Of Chinese painters and Chinese physicians

中国画家和中国医生

The arts in china were nourished by the same naturalist and Taoist sensibility that fed Chinese philosophy and medicine. Chinese art attempts to express the ideas of balance, harmony, and change that are contained in Ying-Yang theory. In landscape painting, the harmonious spirit of nature is revealed through the depiction of a scene that depends on proportion and measure to create beauty.

在中国，和哲学和医学一样，自然主义者与道家学者也滋养了艺术。中国的艺术力求表现平衡、和谐，以及蕴含着阴阳之道的变化。在山水画中，自然和谐的精神通过布局谋篇来展示与创造着美。

Wang Yun’s Mountain landscape is a traditional Chinese landscape painting. In it, the artist has captured the essence of nature as he sees it, in balance and in flux. The painting is like the Taoist symbol, containing yin and yang in their proper proportions but constantly interacting and transforming into each other.

王允的山岳图就是一幅传统的中国山水画。在画中，艺术家捕捉到了他所能看到的自然美景中的精华，既有平衡之美，又富动态之美。这幅画就象太极图一样，表现了阴阳的相互作用与相互转化。

The scene depicts a vast range of elements, from the towering mountain to the little trickling stream. Nature is shown as a balance of the yielding yin (foliage, water) and the unyielding yang (rock, trees). There are the dynamic (water, people) and the quiescent (mountains, houses); the slow (trees) and the fast (mist); the dark and the light; the solid and the liquid. All things contain both yin and yang. The water, for instance, is both yielding (yin) and dynamic (yang).

画面通过高耸的山峰和潺潺的小溪表现了宏大的场景，柔顺的阴（树荫、流水）和坚强的阳（岩石、树木）则展示了自然界的平衡之美。画中有动的流水、人物，也有静的山岳、屋舍；有缓的树枝摇曳，也有快的薄雾飘渺；有明有暗；有固态也有液态。所有的事物都既有阴又有阳。好比说水，既有柔顺之阴，又有激越之阳。

The picture is a totality, and each detail takes on meaning only insofar as it participates in the whole. The mountain is immense by virtue of its smaller foothills; the people are small by virtue of the vastness of nature. All things are imbued with interactive qualities and dynamics in their relationships to the things around them.

画面是一个整体，每一个细节只有在整体中才能显示出它的意义。山麓低矮方显出群山巍峨，自然广袤才映衬人类渺小。所有的事物都与其周围相关的事物交互渗透、相互作用。

Through a kind of poetic logic, the Chinese also think of the landscape painting as a microcosm of the universe. In it are contained all the elements of nature, and it serves as model of the cosmic process. The landscape painter sees in a particular sense a unique configuration of the natural elements. His composition includes those elements, or signs, that are specific to a certain sense, but is also participates in the larger reality. The elements within the microcosm correspond to elements within the macrocosm. For example, winter is death, a budding tree is spring, a lake is all water, a person is humankind. The painting depicts a time and place that through their correspondence with the cosmos become timeless and placeless. As the sinologist Francois Julian has noted:” In china, the purpose of painting is to rediscover the elemental and continuous course of the cosmic pulsation through the figurative representation of a landscape…..The tension created by the correlation between the lines and the washes, the visible and the invisible, fullness and emptiness, endows the landscape with a power to suggest more than the merely visible and open it to the life of the spirit.”20

通过这种诗一般的逻辑，中国人也把山水画看成宇宙的缩微图。这里包含了自然的所有元素，也成为了解宇宙进程的模型。山水画家以自己独特的视角观察到了自然界独一无二的元素，他的作品包含的那些元素或讯息，虽然在一定程度上与众不同，但其实也都是大自然中的真实存在。这个缩微当中的一切元素与真实的宇宙都是相对应着的。比如说，冬天是死寂的，正在萌发的树木代表了春天，湖代指了所有的水，一个人，就意味着所有的人类。画作通过这种时空的相互呼应表达了宇宙的广袤无垠。正如汉学家弗朗索斯·于连所说：“在中国，绘画的目的在于通过对自然山水的描绘再现宇宙的本质和变化过程。……通过笔墨之间的关系、可见与非可见、写实与留白形成的张力来赋予作品力量，显示出更深层次的内容，从而开启人们的心智。”