This quarter (quarter instead of semester...crazy) I'm taking a theory seminar, a class on Symbolism in the 19th century and, something much further from my comfort zone, Landscape and Garden in Traditional China. Because most of my knowledge of Chinese culture comes from Disney's Mulan, I was a little intimidated about this class. Luckily, my professor wears loafers. Loafers are a good sign in a professor when you have no idea what you're doing--loafers are willing to accept that you have no idea what you're doing and work with you.Anyway, Prof. Loaf has presented a great overview to landscape and Chinese art in general. As a western art historian, I usually try to fit eastern philosophy and artistic tradition in a western model...and it doesn't work. My favorite example of this is inscription.
Most Chinese ancient art is on either a hand scroll (sometimes 400 ft long), a decorative fan, or a hanging scroll and almost all of the works we've studied have imperial seals (stamps) and "inscriptions" or captions. When the owner of a hand scroll, for example, thought that the painting was well done, he/she would write "wow, really good work" on the silk! Some of the translations of these inscriptions include "I like Li Cheng's use of mist, but I really prefer southern painters." In the western tradition this would be equivalent to walking up to an oil painting in the Louvre and writing on the canvas (gah!) and would even be considered an honor if you were a little famous. Sometimes the fact that an emperor wrote on a scroll is more important than the image (even if it happened 100 years after it was painted), and sometimes the words are larger than the images like this piece attributed to Ma Lin.
No wonder eastern traditions don't fit into western models very well. I'm sure I'd get arrested if I walked up to a Da Vinci and wrote "Great work, mate. I really like the clouds!" Maybe Chinese characters are just prettier than English printing...or maybe I just need to get a little more famous before I autograph artists' works.
School man, you gotta love it.
1 comment:
That is so interesting! I have gained a strange fondness to asian cultures as of late, even though I don't know much about it. I think it's due to my obsession with the tv show Avatar, but it's there none the less. They're just so interesting because of how different they are.
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