The Art of Expressing Inexpressiveness; An Analytic Survey of Chinese Thought & Art based on Bada Shanren Paintings

The fundamental doctrine of Eastern culture is based on the ethics. This is a thought found in every, even tiny, lesson taught to the children. In fact, all the values are takes from the life, even apparently materialistic but spiritual deep inside. Here, in order to exalt the soul and to fulfill the valuable status an endless effort of the man is taken in his life. Therefore, no boundary can be traced between the criteria of this or that world. Actually, the union of the two is the essence of the thought in which the man is assisted to gain the knowledge of the life in accordance, and not contrary, to the nature. The eternal search of the scholar turns into a never-ending training inside. In other words, as long as he is being educated and therefore he is gaining the spiritual level he is parted from the carnality and closer to the moral elevation. The Chinese artist is not normally a professional as it is in the western art. He is a scholar whose job is to work as an official serving the State. One of his requirements, apart from being literate, is to be able to understand the literature especially the poetics which might be the reason through which Chinese scholars would become poets afterwards. Their occupation forced them to deepen the thought and the philosophy beside the arts and especially the painting presented many Chinese scholars through the long history of this civilization. Chu Ta or Pa-ta Shan-jen (1625-1705) is known as a Chinese expressionist. He gave himself many names among which Bada Shanren is more accepted recently. He loved company and drink and seemed to have many friends. In his later years, his well known eccentricities bordered on madness. People who wanted his works plied him with wine until he was completely drunk, and were rewarded with some of the most joyous and startling pictures in the history of Chinese painting. Nearly all works of him are swiftly studies of flowers, angry little birds, or fishlike rocks. Poised in empty space, and drawn with the fewest possible strokes in dark, rich ink, his small, lively creatures capture the very essence of living nature. Even his rocks seem to be alive. Occasionally he painted landscapes, beneath whose cryptic, abstract forms lies a deep feeling for the monumental compositions of the Northern Sung Dynasty. This article presents a study of the painter’s life through which the analysis of his works seemed necessary and to familiarize the reader with eastern and more precisely Chinese visual arts an overall view of this culture has been schemed in brief. The methodology of this research executed through library works and the majority of analysis on the artist's paintings is done in a descriptive way. The methodology of this research executed through library works and the majority of analysis on the artist's paintings is done in a descriptive way.