This article reads the abstract paintings of Lin Xueming, an artist from Sihui, Guangdong, through the lens of the European Section d’Or Cubist abstraction of 1912. Like the late Cubists, Lin breaks down and recombines the form of the object, as in his Wetland Series, to reach its essence without falling into pure abstraction. The author situates this within the trend, after the ’85 New Wave, of drawing on local traditional resources in contemporary Chinese abstract art. Unlike the cold geometric rationality of Kandinsky, Mondrian or the Delaunays, Lin grasps the essence, and thus the Dao, through free, discontinuous brushstrokes that interrupt the composition and leave blank areas where the invisible becomes visible. Whereas European abstractionists located essence in a rational code such as the golden mean, Chinese artists locate it in the void. Comparing Lin with Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey, the article notes that he moved from ink to a combination of acrylic and ink around 2008, uniting the hard clarity of acrylic with the softness of ink. His Touching Mountains series, shaped by a near-death experience in Tibet in 2005, exemplifies this East–West dialogue.