale and encountered Western art more directly, how should it understand its own tradition? And by what standards should innovation be judged?

Teacher Luo answered that this question must first be traced back to one of the most fundamental principles of Chinese painting: Zhang Zao’s Tang-dynasty formulation, “externally imitate creation; internally attain the heart’s source” (wai shi zaohua, zhong de xinyuan). These eight characters, she said, almost encapsulate the most stable core logic of Chinese painting across several millennia. The artist draws experience from nature, but this experience must ultimately be absorbed and transformed inwardly before it can become a truly personal expression. Chinese painting has never been a mechanical imitation of the visible world. It uses nature as a means of reaching the source of the heart. Every generation of painters has done this, though their political circumstances, social structures, and spiritual climates differ, and those differences give rise to different kinds of brush-and-ink expression.

In this sense, Teacher Luo stressed one point in particular: brush and ink change with the times, but the spiritual core of Chinese painting does not. Shitao’s famous statement that “brush and ink should follow the times” is often quoted, yet if one notices only the phrase “follow the times” and ignores its premise, the meaning is easily distorted. To follow the times does not mean abandoning tradition, nor does it mean innovating for innovation’s sake. It means that people in every age must reactivate brush and ink through the lived experience of their own time. Brush and ink are only the vehicle. What they carry is the artist’s view of the cosmos, of life, and of nature.

It is precisely for this reason, she said, that she remains cautious about certain modern approaches that simply transplant Western artistic language into Chinese painting. Of course Chinese painting has been affected by outside influences in the course of globalization, and some of those influences have indeed operated with a degree of historical pressure. Yet such pressure does not mean Chinese painting must surrender its roots and adapt itself to an external evaluative framework. On the contrary, the more frequent global exchange becomes, the more clearly Chinese painting must understand what its own tradition actually is. Teacher Luo made one especially weighty remark: ideas may be new, but brush and ink cannot be discarded; brush and ink must remain traditional, because they are the root of Chinese painting.

I agree with this very strongly. People often measure the value of Chinese painting by asking whether it can be integrated into the system of global contemporary art, yet the question itself may be flawed. The arts of different civilizations are grounded in different philosophical foundations. Teacher Luo pointed out that the underlying logic of Western painting is different from that of Chinese painting. Chinese painting is shaped by the idea of the unity of heaven and humanity, and that principle begins to operate even at the level of material. Xuan paper, the brush, and the diffusion of ink and water make the act of painting inherently collaborative, a process in which human intention and natural process generate the image together. The painter does not control everything absolutely, but works in concert with the material, with contingency, and with the circulation of breath and energy. This is why Chinese painting places particular importance on xieyi, or “writing the idea.” Xieyi is not simply a matter of stylistic abbreviation; it begins from the heart, and the brushstroke directly bears spiritual activity.

By contrast, throughout much of its history, Western painting placed greater emphasis on constructing the image through reason, structure, and visual representation. In the Western classical realist tradition, the brushstroke is often concealed: the painter recedes behind the picture so that the depicted object may appear convincing and real. In Chinese freehand painting, however, the brushstroke is not hidden. Indeed, it is precisely through the brushstroke that the painter’s presence, temperament, and life state are made visible. In other words, within Chinese painting, the brushstroke is itself a kind of declaration by the artist.

We also spoke about Picasso, African art, and Cubism. Teacher Luo believes Picasso was, of course, a great artist, and he clearly recognized that the pursuit of likeness alone would eventually reach its limit, so he began deliberately breaking with Western realist tradition in search of new ways of seeing. Even so, she felt that his explorations still belonged more to the realm of conceptual construction, whereas Chinese painting places greater emphasis on awareness and awakened perception. A Chinese painter may think during the planning stage, but when the brush actually descends, the process is often no longer a rational sequence worked out step by step. It becomes a more direct and immediate state in which mind and hand move as one. From this perspective, the enduring vitality of Chinese painting does not depend on whether it repeats the trajectory of Western modernism. Its strength lies in the fact that, from the root onward, it is an altogether different system.

Following this line of thought, I asked Teacher Luo how Chinese painting should face the future in an age increasingly shaped by globalization and contemporaneity.

Her answer was strikingly clear. She strongly endorsed the idea of “holding fast,” and borrowing a Daoist expression, she summarized it as “holding to the One, and thereby generating life without end” (shou yi er shengsheng buxi). To “hold to the One” does not mean freezing tradition in place or refusing development. It means preserving the most fundamental source: the historical and cultural flame. New growth is possible only when the root remains alive; without the root, innovation becomes water without a source, wood without a base. She cited modern artists such as Lin Fengmian and Wu Guanzhong, arguing that they were able to achieve a genuine fusion of Chinese and Western art precisely because they never truly abandoned the core of Chinese painting. They never completely discarded brush and ink, nor did they allow themselves to become rootless driftweed.

This metaphor stayed with me. Teacher Luo said that Chinese painting is like a kite: it may soar very high, but it must always remain tethered by a string. If the string breaks, it may appear to have gained absolute freedom, but in fact it has lost the very basis of its existence. Subject matter may change, and what is depicted may be continually renewed—Qi Baishi could even paint salted duck, which shows that “what one paints” has never been the real issue. What matters is whether one still holds onto that string, whether one still preserves the brush-and-ink root, the cultural root, and the spiritual root of Chinese painting.

I then pushed the question into a more concrete domain. We all hope Chinese painting can claim a place on the map of world art, yet once it truly enters the global cultural condition of the so-called “global village,” does that mean it must understand itself according to Western artistic standards? On this point, Teacher Luo’s answer was unequivocal. The difference between Chinese and Western painting is not simply a matter of style. It is a difference in foundational thought and cultural origin. Because the roots are different, the logic of their development has been different from the very beginning.

Teacher Luo pointed out that Chinese painting possessed a certain kind of “abstraction” from the outset. By “abstraction” she did not mean formal abstraction in the modernist sense. She meant that Chinese painting has never treated the object merely as an external thing to be copied. From the beginning, it has been bound up with inner state, vital resonance, and the written quality of the brush. Western painting, by comparison, bore a much stronger documentary function over a long stretch of its history. Whether in religious narrative, mythological representation, portraiture, or history painting made in service to aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons, it remained closely tied to the accurate depiction of the external object. China, of course, also has works with a documentary character, such as The Night Revels of Han Xizai. Yet the true central current of literati painting does not lie in representational recording; it lies in giving written form to the feelings of the breast.

This is why, Teacher Luo emphasized, the invention of photography did not affect Chinese and Western painting in the same way. For Western painting, the advent of photography did indeed generate a powerful sense of crisis. When painting has long taken verisimilitude as one of its major goals, the appearance of a more efficient and more precise means of visual recording naturally compels painters to ask again: what is the meaning of painting’s existence? That crisis ultimately helped propel Impressionism, modernism, and the many experiments that followed. In other words, Western art’s movement from likeness toward non-likeness involved a considerable degree of reactive adjustment. Innovation did not always arise from purely spontaneous spiritual necessity; at times it also emerged because the established realist path had been pushed to its extreme and another route had to be found.

Chinese painting, however, is different. In Teacher Luo’s view, the arrival of the camera, photography, or even today’s AI-generated images does not fundamentally deprive Chinese painting of the basis for its existence. Chinese painting has never grounded its value in substituting for reality. Its concern has never been whether it can outdo reality in likeness, nor whether it can surpass technology in efficiency. What matters is whether brush and ink can transform an inner state, an emotion, and a spiritual condition into visible form. This is why Chinese painting, when facing external technological change, has rarely experienced the same acute crisis of identity found in Western modern art. It does not urgently need to prove itself to the outside world, because its essential value is not founded on representation.

At this point, I felt I understood more clearly why Teacher Luo repeatedly stressed the word “self-consistency.” For the Chinese artist, this self-consistency is not a form of conservatism. It is a lucid recognition of the inner core of one’s own tradition. Whatever changes may occur in the external world, what remains irreplaceable is always the human inner state, the mode of feeling through which human beings, nature, and the myriad things are apprehended after long cultural and spiritual sedimentation. Teacher Luo even remarked that although AI can now generate images, it still cannot replace the entire Daoist and Eastern understanding of life on which Chinese painting depends. Technology can simulate form, but it cannot truly generate the emotional tenor, temperament, and state of mind formed within a painter through long cultural accumulation.

At the same time, Teacher Luo did not simply oppose Chinese and Western painting in absolute terms. She specifically noted that Impressionism was, to some extent, inspired by Eastern art. Feng Zikai once referred to painters such as Van Gogh, Monet, and Sisley as “poets of light,” and she found that phrase particularly suggestive. By the time of Impressionism, Western painting was no longer content with mechanical depiction of the object; it had begun instead to turn toward the apprehension of light, atmosphere, color, and fleeting sensation. In this respect, it shares a certain affinity with strands of Eastern art that privilege yi—idea, intent, or resonance—over mere form. When Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, for instance, what he captured was not a sunrise as an object exhaustively defined by detail, but his own transient perception and impression before nature.

Teacher Luo also mentioned that she is especially fond of Cézanne, because in his work she often senses something akin to the Chinese ideal of qiyun shengdong, or “spirit resonance, life-motion.” The techniques and tools of painting are certainly important, she said, yet they are not the deepest determining factor. What matters most is how the artist understands nature, how the artist understands the world, and how that understanding is transformed into rhythm, breath, and structure within the image. It is in this sense that Impressionism and certain later forms of modern painting enter into a relation with Chinese art in which the two can illuminate one another.

At the same time, she cautioned that the situation becomes more complicated with later abstract art. Some artists, she felt, were indeed changing simply for the sake of change, driven by the logic that if others were still painting likeness, then they themselves could no longer do so. If innovation is founded first and foremost on a deliberate rebellion against older tradition, then its spiritual legitimacy may remain uncertain. Chinese painting, by contrast, has not developed through an intentional pursuit of novelty. Its changes have arisen more organically, growing out of transformations in historical circumstance and inner life. “Brush and ink should follow the times” does not mean manufacturing novelty by force. It means that as human experience changes under different historical conditions, brush-and-ink language changes accordingly.

Toward the end of the interview, I tried to summarize the discussion as a whole. Looking back, beginning with Fan Kuan in the Song dynasty, we saw landscape painting establish the human relationship to nature through grandeur and sublimity. With Ni Zan in the Yuan, the picture began to empty out and simplify, as Chinese painting gradually shifted from representing nature toward expressing the mind. With Shen Zhou in the Ming, literati painting, through its revival, regained a state that was more rounded, more generous, and more fully infused with the atmosphere of human life. With Shitao and the Four Monks in the Qing, individual subjectivity emerged still more clearly, and brush and ink became a more direct outward form of personality and spirit. Then, with Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong in the modern period, Chinese painting entered the historical scene of globalization and at the same time revealed with greater clarity the part of itself that is most enduring. What it must ultimately preserve is never a fixed pictorial formula, but the spiritual core carried within brush and ink.

In other words, throughout its long history, the central issue in Chinese painting has never simply been whether the image resembles its object. What matters is what sort of inner state, vital resonance, and sense of life each stroke and each line carries within it. The true painter is not merely an artisan who reproduces objects, but someone able to transform the world of the spirit into perceptible form through brush and ink. Technique may change, subject matter may expand, and every age will continue to bring new forms of fusion and adjustment. Yet at its deepest level, Chinese painting remains concerned with how, through brush and ink, it gives expression to the relationship between the human being and nature, the world, and the self.