Munakata Lecture, for Sacred Mts. symposium, November 1990.
Pleased to be here on occasion of this major exhibition, at invitation of my old friend & colleague Kiyo Munakata. I believe I am performing a special function here today, which I’m happy to perform; I think he invited me partly with the idea of having presented another point of view on Chinese landscape paintings, and paintings of sacred mountains. Kiyo tends to be drawn to religious readings of paintings--of which the exhibition and his catalog are wonderful expressions--while I’ve always tended to be drawn to secular aspects or accounts of the subject.
He remarks in his catalog essay that studies of Ch. ptg. have tended in recent times to concentrate on the secular, and that’s true enough; but that, in turn, has in some part been a reaction to an earlier phase in Asian art studies in which the emphasis was heavily on the religious, especially the Buddhist. Japanese scholarship has tended that way, and pioneer U.S. and European specialists were inclined to follow them, besides being strongly influenced by the Anglo-Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for whom all Asian art was essentially religious--a matter of dogma with him. I, in turn, reacted strongly against that when I came into the field in the 1940s-50s; it was a time when too many people were inclined to credit virtually everything interesting in Asian art to Ch’an or Zen Buddhism--people wrote as though whatever was spontaneous, or intuitive, or witty, or any other of the good things, in Chinese and Japanese art was that way because of Zen. Profoundly untrue; I launched a kind of campaign against this kind of thinking, which Kiyo will remember well. Have softened, but essentially still at it. So you find me here, talking about “A Functional Approach to Chinese Landscape Painting.”
What do I mean by functional? Let me answer that with a reminiscence. Some years ago one of my best students, Cheng-chi or Ginger Hsu, was taking her doctoral oral exam; and one of examiners, our Renaissance specialist Loren Partridge, asked her unexpected question. Ginger had been in his seminar on patronage problems in Italian art--her dissertation was to do the same for 18th cent. Chinese painting--and Loren asked her: why did patrons, or consumers, of Ch. ptg. want so many landscape paintings? why did they want pictures of mountains and trees and streams, that is, on their walls? Ginger was momentarily struck speechless, then responded in rather unsatisfactory way--more or less as I would have; we hadn’t really thought through this question, or investigated it, as much as we should have. We had gone along with general practice of locating meaning of painting, and reason for producing it, always in artist; had vague mode of explanation according to which artist had thoughts and feelings about nature, philosophical or religious or whatever, and felt urge to express these in painting, without caring much about what happened to it afterwards. But if you begin thinking the other way--artist produces ptg of particular kind because someone out there wants ptg of that kind--which is far truer account of how works of art come into existence, at least until quite recent times--other questions arise, like the one Loren Partridge asked Ginger. And they are the ones I mean to address today.
My main point will be that readings Kiyo gives in his catalog essay for landscape imagery, Taoist and Buddhist and geomantic and metaphysical, seem to me perfectly right for early periods; less right, most of the time, for later periods. Kiyo’s essay covers the period from the pre-Han period to the T’ang dynasty, the eighth century; many of the objects in the exhibition, however, are later, and he acknowledges that later people came to the mountains, and depicted mountains, for other kinds of reasons. It is those I mean to explore. So in a sense I am here as a supplement to his impressive achievement, to talk about the other side, so to speak. Not matter of equal time--there will be a whole symposium tomorrow with people giving papers on religious aspects of mountain imagery in China, going on all day, whereas I don’t mean to talk that long, you will be happy to learn.
Although I will speak today mainly about works of later centuries, Sung and after, I will begin with a few observations about early periods.
S,S. Po-shan Lu, Freer. It is this kind of representation of the sacred mountain that Kiyo writes about so enlighteningly--as he has done in the past, in earlier papers. Cosmic mt., “animistic images of the sacred realm” as Kiyo calls related things; will leave for you to read. Accords with early Chinese conceptions of the world as we know them from texts; this excellently expounded in Kiyo’s essay.
--S (Szechwan tile, salt mines.) On the other hand, I would hold that formally similar imagery in the early periods could also serve more worldly ends. This is one of relief tiles from tombs in Szechwan, 3rd cent. A.D. or so. Kiyo points out similarity to LS on incense burners; goes on to say: “It appears that this representation was made as a laud and a prayer to the benevolent power of the great mountains in the region” and writes about “The sure naturalism that made those religious representations so close to descriptions of daily life...”
S-- (Szechwan tile, hunting ducks and harvesting rice.) I would rather suppose, along with the Chinese scholars who excavated them, that these are representations of daily life, emphasizing the wealth and power of the deceased during his lifetime (as Chinese tomb art often did) by depicting ideal scenes that might have been on his estate. Religious reading of these seems a bit forced. Better, I think, if we assume the early development of landscape imagery as a formal repertory, somewhat neutral in meaning in itself, that could be adopted by artists and their patrons for variety of purposes, religious or secular, according to needs of people who had the work done. Landscape imagery appears in wide range of contexts in early China; no time to outline them.
S--(mountain from Ku K’ai-chih attrib., Admonitions.) One of best passages in Kiyo’s essay is one in which he uses this image, from a surviving handscroll attributed to Ku K’ai-chih, to imagine what mountain described in Ku’s essay on “How I would paint the Cloud Terrace Mountain” would have looked like. This is absolutely right, and to the point. But the actual painting is illustration to a Confucian moralizing text, “Admonitions to Court Ladies,” and is accompanied by lines that read: “In Nature there is nothing high which is not soon brought low . . . When the sun has reached its noon, it begins to sink; when the moon is full, it begins to wane. To rise to glory is as hard as to build a mountain out of grains of dust . . .” So, rather literal illustration of didactic text. My point is that mountain imagery could serve Confucian didacticism, Taoist mysticism, or more mundane purposes--
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