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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back What Ruins? The Aesthetics of Desolation and the Contingency of Its Pictorial Practice in Northern Song Eugene Wang Harvard University As a leading antiquarian, Ouyang Xiu's (1007 - 1072) interest in painting may not be as pronounced as his attraction to ink rubbings of inscriptions. Yet the few pronouncements he makes about painting has a lasting impact on Chinese art history. Most notable of them is his preference for the ineffable mood of "desolation and austerity" 蕭條淡泊 and the "leisurely peace and awe-inspiring stillness" 閒和嚴靜 which he considers the effects "most difficult to capture in painting." The aesthetic principle eventually materialized in the kind of literati landscape paintings exemplified by Ni Zan and has become the standard prism through which we view paintings of this kind. However, as my paper argues, this hindsight need not obscure the historical situation of the Northern Song when alternative visual models were fashioned in response to Ouyang Xiu's aesthetics. The case in point is the Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, dating most likely from the mid-eleventh century. Entrenched in our habitual way of understanding, we would normally not see the painting in the light of the aesthetics of desolation and austerity. However, a case can be made that the painting indeed evinces a conscious effort to respond to the aesthetics of desolation and austerity, with the crab-claw branches spelling out "desolation" and the mountain monastery suggesting "austerity." Set against the dynamic landscape forms, the architectonics of the pagoda-dominated architectural precinct also conveys the effect of "leisurely harmony and awe-inspiring stillness." Much as the painting shows a close fit with—and responsiveness to—Ouyang Xiu’s ideas, it also departs from the antiquarian scholar’s aesthetic vision of desolation and austerity. The problem comes to a head in the painter's specific decision with regard to the image of the "solitary temple." The choice of flaunting an ostensible pagoda in the center, on the face of it, makes sense in view of the growing interest among scholars in seeking solace in the transcendent haven of the Buddhist realm. However, a set of specific historical circumstances in the eleventh century makes this iconographic scheme a glaring oddity that would certainly have offended the sensibility of the likes of Ouyang Xiu. The Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks therefore affords us a rare opportunity to examine the dynamics of how the conceptual ideals of literati and the actual practice of the "painter-craftsman" mesh and clash, and how the domain of words, in which the literati excel, and that of visual images, the primary medium for "painter-craftsman," interfuse and interact. This line of inquiry would thus situate us in the bedrock of historicity with sufficient attention to the permutations of its circumstantial contingencies, thereby pushing the study of antiquarianism beyond the familiar explication of paintings in the light of some general theoretical programs and aesthetical principles. |
