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Ruins Text 3 A STORY OF RUINS A STORY OF RUINS PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN CHINESE ART AND VISUAL CULTURE Wu Hung reaktion books To my students Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2012 Copyright © Wu Hung 2012 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in/by British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wu Hung, 1945 – A story of ruins : presence and absence in Chinese art and visual culture. 1. Ruins in art. 2. Symbolism in art – China – History. 3. Art, Chinese – Themes, motives. 4. Art and society – China – History. 5. Art and history – China. 6. Ruined buildings – China – Psychological aspects. I. Title 704.9'46'0951- dc 23 isbn 978 1 86189 876 0 CONTENTS PREFACE 7 1 INTERNALIZING RUINS Premodern Sensibilities of Time Passed 11 Where are the ruins in traditional Chinese art? 13 ~ Qiu and Xu: erasure and remembrance 19 ~ e stele and withered trees: painting and poetry on ‘Lamenting the Past’ 30 ~ Rubbing as surrogate ruin 51 ~ Ji: traces in landscape 63 2 THE BIRTH OF RUINS Inventing a Modern Visual Culture in China 93 Circulating picturesque ruins 95 ~ War ruins: conquest and survival 121 e destruction, ruination and resurrection of the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming Yuan) 155 3 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE Transience as a Contemporary Aesthetic of Ruins 165 Signifiers of despair and hope 166 ~ Representing contemporary ruins 201 CODA : State Legacy 237 References 259 Works Cited 277 Acknowledgements 285 Photo Acknowledgements 286 Index 287 PREFACE A larger purpose of this book is to think of Chinese art and visual culture globally. As such my project consists of two interrelated aspects, one conceptual and the other historical. Conceptually, a study of ruins in Chinese art and visual culture rec ognizes alternative histories of ruins and, more fundamentally, acknowledges het erogeneous notions and representations of ruins in different cultural and artis tic traditions. e English word ‘ruin’, or ruine in French, ruine in German and ruinere in Danish, has its origin in the idea of ‘falling’ and has long been associated with fallen stones. 1 From here it has gained its primary definition as architectural remains of predominantly masonry structures. is definition laid the basis for constructing a story of ruins in the West, one that has been told and retold countless times by writ - ers, artists and scholars from different disciplines. is story has also influ enced, to say the least, the ways in which ruins in other cultures are perceived, represented and interpreted. e art historian Paul Zucker writes in an influential essay: ‘e popular concept of ruins in our time has been created by the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Wal pole on.’ 2 is is true not only for Europe and America, but also for many other places around the world as a result of the spread of Western culture and ideas through colonization and globalization. As evidence, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Gebel Barkal in Sudan, Tikal in Guatemala and the Great Wall in China are not only won ders of the world but also the pride of each nation, featured in picture albums and tourist guides in ways no different from those of the Parthenon, Colosseum and Tintern Abbey. ese stone or brick structures have become architectural symbols of their countries of origin, and inspire aesthetic appreciation and awe that is deemed universal. Unknowingly, the Western concept of ruins has become a global one. ONE INTERNALIZING RUINS : Premodern Sensibilities of Time Passed Where Are the Ruins in Traditional Chinese Art? Several years ago, after re-reading writings by Hans Frankel and Stephen Owen on the Chinese poetic genre huaigu – ‘lamenting the past’ or ‘meditating on the past’ 1 – I decided to conduct a survey of ruin images in Chinese painting because such images frequently appear in huaigu poems. The result surprised me: among all the examples I have checked, covering a broad chronological span from the fifth century bc to the mid-nineteenth century ad , only five or six depict ruined buildings. 2 Typically, the architectural structures in a painting show no trace of damage, even if the artist has inscribed a poem next to the image describing their ‘broken roofs’ and ‘ruined entrenchment’ ( illus. 1). I was no less astonished when I turned to architecture: there was not a single case in pre-twentieth-century China in which the ruined appearance of an old building was purposefully pre - served to evoke what Alois Riegl has theorized in the West as the ‘age value’ of a manufactured form. 3 Many ancient timber structures do exist, but most of them have been repeatedly renovated or even completely rebuilt ( illus. 2). Each renovation and restoration aims to bring the building back to its original bril liance, while freely incorporating current architectural and decorative elements. Although I could simply have continued my search for images of ruins, these initial findings were forceful enough to prompt me to ponder their implications. Logically, I questioned first why I was so surprised by such findings: clearly I, like many other people as I found out later, had presumed that ruins were an integral element of traditional Chinese culture and existed in both architectural and pic torial forms. It is also clear that in making such a presumption I was uncon - sciously following a cultural/artistic convention that is at odds with the trad itional Chinese ways of representing ruins – if such representations indeed existed in art. is realization led to two kinds of reflection, about the origin of such a mis - conception and about indigenous Chinese concepts and representational modes of ruins. A contemporary observer has been exposed to various cultural influences, which could have shaped his imagination of ruins in traditional China. e most powerful influence comes from the Romantic view of ruins, which, Paul Zucker argues, still determines today’s popular approach to ruins. 4 is view has a long genealogy in European art and architecture: ruins were depicted in paintings 1 Shitao, Qingliang before the Renaissance and entered garden architecture in the sixteenth century. Terrace , hanging scroll, c. 1700, ink and colour on But it was not until the eighteenth century that sentiment toward ruins penetrated paper. every cultural realm ( illus. 3, 4): : juxtaposition of these two contemporary architectural types points to a deeper concept in Romantic art, in which the Picturesque and exotic, indigenous and foreign, nature and artifice, contribute to a mixture of beauty and the Sublime in an imaginary visual world. e juxtaposition of the two types of follies is found not only in actual gardens but also in design books, trompe l’oeil murals, decor - ative patterns ( illus. 6) and theoretical discourses. In writing and speech, Chinese gardens were evoked to justify the Romantic dissatisfaction with formal gardens. 8 e association between the Picturesque and the exotic also explains why some 3 Antonio Canaletto, Rome: Ruins of the Forum, Looking towards the Capitol , 1742, oil on canvas. 4 The water reservoir of 1748 at the Ruinenberg, Potsdam. 5 Chinese Tea House in Sanssouci Park, Potsdam, designed by Johann Gottfried Büring, 1755–64. 6 Carved and painted 18th-century Chinoiserie panels, originally in the Hôtel de la Lariboisière, Paris. painters depicted Chinese buildings in the manner of classical ruins. An early example of such cultural coalescence, an engraving made in 1626 by Velentin Sezenius ( b. 1602 ), shows a group of buildings, consisting of a half-broken bridge and a dilapidated watermill amid Oriental figures, willow trees and a phoenix (illus. 7). Among the eighteenth-century European architects who pursued Oriental fol lies, none was more diligent or influential than William Chambers ( 1723 – 1796 ), the official architect of Princess Augusta and the architectural tutor of her son, the future George iii .9 Significantly, the effort he made to simulate Chinese architecture in English gardens was closely related to his commitment to con - structing classical ruins in the same settings. 10 His design for Kew Gardens, near London, typifies this parallel interest: the ornamental follies he built there in - cluded, among others, a ruined Roman arch ( illus. 8), a ten- storey Chinese pagoda (illus. 9), a ‘menagerie pavilion’ in a typical Chinoiserie style, and a relocated House : of Confucius. Going a step further, he wrote in his 1772 Dissertation on Oriental Gardening that the Chinese actually decorated their gardens with decaying buildings, ruined castles, pal aces and temples, half-buried tri - umphal arches, and ‘whatever else may serve to indicate the debility, the disappointments and the dissolution of humanity; which . fill the mind with melancholy and incline it to seri ous reflection’. 11 One wonders on what basis Chambers made this claim: although he did visit Canton twice in the 1740 s, his account about the artificial Chin - ese ruins contains little truth. 12 It is possible that at the time he, a young employee in the Swedish East India Company, had not yet received any of the professional training that later made him a renowned architect, and so mistook some broken-down build - ings as deliberate aesthetic objects. 13 It is also possible that he, as his biog - 7 Velentin Sezenius, rapher John Harris says, put his ideas ‘into the mouths of the Chinese’ 14 to sup port Chinoiserie design, 1626. his own theory. As we have seen, this had become a conventional rhetorical strat egy 8 William Chambers, by the time.
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