Walls & Mist Patrick Lundberg’s Paintings

And suspended above the earth, I look across to unstable forms.

It was on a trip to the sacred Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province that I thought I came to a personal understanding of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Ascending in a gondola, looking across to the rugged, wooded range shrouded in late-December mist opposite, the scene appeared a precise analogue for the art. The steep terrain seemed to flatten out in the manner of a Hitchcock dolly zoom, a vertiginous experience of spatial contraction of the world simultaneous with the apprehension of a correlative relationship to a mode of painting. Suspended and moving, the landscape seemed to scroll around me, a painterly experience of and in the world.

As a literal experience, it captures attention. Nor is that experience completely removed from the greater significance of the centuries-old art form it called to mind. Nevertheless, in the recognition of Chinese landscape paintings’ verisimilitude lies also the very condition that rejects the myopia of thinking them to be merely representational. The swirling shrouds of obscuring clouds open out a physical and spiritual relationship with the land; attending and revealing its steep inclines, filling and emptying the phenomenological experience of being in this place at this time. So, too, the more expansive response to the paintings such experiences inspire, in which the fugitive qualities