Yu Liu: Teaching Module on the Aesthetics of China and the West
1. General Objective:
To examine the original contrast and the relatively recent convergence of the West and China in
art theory and practice and to explore thereby the complex issue of identity and distinction in any
comparative study.
2. Specific Organization:
a) Part I: the contrast of theory
In the European model, for instance, the artist is conceptualized as a godlike figure who
has the power to create order out of chaos and whose artistic skill is in fact measured in
terms of this externally imposed form or order. In the Chinese model, in contrast, the
artist is envisioned as someone who works in accordance with nature and the highest
achievement in art is thought of as perfect union with nature (tian ren he yi).
Reading assignments on European art: Plato, Timeus, The Bible (Genesis), Vitruvius,
excerpts from Ten Books on Architecture, and Andrea Palladio, excerpts from Four
Books on Architecture.
Reading assignments on Chinese art: Laozi, Dao De Jing, Confucius, Analects, and
Focusing the Familiar or Doctrine of the Mean (especially about the love of natural
landscapes, the idea of harmonious disagreement, he er bu tong, and the notion of unity
of heaven and humanity, tian ren he yi), The Book of Changes (especially parts of the ten
wings supposedly written by Confucius), and Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens (17th
century).
b) Part II: the contrast of practice (example)
Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and his landscape paintings:
Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 1646
Landscape with Dancing Figures, 1648
Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657
Landscape with Apollo and Mercury, 1660
Note: Studies of Claude’s landscape paintings will be focused on not only his use of the
allusion to a by-gone classical golden age to celebrate the land possession and power of
the new Church-connected Roman aristocracy, but also his geometrical and mathematical
division of visual space and his use of the Euclidian single perspective to achieve the
overwhelming effect of awe and shock all at once.
Reading assignment: Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka
Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Song dynasty landscape painting (960–1279):
Guan Tong (c. 906-960): Zhang Dai-qin’s forgery of Guan Tong's Drinking and singing
at the foot of a precipitous mountain
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Li Cheng (919-967): Buddhist Temple in Mountain 晴峦萧寺, 960
Fan Kuan (990-1020): Travelers amid Mountains and Streams 谿山行旅, (date ?)
Guo Xi (1020-1090): Early Spring, 1072
Note: Studies of the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty will be focused on not only
the so-called cartography of empire and Confucian cosmology, but also the use of
multiple points of view and the spectator’s participatory excursion in the depicted
landscape to engender the excitement of discovery and self discovery.
Reading assignment: Steve Goldberg, “Philosophical Reflection and Visual Art in
Traditional China,” in Asian Texts-Asian Contexts: Encountering the Philosophies and
Religions of Asia, ed. David Jones and Ellen Klein (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 227240.
c) Part III: an instance of the relatively recent convergence
The particular moment in history is late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and
the event is the sudden and dramatic turn of English landscaping from the regularity and
discipline of classical art to the irregularity and freedom of nature.
Studies will be made of the interconnected lives of four people: William Kent (16851742), Robert Castell (d. 1728), Matteo Ripa, and Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington
(1695-1753). Kent was famous for his garden innovations in the late 1720s and early
1730s at Chiswick, Stowe, Rousham, Claremont, and so on where he made twisting and
turning rivers and lakes and zigzagging pathways and transformed the experience of
seeing a garden from the traditional single perspective or bird’s-eye view from outside the
garden to the new moving and changing perspective inside the garden that emphasized
the excitement of surprise. In 1728, Castell published a highly unconventional annotated
translation of Pliny’s letters about his Tuscan and Laurentian country houses (Villas of
the Ancients Illustrated) in which he compared the classical European garden design to
the Chinese plan and cited both as in favor of natural irregularity. Matteo Ripa was a
European missionary-artist and worked for a long time at the imperial court of Kangxi.
While there, he made thirty-six engravings of the emperor’s summer resort at Chengde in
1713. In 1724, during a visit to London, he made these engravings available to
Burlington. Burlington was a close friend and/or patron of Kent and Castell; as such, he
helps us understand why the English garden was called in the 18th century le jardin anglochinois and why this is not just because Sir William Chambers built a House of
Confucius and a Chinese pagoda at Kew Garden.
Reading Assignments:
Robert Castell, The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (London, 1728).
John Charlton, A History and Description of Chiswick House and Gardens (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1958).
Basil Gray, “Lord Burlington and Father Ripa’s Chinese Engravings,” The British
Museum Quarterly, 22 (1960): 40-43.
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Yu Liu, “Castell’s Pliny: Rewriting the Past for the Present,” Eighteenth Century
Studies, 43 (2010): 243-257.
Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic
Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
Michael I. Wilson, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685-1748
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
Finally, it will be interesting to read English literary works such as Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads and The Prelude and Shelley’s poems “Mont Blanc” and “Ode to Intellectual
Beauty” and see the then already thoroughly English affinity with nature. Even though we
do not have to connect this new English or Western sentiment about nature with the
earlier transmission of Chinese gardening ideas, any effort to do this will reward us with a
significantly different understanding of the involved history of ideas and the complex
issue of identity and distinction in any comparative study of China and the West.
3. Evaluation methods:
A combination of tests and research essays.
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