Page 254 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

283 K'un-u'an (Shih-ch'i, c. 1610-
1693), Autumn Landscape. Handscroll
dated equivalent to 1666. Ink and colour
on piper Ch'ing Dynasty.

284 Shih-t'ao (Tao-chi. 1641-c. 1710),
The Pttth Blossom Spring, illustrating a
story by T'ao Yuan-ming. Detail of a
handscroll. Ink and colour on paper.
Ch'ing Dynaity.
summarised in a paragraph, for it is not a statement of a coherent
aesthetic theory so much as a series of utterances that touch on
reality, nature, man, and art at many levels. 4 Central to Shih-t'ao's
thinking is the concept of the i hua (literally, "one line" or "one
painting"); but the very word i might mean the transcendent
"One," the unity of man and nature, or simply "the single," and
hua either the art of painting, "delineation," or simply "line."
Drawing both upon earlier aesthetic theorists going back as far as
Tsung Ping and Hsieh Ho, and upon Buddhist and Taoist meta-
physics, and not unaware of his own genius, Shih-t'ao meditates
upon the artist's power to express his sense of oneness with living
nature in the unified, uninterrupted flow of inspiration through
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