Art in traditional Chinese scholarly gardens
The art , especially the landscape painting, but also the poetry had a very strong influence on the design of Chinese gardens . In order to understand this influence, one must first examine the philosophy of the horticulturalists and their "religious" beliefs in nature.
The builders were mostly scholars and professionally active as civil servants in the public service and viewed social developments with concern. They denounced the proportional representation, as well as the increasing corruption in the Chinese society and, as an "excuse" from it, referred to older Chinese philosophies such as Taoism and Confucianism, which in their opinion produces a nobler society.
Taoism and the Scholars
The Taoism could be sweeping understood as a religion of nature. The ultimate goal in Taoism is to become one with the universe and thus to be "immortal". Man can only achieve this by purifying himself internally and ultimately finding his inner "emptiness". Because only those who give up their own “subject” or “I” without desire and ultimately also without time can absorb and understand the entire cosmos and its processes.
To achieve this, many Taoists lived as hermits in the midst of the harsh nature, mostly in the mountains, meditating and nourishing themselves on what nature gave them. Since this life was very arduous and most of the scholars were still active as officials, they decided to imitate nature in their private gardens in order to practice Taoism in the midst of their small, closed “universe”. Since the garden was a copy of nature, the most important elements in it were mountains, water and, last but not least, plants.
Painting in the scholarly gardens
As already mentioned, landscape painting goes hand in hand with the art of horticulture. Just as the hermits painted the landscape in the mountains, the scholars also captured them on canvas in their gardens. But in order to understand the landscape pictures of a Chinese garden, the philosophy behind the Chinese landscape painting or poetry has to be explained in more detail.
Chinese landscape painting
The Chinese landscape paintings were different from the painted objects in our western society. In this country, the actual object was painted from a fixed perspective. This had the disadvantage that it was taken out of the entire “nature matrix” and considered separately, i.e. the interactions and the processes between the objects were not taken into account. The Chinese went a different way. They tried to grasp the entire "matrix". But this could only be achieved by painting the natural process yourself.
According to Taoism, the entire cosmos is a constant change ( Yin and Yang ). Nothing is stationary or eternal. Yin arises and is replaced by Yang, the eternal cycle of the universe. And it is precisely this constant transition that the Chinese painters tried to reproduce. If you look at a classic landscape picture, you will see that it is painted very vaguely and without sharp contours. It also contains a great deal of unpainted free space between what is painted. This free space was very important for a picture, because it symbolizes the emptiness that is responsible for the constant change. A landscape image was not simply viewed centrally, it was started either from the side or from below and viewed horizontally or vertically up to the opposite side. If the eye thus z. B. wanders up from below, a painted object manifests itself slowly because its outlines are vague. Shortly before it shows its full shape, however, one reaches its opposite outline again and returns to the empty, i.e. unpainted space of the canvas, before the game begins again behind it. The water in front of it dipped into the void and transformed or manifested itself a moment later increasingly as a mountain. The painter was thus able to depict the constant process of transformation.
Viewing such images helped the Taoist to find his inner emptiness. Because his eye wandered through the entire picture, so he experienced the constant transformation of the "objects" until he reached the emptiness at the top of the canvas, which mostly represented the sky. When the state of inner emptiness was finally reached, the Taoist was able to give up his "I" and leave the "empty space" within him to the entire cosmos.
Chinese poetry
In contrast to the West, where painting came before writing, in China writing developed parallel to painting. The Chinese characters are basically nothing more than painted "pictures" and the ancient Chinese used the same ink and brush for their calligraphy as well as for their pictures. It can therefore happen that the old painters in particular said that they “write” mountains, trees or landscapes.
Painting is very closely linked to poetry. If you take a closer look at a landscape painting, you will find that very often there is a poem in the upper or side corner that is supposed to arouse the same feelings as the picture. The two complete each other, so to speak, alternating like yin and yang. The ancient Chinese also said: the picture is a silent poem and the poem is a speaking picture. Or: What poetry is no longer able to express in words eludes the art of writing and turns into an image. And when the art of painting reaches its limits, shapes become words.
The approach in poetry is also very similar. A Chinese poem always tried not to express anything too clearly and always left a lot of leeway for the reader's imagination. As soon as a meaning began to become clearer, it gradually dipped into the white space between the words, or rather characters, and turned into something else.
Landscape pictures in the scholarly gardens
If you now take a closer look at a scholarly garden, you will find that it consists of innumerable landscapes. On the one hand, of course, you can find many landscape paintings on the walls, but the natural pictures are much more interesting. Because the ancient Chinese knew how to skillfully stage certain visually appealing garden sections, mostly using frame effects. Such “screens” were very often wall breakthroughs, such as windows or doors, which reproduce the garden section behind them as a perfect landscape.
In addition to the windows, there are of course passages, which are often round in shape. The circle symbolized the Dao, the constant change and the return. Often there are eye-catchers behind, like the pavilion here. The builders also made it very important not to show the entire scene behind the wall openings. Only well-proportioned parts were shown, the rest is left to the imagination of the beholder, as is the case with the paintings.
These openings were often arranged one behind the other to reinforce the passe-partout effect. It should be noted here that a Chinese scholarly garden was usually very small. In order to represent the infinite abundance of nature and ultimately the universe, the builders had to come up with certain tricks. A common variant was to divide the garden into many, smaller, self-contained areas. So you could never see the entire garden at a glance, which made it appear larger. These sub-areas were then visually connected by windows and, of course, doors through which one could see or guess the area behind.
If you take a closer look at the octagonal windows, which are arranged one behind the other, you notice that behind the first window you cannot see the floor of the space in between. This is another nifty trick used by the builders to make the garden appear bigger. Because without a floor, the eye cannot create a perspective, that is, it cannot see how far away the window behind it is or how big the space behind it actually is.
Another option was to arrange windows side by side in a row. When the viewer passed it, the landscape behind it changed constantly, depending on which window one was at. The walls were always colored white. With this variant, the parallels with regard to the way landscape images are viewed, as described above, can be established very well. A painted picture was sometimes viewed from right to left. If you now pass the first window, the first part of the garden manifests itself behind the window just like a painted part of a landscape. If you step forward and pass the first window, you can see the white wall, as well as the unpainted part between the painted parts in the painting. Until you then reach the next window again and so on.
But it didn't always have to be wall breakthroughs that create landscapes. The builders have planned a kind of “tourist route” in each scholarly garden, which guides the viewer through the entire garden and is intended to show him the most beautiful and most important parts. These paths were often covered so that you could see the garden when it rained. The roof was held in place by uprights, which together with the upper edge of the roof, which were often provided with finely worked wood carvings, in turn form a frame. The garden arrangements behind were skilfully set in scenes as a landscape picture.
These corridors often form a zigzag course, whereby you get many different, constantly changing perspectives or framed landscapes of the garden to the left and right.
On the last pages you could see very well how essential the Chinese landscape painting was in the scholarly gardens and how the horticulturists integrated their "landscape pictures" into their gardens as part of the whole. One could say that a traditional scholarly garden consists of landscapes, just as the entire garden represents a single landscape. The size of a garden does not necessarily count, the imagination and sensitivity of the viewer are much more important.
literature
- R. Steward Johnston, Scholar Gardens of China, Cambridge University Press 1991
- Peter Valder, Gardens in China, Timber Press 2002
- Francois Cheng, Abundance and Emptiness, Merve Verlag Berlin, 1991
- Marcel Granet, The Chinese Thought, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985
- Francois Jullien, About the Fade - an Eloge, Merver Verlag Berlin 1999
- Wolfgang Bauer, History of Chinese Philosophy, Becksche Reihe, 2006
- Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden, Ulmer Verlag 2003
- Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, Yale University Press, 1988
- Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation, Yale University Press, 1992
- Cheng Liyao, Private Gardens, Springer Verlag Vienna, 1999
- Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, The Art of Writing, Shambhala Publications, 1996
- Francois Jullien, The big picture has no form, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 2005
- Roger Goepper, On the essence of Chinese painting, Prestel Verlag, 1962
- Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting, University of California, 1980
- Chen Cong Zhou, On Chinese Gardens, Tongji University Press, Shanghai China
- Ulrich Müller, Space, Movement and Time in the Work of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2004
