In this paper, we pose a speculative encounter between Heidegger and the Chinese Song Dynasty landscape painter Xia Gui. Our intention is to reassess Heidegger’s theory of the fourfold. By placing the concept in a cross-cultural context, we argue that Heidegger was essentially correct in that the world is structured as a fold between interrelated elements. At the same time, we challenge the quantity and quality of the folded elements. If one turns to the work of Xia Gui (...) in conjunction with relevant Daoist texts, what one finds is a threefold structure to the world, composed of earth, sky, and mortals without Heidegger’s emphasis on divinities. In conclusion, we suggest that studying the folding structure of the world ought to be done through cultural comparisons of philosophical and aesthetic traditions in order to understand the potentiality for worldhood as an xfold. (shrink)

This article deals with the Chinese ink painting tradition, as a paradigm in which art and life are coupled and intertwined. In fact, in Chinese classical aesthetics, art and life do not produce a dramatic tension, but are inscribed in a common process of naturalness or spontaneity. The painter has to learn how the breath, or vital energy, that flows in every single image-phenomenon, can be enlivened by the brush strokes. Moreover, the paper builds a dialogue between the (...) European and the Chinese main patterns. Showing alternately the continuity or the discontinuity between art and life, both traditions of thought display the possibility to learn a sort of “art of living”, through – and not despite – the dynamic de-coincidence that appears in the folds of human experience. (shrink)

This paper considers Western approaches at different time periods to Chinese landscape painting, with a focus on the eleventh century Chinese painter Guo Xi’s Essay on landscape painting. First, brief information will be given about the artist and his work. A brief scrutiny of a review published in 1936 will show how the Essay became influential in the West. Later publications, which appeared in 1969, 2007, and 2009 respectively, will show some changes in Western approaches to (...) Chinese landscape painting, revealing the main rhetoric of their times along with changing debates and approaches within Western art history. (shrink)

Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its (...) wildness; the aesthetic lives on in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” ; the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond (...) is to ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond (...) is to ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

I. The Paradox of “Judgment” and Pre-reflective Self-AwarenessIn “Fichte’s Original Insight” (1982), Dieter Henrich, the founder of the Heidelberg School, delivered a diagnosis of why three hundred years of Western explication of the internal structure of subjectivity proved to be fruitless. As Manfred Frank noted, “Seldom has so much food for thought been put in a nutshell.”1 Fichte had the “insight” that his predecessors, in their totality (and “nearly all his successors”2), including Kant, misconceived the reality of our self-consciousness as (...) reflection, and thus fell prey to circular reasoning. A subject’s reflection on its own identity is impossible, since it can gain awareness of this identity only if it previously possessed some immediate knowledge of itself. Therefore, (self-)consciousness should not be conceived within the framework of the “reflection model,” which possesses an inherent contradiction, but rather as pre-reflective in nature, and as such it must be postulated by our thought. This is not to say that reflective consciousness—“egological” consciousness, the “reflection model of consciousness,” the “higher-order” theory of consciousness—i.e., the cogito, is impossible, but merely to highlight that its logical foundation cannot be justified by itself and that it essentially depends on the pre-reflective sphere of our psychic lives.3. (shrink)

Focusing on the “bian” (changes) of Chinese landscape painting in the Tang Dynasty, this essay seeks to expound a breakthrough in the study of painting in the dynasty. Such a study was once difficult to carry out in the form of pictorial and stylistic analyses due to the lack of physical works. By showing that the prevailing landscape paintings of two representative painters Wu Daozi and Li Sixun were at the time most likely to be dominated by (...) the sutra paintings and pictures of the immortal land, the essay attempts to demonstrate that the meaning of “changes” in landscape painting lies more in the change of style in representing landscape and the attitude of critics towards landscape paintings than in the change of subject matter. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that historical narratives also played a key role in constituting the concept of “landscape painting.” The focus on and analysis of the historical constitution itself provide people with another possible and feasible research approach in addition to the one based on the analysis of works and images. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ideological foundations of the emergence and evolution of landscape in Chinese painting as an independent genre from the III to the XVIII century, before the rapid integration of Western European artistic traditions. Landscape painting is considered as an expression of the state of mind of Chinese artists, the prevailing philosophical ideas, in particular Taoism, the embodiment of literary images associated with the natural origin. Despite the attention of the scientific community to the (...) development of images of nature in the art of ancient and modern China, there are few studies devoted to the causes and justification of certain processes that influenced the formation of the genre. The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the appearance of images and motifs in the landscapes of Chinese artists in connection with the philosophical ideas of that time, cultural connotations in poetry and the principles of landscape art. The tasks include determining the most typical range of scenes and images in landscapes created from the III to XVIII centuries. The material is the work of Chinese artists who lived since the reign of the Wei Dynasty, during the heyday of landscapes in the era of the Tang Dynasty and up to the XVIII century. Of interest is the study of the mechanism of influence on the formation of figurative systems in Chinese landscape painting that developed in parallel poetry and landscape art. (shrink)

This article analyzes the views of representatives of the scientific community on ancient Chinese landscape painting, emphasis is mainly placed on views that concern the spiritual qualities of landscape painting, as well as rethinking concepts that ignore the significance of sensual perception. Landscape painting is usually considered as a spiritual work of Taoism: landscape painting developed from Taoist thought, Taoist philosophy determined the identity of the artistic style and the inherent spirit of landscape painting. (...) Moreover, some researchers even believe that bodily contemplation of landscape painting means setting the very original nature of mountains and waters, and the "knowledge of the truth" is a spiritual process that is more blocked by the human capacity for sensual perception. Some of the scientists completely deny the possibility and truth of sensual perception of physical objects in landscape painting. The author of this article believes that the spiritual component of landscape painting lurks precisely in the value of sensual perception, and bodily contemplation of mountains and waters is impossible without the participation of the body, clear confirmation of which we find in the ancient Chinese theory of arts. Ancient Chinese works of art traditionally had a close connection with sensual perception through bodily contemplation. This process is not simply about capturing object information, but when the subject takes an active part in the vision of the object, when the subject gives feedback to the object, and through acquiring the object its meaning is transmitted. Only through bodily contemplation, the individual can fully feel the artistic value of landscape painting, and Taoist philosophy thus gains a real existence in landscape painting, becoming a kind of emotional thinking. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 293-311.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 199-218.

This book discusses qiyun aesthetics in Chinese painting formulated by leading sixth to fourteenth-century intellectual elite. In light of Kant’s account of artistic genius, it considers the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun, thereby both demystifying qiyun aesthetics and illuminating some limitations in Kant’s aesthetics.

Grounded in the use of the visual, Chinese thought and language operate within a wide spectrum that includes calligraphy, poetry, literature, painting, and garden-landscapes. In languages of phonetic signifiers, the spectrum is deliberately controlled to be narrower, excluding the visual from language and delegating it to iconology. These linguistic-cultural strategies have an ancient past and produce far-reaching consequences in thought and artefacts, with garden-landscapes being one of the most substantial outcomes. Garden-landscapes are China’s equivalent to Greek architecture, leading us (...) to both a repositioning of Chinese thought and a new framework of architecture. In this sense, the city, serving the function of thought in the expanded medium of conceptual and material units of meanings (figures), incorporates things into intellectual orders. This is perhaps the most important feature of Chinese thought and one that is the first to be obscured when it is rendered in scholarship in Indo-European languages. (shrink)

The article analyzes the works of Chinese artists of various historical eras who used a stylistic and thematic direction with the image of a plum blossom. The artists' appeal to images of nature to convey feelings and experiences contributed to the emergence of this image and its formation as a symbol of steadfastness and inflexibility of character. Thus, the subject of the proposed study is Chinese painting, the object is the formation of such a common motif as a (...) plum blossom. The purpose of this publication is to determine the main types of images of this image in Chinese traditional painting in the time interval from the VI century to the end of the XIV century — the most fruitful period of its formation and development. Plum blossom is of greater importance in the development of traditional landscape painting in China. For almost a millennium, the interpretation, compositional solution, as well as the technique of depicting this image have changed. The author's contribution to the development of the problem is a comprehensive analysis of images of plum blossoms in landscape paintings by Chinese artists of various historical eras, as well as the characteristics of the process of evolution and the features of the embodiment of this image. The paper traces the origins of this plot in the art works of Chinese artists, analyzes the processes of change and development of images, and characterizes the specifics of its external expression and internal content. (shrink)

In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), Shen Chou (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries), and Shih-t'ao (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art. These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, (...) conscious play between the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist. The artist is continually imitating the world--sometimes more, sometimes less--but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor, in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement. Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Art and Art History, University of Michigan. (shrink)

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of (...) a-subjective consciousness. A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen encountering something unfamiliar, it is natural to describe and understand it by reference to what is familiar. Commentary on Chinese landscape painting usually relies heavily upon analogies with Western art. James Elkins, concerned to understand the implications of this procedure, asks whether in seeing and writing about this art we ever can escape our Western perspectives. His problem is not just that he himself does not know Chinese. Even bilingual specialists or native Chinese speakers employ (...) this vocabulary, for the vocabulary of contemporary art history, developed in the West, now is the language of academic art history everywhere. We know that we are distorting our descriptions of this Chinese art, even though we don't know how to “get it right.” In the history of European painting from Cimabue to the present, it would be hard to find any Western paintings that could be confused with any art made in China, so the frequent reliance of scholars upon such comparisons seems problematic. Of course, in the near future this situation might change. Perhaps in fifty years, as China becomes more prosperous, art history will become a hybrid discipline. At that point, the situation, which Elkins analyzes, will be reversed. But such a change is a long way in the future. (shrink)

In the process of interpreting works of pictorial art, it is easier to understand not the "style", but the "theme", that is, not how to write, but what to write. In the history of modern art, which attaches more importance to "style", the problem of "theme" is not fundamental and is among the primitive issues worthy of the attention of amateurs who do not understand art. However, sometimes it is in simplicity that the essence lies. The simplest questions that interest (...) almost everyone are the link between works of art and society. When analyzing the "topic", the subject under study is not confined to one work of art, since an integrated approach to the consideration of the problem should be used. The author's main contribution to the study of the history of the development of Chinese painting is a new perspective – the analysis of works based on the "theme". The results of the study revealed the main themes of Chinese pictorial art, identified the main reasons for referring to them, and also established their symbolic meaning, connection with philosophical and literary traditions. The important role of literary scientists in determining the directions of thematic development of Chinese landscape painting is revealed, the significance of the images of the fisherman and the traveler as carriers of the spiritual content of the landscape is determined. The conclusion is made about the prominence of certain themes in the pictorial art, depending on the processes of social development of China. (shrink)

This paper looks into Tsujimura Kōichi’s notion of the “circumspective,” which not only indicates a type of composition in traditional Chinese landscape painting but also a way of seeing and relati...

Philosophical reflections on journeys and crossings, homes and habitats, have appeared in all major East Asian and Western philosophies. Landscape and travelling first emerged as a key issue in ancient Chinese philosophy, quickly becoming a core concern of Daoism and Confucianism. Yet despite the eminence of such reflections, Landscape and Travelling East and West: A Philosophical Journey is the first academic study to explore these philosophical themes in detail. Individual case studies from esteemed experts consider how philosophical (...) thought about places and journeys have inspired and shaped major intellectual and cultural traditions; how such notions concretely manifested themselves in Chinese art, particularly in the genres of landscape painting and garden architecture. The studies present a philosophical dialogue between Confucianism and Daoism on issues of social space and belonging and include discussion on travel and landscape in Buddhism as well as Japanese and Tibetan contexts. Approaching the topic from an inter-cultural perspectives, particularly East Asian philosophies, and using these to enrich contemporary reflections on space, the environment, and traversing, this unique collection adds an important voice to present philosophical, political, and cultural discourses. (shrink)

The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. _Reading Zen in the Rocks_, the classic essay on the _karesansui_ garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully (...) illustrated history of these gardens. Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form. _Reading Zen in the Rocks_ is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the _karesansui_ so superbly represents. Praise for the French edition: "A small book of rare depth, remarkably illustrated, on one of the most celebrated and beautiful rock gardens of the monasteries of Kyoto."—_L'Humanité_ "Through _Le Jardin de Ryoanji_, Berthier teaches us to read the zen in the rocks, to discover the language offered by the garden at Ryoanji. Enigmatic, poetic, and disconcerting, an enriching journey through a work of art of surprising modernity, _Le Jardin de Ryoanji_ is a work that will interest all the amateurs of Japanese art and Eastern philosophy."—_Lien Horticole_. (shrink)

The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. _Reading Zen in the Rocks_, the classic essay on the _karesansui_ garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully (...) illustrated history of these gardens. Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form. _Reading Zen in the Rocks_ is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the _karesansui_ so superbly represents. Praise for the French edition: "A small book of rare depth, remarkably illustrated, on one of the most celebrated and beautiful rock gardens of the monasteries of Kyoto."—_L'Humanité_ "Through _Le Jardin de Ryoanji_, Berthier teaches us to read the zen in the rocks, to discover the language offered by the garden at Ryoanji. Enigmatic, poetic, and disconcerting, an enriching journey through a work of art of surprising modernity, _Le Jardin de Ryoanji_ is a work that will interest all the amateurs of Japanese art and Eastern philosophy."—_Lien Horticole_. (shrink)

Yuan Dynasty was an era with austere political reality and thinking reality. As a result of despisement to ruling of different races, a large majority of scholars in Yuan Dynasty chose seclusion without other choice, but the “internal beauty” they pursued was amazingly unanimous, which was, without doubt, owing to the spirit of the mountains and forests. When they tried to find enjoyment in painting, they put their willpower in it, which was a spontaneous awareness of cultural spirit and was, (...) moreover, a peak experience of Chinese traditional culture. Achievement of Yuan Dynasty painting was impressive, and extended the aesthetic space of human beings. Thus, it enriched and development and manifestation connotation of landscape painting to a great extent, and would be engraved forever in the spiritual and cultural history of human beings. (shrink)

As symbols of adaptability and transformation, together with qualities of vigilance and intelligence, we argue the relevance of dragons for spatial planning in China. We develop a metaphorical concept – the green dragon – for grasping the condition of contemporary Chinese societies and for facilitating the development of theories and practices of spatial planning which are able to face the challenges of rapid change. We ask Chinese scholars and spatial planners to liberate Deleuzian potential for strategic spatial planning (...) in a ‘becoming-between, coming-together’ of concepts which can effectively make a difference in the world. Having outlined what we regard as key transversals or diagonals between our reading of Gilles Deleuze and aspects of Chinese philosophy, we then offer the metaphor of strategic spatial planning as Chinese literati landscape painting. This is a form of painting which rejects the idea of the world being supremely organised from a particular point of view, preferring to paint immanence and transformation. Chinese literati landscape paintings, like philosophy and strategic spatial planning, ‘look only at the movements’. We conclude that connections between what concepts of Chinese philosophy and those of Gilles Deleuze can do, suggest that in China, a conception of strategic spatial planning as metaphorical green dragon may offer academics and planning practitioners a transverse way to relate the legacies of past philosophies and current thinking. (shrink)

Having reached its zenith in the Song dynasty, Chinese landscape painting in the dynasties that followed became highly formulaic as artists simply copied the old masters to perfect their skills. This orthodox approach was not accepted by everyone however; some painters criticized it, arguing it was better to learn the ideas behind the techniques of the old masters than to blindly copy them. Shitao was one such critic and his Manual on Painting exemplifies his desire to disassociate himself (...) from the classical approach to painting. This paper will investigate the three major themes of Shitao’s text—the holistic brushstroke, brush and ink, and the method of no-method—in order to show how they shaped his view of landscape painting and how said paintings subsequently embodied them. Unlike the near-scientific approach taken by his contemporaries and predecessors, Shitao paints to capture the unifying simplicity of nature, an onto-aesthetic experience that is profoundly enlightening. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

As a general concept, aesthetic education and art education are connected; to a certain extent, the two can be taken as one or two sides of the same coin. However, the specific questions involved are how they are connected and how to connect them in teaching practice. To answer these questions, I define aesthetic education as more general and theoretical and define art education as less general and more practical, that is, teaching students to read art works. Exploring the answers (...) to the first question, this essay offers an examination of an important aesthetic concept in Chinese art theory, inscape, and relates it to the teaching of how to read Chinese landscape painting. On the one hand, this aesthetic concept... (shrink)

The article deals with Chinese ink painting and some aesthetic notions, in particular those of xiang 象 and shanshui 山水 (literally: “mountains-waters”, i.e. landscape...

In a society which traditionally valued the moral and expressive forces of art, landscape painting became one of the most esteemed art forms. In China, "landscape" has always meant what its Chinese name—shan shui —implies: paintings dominated by peaks and streams supplemented by trees, rocks, mists, and plunging waterfalls. Despite major changes in style, landscape painting in China between the eighth and eighteenth centuries was remarkably stable in subject matter. Chinese artists painted the natural settings (...) which surrounded them in their home provinces or those which they discovered in their travels; and such settings were dominated by mountains and rivers. Moreover mountains and water were imbued with symbolic value. Traditionally the mountain has been considered the symbol of the emperor—the son of Heaven—and of virtue and masculine energy. The ridges and folds of the mountains display the veins of energy that course through the earth and the continuous process of change which characterizes the Universe. Water represents the origin of life, the female principle, vitality itself. Trees, stones, bamboo, and many flowers were similarly endowed with cosmogonic and moral significance. Given the symbolic value with which elements of nature were traditionally endowed, Chinese landscape painting is properly considered the normative form through which artists reasserted correct social relationships, moral order among men, and moral order in nature. Esther Jacobson-Leong, associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon, is currently working on problems in the significance in Steppe art and related traditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and AestheticsJoseph GrangeIn Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. By François Jullien. Translated by Paul M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Pp. 1,969.A book praising "blandness"—which is the translator's English word for the French fadeur, which is the author's translation of the Chinese dan!—and a book that is at once fascinating and "repellent" (...) (to use the translator's description of his tortuous search for an equivalent of fadeur and dan), In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics by François Jullien is a "globalizing" philosophical essay bent on stopping readers in their tracks at every twist and turn of the text. Is it worth the trouble? I shall venture a response in this review.More than once while reading this book, I was reminded of Plato's Sophist, where the difficulty in locating the sophist is described in such intricate detail. First he is here, but then he is over there; on the other hand, he could be hiding near by— but wait, maybe he has disappeared. So it is also with blandness. And perhaps it should be so, because once you have located the bland, it ceases to be bland and turns into something else. To take a fix on blandness Jullien throws it against a number of traits, qualities, experiences, and events: strength, music, sounds, signs, landscapes, painting, tastes, literature, ideology, margins and centers, and, finally, the fact that "transcendence is natural." At the same time, the author weaves these contrasts and comparisons through the history of Chinese culture, especially in the evolution of its painting and poetry. [End Page 484]Foremost among the qualities associated with blandness is inner detachment. What come immediately to mind are Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and aspects of Confucian teaching. Jullien has already given us a splendid treatise in his The Propensities of Things, and in some ways this volume rings many changes on that study of Chinese culture. But there is more to blandness than causal efficacy. It also suggests openness and a mood of friendliness toward the other, the different, and all things strange. Further, blandness is similar to harmony in the sense that it does not insist on its own presence. Rather, it constantly blends together opposites through its own power.It is power and its expression that is at the heart of the author's project. He attempts over and over again to show how the seemingly weak is actually the strong, that the far away is really close to hand, that emptiness is charged with spontaneous creative energy. Thus, what lingers is not yet finished expressing itself. And the translator tells us that a gustatory sense is the primary base of fadeur, dan, and blandness. The body is the region within which the bland can have its most powerful effect. Think of Chinese medicine, where "the web that has no weaver" (the title of Ted Kaptchuk's brilliant book) is the object of the physician's art. Or consider the power of water to yield and then conquer all. Or remember the Mahāyāna Buddhist's invocation of śūnyatā as the source of healing and renewal. Or recall the many times that Confucius advises silence rather than words. All these moments are akin to what Jullien calls "blandness."One way to grasp the insight into Chinese culture that Jullien is struggling with is to express it by way of Neoplatonism and Spinoza. What is often forgotten in expositions of these formidable philosophies is the way in which they use a novel doctrine of causality to bind together different realms of beings. For Plotinus and Spinoza the cause never really leaves the effect but remains there, hidden but effective. It is through this lingering presence that transcendence and immanence, body and soul, and God and the World remain conjoined. The image of the ladder so frequently found in these texts must be understood to run in both directions—up and down. So also, blandness is a dao that opens up experience to further depths and heights.Jullien's major concern is aesthetics... (shrink)

ABSTRACT A review of Songs of Nature, a study by John Sallis of the landscapes of the modern Chinese artist Cao Jun, with philosophical emphases on the notion of landscape, this analysis widens out to a relevance to all creative work. It homes in on the comparative or intercultural overlap between Western and Eastern traditions. as well as that between painting and music and the other senses. The focus is on the elemental. Art is at base a return (...) to nature with earth and sky as the horizons of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Shan Shui art is a traditional style of Chinese landscape painting that has had a lasting impact on Chinese culture. This paper attempts to view a masterpiece of this genre of art – the artwork entitled ›Hermit Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains‹ by Wang Meng – from the perspective of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of art in order to show how such an artwork can convey an ontological insight for those who experience it. Instead of viewing the artwork (...) as simply an aesthetically pleasing landscape and thereby relegating the experience to the realm of feeling as is common in modern Western approaches to art, I argue that the artwork is best understood as imparting meaning into our lives by opening up a new perspective on reality. Specifically, I show the Daoist principles and concepts that underlie shan shui art at work in Wang Meng’s (c. 1308–1385) masterpiece. The Gadamerian approach adopted provides an appropriate avenue to respect Wang Meng’s artwork and other paintings in the shan shui genre on their own terms for those embracing a contemporary Western aesthetic sensibility. (shrink)

"You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space--as well as our place in it--is the subject of Edward S. Casey's study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey's discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and (...) photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language--a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject." -- Book jacket. (shrink)

Many environmental aestheticians—most prominently, Allen Carlson—have drawn a distinction between “arts-based” and “nature-based” approaches to the aesthetics of nature and have argued that the widespread practice of using arts-based theories and categories to understand the aesthetics of nature is a mistake. This practice, they argue, should be rejected and replaced by a practice in which an aesthetics of nature based on a clear, scientifically grounded understanding of the environment is used to appraise nature. In this paper, I will challenge important (...) parts of this argument through a discussion of an example often used by these environmental aestheticians in developing their arguments: namely, landscape.. (shrink)

This article mainly focuses on one of the most refined movements in world aesthetics and fine art—one that spread when Chinese Renaissance ideas arose during the Song Epoch and that was called the Intellectual Movement. The ideological sources of intellectual aesthetics are discussed—as well as the distinctive nature of its fundamental theoretical views and of its creative principles in relation to a changing historical, cultural, and ideological contexts. The greatest attention is devoted to a complex analysis of the attitudes (...) toward the artistic creation of the most typical intellectuals, Su Shi and Mi Fu; the close interaction between the principles of painting, calligraphy, and poetry is emphasized; a special attention is paid to the landscape genre and to conveying the beauty of nature. This article discusses in detail the most important components of artist’s creative potential, the opportunities to employ them during the creative act, and the influence of Confucian, Daoist, and Chan aesthetic ideas. The various external and internal factors influencing the intellectual creative process are analyzed; artist’s psychological preparation before creating is discussed along with the characteristics of his entrance into the creative process. This article highlights the meditational nature of artistic creation typical of representatives of this movement, the freedom of the spontaneous creative act, and the quest for the inner harmony of the artist’s soul with expressions of beauty in the natural world. (shrink)

Shan shui art is a traditional style of Chinese landscape painting that has had a lasting impact on Chinese culture. This paper attempts to view a masterpiece of this genre of art – the artwork entitled ›Hermit Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains‹ by Wang Meng – from the perspective of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of art in order to show how such an artwork can convey an ontological insight for those who experience it. Instead of viewing the artwork (...) as simply an aesthetically pleasing landscape and thereby relegating the experience to the realm of feeling as is common in modern Western approaches to art, I argue that the artwork is best understood as imparting meaning into our lives by opening up a new perspective on reality. Specifically, I show the Daoist principles and concepts that underlie shan shui art at work in Wang Meng’s masterpiece. The Gadamerian approach adopted provides an appropriate avenue to respect Wang Meng’s artwork and other paintings in the shan shui genre on their own terms for those embracing a contemporary Western aesthetic sensibility. (shrink)