Perhaps as a student in a high-school art class, you had an experience similar to this--if, in completing an assignment for a painting of a still life or a natural scene, you didn't fill in the background in some manner, the teacher looked at it and said, "It's not finished!" Could one really be so lazy as to purposely neglect to paint a background for his own painting?

At any rate, looked at from the standpoint of traditional Chinese painting, this manner of thinking cannot be justified. As Kuo Hsi, a painter of the Sung Dynasty, has pointed out, in painting natural scenes there must be left room for the sky and the earth. The ultimate taboo is to "scribble over the entire scroll," as this seems to be "filling in the eye of the beholder," and leaves people with a sense of unease.

The leaving of blank space is an art within the art of Chinese painting. Although these spaces have not been touched by brush or ink, they are not to be considered "holes," or unfinished portions of the painting. They are, rather, integral and important parts of the painting as a whole. It could even be said that this practice of leaving blank spaces is the transplanting of Lao Tzu's philosophy of "non-action which leaves nothing unacted" into the field of esthetics. Lao Tzu wrote, "The myriad things under the heavens are born of being, being is born of non-being." In other words, the leaving of blank spaces within a painting does not indicate a lack of representation; it, on the contrary, has an active and positive role to play within the composition. Call it "non-action," yet it "leaves nothing unacted"; this "non-being" includes the unlimited possibilities of "being."

This is to say, a blank space could be sky, it could be fog, it could be water, or it could be the more brightly illuminated face of an object. It is a space of all-inclusiveness, a force which circulates throughout the entire painting. In the words of Lao Tzu, "That which called Tao is evasive, elusive. Elusive, evasive, yet within it are forms. Evasive, elusive, yet within it are objects. Deep, obscure, yet within it is the essence of all." Within the formless "Tao" is contained the inexhaustible forms of the myriad things.

White spaces are an integral component of a painting, in the same way as the appreciation of a work of calligraphy requires an understanding of the blank spaces within the characters as well as the lines of the characters themselves, because blank spaces are an important factor in achieving an esthetic balance in a calligraphic work. A common expression says, "White paper takes black characters"; the fundamental requirement of this "black" being that there be "white" to provide a contrast. Amongst other mediums, such as stone inscription, paper cutting, stone painting, Yin and Chou Dynasty bronze designs, and porcelain pottery, there is none which does not make use of the esthetics of empty space.

The concept that "vacuousness and concreteness are born of one another, unpainted areas constitute wondrous scenes," is certainly not without its reason. The ancients have reminded us to give special notice to the "unbrushed, uninked areas," as these spaces impart to a painting a living energy, and also provide for the viewer even more room for the use of his own imagination. They offer us an unlimited sense of possibility.

Chang Shih, a painter of the Ching Dynasty, put the idea in somewhat more concrete terms: "On three feet of paper one foot is painted. Though the remnant of the paper is unpainted, still the painting exists there. Therefore, to say 'blank whiteness' does not mean 'empty paper.' 'Blank whiteness' is painting."

In short, with the support of an awareness of "non-being," what is desired to be imparted is a pervasive spirit, an organic, living feeling of space. This is entirely different from traditional Western styles of painting. The Chinese people have come to an understanding of the art of using space; in addition to "concreteness," even more important is the essence which is contained within "vacuousness."

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Chu Ta/Fish