Starting from the problem of the unpainted white surface and the Western artist’s horror vacui, this essay explores points of contact between Western concepts of art and Far Eastern thought, centred on emptiness understood as a generative in-between rather than a lack. Drawing on her own practice, including an intercultural performance combining Baroque imagery and Noh theatre, and on the Yi Jing hexagrams of stagnation and peace, the author develops three examples. First, the epistemological dimension of Cubism, which abandons single-point perspective and reveals reality as relationship rather than object. Second, the covertly “responsive” attitude of Jasper Johns, whose works take rather than invent their material and resonate with the pre-modern Chinese understanding of the image as an answer, discussed through Bernhard Waldenfels, Mathias Obert, François Cheng and François Jullien. Third, sustainability as a theme of contemporary Chinese art, from Ai Weiwei’s critique of unlimited freedom to Wang Shu’s architecture built from reused materials, alongside Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s study of the matsutake mushroom. The author concludes that an aesthetic of blandness, attentiveness and interstitial space can overcome the Western subject–object divide and point towards a sustainable, responsive relation to the world.