This chapter aims to inaugurate an East-West dialogue around the question of artistic agency. It examines some of the differences between classical Chinese brush-and-ink painting and the system of illusionistic painting that held sway in Western Europe from the time of the Renaissance through to the advent of modernism in the mid-nineteenth century. Through an engagement with the recent theoretical works of Pan Gongkai and French philosophers François Jullien and Jacques Rancière, this chapter explores some of the major philosophical differences that animate these two systems of painting. In particular, it is concerned with the ideas of artistic agency that follow from the Aristotelean system of poetics and the Daoist model of creation. It finds that while classical Western painting aimed to capture things in terms of their essences, thus breaking with the plane of life and setting up art as something fundamentally different from life, Chinese brush-and-ink painting remained grounded in a conception of the basic life energy or 氣 (qi) that unites nature, work, and artist. This chapter concludes with some remarks on what it would mean to reframe our understanding of artistic production in terms of dynamic form or “xing” (形).