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p.2 We can imagine a beyond to everything: to a landscape, to the horizon, to the world, to clouds. Ever further, other worlds, hinterlands. But there is no beyond to the nude. "Here is your beginning and here is your end": part of the real stops there... after the nude there is nothing more... perception cannot reach behind it... An extreme has been reached. Not at the most distant horizon, but right here.
p.34 In China... the body is viewed from the standpoint of "energy," not anatomy... The body is conceived of in exact correspondence to the external world, with which it is in permanent communication.
p.36-37 the endless unfolding of delectation favored by the Chinese (again, the logic of processes)... the Chinese preferred the experience of a blandness whose capacity to unfurl is inexhaustible.
p.37 Chinese aesthetics demand that there should always be a "beyond": a "beyond" to words, to shape, to the taste of things.
p.59 Instead of considering the human body from the standpoint of its organic structure, and then thinking of it in motion according to a complex interplay of calculable forces, the Chinese perceive it as being pervaded by a network of pathways for the circulation of physiological energy, which is manifested through the various pulses.
p.61 what a Chinese artist tends to render in painting a figure is precisely these flows of invisible breaths connecting it with the outer world and animating it from the inside, because this is what sustains life... when Chinese painting depicts figures, it focuses on presenting them as intimately bound up with the world around them
p.67 In China, the real is not conceived in terms of being, but as processes (whose constancy lies in their regulated character, and which, taken globally, constitute the course of Heaven, or the dao - the "way")
p.68 since everything is subject to trans-formation, wise is he who "does not take his stand on that which has form" ...Chinese thought, unlike Greek, makes no sharp division between the visible and the invisible... In China, attention is focused entirely on the transitional stage between the one and the other... the transition is the predominant issue
p.74 the Chinese principle of internal coherence is inseparable from the energy it organizes. The energy's constancy hinges on this regulating capacity, which enables it to become actualized by "taking shape" in a viable manner... Consequently, to the Chinese painter, depicting a rock is a matter not of representing it by imitating its form, but of seeking out the energetic ("vital") principle that causes a rock to deploy into a rock.
p.75 everything is always in the process of change.
p.80 "Landscape" is not divorced from "emotion," but one resides within the other, the one reveals the other.
p.81 What is depicted in Chinese art... is stamped by its quality of pregnance. While it is in the stage of pregnance, nothing is final and the real is imbued with a "possible" from which nothing has been excluded thus far. Instead of imposing anything (on perception), the vagueness that inhabits the configuration allows things to pass discretely through. This lack of definition is a resource
p.108-109 When it comes to the indice... the relationship is that between detail and the whole; it is one minute point that reveals the entirety, its function being to provide the clue... The "fine," "tenuous," "subtle," almost invisible indication marks the transition between the manifest aspect of the phenomenon and its unseen aspect, at which it hints. To be precise... the indice is the point where the visible and the invisible compenetrate each other instead of splitting up into overlapping planes... the indical relates to a logic of suggestion (allusion) that needs to be prolonged and unfolded in order to obtain its full effect.
p.109-110 more generally speaking, all of Chinese strategy lies in the art of detecting the indices and making use of them. [footnote: for strategic discernment, see A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, chap. 5, pars. 2 and 3.]
p.115 Now, taking a last look at the Mustard Seed Garden's technical illustrations teaching the depiction of the human figure... For what is rendered is not the cleverly analyzed movement of physical strength, but the movement of inner tension, captured in a "cursive" line that expresses what is happening within the figures or between them. Their intentionality is apprehended "from afar," preserving its ability for further development
p.116 For how do the Chinese critics express their admiration of a landscape painting? ...These critics point out the soaring quality that results from the freedom of execution and transcends the brushwork; they praise its ability to go hand in hand with the process of natural generation, but they never condense its value and allow it to be... reduced... under the heading of beauty.
p.129-130 In treating the subject of literati art, I was led to use the concept of pregnance. By this I mean the capacity of an immanence - whether it resides in the undifferentiated mass of forms or of intentionality, for the two go together - to emanate. To "e-manate," as the language indicates, is to arise out of its natural source. This power of emanence is oriented indefinitely toward a "beyond"; allowing it to keep its capacity for development, and to this end refraining from any pressure that might objectify it... this potential that "cannot be exhausted" ...Being part of a process of continuous interaction, at the transition between the "there is" and the "there is not," ...it is elaborated neither on a purely sensitive nor on the "Intelligible" plane.
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