Fish and rocks

Water. There is not a single stroke of it. No ripple, no wash of grey, no line for a surface. And yet nobody who looks at this scroll doubts for a second that it is underwater, because the fish are swimming, and fish do not swim in air.

Large fish. These are tiny, seven or so minnows, each a flick of the brush with a darker head, scattered through the lower half of the paper. One noses toward the cliff. Two head off together. One hangs alone near the right edge, turned back toward the others, the way a child stops on a walk to see whether anyone is following.

Solid ground. The upper rock does not rest on anything. It leans out from the top left corner like a cliff seen from below, swollen at the top and pinched at the base, outlined in one long wet stroke and darkened with shaggy patches of ink. The lower rock is no steadier: a heavy mass balanced on a stem so thin it looks ready to topple, perched on a slab that tapers away to a hairline. Both look capable of moving. The fish do not seem worried.

A reason. Bada Shanren gives none. He was born Zhu Da in 1626, a descendant of the Ming imperial family, and was a young man when the dynasty fell to the Manchu conquest in 1644. He became a Buddhist monk, later left monastic life, and took the name Bada Shanren in his late fifties. He painted this in 1699, at seventy-three, with ink alone on paper.

His face. Instead there is his signature at upper right, the four characters of his name brushed so that they also resemble the words for crying and laughing. People have read his whole life into that ambiguity. He let them.

Colour, except in the seals. Small red squares are stamped down both margins and beside the signature, the only warmth on the sheet.

An ending. The fish are mid-swim and will stay that way. The rocks are mid-topple and will stay that way too. More than three centuries on, the scroll keeps its balance by explaining nothing, in a space made of untouched paper that the minnows have turned into a river.