Western Approaches to Chinese Landscape Painting

Abstract

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.

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It is a leisurely spring day;

Rise Guo Xi's mountains in my study.

Doves and swallows chirp as they wake up:

White clouds amid blue mountains-

Am I in heaven or still on earth?

This poem of the eleventh century Chinese poet Su Dongpo (Zhang, 2002: 107) reveals the artistic conception of his contemporary, the landscape painter Guo Xi, who was outstanding not only as an artist but also as an art critic. Three centuries later, on a dark day in mid-fourteenth century, a scholar named Song Lian found on the wall of an old building a painting of two pine trees by the great Song dynasty master Guo Xi. Taking a brush, he wrote on the wall beside it, ‘Holding a candle to look at this painting of two pines … it is exquisite in its delicate beauty. The brushwork is simple, the conception tranquil. The flavour is subtle and elegant. One has a sense of pride triumphant over wintry chill, and of moral integrity’” (Sullivan, 1979: 90).

As this quotation also indicates, many scholars maintained that Guo Xi was versed in the painting of large-sized scrolls and that he was particularly good in terms of a painting's structure. He had the unique talent of moving a viewer's imagination to a higher plateau. According to him, a good landscape was not only good to be “looked at” or “admired”; it should also be a place one wished to “visit” or “live” on a permanent basis (Zhang, 2002: 107).

Guo Xi elaborated on perspective in great detail. His “three ways of viewing a mountain” is not only sound from the viewpoint of perspective but also most instructive in terms of the application of color, the creation of a certain mental framework for the viewer, and the cultivation of a healthy relationship between man and his environment (Zhang, 2002: 109). Guo stresses the free inspiration of the artist as heroic creator, in which the artist's character intervenes as the defining factor in the making of the great work of art. The picture came not from an observation of an external phenomenon but from within the heart/mind of the artist (Clunas, 1997: 55).

In his work, Guo suggests that a landscape should give viewers a feeling as if they were present on the scene, where they can take a stroll, feast their eyes, enjoy themselves, and take a brief retreat. He also encouraged the painters to travel extensively and observe everything closely in an effort to learn from nature. He summarized the painters’ observation skills into three perspectives: remoteness in height, remoteness in depth, and remoteness in horizon (Lin, 2006: 91). This idea of three types of distance is used in modern times in discussing composition. Composition was the suitable filling-in of space. Guo Xi says that whenever one is going to use the brush, one must correlate sky and earth… between them one may develop the ideas of scenery (De Silva, 1967: 89).

What does the cock say? Cocorico, kikeriki or kiao kiao?

The poem of Su Dongpo reflects how a contemporary of Guo Xi, a poet from his nation, perceived him and his art. What we shall attempt to do in this paper is to consider Western approaches at different time periods to Chinese landscape painting, basing my comparison on Guo Xi's Essay on landscape painting (Guo, 1935), considered as one of the masterpieces written about Chinese painting.

In the first part of the paper, I will provide some brief information about Guo Xi's An Essay on landscape painting. In the second part, I will consider how its publication in 1935 was influential in the West, through a review published in 1936. Then, I will offer some reflections about the Western approaches to Chinese landscape painting at almost 35-year intervals, after the publication of this work in English. The first article is from 1969, and the second and the third ones from 2007 and 2009 respectively. My main argument is that these articles dealing with Chinese landscape painting give clues about their period's main rhetoric as well as discussions and approaches in the Western art history realm. These articles reflect what was going on in Western art history at different time periods. In other words, what we see or what we “believe” we see and how we represent that “image” changes according to the knowledge attained at the time period, and are also very much influenced by the social, political, and cultural factors, which reflect our approach and our mindset.

When we approach this subject matter in terms of artistic representation, it becomes even more complicated. To begin with a very simple statement, there are typically three factors involved in artistic representation: a thing, its actual image, and a mental image. In David Summers’ essay where he tries to depict this schematic history of representation, he analyses the interacting relationships among these three factors parallel to historical developments (Summers, 1996). Beginning from Plato and Aristotle, then moving on to medieval scholastics, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he raises the question about the priority of mental images in a historical perspective. Summers suggests that these ideas and attitudes are culturally specific, and if it is so, then the history of art is in large part a commentary of the Western tradition upon itself. He concludes that representationalism and its attendant problems are integral to the history of Western art, but not to the history of all art (Summers, 1996).

Ernst Gombrich (1960) approaches this subject by comparing examples from language at a more personal level. For English people the cock says “cock-a-doodle-doo”, for the French “cocorico”, for Chinese “kiao kiao”, and for German “kikeriki”. All these people hear the same cock and imitate it differently. So, Gombrich remarks that “there is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear” (1960: 307). He points to three factors in the analysis of representation: the medium, the mindset, and the problem of equivalence. The understanding depends on the expectation and experience of possibilities and also on the mental knowledge of the person.

Another way to approach this problem of representation is through a dichotomy of “insider” and “outsider”, or “emic” and “etic” perspectives, neologisms coined by the American cultural linguist Kenneth Pike (1967) from the suffixes of the words phonetic and phonemic (Harris, 1976: 331). Pike noticed that some sounds, phonemics, are unique to a particular (set of) culture(s), whereas other sounds, phonetics, are universal across cultures.

The emic or inside perspective focuses on cultural distinctions meaningful to the members of a given society, whereas the etic or outside perspective examines the extrinsic concepts and categories meaningful to scientific observers. Emic accounts describe thoughts and actions primarily in terms of the actors’ self-understanding; in contrast, etic models describe phenomena in constructs that apply across cultures (Morris et al., 1999: 782). In Pike's delineation, an emic perspective is not only that of the ‘native insider,’ but also represents culturally specific phenomena. Emic researchers examine human behavior within a particular cultural system, seeking meaning and causal explanations from within that cultural system, which are likely to be unique to that system (Tinsley, 2005: 188). This methodological contrast is also formulated as: “etics is bound up with the cross-culturally valid, emics with the culturally specific” (Feleppa, 1986: 244).

Guo Xi and his work

Guo Xi was considered the greatest painter of his time, he lived in mid-eleventh century in China. His essay contains his remarks and instructions to his son, without thought of publication. After his death, the son edited and published them. After nearly nine hundred years later, it was translated into English and published in 1935.

This work is regarded as having had tremendous influence on the development of Chinese landscape painting since the eleventh century. Quotations from it are familiar in the West, but only in 1935 did it appear in separate form in complete and adequate translation.

The literary style of the Essay is one of extreme balance, balance of thought as well as of phrase. Repetitions, parallelisms, and poetic phrases, which seem absurd in English prose, fall in precisely appropriate ways into Chinese. For example:

“A mountain is a large object: hence its form may be high and towering; it may stretch out proudly, stand in grandeur, crouch down, or slope forward; it may be majestic, energetic, austere, ingratiating, or obeisant; it may have a cover above or pedestal beneath; have some support in front or in back; it may look down as if to view the scene or march down as if to command. Such are the great form-aspects of the mountains” (Guo, 1935: 47).

Because of this difficult task, the role of the translator is emphasized by all scholars. In the discussion of emic-etic dichotomy, translation is considered as creating a structure, not reflecting the preexisting structure: “And while this structure is causally connected, via its ties to observation, to source-language structure, observer and receptor-language community interests have a constitutive impact on it, since translation must serve those interests. Translation, like other forms of codification, transforms what it touches”. (Feleppa, 1986: 250)

A few words about the translator

Shio Sakanishi was a Japanese essayist and translator (1896–1976), born in Tokyo. She went to the United States in 1922, where she completed her studies on aesthetics and literature at the University of Michigan; she then worked at the Library of Congress from 1930 to 1942. After the Second World War, she was an advisor to the Japanese government. Her writings deal mainly with women's issues and international relations.

In addition to her translations of Japanese works, Sakanishi turned to compiling Chinese art criticism, in the process demonstrating an impressive command of classical Chinese. Her first effort in this field was the English edition of Guo Xi's An Essay on Landscape Painting. “The Spirit of the Brush”, Sakanishi's best-known work, followed four years later.

Guo Xi, An Essay on landscape painting

The essay is a compilation of the aesthetic doctrines of the eleventh century Chinese landscape painter Guo Xi (born about 1020 in Hunan, China). The book consists of three parts: Comments on landscapes, the meaning of painting, rules for painting. Guo Xi, a devoted Taoist, was admitted at an early age to the Imperial Academy of Painting and soon became known for his bold and masterly brush work. Having acquired great fame as a landscape painter, he was called to the court. Guo was considered by his contemporaries as the greatest master of his day. One of his masterpieces, Early Spring (1072), is in the collection of the Palace Museum in Taipei.

For a very general Chinese art history background, we can note that the Tang (618–907) painters developed black and white paintings to a high degree, showing the capabilities of ink-stroke rhythms, laying the basis for the impressionistic style, usually called the literati style. On the other hand, the Song period is considered by art historians as an important period for three reasons: 1. The beginning of the academician paintings, which are generally realistic, in contrast to the impressionist style 2. The death of portrait painting 3. the birth of landscape painting. So, during the Song period, the emphasis changed from human figures to nature such as landscape, birds, and animals (Lin, 1967: 69).

As a result of these changes, one of the things which separates Guo Xi from Tang artists is his subject matter. Virtually all Tang artists painted at least some figure subjects, whether religious or secular. But we have no evidence that Guo Xi painted anything other than landscapes. Patrons and painters in China had always been partial to paintings of people and gods in certain contexts, but the rise of landscape painting to a dominant position of esteem was obvious to critics in the eleventh century, when Guo and other court landscape painters were active (Clunas, 1997: 55).

The importance of the essay

Why did this essay, compiled of conversations without the aim of publication, have such a tremendous effect on Chinese art history? Guo's thoughts were not revolutionary, they only reflect the ideals of his period. Actually, Guo Xi followed in the footsteps of his predecessors who, in their fragmentary treatises, had set down abstract theories on the art of landscape painting. His discussion, however, is more thorough than theirs, his application of general theories is at once more practical and more personal: “The primary contribution of the Essay to the study of aesthetics, however, lies not in its technical advice –which is indeed excellent in itself- but in its presentation of a thoroughly integrated conception of the essential spirituality of all art” (Guo, 1935: 24).

This essay is considered as signaling the rebirth of landscape painting, showing the intense feeling for hills, rivers, and lakes, and some of its important techniques. This feeling for nature runs through all Chinese prose and poetry and is not the result of Zen; it determined the development of Chinese art into landscapes at the cost of human portraits (Lin, 1967: 69).

I now turn to examining the impact this translation had on Western approaches to Chinese landscape painting.

Review by Helen Fernald, 1936

The year following the publication of the Essay, a review by Helen Fernald is published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fernald argues that this work is not only addressed to artists but to all people: “It is because of the fundamental truths herein expressed, the mind of a great man of the past revealed, that this essay will appeal to a great many persons who are not interested primarily in art but in people” (Fernald, 1936: 681).

She then focuses on the main principles of Chinese landscape painting: “With the complete translation before us we are struck anew by the emphasis upon certain principles. Never does Guo Xi forget that the object and end of painting is to express the spirit of a scene. (…) How can the artist catch the spirit of landscape? Only by concentrating his spirit upon the essentials in a scene” (Fernald, 1936: 682).

Finally, she points to some Western misinterpretations of Chinese art and the way the artist works: “We had thought that the Chinese took no notice of effects of sunshine and shadow, what we call ‘chiaroscuro’. But here is evidence that Guo Xi recognized it and gave rules for representing it. Another theory of ours is shattered, that the Chinese painter never ‘worked over’ his lines. Also that the painter made sketches out of doors on the spot is certainly suggested by the first passage quoted above” (Fernald, 1936: 682–683).

In 1979, one of the prominent Western scholars of Chinese art, Michael Sullivan, also comments on the chiaroscuro element in the works of Guo Xi: “We do not often think of chiaroscuro as an element in Chinese painting, but Guo Xi was a master of it. (…) His greatest surviving work, the Early Spring of 1072 in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, shows him as a master of monumental design, in which the realistic details of buildings, boats, and fishermen are totally subordinated to broad effects and dramatic contrasts of light and dark” (Sullivan, 1979: 64–67).

Wen Fong, “Toward a structural analysis of Chinese landscape painting”, 1969

33 years after the publication of the Essay, in 1969, an article by Wen Fong is published in Art Journal. The very first sentence of the article is: “A critical and historical study of Chinese landscape painting has long suffered from the lack of an acceptable method for dating painting by style” (Fong, 1969: 388).

As quoted above, the author's main aim throughout the article is to classify “the modern notion of period style” for Chinese landscape painting, as well as identify and describe the individual manner. With the major term “style” in mind, Wen Fong is trying to apply Western frameworks and notions of art: “A new style is a new idea… The historian is interested in the inceptions of styles, not in their perpetuations” (Fong, 1969: 391, quoting from Max Loehr).

Wen Fong approaches, categorizes, and evaluates Chinese landscape painting with Western art historical templates and labels. She raises the following question: “How can we formulate an historical development of Chinese painting which, in short, combines the idea of periodic change in pictorial structure (or form-relationships) in painting, with the knowledge of continuous individual manners characterized by individual motifs (including form elements and techniques) and expressive qualities?” (Fong, 1969: 392).

She then gives the answer: “We must study the archaeologically recovered early works for the only remaining evidence of fixed visual positions during the early periods: Archaeological materials showing early Chinese landscape painting offer a clearly definable stylistic development” (Fong, 1969: 392).

Her final proposition for the determination of Chinese period style and of the individual style is summarized as such: “The stylistic development deduced from the archaeological evidence represents a history of style without knowledge of individual contributions. With the help of literary records, individual contexts and critical purposes can be reconstructed” (Fong, 1969: 396).

Mark Sullivan, “The gift of distance, Chinese landscape painting as a source of inspiration”, 2007

When we reach the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are faced with more comparative approaches which try to understand Chinese ways of thinking and underlying conditions of the history and philosophy of Chinese art. The first example is an article by Mark Sullivan, published in Southwest Review in 2007. The motto quotation of the article is from Theodor Adorno: “Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people” (Sullivan, 2007: 407).

Sullivan begins by describing a Chinese landscape painting displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: fifteenth century Chinese artist Shen Zhou's Autumn colors among streams and mountains: “Whether walked along or unspooled in segments, the scroll intends to involve the viewer's imagination at an almost physical level, creating a feeling of wandering through a scene rather than absorbing it from a fixed point. In Western painting, we’re more familiar with physicality created through sheer scale, (…); here the experience is far more intimate, less autarchic, as though the deceptively simple brushstrokes spelled out an invitation to meet them halfway, to complete their envisioning” (Sullivan, 2007: 408).

Major terms in his approach are the most important notions of Chinese landscape painting: space and “breath-resonance”. First, he tries to explain the historical background and the philosophical meaning of the empty space: “Part of what gives the painting spaciousness and lucidity is its confident resting on tradition, what it can take for granted. One place to see this assurance is the blank (…). Like so much in Chinese painting, this empty space, seemingly devoid of any content or signification, has history. It goes back at least to the great monumental landscape paintings of the Northern Song Dynasty to legendary tenth and eleventh-century masters (…)” (Sullivan, 2007: 409).

Then, he identifies the various uses of empty space changing according to different periods, parallel to historical developments and according to how these developments were perceived by the artists. For example, Song period painter Guo Xi is referred to as “balancing of form and emptiness, using a mysterious blankness; whereas under the foreign Mongolian rule of Yuan dynasty, Ni Zan using a poetic spaciousness, symbolizing the inner exile and sufferance of the artist: “The yearning figured in the empty spaces of Ni's hanging scrolls arises from this dual signification of untouched purity as both a place of rest and an index of isolation. These blanks, in other words, make visible a painful exaltation” (Sullivan, 2007: 410).

Another important term used by the author is the “breath-resonance”: “The first and most important of the so-called six canons or principles of Chinese painting, formulated by the fifth century painter and critic Xie He, emphasizes the need for ‘breath-resonance’ (perhaps we would say ‘vital force’) to create within painting movement that feels like life (…). This principle, which is probably the most influential statement ever made about Chinese painting, stresses flow and energy as the means to make convincing images” (Sullivan, 2007: 412).

Matthew Turner, “Classical Chinese landscape painting and the aesthetic appreciation of nature”, 2009

In an article published in The Journal of Aesthetic Education in 2009, Matthew Turner also approaches the subject from within the realm of Chinese aesthetic notions. The major themes of his discussion are again the “spirit resonance” and empty space.

He begins with the question “Where should we look for the aesthetic experience of nature?” With this purpose, he turns to classical Chinese painting because “the Chinese attitude toward visual representations of nature is such that it provides us with a way to look at Western attitudes toward the object of nature in a different light” (Turner 2009: 107).

He argues that current accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature are incomplete insofar as they take their impetus primarily from a culturally bound set of issues that overlie the ground of aesthetic experience: “As members of a particular tradition, we have (reasonably) worked within that tradition to develop its resources. By stepping outside of that tradition, we can become more aware of the multifarious dimensions of our potential aesthetic experiences” (Turner, 2009: 108–109).

Thus, he refers to theoretical foundations of the practice of Chinese painting. The founding document of the theory of Chinese painting is Xie He's six principles and the most important principle is the first one, translated as “Spirit Resonance”. Turner argues that it is possible to illuminate the concept of Spirit Resonance by understanding its association with broader Chinese metaphysical theories (Turner, 2009: 110). Then he addresses the general features in order to explain this concept.

As Turner emphasizes, to many in the West the Chinese tradition of landscape painting often looks monolithic. There is repetition of similar elements and themes, and the media does not change: “But this claim could not be further from the truth. There is an enormous breadth in the tradition of landscape painting, and armed with the appropriate art historical resources, we can see how it is that individual artists were capable of transcending the apparent limitations of this style of painting” (Turner, 2009: 113).

According to Turner, we have to note:

1. - the weight that is placed on the use of brush-connection between painting and calligraphy

2. - the different ways in which the watercolor inks can be used

3. - the role that poetry plays in these paintings

4. - the role that Chinese literati (educated scholar-officials) played

These historical events helped usher in a new element of Chinese landscape painting: personal style (Turner, 2009: 114).

These individual styles of various painters contribute to their uniqueness and aesthetic value. Like Sullivan, he also compares Southern Song academy master Guo Xi and Yuan dynasty literati painter Ni Zan especially in terms of the use of empty space: “As a general contrast, we can see Guo's image as robust, detailed, and ‘big’ in both composition and brushwork, while Ni's is sparse and simple. Both are portraying the landscape; both, in the estimation of many critics, portray Spirit Resonance, but both do so in decidedly and characteristically different ways” (Turner, 2009: 116).

Turner concludes that by attending to Chinese painting, we can ourselves learn how to appreciate nature by acquiring new criteria for seeing nature itself. One of the most important aesthetic goals of Chinese painting is a kind of representation: to capture the essence of nature by seeing as much like nature itself.

Entering more “inside”, to see better what is both “inside” and “outside”

Guo Xi thinks that there are landscapes in which one can travel, landscapes in which one may gaze, landscapes in which one may ramble, and landscapes in which one may dwell; any painting which reveals one of these is in the category of the excellent (De Silva, 1964: 33). In the twenty-first century, Turner questions how the body of classical Chinese landscape art could be relevant to our Western approaches: By adopting the resources that are made available by particular Chinese paintings, we can continue to refine and develop our own aesthetic interaction with the natural environment.

Similarly, the same path can be followed for all non-Western art, in order to appreciate them but also to refine and develop our own aesthetic appreciation towards not only nature but all that is “outside” of us in general, towards all “others”.

The “Eurocentric” or “Western” understanding of art history is embedded in classification, chronology, terminology, rhetoric, and narrative as well as in the institutional structures of art history scholarship. Robert Nelson looks at three cases to examine the space and time created by the discipline (1997). In the first case, he points out the unnatural, inconsistent, and illogical aspects of the categorization of the annual list done by the Art Bulletin for the American and Canadian art history Ph.D. dissertations. The classification system is both chronologically and geographically biased. The same can be said about library classifications which can be even ethnocentric, as well as for introductory art history survey books. As Nelson points out, the major systems used in Western Europe and America are derived from values held by those societies. They prioritize European history, Christianity, Western philosophy, and capitalist economies. The “map” of art history is drawn by the modern, the national, and the Euro-American, and by their culturally derived senses of order, classification, and system (Nelson, 1997: 40).

What if we try to write or order, classify, and systematize a “global” art history? Lately this problem has been questioned and discussed, and the scholars have tried to find new ways of expression, to develop new approaches to the field. Ladislav Kesner gives a number of reasons “for insisting that art history should go only so far in criticizing itself for not being sufficiently ‘global’” (Kesner, 2007: 82).

But on the other hand, if we approach to the matter from a different point of view, we can argue that “it is impossible to escape the fact that the art history we learn, practice and teach has grown up and continues to develop in the European intellectual tradition and we cannot jump out of our intellectual skins or run away from our intellectual shadows” (Summers, 2006: 218). Nevertheless, it does not mean that this whole tradition should be abandoned. Instead, history remains fundamental to our self-, group-, and mutual understandings, and it cannot be ignored. Summers concludes that “the history of art as it stands is a de facto world art history, whether we admit or not, and it is a deeply flawed, partial and inadequate one” (Summers, 2006: 218).

Today most cultural anthropologists agree that anthropological research should gather both emic and etic knowledge, which are seen as complementary approaches stimulating each other's progress. On the one hand, emic knowledge is essential for the intuitive and empathic understanding of a culture; etic knowledge, on the other hand, is essential for cross-cultural comparison. Each provides only half of the story (Morris et al., 1999: 790). In Pike's view, the relationship between emics and etics is dynamic and neither is more significant than the other. Both concepts provide a way of discriminating between various types of data for the study of cultural phenomena (Xia, 2011: 77). Another point of view is, as Tinsley emphasizes, “although emic knowledge is invaluable for ensuring a valid operationalization of the research question for any one culture, this needs to be tempered by the need for equivalent models and measures across cultures. The goal of each researcher or informant should be to transform their emic knowledge into an etic model” (Tinsley, 2005: 191).

According to Kesner (2007), the boundaries between “global art history” and local environments are fluid and permeable, sustained largely by language, but also by other factors such as curatorial practices, culturally specific categories, concepts, terms embedded in the specific ways of looking. Through examples from Chinese art history, the author asks a valid question: Is the absence of non-Western categories and terms in art history a sign of ignorance and of a much needed opening up of the discipline, which remains so Eurocentric, or is it rather a sign of the very limited potential applicability of such culturally specific terms outside of their original contexts? (Kesner, 2007: 90).

Similar problems of terminology are also discussed in the context of, for example “Islamic art” (Grabar, 1976, Blair and Bloom, 2003, Bozdoğan and Necipoğlu, 2007, among others). But this problem of terminology is not specific to “Chinese art” or “Islamic art”, as Grabar points out, since it deals with “man-made things”, and as raw materials and preliminary mode of operation, it uses visual observation (Grabar, 1976: 229). So the discipline of history of art itself is also one of the major sources of this ambiguity, although not the only one. It arouses such kind of problems because the historian of art has to make choices in existing documents, basing its work on the assumption that there are qualitative variations in the things made by man, and aiming to determine the nature and development in time of these qualitative modifications.

This question brings us to the universality of art history, to “the ideal of truly multicultural art history”, i.e. to “global” art history. Kesner emphasizes that this has to “resemble a network or a dense mosaic of narrowly defined cultural groups, or local and particular cognitive styles, each with its local spatiotemporal horizon for the production and use of art” (Kesner, 2007: 102). Then the real challenge of a global art history will be in “reconciling a dedication to the uniqueness of diverse art traditions and culturally specific ways in which art has been created, with a faith in certain universal dispositions of human consciousness” (Kesner, 2007: 104–105).

Through these contradictory approaches to Chinese landscape painting with almost 35-year intervals, I tried to discuss these problems and propose such kind of understanding: entering more “inside”, in order to look and see better what is both “inside” but also what is “outside”…