This article examines how the East Asian painting tradition, which has developed continuously in China for over two thousand years and spread to Korea and Japan, relates to the principles of the concrete and the abstract. Starting from Xie He’s Six Principles and from encyclopedic definitions of abstraction as the selection of essential features, the author argues that East Asian painting has been committed to abstraction from its beginnings, aiming to concentrate form on the essential. Laozi’s Daodejing defines that essence as emptiness, and the Heart Sutra’s “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” underlies the interplay of form and void in painting. Yin-yang theory, Confucius’s doctrine of the mean and the Buddhist middle path explain why painters, even the Chan masters of the thirteenth century, never abandoned representation altogether; Qi Baishi locates painting on the border between the concrete and the abstract. The article then discusses Su Dongpo’s xieyi, the canonised models of manuals such as the Mustard Seed Garden, the individualism of Shitao’s “one stroke” and Gao Qipei’s finger painting, and the shift to monochrome ink. It concludes that reduction and restraint place the painter between convention and individual freedom.