Reporter | Intern reporter Zuo Maolin reporter Pan Wenjie
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Chinese literati often use landscapes to care for society, and Ouyang Xiu once said: "The meaning of drunkenness is not wine, but also between mountains and rivers." Zhao Tingyang, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the literati landscape is not an observer as an object of understanding, but a subjective existence that reflects the heart of the literati.
In the fourth season of the Sanlian Xinzhi Conference "Our China: A New Exploration of Civilization" held recently, Zhao Tingyang and several scholars from different fields such as philosophy, art, sociology, anthropology and other fields held a dialogue on "Chinese Civilization and the World of Landscape and Water", presenting us with the development context of the knowledge concept of landscape in culture and art, and their significance to current life and research.
Leaving the Mountains and Forests, Entering the Mountains and Practicing: What Is the Culture of Landscape and Water?
What is a cultural landscape? Cultural landscapes are compared to natural landscapes. When analyzing the process of the emergence of cultural landscapes, Wei Bin, a professor at the School of History of Wuhan University, believes that natural landscapes are the natural spaces in which people live by the waters in the mountains, as well as the material and economic practices formed by people's labor in the mountains and waters.
The generation of cultural landscapes is related to the belief groups with intellectual attributes, Wei Bin pointed out that cultural elites in the political environment is tense, social competition failure of the atmosphere, the sense of absurdity of life, often choose to leave the mountains and forests, become an important shaping force of cultural landscapes. For example, Su Shi once wrote in "Qinyuan Spring", "When using the house, the line is hidden in me, and it is better to sit idly by and watch," expressing a kind of melancholy that the literati want to escape from the world.
He also mentioned that the local religious elite is also one of the forces that shape cultural landscapes, such people are to cultivate into the mountains, the "sacredness" of the landscape into tools to help enhance personal cultivation, with the rise of mountain monasteries, Taoist halls, a new cultural and geographical space has been generated, such as the great southern slope of Maoshan Mountain is china's earliest Taoist complex, in addition to the Tiantai Mountain Zen Temple and so on. And when this group of people began to write about their landscape experience, a large number of texts about landscapes were produced, which together constituted the dynamic connotation of cultural landscapes.
From left to right: Qu Jingdong, Yin Jinan, Zhao Tingyang, Wang Mingming From characters to landscapes, from green to ink
In Zhao Tingyang's eyes, the concept of landscape is constantly evolving, and he interprets "the source of peach blossoms can no longer be found" as a dynamic metaphor for landscapes. In his view, if the landscape is like the peach blossom source, it will lose the value that people will look for, thus emphasizing the importance of treating the landscape as a developmental image.
The characteristics of Chinese painting in public perception are usually landscape, ink, freehand, Yin Jinan, a professor at the School of Humanities of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, mentioned in the dialogue that in fact, landscape painting has also undergone a process of development. The development of early landscape painting and figure painting was not synchronized, and figure painting in the middle and late Period of the Northern Song Dynasty gradually declined and was compressed within the court, and at this time landscape painting slowly became a very "powerful" painting genre. Yin Jinan noted that when Northern Song China entered the world of civil officials, the influence of the previous aristocratic "theory of descent" on the subject matter of painting gradually decreased. After the needs of the nobility to "recognize the ancestors and return to the ancestors" were reduced, the characters into the painting were no longer highly emphasized.
Landscape painting in the Tang Dynasty has a high degree of aristocratic temperament, Yin Jinan believes that the popular green in the Tang Dynasty has a high degree of decoration, basically from the Buddhist turquoise system. The turquoise system is very strong in some paintings such as Dunhuang and India, and gradually influences central plains painting from the west to the east. During the Northern Song Dynasty, most of this color with aristocratic atmosphere was shrunk in the court, and the "Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" was also created by Wang Ximeng as a court painter. However, the literati world of the Northern Song Dynasty was very repulsive to this kind of green, and then developed the ink factor of the late Tang Dynasty. Yin Jinan also pointed out that for the "realistic" style, the bureaucratic ancients of the small and medium-sized landlord class also set off a wave of denial. "This kind of freehand ink has a high aesthetic quality, which is promoted by the small and medium-sized landlords of the lower class, and finally generalized in its entirety." The rise of a class led to a unique aesthetic approach, and the Northern Song Dynasty literati made the values of landscape and ink closely linked, and then abstracted into China's unique cultural landscape.
Qu Jingdong, a professor in the Department of Sociology of Peking University, said in response to this topic that landscape is not condensed on a specific event or person, the concept of landscape is a process of historical generation, and the interpretation of posterity and the meaning of new life are constantly expanding the original meaning of landscape. As a concept in art history, landscape painting is a bridge between history and culture, constituting a long chain of civilization inheritance relationship.
The Realistic Landing Point of Landscape: The Falling State of Mind and the Perspective of "No Self"
Wei Bin mentioned at the end of the dialogue that the modern significance of landscape and water is to provide people with an opportunity to escape from modern society, giving people a sense of relaxation and freedom. At the same time, he also stressed that the current so-called "home" and "lying flat" escape methods are fundamentally different from the escape of landscape and water, "The spirit of landscape lies in the sense of inner clarity." ”
Wei Bin remotely connects to discuss the chinese landscape in history
In addition to implying a state of mind, the spirit of landscape also contains a methodological enlightenment. In the dialogue, Wang Mingming, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, believes that there is a problem with this set of sociological and anthropological research methods that only focus on "human life". He shared his 1991 fieldwork experience in Anxi County, Fujian Province, arguing that in real life, farmland, mountains, and the gods believed by the locals are closely linked. The fieldwork should not only be limited to the level of human relations, but also the landscape world outside of people.
Wang Mingming also said that "landscape" means "none-human", that is, to remove one's own shadow when understanding nature. The distinction between "no-self" and "self- can re-examine some of the classical views of the Western anthropological tradition on the relationship between the matter and the self." He summarized the anthropological tradition's understanding of the structure of the world into three ways, all of which are "self-contained": one is "animism", which holds that things in nature can dream like people, and in dreams can be transformed into a spiritual being to wander around the outside world, which is a way of observing things by itself; the second is "totemism", which is actually the source of describing the surrounding animals and plants as the source of self-description, a way to examine the self by things; the third is "witchcraft". Understanding the world through similarity associations and analogies is still a "me" way.
In Qu Jingdong's view, the significance of revisiting Chinese landscapes may lie in providing a way of thinking that jumps out of the "me" and out of human society to build a civilization system: "It should be understood from the multiple connections of a broad humanistic relationship, that is, what we often call things—various things, gods, and people—beyond the relationship between people." ”