garden theory landscape painting borrowed views cultural metissage
travelling landscapes Chinese and European gardens of the eighteenth century
vincent yu-xin qiu
Travelling through landscapes is an aesthetic activity that generates diverse experiences, and such a variety of experiences becomes evident at the points of cross-cultural intersections —particularly the well-known example of eighteenth century European landscape discourses in which the Chinese garden plays a seminal role. Revolving around the same motifs as Chinese gardens, something rather similar in physical appearance might be designed and constructed in both the East and West. However, beneath the resemblances are dramatically different cultural logics, which can be unearthed through the literary descriptions of travelling experiences each in their respective contexts. Specifically, here, is the comparison of two travel experiences found in two representative texts: William Chambers’s Design of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils of 1757, 1 and The Craft of Gardens or 园冶 yuan ye . The Craft of Gardens , the only Chinese treatise that comprehensively introduced garden making in pre-modern Chinese cultural history, was written by JI Cheng ( 计成 1582- 1642), a minor literati of the Ming dynasty. Scholars widely believe that it was one of Chambers’s references for writing his texts about China. 2 For Chambers, travelling through a landscape is closely related to various feelings incurred by natural scenery. He dedicated lengthy descriptions in his texts to the emotional reactions vis- à-vis diverse landscape settings: ‘Their artists distinguish three different species of scenes, to which they give the appellations of pleasing, horrid, and enchanted. Their enchanted scenes answer, in a great measure, to what we call romantic, and in these they make use of several artifices to excite surprise … In their scenes of horror, they introduce impending rocks, dark caverns, and impetuous cataracts … these scenes are generally succeeded by pleasing ones. The Chinese artists, knowing how powerfully contrast operates on the mind, constantly practice sudden transitions, and a striking opposition of forms, colours, and shades.’ 3
It can be said that an entire landscape can unfold through a visiting trajectory that links various spectacles and enables different psychological responses. It is crucial that the designed scenery in front of the eyes can solicit visitors’ correct feelings, which can then be subject to analysis and rationalisation in theoretical discourses. Travelling through landscapes is a method to evaluate the landscape design — the criteria of evaluation is whether the pre-conceived spectacles generate the expected psychological impacts corresponding to them. And travelling through landscape is detached observation in which disinterested human subjects seek to rationalise diverse emotions into a repertoire. Following this thinking, it’s not difficult to find that the foregrounding idea of Chambers’s text is that gardens should be considered as an artificial work; it is nature improved by way of designers’ skills. From a designers’ perspective, nature is turned into components such as rocks, trees and clumps, all of which are subject to manipulations as if they were painting materials. Designers should dispose these natural elements as if creating pictures. Several quotes from Chamber’s text further illustrate this point: ‘The Chinese gardeners, like the European painters, collect from nature the most pleasing objects, which they endeavour to combine … to unite in forming an elegant and striking whole.’ According to Chambers, Chinese gardeners distribute landscape elements ‘by a judicious arrangement, and with the different masses of light and shade, in such a manner as to render the composition at once distinct in its parts, and striking in the whole.’ 4 For Chambers the crux of the art of gardening lies in the composition of nature and the demonstration of human accomplishments. Nature itself does not suffice as a model for gardens, it must be invested with human expression, combined and enhanced with the human art of arrangements. The fundamental idea of gardening as improvement of nature becomes increasingly apparent in the development of Chambers’s thoughts in his 1772 Dissertation on Oriental Gardening , an expansive elaboration of the same topic where Chambers brought readers into a fabulous and exotic realm in which the array of ingenious artificial creations surpasses the beauty of the original landscape and overshadows any aspect of primitive nature.
1 Chambers is known for his two widely circulated texts on Chinese gardens and designs, the other was published 15 years later in 1772, under the name: Dissertation on Oriental Gardening . 2 Janine Barrier, Monique Mosser, et Chebing Chiu, Aux Jardins de Cathay : L’imaginaire Anglo-Chinois En Occident. Besançon: Editions de l’Imprimeur, 2004. pp 45-58 3 William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. London: Wilson and Durham, 1757. pp 15-16
4 William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils . London: Wilson and Durham, 1757, p15
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