Organizer and Chair: Melinda Takeuchi, Stanford University
Discussants: John Rosenfield, Harvard University
The act of replicating natural scenery sets in motion a palimpsest of discourses. Fifty years ago Western scholarship on East Asian landscape painting began by taking the artists’ original writings at face value, rhapsodizing about the qi, or mystical essence of the landscape. In recent decades scholars of Chinese and Japanese art have re-directed their investigations to the economic, ideological, and social ramifications of landscape imagery.
This panel attempts to take the cultural process of landscape a step further by engaging recent discourses by cultural geographers and other non-art historians. Postmodern theory argues that the fabricated landscape belongs to the realm of culture rather than nature. How does landscape "perform?" How do artists and audiences invest it with meaning and react to those meanings? What kinds of emotionality are called into play in renditions of landscape? If landscape is a "process by which social and subjective identities are formed," in what domains do Chinese and Japanese landscape manifest national differences? The ways we view landscape become increasingly pertinent as our own natural environment succumbs to the forces of "culture."
Richard Barnhart addresses the question of Song landscape painting’s unique engagement with the auditory. Mimi Yiengpruksawan’s paper investigates two landmark objects of eleventh and twelfth-century Japan, the Phoenix Hall Raigo Scenes and the Toji Senzui Screen, from the perspective of habitat theory and sign-stimuli. Melinda Takeuchi discusses replications of Mount Fuji and contrasts the Western stigma of simulacrum with the Japanese notion of mitate and the negotiation of power in the gendered landscape.
"A Song At Twilight"—the Auditory Impulse in Song Landscape Painting
Richard M. Barnhart, Yale University
Modern scholars probably misuse the European concept of Realism in analyzing Chinese painting, especially Song painting, where it is used most frequently. The Chinese term Xie sheng, "Sketching life," may sometimes imply elements associated with the Western tradition of Realism, but it is basically a reference to the attainment of more-or-less correct formal resemblance in drawing and color in the realm of flower-and-bird painting. Realism, in fact, is scarcely an adequate word for Song landscape painting, because, judging from the responses of the people of the time and from the content of Song landscape painting itself, the affective capacity of such art derived from more than formal properties. Light, sound, movement, and time itself are among the elements that must be considered part of the identity of Song landscape painting. These phenomena are not commonly seen in conjunction before the tenth century, and barely survive the thirteenth.
While light—the dark glow of twilight, for example—is essential to the landscape art of no other time in Chinese history than the Song, in this exploration I will examine primarily the phenomenon of sound and landscape. The inseparability of sound and landscape painting in Song China should also put into perspective the popular Chinese description of painting as "soundless poetry" (wusheng shi). This attractive but unfortunate phrase was the invention, after all, of poets, not painters, and in retrospect suggests the very different interests of poets and painters in the part of painting.
A World in Blue and Green: The Classical Habitats of Japanese Landscape Painting
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
To contemplate classical Japanese landscape paintings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is to enter a world saturated in blues and greens over a rolling terrain of vistas stretched skyward. It is a physiognomy of land turned to the relishing eye, of place and its poetries, that equally gives structure to an experience of habitat—social and religious—as aesthetic and mythical domain. From the screens and wall paintings inside the homes and temples of Heian aristocrats, to the very earth outside and around them, the classical Japanese landscape projects the environmental conditions favorable to a satiated and stable gaze.
My paper is a rumination on classical Japanese landscape painting from the methodological position of habitat theory. I take up two celebrated works, the Phoenix Hall Kuhon Raigozu and the Toji Senzui Byobu, and explore their formal and allegorical features as materializations of a beloved landscape charged with longing. In so doing I consider the sign-stimuli that make these works what they are for modern scholars, representations of a uniquely Japanese landscape configuration, and raise some questions about the mythical habitats that frame, not only the pragmatic social spaces of Heian courtiers, but our own as we turn our gaze back to their world.
A Place in Time: Thinking About the Contexts of Constructing Places in Song Dynasty Mountain and Water Painting
John Hay, University of California, Santa Cruz
Space and place are perennial topics in the study of landscape and landscape painting, those of China and elsewhere. They rise repeatedly to the surface, like oil seeping from a submarine stratum; they are fundamental in our existence. The ways in which cultures articulate them are critical to our self-construction as humans. Landscape painting has often been one of the most articulate media in which this has occurred. These topics repeatedly assert themselves in our thinking about landscape painting; not only because they are central to this medium of representation but also because they are inherent in our thinking.
These issues were foregrounded with uncommon prominence in Chinese mountain-and-water painting of the Northern Song, but a shift of emphasis from space to place became explicit in the Southern Song. The precise ways in which these issues were articulated visually was not extensively described in texts, probably because the visual constructions themselves were seen as being so articulate in their own terms. These issues, however, were widely addressed in many other media and fields of thought and action. The situation might be called conceptually symbiotic, in that, as a particular medium becomes the specific text of the moment, other implicit media constantly re-order themselves as context. Whether there are ever Ur-texts or ideologically dominant texts is a matter of history. In the case of painting it is singularly difficult to be definitive.
It is clear that the construction of "place" is inextricably linked to other fields of cultural definition, such as dwelling, gravitational time, and identity (historical, social, and psychological). This paper will consider (tentatively, to be sure) how to think about this in painting, during the crucial transitions of the middle Song.
Making Mountains: Replications of Mount Fuji
Melinda Takeuchi, Stanford University
Although the Japanese have a long history of replicating famous sites in painting, in gardens, and in miniature landscape trays—and imputing to these specific emotive attributes—there is perhaps no site on earth as widely reproduced as Mount Fuji. In additional to the "original" and the 112 "local Fujis" distributed throughout Japan, countless painted images of Mount Fuji exist; there are also a number of famous gardens, such as those at Zuisenji and the Silver Pavilion, with triangular-shaped mounds intended to evoke this conical geographical phenomenon. Although Fuji was gendered female (its goddess was a woman and images exist which show pilgrims sucking from fanciful breast-shaped stalagtites in its caves), only men were allowed to climb the sacred mountain. It became popular during the Tokugawa period to erect "mini-Fujis," which both men and women climbed in lieu of ascending Fuji proper. So important were these mini-Fujis that fatal disputes broke out about rights to sell mini-Fuji souvenirs.
Thus the case of Fuji raises the issue of simulacra—rather, simulacra of simulacra—writ large. Much has been written, starting with Plato, about the deceptive aspects of the simulacrum, the anxiety and nostalgia that it generates. In the West, simulacra evoke distrust. In Japan, replication is a holy act, and simulacra are tied to the notion of mitate, substitution. The question of Fuji and its replications also points towards profound issues about Japanese attitudes towards the relationship between gender and landscape, and how power is negotiated in the space between the original and its replicas.