The book on Yin Zhaoyang:Landscape into Shanhe is a compressive overview of a sustained and impressive practice which opens out a transpersonal account of a Chinese response to Western aesthetic modernity, as well as the Chinese Classical tradition. Rather than an assumption of a ready-made Modernity, the essays in this publication demonstrate a sensitive awareness of how an artist might construct a relationship to the situation of a disrupted and even broken modernity due to the conditions of Chinese history. What was at stake with the passage of a Late Modernity for a generation of practices, was the appropriation of a memory system that is a product of this context. This implied a revitalised response to tradition, as well as a navigation of exact passages within Western painting. This could be theorised as an operation of aesthetic complexity based upon folds within the distinct memory systems. There is a lush immediacy to this painting style that also contains within a mediative repose born out a relationship to mark making of a much more distant time.

A pre-occupation with the depiction of mountains demonstrates the principle of the combination of aesthetic appropriation if we examine a painting such as Guo Xi’s ‘Early Spring’ (1072) and Paul Cezanne’s ‘Mont Sainte Victoire with Large Pine’ (1887). There is a paradox at the heart of such a contrast because many of the exploration of each painter appear to overlap and be in accord with each, despite a thousand-year temporal difference. What is presented in such a contrast are questions related to the privileging, and it is dealing with such complex relationships that the essays nuance in exacting ways to open the third space of a Contemporary response to such conjunctions. What also follows from such comparative explorations are relations between inscriptive processes, intensities (particularly of colour), gestural mark making, abstractions, relationships of visibility and invisibility, the play of mind and matter, and the beyond of representation. Central to these facets, is what is the relationship between the subject of perception and the object of attention and with this the pulverisation or collapse of difference between them. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorised this aesthetic flux as the ‘flesh’ of the world. In this the mountains co-mingle with the mind and through this a medium of having a non-dual world arises. The publication presents a vision of the art of Yin Xhaoyang as resonating with the feeling of this ‘flesh’ of the world that contains the circulation of a chain of figures which occasions aesthetic excess. It is eruptive in its manifestation because this excess appears to exceed the figures that are employed to present as if what is sayable is never in front of what is seeable. This gives rise to the sense that the publication has a weight that is an outcome of a surplus of not everything that might be said being available to language. Painting appears to contain the touch feel of the world which is why they are not purely documents of light nor reducible to the figurations they appear absorbed within. They are beside themselves as documents of a world that is to come.

Every book on art must elect a method through which it is read. An art historical schematic account elects an overview connected to an unfolding narrative that offers itself as a convincing logic that such a method will render the subject as a knowable subject. The multiple micro-narrative of this book opens out different passages and stylistic encounters, which is closer to a labyrinth through which the reader might collect different fragmentary insights. The visual mapping that attends this is both relational but also singular and this makes possible the act of dwelling within this space because the text itself is already based on the perception that writing is a spacing of sense in which not everything needs to be signified. This opens out to a double gesture, the first aesthetic and the other ethical in which the essayist lend their insights whilst refuses the temptation to attempt to totalise. This is in accord with the art that is being offered to such a gestural reflex.

The art exhibits itself; the book presents the potentiality of the relationships which are offered by the work, a play of image and temporality comes to the fore, and matters of obscurity, sink back into a shadow region at the threshold of what might have been presented.
The book is a system of notation which regulated to desire to be witness alongside the desire to know. It is the generation of a context: personal, aesthetic, temporal, historical. No order can be assumed by these circulations as they are the chaotic starting point for an invention. The extent to which invention occurs opens out discrete spaces in which the reader might dwell.

The book is an assembly of figures, densities, intensities, offerings, withdrawals, encounters, pleasures.

Turning these pages creates a rhythm. Without this rhythm there is a dull assembly, a trophy like product. The reader is faced on the one side with a poetics and on the other side didactics. Didactics is sober, poetics excessive, rhythm comes alive with such contraries. The reader is caught up in such a rhythm in wanting to learn, but also wanting to be party to a redistribution of sense. The reader becomes aware that the appropriation of the artist is not in any way like that of the spectator, but rather follows a course that is empathetic to the complexities of the aesthetic process.

How can an artist trace influence as disparate as those that are cited here. Art historical logic would not be able to create a deductive set of figures for this, but an artist can bend the notes that enables this occur. The work is the sum of all the notes that are bent, all the layers that are generated, and all the folds which are processed. There is a great deal of disorganisation to pass through to stay with such complexity. Aesthetic autonomy resides in such a passage.

The book proves little but does add to the weight of significance. The art works remain true to their pulsation born out of their existence as a sensuous shining. They find their truth there, and resonance within such particles of becoming manifest.