The landscape painting (shanshui hua) has a long history in China. Chinese painters of the past used landscape (shanshui) as a way to express themselves: their look on the environment (mainly natural) carried their entire cultural background, and it was heavily symbolic. There were many layers of possible interpretation of their works, depending on the viewer’s knowledge and understanding.
In 1935, the Shanghai Chinese Painting Society1 organized two special issues for their journal, Chinese Painting Monthly, on the aesthetics of Chinese and Western landscape painting. Many prominent scholars and artists participated in this discussion. Among them, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, Zheng Wuchang, Yu Jianhua, and Xie Haiyan wrote essays on Chinese landscape painting. Ni Yide, Chen Baoyi, Li Baoquan, and Lu Danlin focused on Western landscape painting. Through reviewing the origins, history, and evolution of Chinese landscape painting, they tried to find the similarities and differences between Chinese shanshui hua and Western landscape painting.2 Although the discussion at the time did not reach any common ground, its importance should not be overlooked. By the nineteenth century, along with the decline of the imperial examination system, the social structure that supported the Confucian class was abolished. Chinese landscape painting, which was regarded as the highest form of art by scholar- gentle-official painters for more than a thousand years, also lost its glory. It was not just a category of painting, however, but a reflection of the attitude towards nature, a symbol of Chinese culture. The discussion at the time focused on styles, formats, and techniques and the discussants tried to use some styles and techniques of Western painting for Figure 1. Zhang Hongtu, Dong Qichang: Cézanne, 1999, reference, or find some differences and even oil on canvas. Photograph courtesy of the artist “weakness” to provide evidence of the greatness of the Chinese tradition in order to rescue the declining tendency of Chinese ink painting at the time. This, actually, was a natural result of a cultural climate that had been dominated by the May Fourth New Cultural Movement, which advocated adopting Western science, technology, and aesthetics to rescue and reconstruct the country.
Figure 2. Zhang Jianjun, Simi-Ink Garden of Re-creation,2002,mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy of the author
A century ago, using the word shanshui in China was relatively simple because it usually indicated the ink or coloured painting of natural scenery. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the word “landscape,”which was translated into fengjing, appeared in art terms in China, when western style oil painting was introduced to China. In the circle of traditional Chinese ink painting, however, people still used shanshui and avoided using fengjing. Fengjing became a special term used for the landscape painting in Western media, such as oil or watercolour. This situation has continued to the recent day. For example, in 1998, the organizer of the “International Art Festival” still insisted using the term for the title of their exhibition, Contemporary Chinese Shanshui Painting and Oil Landscape Painting Exhibition.3
Lin Fengmian (1900-1991), a French-trained painter and important art educator of the time, in his 1926 article, “The Futures of the Oriental and Western Arts,”discussed landscape paintings in China and the West and tried to use the term fengjing to replace shanshui.4 “Chinese fengjing painting originated in southern China during the Jin Dynasty,”Lin claimed, “and the beautiful scenery of the south set up a foundation for its basic structure and formation. The grace of the
Tang landscapes and the monumentality of the Song landscapes were very unique at the time. The representation of the Western landscape painting was inferior to those of oriental. The first reason is that landscape painting is suitable to lyrical expression. The strength of Chinese art is lyrical; second, compared to Western painters, Chinese landscape painters enjoyed more freedom of expression. Western landscape painters depicted the natural scenery realistically, representing the surface of nature. Therefore, their painting did not have a lyrical feeling and was very mechan- ical. Chinese landscape painting, however, was the expression of personal mood and imagination. Chinese painters travelled through beautiful scenery, then used painting as a vehicle to express their moods. The formal likeness was never their main concern. Therefore, Western landscape painting is the representation of objects; Oriental landscape painting is the expression of impression.”5 Lin’s opinion was rather extreme in some way, but it represented many Chinese artists’ point of view of the time.
Many scholars believe that Chinese landscape painting originated in the Six Dynasties period when Daoism was flourishing. Daoist philosophy provided the theoretical background for the later development of landscape painting. However, Six Dynasties artists’ appreciation and understanding of landscape focused on literature, and did not directly apply to landscape painting. They emphasized the freedom of imagination and found spiritual sustenance in landscape.6 He Tianjian in his 1935 essay for the special issue of Chinese Painting Monthly also attributed the establishment of landscape painting to the growth of Daoism and Zen Buddhism during the Six Dynasties and Tang-Song periods.7 He also believed that the successive years of domestic war and ruthless political struggles in the officialdom were the reasons that many literati tried to seek spiritual sustenance in nature and use landscape painting to express their feelings.8
Not until the end of the Tang Dynasty, around the tenth century, did landscape painting become an independent category in Chinese painting. In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), along with the establishment of the imperial examination system, the tendency of upholding technique and form of beauty was reflected in landscape painting. Various painting techniques (brushwork) for depicting the landscape elements were developed. The Northern Song landscape, which has been regarded as the golden age of Chinese landscape painting, however, was not a realistic or naturalistic representation as seen in Western painting, but an “illusion” or “image of mind.”The depiction of details was applied with formalized textured strokes. The formal expression of brushwork itself, not the realistic presentation and likeness of nature, was appreciated by literati painters. In the Ming and Qing periods, the conventions of brushwork were carried to extremes.
Since the twentieth century, as W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out, the study of landscape painting in the West has gone through two major shifts.9 The first, led by Ernst Gombrich10 and associated with modernism, attempted to read the history of landscape painting as a progressive movement of formal and stylistic evolution; the second, associated with postmodernism, tends to decentre the role of painting and pure formal visuality in favor of a semiotic and hermeneutic approach that treats the landscape as an allegory of psychological or ideological themes.11
In the study of Chinese landscape, many natural features such as mountains, rocks, trees, water, clouds, mist, as well as figures and animals, can be also read as symbols in political, religious, and psychological allegory; meanwhile, the forms, compositions, and structures of painting can be directly linked with generic and narrative typologies such as the pastoral, the georgic, the exotic, the sublime, and the picturesque.
Martin Powers, in his recent article, deals with the rise of landscape painting as a new artistic genre in the tenth century and draws attention to the discourse of landscape painting as well as to its social significance.12 Powers sees the rise of landscape painting in the Song as a displacement of figure painting that was well established by the Tang. This development was the expression of a profound social change characterized by the political rise of the civil service examination elite at the expense of hereditary aristocracy. The new genre of painting, in other words, was the tangible product of a new way of seeing the world through the eyes of a new elite, which turned art into a medium of social contestation. 13
As Powers has noted, the realignment of the social and the artistic during the Tang-Song transition did not take the form of different strategies competing with each other in the representation of landscapes in paintings. It formed, instead, the backdrop of the rise of landscape and the fall of figure paintings as an alternative artistic genre. The opposition between figure painting and land- scape painting was accompanied, meanwhile, by a shift in artistic discourse that was less the result of a break with the past rather than a re-appropriation of it. Landscape discourse borrowed both from the old aristocratic language of social hierarchy and aesthetic discrimination in the stylistic of figure painting and from a long tradition of literati literary theory that injected moral attributes into discrete forms, postures, and spatial positioning. The result of these borrowings and reconfigurations in Song practice was the inscription of an “agonistic framework” in landscape.
Because landscape was without artifice, its space thus “offers a site within which an educated but non-aristocratic individual could negotiate issues of personal worth in the absence of overt signs of rank and station.”14 A lone pine in the tenth-century painter Jin Hao’s landscape thereby became the ideal medium of a post-feudal, non-aristocratic imperial vision built upon a universalizing claim of moral integrity, because moral claims were universal while rank and hierarchy were not. Because the Song discourse of landscape painting was embedded in an aestheticism that was moral rather than ornamental, spiritual rather than material, it lent itself to the service of this vision as the pictorial parallel to the mutual accommodation between the court and its literati officials.15
In recent years, art historians, in their studies of Chinese landscape, have also tried to read landscape painting not only as a body of passive representation in historical context but as a body of cultural and economical practice that actively participated in “making” history. At this point, I agree with W. J. T. Mitchell’s opinion that today, we think of landscape (shanshui), not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed. What concerns us is not just what landscape is or means, but what it does, and how it works as a cultural practice. Landscape does not merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power. Landscape as a cultural medium thus has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its status as sight and site. Thus, landscape always greets us as space, as environment, as that within which we find or lose ourselves.16
Nowadays the natural environment in China is difficult to be reached. Vast areas around the industrialized and urban zones have changed dramatically and do not resemble in any way the “mountains and water” we used to admire in the hanging scrolls.
Figure 3. Xu Bing, Writing Shanshui,2001,ink on paper. Photograph courtesy of the author
Most of the contemporary artists live in big cities, and their works focus on their environment, an environment that has changed greatly in the last few decades, causing the disappearance of scenes and habits, which have shaped a great part of their life. It is obvious that they should react to all that has happened in terms of visual impact and living conditions, transferring their feelings into the works.
The landscapes we see in these artists’ works differ greatly from the traditional shanshui, just as the contemporary reality differs form the ancient one. Contemporary Chinese artists use landscape as a statement of cultural power, through which the regional, national, and cultural identities have been represented.
Hongtu Zhang (b. 1943) in his landscape series seemed to follow a single and simple formula: execute a famous Chinese composition in a well-known Impressionist or Post-Impressionist brush manner, Ni Zhan as if painted by Monet, Dong Qichang done by Cézanne, Guo Xi and Shitao by Van Gogh (fig. 1). 17 But the works and their results are anything but simple, and audience responses to Zhang’s series of works vary widely. Some may enjoy the tranquil beauty of his landscapes, or the sheer dynamism of others; some may appreciate the particular pairings of past masters. Others, however, may be disturbed by their iconoclastic appropriation of past styles and their miscegena- tion of different traditions; others may contemplate the profundity of numerous aesthetic and cultural questions raised by the artist’s “simple” act of mixing traditions, blending our fixed cultural stereotypes. Like any savvy postmodernist, Zhang is keenly attuned to his audience, intent on challenging expectations, raising questions of values, and producing different responses.
The radical juxtaposition of East and West embodied by Zhang Hongtu’s art parallels the conflation of “modernity” and “Westernization” in nineteenth and twentieth century Chinese political practice, when Sun Yat-sen’s republicanism, Mao Zedong’s Marxist-Leninism, and Deng Xiaoping’s rush to capitalize all drive their sanctions from Western sources. Ironically, by dipping back into the past in order to examine and question its premises, by focusing on tradition in search of an escape from its constraints, Zhang Hongtu’s project infuses the art of the past
Figures 4 and 5. Xu Bing, Read Shanshui: After Yuan Jiang,2001,mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy of the author with his own vitality and gives it an on-going presence. His argument is not with the past but with excess—not with the past masters but with the over-simplified historical treatment of them, with their sanctification, with the investiture of them with inflexible authority over the past.18
In his most recent installation, Simi-Ink Garden of Re-creation, Zhang Jianjun (b. 1952) integrates humankind and nature, history and contemporary culture (fig. 2).19 Central to the installation are five taihu rocks made from ink. In traditional Chinese garden practice, taihu rocks and water encapsulate the vastness of nature: for cultural city-dwellers without access to mountains and streams, they act as direct substitutes. Zhang’s ink rocks were manufactured in molds formed directly from taihu rocks. Two of them are ink mixed with resin; the other three are ink combined with glue. Water pumps up through the centre of each ink-glue rock, to then drips down, forming glistening trails that gradually dissolve the rock. Surrounding the five imposing rocks is a pavement of dusty grey antique bricks, acquired from the demolition of old Shanghai houses. Deployed thus, the ink, the bricks, and the garden conventions transcend the bounds of their original specific functions, finding broader meaning in the present. Visitors can walk over the bricks, between the rocks, absorbing notions of time and process as they enjoy the complex array of forms coloured by a limited palette of greys and blacks, as in a traditional scholar’s ink painting. As Zhang Jianjun believes, every era is marked by a characteristic line, form, colour, and material. Linking the morphing visual markers is time, as experienced by humankind. Culture is propelled in this manner, with human experience as a universal quality that unifies across time and distance. Via the powerful statements embodied in his work, the artist tried to lead audience to an internalized understanding of these issues.20
In October 1999, Xu Bing (b. 1955) and five other artists from different countries were invited by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland to the Himalayas. The result of this project was his new series ink work Helsinki-Himalaya Exchange based on his small sketches produced while he was trekking through the Himalayas. Continuing his concerns through words in this series, Xu Bing pushed the pictographic function of Chinese characters to an extreme. In ancient times, Chinese literati painters usually described their painting as “writing” to distinguish themselves from the professional artisans. Xu Bing, however, directly applied the meaning of “writing” to draw the landscapes. From the distance, three large scale scrolls look like traditional
ink landscapes (fig. 3). Upon closer inspection, it is found that the landscape elements were composed with repeated units of Chinese characters, just like the conventional texture strokes applied by ancient painters. He rendered the foreground grasses using the Chinese character for grass, built up mountains from the characters for mountain, stone, and trees, and wrote “white” in Chinese art intervals in faint ink across areas of mist. In his another work, Read Shanshui: After Yuan Jiang, Xu Bing even made three-dimensional Chinese characters to expand the composition of Qing court painter Yuan Jiang’s hanging scroll painting to a three-dimensional installation (figs. 4 and 5).
Li Huayi (b. 1948) combines a strong sense of compositional drama, something that one might associate with Abstract Expressionism, with landscape images that evoke, but never copy, elements from the stunning aster-pieces of Li Cheng (919-967), Fan Kuan (d. after 1023), and Guo Xi (ca. 1000-1090) of the Northern Song period. The highly detailed constructions of trees and rocks in Li Huayi’s paintings are remarkable because they are convincingly structured from individual elements that are in themselves conventionalized. Then, despite their seeming naturalism, they are placed in impossibly dangerous mountain settings. Clearly imaginary, they are so powerfully persuasive as to seem like the rare dream image that one encounters, with the shock of recognizing the impossible, in broad daylight.21 As in Red Trees and Wrinkled Cliff (1994), he combined techniques of Song and Ming painting with fragments of observed landscapes to create a fantasy worlds, or dream worlds, presented in an almost surrealist fashion (fig. 6). His work rewards close scrutiny by drawing one into this imaginary world.22
Landscape is a dynamic medium, in which we live and move. But it is also a medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another. In contrast to the usual treatment of landscape aesthetics in terms of fixed genres (sublime, beautiful, picturesque, pastoral), fixed media (literature, painting, photography), or fixed places treated as objects for visual contemplation or interpretation, we try to displace the genre of landscape art from its centrality in art historical accounts of landscape, to offer an account of landscape as a medium of representation that is represented in a wide variety of other media, and to explore the fit between the concept of landscape in modernist discourse.23
Figure 6. Li Huayi, Red Trees and Wrinkled Cliff,1994,ink and colour on paper. Photograph courtesy of the author
Notes 1 Chinese Painting Society (Zhongguo huahui) was established in 1931 in Shanghai by Ye Gongchuo, Zheng Wuchang, He Tianjian, Qian Shoutie, Huang Binhong, Chang Yuguang, and Sun Xueni. The goal of the society was to promote traditional Chinese painting and raise the position of Chinese art in the world, while preventing the domination of Western culture. 2 Guohua yuekan (Chinese Painting Monthly) nos. 4 and 5. 3 About this, Fan Jingzhong gave a very good analysis in his article, “The Fengjing Hua (landscape painting) in Chinese’s Eyes,” Xin Meishu (New Art), no. 3 (2000): 49-54. 4 Lin Fengmian, The Future of Oriental and Western Arts (1926). Here I quote from Jingdai Zhongguo meishu lunji, ed. He Huaishuo 4 (Taipei: Artists Publishers, 1991), 43. 5 Ibid. 6 Zong Bin, Hua shanshui xu, in Lidai lun hus minzhu huibain, ed. Shen Zichen (Beijing: Wenwu Publishers, 1982.), 15; Zhang Yanyuan, Lidai minhua ji, Lun hua shanshui shushi 1 (Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1963), 15. 7 He Tianjian, “Zhongguo shanshuihua zai huake zhong datou zhi lunzheng,” Guohua yuekan, no. 4 (1935): 6. 8 Ibid. 9 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1. 10 Ernst Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 11 Simon Pugh, ed. Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital (Manchester, 1990). 12 Martin Powers, “When is a Landscape Like a Body?” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1998), 1-22. 13 Wen-hsin Yeh, “The Spatial Culture of Neo-Confucian China,” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1998), ix-xv. 14 Powers, 3. 15 Yeh, x. 16 Mitchell, 1-4. 17 It is an on-going series the artist has been working on since 1996. 18 Jerome Silbergeld, “Zhang Hongtu’s Alternative History of Painting,” in Zhang Hongtu: An On-going Painting Project (New York, 2000), 3-8. 19 This work was created for the artist’s solo show at the He Xianning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2002), and was subsequently exhibited in the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. 20 Britta Erickson, “Visual Experience of Time and Cultural Form: Installations by Zhang Jianjun” (unpublished paper). 21 Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Shock of the New: Li Huayi, Zhang Hong, and the Reordered Landscape,” Kaikodo Journal 16 (November 1999): 11-25. 22 Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “Chinese Painting in the Post-Mao Era,” in A Century in Crisis-Modernity and Tradition in the Arts of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 281. 23 Mitchell, 2-3.