Arnold Chang | A Closer Look at Bimo 筆墨 (Brushwork)
Art historians, collectors, curators, and artists all agree that brushwork is an essential component of Chinese calligraphy and painting and a crucial criterion for assessing the relative quality as well judging the authenticity of a given work. Yet, in my five decades of experience working in the field of Chinese paintings, I have found that there is little agreement amongst the experts, or amongst the artists themselves, as to what constitutes “good brushwork,” or even how to describe what we are seeing when we look at the lines, dots, and smudges that are made by the interaction of brush and ink with paper or silk.
Using large scale high-resolution reproductions and on-screen digital images, I will attempt to lead a discussion of the development of brushwork techniques and a brushwork-oriented aesthetic in landscape painting, from Fan Kuan through Shitao, and beyond. Through a close examination of reproductions and digital details we can explore and try to understand how these paintings were actually created and begin to de-mystify the aesthetics of bimo.
