Lunation

Abstract Tao Lengyue (1895–1985) obsessed over the moon. He painted it endlessly. He was a chronicler. By complexly foregrounding long-lived Chinese systems of lunar timekeeping in his paintings and journals, Tao presents an alternative to Western semi-heliocentric modes of measuring time. But there is more to Tao's understanding of time and temporality that deepens negotiations of the discriminatory universalism of the modern Western model of time. Tao was after the feeling of time. His paintings reveal intervals beneath the full moon, a sense of suspended animation, an anticipatory breath. The still moment of waiting under Tao's cold moon prompts the question: How does waiting shape a sense of time? This article reveals how the artist relied on practices of astronomy, dynastic painting and painting theory, photography, and poetry to encourage beholders to enter his paintings where time might be experienced as a tranquil sense of waiting and, through its multiplicity, open to possibility and hope.