Oriental art is often oblique and obscure to the untrained Western mind and eye, and Dr. Van Briessen has approached Chinese and Japanese painting ""from the very beginning"" in order to give the Westerner some standards of judgment and enable him to differentiate between the ""traditional and the contemporary, the convention or the personal."" While not minimizing the symbolic and spiritual elements, the interpretation concentrates on the techniques and principles; the materials; the use of perspective, color, ink; the six principles of the 5th century Haieh Ho which still defy clear definition (but have led to ""copying... both the blessing and the curse"" of Chinese painting); and the closing more fragmentary ""notes"" deepen the investigation.