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4.5
Reading this book closely, and more slowly than I generally read, has been transformative. The Great Image Has No Form has worked for me on three levels.The book is an intimate study of the classic Chinese texts on landscape painting, especially the Shitao. This text is not well known (anyway, I was only peripherally aware of it and had never thought it essential to my own work) but in Jullien's treatment it is revalatory. It has changed how I look at Vancouver's North Shore Mountains, or cycle up through them, and how I experience the intimacy of mountain and water. When I look at paintings, Chinese or otherwise, I will be watching for the pattern of what is concealed and revealed and how absence bleeds into presence and presence celebrates its own absence.Beyond this, the book uses Daoist thought on presence, absence and how they interpenetrate to deconstruct Eurocentric thought on essence and object, self and nature. Perhaps it is only from the position of other and outside that this can be done, and Chinese thought is one place from which this can be done. As I understand it (in a very limited way at this point) this is part of Julien's larger project and I am looking forward to reading his other books.Like many people, I have read several translations of Laozi, most recently to compare Red Pine and Hinton's approach to translation. This book has sent me back to Red Pine, in order to read more closely into the lines. I sort of knew that Chinese landscape painting was an entry into the Tao, but thinking about this book, seeking out paintings, and going for walks in the woods and along the shore has taken me out much farther.The book's chapter titles are a wonderful sequence in themselves.1. Presnece-Absence2. From the Foundation-Fount of Painting3. Vague-Drab-Indistinct4. The Great Image Has No Form5. Theory of the Sketch6. Empty and Full7. Not Quitting, Not Sticking8. Quitting Form to Achieve Resemblence9. The Spirit of a Landscape10. On the Truth in Painting11. Gaze or Contemplation13. Peindre n'est pas depeindre14. What Does Painting Write?15. Image-Phenomena: Painting Transformation and LifeIf you have not seen it, search out the painting Spring Mountain by Guo Xi (1020-1090)
