At the same time, Chan had profound impacts culturally. In China, Chan ideals of personal vitality and responsive virtuosity found ongoing visual expression in calligraphy and painting, and literary expression in poetry. And as Chan spread to other parts of East Asia, these ideals came also to be infused into the performance arts of music, tea ceremony and drama. The distinctive ways in which Chan wedded nonduality or metaphysical ambiguity with a moral aesthetics of improvisation opened real possibilities for imagining presence as already liberating.