Note: This is a raw transcription of an audio recording. Part of our mission is to release transcriptions as soon as possible, to improve access to M+ talks. Therefore—while we strive for accuracy—in some places, these transcriptions may be imperfect.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Good afternoon everyone. I’m Lesley Ma, Curator of Ink Art for M+ at the West Kowloon Cultural District. I’m happy to be here with you today and talk about the connections between eco-aesthetics and ink art. We are honoured to have invited Taiwanese writer Mr Liu Ka-shiang to shed some light on this. Speaking of this topic, many of you may wonder, what Mr Liu’s eco-aesthetics has to do with ink art. I guess all of you here came with this question in mind. We are now staging the first exhibition of the M+ ink art collection at the M+ Pavilion. What we want to bring to discussion is ink art not only as an artistic activity of medium throughout the past sixty years of its development, but also as a kind of ink aesthetics in itself. If we look at landscape paintings and calligraphy as ink aesthetics, we will come to realise that ink art doesn’t have to be paintings. It doesn’t have to portray landscapes. It can be an expression of our feelings and observation of nature. This is why Mr Liu is with us today to talk about the subliminal views in landscape paintings from the perspective of a veteran hiker. In the busy life of Hong Kong, we may not have the luxury to see much of nature. We also hope Mr Liu can give us some pointers. We live in the city and sometimes go hiking, but what are we actually seeing? Perhaps when we look again at landscape paintings and ink art in new light, we will feel them differently. The talk will be around one and a half hours. Afterwards I’ll open the floor to your questions and moderate the Q and A session. Do feel free to join our discussion. You should have received a handout with an overview of the talk. Mr Liu may mention some terms that are quite unfamiliar in our daily life or some descriptions about nature. You may refer to the handout for an idea of what these mean. After the talk, there will be shuttle bus service to the M+ Pavilion at the entrance of Asia Society Hong Kong Center for those of you who are interested in our exhibition. The Pavilion is in West Kowloon, so we hope... It may take a bit of trouble to go there from here, so we have arranged the shuttle bus to make it easier for everyone. Without further ado, let’s welcome Mr Liu on stage, and please be reminded to turn off your mobile phones. Thank you.

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] Thank you, Curator, for the introduction, and for suggesting this topic half a year ago in Taiwan and inviting me over to share my two pennies. Can someone who loves hiking in Hong Kong dialogue with ink paintings? What I’m hoping to do today, in some ninety minutes or less, is to take a bold journey back in time to 600, 1,600 or even 4,000 or 5,600 years ago, to explore what landscape paintings in ink art is, centring on the geographical location of Hong Kong, in light of the ancient geography of Lingnan and Hong Kong. I’ll now tell you about my exploration. I must start my journey with this story. Around September—February, a writer in Hangzhou called me and asked me for help. He was going to publish a book, a travel guide to Hangzhou, and invited me to give a lecture there. I thought of the picturesque West Lake in Hangzhou, and accepted the invitation at once. That same day I flew to Hangzhou and went there all the way on the highway once I landed, but I found that we passed Hangzhou without stopping, so I asked the writer who invited me, ‘Aren’t we going to Hangzhou?’ ‘We were, but we are arriving at a new neighbourhood to the north of Hangzhou.’ He even told me, ‘There’s a public building over there, built by Ando Tadao. You’ll give the lecture there.’ I was so thrilled to hear about Tadao Ando that I didn’t care where I had to go.

[Audience laughter]

So, we were there at last. I got off and asked where I was. He gave me this name: Liangzhu [良渚]. On the two sheets of A4 paper distributed to you, there is the Chinese character of ‘zhu’ [渚]. It’s written with three droplets on the left representing water and the word ‘zhe’ on the right. The whole word is pronounced as zhu. This word ‘zhu’ is very important to what I’m going to talk about today, and it will relate to the word ‘chong’ [涌] and other words about Hong Kong. Liangzhu is the name of this place I found myself in. I had never heard of it before. That was my first time. The writer made a special remark that there is something big happening in Liangzhu to the north of Hangzhou in recent years, something he must told me about.

In Liangzhu, excavation work has unearthed heritage materials dating back to 5,000 years ago. This tells you the Chinese civilisation began not along the Yellow River; there was already a Liangzhu culture in Hangzhou to the south of the Yangtze River at the time. This culture was very progressive. If you visit the museum there, you will see a lot of things, a lot of exquisite artefacts, that show this culture is not any less significant in value than the other one to the north of the Yellow River. When we arrived, I put down my things in the hostel. He just gave me a minute to settle myself down, and he took me out. Imagine, I just landed and spent around 1.5 hours on the highway, and after less than five minutes in the hostel, I set out to walk the mountain trail for more than three hours. It was not the usual trail of mountains, but of wilderness. Where did it lead to? There were rape flowers, and there was water, too. I had not realised what an environment like this implied.

Since then, I had been wondering about the word ‘zhu’. I later came up with an explanation for it, according to the dictionary, or from my own experience of walking there. The word ‘zhu’ is very interesting. It refers to the kind of small patches of land on water, surrounded by a marine environment. We call what emerges out of water an ‘island’. We have different words to describe it in Chinese like ‘zhou’ [洲] ‘dao’ [島] or ‘ting’ [汀], but this one is called ‘zhu’. They really like to use the word ‘zhu’ here. What is so special about ‘zhu’? It is fertile soil surrounded by abundant water from the river. How fertile, and how abundant? For the next three hours I was walking in a ‘zhu’ environment like that, to the south of the Yangtze River (Jiangnan). In less than five minutes that I got in, walking along the ridge between vegetable fields in the shoes I’m wearing today – I brought them here to show you, this is the pair I put on when I usually go hiking in Hong Kong – once I stepped in, alas, I was stepping on clay. It was extremely viscous, everywhere I went became muddy. For every step I took, a kilo of sludge came dragging along. I stopped after three minutes of walking. Why? I just couldn’t go on. I picked up a branch, dug out the sludge and washed my shoes by the river. I felt the texture of the sludge. It was so viscous. What could you do with it? When I was small and didn’t have any money or electric toys in Taiwan, we made little mud figurines and vessels. We made them with sludge like this. Just give it a nudge and it can stick very well. Let me tell you, this sludge – we call it clay – is a very good one. You can find it in the countryside of Hangzhou. Is this the kind of environment known as ‘zhu’? What immediately came to my mind was that you don’t need much fertilisers to grow a lot in such a fertile environment. Say in February, as shown in the picture, what do you see the most? Rape flowers. The flowers there were quite unlike those in Taiwan. They were very big and tall. People made oil with it. Rape flowers in Taiwan are fertilisers at best. There was another crop there besides rape flowers, known as broad beans. Their flowers were purple at the time, sometimes they are white. These are the broad beans.

All the way during those three hours of walking, I saw mostly rape flowers, and broad beans too. They grew out of the fertile land of ‘zhu’. While I was washing the sludge away, I remembered the pot that the hostel put on showcase. I saw it when I came out. The pot was part of Liangzhu culture. What was it? It was an earthen urn made of clay. There were many earthen urns, in black or brown. I looked it up later and found that they were basically made of the soil of ‘zhu’: the pots are created with the soil that is available in their location. This one dated back to 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists dug out a lot of these pots in their excavation work. The relics were dramatic with a great diversity, named collectively as ‘Liangzhu culture’. This isn’t all there is to Liangzhu culture. I want to show you something else in a moment. So we can see Liangzhu culture is very exquisite, born out of a region thriving with life in all its different forms. While I was cleaning my shoes, I noticed how distinct this sludge in ‘zhu’ was, and if this soil is the soil of the Liangzhu culture, the region it belongs to must be tremendously expansive, covering Suzhou and Hangzhou. Even the Jiangnan area and around Qiantang River at large may be related to ‘zhu’, though we weren’t... we weren’t very aware of it before.

There by the river, I saw a stone bridge from afar. Behind the bridge I saw a local community. Many public communities were built over there in Hangzhou, and a community museum invited a master architect from Japan to build them a wonderful library, which was where my lecture would be. The stone bridge really caught me by surprise. I went to check the bridge out. What was I thinking of? ‘Zhu’. For the three hours of walking, I hadn’t come across a single piece of rock. All the while I was walking on black clay. The granite bridge seemed to be 400 or 500 years’ old at least, but where did the rocks come from? I could just think of two possibilities. The hills in Hangzhou aren’t very tall, perhaps 400 to 500 metres at most, similar to those in Hong Kong, so I went uphill to take a look. There wasn’t that kind of rocks at all. Where did the granite on the stone bridge come from then? I gave it a good thought, and supposed the rocks were transported there from various places by canals.

Well, that’s it. The next day, I went to see the Liangzhu Museum, which houses the culture of a place with 5,000 years of history, different from that which also dated back to 5,000 years ago to the north of the Yellow River. For a culture of 5,000 years in Zhejiang, what is its exquisiteness represented by? This thing is called ‘cong’ [Chinese jade vessel], a very delicate one. You may see the picture here. It was in the Liangzhu Museum, but it actually was bought from abroad. These fine artefacts were in San Francisco, in the United States, possibly dug out by anthropologists or archaeologists from the United States or Europe during the battle of the eight-power allied forces against China or in the late Qing dynasty, and taken to their own museums. This was highly possible, but there could be other reasons.

Apart from this ‘cong’, there is another artefact called jade. These are still not quite the same material as the stone bridge I mentioned. The bridge was granite, and this looked like marble or 'cong'. A culture that could produce ‘cong’ and jade 5,000 years ago must be very sophisticated. This is what comes from a culture known as Liangzhu. I’ll show you another picture. What’s interesting here is that there are also some bowls, in addition to ‘cong’ and jade. But what’s indicated below isn’t Hangzhou where the ‘zhu’ culture is found. Where is it? Gansu, Jiangxi or Henan. These places have ’cong’ and jade, too. What does it mean? It means these artefacts from 4,000 to 5,000 years ago were unearthed in different places, that ‘cong’ and jade are found in the entire continental region along the Yellow River or the Yangtze River, forming different regional cultures.

The ‘zhu’ culture is representative in areas such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Why am I stressing it here? We are talking about landscape paintings today – landscape ink paintings. If you look up in the encyclopaedia or any general information, you will know ink art came into being in the Tang dynasty, developed all the way through the Five Dynasties and culminated in the Northern and Southern Song dynasties. Ink paintings are basically classified this way: focusing on people in the Tang dynasty, landscapes during the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song dynasty, and then figures of nature like flowers and birds. This was the development of Chinese ink paintings, progressing from people, landscapes to flowers and birds. [The paintings] have also generally been categorised into these three types, though some scholars and ink art researchers later believe Chinese ink paintings shouldn’t be reduced to these three types and be defined more specifically. How so? I’m not going into that as it’s too complicated.

Today we talk about landscape paintings, so let me jump right to the Northern Song dynasty. I’m also trying to look more closely into the broad category of landscape painting. What I want to discuss now is panoramic landscape painting, comparing the Lingnan landscape and the naming of places in Hong Kong, with landscape painting of the Northern Song dynasty over 2,000 years ago. I’ll give you an idea of some of the features of landscape painting in the Northern Song dynasty. Those of you who paint may find them very familiar. In the Northern Song dynasty, there was Guo Xi whose two works are shown here. Guo Xi is a master landscape painter at that time. Landscapes in the Northern Song dynasty – as you can see from his works here – tend to portray mountains more, as the place was indeed mountainous. You will see mountains being the subject in these paintings, and these landscape paintings are portraits; they are upright. This mountain is so full of force, sturdy and intense. You can recognise the Northern Song dynasty at once, but the Southern Song dynasty was a different story.

At the time of the Northern Song dynasty – you’ll know from history – there was a very violent country to the north, even more violent than North Korea now, called Jin, Jin as in Jin dynasty. Jin captured two emperors of Northern Song, which in effect terminated the dynasty and brought about Southern Song. In portraying landscapes, the artists’ mental landscapes that reflected on society at the time also seeped into the paintings. Now we’ll look at the landscapes of the Southern Song dynasty. Of course they looked different from those of Northern Song, not only in terms of social conditions. The Southern Song dynasty was battling against Jin, and the tug-of-war resulted in gains and losses on both sides in a kind of gruesome balance, so landscape painters in Southern Song might be worrying about the country and nostalgic about Northern Song. The environment around Suhang might also have inspired them to depict the fine scenery of Jiangnan. These paintings are a great deal different from the lofty mountains we see in those of Northern Song. The landscapes we see here are exquisite views from the south. This painting here is the most famous one of the Southern Song dynasty, representing the evolution of ink painting, by master painter Li Tang. His works marked the beginning of a more serene and refined style. It is painted in a horizontal perspective and mellow tone. What does it mean? It evokes a sensibility unlike the lofty, intense landscape viewed from afar of Northern Song, and mountains cease to be the subject. What is the aesthetics of Li Tang? Very intriguing. It lies in the oblique angle. The visages of mountains depicted from the side are different from those of Northern Song, which are fairly easy to tell apart. It’s not difficult to distinguish, apart from the name, between the landscape paintings of Northern and Southern Song dynasties. Does this disparity have anything to do with ‘zhu’? This is the intriguing part: it does. The public life of the Southern Song dynasty took place in the area around Suhang – as I mentioned – in a form known currently as the ‘zhu’ culture. The culture persisted from 5,000 years ago up to the Song dynasty. The people at the time of the Liangzhu culture were no longer around, but I believe its descendants lived there until the Song dynasty.

This isn’t the point; the point is how abundant, diverse and various such an environment is. I am looking at the characteristics of the ‘zhu’ culture here. What are they? As you can see, at its prime time, there was black clay, and the people had the luxury of time to create beautiful wares like ‘cong’ and jade. They could build a wonderful granite bridge with rock materials transported there from afar. They could craft hardware – or artefacts – to this level of complexity, which tells you their society knew no poverty. It was also a sophisticated society that cultivated fine art. This is why many people believe the most mesmerising and picturesque scenery of landscape paintings are to be seen in the works of the Southern Song dynasty.

What does the ‘zhu’ culture of Southern Song stand for? In modern language, it is the capacity of free time afforded by slow living, to connect with nature in multiple ways and indulge in the arts. How did the people connect with nature? I’m going to show you some famous ink and landscape paintings as well as some less well-known ones.

Look at the word ‘zhu’. In order to make sense of other words describing features of Jiangnan portrayed in ink paintings other than ‘zhu’, I’ll have to introduce the region of Suhang. Not only can you find ‘zhu’ there, but also ‘ting’ [汀]. If I had not brought up ‘zhu’ today, what other words related to water can you find in that area? Say in Hong Kong, we may come up with ‘chung’ [涌], ‘lik’ [瀝] and ‘chau [洲] etc. In that greater region, there are many words that mean ‘by the waterside’, ‘ting’ may be the most common one. Consider this word ‘ting’, and compare it with ‘zhu’ I shared with you earlier. Unlike ‘zhu’, ‘ting’ is, as shown in this photo, like this, the part that sticks out at a distance. The one here doesn’t stick out that much. Look at this one, this is where ‘ting’ is. There are sometimes grasses, or trees. What other features by the waterside are there in this area, besides ‘ting’? In fact there are a lot. In northern China there are many words related to earth and hills, and in the south, earth and water. The word that’s closer to ‘zhu’ – we’re having a Chinese class now –[audience laughter] is ‘dai’ [埭], the earth countering water by a headland. The ‘dai’ is actually quite similar to ‘zhu’, in that it also suggests abundant water and fertility; ‘a land of fish and rice’, though I think the ‘dai’ environment is not as fertile as that of ‘zhu’. I’ll show you in a minute, the word ‘dai’ as well as many other words.

The word ‘po’ [浦], with the three water droplets on the left, can be read alongside the ‘po’ [埔] in ‘Tai Po Market’. The word ‘lik’ [瀝] exists in Hong Kong too, but the other words are even more intriguing: ‘jing’ [涇], ‘yang’ [洋], ‘tan’ [潭], ‘wei’ [圩], ‘bu’ [埠] and ‘wu’ [塢]. Each of these words represents a certain geographic environment and landform. Google them and you’ll see they are all distinct from one another. If we apply these characteristics in viewing a scroll of panorama ink painting, like A Landscape of Rivers and Mountains, or Along the River During the Qingming Festival, applyingany one of those words into the painting, and you may be able to see them in perspective. Try it some time.

I want to show you this. I take these decorative boats every time I visit Suhang, touring the peaceful little canals in them. While I was sitting there on my own, I wondered how ‘zhu’ could be understood. For instance, are the rocks of hundred or thousand years’ old, mainly granite perhaps, and formed over long periods of time, part of the ‘zhu’ as well? Yes. Some people regard them as a ‘shi zhu’ [rocky ‘zhu’, an island made of rocks]. Some see them as a ‘duan zhu’ [isolated island]. There are many names. In fact ‘zhu’ can be found in landscape ink painting, or virtually anywhere. Let me list some of these words that can be found in the dictionary for you. There are ‘zhou zhu’ [a small island on water], ‘yu zhu’ [fish ‘zhu’, an island people can fish on], ‘shi zhu’ [rocky ‘zhu, an island made of rocks], ‘sha zhu’ [sandy ‘zhu’, an island made of sand], ‘shui zhu’ [water ‘zhu’, a small island on water], ‘lin zhu’ [forest ‘zhu’, a vegetated island], ‘ye zhu’ [an island in the wilderness], ‘fu zhu’ [ducks ‘zhu’, an island where ducks live], ‘hong zhu’ [an island where birds rest], ‘zhou zhu’ [boats ‘zhu’, an island where boats settle], ‘chuan zhu’ [stream ‘zhu’, an island in the middle of a water stream], ‘jiang zhu’ [river ‘zhu’, an island in the middle of a river], ‘tuan zhu’ [an island in the middle of a turbulent river], ‘gui zhu’ [bay trees ‘zhu’, an island with bay trees] and ‘lan zhu’ [an embellished name for an island] etc. There are so many words describing ‘zhu’. Why is that so? It can be a noun to be modified by descriptions before or after it. What does it have to do with landscape paintings? Once you figure out what all these words mean, you’ll see they are connected in many ways. Reading landscape paintings from the perspective of ‘zhu’ is very exciting. Adding the words from the ancient Jiangnan district names I just mentioned, like ‘duan’, ‘wu’, ‘ting’, ‘zhou’ and ‘jing’ to the core of the ‘zhu’, and you’ll see how these words are all linked to landscape paintings. You may be confused by some of the words, for example this one. Here are a few that carry special meanings. Both words read ‘zhu ya’ [渚芽、渚牙], written differently – one with the grass radical [two little crosses] on top standing for vegetation. What’s the difference? It gets interesting as you look them up in the dictionary. Google ‘zhu ya’ without the grass radical [渚牙]. It refers to an island where the grass sprouts. I never knew such a word before. Then what’s the other ‘zhu ya’ [渚芽]? It means a shoot that comes off a tree branch. In landscape paintings you may have seen some new shoots growing off a tree in finer detail. That’s it. What is ‘zhu tian’ [渚田], you may ask? My guess is a paddy field, or some other field. What’s ‘zhu lian’ [渚蓮] then? Lotus flower. How about ‘zhu tan’ [渚潭]? Perhaps a depression, a puddle. And ‘zhu yan’ [渚煙, an island covered by smoke ]? This one is significant, too. It may be expressed in ink paintings not as the white space in landscapes, but as a splashing technique when you paint mountains and waters, maybe we can call it ‘zhu yan’. A ‘zhou zhu’ must be about boats. A lot of boats mooring at a ‘zhu’ is a ‘zhou zhu’. What is a ‘hong zhu’? ‘Hong’ is a big bird. A puddle where big birds settle is a ‘hong zhu’. ‘Fu zhu’ is a duck floating on water. If I had not known about the word ‘zhu’, I would not have found out these things. All these words are in the Kangxi Dictionary. All of these... If we talk about landscape paintings not in terms of the aesthetics of Chiang Hsun (b. 1947), but learn these geographical features and look for them in the paintings, wouldn’t it also be fun and give us another way of reading landscape paintings? I have been thinking about it to this day, but I still have not been able to articulate my thoughts in an organised way, so I am bringing this up today.

Now let's take a look at another random landscape painting – there will be more by famous painters later. What can we see here? I wrote some notes below. This is ‘zhu ya’ [渚芽]. This character is wrong. It should be the ‘zhu ya’ [渚牙] with young sprouts and lotus flowers emerging on grassland. There is also ‘zhu lian’: lotus flowers. ‘Zhou zhu’ is where boats are berthed. And we also have ‘sha zhu’ [sandy ‘zhu’], a deposited piece of land connected to a ‘zhu’.

Now look at the next painting. This is quite interesting. We can relate it to ‘zhu’. Of course you can also relate to other words we went through before, like ‘wu’ and ‘duan’ and so on, but with ‘zhu’, we can come up with ‘lin zhu’, ‘zhu yan’ and ‘jiang zhu’. ‘Jiang zhu’ is a large river: with wide banks and a broad river bed. This is what we call ‘jiang zhu’. Here is a closer look. The rocky part here may be a ‘shi zhu’, and there are ‘cao zhu’ [草渚, grass ‘zhu’]and ‘mao zhu’[茅渚, thatch ‘zhu’]. What is ‘mao zhu’? It refers to these shafts of reed. An ink painter may not know what it is, the type we use to bundle pork or fish, but he can draw it, so I can describe it now. As we are talking about landscape paintings today, you can explain lots of fascinating elements that you did not know before if you learn these features. With the help of ‘zhu’ or other words, I will find this painting very intriguing, extraordinary and unique. This one, for example, is great. Why? You can identify ‘fu zhu’, and ‘hong zhu’ about big birds, as well as ‘shi zhu’ and a ‘zhu’ about walls ‘ping zhu’. There are also ‘zhou zhu’ and ‘qiao zhu’[橋渚, bridge ‘zhu’]. The presence of all these kinds of ‘zhu’ in the ink painting makes it rich in meaning. There are numerous allusions by extension of ‘zhu’.

Now this one. [cough] We will look at paintings by more famous painters now, such as Li Keran during the early Republican years. He was a painter from southern China, portraying landscapes of the south. In his paintings I can see some interesting words: ‘gui zhu’ [桂渚, osmanthus ‘zhu’] or ‘liu zhu’ [柳渚, willow ‘zhu’], and even more intriguing is the ‘lu zhu’ [蘆渚, reed ‘zhu’] at the back that looks like reeds. When I identify ‘gui zhu’ and ‘liu zhu’ in Li’s painting, I know it has something to do with the south, definitely not the north. Apart from the southern scenery, some elements in plants may also give us a clue.

Now look at this painter, Shen Zhou in the Ming dynasty. His painting Travellers Among Mountains and Streams is very well known. This is a landscape work of around three or four feet long, I can’t say for sure. Looking at this work of a renowned painter, I see ‘zhou zhu’, ‘shi zhu’ and ‘tuan zhu’. What is ‘tuan zhu’? Somewhere with a waterfall like this is a ‘tuan zhu’. It is not uncommon to see waterfalls in southern Chinese landscapes, and even more in Lingnan.

So about Shen Zhou, I would like to introduce Shen Zhou… the landscape painting I want to show you the most has something to do with ‘zhu’ – Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is hailed one of the ten best landscape paintings in China. But Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains – Shen Zhou imitated the painting. This is his rendering. Before talking about Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains,

I shall introduce Shen’s rendering first. There are a lot of allusions to ‘zhu’ in his rendering, and it is just part of the painting. If you unroll the whole painting, you will discover a lot more interesting things about ‘zhu’ that have been overlooked.

So much for Shen Zhou. I will just talk about one painting now, focusing on ‘zhu’ in Lingnan. What I want to introduce is this one: this invaluable original painting of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by Huang Gongwang in the Yuan dynasty. As we all know, it is a legendary work as it was passed from one to another and even salvaged from a fire, which gives it the burn marks. It is an extraordinary painting in history. Why am I talking about this painting by Huang Gongwang here? Not because it is one of the ten best landscape paintings, or because he started learning painting at the age of 50 and finished it when he was almost 80, or because this painting is seven metres long – which of course is part of the reason it becomes legendary. Why am I talking about this painting? The elements in the painting are few. What is the best part about it? It is the Fuchun River it depicts. The Fuchun River is in the southern part of Hangzhou. To its north where I travelled is the ‘zhu’ culture. It is very extensive, covering the entire Hangzhou, and Huang Gongwang had been living in seclusion by this River for decades, in which he spent three years painting this work, so the painting is in fact a form of art nurtured by ‘zhu’ culture. Take a look and you can see those ‘shi zhu’, ‘cao zhu’, ‘sha zhu’ and ‘yu zhu’ that we just mentioned. You can see them even clearer if you enlarge the painting, or you can always google ‘Huang Gongwang’ or ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’. The image [search] is amazing nowadays. You may even find an animated version of the painting. You could look for those ‘sha zhu’ and ‘yu zhu’ in a static painting with a magnifier, and they would all show up one by one – so would the mountains, of course. I will get to that in a moment. Let’s talk about water now.

Here is another piece. Fuchun River at the upstream of Qiantang River, the most famous river in Zhejiang. How about Fuchun River to the south of Zhejiang? This painting shows a different view. There is ‘cao zhu’, ‘shi zhu’, ‘sha zhu’ as well as ‘zhu bu’[渚埠, ‘zhu’ port]. A ‘zhu bu’ is a ‘zhu’ where fishing boats are moored. This painting down below is fascinating, also by Huang Gongwang. Why so? Look at the corners and edges – perhaps I didn’t trim it well – see what is it here? Ducks, ‘cao zhu’ and ‘fu zhu’. The seven-metre scroll of landscape painting by the same painter will lose colour without these ducks, but they also make the work look a bit peculiar. They give it life. There are not many people in the painting, because it is a life of leisurely seclusion being portrayed here. You can’t have too many people like the thousands of them as in Along the River During the Qingming Festival. He just put six or seven people there, some of them walking on the bridge, some farming and some fishing. You won’t want the painting to have no people either, with paths untrodden and a sky totally free of birds, so he put a few ducks here. It is these six or seven ducks that enrich the whole painting, and they form what we call a ‘fu zhu’.

However, as I read this painting in light of ‘zhu’, there is still something I can’t quite decipher, and I am not sure if I can figure it out later. Perhaps I have to fly to Fuchun River and see for myself if such a scene exists in reality. What kind of a scene it is? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the scene is set in Hong Kong, but it is in Zhejiang, and it puzzles me a great deal. It's this one. What do you think is in this painting? What puzzles me most is the ‘qiao zhu’ [bridge ‘zhu’], or ‘ni zhu’ [muddy ‘zhu’] here. Do you notice anything interesting? There is a forest on a sandbar or a shoal. Forests on a sandbar is very rare in Zhejiang or northern Fujian, and more reasonable on the coast of Guangdong. Why? You may associate this scene with a mangrove in Hong Kong. It is what a mangrove at the river mouth usually looks like. But in the northern part of Zhejiang – we know there are lots of mangroves in Taiwan, or in the southern part of Ryukyu Islands – there won’t be mangroves as I recall, not to mention in an inland area like Fuchun River. This is why I wonder about this forest on the shoal. Speaking of the mangrove forest, we come back to the topic today after a long discussion on the ‘zhu’. I should have brought you into Lingnan culture earlier.

What is Lingnan aesthetics? Here are three examples of Chinese characters with the water radical found in Lingnan. What are they? ‘Jiao’ [滘] – as in Tai Po Kau – ‘lek’ [瀝] and ‘chung’ [涌] etc. The word ‘kau’ means the trajectory of a river. This type of relief is especially common in the Pearl River Delta. ‘Lek’ is a common landform, Sha Tin is just one example. It means a shallow river. You will see that later. I think ‘chung’ is the most relevant here. ‘Chung’ is found in fishing villages where rivers meet the sea – which is also where freshwater mixes with seawater. One could write a thousand words just on ‘chung’. It often occurs to me that the ‘chung’ culture is to Lingnan, especially Hong Kong, what the ‘zhu’ culture is to Jiangnan. If one can speak of a ‘chung’ culture in the landscapes of Lingnan, it would be exceptionally meaningful. This picture shows the environment of ‘jiao’. It isn’t a very good picture, but you can see the intersection of two streams in the forest. This is ‘lek’, with water gushing from the pool at the river mouth where little boats are moored. When the water overflows, people sail out to sea. Yet ‘chung’ is still my favourite. It is very diverse. Basically it is a shoal, usually with a fishing village next to it. It could be an environment where the shoal of a river mouth meets the sea, and it could also evolve into a swamp. It would look different as a swamp. There are those with reeds as well as mangroves we just saw. This is Pearl River, and in places like Hong Kong, there must be mangroves – forests at the river mouth – here. The most fascinating one is ‘gei wai’, which has been abound in Hong Kong in the past as well as today. A ‘gei wai’ is used for fishing, blocking the tide when it comes and retaining the fish within with the gates. This way of fishing is particularly common along the Pearl River, and this is closely related to ‘chung’. Where there is ‘gei wai’, there is a walled village, the kind specific to Hong Kong. This kind of walled village brought about by ‘chung’ – I have also emphasised this in the prologue of my earlier book Three Fourths of Hong Kong – constitutes an aesthetics of rural villages in Hong Kong over the past hundreds of years called ‘feng shui lin’. The ‘feng shui lin’ can actually serve as a reference for Taiwan. I have described this aesthetics brought about by the ‘chung’ in a few words: ‘salty weeds grown out of “chung”’ could well be a mangrove; ‘banyans in front of mangroves’; ‘wampee at home’ refers to eating the fruits of clausena at home in July or August when the trees in front of village houses ripen. ‘Longan on the side’ describes the abundance of longan trees and fruit trees in the village, and in the surroundings there may also be large white orchids and alba trees. Behind a ‘feng shui lin’ may be an ancient lush forest of a hundred years’ old. This picture shows the salty weeds, and this is a luxuriant banyan. ‘Salty weeds grown out of “chung”’, ‘banyans in front of mangroves’, ‘wampee at home’ and longan. This is a longan tree. There is a homey feel to the bark. This one is an alba tree. It is in every village. I heard from an old man in Hong Kong that he would stop at the entrance of the village and take a breath every time he left or returned to the village. The fragrance of alba trees is especially marked in summer and autumn, and it reminds him of leaving or coming home. Behind the ‘feng shui lin’ may also be agarwood, which is very representative of Hong Kong as well. All these are the aesthetics brought about by ‘chung’.

I’d like to go back to what we mentioned before about the characters related to water, besides ‘jiao’, ‘lek’ and ‘chung’, there are other interesting ones such as ‘lang’ [朗] in Yuen Long and Long Valley. The ‘lang‘ in Yuen Long– I suspect, although I can’t find any evidence–should not be written like this. It should have been the older character, which represents brightness. A bright land is ‘lang’[塱]. A open and bright land is ‘lang’. Yuen Long is the largest among the few open plain in Pearl River Delta. I always say, there might be a ‘lang’ culture besides the ‘chung’ culture. Another one is 'bu' [埗]. This word is interesting. It's similar to 'bu' [埔]. 'Bu' [埗] is in Sham Shui Po. What are the differences between ‘bu’ [埗], ‘lek’[瀝] and ‘chung’? ‘Bu’ is somewhere with deep water. It’s close to land but deep, instead of shallow. It’s where farmers settle. Anyway, these are characters that are related to the places near water in Hong Kong, which have an earth radical. There are also a few in Taiwan, as you can see, but I'm not going into that. There are some characters in Taiwan that I’d like to check out, but whether it’s ‘chung’ culture or ‘lang’ culture, I shall talk about it another day. Let me show you the kind of open plain of ‘lang’, which was how Yuen Long was like. Now you can only find places like this close to Shenzhen. This is a paddy on the plain. You can see such an environment around it. Shenzhen is right across there. You can see how such an environment was kept. ‘Lang’ is basically a protruded farmland next to a wetland. This is how I define the character. There’s wetland around it, and people grow crops suitable for such an environment.

Now we’re done with the ‘water’ part. I want to talk about the ‘mountain’. On the ink paintings, I also talked about... how you can appreciate the paintings with the ancient characters as a guide. Now I’m going to talk about the ink paintings with ‘mountains’. When we talk about it, I’ve compiled a... When we talk about ‘mountains’, we must not mix it up with ‘water’. The two things are in contrast. ‘Mountains’ reveal a different scenary. I’ve used this example to talk about mountains before: there are only a few phrases for it, Xishan[West mountain], Beishan[North mountain], Dongshan[East mountain] and Nanshan[South mountain]. These are the common ones. There’s a Nanshan in Shenzhen. No one would call a place Xishan or Beishan, as they don’t sound auspicious. What comes to your mind when you think of Xishan? If you want to sell an apartment complex, would you name it Xishan or Nanshan? Surely it’d be Nanshan. If you do an online search, you’ll find Nanshan has the most results of over five millions. The second most... Out of the four, the one with the second-most results, interestingly, is Xishan, with over four million results. Dongshan has over three millions, while Beishand over has around two millions. You see how popular Nanshan is. That’s why [Tao Yuanming] used Nanshan in his poems. If he’d used Xishan, it’d have been bad. [audience laughter] So Nanshan is an important name. Among the five million results, it’s usually use for good things. The results of Xishan might be associated with some complex words. Basically, poets from Tang to Jin dynasty, when you read their poems, imagine a downtrodden scholar feeling blue, he most likely would write about Nanshan. While for someone who’s one deathbed or feeling doomed, like when Liu Zongyuan was demoted to a mountain region near the west in Hunan, he wrote about Xishan. Most people won’t write about Xishan, they write about Nanshan, or sometimes Dongshan. Dongshan is all right, at least it’s where you can see the sun. Beishan, you can imagine it’s colder [facing the north]. So almost no one would write about it. I have a few words here for it: lonesome and desolate. Nanshan is where scholars would hide away from the worldly troubles. But remember that the Nanshan we’re talking about, in the Song dynasty, didn’t include Fujian or even Guangdong, Guangxi in the Lingnan area. Nanshan at that time was probably the hilly area south of Zhejiang. It was considered a demotion to be relocated there. That’s Nanshan. So Lingnan, what should it includes? As I called it here, the south of Lingnan. The eastern region in Taiwan is called the east of Dongshan. South of Lingnan is steeped in the history of demoted officials. So the poems from the few famous poets who came here wrote about dreadful things, like Text for the Crocodiles. Poets like Han Yu and Su Shi wrote about the local scenary and culture when they wrote about Lingnan, to them in that era, they were demoted to a primitive land. But they still managed to create some incredible poems and texts—that are still being studied today—about this ‘primitive land’, which may serve as references when we appreciate ink painting. But we only have very little time, so let me go back to topic of ‘mountain’. You can see here. As I said, there are mountains and waters in Lingnan, but I must first move away from the south, and talk about the mountains in the north, and show you what’s special about them. I’m sure you’ll be taken aback by the characters I’m going to show you. Because you can’t read it or don’t know how to pronounce it. The charactrers might be from Lingnang or Hong Kong. There are also some hard-to-pronounce ones from outside of Hong Kong.

‘Ao’[坳] or ‘gou’ [溝] are fine; ‘yan’ [墕], ‘cha’ [岔], ‘ya’ [崖] or ‘pan’ [畔] are also all right. But the next one is a tough one. You know ‘han’ [含], but this word is ‘mao’ [峁]. And ‘liang’[梁] and ‘zui’ [咀] or ‘ju’. These characters are very interesting. ‘Ao’ is the gap between two peaks. ‘Gou’ is a kind of valley. ‘Gou’ is common in the north. ‘Yan’ is a sort of dam. ‘Cha’ is a fork in the road. ‘Ya’ is a high platform. ‘Pan’ is a lower one. Now this is a interesting one. What is ‘han’? ‘Han’ is when two mountains joined together. There’s another character for it in Lingnan, which we’ll talk about later. The next one is ‘mao’. What’s this character? The north is mountainous, so they’ve invented many odd characters. ‘Mao’ means a very steep mountain. ‘Liang’ means a roundish mountain. ‘Zui’ is multiple ‘gou’s connecting together. The landscape where the ‘gou’s are jointed together is called ‘zui’. If you are to appreciate ink paintings from the Northern Song dynasty, or ink paintings in that style done in another time, you might... You can learn a lot if you use these characters as guides.

Of course, I was talking about the Jiangnan region. This character is ‘ao’ [嶴]. What is ‘ao’? It’s somewhere deep in the mountains, a village on a plain. There is no such word in Lingnan, but there is in Jiangnan. The rest of the characters, ‘bao’ [堡], ‘wu’ [塢], ‘dun’ [墩], ‘keng’ [坑], ‘ling’ [嶺], ‘tan’ [坦] and ‘duan’ [塅], we’ll talk about them later if we have time. Now let’s talk about... I’ll talk about the mountains in Lingnan later. Let me tell you about the mountains in the north. What you’re seeing is a northern mountin. As I said, northern mountains look dull with less biodiversity. In my introduction, I told you I studied ecology. So I try to appreciate ink painting by looking at biodiversity. The ink paintings in Northern Song were not painted considering how trees should look like or if there should be different breeds of tree. So the trees drawn at that time in the whole landscape were mostly of the same type. In Southern Song, there were more variations in the trees depicted. So in theory, there should be even greater variation in Lingnan school of ink painting. So were there? We’ll talk about it later. Here's some food for thought. Lingnan school of ink paintings should have greater biodiversity, unlike the paintings from the Northern Song... in the north. In this monotone kind of ink painting, think about it, do they look boundless, desolate and stern? Most backgrounds in Northern Song painting were drawn this way. You’ll also see something like this: a village with very few trees around. When there were only a few trees, they’d want to have a ‘feng shui’forest around them or a forest on the north. The ‘feng shui’ forest is very different in the north. As trees grow quick in the south, a house or a village can be surrounded by a forest easily. There are hardly any trees [in the north], only a few. But both regions have landscapes that call for the slash-and-burn method in agriculture. What does that mean? In the north, to farm on such land, you must turn it into a terrace. You can’t grow trees on a terrace, only grass. So they burn grass to ash to make compost. This is used as fertilisers for sorghum, barley and wheat. There’s also a similar slash-and-burn method in the south, but people grow rice or other crops. This is something worth noting here.

Okay, the next picture shows Shangxi. I need to bring up a novelist, Li Rui. He’s most famous for... This author almost got a Nobel Prize—But he would not have a chance now that Mo Yan had received this honour. This author, Li Rui, wrote a incredible—should be more than one—many incredible novels where you can learn about the farming life in Shanxi. We can see their daily lives in the stories. The most famous one is probably Thick Earth and some stories about his hometown in the Lüliang Mountains. You can find ‘gou’, ‘ya’, ‘ao’ and ‘cha’ in the stories, especially ‘gou’. He’d tell you about how moving from one ‘gou’ to the other, you could find a village. There were many ‘gou’s and villages. In such an environment, there were many ‘gou’s. There were also ‘mao’ ,and ‘liang’—a roundish hill. ‘Pan’ is a platform where a village might be found. Then there’s this low-lying ‘gou’. This is the typical landscape in the north. Here’s another special character. They have many odd characters to describe parts on the mountains. Besides ‘han’, I remember it’s something similar to ‘ao’, a gap between two peaks. What is ‘gelao’? [圪嶗] ‘Gelao’ is the cave in this kind of valley. But the painters back then didn’t notice caves like this, so ‘gelao’ was less common in their work. Maybe some of them painted it, but we didn’t notice. This is what ‘gelao’ means. This picture is the most fascinating. This is a place with a lot of ‘pan’. ‘Getu’ [圪凸], what is it? ‘Getu’ is a hill rise out of a platform. ‘Yaoxian’ [崾峴] is this part. It’s a kind of ‘gou’. Then ‘zui’ [咀] and ‘ping’ [坪]. A ‘gou’ in a mountain is ‘zui’. ‘Ping’ is the platform. If you use these terms as guides to analyse the ink paintings of the north, you can see a lot of things. You’ll see the moutains shown more changes in paintings from Northern Song than those in the south. You can tell by how many terms they have for the mountains.

While in Jiangnan… This is Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan of the Northern Song dynasty. You can see the straighter peaks and the variation in shapes and forms. Let’s see the next one. It’s the painting of Jiangnan by Li Keran. I don’t know if it’s a scenery of the north. This mountain looks like a mountain in Jiangnan. Li was from Jiangsu. The mountains in the region are less steep. What I want to point out is a painting by Chang Dai-chien. It’s his painting of Mount Emei in Sichuan. The mountains in that region are taller. As you can see, he unknowingly drew Mount Emei more in the northern style. Let’s look at the environment in Jiangnan. This is on a hill in Zhejiang. I went to find ‘cong’ and jade, and the granite. I climbed to the top of the hill. But mostly I only found ‘ao’ [嶴] like this. You can see this is a special character. This ‘ao’ [岙] is a Simplified Chinese character. You can see this is putting the ‘sky’[天] on the ‘mountain’[山]. It’s the same as the other ‘ao’, but in Simplified Chinese. Then we see ‘ling’[嶺, ridge]. You can find ‘ling’ in many places, so we won’t talk about it here. ‘Bu’ [埠] is also common. ‘Bao’ [堡] is also common in Jiangnan. This is a more interesting character. You can find this in the mountain areas in Jiangnan. ‘Fan’ [畈] is a combination of the characters for ‘field’[田] and ‘reverse’[反]. It’s a road with flat land on both sides. This is something that appears as much as ‘tian’ [田]. And you must be familiar with 'di' [地, land] and 'gang' [崗, hillock].

In Jiangnan, when we look at this region, we should also pay attention to the produce there. Like this tea farm, or the bamboos there. We can find the ‘zhu’[渚] culture here in Jiangnan. There’s another character that’s interesting: ‘zhu’[竹] as in bamboo. The culture of bamboo. Or if you prefer, you can use an older character, ‘huang’ [篁], which is used in a poem by Wang Wei. ‘Huang’ is related to bamboo. It means a serene bamboo forest. It’s a combination of the characters for bamboo[竹] and the emperor[皇]. The ‘huang’ culture can be compared with the ‘zhu’ culture. But I wasn’t able to find that many ink paintings of bamboo before this talk. This painting of Jiangnan by Chang Dai-chien is interesting. He drew piles of bamboos. These are basically ‘huang’ bamboos or ‘zhu’ bamboos. Of course there are also the island, grass and pond of ‘zhu’. We can appreciate this modern ink painting of Jiangnan by Chang this way.

Okay, we’ve finished talking about the mountains in the north. Now I’ll talk about the mountains in Lingnan. We talked about the waters in Lingnan with ‘chung’, ‘jiao’, ‘lek’, ‘lang’ and ‘bu’. The mountains in Lingnan are very interesting. We have mountains and waters in ink paintings. We’ve talked about the waters, what about the mountains? Here are a few interesting characters. This is ‘she’ [畲]. It’s written differently as 畲 in Traditional Chinese and 佘 in Simplified Chinese. 輋 is pronounced as ‘che’ in Cantonese, like in Po Lo Che [菠蘿輋] and Tai Che Tei [大輋地]. But if you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s also pronounced as ‘she’ in Mandarin. So to help differentiate which character I’m talking about, I’ll read this one as ‘che’. So one is ‘she’ [畲], the other one is ‘che’ [輋]. ‘Dong’ [垌/洞] is another good one. There’s the one with the earth radical, another one with the mountain radical, and the one with the water radical. So what is it? Hong Kong is a mountainous place. The most famous ‘dong’ is probably Sha Lo Tung [沙羅洞]. There is a village nearby, which is a water village. This village has quite a few streams running through it. The residents will tell you they are the descendants of Zhang Jiuling of the Tang dynasty. Their ancestors ran and hid in this place. The place they hid is called ‘dong’. Don’t think it’s like a cave. Basically this ‘dong’ means a small valley, which is written with the earth radical. This is called ‘dong’ in Lingnan. It’s different from the ‘dong’ as in a cave. It’s a small valley with water running through it. It’s a land of abundance. So what’s ‘she’ and ‘che’? We’ll talk about them later. We can also find ‘ao’[坳, col], ‘keng’ [坑, pit] and ‘zhang’ [嶂, ben]. ‘Zhang’, like Cheung Sheung where we often visit, is very common in Hong Kong. There are some other interesting characters: ‘na’ [那] and ‘fu’ [夫]. I’ll talk about ‘na’ in a minute. This is a character used in Lingnan but not in Hong Kong. It’s used in Guangxi. They use a lot of ‘na’ there, all the way to the Indochinese Peninsula, like Myitkyina and Xishuangbanna, which are big places. But ‘na’ should be small. What does ‘na’ mean? It’s kind of related to ‘she’ and ‘che’. ‘Na’ means a terrace with water. If you’ve been to Guangxi, you’d know they have beautiful terraces there. A few hundred metres of terraces down to the valley. The wide terrace is called ‘na’. But ‘na’ can take a prefix or a suffix to make different phrases. For example, ‘na people’ means there’s a terrace next to people. Of course such a phrase is not actually used, but ‘na village’. The village is located beside a terrace with water, hence the name. A ‘na mountain’ is a mountain next to a terrace with water. So ‘na dog’ must mean a dog next to a terrace with water. Of course, no one call a dog like that. Because a dog is not stationary. It runs around. I was just joking. All right, now this ‘fu’ is interesting. What is ‘fu’? ‘Fu’ is a flat land over a small valley. They call a flat land over a small valley ‘fu’ in Guangxi. Sometimes we might be baffled by why they use this character. It just means a flat land over a small valley. It’s a transliteration. In Pearl River Delta, it’s not known as this. We use a different character. But which is it? I haven’t found it yet, but... Anyway, this character is... No, ‘fu’ should be the field next to a slope. It should be ‘chong’ [冲], with two strokes in the radical instead of three. This is what’s used in Guangxi to refer to flat land over a valley. ‘Fu’ is a field by the water under a slope. ‘Ren’ [屻] is used in Hong Kong. Tai To Yan [大刀屻] is a famous mountain here. The rocks on the mountain top look like blades, hence the name. ‘Dun’ [墩, mound], ‘li’ [壢, hole], ‘duan’ [塅, large flat land] are pretty well-known, so I won’t elaborate on them. From these characters, we can see that in the east, like Lingnan, Guangxi or Pearl River Delta, people use different characters to describe the local landscape. They are different from what are used in Jiangnan or the north. Given our limited time, I’m not going into the characters for mountains in Taiwan.

Let’s talk about Pak Sin Leng in Hong Kong. Pak Sin Leng is a very interesting place. There is the mountain view like the north as well as the biologically diverse forest in the south. Some mountains in Hong Kong have these features because of where they stand. One thing I really love about Hong Kong that we often come across in hiking is hill fires, especially in summer. How unlucky of me to see one, but now as I think of it, I am in fact very fortunate. Why? There are often hill fires after Ching Ming Festival [Tomb-sweeping Day]. It reminds me that what causes hill fires in Guangdong, apart from burning offerings for the deceased on Ching Ming Festival, is the scorching weather, or some people burning the woods into ashes to fertilise the soil when they farm. What are the fertilisers called? There are two names, both pronounced as ‘she’ in Mandarin, but written as 畲 in Fujian and 輋 in Hong Kong, as in Po Lo Che [菠蘿輋] in Hong Kong. The two ‘she’ are not quite the same – this is mentioned in the handout I gave you, you can read about it further. Let me explain the difference, but my explanation would be inadequate, because the more we dig into it, the more questions may come up. The word ‘she’ [畬] in Fujian reminds us of the ‘She’ ethnic group [畬族] in rural Guangxi. They reside in the rural areas of Guangxi, Fujian and Guangdong, merging with the Hakka people when they fled to the south. This is why the names of places populated with the Hakka people often contain the word ‘she’. When you see this word, you know there are Hakka people. Other than geographical references, there is a deeper significance for the word ‘she’. It implies slash-and-burn. What does that mean? It means cutting trees and grasses with a sickle and burning them down to ashes as fertilisers. The ‘she’ culture and aesthetic goes like this: let it grow in the first year, slash-and-burn by way of ‘she’ in the second year, and grow again in the third year when the nutrients in the soil have replenished. The areas burnt by hill fires become fertile again only after three years – this is when society was largely agricultural. After the ‘She’ ethnic group integrated with the Hakka people, the word ‘she’ no longer referred to farming on dry land or slash-and-burn. The culture of the Hakka people is one of paddy cultivation. As a result of intermarriage between the ‘She’ and the Hakka peoples, the word ‘she’ should have emerged to stand for paddy culture in the recent 300 to 400 years. Some areas in Lingnan may practise the ‘she’ paddy culture like in Fujian, but in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta, there is no ‘she’ [畬] culture in this sense; it becomes ‘che’[輋] as in Po Lo Che. The two words 輋 in Hong Kong and 畬 in Fujian are interchangeable in meaning, but they are pronounced differently in Cantonese. For the former word [輋], the site is less likely to have paddy fields. We hardly ever see paddy fields on the hill, but usually at the river mouth. In Hong Kong, we have another breed of paddies known as seawater paddy. It gets interesting if it is grown on hill slopes. How does Po Lo Che get its name? It derives from the crop grown on the hill slope: not paddy or wheat, but pineapples [‘po lo’]. And… You can see in this photo that Po Lo Che is a gentle slope. Pineapples might have been grown here in the past. 'Feng li' is pineapples in Mandarin. Another fun fact: there is something called ‘che hu’ [輋戶] in Lingnan. What the word ‘che’ pairs with indicates the crop that is grown there. There should be other crops than pineapples, and the most important one is tea – tea terrace. It is in Tai Che Tei [大輋地] on Tai Mo Shan [大帽山]. Lay out a map of Tai Mo Shan and you will see a lot of places are named after ‘che’. So what actually is ‘che’? A farmland cultivated on a hill slope. Tea used to be produced on Tai Mo Shan, so it was often associated with the word ‘che’. Now tea is no longer grown there, but the word ‘che’ remains in use today. We can learn a lot about Tai Mo Shan this way.

Let’s look at Sha Lo Tung [沙羅洞]. The hollow [‘tung’] in Sha Lo Tung... This is Sha Lo Tung. It isn’t actually a hollow, but a plain – a pool of water flows through a highland in the mountains, and the families may have settled here since the Tang dynasty. Not necessarily the Tang dynasty I guess, possibly moving southward gradually from the Tang dynasty onwards, and eventually settled here, as descendants of Zhang Jiuling. You may have come across this word ‘ao’ [坳] as in the third word of Sha Tin Pass [沙田坳] from time to time. This word ‘ao’ is also very common and the feature can be found today.

Well, so much for geography and we’ll return to ink paintings. This is painted by Chen Liangyu, a student of the University of Hong Kong. I found it online. Where is this student going? Perhaps Guangxi, with these water terraces here. The water terraces are sloping down. Like I said earlier, these are all water terraces. What are these terraces called in Guangxi? Not ‘she’ [畬] or ‘che’ [輋], but ‘na’ [那], as in the ‘na village’ and ‘na slope’ I mentioned just now. ‘Na slope’ is the water terrace beside the slope. ‘Na dog’ and ‘na mountain’ are just a joke. Guangxi has a ‘na’ culture and Hong Kong has a ‘che’ culture different from the ‘she’ culture in Fujian. I will try to compare the mountains to the north and south of the Yangtze River this way. Ours mountains reflect the ‘che’ culture. Our waters may be a ‘cong’ culture or a ‘lang’ culture. This is how I read it. The ‘na’ word is intriguing. The place depicted in this painting by Li Keran is ‘na slope ’. It'd be clearer if the image is brighter. Then look at another one by Lingnan painter Liang Mingzu. This is a walled village, probably in Fujian. There is a farmland on the other side, a ‘she’ paddy field of the Hakka people. The ‘she’ that used to denote slash-and-burn agriculture is now different. What has it become? In a Hakka walled village like this, you will know the environment is hydroponics. It is fascinating to look at ink paintings this way. This painting also portrays the ‘she’ culture, though the ambience of the walled village is not the same. The forest isn’t as luxuriant too.

Let me end with a painting by famous Lingnan painter Guan Shanyue. I am aware that the Lingnan school of ink paintings has been commented to be more realist than idealist. Is it not good to be realist? It’s just a matter of perspective, of course. Lingnan school of ink paintings... [Ink art] has evolved from the landscapes of Northern Song to Southern Song, all the way through Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties until today. To some extent, the technique of the Lingnan school has surpassed the contemporaries of Northern or Southern Song dynasties. Just to some extent, I mean. I don’t know if I can draw a parallel like this: if we compare it to singing, Northern and Southern Song may correspond to Teresa Teng and Faye Wong, while the Lingnan school may be ‘Sing! China’. [audience laughter] It may sound disrespectful. The singing technique in ‘Sing! China’ is not any inferior to the masters of the past, but singers with a rich timbre are very few. There is another type of singers who perform with a lot of effort in a flamboyant way, but you’ll feel something strange about the voice. In landscape paintings of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties, you see a certain depth or force. When you look at Lingnan paintings, you may find the technique very sophisticated, but the works don’t give you the slowness and peace that is found in landscape paintings – the feeling is still there but weaker than in the past. I have tried to show it with Chinese words today.

Now that landscape paintings have developed up to this stage, I know some critics may want to make provocative statements like landscape painting is ‘dead’ or have reached a bottleneck. They may suggest this based on the recent history of ink art. I think it is a rather pessimistic view. The art of landscape painting has, from its birth to what some critics may call a period of ‘destruction’, now entered a phase of reconstruction. So we will see in M+, some schools of painters create new possibilities for the art by the visages of landscape or the spirit of ink art. Landscape painting has come to the third stage now – a period of reconstruction, following creation and destruction. It is a phase of creative experimentation for modern artists. Being a nature writer, I have been trekking the countryside of Hong Kong and Jiangnan areas of mainland China. Today I had the chance of looking at Huang Gongwang’s painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains 600 years ago in light of ancient words in Hong Kong and southern China like what we did today, or applying the geographical references I mentioned just now to these southern landscapes painted by Guan Shanyue 70 or 100 years ago. When you read paintings this way, you will be moved, subtly, in a lot of ways. These feelings are still growing. Today I told the curator, half-jokingly, that one day I will write a book about all the ancient addresses and nouns in Hong Kong or Jiangnan. I am getting interested in this now, engrossed in the world 600 years ago so much so that I can hardly return to this present moment. I hope this obsession will open up a new world of landscape painting for you, too. That’s all for my sharing. Thank you.

[Applause]

The curator will moderate the Q&A session now. We will sit over there.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Thank you Mr Liu for the fascinating lecture on landscape painting, ecology, geography and the human environment. Mr Liu just said that he has become so engrossed in the ancient world of landscape paintings now, and we feel like we have just taken a walk to all those landscapes with him. Let me start with a few simple questions. I am very interested in your research on the subject. At first, we were discussing whether we can talk about landscapes and ink art from the perspective of eco-aesthetics. In your research, do you look at paintings first, and find the features like ‘zhu’... There are many terms. [Audience laughter] Like ‘zhu’ and ‘cong’ from the landscapes, or are you fascinated from the outset by the cultures on the mountains and by the sea, and then read the paintings with these in mind?

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] It should be a mixture of attitudes, inspired by travel. As I said in the beginning, I started paying attention to the word ‘zhu’ because of a lecture that brought me to a community north of Hangzhou, where I stepped on the sludge. When it occurred to me the sludge that got in my shoes was ‘zhu’, I began wondering, perhaps as a whimsical idea at first and not related to landscape paintings. Later when the curator suggested if we can apply these imaginations to landscape painting, I recalled this experience in my travels. It also reminded me how unfamiliar I used to be with identifying places in Hong Kong when I was hiking here, like ‘cong’ [涌], ‘che’ [輋], ‘dong’ [垌; 洞] or ‘lang’ [塱] as in Long Valley [塱原]. I was curious about these words, but I had no idea about their connections with the geography or their implications, so I turned to see landscape paintings. As I did so, I felt the need to study the history of landscape painting thoroughly. I had studied before as well, but it was history as told by Chiang Hsun. I didn’t want to do another Chiang Hsun lecture, so I have been reading a lot of books on landscape painting these six months. It was then I had a better understanding of its history. Speaking of Lingnan landscapes and Hong Kong, which angle in landscape painting should I pick to start the discussion? Of course from the part that is most exquisite and enthralling: landscapes of Southern Song. Then I thought of Hangzhou and ‘zhu’ and found them very intriguing. From there, I learnt there were a lot more words I hadn’t known of, other than ‘zhu’. There are so many implications even for the word ‘zhu’ alone as I dug further. It even engendered possibilities that literary writers haven’t explored. I wondered about the word ‘cong’: does it have its own aesthetic? Should there be a ‘cong’ forest [mangrove]? How about a ‘cong’ swamp [an environment of saltwater weeds]? Or a rocky ‘cong’ or a levee of ‘cong’ and so on. That’s not all. Like I said, when I see water terraces, I wonder what words describe such environment. I found ‘na’ in Guangxi, but it didn’t seem to fit so well. There ought to be another word in Guangdong and Fujian referring to water terraces, and I found ‘she’ [畲]. Then I thought it also seems strange as it supposedly refers to dry land and slash-and-burn. As I read more, ‘she’ is connected to the Hakka people who practise paddy cultivation, so ‘she’ later on evolves to represent the culture of water terraces. Things just reveal themselves from the keywords ‘landscape painting’, and the more is revealed, the more I lose myself in it. I think about these references all the time. Like what I told the curator, whenever I come across anything about landscape painting, I seem to have engrossed myself in the past. I have departed from the present.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Before the lecture, Mr Liu said he was like being brainwashed by landscape paintings. You jumped right in and couldn’t stop studying things like mountains, waters and hills. I think it’s a whole different experience looking at landscape paintings this way than from the perspective of art history. We are looking at different ages like Northern and Southern Song, how landscapes are represented and the style they stand for in various socio-political contexts. Mr Liu’s angle is very close to the land. The words related to water in landscape paintings that you just mentioned in fact carry the intimate relationship between water and land. The ‘zhu’ culture, ‘hong zhu’ or ‘fu zhu’, or ‘mao zhu’ – just saying – all exemplify the interrelationship between water and mountains. For mountains, you have talked about the relationship between mountains and people. I can’t really recall those words now. It was like a Chinese class. Considering all these connections between landscape painting and nature, you always put your sketches in your works, such as Three Fourths of Hong Kong [《四分之三的香港》] or your column on Ming Pao Weekly. Those are quick sketches, right? Can you tell us more, whether you draw them on the spot, or draw them at home based on the photos you take while you hike? Can you share with us the relationship between your practices of drawing, hiking and writing?

LIU KA-SIANG: [Mandarin] Sure. For the drawing and sketching the curator suggested, this is basically how I work: for plants, I try to collect the specimens as far as possible in Taiwan; I would love to say the same for Hong Kong, but I’m afraid I will be fined by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, [chuckles] so I usually take photos instead. For animals... It’s better now as there are reference photos of animals and plants. For photos of animals – especially birds, their bone structure and feathers – you have to look at a number of images to form a better picture. Your experience in wilderness will definitely be helpful. These drawings I made are rather realistic sketches. It may take me two or three hours to draw one, and it usually comes in black and white. Apart from these drawings, I also draw maps in Three Fourths of Hong Kong, say I have been to Sha Lo Tung, and I will draw the important parts. This helps me organise my thoughts about landscape paintings.

Do you remember the painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains? One thing I don’t understand about this work is the vegetated growth near the pool of water, like a mangrove. Why is it there? I am very sensitive to these details, even though, of course, not all of them get resolved at the end. Perhaps if I draw a map or illustration of Hong Kong, and I know there is a mangrove somewhere that doesn’t exist elsewhere, I will highlight its location for other hikers to find it out, and they will know why I draw it: because there are so many here. Sometimes I have drawn something but you don’t see it on your way because the environment may have altered. This is how I draw. I like to start talking about things with their little details, or to look at my drawings or landscape paintings from these details.

When a landscape painter or critic talks about landscapes of Northern Song in particular, he would say the pine tree is depicted by shading or dotting, or by different kinds of strokes. He will analyse the techniques of the brush. I don’t see paintings this way. I think this is how the tree looks like when the branch breaks off under the weight of snow and grows again year after year. This is how it looks like. Painters may think a special technique is used. Every one of us reads paintings differently, so I will apply my ecological knowledge when I draw a tree and imagine how it looks like. When I look at a tree in a painting of Southern Song or Northern Song, a ginkgo tree may be drawn like a camphor tree, but their trunks grow in different ways. Landscape painters may draw the triangular leaves of a ginkgo tree with the bifurcated trunk of a camphor tree. When I draw it, I pay special attention that the trunk of a ginkgo tree should be straighter. This is what I think, but I can’t say the painter 600 years ago drew trees the wrong way. I can't say that. In those days they might not look into the growing patterns of a tree that thoroughly, but I can do so now. What I am curious about – as mentioned by Lesley – is that the Lingnan school has developed an alternative view compared to their counterparts in Northern or Southern Song or later periods. I wonder if the Lingnan painters draw with a greater ecological sense. This is what I am interested in, and could be a topic for me to research further on.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Thank you. Is there any questions from the audience? There must be. [chuckles]

Are you going to speak in Cantonese?

AUDIENCE A: [Mandarin] I can speak in Mandarin.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Great. Thank you.

AUDIENCE A: [Mandarin] Mr Liu, do you reckon painters in the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties are hikers, like you? What makes me curious is, in your very intriguing introduction, you mentioned the sludge that you needed to scratch off your shoes; when you felt its texture in your hand, you wondered what kind of vegetation could be nurtured by this soil. I found it interesting that, in comparison to ‘viewing’ landscape paintings, your experience with landscapes is not a visual one. It seems that landscape paintings, especially in Northern Song, are always visual experiences, disconnected from the real landscapes. Perhaps it has something to do with the aesthetic you mentioned, you said that landscapes in Northern Song is particularly desolate, then it must be compelling to actually wander in it. The mountains in Southern Song might not be as dramatic in its shape and form, but the soil cultivates fruitful cultures, consist of a variety of communities, animals and plants, and is very appealing. I am especially curious – as you research on landscape painting, which painters do you reckon had shared the similar frame of mind with you? Perhaps they would have touched sludge as well?

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] I can share with you two pieces of experience, which both are very intriguing. Towards the end of my research, the painting I wanted to see the most is Along the River During the Qingming Festival. I wanted to see it in extreme details and identify the ‘zhu’, or other words in geography I mentioned; what kind of birds, ‘fu zhu’, and ‘hong zhu’ can be found in the painting? This is how I experience paintings: through locating the stories. The second piece of experience concerns a historical figure that I have been pondering over: Qianlong Emperor. Qianlong Emperor visited Jiangnan six to seven times. He always bring along landscape paintings when he visited, one of those paintings was Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, but that was a counterfeit, fortunately, as he would inscribe poems in it, [audience laughter] which was a very cruel thing to do. This is what documented in history. But I would imagine Qianlong Emperor, a passionate traveller, without any travel guide or smartphone to provide reference images, arriving the place and observe the landscape in comparison with Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, the actual landscape and the depictions in the painting would not be similar at all. Despite the disparity between the composed landscape in the painting and the authentic landscape in real life, he still managed to find connections between them. He was touched by such resonance and was inspired to inscribe poems or texts in the painting. I have been longing for such frame of mind and I believe it was the cornerstone of my research. Since I was given the research topic by the curator, I have been dwelling in the words such as ‘zhu’, ‘che’ and ‘she’ to the point that I was confused as to what use are all these. But every time when I recalled Qianlong Emperor being touched by ‘reading’ the landscapes in front of him through paintings, I reaffirmed myself that nothing could stop me to present my case. This is what I think. I am not sure if this is the best way to response to your question, but I can say that I had felt like being with Qianlong Emperor, standing side by side with him, talking. It would seem like we both have been forgotten, or are not well-understood. I could feel such a special warmth when I read about Qianlong Emperor’s stories in my research, and I have come to realise that I am very fond of this Emperor. [audience laughter]

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] That is an unexpected reward. [audience laughter] Is there any other questions?

AUDIENCE B: [Cantonese] Excuse me, may I speak in Cantonese? Actually it is a rather simple question. So the topic today is the ‘New Possibilities of the Lingnan Landscape’... I’ll wait.

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] This isn’t on. Can you translate for me?

STAFF: [inaudible]

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] Good.

AUDIENCE B: [Mandarin] It’s a simple question. I can try...

[audience laughter]

I can’t speak Mandarin that well, though. So the topic today is the ‘New Possibilities of the Lingnan Landscape’, what do you both foresee in the development of Lingnan Landscape painting? What kind of new possibilities are there?

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] I actually don’t have such kind of vision, for, after all, I am not an artist. I merely suggested a perspective of reading landscapes with archaic words, which would perhaps be suitable for a hiker; after all this time wandering in the mountains in Hong Kong, they might now be able to see landscape and scenery anew. This is the first thing that came up in my mind. The second thing is that, by looking at artists whose work are in the M+ exhibition, some artists would infuse new elements in the tradition of ink landscape painting, and Ms Tong Yang-Tze is one such individual. She is well-known for her unique calligraphy, with which she interprets the ambience in ink art and landscape painting. I always anticipate one day I could share with Ms Tong the words we have discussed today, such as ‘zhu’, ‘che’, and ‘na’, the imaginations I have had after reading them, and the mood of being at the site. I believe such exchange would catch her by surprise, she might be astonished by the volume of meanings behind these words. Maybe, when one day she writes ‘she’[畲], ‘che’[輋], ‘li’[瀝], or ‘lang’[塱], there could be a new idea emerged from her calligraphy, because she’s equipped with the literary and geographical knowledge. These are my two curiosities. Could what I presented today create a dialogue with artists, and with nature in Hong Kong? After all these years of hiking, there ought to be a new perspective for Hong Kong landscape. Where is this new perspective then? I found one in the archaic words and place names, and it could be a start of a whole new study. That is why tomorrow I will visit the bookstores in town and buy every single book about old Hong Kong place names. I will bring all of them back home to Taiwan and study them seriously; I never got a chance before, and now is the time.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] ‘Landscape paintings’ by a lot of contemporary artist in Hong Kong are actually infused with connections to urbanity. In the works by younger artists, or artist who were born post-war, you could naturally spot mountains and water in a variety of forms, but plenty of these landscapes are embedded with the atmosphere of a concrete jungle or the momentum of highways. Mr Liu mentioned—I wonder if I can rephrase—that the landscape in Northern Song was monumental and splendid, while in the secluded period of Southern Song sentimental and tranquil. From my observation, a number of post-war landscape paintings in Hong Kong are imbued with the experience of urban lives and the longing of a down shifting lifestyle. Some younger artists would mix in the sensation of velocity. I believe that after being deconstructed, landscape painting can be interpreted more liberally in our time.

AUDIENCE C: [Mandarin] I appreciate the connection between landscape and urbanity in modern paintings brought up by the curator. I am keen on hiking recently and I have observed a characteristic of Hong Kong landscape: wherever you looked down from up the hill, in between the mountains and water, there are always skyscrapers. I felt this...contradiction: experiencing nature on one hand, and confronting the towers in Central on the other. I found ‘sublime’ in such a view, but not necessarily ‘beauty’. When you look down from the top of the mountains, would you only pay attention to the natural elements, and erase the modernised buildings in your mind like we do in Photoshop, or would you treat them homogenously in the same view and place? Can you let us know your thoughts?

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] I can't understand you very well, but I recalled something as you brought up this subject. Back in Taiwan, I have been taking up the mission of persuading the mayors of Taipei City and New Taipei City in renovating the hiking trails in the mountain ranges. Despite the geographical differences, and hence the technical differences, I often use Hong Kong as a reference. In Hong Kong, the MacLehose Trail and the Wilson Trail intersect each other and are collectively known as the ‘Big Cross’ trail. I told the Taiwanese governors, especially the Mayor of Taipei Ko Wen-je, there’s a place that they must visit. I wrote an article about it. Ke once said there is no mountain in Hong Kong; he knows about the Peak, but he doesn’t think it is worth anything more than a quick glance. So later I shared with him an article I wrote and asked: when he visited Victoria Peak, did he take the chance to stroll along the smooth Lugard Road right next to it? From there one can enjoy the panoramic night view of Central, or the Victoria Harbour in day time, which is equally fascinating. The experience of strolling along Lugard Road is like being an elder in ancient Rome—not the kind that plot viciously against Caesar the Great—wearing white robes and scandals. Looking at the Eternal City from that position is almost equivalent to gazing at the entire world; whether or not they planned to take over that world is another story. Passing through Lugard Road with the sight of a city, just as observing ancient Rome on its surrounding trail, allows you to ponder over the city through each of your step. What I am trying to say is, such kind of long trail provides its passenger a new opportunity of contemplation. Every civilisation of a great city consists of an extended trail like this. This is what I believe. I always wish for such a long trail in Taipei City, connecting Yangmingshan National Park all the way to the south. We ought to make it happen, but it would be a long process of planning and persuasion. I always... How to put it...

I always cherish Hong Kong, one of the very few cities in procession of this kind of long trail. Shenzhen is another example; I visited there one or two years ago. To be honest, the book I wrote, Three Fourths of Hong Kong, sells better in Shenzhen than in Hong Kong. I believe it is because Shenzhen citizens are very keen on hiking in Hong Kong. We even published a hardcover edition! It’s only available in Shenzhen. There could be another reason which I have to elaborate: I went hiking in Shenzhen in the hope to do in-depth comparative studies. Surrounded by the cityscape of Shenzhen is a Tanglangshan Country Park, it takes four to five hours to hike across it. One time when I hike over there, I was astounded by what I saw along the way. What I’m saying is... Thirty years ago, when Shenzhen was made a special economic zone, Hong Kong was its role model. Towards its take-off stage of economic growth in the recent decade, it started to develop country parks with Hong Kong’s example in mind, hence the Tanglangshan Country Park, in close proximity to the city, within walking distance from metro station. There aren’t much hiking spots in Hong Kong accessible from metro station; Tanglangshan Country Park in Shenzhen is one of the rare examples. It took me five hours to go up and then down. An archway was made the entrance of the park, it is hard to imagine in Hong Kong, where entrances are all made in plain wood: wherever you see a wooden frame that would be the archway! In Shenzhen it’s different, they would be enormous, made with marble or stone. [Audience laughter] The peaks in Hong Kong are simply marked by a black and white triangulation point, but in Shenzhen one would see something different, such as a pavilion or a large inscribed stone. The peak is a different scene. Nevertheless, you would feel familiar when you troll along the trails there, seeing signage and columns all referenced from Hong Kong, as if it was actually a mountain in Hong Kong. One can tell from all these that Shenzhen has been developing its country and trails according to Hong Kong, but this mission is easier said than done. It is not easy, because it has to do with soft power. Soft power and economic power are not something bound to be obtainable from economic take-off, they cost hard work and consideration. For example, to build a quality trail for leisure, the archway at the entrance should be eliminated, the wide pathway tightened to allow less passengers, and the pavilion at the peak demolished, only the soil and the triangulation point would remain. But it all takes time. Economic development is straight forward, but planning for a quality hiking trail and nurturing the respect to nature both point to a long haul. In regard to country park development, I do wish Shenzhen could be as great as Hong Kong. This is my answer.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] One last question?

AUDIENCE D: [Mandarin] May I ask both of you to elaborate on the origin of this collaboration? For example, how did Mr Liu become a candidate? Also, since M+ is [an institution] specialised in contemporary art, does Mr Liu’s approach to classical landscape painting fits with Ms Ma’s original idea?

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] I should leave it to Ms Ma.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] When we planned for this exhibition, we wished to open up ways for audience to interpret and learn about ink art, this talk is one of them. Talking about ink art, people would usually relate it with ancient landscape… [a lady talking on the phone] painting and calligraphy. What we at M+ see is that, apart from traditional discourses and techniques, there are new interpretations for ink art in our time worth exploring. I invited Mr Liu after reading his books on hiking, which depict vividly how regional aesthetics could be experienced through observation and enjoyment of nature. Mr Liu happened to indicate that just now: the experience of hiking and developing a country park in Shenzhen is so different from Hong Kong, such difference is distinguished by their aesthetics, of sensibility and the attitude towards nature. What I had in mind since we first met and explore the possibility of this subject is to consider landscape in the perspectives of a natural ecology observer, a hiker, and a writer. We all know about landscape painting—it is such a common and notable subject, but it doesn’t just concern painting, it is actually about the relationship between human and nature. If Mr Liu could give us all a piece of his mind, we could expand the methods of interpreting landscape and ink painting. There is practical anticipation, too. Mr Liu is followed by such a large group of readers who might not know about M+ that well, so I hope to introduce the new group of audience [audience laughter] to our exhibition by inviting Mr Liu. It is also to manifest that M+ strives to experiment diverse kinds of dialogues as we organise exhibition-related events. Thank you for your question. I hope Mr Liu finds it worthwhile, and not too harsh; the last thing I want is to brainwash you with landscape paintings and put you in pain.

LIU KA-SHIANG: [Mandarin] I have indeed learnt so much in this landscape painting class. Perhaps I can publish a book investigating Hong Kong place names in three or four years, thanks to this.

LESLEY MA: [Mandarin] Great. We should call it a day now. Thanks to everyone for joining us for this two-hour talk on a lovely Saturday afternoon. In a moment, there will be a bus outside Asia Society to take you all to the M+ exhibition The Weight of Lightness. Big thanks to Mr Liu for coming all the way to Hong Kong and sharing so much with us.

[audience applause]