bamboo Although Suzhou gardens never run short of rare species, the most significant ones are still the traditional, classical and most common, without remarkable form, colour or scent. Bamboo, the symbol of the true Confucian gentleman, carries such significant metaphoric and allusive meaning as to be a privileged garden species, outweighing the more exotic, novel and luxurious. Bamboo has straight slender stalks; the distance between each stalk joint grows longer with the height, evoking a gentleman’s moral trait of uprightness and habit of constant improvement. Bamboo’s hollow interior is associated with a predilection to be humble and modest, open-minded and eager to learn. These physical characteristics – the straight-up stem, the perpendicular disposition and the graceful clusters of foliage – are emphasised when bamboo is installed against the whitewashed wall, a typified configuration of its presence in the garden. Unlike rock, bamboo and whiteness do not shape a clear relationship of figure and ground but instead cultivate a more close-knit alliance. Sunlight penetrates bamboo’s waving foliage, casting its silhouette onto a whitewashed wall. Dappled shade twists together light and dark in rhythmic play across the surface. There is a vast territory of grey between emerald bamboo and the pale white wall, a mingling of bamboo, whiteness and the sprinkling lighting effect that mediates the opposition between them. The pattern of foliage bears great resemblance to its shade. It is even uncertain whether the white surface continues behind the bamboo, or whether the bamboo is a self-contained object in front of the wall. Unlike the static boulder, bamboo is always on the move with the soughing wind. Its leaves rustle in the air, and the stalks bow in the breeze, its shadow shimmers and glimmers, echoing bamboo’s shifting movement. Distinction is almost indiscernible; the result is the vibration of their boundary and trespassing of their edge. Bamboo dissolves into whiteness while whiteness integrates with bamboo. Both abandon their sovereignty and become a continuity and totality to be perceived as a whole. Once encountering this entwinement, how
Image taken from From Liu, Dunzhen. Suzhou gudian yuanlin . Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe,1979. p355
retaining a certain degree of its opacity. It is a horizon fertile but impenetrable, rich but elusive, this its most energetic and creative state. Impossible to unravel analytically or treat objectively, whiteness is a unified field already pregnant with meaning and the expectation of sense. The white wall reveals the bamboo but acknowledges the limitation, without overdoing or forcing anything too soon. It is the prolonging of finality, delaying of the definite result, and a deference of completion. It is in no sense passive or inactive, but full of preparedness and resolution. Whiteness is a beckoning gesture and an attitude of patience and releasing. It is a domain of opportunity and possibility, an open territory prepared for appearing. It unfolds itself and won’t be used up, turning into a variety of concrete shapes that points to a unified mode. Any representational figuration of bamboo is only a contingent happening and provisional encountering subsumed by the revealing capacity of whiteness. The white surface is a given task, and an inexhaustible one, bringing with it the investigation process that is also infinite. Inexhaustible as it is, the task traces back to the palpable interweaving of whiteness and bamboo, which approximates it towards an iconic image in collective cultural memory. Though Suzhou gardens exhibit close intimacy to the natural world, whiteness intervenes and differentiates nature, and gives it new values. Whiteness places nature into various segments of the same spectrum and formulates a gradation of clarity. Whiteness reveals and conceals, discloses and occludes, highlights and omits, and fills in while wiping out something. The effect is articulation and, by this articulation, whiteness makes nature a work of art while simultaneously allowing itself, an unremarkable material, to be part of the remarkable artwork.
of my discovery continually renews and repeats. Perception is the clarification progress and the intervention sequence. What is discovered is always inadequate and what is captured has to be tested again. Meaning fulfils as long as one discovers. It is never formed once and for all, rather it is an in-between status of being and becoming. It is a project that is inexhaustible, a steady effort of acting and reacting, creating and recreating. The sense of bamboo sharpens spontaneously in the progression of this conduct. Alternation between capturing and letting go, getting to know and remaining unknown switches between immanence and transcendence, a process in which symbolic meaning is polished and refined into fullness. Bamboo is extracted from sensible stimuli into shape and form, honing a purified identity out of primordial materiality. Bamboo is finally established as a metaphysical Xiang , or iconic image, for gentleman spirit. The whitewashed wall bolsters this process and is caught up in it. Without a clear-cut figure and ground, the relation between bamboo and the wall is better described as adoption or abiding. Firstly, whiteness contrasts with bamboo to set it off. It collects bamboo’s dancing fragments and puts together its fine particles, tempering them to a concordance. In a certain sense, the white surface presents a similar configuration to the garden’s first glance, both accommodating diversity and variances while maintaining their harmony and coherence. Secondly, the white wall provides an abode with vacancy. It allows the bamboo to reside and repose in its shelter and initiates a sort of reliance or adhesion, restraining bamboo’s autonomy and freedom. The effect is in alternation between repulse and embrace, separating and reuniting, concealing and revealing. The white wall sustains a certain sort of constant visible pattern, while
does perception precipitate the bamboo? How does it make use of this primordial
phenomenon? What appears in vision is a patch of texture, a pattern of organisation, a particular arrangement. Each region of the white surface consists of something recurring but possesses its own specific shape, similar to the entire field but never precisely the same. Eyesight surveys and examines each part of the terrain as it glides and sails over it, capturing something kindred and cognate as the characteristic of bamboo. It is a model identified to be the idea of bamboo, which then leads to further exploration of other regions. Since there are always new areas to be opened up and latent figures to be verified, the performance
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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