Path, place, and pace in mid-Ming Suzhou landscape painting
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 67-68; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/693993
ISSN2327-9621
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreePath, place, and pace in mid-Ming Suzhou landscape paintingLihong LiuLihong LiuPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the history of Chinese landscape painting, no artists were more concerned with pathways than those based in the Suzhou area in the mid-Ming period (ca. 1450–1550). Writing about how to paint a landscape, Wen Boren 文伯仁 (1502–75) explained: "Where there are footpaths, [the scenes] wind; where there are forks in the paths, [the scenes] become crisscrossed."1 Indeed, the footpath or path, jing 徑, became ubiquitous as a formalized motif in Suzhou landscape painting, undergirding the spatial coordination and temporal stance of objects and bodies.2 In the configuration of real-life Suzhou gardens and parks as well, the footpath was deployed to move bodies through spaces. In both painting and place making, the footpath functioned as what one might call a place binder, while also enabling the contingent propulsion of bodily movements.Anthropologist Timothy Ingold contends that the act of walking generates a mode of knowledge about the world; one's experience and perception of the living environment is thus realized through the interaction between human feet and the ground.3 In this article I emphasize the roles of the path as a spatiotemporal form and as a presentation of the concept of process in mid-Ming Suzhou paintings. I argue that formalized paths and conceptual pathways enabled these paintings' two-sided exploration of place. This can be set against the discourse of aimless roaming (you 遊), which was also a cultural touchstone for Ming literati.4 Associated with the ideal of nonpurposive activity endorsed by the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi 莊子 (ca. 369–286 BCE), you and woyou 臥遊 ("roaming while reclining on a couch") projected a sense of spiritual freedom and facilitated the transmutation of reality into reverie and vice versa; painting functioned as an effective intermediary vehicle for the visualization of this transcendence. Mid-Ming literati reinterpreted the ideal of you, grounding it in quotidian practice by emphasizing the relationship between one's self-awareness and living surroundings, for which paths became important agentive channels. The present study contextualizes this praxis of experiencing and making the world in relation to contemporary socioeconomic transformations in the Suzhou area. This perspective sheds light on the significance of pause and slowness as markers of social distinction for the landowning gentry-literati class, in the face of an increasingly fast-paced urban life and booming travel economy.The Suzhou masters Shen Zhou 沈周 (1427–1509) and his student Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559), although generally referred to as "literati" (wenshi 文士), represent different life trajectories that reflect the diversity of the educated elite in Suzhou society. Shen Zhou, who was known as a chushi 處士 ("immaculate intellectual"), belonged to the social category of gentry-literati who benefited from hereditary landownership. He never pursued an official post, but he served the community as a tax captain in a sub-bureaucrat system that assigned such positions based on landownership. Wen Zhengming came from a family without great wealth, whose members up to his father's generation had steadily served the government. He therefore spent some three decades (1495–1522) pursuing an office; eventually, after a short-lived career at the court from 1523 to 1526, he returned to Suzhou to become an eminent scholar-artist, establishing an elaborate network of followers and friends who offered ample material means in exchange for his artworks.5 The rise of scholar-artists in mid-Ming Suzhou demonstrates the historical transformation that took place in the Ming state as the career paths of the educated elite bifurcated into imperial service and communal cultivation, with the latter yielding both agricultural and cultural production locally. This sociohistorical change heightened people's collective attention to their living surroundings.The omnipresence of paths in paintings served as a mode of return to the living world that conveyed a sense of "keeping one's feet on the ground," both literally and socially. The term "foot-field" can be used to refer to the walked and walkable territories consisting of footpaths, bridges, terraces, plateaus, and any other open spaces or passageways that a human or animal could dwell in or pass through. As a compositional infrastructure, the foot-field signals Suzhou artists' efforts to mediate their experience of place, both in real life and within their works. The foot-field empowers bodily animation and catalyzes shifting views of the constructed scene.Path, place, and scenePerformativity of and in a given place marked a new conception of space and landscape in the mid-Ming period.6 In the hands of Suzhou artists, the foot-field instantiated for the intended audience—often their friends or acquaintances—the imaginative action of walking within, as expressed by scholar-official Wu Kuan 吳寬 (1435–1504), a friend of Shen Zhou, in his comments on a landscape painting of Shen's: "[Shen] Shitian sent this scroll to Beijing, which made me forget the hardship of the dusty world. Such scenery [fengjing] of Jiangnan [the lands adjacent to the south of the Lower Yangtze River] often comes into my dreams. When shall I physically tread on the ground [qinlü] in this scene [jing] together with Shitian?"7 The painting depicts sprawling grounds irregularly cut across by bodies of water along with pathways that invite perambulation (fig. 1). Shen represents his experiences of the Suzhou landscape by delineating a flow of nonhierarchical pictorial space, differentiating his painting from the typically monumental naturescapes (shanshui 山水) of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127).8 The latter often insinuated a cosmic realm which in turn conveyed the view of an imperial domain.9 In its accessibility and presentation of spontaneous human experiences and everyday activities, Shen's painting also differs from the lyrical and eremitic views of the paintings of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Thus, the notion of "physically treading on the ground" (qinlü 親履) developed on a new level the existing conception of an embodied environment as traversable (keyou 可遊) and inhabitable (keju 可居), as promoted by the Song landscapist Guo Xi 郭熙 (1023–ca. 1085). Guo valued these two attributes of landscape paintings in addition to their walkable (kexing 可行) and observable (kewang 可望) traits, because the actual landscapes in his environment were mostly inaccessible; he recognized landscape painting as an alternative space that could liberate humans from the constraints of reality.10 But in terms of composition, Guo's ideas conformed to a hierarchical conceptualization of the naturescape relative to the human world and cosmic realm: he supposes that natural things like mountain peaks, hills, and trees should be configured in ways that emulate the hierarchical positioning of people in imperial rituals, the social domain, or the paradisiacal abode.11 By contrast, the empathetic notion of qinlü in the mid-Ming period indicates that traversing the actual landscape conjured by the painted scene is intimately somatic and driven by free will—an opportunity to relish natural and potentially social surroundings.Figure 1. Shen Zhou, section of Painting of Jiangnan Scenery (Jiangnan fengjing tu 江南風景圖), last quarter of the fifteenth century. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 23 × 440.5 cm. Shanghai Museum, Shanghai.The development of a pictorial concept of fengjing 風景 ("scenery" or "prospect"), a term used today to translate the English term "landscape," involved a distinct ethos of place. It denotes perceptual-mnemonic views of a place with discernible customary activities, dwellings, and lifeworlds situated within a geophysical system. Wu Kuan's mention of Jiangnan invokes what one might call the "geo-aesthetics" of the Suzhou landscape—the entanglement of lifeworlds with topography.12 Humans' immersive activities and sensorial engagement in the landscape animate the place as a jing 景 (scene). When Wu remembers Jiangnan upon looking at Shen's painting, jing refers to both the pictorial scene and the site depicted—the mutual evocation of place and painting.The concepts of fengjing and jing shed light on the nuanced meanings of landscape as a performative scene constituted by human actions and senses in a particular place, as expounded by modern humanist geographers. Although "scenery" and "landscape" are virtually synonymous in modern English usage, Yi-Fu Tuan points out that the origins of the former term can be traced to the theatrical stage, while the latter referred to an outdoor expanse in the "real" world. Since the eighteenth century, when the notion of landscape became associated with art (especially in the idea of the picturesque) in England, "landscape" has also come to refer to a prospect seen from a specific standpoint, connoting the theatricality and artifice inherent in landscapes as constructed scenes. In the context of a portrait, the depiction of landscape can likewise set a "scene" for a sitter; thus both the real landscape and painted landscape reflect theatrical illusions.13 In ideological and geographical terms, Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove define the notion of landscape (not exclusively landscape painting) as "a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings."14 Kenneth Olwig has described how place and polity have been created through people's "'doing' of landscape": "The suffix -scape embodies this sense of creative shaping and carving."15 Art historian Jonathan Hay promotes a more expansive use of "scape" that consolidates humans' perceptual, conceptual, and sensorial engagements in things, afforded by the agency of the artwork as well as the viewer's. He uses "imagescape" to underline the "topological dimension" of a painted image: the interplay of facture (such as ink or paint) and substrate (such as silk or paper) through which legible pictorial forms emerge. The planar surface/substrate acts as a ground or resonating field for this emergence. "Scape" in this sense is the formation of the relational pictorial field made comprehensible through the viewer's situational perception of the depicted forms.16Here it may be worthwhile to consider a notion of "pathscape" in mid-Ming Suzhou landscape painting. The pathscape not only demonstrates how humans carve into the surfaces of terrain by imprinting a meshwork of trails but also affords possibilities for human bodies to inscribe their senses and sensibilities onto the material world they inhabit.17 Pathscape both establishes expectations and enables the pleasure of serendipitous exploration, presenting and producing spatiotemporality as an imminent process, a continual coming-into-being. Michel de Certeau defines "place" as "an instantaneous configuration of positions," whereas "space" is "a practiced place"—one that is temporalized and produced in a durational process.18 In mid-Ming Suzhou landscape painting, paths present the contingent positioning of the body as it inhabits or moves through its surroundings. Humans enact and perform place through their presence, perception, and movement along the pathways that continually open the world.19Mid-Ming Suzhou landscapists brought to the fore the material realization, everyday propinquity, and emotional intimacy of a jing, and thereby popularized what they called shijing 實景 as a genre of painting. Shi is variously translatable as "real," "authentic," "concrete," "practical," or "legible/veritable." Shijing denotes the specificities of places—usually "scenic" places such as gardens, villas, and parks—that are not only named or identifiable but are, more significantly, replete with human consciousness of existence, action, memory, and aesthetic sensibility. The shijing paintings with which we are concerned simultaneously present "substantive landscape" and "scenic landscape," to borrow the terminology of Kenneth Olwig.20 Olwig explains that scenic landscape is perceived pictorially; he employs the term "scene" in its literal, theatrical sense, which "derives from the perspective scenery of the stage, with its 'blocked out' space upon which the action is performed."21 The combination of the "substantive" (real or concrete) and the "scenic" (contrived) encapsulates the ways in which the compositions accordingly emphasize both material grounding and performativity of and in a place. Besides their content, shijing paintings also boasted sophisticated pictorial craft: the artist's legible and evocative depiction of a particular place endowed the painted scene with a sense of "realness." The rhetorical power of the image thus lay in the artist's masterful creation of a "reality effect"—the presentation of concrete details of topographical forms and living activities that produced a convincing sense of place.22 In the construction of real-life scenic sites as well as in pictorial depictions of them, winding paths functioned as embedded "ways" to prompt embodied spatiotemporal narratives.23Path as siteThe zealous path-making activities in mid-Ming Suzhou suburban and urban spaces were a testimony to Suzhou's economic growth and the revival of its cultural dominance following a century-long period of political and fiscal suppression.24 Located in the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the terrain of the Suzhou area was parceled according to the divisions of numerous watercourses. The Gusu Gazetteer of 1506 lists some 860 named bridges; in its 1542 compendium edition, there are around 1170.25 Around Suzhou city the number of bridges increased, partially due to the increased number of newly dredged canals.26 Bridges functioned as indispensable infrastructural elements connecting pathways and linking the various walkable territories. Urban residents spent their leisure time in the southwestern environs of Suzhou city, where Lake Tai endowed the area with various scenic sites.In the midst of a prospering travel industry and the rising popularity of excursions to local scenic sites—trends that heralded the social and economic mobility of a burgeoning consumerist society—the landed gentry and educated elite presented their own ways of being "in place" and positioned themselves as active participants in the making of places. A landowner and community leader, Shen Zhou applied his artistic acumen to the observable textures of everyday life in his shijing paintings. Among the great number of Shen's works that represent specific places in the Suzhou area, the handscroll Thatched Monastery highlights the foot-field as the compositional mainspring of the scene (fig. 2). The painting depicts an aerial view of the monastery in the southern part of Suzhou city, underpinned by a pathscape of crisscross footpaths along fields, dikes, islets, and bridges—all these areas are connected as walkable passageways. At the opening section of the scroll preceding the painting, Wen Zhengming wrote in large characters the phrase Qu jing tong you 曲徑通幽 ("Winding footpaths leading to secluded scenes"). The notion of tong 通 is key to understanding the pictorial interfacing of the depicted territories: it denotes connectivity between spaces as well as the act of navigating through spaces in transitory moments. Spaces may be interrupted by the parceled lands and watercourses, but the winding trails maintain a sense of continuity underlying the formation of the place and one's experience of it. By depicting these passageways, the painting highlights the urban resident's search for destinations away from the hustle and bustle of city life. The white-robed man at the right edge of the composition is about to reach his destination by crossing two wooden-plank bridges that connect the grounds and lead to the secluded monastery; a monk stands at the opposite end, waiting to greet him. The painting's emphasis on locomotion and potential social/spiritual interaction along the pathway reveals how the figure makes the site a world of his own.Figure 2. Shen Zhou, Thatched Monastery (Cao an tu 草菴圖), 1497. Handscroll, ink and color on paper, 29.5 × 155 cm. Shanghai Museum, Shanghai.Contrasting with this connectedness and accessibility, other paintings emphasize disruption and isolation by depicting interrupted paths, as seen in Wen's 1525 short handscroll Giving Advice on Farming (fig. 3). At first glance, the painting represents a lyrical scene composed with simple lines and dots. Wen reductively depicted the ground plane by applying lateral strokes of lines that recess diagonally from the right to the left; rows of trees rise from the grounding lines. Beside a village at the right edge of the composition, two tiny figures, a man and his attendant, stand looking into the distance. The only form that breaks the horizontal arrangement of the motifs is the forked path situated in the middle of the composition—this is the path that is disrupted. Although a seemingly idyllic scene, Farming actually represents a catastrophic event that took place in Suzhou in 1510.27 In his colophon, Wen records that during the fifth year of the Zhengde 正德 era (r. 1506–21), a severe flood invaded the Suzhou area. Pan Banyan 潘半巖 (1463–after 1525), a member of the local gentry from Xukou 胥口 at Xiangshan 香山 in the western environs of Suzhou city, advised his servants to take control of the flood by pumping the water. Wen executed a painting to commemorate Pan's heroic action, but the work was lost over the course of time. In 1525, when he painted Farming, Wen was a palace editorial assistant (daizhao 待詔) at the court in Beijing. He produced the work following a visit from Pan Banyan's son Pan Chang 潘鋹, who informed him of the recent grasshopper disaster in his hometown of Suzhou, and how Pan Banyan had again led the local community to cope with it. Wen was then inspired to recreate the work he had painted more than a decade previously. In his speedy and abridged execution of the painting, Wen carefully depicted the path using straight, parallel lines. His focus on the path, here a disrupted one, materializes the diminishing dry ground during the flood. This visualization of the flood's progression and the action of the two men overseeing the fields encourages the viewer to imagine a well-connected, unflooded ground that would allow the men to walk into the field and carry out their work.Figure 3. Wen Zhengming, Giving Advice on Farming (Quan nong tu 勸農圖), 1525. Handscroll, ink on paper, 28.9 × 140.6 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.The stark contrast between Shen's Thatched Monastery and Wen's Giving Advice on Farming suggests that the path is a necessary element that insinuates a tangible ground of existence for both bodies and human consciousness. In other works, mid-Ming Suzhou artists thematized paths as sites that enact the process of psychophysical engagement and mental and sensorial immersion in scenes articulated by bodily movement. An example is Shen's Vermilion-Cherry Path, a leaf in his Eastern Villa Album, which depicts Wu Kuan's family property (fig. 4). In this painting, Shen represents what we might call a path-site: in this case the path not only bound scenes to the ground but was also a scenic site in itself that served as a transient destination for sightseers. Shen depicts a sinuous paved footpath extending diagonally across the painted surface. The curves squiggling along the diagonal axis delineate the process of navigating a maximized pictorial space. A man is treading on the path, his bodily movement performing its meandering form. This pedestrian's forward motion conveys a sense of unfolding progression across the space. The cherry trees flanking the path reinforce it as a locus whose toponym—the "vermilion-cherry path," as in the title inscribed on the facing leaf—captures its paradoxical character as both a connecting passage and a destination. Similarly, Shen's presentation of a figure that is walking while savoring the surrounding scene simultaneously evokes linear movement and place-centered absorption. The painted scene gives the impression of having been cropped from a larger environment, as indicated by the path that we understand to continue beyond the pictorial space.Figure 4. Shen Zhou, Vermilion-Cherry Path (Zhuying Jing 朱櫻徑), in Eastern Villa Album (Dong Zhuang tu ce 東莊圖冊), late fifteenth to early sixteenth century. Album leaf, ink and color on paper, 28.6 × 33 cm (with inscription on facing leaf). Nanjing Museum, Nanjing.Intimacy and immensityThe formal dialectics of the path resides in its twin operations of delineation and enfolding: the linear flux and spatial partitioning connect and divide the space at the same time. Thus, pathways invert the "way through" of the trail into "the containment of the place-in-space."28 When the connection and division are articulated by a moving body and eye, the space produces multifarious directions and views in a contingent process of unfolding, transgressing modular modes of existence.Shen Zhou's short handscroll of 1493, Solitary Pacing at Thousand-Man Rock during a Moonlit Night, provides an intriguing case for understanding the body as a medium that inscribes a bounded space in the process of creating/unfolding an image of immensity (fig. 5). It offers a horizontally stretched view of the delimited scenic site Thousand-Man Rock at Tiger Hill, featuring a lone man with a cane strolling on the rocky plateau. Shen deliberately crops out part of the plateau at the lower edge of the composition in order to invite the viewer to imaginatively enter the pictorial space. Shen's composition achieves a tension between intimacy and vastness by depicting a small, solitary figure walking on a slightly inclined rock surface. He acts out a sequence that unfolds the place in accordance with the continuing repositioning of this figure's body, while multiplying the space as his footsteps progress.Figure 5. Shen Zhou, Solitary Pacing at Thousand-Man Rock during a Moonlit Night (Yueye Qianren Shi du bu 月夜千人石獨步), 1493. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 30.1 × 157.1 cm. Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. Photo: Lin Li 林利. Courtesy of the Liaoning Provincial Museum.Located at the foot of Tiger Hill, seven miles outside the northwestern wall of Suzhou city, Thousand-Man Rock could be perceived as an intimate spot due to its smallness and familiarity to people of the time. The Gusu Gazetteer records: "Tiger Hill is the smallest among the famous mountains [in the Suzhou area], but its scenic spots are the most remarkable, and it is not appended to [other scenic sites], therefore it is ranked number one [in Suzhou]."29 In his poem-colophon for the handscroll, Shen provides this description:A mountain [Tiger Hill] has this site;No spot is more scenic than this one [Thousand-Man Rock].Everything here stands out as barren;Flat and open, [the rocks] distinctively resemble blade grinders.The foot/root of the Rock dips into a cavernous pond;And is covered in a diffuse glow of deep purple.30Shen's poem represents layers of groundedness: the most scenic spot is nestled in the most scenic mountain; the rocky ground descends into the deep water below. The ground is the root of the spot, the basis of the place.The name Thousand-Man Rock was derived from stories about the legendary preaching of a Buddhist monk, Zhu Daosheng 竺道生 (355–434), allegedly a student of Kumārajīva (334–413). It is said that when he preached while seated at the foot of Tiger Hill, a thousand stones surrounding him nodded in agreement. Another tale relates that the place where he preached featured gigantic stones, tortuous paths, and open platforms spread out unevenly, all of which could accommodate a thousand listeners.31 These stories imbue the place with a metaphorical projection of a mass assembly acting on the ground. Continuing the poem, Shen writes:Urban residents, men and women, come to visit;The number of people is innumerable.They banquet with wine;Dancing and singing arise amidst the tumult of the festivity all day, every day.32Shen then narrates the quieter scene that we see in the image: "Tonight, I come to roam."33 He describes himself wandering alone during a moonlit night, seeking an otherworldly experience in a familiar place that during the day would be filled with worldly noise. Shen emphasizes the quietude and the brightened nocturnal world with its dreamlike atmosphere. In the subsequent stanza he explicates the notion of a limited but multipliable space in relation to the multiples of his own body that are cast as shadows along the sequence of his footsteps:The moon pours its light onto the ground, bright and clear;Lifting my foot, I fear that I am stepping on water.The area of this place is less than one hundred steps of walking;Though, winding around, I count a minimum of one thousand steps.With each step, the moonlight casts a shadow of my body.A thousand shadows are like the presence of a thousand bodies.34Shen goes on to raise bodily motion to the level of mental meditation on an otherworldly realm:One self wants to match one thousand bodies;How absurd my idea is!Like the Buddha who instantiates the boundless universe;Everything is generated from a tiny substance!35Shen's Solitary Pacing animates visualization in action and situates being in doing, intellection in walking. The path necessitates the alignment of body and mind: it is the prescription and product of the depicted man's action and visualization. The conception of the path presupposes that walking embeds the body within the surrounding space in a sequential process. Conversely, the action of strolling produces a virtual path—invisible but materially articulated through the man's body and spatially delineated through his motion. The man's action of winding around (xuanrao 旋繞) the ground multiplies the space of the place and is indexed by his alternating footsteps and bodily positions. Thus, a single body can both pose and suppose a mass of bodies, as the pattern of a single stroll recapitulates the strolls of multiple individuals.It is worth turning to Chinese theatrical conventions to get a glimpse of the broader cultural references of Shen's painting and poem. The distinct theatricality of the scene has a close parallel in the convention of suppositionality (xunide 虛擬的). Film scholar Weihong Bao has cogently discussed this convention, which characterizes the performing body of the traditional stage actor as "subjunctive."36 According to Bao, in operatic performance the actor's stylized acting and concrete bodily movements are the informed audience's focal point of attention, and the actor's subjunctive body instantiates the sequential narrative of the performance in the bounded space of the stage. In his poem, Shen expresses that the serried shadows cast by his rhythmically moving body in the moonlight simulate the imaginative presence of a thousand bodies. The act of "winding around" the limited ground/stage generates an image of the potential infinity of the space, which is acted out through the prolonged process by which the actor (Shen) incessantly poses his body.37 Thus, the reticular trails of footsteps actualize and symbolize the paths at the same time. The physical traces of these steps function as indices of the multiple apparitional forms of bodies cast by a single body in corresponding chains of spatiotemporal variations. The path, in this sense, underscores both spatial conjunction and temporal duration, enacted and advanced by the body's gait. As the body moves, the path extends, which expands the space.In his invocation of daydreaming as a way of describing "intimate immensity," the philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) presupposed a threefold existence: a passive body, an active mind, and a free spirit.38 The body, as a container, is supposed to be motionless; the mind projects a "consciousness of enlargement" that is facilitated by the imagining of an elsewhere; a relaxed spirit becomes illuminated through solitude and meditation, which enables the daydreamer to see images of immensity, and to lodge his spirit in these images.39 It is the quiescent solitude that blends the immensities of intimate space and world space; one thereby becomes conscious of one's own existence in the context of the coexistence of things in a given space.40 In Chinese terms, both motionless contemplation (jingguan 靜觀) and motional contemplation (dongguan 動觀) shaped approaches to appreciating places like gardens, which often epitomized grand cosmological spaces within delimited areas.41 In the construction of gardens, winding paths that entice bodily movements were creatively used to imbue bounded spaces with an experiential and contemplative immensity.In Solitary Pacing, Shen proposes a mode of motional contemplation. The intimate relationship between small and large is generated through the process of interaction between body and space; both body and space are mediums for the creation of a narrative of enlargement in an integrated process of performing and imagining. Thus, the elsewhere that lurks behind the contemplation of immensity is produced and measured by a process of action and a consciousness of the passage of time together with the expansion of space. Solitude is sought and staged, experienced and performed at the same time. Shen's self-awareness of corporeal movement is made clear by his description of the shadow cast by his body in moonlight. The visible, locomotive shadows projected by his walking instigate his visualization of a mass of participants in this place.Shen also imagined an observing eye "out there" that would make sense of the cosmic enlargement of this blocked-out scenic space
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