The view out of the window of the Chamber of ladder cloud. A Taihu shi, gnarled and crude is placed in front of a white stuccoed wall. Hua bu xiao zhu (A little structure of splendor steps) Image taken from From Liu, Dunzhen. Suzhou gudian yuanlin , Beijing : Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe,1979. p355
of substance. The reality of the rock is not to be found only in the its substance but also in the vacancy of the whiteness enclosing the rock. The rock against the wall registers as art, a field to be surveyed, a realm of investigation. In traditional Chinese culture, rock is endowed with abundant metaphysical connotations that almost promote it to a religious icon. There are plenty of folk tales, imaginaries and mythologies related to rock; connoisseurship of rock is a faculty of knowledge called rock lore. Symbolic meanings are at once immediate and delayed. They originate from perceptual and sensual engagement with the world, while at the same time going beyond, channelling upward to the transcendental realm and inward to an intellectual, reflective realm. Whiteness, I contend, has a critical role in generating the rock’s symbolic values, elevating perceptual, visual reality into higher levels of spiritual, conceptual experience. On one hand, the white wall occludes the objects nearby and puts the rock in an unknown context. Rock emerges purified and stands in solitude, a single piece of rock and nothing more. now detached, it must be understood anew. On the other hand, whiteness replaces familiar, concrete, surrounding objects with more abstract, remote and unpredictable conditions. Principally it
for objects, lingers near the rock. Awareness accumulates and intensifies, gradually evolving into mature consciousness and then into intentional attentiveness. The observer turns from looking for the rock to looking at it. The rock is crystallised as a figure, springing forth from its ground. The rock as a piece of art is not self-sustained, its meaning relies on its context. The favour that the white wall does the rock lies not only in the receiving and conveying of light, but also in modulating and modifying the nearby milieu inside the garden. In the midst of a jarring juxtaposition of diversities, it is too easy for the rock to disappear. Think it otherwise, without its white backdrop the rock would be engulfed by contesting and combating elements in the garden, submerged under arrays of materials vying for attention. Whiteness cools down the clamouring swarm of items and provides an interval, a breathing space. It establishes a realm of emptiness; it produces a lacuna: what is true of the rock is revealed, made sense of. As ground in the figure-ground relationship, the wall is anonymous, unremarkable and unknown, but that does not mean it is without meaning; the wall is a latent and tacit presence. Whiteness is not emptiness as void, vacuum or nothingness, but the inverse and the complement
focalises sunlight into its opposite, shadow; it registers the behaviour of light with rock and records their interaction. Light alters the relationship in unforeseeable ways, the rock becomes mysterious, the mundane and familiar become enigmatic and exceptional. The rock never discloses itself completely, nor does it stand out in full clarity. On the body of the rock, there is hardly any clear point on which to focus, stable edge to hold, or fixed margin to capture. Part of the rock is unseen and refuses to be configured. Its scale loses certitude, its size becomes indefinite, zooming in and out without any precision. Such indeterminacy prompts fertile imagination, arouses conjectural creation and stimulates speculative thinking. Rock’s embroiled volumes are like mountain ranges swathed in clouds, its tiers of outlines like peaks drifting in the mist. The rock in front of me grows into a microcosm teeming with plenitudes of the universe. It is a passageway accessible to the splendorous realm of otherworld. The single gesture that installs a rock against a white wall sets it off as a work of art. And whiteness, by partaking in this mechanism, presents itself as a part of the work of art.
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