ON GARDENS 5
Architecture Department, Tongji University, January 20, 1982
Feeling that I have not said enough about in-motion and in-situ viewing in garden-making in "On Gardens 1," I would like to get all my thoughts on it off my chest in this final instalment of my discourse on gardens.
Motion and stillness are relevant to each other insofar as sightseeing is concerned. Where there is motion there is bound to be stillness, and vice versa. In sightseeing, however, stillness is contained in motion, whereas motion stems from stillness; together, they conjure up innumerable visual changes and scenic wonders. As the Commentary of the Book of Changes goes,
The numbers are combined in various ways, which exhaust all aspects of changes, and, in consequence, the hexagrams form the pattern of Heaven and Earth.
Motion and stillness can also be interpreted, in garden-making parlance, as moving scenes and still scenes respectively. To someone sitting in a pavilion, drifting clouds and flowing water, flying birds and falling flowers are moving views, whereas rockeries and trees observed from a moving boat are still views. A body of tranquil water is a still view, and the fish swimming in it are moving views. Thus motion and stillness interact in an engaging way. Therefore, scenery unveils itself to a perceiving eye which sees motion in stillness and stillness in motion.
Seen in-situ, multitudes come forth of their own accord,
Seasonal sights change in the same way as man's mood.
This line summarizes the ins and outs of mutations in all things. In a typical case of intangibles relying on tangibles for existence, a garden loses all its natural appeals if it is stripped of its fair share of water, cloud, shadow, sound, morning sunshine and setting sun.
Even in still things there is motion. Sitting in front of an erected rockery riddled through with cavities, one finds that its sprightly wrinkles and robust lines, though still, seem to be flying. A water surface seems to be still, yet it keeps swaying and rippling on its own. A painting seems to be still, yet movement presents itself before the eye. A still thing entails no motion if it appears inanimate. Thus the visual results of a garden being created hinge upon its scenes and sights for in-situ and in-motion viewing. He who can make sense of this rule has by and large grasped the rule governing the craft of gardens.
The feel of texture in certain material is real, whereas the feel of color is illusory. The feel of texture is the foremost factor in a garden's genuine appeal. This principle applies to architecture as well, which brims with divine charms if it offers the real feel of texture, but loses such charms if the illusory feel of color holds sway. If a garden loses its feel of texture, it would look like stage property. If a painting or a work of calligraphy is devoid of the feel of texture, it would look like a print. Therefore, lacquered pillars and carved
girders can only bedazzle those who are enticed by their gaudy appearances, whereas a thatched hut with bamboo hedges can be highly thought-provoking. In A Dream of Red Mansions (Chapter Seventeen), "Literary Talent Is Tested by Composing Inscriptions in Grand View Garden," the author comments on plagiarism perpetrated in building the Paddy-Sweet Cottage through Baoyu's mouth,
There you are! A farm here is obviously artificial and out of place with no villages in the distance, no fields near by, no mountain ranges behind, no source for the stream at hand, above, no pagoda from any half hidden temples, below, no bridge leading to a market. Perched here in isolation, it is nothing like as fine a sight as those other places [the Bamboo Lodge] which follow the law of nature and capture the appeals of nature. The bamboos and streams there didn't look so artificial. What the ancients called "a natural picture" means precisely that when you insist on an unsuitable site and hills where no hills should be, however skilfully you go about it the result is bound to jar…
Here, plagiarism stands for what is described as "artificial" and "out of place" in a garden, whereas those which "follow the law of nature and capture the appeals of nature" stand for realness. The above quote from the 17th-century Chinese novel is worth a complete essay on garden-making.
The famed Northern Song painter Guo Xi (c. 1000-c. 1080) says,
Water adopts the mountain it winds its way through as its face…and thus acquires feminine allure from the mountain.
In the annals of Chinese landscape painting, nobody has ever said that water and rockery can be treated separately. The above quotation of Guo Xi gives tacit expression to his insight on the rules for landscape gardening, rules that can stand those who act on them in good stead one way or another. At the first sight, water and stone appear to be a pair of opposites, but in essence, water can change itself only by relying on rockery. Without rocks, water will be devoid of form or shape, which is why rock must be made to protrude from shallow water and assume the form of an isle chain in deep water. At the Seven Star Crags of Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, rocks are spectacular and brooks bewitching, with stones shimmering in rippling water, water-curtained caves sequestered in mystic repose, and streams taking winding courses—all this is attributed to water's interminable changes, without which rocks will elude attention, and shores will be shapeless. For this reason, water and rockery cannot be separated, or else the law of nature is violated, and realness lost.
A garden's personality is hinged on interdependence between mountain and water. Therefore, it is imperative to dig a pond to bring in water. In the gardens of south Jiangsu province, ponds are graced with winding embankments to impart a gentle touch to the setting. Many gardens in the Ningbo-Shaoxing Plain in Zhejiang province feature square ponds, resulting in views that are flat and straight. Water is shapeless to begin with; it is the embankments that bring it into shape. Water inlets and embankments, be they straight or twisting, are instrumental in shaping water's surface. Because of embankments water becomes gentle or vivacious, motionless or flowing. An embankment built of delicate rocks endows water with the spell of feminine grace, while an embankment made of rustic rocks adds masculine verve to water. A rock looks plain and simple on account of its bucolic shape, and a projecting rock owes its appearance to the manifold differences in its façade, whereas a rock with its beauty disguised in ugliness is deemed a rare treasure among all rocks because of its peculiar character. Rocks may be masculine or feminine, pretty or ugly. Water can look aggressive or gentle only with rocks as the difference-maker.
A deserted garden does not mean it is not worth visiting, just as a remnant poem or essay is not necessarily unappreciable. We have got to know that a tattered piece of brocade or a broken shard of jade can still be prized as objet d'art: the beholder hates to part with it merely on account of its genuine character. Gong Zizhen (1792-1841) has this to say,
"Weiji," the last hexagram, renders one at a loss,
Things'd be imperfect but for their drawbacks;
Someone my age chants beyond hills at sunset,
Hard to avoid is the lingering worldly aftertaste.
Garden-makers ought to grasp the spirit of this poem.
One sees a mountain's face in spring, finds its vitality in summer, feels its mood in autumn, and discovers its bones in winter.
Mountains appear low at night, close at hand on sunny days, and high at dawn.
By investing their sentiments in the scenery they were seeing, our forebears wanted to drive home the fact that because of changes in the four seasons, it is as hard to create scenery as to make sense of the scenery that meets one's eyes. What is implied in the line, "With tears brimming my eyes I ask the flowers, but get no answer," is silliness; what is implied in the line, "The spring breeze is let go of its untold frustration," is resentment. People go sightseeing with feelings. Such feelings give rise to interest in the sight and culminate in passion for the landscape, so much so that one is disposed to regard a spring or a rock as a bosom friend. People's aesthetic attainment or depth of feeling, or the lack of it, has very much to do with their cultural cultivation. For this reason I would like to reiterate that if you do not appreciate a garden you should not go see it; if you cannot go see a garden, you should not make one.
The craft of gardens is a multidisciplinary science, whose rich stock of philosophy enables the crafter to observe manifold changes in the course of it. Simply put, it takes intangible poetic mood and picturesque perception to construct tangible waters, rockeries, pavilions and terraces. Dark or gloomy, wind and rain can cause infinite changes to scenery, while differences between southland and northland in geography and folkways are extra factors that ought to be taken into full account. As each visitor takes what he likes from the various functions of a garden he is visiting, on no account should the garden crafter supplant reality with illusion. A garden thus crafted is unlikely to offer well-conceived constructions. Arbitrary studies of a traditional garden to the neglect of the society and lifestyle of its time can be as far-fetched as Han-dynasty Confucians' interpretations of canonical classics. For this reason, garden crafters of today should avoid falling into the old rut of their predecessors, and make their wealth of life experience and erudite knowledge instrumental in advancing their careers.
Painters can portray the beauty of the same scenery with different brushstrokes, whereas writers can describe it from diverse points of view. Performers can vocalize the same aria and achieve sublimity in different ways as per their respective schools of performance. In the same token, a garden can be designed in different ways, but the peerless design invariably comes from the designer with the keenest eye and finest distillation from all factors.
In the beginning I had a hard time comprehending why people of the Song were so enamoured of landscape paintings done by lavishing greenish blue on vermilion color bases. It was not until I saw Mount Songshan on a midsummer day that I finally came to terms with this style of painting. There, the Central Plain's dark red soil was covered by deep green vegetation that gleamed amidst well-scattered green-and-golden pavilions and belvederes, and it instantly reminded me of the landscape paintings of General Li Sixun (651-716)1 and his son. Both men's paintings, done with saturated color tones on an agreeable chromatic scheme, capture exactly the celestial charms of the landscape of central China. By contrast, the landscape of the Jiangnan area is always portrayed in paintings with subtle azurite and malachite green on an ochre and green color base, with buildings outlined against a light dark backdrop. Eyecatching in a refreshing way, these paintings serve exactly as the drafts for Jiangnan gardens. In either case, it is conceptions that lead the way, and are executed through well-coordinated coloration and brushwork.
I have said that the buildings and gardens of Suzhou are of a gentle and suave style, or, to put it in the local dialect of the former kingdom of Wu, "glutinously mellow." By contrast, most gardens in Yangzhou are as elegant and dynamic as the lyrical poems of Jiang Kui (1154-1221), who portrays sentimental heartthrobs with a robust writing brush. Though different in style, these two schools of landscape architecture and gardening stem from the same quest for realness, that is, to present engrossing garden scenery. A garden's style has to be fixed before its components are dealt with individually. As to whether a pavilion or a waterside verandah ought to be built, which school of artificial mountains ought to be chosen, and in what fashion should water be brought in, all the answers could be found from a well-conceived plan in which measures are adjusted to the actual situation and views borrowed methodically. At the same time, the garden's general style must be strictly followed, flexibly employed, and prescribed rules observed when rocks and flowers were chosen and sights for in-situ or inmotion viewing decided. For this reason, the garden crafter must stay composed, have everything at his finger-tips, and take it easy as he goes about his job. Only thus can he lay out his garden in a sensible way. If a garden is to excel in natural momentum, it must show integrity in its conception and layout.
When I was sightseeing in the mountains of Fujian province, I found that their peaks were bald, trees were scarce, outcroppings were everywhere, old trees had twisted roots and gnarled trunks, and the mountainous terrain was there for all to see. I was able to identify the landscape with certain schools of painting and texturing techniques right away. We can always figure out a painting technique from a real scene, or associate such a scene with a particular painting technique. The turbulent streams and monoliths shimmering in swift rapids in Fujian make ideal prototypes for construction of artificial mountains. The precipices of Huizhou in south Anhui and Fangyan in east Zhejiang also find expression in the texturing techniques of traditional painting. The landscapes in these places, each featuring a distinct variety of topographic wrinkles and textures, never fail to captivate the sightseer with a bonanza of scenes for in-motion or in-situ viewing. Our ancients loved to appreciate rocks and meditate in front of a cliff wall because it enabled them to ruminate the philosophy and values entailed in them.
The hardest part in composing a lyrical poem to a stylized tune is that the transition between its upper and lower stanzas calls for wording and meaning that sound at once attached and detached. The same is true with garden-making, where dexterous and impeccable application of transitions between vistas is essential to achieving uninterrupted momentum and perennial aesthetic appeals in a garden of a thousand hectares, where all the streams flow along zigzagging courses, all the artificial mountains jostle in picturesque disorder, all the lofts and towers set off each other felicitously, and all the trees reach high into the sky while the ground is carpeted with flowering plants—none of these components are left in isolation on the premises. Thanks to smooth transition between views, the garden remains open and spacious while its terrain undulates and meanders, and provides ready access to various nooks and crannies. Transitions of this type, however, ought to be effected through appropriate media, perchance, such as a roofed walkway between buildings, or a bridge between a flowing stream's different sections. Without transitional coloration, a color scheme cannot level off smoothly from dazzling brilliance to simple and subtle hues. Touch-up brush strokes employed in painting also come in handy for transitioning in a landscape garden so that its momentum can be maintained and its spatial and spiritual verve conveyed to the beholder. The relationship between intangibles and tangibles calls for smooth transition as well, so that scenes can be infinite and their appeals unfailing. To attain intangibles from tangibles, and to seek a lingering effect from a song or a piece of instrumental music, the secondary may outweigh the principal, and a role player can sometimes outdo the leading actor. The reason why "a river can flow beyond heaven and earth, and a mountain's hue can teeter between nonexistence and existence" is because intangibles can sometimes accomplish what tangibles cannot.
A city cannot do without making gardens, for it really matters for the well-being of its dwellers. The key to the success of such a craft, however, lies in "view borrowing" and "view screening" techniques. No gardens in a city can do without view borrowing. The three lakes in Beijing are good examples in this regard, where views from the imposing walls and halls of the former Forbidden City are appropriately borrowed. According to Li Gefei (c. 1045-c. 1105) in A Record of the Celebrated Gardens of Luoyang,
There, if one gazes out to the north, he will see halls and towers in the palace compounds of Sui-Tang times, with thousands of doors and ten times as many windows, lofty and elevated, resplendent and gorgeous, extending over ten miles. What took Zuo Si2 ten years of utmost efforts to describe in his rhapsodies can be exhausted here at one glance.
However, I seldom hear of gardens with smokestacks in close proximity or factory buildings lurking in the background. The only exceptions are the Humble Administrator's Garden and the Loving Couple's Garden3 in Suzhou, for whose awkwardness I can only sigh in helplessness. But there is no lack of exemplary gardens that borrow views from a mountain in a city's outskirts or from a pagoda in a Buddhist temple in the distance. Apart from "view borrowing," there is "view screening," meaning that a city garden must be screened off vulgar and ugly vistas. Integration and separation are a pair of opposites that can also be made to supplement each other. Without screening the vulgar part of a vista off a garden, there is no way to bring the elegant part of it into the fold. Without covering up ugliness, how can a garden's beauty be brought into focus? Because a scenery to be created may be one- or double-sided, we have got to make a choice. At one end of the Gratification Garden in Shanghai there is the Profuse Beauty Hall, whose backside faces a busy street and whose front is reposed in the seclusion of the Giant Artificial Mountain's northern foot, but visitors wandering about the hall are oblivious of the urban traffic and din simply because a wall has screened the celestial world in the garden off the secular world outside of it. Screening, indeed, can work wonders. In 1980, when I was building the Astor Court, a Ming-style Chinese garden in imitation of the Master-of-Fishnets Garden's Late-Spring Peony Lodge, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that occupies two floors and has no views to be borrowed, I had double gates and tall walls erected to create a secluded world in which fine scenic results are guaranteed. A garden must have a "prelude" to guide the visitor gradually into the heart of its scenery, which is something that should not be trifled with, and the transition methods described in the foregoing must be put to good use. None of the traditional gardens in the cities of the Jiangnan area can dispense with such a "prelude." However, the gardens built these days are often made to come straight to the point, lest the visitor fail to know they are visiting a garden, and the new front gate of the Garden of Brotherly Indulgence in Suzhou is a case in point. The Dark Blue Waves Pavilion is a semi-closed garden, and the sceneries across the river are within reach and serve as a "prelude" that ushers the visitor into the garden without knowing it for a leisured stroll.
Before a dying garden is repaired or resurrected, its history must be studied first, its status quo thoroughly grasped, all its rock formations and architectural elements accurately dated, and their salient features pinpointed. Only then can a repair or restoration plan be considered. This is like mounting an ancient painting, whose touch-up strokes must be perused and fathomed out—a task that can be more difficult than painting a new one. In the course of the repairs, every brushstroke must be mulled over beforehand. Engineering work ought to begin with buildings, in which carpentry comes first and plastering comes next. Only after major carpentry work is done can ponds be refurbished, artificial mountains repaired and new rockwork erected. The planting of trees and flowers can sometimes be weaved into the engineering work. Roads should be paved, walls repaired and nameboards painted and hung up on the last leg of engineering work. Then the repair or restoration project is over, with furnishing forthcoming.
In landscape gardening, ancient rules can be followed and foreign practices assimilated, but these two aspects are in no way mutually exclusive. To mesh old heritages with modern things, and to make the past serve the present, is an inevitable trend, but blatant plagiarism and patchwork at the expense of judicious quest for style and spiritual charms are not recommended. For this reason, garden history and the craft of gardens past and present, Chinese and foreign must be thoroughly explored alongside their aesthetics and historical and cultural backgrounds. Only with well-documented literature and pertinent allusions from canonical classics can we assimilate the theories and expertise past and present, Chinese and foreign. Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715) says,
To copy a painting is not as desirable as to observe it. Upon coming across the authentic work of an ancient painter, we had better trace it to its root, and study its concept and its composition, its discrepancies, strengths and drawbacks, as well as its layout, brushstrokes and inkwork. There must be something that the ancient painter did better than we can, and with time, we can eventually gain a true understanding of the painting and the painter.
The way of learning introduced in this passage is worth emulating. The Japanese learned from us Chinese before the Meiji Reform (1868-1912) and from Europe afterward. They are imitating the Americans lately, but what merits attention is that the Yamato tradition always runs through Japanese buildings and gardens. History studies naturally have all along figured prominently in Japan, and the collections of Chinese books in Japan's libraries are so extensive as to be astonishing! Ji Cheng's book The Craft of Gardens we see today was actually copied from its original kept in Japan. The Japanese collections of European and American materials are immense as well. Japanese scholars of the older generation, like ItōChūta (1867-1954), Tokiwa Daijō (1870-1945) and Sekino Tadashi (1868-1935),4 were among the prominent figures in the study of Chinese architecture. As crystallizations of hard work and down-to-earth attitude and approaches, their books on this field of learning are still playing a major role in the academic world today. They took great pains in collecting first- and second-hand data, and, by distilling essence from a wealth of information, eventually came to the fore as erudite scholars. Indeed, "Stones borrowed from other hills are ideal for working one's own jade." As "view borrowing" is often stressed in landscape gardening, is there any difference between garden-making and learning in this regard?
Garden-making involves tangibles and intangibles. The same is true with learning. As I conclude this five-instalment discourse of some ten thousand words, I think I have used up all my stock of learning. Short of substance though this discourse may be, I would not have written it if I had not devoted half of my lifetime to traversing the country, visiting all the famous gardens and practicing the craft of gardens. I am here presenting my humble opinions with a desire to consult and learn from all the experts in this field of endeavour. If my ageing heart still allows me to make new discoveries and gain new insights, I will definitely burn my candle and write them out deep into the night.