“Representations of Gardens in Chinese Painting.” Lecture for Asia Society, New York, April 29, 2004.
I should clarify at the outset the topic of my lecture. I won't be talking about gardens--not qualified. Or even about what ptgs tell us about old gardens--or only a little of that. My topic is, rather, the different manners and forms in which gardens are represented in China, and what kind of visual information each of these forms gives us. My hope is that with the really informative paintings identified and established, others can make use of them for reconstructing the layout and features of great old gardens--that would make a very interesting and valuable book, but I'm not the one to write it.
What is basic aim of artist who does a garden painting? It isn't, I think, primarily to provide information about the garden; usually the ptg is done for the garden's owner, who doesn't need to be told that. Rather, it's to commemorate the garden, honor it as a portrait does the sitter; it provides the owner with something to show guests, for them to admire. And typically, it aims at evoking in the viewer an experience that is somehow analagous, or congruent, to the experience one has of visiting the garden. Artist presents visual materials, images that are recognizable as representing things and spaces of garden, arranging these so as to structure the viewer's experience, again in a way analagous to the way one experiences a garden.
Think of the defining characteristics of a garden:
- Enclosure; the sense of security if offers, or escape from the troubles and dangers of the outside world.
- Order, or organization: the arrangement of materials and spaces--trees, rocks, bodies of water, buildings--into a designed piece of terrain.
- The making and placing of certain arrangements or objects (jing, "scenes") to evoke memories, either of literary and historical themes and events, or of some themes or events in the life of the owner--and the poetic naming of these.
- The arrangement of all these so as to encourage certain ways of moving through the garden, or being in it, experiencing and enjoying it.
Now, what of all this is transferable, so to speak, from one medium to another? From garden to painting, that is. But of course it was a two-way relationship: the design of gardens followed in some respects the conventions of painting. From the time of the Yuan Ye by Ji Cheng, written between 1631 and 1634, the earliest and most informative treatise on gardens in China, the idea that a garden should be like a painting is expressed over and over. A person who built a garden thought of himself as inhabiting a work of art, with all the attendant sense of transcending the real world. Close affinities between gardens and paintings affirmed and enhanced this feeling. Garden designers were often also painters.
Simple answer to question of what is transferable: it depends on how you use the medium of ptg--what form you choose, and how you employ that form.
An aesthetic experience, as a general category to which a visit to a garden belongs, has certain characteristics: it stands somewhat apart from our everyday, routine experience; it has a beginning and an end; and it is structured somehow within that: theme and variations, building to climax and subsiding, and so forth.
Thee are many other ways one can think about garden: Craig Clunas's "Fruitful Sites," as a profitable piece of land, with orchards and edible or otherwise valuable plants; as display of wealth, way of impressing guests; as site for love affairs and other kinds of human interaction--all imposed by usage owners make of it. All these relevant, but too much to encompass in a single lecture. So, on to paintings.
Essentially three models, for which three standard forms that Ch. ptgs commonly take are appropriate.
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