Chinese Gardens

In a Chinese garden, all components complement each other (or at

least should be reflected in garden designs) without losing
individuality of each element such as rocks, water, plants,
architecture or literature. In addition, a thoughtful garden has also
taken into consideration its relation to its environment. At a
philosophical level, an ideal Chinese garden serves as a metaphor
for an ideal human society in which a community doesnt assert its
tyranny of the majority as phrased by John Stuart Mill.[1]
Explain how Chinese gardens make a cultural, philosophical, and
artistic statement.

[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, reprinted from The Harvard

Classics, vol. 25 (New York: Collier, 1909). A copy of the work is
on the website for this course: http://uwch4.humanities.washington.edu/~188/ 188 Texts/

John Stuart Mill

(1806-1873)

British philosopher, economist,

moral and political theorist, and
administrator, was the most
influential English-speaking
philosopher of the nineteenth
century.
The overall aim of his
philosophy is to develop a
positive view of the universe
and the place of humans in it,
one which contributes to the
progress of human knowledge,
individual freedom and human
well-being.

Figure-ground articulation

Figure-ground articulation
(Definition)
The

figure has an object-like character,

whereas the ground has less perceptual
saliency and appears as 'mere'
background. The areas of the figure and
the ground usually do not appear
juxtaposed in a common plane, as in a
mosaic, but rather as stratified in depth.

Focal Point/Emphasis
Flowers and Leaves

Definition: A focal point is

the element in a painting
that pulls in the viewer's eye,
that is the center of attention
or the main subject. You can
emphasize a focal point
through the painting's
composition, through color,
and through the range of
tones you use.

Find the Moth 39

Ralph A. Clevenger/Corbis Images 16
Figure-Ground Contrast Blurred/Blended

Figure-Ground Contrast/Switch
Its Philosophical implications

Rubin's vase
(sometimes known as
the Rubin face or the
Figure-ground vase)
is a famous set of
cognitive optical
illusions developed
around 1915 by the
Danish psychologist
Edgar Rubin.

Duck or Rabbit?
Illustration of a "duckrabbit," discussed in
the Philosophical Investigations, section XI,
part II by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1953

An ambiguous figure in
which the brain switches
between seeing a rabbit
and a duck. The duckrabbit was "originally
noted" by American
psychologist Joseph
Jastrow (Jastrow 1899,
p. 312; 1900; see also
Brugger and Brugger
1993).

Young Girl-Old Woman Illusion

Frog or Horse?

Sky & Water I, 1938

Birds or Fish?
M. C. Escher

(17 June 1898 27 March 1972)

"In the horizontal center strip

there are birds and fish
equivalent to each other. We
associate flying with sky, and
so for each of the black birds
the sky in which it is flying is
formed by the four white fish
which encircle it. Similarly
swimming makes us think of
water, and therefore the four
black birds that surround a
fish become the water in
which it swims." M.C.E.

The Steerage
Alfred Stieglitz
Complementary or Competitive?

The Steerage is a
photograph taken by
Alfred Stieglitz in 1907. It
has been hailed as one of
the greatest photographs
of all time because it
captures in a single image
both a formative
document of its time and
one of the first works of
artistic modernism.

Complementary vs. Competitive

Chapter 2 (Tao Te Ching)

Thus Something and Nothing produce each other;
The difficult and the easy complement each other;
The long and the short off-set each other;
The high and the low incline towards each other;
Note and sound harmonize each other;
Before and after follow each other.
To setoff: something used to enhance the effect of
another thing by contrasting it, as an ornament.

Zhuangzi online

Without an Other
there is no Self,
without Self no
choosing one thing
rather than another
(99)

Liezi could ride the

wind and had a good
time flying for 15 days.
But he still had to
depend on something
to get around (98).
Are Individual
accomplishments truly
individual?

Types of Chinese Gardens

1. Royal Gardens: Summer Palace; Beihai Park;

Jingshan Park (Hill of Prospect);
The Imperial Summer Resort - (The
Mountain Resort and its Outlying Temples,
Chengde)
2. Private Scholar Gardens: Yu Yuan and
Zhuozheng Yuan
3. Natural Gardens: Seattle Chinese Garden in
south Seattle modeled on Sichuan natural gardens

The Summer Palace

The Marble Boat vs. a Strong Navy

Yhyun the
Summer Palace (in Beijing,
modeled on the West Lake
in Hangzhou).
The lake and the hill is half
man-made. The Longevity
Hill is a branch of the
Western Hills in Beijing.
Western Hills are most
famous for red leaves.
The best season to see the
scene is in the fall,
especially after the first
frost hit the red leaves (late
October, early November).

Ci Xis 60th Birthday

Embezzled the fund for building a strong army

for her birthday celebration;
China lost its first Sino-Japanese War (1894 to
1895) over who could dominate the Korean
Peninsula;
The result is China lost Taiwan to Japanese
who did not return it until 1945, then the
National Party;
Taiwan, the biggest island, is nicknamed as the
Treasure Island;

The Marble Boat

The

Marble Boat, also known as the

Boat of Purity and Ease ( Qing
Yan Fng) is a lakeside pavilion on the
ground of the Summer Palace in Beijing,
China.
Emperor Qian Long (1736 to 1795) wrote
a poem to describe its symbolic
significance: Never Sinking with stability

The Royal Gardens and Han fu

Royal gardens are like Han Fu

Scalemagnificent/
Mathematically
sublime Immanuel
Kant
The Han fu inherited
from the Chu poems
the sao-style prosody
(chap.2 in How to
Read Chinese Poetry)
See the DVD

Rhapsody or Fu,
best executed by
Sima Xiangru and
Yang Xiong in the
Han dynasty;
Read Shanglin Fu
or Fu on the
Imperial Park by
Sima Xiangru online

Ebrey on royal gardens

The emperor, as guardian of the realm, sought to demonstrate

a harmonious relationship with and an intimate knowledge of
the forces of nature. The imperial parks were vast in territory
and kept an abundance of all imaginable plants and animals,
almost like a museum. Such parks replicated the emperor's
realm in miniature, with man-made lakes and mountains often
corresponding to real geographical features. They reinforced
the emperor's role as the Son of Heaven. By the Tang dynasty,
a tradition of painting the royal hunting parks as paradise
landscapes had developed. This gradually came to be applied
to representations of landscapes in general.
http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/home/3garhist.htm

Chng d

b sh

shn zhung

The Imperial Summer Resort

Imperial Summer Resort

1703 -1792

Suzhou famous for its refined

private scholar gardens

Garden construction reached a peak during

the Ming and Qing dynasties, as landholding
aristocratic and scholar elite families moved
their main residences from the countryside to
urban and suburban areas of southern
cities. Suzhou in particular became a place
of refined culture, renowned for its canals
and mild climate, as well as the ready
availability of garden building expertise.

Humble Administrator's Garden

, Suzhou, Wang Xianchen , 1506;
Lu Guimeng 618 907, a Tang Poets Residence
Mother of Chinese Gardens

Yu Garden , Shanghai
Pan Yunduan 1559

Rocks from Lake Tai

 pnjng <art>
potted landscape;
miniature trees and rockery.

Sometime during the Tang dynasty, miniature landscapes

in trays (or penjing), composed of rocks, plants and water,
began to take the place of the censers (see above).
These small-scale landscapes still retained their
otherworldly associations. Especially favored were highly
contorted rock and plant specimens. Scholars often kept
these dwarfed landscapes on their desks, and one Tang
dynasty court magician was said to have cultivated the
ability to disappear into his tray landscape at will.
Collecting unusual rock and plant specimens became
common literati pastimes from the Song Dynasty onward.

Components in a Chinese Garden

Complement each other
Symbolism in each component
Rocks/
Stones

Plants/Flowers

Water

Architecture/
Literature
Calligraphy
Paintings

Rocks Used for the Royal

Garden Designs
How to Judge Rocks

Natural Internal Frames

in garden designs
Hidden views
Indirectness in
garden designs
Borrowed views
Fountain/Mountain
Captain at UW

Three Friends in Cold Seasons

Pines
Bamboos
Wintersweet

[suhnsnyu] 1. [
] the three plants
which thrive in cold
weatherthe pine, the
bamboo, and the plum

Painting of Three Friends

in Cold seasons by Zhao Mengjian

Four Gentlemen among Flowers

their symbolic significance

Spring/Orchid
Summer/Bamboo

Autumn/
Chrysanthemum
Winter/
Wintersweet

One Can Never See the Whole

Scene of a Chinese Garden

Our knowledge is
partial;
Actions based on the
partial knowledge will
entail consequences
Humility
Bamboos always
have room for
more

Scenes are forever

changing:
Different flowers in
different seasons;
Same plants and
tress but with
different colors in
different seasons;

Sublime vs. Beautiful

Kant, in 1764
Observations on the Feeling

of the Beautiful and Sublime.

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis

([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty,
elevated, exalted) is the quality of greatness or vast
magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual,
metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The
term especially refers to a greatness with which
nothing else can be compared and which is beyond
all possibility of calculation, measurement or
imitation.

Kant on the Beautiful

Immanuel Kant developed a theory of aesthetic

judgment in his Critique of The Power of
Judgment (1790), that concentrates on how it is
that we make the claim that a work of art is
beautiful. That is not the same thing as a claim
that we like it, that it pleases us, or that the
claim pertains only to ourselves. Instead, Kant
argues, when we say of a thing that it is
beautiful, we expect everyone else to agree-and if they do not, it is because they have failed
to understand the form of purposiveness that
the work displays.

Subjective vs. Objective

That means that just looking at an object is not enough: an

aesthetic judgment is not like saying that you like pancakes or
peaches or the color red. Those are judgments of sense, and
they pertain only to the person who happens to like those
things. In the same way, the reason we claim that something is
beautiful is not because it has certain properties or qualities. An
object judged to be beautiful can have any qualities whatsoever
(shape, color, texture, etc.). When we say that something is
beautiful, we have to carry out a thoughtful and accurate
analysis of it: we see that its form is purposive. It is no accident
that all the details of the work (a poem, a painting, a novel, an
essay) are exactly as they are. When we understand exactly
how the work is integrated, and why it is exactly as it is, then
and only then are we entitled to say that it is beautiful, and we
make the claim in the expectation that anyone who understands
it will agree.

the Sunken Garden

Victoria BC
The Butchart Gardens

An Intelligent Transformation

As Mr. Butchart exhausted the limestone in the

quarry near their house, his enterprising wife,
Jennie, conceived an unprecedented plan for
refurbishing the bleak pit. From farmland
nearby she requisitioned tons of top soil, had it
brought to Tod Inlet by horse and cart, and
used it to line the floor of the abandoned
quarry. Little by little, under Jennie Butchart's
supervision, the abandoned quarry blossomed
into the spectacular Sunken Garden.

The Sublime and the Beautiful

Chinese Royal Gardens (sublime) vs.
Chinese Scholar Gardens (delicate)

Contrast the
breathtaking sunken
garden with the delicate
Japanese garden.
Then you will suddenly
understand what it
means to be
mathematically sublime
as defined by Kant.

Delicate
Miniature
Petite
Well manicured

Chinese Garden at MET, New York

The

Chinese Garden Court at The

Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C

92bYFQDTzA
DVDs

http://depts.washington.edu/chin
aciv/home/3garintr.htm
Professor Ebrey on Chinese Gardens:

Garden design was an art in China. One of the

most common ways to make a Chinese home more
elegant was to develop one or more compounds into
a garden with plants, rocks, and garden buildings.
Gardens were especially appreciated for their great
beauty and naturalness. In time, garden design
came to be regarded as a refined activity for the
well-heeled and well-educated.

Fengshui
(wind-and-water, or
geomancy)

Fengshui (or wind-and-water, or geomancy) also

played a large role in the form a garden would take.
The natural environment was interpreted by the
fengshui master as a living organism, the alteration
of which could positively or negatively affect the lives
of people in contact with it for generations to come.
fngshu the location of a house or
tomb,supposed to have an influence on the fortune
of a family; geomantic omen.