Chinese landscape painting from a Western perspective
An illustration from The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland by Chiang Yee Photo: FILE
Landscape painting has played a significant role in China’s fine arts. The Song Dynasty witnessed the maturity of landscape painting and the arrival of many outstanding artists, including Li Cheng, Fan Kuan, Guo Zhongshu and Hui Chong from the Northern Song period (960–1127), and Li Tang, Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan, Xia Gui from the Southern Song period (1127–1279). The Song brought landscape painting to a height of prosperity and splendor. Xu Fuguan, a leading member of New Confucianism in modern China, wrote that Chinese landscape painting was created in the Wei and Jing periods (220–420), approximately 1,400 years before landscape painting in the West; the Northern Song era saw landscape painting replace figure painting as the mainstream Chinese fine art. The same ideas of perspective found in Western painting can be found in Chinese painting. Michael Sullivan, one of the most distinguished experts in the field of Chinese art, regards landscape painting as the most unique achievement of traditional Chinese painting. For foreigners who have little knowledge of traditional Chinese painting, it may be difficult to understand. In the 1950s, when working on his new book Chinese Painting, James Francis Cahill, a renowned American art historian, showed his publisher Albert Skira photos of paintings he wanted to include. Skira said, “Rocks and trees, Mr. Cahill! Rocks and trees! All you ever bring me are rocks and trees! My readers want to see people, and houses, and stories, not just rocks and trees!” Cahill had to explain to Skira that landscape paintings represent the best of Chinese paintings, and most of them depict rocks and trees, sometimes with spaces among them, or several buildings and figures.
Modern people in cities find these landscape paintings refreshing for the mind and the heart. The paintings are an example of Chinese classical art and traditional Chinese aesthetics. For Westerners, they are also visually stunning pieces of art. Sullivan vividly described what he felt when appreciating Chinese landscape paintings: “We found ourselves drawn unwittingly into the scene spread out before us. The artist invites us to follow him down the winding paths, to wait at the river-bank for the ferry boat, to walk through the village—disappearing from view for a few moments, perhaps, as we pass behind a hill—to reemerge and find ourselves standing on the bridge gazing at a waterfall; and then perhaps to saunter up the valley to where the monastery roof can just be seen above the tree-tops, there to rest, fan ourselves after our exertions, and drink a bowl of tea with the monks. At the end of the scroll the artist will leave us standing at the lake shore, gazing out across the water to where distant peaks rise through the haze.”
Appreciating landscape paintings is a dynamic journey, and observers feel drawn inside of that world and part of it. Sullivan believed that Chinese landscape paintings allow the mind to roam at large through a small piece of paper or silk. Landscape paintings are expressions of the minds and hearts of the Chinese people, reflecting human relations with nature, perspectives which are quite different from those of the West. This profound and significant sense of harmony is firmly rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Inspired by distant mountains enveloped in mist, Chinese learned men experienced a great level of relaxation, inspiration and wandering imagination. As for Song Dynasty landscape paintings, Cahill commented that they exhibit a kind of perfect balance between nature and art. Cahill noted that the artists of these masterpieces seem to come into contact with nature for the first time in their lives; they respond to nature with a mixture of awe and wonder. The words of Cahill and Sullivan reveal the irrepressible excitement of a Western spectator admiring Chinese landscape paintings, suggesting that the East and the West may not be so different when it comes to enjoying such works of art.
However, Chinese paintings puzzled Westerners in earlier ages as they had no idea what the paintings were communicating. For 19th-century Europeans, Chinese paintings were something beyond their ability to understand. The turning point occurred in the 20th century, when a large number of Sinologists and artists further explored and introduced Chinese art to the West. Works such as An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art by Herbert Allen Giles, Painting in the Far East by Laurence Binyon and Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting by Arthur David Waley helped to open the gate to China’s fine arts. Because of these efforts, people in the West began to accept and appreciate the unique charm of Chinese paintings.
In 1933, Binyon was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In his lectures, Binyon contrasted Chinese landscape paintings with landscape paintings drawn by the greatest European artists, such as Tiziano Vecellio, Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, and he even believed that the Chinese artists did better than Western artists in some aspects. Even the expression for Chinese landscape painting, shan shui hua (mountain-water pictures), as noted by Binyon, suggests that what is depicted is a living organism—“The mountains being its flesh and the streams its blood.” The special thought and outlook inherent within the Chinese people make their paintings so unique in the world.
Binyon interpreted the Song artist Ma Yuan’s “Bare Willows and Distant Mountains” as containing a strong poetic feeling—a glimpse of mountains in early spring as suggested by willows leafing out and blue sky after rain. The painting dating to hundreds of years ago reminded Binyon of the nature poetry of William Wordsworth. He said that the willows were so vividly depicted that the spectators almost believed that twigs and leaves had their own feelings and emotions, just like what Wordsworth wrote in his poem, “Every flower/ Enjoys the air it breaths.” Savoring and understanding Song Dynasty landscape paintings in combination with Wordsworth’s poems promotes a great fusion of East meeting West. This has deeply affected later appraisals of Chinese landscape paintings.
Sullivan inherited this tradition of interpreting landscape paintings through Wordsworth’s poems. His title Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China is taken from the sixth book of Wordsworth’s Prelude. The great art historian E. H. Gombrich believed what Sullivan did was brilliant: “He wants to offer an interpretation of Chinese landscape art which will bring it closer to the Western reader,” because “these lines show how much is universally human in the response of the Western poet and the Eastern painter to the sublimity of mountain scenery.”
In 1937, a young Chinese man named Chiang Yee (1903–1977) published a book in Britain, The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland. This book gained great popularity as readers saw the Lake District, an area favored by Wordsworth, through the eyes of a Chinese artist, especially in combination with his ink paintings in the classic Chinese style. The integration of Chinese art and European scenery kindles unique charm and significance.
The article was edited and translated from Guangming Daily. Sun Hongwei is a lecturer from Nanjing University.
edited by REN GUANHONG