Curatorial Insight on Clouds in East Asian Art

Shi Tao (1642–1707), the seventeenth-century individualist monk-painter most known for his ferocious compositions of interiority and soul, went further. Shi equated clouds as pictorial metamorphoses that bound the painting’s composition: “river and clouds, because of the way they gather or disperse, constitute what binds it [the painting] together.”

Calligraphy, painting’s cognate aesthetic form, also relies on the cloud for its dynamism. In the words of theorist and imperial court artist Zhang Yanyuan (c.815-c.875), the most critical of all brushstrokes was “a cloud stretching for a thousand miles.” Official calligraphers since the earliest beginnings of the imperial state (c.221 BCE) were urged to move their wrists with a swing, “as rising clouds over a great mountain.”

Ceramic and bronzes, too, come to life through the cloud form. Typically relegated by the discipline of art history to the categories of the applied arts or dismissed as superfluously decorative, painted swirls on ceramic vessels and the ash-driven glazed ceramics produced through deft manipulations of kiln “atmospheres” manifest endless iterations of indeterminate colors lying somewhere between green, blue, grey, ivory, or tawny yellow. It is no wonder that a Tang dynasty (618-907) poet of the ninth century likened such shades to something as bewildering as “green clouds.”

Linking the arts of brush with the object world, the cloud seemingly defies exact definition. Functioning as numerous motifs, framing devices, a conceptual charge for notational and poetic imagery, and a desktop icon of infinite data, the cloud’s ubiquity serves as a reminder that perhaps humanity’s greatest constant, in history and today, is its boundless possibility rather than strict definitions. Rather than the cloud, perhaps we have clouding.