Starting from Picasso’s question of why Westerners never think of learning Chinese painting, this article presents the German painter Dirk Huisken (1911–2007) as a rare Western pioneer of artistic dialogue with East Asian ink painting. While many contemporary artists in China, Korea and Japan adopt Western forms, few Western artists engage with East Asian principles in comparable depth. The author first outlines the xieyi theory of Su Dongpo, which links painting to calligraphy, frees the painter from commercial constraints and asks that personality be expressed through free, spontaneous brushwork; he describes it as the first expressionist credo in art history. Huisken, introduced to East Asian art by his father and uncle, gained access after the Second World War to the Chinese and Japanese paintings of Berlin’s East Asian Museum stored at Celle Castle, an encounter that shaped six decades of work. Rather than imitating a Chinese style, he drew on Daoist and Chan thought, Chan painting and cursive calligraphy to make “his own painterly statements”, turning to calligraphic abstraction in his final years. A donation of more than 100 of his ink paintings now forms the basis of a collection at the Confucius Institute Nürnberg-Erlangen.