Deciphering the reclusive landscape: a study of Wen Zheng-Ming's 1533 album of the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I owe my sincere gratitude to an anonymous reader of the original draft, whose suggestions greatly improved the presentation of this article. Notes 1. Craig Clunas painted this broad picture from the perspective of garden culture, i.e. the discursive practices surrounding the idea of garden; Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Clunas argues that the cultural category of ‘garden’ evolved from about the 1520s; ibid., p. 67. 2. Although Wen studied painting with Shen Zhou from 1489 and throughout the 1490s, painting by then was only his casual leisure pursuit, secondary to history and literature and to the task of passing the civil examinations and winning a position in the hierarchy of government; Anne de Coursey Clapp, Wen Cheng-Ming: the Ming artist and antiquity (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1975). 3. Shih Shou-Chien, Fengge yu shibian [Style in transformation] (Peking University Press, 2008), pp. 297–334. 4. The Jade Chime Mountain Lodge was built in 1527 shortly after Wen's retirement to Suzhou. It was a courtyard within the family residential garden Halting Clouds Studio (Ting yun guan) developed by his father Wen Lin since 1492, which also included the Living-Room of Direct Speech (Wu yan shi), the Magnolia Hall (Yu lan tang) and the Singing So Tower (Ge si lou). 5. Wang Xian-Chen was twice an imperial censor and ended his political career as a provincial magistrate of Yongjia County. He gave up office in favour of a life of gentleman of leisure in 1510, about the time when he began creating the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician. Wen Zheng-Ming's friendship with the ten-year-older Wang started much earlier than the creation of the garden. In 1490 when Wen was 21 years old, he supplied a preface to a body of poems by the local elite of Suzhou presented to Wang. 6. Liu Dun-Zhen, Suzhou gudian yuanlin [Classic gardens of Suzhou] (China Architecture and Building Press, 1979). 7. Wen painted the garden at least five times, in 1513, 1528, 1533 (album), 1551 (album) and 1558. 8. The middle part of the present garden can be dated to 1871 with another major renovation in 1887; the west part was redeveloped by Zhang Lü-Qian in 1879; the east part had for long been dilapidated. 9. For the 1533 album, now missing, see Kate Kerby, An Old Chinese Garden (Shanghai: Chung Hwa Book Company, 1922) (printed in collotype). Another extant album of the garden was produced in 1551. It is comprised of eight leaves, with different views but slightly adjusted poems and notes as in the 1533 album. For the 1551 album now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, see Roderick Whitfield, In Pursuit of Antiquity (Princeton, 1969), pp. 66–75. 10. Wen used various poetic styles: 13 poems were written in regulated verse (Lü shi, eight lines in set tonal pattern with parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets); 9 poems in quatrain (Jue ju, four lines following the tonal pattern of the first half of the regulated verse but without parallelism); 8 poems in the ‘old poetry’ style (Gu shi, eight-line rhyming poem without set tonal pattern); and 1 poem in ancient style of 4-character lines. 11. This reflects the close identification between the owner and his garden. According to James Cahill, ‘Chinese scholars regularly used their studio names to designate themselves and are called by these names’; James Cahill, Parting at the Shore (Weatherhill, 1978), p. 78. 12. Wen was often praised for successfully combining the three arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting. But his teacher Shen Zhou and his friend Tang Yin were also renowned as masters of these three accomplishments (San jue). 13. Wen's painting of the Cotton Rose Bend imitates Shen's painting of the Winding Pond, and Wen's Pavilion of Bamboo Torrent imitates Shen's North Harbour. Shen Zhou's album consists of 24 leaves (3 missing), each with a supplementary leaf of scenery name written by calligrapher Li Ying-Zhen, and a postscript by Shen Zhou himself (missing). For the album now in the Nanjing Museum, see Dong Shou-Qi, Suzhou yuanlin shanshuihua xuan [A selection of landscape paintings of Suzhou gardens] (Shanghai: SJPC, 2007), pp. 20–43. 14. According to Anne de Coursey Clapp, Wen's conservative style was fully evolved by the early 1520s, in which ‘stability and permanence are essential to the fundamental meaning of the garden pictures and nothing is permitted to interrupt their quiet, static lines’. This was caused in part by the garden owner's desire for ‘a recognizable image of the actual garden’. Clapp (see note 2), pp. 45–49. 15. Clunas (see note 1), pp. 94–103. 16. ‘It came to be the case that less attention was paid to what was owned, and more to the way it was owned, in particular to the structure of references within which the possession was enmeshed.’ Ibid, pp. 90–91. 17. Modern aesthetic philosophers claim the ideational realm (Yi jing) as the central concept of Chinese aesthetics in general and of garden aesthetics in particular; Zong Bai-Hua, Meixue sanbu [Peripatetics in aesthetics] (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1981 [1943]) and Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixueshi dagang [An outline of the history of Chinese aesthetics] (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1985). The ideational realm is defined in short as the coalescence of natural feeling and the reality of things. Following the renewed upsurge of Yi-Jing aesthetics in the 1980s, garden theorists and historians began to establish the concept as the design objective of traditional garden making; Jin Xue-Zhi, Zhongguo yuanlin meixue [Aesthetics of Chinese gardens] (China Architecture and Building Press, 1990) and the definitive characteristic of Chinese Garden; Zhou Wei-Quan, Zhongguo gudian yuanlin shi [History of classical Chinese gardens], 2nd edn. (Tsinghua University Press, 1999), pp. 18–20. 18. Philip Watson, ‘Famous Gardens of Luoyang, by Li Gefei’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 24/1, 2004, pp. 38–54. 19. Clunas (see note 1), p. 140. 20. Ji Cheng, Craft of Gardens (1631), trans. Alison Hardie (Yale University Press, 1988). 21. Wen's record said that the Leaning Jade Gallery ‘faces straight northward to the Tower for Dreaming of Reclusion’; and in the note to the Tower, Wen told us that the Tower ‘faces straight southward to the Hall Like a Villa’. ‘Face straight’ (Zhi) is a strong term that denotes direct confrontation and was only used in the above two cases in the whole album. 22. All translations are by the author unless otherwise cited. 23. Linguistic studies on spatial description suggest that people utilize three basic ‘perspectives’ (i.e. gaze, route, survey [or map]) to schematize spatial elements and relations and to highlight different aspects of a scene or experience. Each perspective corresponds to a natural mode of experiencing space. A route perspective describes landmarks with respect to the changing position of a traveller within the environment. Barbara Tversky, ‘Narratives of space, time, and life’, Mind and Language, 19/4, 2004, pp. 380–392. 24. Arriving Birds is the Chinese name of pear-leaf crab-apple (Malus prunifolia). 25. Gong (bow) is an ancient measurement of length. 1 Gong equals 5 Chi (ruler), approx. 1.63 metres. 26. Wu (half-step) is an ancient measurement of length. 1 Wu equals 3 Chi (ruler), approx. 0.98 metres. 27. Clunas (see note 1), p. 142. 28. The only exception is the note to the Flushed with Pleasure Place, which according to the record is located in front of the Tower for Dreaming of Reclusion. 29. The trigram Kun indicates southwest. The two notes (place no. 6 and 14) that use the trigram Kun conflict with other spatial clues about their locations. Painter Dai Xi (1801–60) made a similar observation in 1836, when he tried to draw an overview painting of the garden from Wen's album. Dai Xi wrote in his postscript that the Pavilion of Waiting Frost (no. 14) shouldn't be located in the Kun-corner. Dai Xi's painting (and postscript) was included in the printed version of Wen's 1533 album; Kerby (see note 9). 30. The note to the Little Flying Rainbow describes it as: ‘located in front of the Tower for Dreaming of Reclusion, in the north of the Hall Like a Villa, and stretching across the middle of the Surging Waves Pond’. 31. A cognitive landmark is an anchor point standing out of its surroundings because of its singularity, prominence, meaning or prototypicality for organizing spatial knowledge and facilitating spatial navigation. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT, 1960). The Water Flower Pond is regarded as a landmark because of its prominent location in the structure of space. 32. Clunas (see note 1), p. 51 33. A permeability graph is a diagram of the connectivity structure of the layout of an environment based on step depth from the outside. B. Hillier and J. Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 34. For example, the present Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician includes thirty-two pavilions, halls and towers in the middle and west parts covering a total area of 31 mu (equivalent to 2.07 hectare), while the garden in Wen's time contained only twelve buildings on a site of 62 mu (4.13 hectare). 35. The only possible exception is the painting of the Thoughts of Afar Terrace (no. 10) that shows a mountain range in distance, but it seems to be an imagined landscape other than the actual view. 36. Clunas (see note 1), pp. 150–151. 37. I borrow the concept of ‘vicarious imagination’ from narratology, which is a psychological mechanism to make sense of other selves in times, places and conditions not our own. As Marshall Gregory put it, ‘stories take us to other places that get vividly realized in our heads, places about which we know the details, their aromatic essence, the tactile and emotional feel of the total environment. The mechanism for this is the vicarious imagination’; Marshall Gregory, ‘Ethical criticism: what it is and why it matter’, Stephen K. George, ed., Ethics, literature, and theory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 56. 38. Mary Tregear, Chinese art (Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 157. 39. Historical references, scenic places nos 2 and 7; literary references, places nos 13, 14, 18 and 30; personal references, places nos 1, 25 and 26. 40. Leaning Jade Gallery (no. 4) and Little Flying Rainbow (no. 5). 41. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Explaining characters] (Zhonghua Book Company, 1963), p. 299. 42. Liu Yi-Qing (403–444), Shishuo xinyu [New account of tales of the world], trans. Richard B. Mather, ‘The fine art of conversation: the Yen-yu pien of the Shih-shuo hsin-yu’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 91/2, 1971, pp. 222–275. 43. The record said that this place is accessed by ‘going further east and emerging at the rear of the Tower for Dreaming of Reclusion’ and departed by ‘go round and emerge at the front of the Tower’. Therefore this place is like a detour into the secluded north-facing rear side of the hill.