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

Abstract

This article reconsiders Huang Binhong’s landscape painting through a phenomenological perspective, focusing on how brush and ink generate rather than merely represent landscape. Drawing on Heidegger’s concepts of world and earth, it examines three works—Dwelling in the Qixia Mountains, Ten Thousand Valleys in Deep Shade, and Layered Peaks and Waterfall—to analyze the opening of a habitable pictorial world, the preservation of depth through accumulated ink, and the dynamic tension between revealing and concealing. The article argues that Huang’s brushwork should not be understood only as a formal or stylistic legacy of literati painting. Instead, it functions as a mode through which landscape becomes visible while retaining opacity, density, and inexhaustibility. By placing Heidegger’s art theory in dialogue with Huang’s own writings on brush-and-ink, void and solid, and nature, this study proposes a cross-cultural interpretation of modern Chinese landscape painting.