The European view of art is to reproduce an actual view. A Western or European painting is ‘figurative’ or emblematic. The European painter wants you to borrow his eyes and look at a particular landscape exactly as he saw it. He wants us to watch the painting from a specific angle from his point of view. In European painting more attention is paid to “delicate realism” It can be illustrated from the example of Quinten Metsys, a master blacksmith, who painted a fly on the latest panel of a painter, with whose daughter he fell in love. It looked so real that the painter admitted him as his apprentice. But a classical Chinese painting is not meant to reproduce an actual view. The Chinese painter does not choose a single viewpoint. His landscape is not a ‘real’ one, and you can enter it from any point and then travel in it. This is because the artist creates a path for your eyes to travel up and down, then back again, in a leisurely movement. This is even more true in the case of the horizontal scroll. In it the action of slowly opening one section of the painting, then rolling it up to move on the other, adds a dimension of time. This is unknown in any other form of painting. It also requires the active participation of the viewer, who decides at which pace he will travel through the painting. Thus the participation is physical as well as mental. The Chinese painter does not want you to borrow his eyes. On the other hand, he wants you to enter his mind. The landscape is an inner one, a spiritual and conceptual space.
