The Cleveland Museum of Art 1978.67
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With the same departure point of traveling experience, we have traced two sets of correlated ideas. In Chambers’s texts, moving in landscapes is correlated with emotions which are understood as correct psychological reactions to spectacles. The fundamental presumption here is that designers can manipulate natural elements as if using painting materials, and thus, gardening should be deemed as the composition of nature. In Ji’s treatise on Chinese gardens, moving through landscapes is meant to discover borrowed views. Designers meander in nature with particular emotional sensibilities which provide the pivotal support to uncover beautiful views that resemble paintings. Aiming at minimal human interventions, garden-making should be regarded as the configuration of nature.
Because of the distinct understanding of painting, emotion, and garden vis-à-vis nature, Chinese gardens in the East and West generate two distinct modes of travel experiences in landscapes. The purpose of this comparison is not simply to identify an opposition between the East and West but rather to penetrate into the deep cultural structures fostering the two positions. The varieties of aesthetic experiences converge and diverge, coincide and bifurcate, becoming distinguishable at specific points where there are sufficient differences and blending again into the unified totality of human experiences when a more comprehensive range of registers is considered. The quest for the varieties of aesthetic experiences is also the quest to open up pluralistic modes of concealed experiences. It is to go beyond binary oppositions and assume a broader range of unknown experiences awaiting articulation and clarification through the historical evidence of alternative cultures.
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