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Dedicated to Dragon Veins

(Picture: Kun Can, Landscape with Waterfalls and Trees, 1636, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

(Picture: Shitao,
Waterfall at Mount Lu)

(24.1.2023) The term or notion of ›dragon veins‹ (long mo/in earlier texts also: lung-mo) we may encounter if we are trying to get more familiar with Chinese painting discourses. In other words: if we are trying to think our way into discourses on Chinese painting, Western discourses or Eastern discourses. I’ll quote a definition of ›dragon veins‹ below (that seems to be very concise to me), but what I’d actually like to illustrate here is the problem of thinking ourselves into something, something unfamiliar. By showing how a remarkable scholar, Victoria Contag, tried to do that, and how she, most remarkably, corrected her earlier – in her view: false – understanding of ›dragon veins‹.

A remarkably concise discussion of ›dragon veins‹ can be found in a 2019 book by Adam Loughnane, which is actually dedicated to philosophical problems. But it contains very precise descriptions of what we are dealing with. After having observed that ›dragon veins‹ can have a »straightforward geophysical meaning, referring to the various articulations of peaks that ran along the upper ridge of mountain ranges forming vein-like patterns«, and after naming certain formula in Chinese paintings which are rendering mountains, formula suggesting dragon-like shapes, Loughnane goes on to address the heart of the matter, which is, in my view (or in my words now) a dialectics of the visible and the invisible, in nature as in painting, and, perhaps also, in the relation between art (painting) and nature, which can only be seen (understood), if art and nature are not thought as being separated (or separate worlds), but thought as belonging to one and the same whole, to one and the same world:

»For our discussion, the important use of the term ›dragon veins‹ was the one that referred to the invisible internal relations that bound the elements of a painting together. ›Dragon veins‹ were not only the physical patterns of mountains, but also the web of aesthetic interdependence that straddled the visible and the invisible. Thus, Chinese painters and the Japanese who emulated them strove to capture the vitality of the landscape by attending to this aspect that weaves together the forms of the visible world without itself being visible. Yet, just as yin is never without yang, these veins cannot be pure invisibility because if there were no visible forms, no positivity in a work, there would be nothing to bind. Conversely, if the veins were fully visible, the painter would forfeit painting at the limit of ›there is and there is not‹, and settle for ›there is‹, thus losing the generativity of the identity of opposites. When a landscape painting comes to life, the Chinese claim that ›the dragon veins have been stretched properly‹, and a painting thus has the ›cohesive strength which draws the observer irresistibly into the depths of the painting.‹ When stretched properly, a work becomes a magical perceptual phenomenon not just to behold but also to merge with [/] through perceptual negation.« (Loughnane, p. 70)

The European Eye versus the Chinese Eye

If we turn our attention now to a 1950 book by Victoria Contag, dedicated to the ›Two Stones‹, namely the two artists Shitao and Kun Can, we may find, on page 98, a remarkable footnote:

»In der von mir vor zwölf Jahren noch im Bann europäischen Sehens verfassten Darstellung, Sechs berühmte Maler der Ch’ing-Dynastie, ist Lung-mo mit »Schwunglininen« wiedergegeben; das ist deshalb ein Fehler, weil – von der Komposition des Bildes aus – die Wirkung für die Ursache angesehen wurde. […]« (Contag, p. 98, note 20)

(Picture: Shitao, Hermitage at Mount Lu, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It says – and while I am wondering how to translate it best, I am also thinking of the late James Cahill, who found the German of Mrs. Contag, a very respected scholar and collector at her day, »impenetrable« –, it says basically that twelve years ago, in another book, she had translated the notion of ›dragon veins‹ with ›Schwunglinien‹ (drawn lines that show/suggest/represent an impetus, a momentum), but that now she did regard this as a mistake, because she had, then, and being still under the spell of European vision/looking, confused cause and effect.
Cause and effect of what? To answer this question, we may turn again to the book by Loughlane, because another passage reads almost like a comment to Mrs. Contag, like a comment helping her – or us – to think our way into discourses on Chinese painting:

»[…] I mentioned that the movement from this chapter [of his book] to the next involves proceeding from the perceptual to the motor-perceptual. As we progress, we see that the notion of ›dragon veins‹ helps facilitate that advance because it actually has significance not just for vision but also for motion. When the artist is searching for the veins, she is not simply looking to depict something that the observer will later enjoy through perceptual engagement, but is searching for an invisible pull within the landscape that will move the sensorimotor body and solicit the artist’s gestures while painting and the viewer’s body while beholding their work.« (p. 71)

As in a nutshell we find here everything – as it seems to me: wonderfully – illustrated (the problem of thinking our way into something; a going back from an – perhaps – more authentic Eastern understanding to an earlier, perhaps all-too limited European one, and back) as the concise meaning of what ›dragon veins‹ are all about: a »pull«, coming from landscapes perceived (in visible as well as in invisible aspects), that will »move« a body, resulting in »gestures« that can be viewed and may again move a beholder.
But while viewing we may also think, and – in case we are interested in discourses on Chinese painting – we may think here of the whole of nature and art, a whole which is addressed here as well as evoked. And Victoria Contag had settled to another translation of long mo finally: in German she had used the word Pulsadern now (literally: artery), but more in a sense of veins indicating a pulse that can be felt, an inherent vitality that is common to both art (and its gestures) and nature. But the vitality in a drawn line is related here to the vitality of nature perceived by an artist who is seen in relation to, and perhaps: filled by vitality of nature, as, if painting succeeds, his work of art may seem to be full of the same energy or vitality, partly visibly, and partly invisibly so.

Selected Literature:
Adam Loughnane, Merleau-Ponty and Nishida. Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual Faith, New York 2019;
Victoria Contag, Die beiden Steine. Beitrag zum Verständnis des Wesens Chinesischer Landschaftsmalerei, Braunschweig 1950;
Clarissa von Spee, Victoria Contag: Pioneer, Scholar and Collector of Chinese Paintings, in: Michaela Pejčochová / Clarissa von Spee (eds.), Modern Chinese Painting & Europe. New Perceptions, Artists Encounters, and the Formation of Collections, Berlin 2017, pp. 61-78

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