Architecture in Ji Cheng's The Craft of Gardens: a visual study of the role of representation in counteracting the influence of the pictorial idea in Chinesescholar gardens of the Ming period

摘要

Making, for Plato, is poesis on its own behalf. However, the making that takes place in the context of Chinese garden culture may differ from Plato's original conception of poetic thinking. Founded on a non-material attachment to beauty, Chinese gardens are typically structured around the dominating feature of the pictorial idea (huayi 畫意), which aims to evoke imagined affections that are beyond physical touch and tangible encounters. Following this principle, the Chinese scholar gardens are thought to define a type of bodily experience that intertwines mind and image, and therefore to be subject to an aesthetic that is identical to that of scholarly landscape paintings or, in other words, the pictorial idea of the garden. Accordingly, this pictorial aesthetic appears to suppress the corporeal operation of the eye to some extent. This is evident in the gardens of the Qing Dynasty (1644—1912), whose symbolism came to replace the naturalistic aesthetic that had dominated painting since the time ofEmperor Huitsung (1082-1135). That is, the depiction of Qing garden space no longer aimed to reflect its physical form but presented poetic themes with the help of literal interpretation. The neo-Confucian ideology of the late Ming period (1368— 1644)further emphasized this association in promoting the dominance of 'thinking' over the 'making' of tangible things. In this regard, the representational sense of the garden is challenged by a pure mental image withtranscendental meaning. According to most of the contemporary scholarship on Chinese gardens, the actual image of the typical scholarly garden never seems to be in accordance with the making of the garden space.