Interview: Paul Moss on The Single Feather of Auspicious Light

”As they say of expressive calligraphy; "out of the heart, down the arm, through the brush on to the paper".  The same is true, right there in front of your careful, caring eyes, of the more intimate and personal paintings in the literati tradition.”

Sydney L. Moss’s catalogue A Single Auspicious Feather of Light

Sydney L. Moss’s catalogue A Single Auspicious Feather of Light, published in 2012, is anything but light, but it is beautiful.

The catalogue features, for the first time, life-sized reproductions of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy, acquired by then-director Paul Moss and his son Oli over a six-year period in China. It is a epic undertaking that took six years, and may be a contender, thanks to the obsession for detail, for the most expensively produced catalogue of all time!

Pavilion is pleased to offer this catalogue for sale in our shop, for readers interested in the stunning treasures within its pages, and the scholarly accompaniments by Paul and Oli, whose care and fascination for the subject have led to this magnificent document, a record of great Ming and Qing works of art.

For those interested in the project, we are delighted to share the below interview with Paul.

T’ao Leng-yuëh

When and how did you first begin to envisage this project, and how did you start work on it?

In 2004/2005 it seemed evident to me that a new period of availability of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy was burgeoning in China.  Following upon the New York market of the 70’s and 80’s, which had shifted to Hong Kong, the appearance of a plethora of new mainland auction houses from say 2002 promised to drag on to the art market an exciting supply.  Values had not yet really taken off; one had to make judgements at a distance but the possibilities of endless playtime were extremely attractive, and I didn't resist. 

By the start of the Single Feather project I had already bought quite a number of worthwhile contenders, and we were still buying for the book while deep into the six-year project.  We also sold several of the contents as we went along, which made for logistical problems but at least we managed to pay for the book that way.

The meticulous process of reproduction took six years - how does one realise a project of this scale? 

To realise such a project you hold your nose and jump in at the deep end.  After a year I employed my son Oli, fresh out of university, to be my research assistant.  This was also a way of immersing him in old Chinese graphic arts, and it worked.  During this period he made two three to four-week trips to China a year, for the auctions, and with my HK agent and his Beijing friends operated as my eyes on the ground, sending back closeups and opinions as I ransacked the home library for evidence, comparable versions etc. 

Had we realised at the outset just how huge and how expensive to print the resultant book would be, we might have rethought our strategy.  We didn't know what we were going to end up with, only that it was a time when such things were possible, the art needed and deserved it, and it seemed a big shame to have so much great stuff and not record it somehow.  We made it all up as we went along.

What can a viewer expect from the life-size reproductions, that they can’t get elsewhere?

It seemed and seems obvious to me that small illustrations of painting and calligraphy (anything smaller than lifesize) fail to convey the reality and the beauty of the work of art, and thus do the job that we require of any illustration.  If you have a small reproduction, as you do in most books, then you kind of have to know already what the work of art actually looks like, or you'll be guessing. 

Our intention was to not only record our great good fortune and cleverness in winning these beauties, it was to turn on a putative new generation of admirers, participants, students and academics - and hence our clientele.  We had a history prior to This Single Feather of publishing paintings in their original format (viz. Scrolling Images, a chunky boxed set of ten handscrolls, each a hardbound foldout but of manageable size), and that taught us that reproductions of the goodies we loved needed to be lifesize or they wouldn't be telling the truth. 

Our whole point was to reproduce as much as we could both lifesize and in the format as it was created.  Fans, albums and handscrolls were as far as possible printed in full size and with as many foldout format handscrolls as we and our printers could muster.  I did originally have a plan for printing quite large hanging scrolls lifesize too, but once it was demonstrated to us how impossible it was going to be for even the most dedicated viewer to refold neatly our vast unfolded sheets of paper, so that the volumes might still function as a book, we gave up on that idea.

Wu Bin

Which dynasty is reflected in these works, and why did you choose these particular pieces?

The book is virtually all Ming and Qing dynasty painting and calligraphy, with a very few super-special literati objects and a fascinating C20th wartime folding fan painting / calligraphy / bamboo "frame" to finish off with.  Ming and Qing is what is a) available and b) the areas that we can relate to and understand.  Earlier works are, to me, to us, a minefield and we don't trust them or ourselves not to make expensive mistakes.  Also, the condition of very early works can be a nightmare.  On top of that, I/we have an intuitive attraction for the wildly subversive range of the arts of the Ming-Qing transition in the seventeenth century, and its aftermath into the early Qing. 

The adherents of Ming loyalism, many of them declining to serve as officials under the Qing, others collaborating with the Manchu hierarchy but with an ambiguity of sympathies, others actually fighting and dying in efforts of hopeless resistance, seem to us a phenomenon in art that echoes the resistance to the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty but was more wide-ranging and is far more realistically available.  There is a great richness in that cultural context which you can see and feel in their works of art, and it means a great deal to us.  We wanted to convey as much of that richness and variety as possible.  As for why did we choose those works; well, we buy our taste.  Sometimes that taste is informed as much by the theoretical content of what we read and know about, sometimes it's because the work is extremely fine or beautiful or atmospheric.  The range of the aesthetics concerned is pretty much infinite.

Ch’ien Tu

Do you have favourites among the artworks depicted, and could you talk about a few of those?

We bought pretty much every work because we loved and love it.  Of course, some are more important than others or tug at the heartstrings of regret more than most, because we felt that we needed to sell them all too soon, to keep the project rolling nicely along.  Of the foldout lifesize handscrolls, I think that maybe we remain to the most attached to the Ding Yunpeng incredibly fine and delicate baimiao luohan crossing the sea, and also the Wu Bin so-called Peach Blossom Spring handscroll, which he somehow contrived to take place across three separate islands.  The Ding Yunpeng we bought on one glorious occasion at a Shanghai sale when the city was hit by a typhoon.  Phones and internet went down, and only those staying at the hotel the auction was held in could bid.  We bought a number of truly unrepeatable works, and had a hard time immediately affording our buys.  These days are long gone.  

I should also mention (there are too many favourites to count) the two large hanging scrolls of the Yellow Mountains by the Buddhist monk-recluses who lived there, deep in the fastnesses of Huangshan; monks Xuezhuang (Hsueh-chuang, umlaut over the u) and Yizhi (I-chih).  Those are extremely rare; we haven't seen another to buy since, and we've been looking.  And the extraordinary set of four tall hanging scrolls of genuinely weird ink prunus by one of our favourite literary heroes, Fang Yizhi.  The Anhui school of painting is very close to our hearts, and we continue to focus on buying Anhui works not only of the seventeenth century but later too.

The experience of exploring these catalogues is to be fully immersed in the painting. There doesn’t seem to be a particular beginning or end - is that something you chose to do, and why?

There was intended to be a beginning of sorts, and an ending, but there is so much chaotic opportunism in the middle that you might be forgiven for not recognising it.  We meant to start with Shen Zhou, the granddaddy of the Wu School and the foundation stone of classic Ming literati painting and calligraphy, and fortunately for us we somehow managed to acquire a masterful calligraphy handscroll of his "Falling Flowers" poems.  Talk about profound.  And we meant to finish off with somewhere late in the Qing dynasty, probably before the Four Rens, but our final fling Tao Lengyue rainy banana plant folding fan ensemble seemed too good to leave out.  So yes, that is a bit of an afterthought.  By and large, we had intended not to get into twentieth century art, but to stop by the mid-nineteenth century with a flourish from the likes of Qian Du and Zhang Yin and his followers.  The abandoned byways of publishing are littered with the decayed remains of good intentions.

What can we learn today from the Chinese paintings in this catalogue?

Mostly, we learn that it feels like a Golden Age that we can't do any more, not to anything like that scale.  We still manage to buy the occasional great work - virtually never an orthodox landscape, those are more than spoken for - but it's few and far between, and we have to get lucky too.  That's the historical lesson.  What you mostly stand to learn from surveying the works reproduced is just how endlessly varied and meaningful classical Chinese painting and writing can be.  When you look slow and hard at lifesize images you stand a chance of grasping the hand and the character of the artist.  As they say of expressive calligraphy; "out of the heart, down the arm, through the brush on to the paper".  The same is true, right there in front of your careful, caring eyes, of the more intimate and personal paintings in the literati tradition.

Shen Zhou