The aesthetics of wandering in the Chinese literati garden

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The excerpt is a description of the tour of the Grand Vista Garden. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 327. 2. Tim Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 173–179. 3. Susan Bush, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 151–152. 4. Victor H. Mair, ‘Wandering in and through the Chuang-tzu’, Journal of Chinese Religions (Boulder, CO) no. 11 (Fall 1983), p. 109. 5. Zhuangzi 莊子(369–286 bc), Zhuangzi jin zhu jin shi 莊子今注今譯 (annotated and translated by Chen Guying 陳鼓應) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), pp. 1–31. 6. See, for example, Zhao Xigu's 趙希鵠 (fl. 1180–1240) account of viewing a landscape painting by Li Cheng 李成 (919–967 ad); Bush (see note 3), p. 211. 7. Ji Cheng 計成 (1582–c. 1642), Yuan ye zhu shi 園冶注釋 (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1988), p. 38. 8. Zheng Yuanxun's 鄭元勳 (1603–1644 ad) preface to the Yuan ye; Ji Cheng (Alison Hardie, trans.), The Craft of Gardens (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 29. 9. Ji (see note 7), p. 51. 10. Confucius, Lun yu (The Analects), 7.6. 11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 105. 12. Ibid., p. 106. 13. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 142. 14. Nelson Wu describes the Chinese garden as a negative space between architecture and landscape painting. I would like to add that the garden also is a negative space between nature and architecture. Nelson Ikon Wu, Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man, the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals (New York: G. Braziller, 1963), pp. 45–46. 15. Geng Liutong 耿刘同. Zhongguo gu dai yuan lin 中国古代园林 (Beijing: Zhongguo guo ji guang bo chubanshe, 2009), p. 109. 16. The interrelation between personal and public spheres in art has also been explored by contemporary Western thinkers. Acconci describes it as ‘private space containing the seed of public space’, and Habermas, ‘the tendency toward a mutual infiltration of public and private spheres’. While both Acconci and Habermas focus on the body politics — both spheres intruding on each other — you tries to mediate the two spheres and in so doing creates a new aesthetic sphere. Vito Acconci, ‘Public sphere in a private time’, in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 162; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 141. 17. The zigzagging nine-bend bridge symbolizes the Nine Bends Stream on Mount Wuyi that is associated with Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 ad). 18. Clunas (see note 13), p. 111. 19. Toshirō Inaji, The Garden as Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990), p. 132.