Taoist Art

TAO

The Chinese Philosophy of Time and Change

By Philip Rawson, Laszlo Legeza

Thousands of people nowadays know about the yin and yang as Chinese male and female sexual energies. But a lot of people use the text without understanding how it was meant to work. Taoism is the key – and art can give us perhaps the most direct approach to the strange universe of fluid energies of Taoism.

The first aspect in understanding Taoism is that the Taoist perception of the real world differs essentially from our usual Western one. We tend to think of a world of seperate things. We act on the assumption that our world is a structure assembled of solid building-bricks in many different shapes and sizes. They are fixed and unchangeable. We assume, that change happens by one “thing” turning into “something else”. The way we experience and measure time is by dividing it up into countable moments, in an abstract way, identical to all others.

Taoism sees all this as schematic, vulgar and absurd. Taoism knows that everything is in movement and change. To Taoists, objects and facets are simply shapes and phases which last long enough for us to consider them as units. You are not the same person who began reading this text. Nothing which happens, no event or process, ever repeats itself exactly.

In art the most powerful and common image for this is the convoluted stone, full of holes and hollows eroded by water, whose shapes never repeat themselves. Real stones with genuine Tao quality were eagerly sought by Chinese collectors.

The second aspect in understanding Taoism is that Taoist works are meant acutally to nourish or feed the inner man with matching energies. All true Taoist art is therefore a projection of time, of complex process, not a static conceptual shape. It is full of suggestions and hints at extra layers of meaning.

In art, artist always try to depict yin and yang. Yang is bright, red, male, penetrating, high, celestial. Yin is dark, black, female, receptive, abyssal, deep. All of this belongs to the vocabulary of the secret Taoist language used everywhere in Chinese art.

In Taoist art, the aim is harmony. But harmony is impossible without “forces” to harmonize. So Taoist art is full of emblems of aroused yin ang yang, combined so as to balance each other. It was Taoist theory that things brought into contact with each other, or arranged together, influenced each other. So works of art were made and used as practical magic. The harmonic combinations might be a dragon among swirling clouds or woman with a ram.

Especially important is a set of eight trigrams, triplets of horizontal lines. Continuous lines represent yang and broken lines represent yin. Each trigram has a name and a general symbolic significance which are placed into a circle.

For example three continuous lines mean Heaven, the Creative energy. One continuous and two broken lines mean the mountain, keeping still, beginnings and ends. Many sets of paintings were made in China designed to express shifting qualities of the trigrams through landscape or flower images.

The directional symbolism in the circle of trigrams was extremely important in Chinese life, governing in particular the design of houses. For the Chinese always wished to “face” the south, where lay the peak of yang vitality. Animals symbolizing the directions were used again and again in art.

The last aspect in understanding Taoist art is that it is full of references to sex and sexual customs. The Taoist idea is that sexual essences are secreted by men and women, when they become sexually aroused. By orgasm the energies are released out of the body and may be absorbed by the partner of the opposite sex. To keep his household happy, one man was obliged to satisfy sexually many women, without reducing himself to a state of exhaustion. All men therefore had to learn a large number of clever erotic techniques. Any follower of Tao, male or female, naturally aims at some sort of self-cultivation.

All in all, there are three main things everybody should know – Chinese artists try adequately express their sense of Tao through art; the goal is to achive harmony; Chinese art is full of symbolism.

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