Vacío y plenitud

Emptiness and Fullness is one of those fundamental works that allow access to the understanding of Chinese painting. Its author, François Cheng, a well-known specialist in Chinese poetry and painting, exposes the development that painting has had in China over fifteen centuries, but his study is not historical but philosophical. The first part explores the painting system in relation to Taoist philosophy based on the notion of emptiness that every artist must know, the fundamental axis of the Chinese conception of the universe and its understanding of the objective world, linked to the idea of the vital breath. and to the supreme state to which man must tend. Cheng also explains to the Western reader the ascription of this art to the Taoist conception, incorporating fragments of Chinese painters and treatise writers on elements and moments of pictorial activity.