Shitao, Returning Home

This is an album called Returning Home by Shitao. He spent the first forty or so years of his life as a monk. And then he starts to think, “You know, I want to get some recognition in my life, I’m a great painter.” So he goes to seek fame and fortune in the capital in Beijing, but he becomes disillusioned. It’s in this moment that he makes this album. The experience it presents is serial. You’re required to flip each page. Leaf number one gives you an elevated view of a landscape with a stream running through it. There’s a man sitting in a little skiff near a stone bridge, and so you’re zoomed out, and then you turn the page and you zoom way in. You’re presented with plum blossoms that are so detailed you can make out the individual pistils and stamens. You can feel the rough texture of the branch. Shitao is really taking you on a rollercoaster ride here. As you move through the album, you have that kind of boomerang experience. You could think of it as a kind of dream logic, that hard cut from one place to the next, where you’re saying to yourself, “How did I get here? I thought I was on that mountainside gazing off at a distant mountain. What is this flower doing in my face?” And then all of a sudden you get zoomed back out. Each of these paintings is paired with a poem. The pictorial shift is mirrored by a calligraphic shift in style. So, on the first image we have bolder, archaic calligraphy, and then we shift to the second one, and all of a sudden the strokes of the calligraphy are very sinewy and attenuated. You can almost think of them as branches of trees. I think that the climax comes in leaf number five. We see a man in a boat passing through this ineffable, stripped-down landscape. There’s no place to moor his boat, there’s nowhere to stop. The poem itself speaks to his rootlessness, dislocation, loneliness, and melancholy. This is the first place that you encounter any color. Only the face of the man in the boat has just a light wash of a skin tone. It makes him more real. It’s impossible not to read this as Shitao himself. This is a guy who’s asking the question, “Who am I, and what am I supposed to do with my life?” And that’s something that’s really easy to identify with. When you get to the end of the album, he’s just sitting by the window painting narcissus. Maybe you can read that as a resolution, maybe the place that he’s sitting is the home that he’s found. The journey that you undertake in this album is really personally affecting. I feel like I’ve been in the boat with Shitao.