Brush and Ink as Manifestation and Concealment:Huang Binhong’s Landscapes through Heideggerian Phenomenology

Abstract

This paper mainly observes the houses, mountain lines, tree dots, pale roads, dark ink and blank paper in several landscape paintings by Huang Binhong. The works discussed are Dwelling in the Xixia Mountains, Ten Thousand Valleys in Deep Shade, and Layered Peaks and Waterfall. These paintings are different in size,ink condition and viewing movement. Some parts are easy to recognize, such as a roof, a bank or a white waterfall. Other parts are covered by trees,mixed with gray wash, or pressed into a heavy black mountain. The viewer often needs to look again. This paper first describes the places of these forms, the dry and wet strokes, the thick and pale ink, and the different uses of open paper. Huang’s writings and ancient painting theories are then used as materials for explanation.Heidegger’s ideas of world, earth and strife are also introduced in some passages.They are useful for the opening and hidden side of the picture, although Huang’s brush-and-ink has its own long Chinese background. From these works, it can be seen that brush-and-ink not only gives the form of landscape, but also makes the looking process slow, repeated and sometimes uncertain.