Feature Articles
Author: Shelley Drake Hawks
Keywords: Art, China, China and Inner Asia, Education, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Religion
How to Cite: Drake Hawks, S. (2013) “An Environmental Ethic in Chinese Landscape Painting”, Education About Asia. 18(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1158
Landscape painting in Western art did not develop into an important category of painting until the seventeenth century. In contrast, landscape painting in China was already a prized art form by the ninth century.1 In fact, when Chinese art was systematically introduced to the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the prominence afforded nature—as opposed to humans— in Chinese art startled Western audiences. One reviewer of a pioneering exhibition of Chinese art at the British Museum on view from 1910–12 exclaimed that “no classical European master ever expressed the structure of mountain and rock as it is expressed here.”2 Another observer claimed that Chinese artists painted rocks and streams “as seriously as Rembrandt painted the portrait of a man.” Of the geese in a Chinese landscape painting, a British critic wrote: “The subject seems nothing to us, but [the Chinese painter] proves that it meant all the world to him.”3 Western artists celebrated the human story above all else, while Chinese artists gave trees, plants, birds, rocks, and streams utmost scrutiny. Historically, what beliefs about nature motivated Chinese painters to make landscape such a prestigious art form? During the Song dynasty (960–1279) in particular, many Chinese literati shared a philosophical perspective that is clearly reflected in landscape painting, one that honors the natural environment. In today’s China and in much of the modern world, the relentless drive for economic development sometimes makes the natural environment seem peripheral to human concerns. Nature is merely the stage upon which human activity unfolds, rather than something appreciated for its own sake. Introducing Chinese landscape painting into a world history or a world art course can serve as a platform for discussing environmental ethics. For example, how does a Song dynasty Chinese landscape painting envision humanity’s relationship with the cosmos? The tiny scale of humans relative to the mountains in a typical Chinese landscape painting suggests that we humans coexist with many otherliving things. Humans are integrated into a larger whole rather than celebrated as a towering presence. The Neo-Confucian philosophy developed during the Song dynasty, one of the great eras for monumental landscape painting, cultivated a profound respect for all living things. Neo-Confucianism emphasized humanity’s interconnectedness with a wider universe. The following statements are representative Neo-Confucian claims: by Cheng Hao (1032–1085), “The humane person forms one body with all things comprehensively”; and, by Cheng Yi (1033–1107), “The humane person regards Heaven and Earth and all things as one body.”4 A later Chinese philosopher, Wang Yangming (1472– 1529), cited this notion of interconnectedness as the reason why humanity should extend love to all living things:Everything from ruler, minister, husband, wife, and friends to mountains, rivers, spiritual beings, birds, animals, and plants should be truly loved in order to realize my humanity that forms one body with them, and then my clear character will be completely manifested, and I will really form one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things.5The Confucian outlook never presumed that humanity could triumph over nature; rather, the organizing principle was that humans thrived by operating within nature’s parameters. For example, the great sage Yu is said to have controlled the floods by “imposing nothing” to obstruct water’s natural tendencies.6 Chinese sages thus looked to nature to find ethical instruction. In Analects 9:17, Confucius remarked upon the unceasing flow of a passing stream: “Isn’t life’s passing just like this, never ceasing day or night?”7 Confucius’s comment suggests that a fully realized life requires limitless resolve, like a surging stream.8 A famous passage in the Book of Mencius illustrates Confucianism’s affinity for finding a mirror for human conduct in nature.9 Mencius draws an analogy between a once-luxuriant mountain robbed of its trees and a human heart insufficiently cultivated. In the case of Ox Mountain, the terrain has become barren because its grasses have been grazed upon too often and its trees chopped down before new shoots can grow. The human heart is presented likewise: “A child must be nurtured and given the space to develop, or the child’s original heart will wither away.”10 This passage inspires a sense of duty to protect the young against life’s injuries. It also promotes an ethic of environmental sustainability. The cautionary example of a denuded Ox Mountain suggests that all living things must be kept in balance and that new sprouts reach their potential only when their habitat is respected.11
Before you plan to discuss Early Spring in class, ask students to scrutinize the painting carefully on the website of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum (http://tinyurl.com/dycqtnv).15 This is an important prerequisite for a full discussion because there is a tool on the website for enlarging the image so that its details can be closely examined. Without this magnifying glass effect, the painting cannot be fully appreciated. Explain to your students that it is useful to divide the painting into five sections,Chinese landscape painting unites Confucian philosophical concepts with Daoist and Buddhist thinking about nature.
the three boulders that anchor the bottom; the center, where a pair of parallel ridges, bathed in mist, circle left; the right section, with its cascading stream and buildings nestled in a gorge; the low, misty valley that reaches into the distance at the left; and the summit, a high, distant peak, zig-zagging upward out of the mists.16
Students should peruse all five sections for details of what is happening within the landscape before responding to the entire picture. Encourage your students to write out a description of the rocks, trees, buildings, water, mist, animals, and people populating the painting. You might provide them with a list of specific items to find, such as “cloud-like boulders,” “crab-claw” tree branches, a fisherman poling his boat, two monks ascending a path, an official riding a mule, and a small dog.17
The symbolic elements in Guo Xi’s Early Spring offered praise and auspicious blessings for Emperor Shenzong’s reign.
A great mountain is dominating as chief over the assembled hills, thereby ranking in an ordered arrangement the ridges and peaks, forests and valleys, as suzerains of varying degrees and distances. The general appearance is of a great lord glorious on his throne and a hundred princes hastening to pay him court, without an effect of arrogance or withdrawal[on either part].20Even the human figures and trees in the painting are placed in the composition based on social ranking, with commoners situated on the lowest tier of the mountain and the monks and officials located a bit higher.21 The two tall pine trees on the boulders at the bottom center of the painting are said to resemble watchmen standing guard at the entrance to the mountain structure.22 In Chinese, the word for landscape consists of the words for mountain and water (shanshui). According to Francois Jullien, a French sinologist (b. 1951), this dual term (mountain/water) is reflective of the interaction between complementary dualities (yin and yang) characteristic of the Chinese concept of landscape.23 Jullien argues that the Chinese placed central importance on the activity of breathing as the defining characteristic of life. Whereas the Greeks “privileged the gaze and the activity of perception,” the Chinese conceived of reality in terms of qi, or breath-energy.24 The activity of breathing out and in unites humans to the alternating rhythms of heaven and earth. In the Daoist classic Daodejing, the universe is pictured as a great pair of bellows engaged in a cosmic process of respiration.25 Most students will have been exposed to the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang, the passive and active principles said to alternate throughout nature. In Chinese theory, yinand yang are always in motion. There is always a bit of the opposite principle becoming visible in each.
This constant sense of metamorphosis is palpable in Guo Xi’s Early Spring. The painting seems alive with movement as yin turns into yang and vice versa. The painter achieved this feeling of rhythmic motion by alternating areas of dark ink and unpainted surface, massive rock and airy valleys, and dense foliage and light mist. An S-curve, repeated many times throughout the painting, adds to this sense of motion. According to Stanley Murashige, the open-ended shape of the S-curve, neither circle nor straight line, represents “the graphic trace of the creative principle in nature.”26The S-curve suggests a constantly renewable cycle, like the changing of the seasons. Yet the S never comes back to a full circle because a season never manifests itself exactly the same way twice. Ask students to locate the S-curve as it is repeated throughout the painting. Discuss what effect the S-curve imparts to the painting’s overall structure. The final, and arguably most important, take-home lesson from Guo Xi’s painting is the invitation for a kind of partnership between humankind and mountains. The relationship being sought is one of compatibility, participation, and interconnectedness. According to Guo Xi’s own words, cited by his son in “The Lofty Truth of Forests and Streams,” the mountain lives only in the act of wandering. He adds: “The mountain’s form changes with every step.”27These comments suggest that the mountain is only conceivable from multiple standpoints, as if one were wandering through it. Indeed, the Chinese viewed the landscape painting as if they were mentally traversing through it. If we look carefully at the bottom, middle, and top sections of Guo Xi’s painting in this way, we will see an illustration of shifting perspectives, a typical feature in Chinese landscape painting. The bottom three boulders with accompanying trees seem to be viewed as if we are standing above them; the middle register looks as if we are viewing it straight on; and the top portion, the regal summit, seems to be viewed from below. We are constantly adjusting our eyes to take in a fresh point of view. Guo Xi called this exercise “viewing the form of a mountain from each of its faces.”28 Unlike the aspiration central to Western landscape painting—ie, to paint a particular location from a fixed standpoint—Chinese landscape painting aimed to incorporate the essence of thousands of mountains, the accumulated sights of a lifetime into one composite landscape. Thus, to look upon a landscape painting in the Chinese tradition was to feel connected to the full scope of places and living things. In a Chinese landscape painting, mountains, foliage, rocks, and streams in the painting were not mere objects; they often were invested with human-like qualities. In “The Lofty Truth of Forests and Streams,” Guo Xi’s son speaks of the water of mountains as “blood,” foliage as “hair,” and rocks as “bones,” which hearkens back to earlier theories by Chinese critics as to what makes a good painting, like the Six Laws of Chinese Painting written in the fifth century CE.29 In today’s technologically driven age and urban society, we risk losing a strong sense of connection to the outdoors. Chinese landscape painting enlivens our sense of partnership with nature and reminds us of the wisdom of the ancient Chinese saying tian ren heyi (“the heavens and humanity together in harmony”).30 Ask your students how this differs from what they have experienced or know of in the West.The painting seems alive with movement as yin turns into yang and vice versa.