The Cleveland Museum of Art 1978.67
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And the last and perhaps the most important point, the alternation between distanciation and approximation amid diverse cultural experiences is a task that requires constant effort. It is perhaps the only way to bring to light the often- neglected cultural structures foregrounding ourselves and our contemporary disciplinary fields. £
top , both pages: Qiu Ying, Garden for Solitary Enjoyment, 1515-52. Ink and light colour on silk, 11 x 204 “. Qui Ying’s painting depicted the garden of Sima Guang (1019-1086), an eleventh century statesman. This typical literati garden is a place to exercise emotions, discover pleasing scenery and seek to be in communion with nature. Qiu Ying is a Ming dynasty Chinese painter who lived in Suzhou. His life and career were developed in a context similar to Ji Chen, the author of The Crafts of Gardens. above, both pages: Humphry Repton, drawings of the Wentworth Woodhouse property, South Yorkshire, existing and proposed, 1791. Although William Chambers and William Kent were responsible for the design of Kew Gardens (1762) with all its happenstance Chinoiserie follies, Humphry Repton was responsible for many actual landscape designs throughout the late eighteenth century. The terrain of China, mountainous with winding streams, circuitous paths and cliffs, is distinctly not the terrain of Chambers’s England which was mostly agricultural fields, grazing land or forest. While Chinese gardens compressed a vast terrain into a smaller space, the English Landscape Movement took the complexity of the Chinese garden and expanded it to suit the thousand acres of a country estate.
VINCENT YU-XIN QIU holds a Master’s degree in architectural history and theory from McGill. He was a practitioner of architecture and visual art, before moving to Canada to pursue a research career. Now he lives and works mostly in Montreal while advancing his PhD dissertation on Chinese gardens.
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