Free Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe Page A

Connecticut : Yale University Art Gallery, 1990) is the first comprehensive inventory of Bada Shanren’s work. In Chapter 25 I use some lines from one of Bada’s poems which Wang Fangyu cites in English. The translation of another original text, meanwhile, served as the basis for the letter in Chapter 35.
    In his essay ‘Zur Biographie des Pa-ta shan-jen’ in Asiatica: Festschrift Friedrich Weller zum 65. Geburtstag (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1954), pp. 119–30, Herbert Franke has assembled historical documents in German translation relating to the life of Bada Shanren. In Chapter 32 I use excerpts from Shao Zhangheng’s recollections of a meeting with Bada. Chen Ting’s outline of Bada’s life has been an indispensable source, particularly his information about Bada’s madness and the various names he gave himself. Herbert Franke also provides translations of the most important passages from Chinese treatises on ink in his book Kulturgeschichtliches über die chinesische Tusche (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften , 1962). This source provided the background necessary for Chapter 16, as well as assisting other places in the text.
    I have allowed Bada Shanren himself or his teacher, Master Hongmin, to utter some of the theses from Shitao’s discourse on painting – ‘Shih-t’ao: Quotes on Painting’ in Aesthetics: The Classic Readings , edited by David E. Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 65–76. In Chapter 33, therefore, we have Shitao’s third thesis, which states that the best technique of painting is the ‘technique of no technique’. The fourth thesis, in which Shitao describes the painting process as a step-by-step transfer of the idea of the picture onto the paper via the wrist, the brush and the ink, has made its way into Chapter 15, in association with ideas on the function of ink, paintbrush and the subject of the painting from thesis 18. The sublime significance of the function of water, taken from the same thesis, also crops up in Chapter 22.
    The father’s sentence from Chapter 4, ‘A path comes into existence by being walked on’, is a saying taken from the work of the fourth-century-BC philosopher Zhuang Zhou, more specifically from the following edition: Zhuangzi – Das klassische Buch daoistischer Weisheit , edited and with a commentary by Victor H. Maier, translated from the English by Stephan Schumacher (Frankfurt am Main: Krüger, 1998). The question which concludes Chapter 7 is also taken from this work. The idea developed in Chapter 15 of a unity of different things takes up one of Zhuangzi’s central theories: ‘This is also that, and that is also this.’ The dream meeting at the end of Chapter 24 cites a short extract from the anecdote about the goldfish, while the brief dialogue about the joy of fish is my amended version of a conversation between Master Zhuang and Master Hui.

Picture credits
     
     
Lotus flower
     
    Page from an album, between 1689–92.
    Ink on paper. Private collection, China. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Calamus
     
    Page from an album with eleven leaves, around 1681.
    Ink on paper, 30.2 x 34 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Mrs George Rowley in memory of Professor George Rowley. Photograph © Bruce M. White.
Branch of blossom with thorns
     
    Page from an album.
    Ink on paper. Private collection, China. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Two chicks
     
    Page from an album with sixteen leaves, in places dated 23/24 June 1693.
    Ink on paper. Shanghai Museum. Photograph: all rights reserved.
Fish and rocks
     
    Hanging scroll, dated 1696.
    Ink on paper, 134.6 x 60.6 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford Jr, 1988, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, all rights reserved.

Landscape with hut
     
    Page from an album with twelve leaves, dated 1699.
    Ink and light colour on paper, 23.3 x 16.8 cm. Bequest of John M. Crawford Jr, 1988, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, all rights reserved.
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