Outlook: China and Japan
Alongside the Western tradition, other ways of thinking about beauty grew up in China and Japan: the spirit in the brushstroke, the suggested and the hidden, the simple, the aged and the imperfect. When Europe and America encountered these ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries, they became an important stimulus for the Impressionists, for modernist simplicity and for architecture’s understanding of space.
The aesthetics that the previous chapters have followed, from Plato to Bourdieu, is a European tradition. But ideas about beauty, art and taste have developed in many places, and in China and Japan there is an equally long and rich tradition of theory about painting, poetry, theatre, gardens and architecture. It differs from the Western tradition on a few important points. Representation, mimesis, was seldom at the centre. Instead the emphasis lay on the life of the brushstroke, the artist’s inner disposition and the relationship between human beings and nature. The empty and the suggested could be as important as what was shown. This chapter follows some of the most important ideas and shows how, when they reached Europe and America, they came to influence Western art and architecture.
The oldest and most influential text on painting in China was written by Xie He, who was active around the year 500 under the Southern Dynasties. In the preface to a short work in which he ranked earlier painters, he formulated six principles of painting. The first and most important, qiyun shengdong, is usually translated roughly as spirit resonance and life movement: the painting should be suffused with a vital force, qi, that makes it live. The other principles concern the structure of the brushstroke, the rendering of form, colour, composition and the copying of older models. The order is telling. Likeness to the subject comes only third, and spiritual vitality comes before everything else. The principles were quoted and interpreted for more than a thousand years. How the characters should be divided and translated has been disputed, and each age has interpreted the six principles differently, but they gave Chinese art criticism a common language.
Under the Song dynasty (960–1279) landscape painting reached a high point. Fan Kuan’s Travellers among Mountains and Streams, painted around 1000, shows a vast mountain towering over a small caravan of travellers. The picture is not a depiction of a specific place but a summation of the grandeur of nature and humanity’s place within it, in a cosmic order that draws heavily on Daoism and Confucianism. At the same time the ideal of literati painting emerged, in which educated scholar-officials painted as an expression of their character rather than as professionals. The poet and official Su Shi wrote that anyone who judges painting by likeness has the understanding of a child. The brushstroke became a kind of handwriting, in which the artist’s personality is as visible as in calligraphy. The painter Guo Xi, active in the 11th century, described in a text compiled by his son how a landscape can be seen in three ways: from below towards the heights, from the front into the depths, and across a flat landscape towards the distance. This was not a unified central perspective as in the Italian Renaissance, but a picture the viewer can wander through, and the hanging scroll or the long handscroll was read in time, section by section.
Japan took over much of Chinese art and theory, especially through Zen Buddhism, which from the 13th century brought with it Chinese ink painting, tea and monastic architecture. But in Japan the concepts developed in their own directions. One of the most important is yūgen, a word of Chinese origin meaning roughly the dim and the deep. It was first used in poetry criticism for a beauty that is sensed but not stated outright. The actor and playwright Zeami Motokiyo, who around 1400 wrote the first theoretical texts on nō theatre, made yūgen the highest ideal of the theatre: a refined, subdued beauty that reaches the audience through suggestion and restraint. His idea that what is hidden has a stronger effect than what is shown is a key to much in Japanese aesthetics. Zeami also described a rhythmic pattern, jo-ha-kyū, roughly introduction, development and rapid conclusion, which was to govern everything from a single movement to an entire day of performances. For him beauty was something that happens in time, in the encounter with an audience.
The same ideal can be seen in the art of the garden. The rock garden at the Zen temple of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, probably laid out around the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th, consists of fifteen stones in raked white gravel. It is a karesansui, a dry landscape, in which the gravel can be read as water and the stones as islands or mountains. Wherever one sits on the veranda, all fifteen stones are never visible at once. The garden represents nothing definite, and its empty space is as important as the stones. It can be compared with Hasegawa Tōhaku’s screens of pine trees in mist from the late 16th century, where most of the paper has been left empty and the trees only just emerge. The emptiness is not a lack but what gives the picture depth and life.
In the 16th century the tea ceremony was given its classic form by the tea master Sen no Rikyū. Against the wealthy warlords’ fondness for Chinese porcelain and lavish collections he set an ideal called wabi: a quiet, simple and austere beauty, with roots in words for poverty and solitude. The small tea house Taian, attributed to him, is a room only two tatami mats in size, built of clay walls, paper and untreated wood. Guests crawl in through a low opening. The bowls were often simple, hand-formed and irregular. The word sabi, meaning roughly patina and age, is associated with the same ideal: the beauty of what bears traces of time and wear. The compound concept wabi-sabi is a later summary, but the idea that the imperfect, the aged and the simple can be more beautiful than the perfect is an old one.
These ideals were to a large extent an aesthetics of the elite. The tea ceremony was practised by warlords, monks and wealthy merchants, and the simple bowl could be very expensive. There were other currents of taste as well. Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa of around 1830–1832 belongs to ukiyo-e, the popular colour woodblock prints of Edo, present-day Tokyo, which were sold cheaply and depicted actors, courtesans, landscapes and everyday life. It was these prints, not the tea bowls and the rock gardens, that Europe first came to know, when Japan was opened to trade with the West after the middle of the 19th century.
The encounter was transformative. From the 1860s Japanese woodblock prints, fans and objects spread in Paris and London, and Japan took part in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. In 1872 the French critic Philippe Burty coined the word japonisme for the Japanese influence. Manet, Degas, Monet, Whistler and Mary Cassatt were impressed by the prints’ flat areas of colour, cropped compositions, high or unusual viewpoints and asymmetry. Van Gogh copied prints by Hiroshige and wrote in his letters of how much he admired Japanese art. In 1905 Debussy had a detail of Hokusai’s wave adorn the score of La Mer. Japonisme helped to dissolve the central perspective and the illusion of depth that had governed European painting since the Renaissance, and thus contributed to the shift towards the flat surface that Greenberg later described. The influence extended to interiors and design as well. In 1876–1877 Whistler painted an entire room in London, the so-called Peacock Room, for a collection of Chinese porcelain, and in the United States the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow based a theory of pictorial composition on Japanese models in his book Composition (1899), with light and dark, line and colour as the basic elements. One of his students was Georgia O’Keeffe.
Around 1900 Japanese thinkers themselves began to explain their aesthetics to the West. Okakura Kakuzō, who had helped found the state art school in Tokyo and later worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, wrote The Book of Tea (1906) in English for an American audience. In it he presented the tea ceremony as an entire philosophy of life, a worship of the imperfect, and the tea house as a room in which emptiness is the essential. In 1933 Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote the essay In Praise of Shadows, an elegy for the traditional Japanese house, in which the half-light, the muted light through paper and the sheen of lacquer by candlelight made up a beauty that electric light and Western clarity threatened to obliterate.
In architecture the influence was great but not always direct. Frank Lloyd Wright saw a Japanese pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, collected Japanese woodblock prints and visited Japan in 1905. His open plans, horizontal lines and projecting roofs have often been compared with Japanese architecture, even though he himself played down the influence. The German architect Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936, praised the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto as a model for modern architecture, and after the war Walter Gropius visited Japan and in 1960 wrote a book on Katsura together with the architect Kenzō Tange. The modular system based on the tatami mat, the sliding walls, the untreated materials and the fluid connection between inside and outside suited modernism’s ideals of simplicity, standardisation and truth to materials.
Yet the encounter was not merely a borrowing but also a construction. Westerners saw in Japan what they themselves were looking for: the Impressionists flat colour, the modernists stripped-down form, and artists of the 1950s the emptiness and spontaneity of Zen Buddhism. Okakura and Tanizaki in turn selected and idealised certain aspects of the tradition, partly as a response to Western dominance and at a time of growing Japanese nationalism. Even so, the exchange is one of the most important in the modern history of art. It shows that the concepts Western aesthetics long took for granted, representation, symmetry, perfection and permanence, are not the only possible ones, and that an empty room, a cracked bowl or a half-light can also be a form of beauty.