Ink, Water, and Xuan Paper

My materials are simple: ink, Korean color pigments, and Xuan paper. But within these simple materials is a depth you could study a whole life and never exhaust.

Xuan paper drinks the ink and makes the bloom

Xuan paper accepts ink in a particular way. It does not receive it obediently, as Western watercolor paper does; it hesitates a little, and it blooms and seeps very readily. In ink painting it is the paper that registers, with great delicacy, the gradations of the ink, the spread of the wash, the movement of the brush. It is not simply a surface to paint on — it is a medium that records the motion of brush and ink.

Xuan paper does not hide the artist's stroke; it shows it exactly as it was made. It is a paper that records the relationship between brush, ink, and water.

The gradations of ink

Ink is not a single black. Meeting water, it becomes dozens of grays and blacks. Dark ink, dry ink, pale ink — the eye that reads the subtle layers between them is the heart of East Asian painting. That is how, without color, a single ink can render mist and rock and pine alike.

Not fearing the empty space

In East Asian painting, the empty places are not empty. They are mist, water, sky, breath. The thing beginners find hardest is exactly this empty space. To set down the urge to fill everything — that is the beginning of a long practice.

In class I always say: before learning how to paint well, learn how to listen to what the paper, the ink, and the water are saying on their own.