Landscape Painting, East and West.
This photograph is of of concrete gun emplacement near my house, part of the extensive fortifications that have been constructed around the DMZ. It seems someone had the bright idea of painting a view of what can be seen through the gun port, I suppose in order to aid the gunners during night-time actions. This painting is crude, but it follows the conventions of Western landscape rather the traditional Korean, in that it is based on fixed-point perspective, that is, it imitates the view as seen from a static single position - in this case, what can be seen when you stand looking out of the rectangular aperture. This got me thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western conventions of depicting landscape, as I was struck by how useless a traditional Korean landscape painting would be if the purpose was to represent a place in order to bombard it accurately with high explosive.
From the Renaissance until the advent of modernism, Western painting was dominated by the conventions of fixed-point perspective, a system which enhanced the ‘objective’ experience of visual mastery. The horizon is usually located low down, as if the landscape is seen from the ground and from a single, standing, position. A landscape painting by, say, John Constable therefore mimics a view seen through a window frame, suggesting that we are looking onto a real or imagined view which is graspable and controllable from the position it is being viewed..
‘The Hay-wain’ by John Constable (1821)
Traditionally, Korean landscape painting – like all painting produced under Chinese cultural influence - depicted very broad views of the scenes they represented, tending to put the horizon high, as if the landscape was perceived from the point of view of a flying bird or of someone perched high on a mountain. Korean artist Ahn Gyeon’s painting, Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise (c1447), for example, which was inspired by Chinese Northern Song models, incorporates three kinds of viewpoints into one painting: the left side is drawn with ‘Level distance’, the rugged mountains with ‘High distance’, and the dream-land on the right with a ‘Bird's-eye view’, to which a ‘Deep distance’ viewpoint is also applied.
‘Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise’ by Ahn Gyeon (c.1447).
A work by a later Korean artist, Jeong Seon, like his view of the Geumgang mountains, painted in the mid-eighteenth century, is also an amalgam of different viewpoints, but unlike the Ahn Gyeong it depicts an actual location (a range of mountains that are now within North Korea). However, one would have to be a bird to see it from this elevation, and like the Ahn Gyeonggi-do, it actually incorporates several viewing positions. As a result, the topographical features are not located as they would be if we were viewing the mountains from one fixed location.
‘General View of Inner Geumgang’ by Jeong Seon (c.1740s)
The phenomenal aspect of nature was described in Korean culture by the Chinese characters meaning “mountains-waters” (shanshui), which is usually translated by the English word ‘landscape’. But this coupling of environmental attributes implies a fundamentally different relationship to the depiction of nature to that of the West. In fact, rather than understanding it as an object of perception, the East Asian idea expresses a sense of immersion. For shanshui painting was as space within which ch’i-yun- ‘vital breath’, ‘breath-resonance’ or ‘breath-energy’ - could circulate. For everything was understood to realize both itself and its relationship with everything else within the unity of ch’i - composed of the non-dualistic intertwining of yinyang – the two defining principles of the East Asian world-view. While it is misleading to set these terms in opposition to each other, broadly speaking we can say that yin is negative, dark, and feminine, while yang is positive, bright, and masculine. The sky is yang and the earth as yin. Water in yang and mountains are yin. Yang is active and yin is restful. Their interaction influences all creatures and things. Ch’i is therefore an inherent animating energy that continuously circulates and concentrates itself, and by circulating it connects and brings consistency to reality. “Not only my own being, as I experience it intuitively,” writes the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien, “but the entire landscape that surrounds me as well, is continuously flooded by this subterranean circulating energy.”
In painting this ‘vital breath’ was also signaled by the energy of the brush, ink, and colours. As a result, what to Western eyes registers as lack of finish or refinement, sketchiness, or a sense of incompletion, was highly valued because ‘breath-energy’ was associated with spontaneity and open-endedness. Sketchiness was meant to put potentiality at the centre of representation. “When you paint”, advised the Chinese scholar-artist Tang Zhiqi (c.1620), “there is no need to paint all the way; if with each brushstroke you paint all the way, it becomes common.” The aim was not to fix essences but to make a record of a play of energy. Catching the flow of ch’i required that a painting conveyed a stage “when plenitude has not yet broken up and dispersed”, writes Jullien. As the T’ang Dynasty painter and writer Chang Yen-yüan wrote in his Origin and Development of Painting (c.845AD): “If the spirit-resonance [ch’i-yun] is sought for, the outward likeness will be obtained at the same time.”
Because of this emphasis, in contrast to the West landscape painting in East Asia held for hundreds of years the preeminent place as the most esteemed subject for artists. But it wasn’t directed at mimesis, or imitation, in the Western sense of replicating nature and achieving a convincing three-dimensional illusion. Instead, the principal goal for a painter was to enhance awareness of a reality within which the viewer actively participated. But if the goal is to use a picture to help accurately aim at a target within a landscape, then obviously shanshui is of little help. The Western model, however, seems perfectly suited to the task. The Korean soldier who painted the view on the gun emplacement was also taking a ‘bird’s eye view’, one granted courtesy of the siting of the emplacement, which overlooks the valley below. But because it adopts the Western conception of pictorial space, the image can dominate what it overlooks by setting the viewer clearly apart from what is viewed. In fact, one could even suggest that the origins of the whole Western classical ideal of art as dedicated to the imitation of the visible is fundamentally about capture and control. It implies the goal of mastery over nature in order to dominate and exploit it, and thereby reduces the environment to a space for predator and prey. The East Asian model is more benign by comparison, as it mixes the viewer up with the viewed, uniting them within the general flow of ch’i, rather than separating them into an active and dominating viewer and a passively viewed. It is no surprise that photography, which simulates very effectively the static viewpoint pioneered in painting, is so very appealing. Here too we have a technology for grasping and controlling. It is no coincidence that we say – or used to – that we ‘shoot’ a camera and ‘capture’ an image. In this context, however, digital photography, which is infinitely manipulable and can incorporate multiple viewpoints, can be seen to offer the possibility of another kind of picturing, one that is closer to the shanshui model.
Both the Eastern and Western models are fundamentally technological, in the sense of functioning as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. But they construe their goals very differently. The distinction is also evident in the physical practice of making a painting. As the art historian John Onians has pointed out, the posture adopted by Western painters mimics that of the warrior holding a shield (palette)and sword (brush or palette knife). Here, for example, is a self-portrait by William Hogarth from the same period that Jeong Seon was working in Korea:
By contrast, the ideal of the Eastern painter is more analogous to that of a farmer sowing a field, in that he works on a horizontally sited surface rather than a vertical one, crouching over the work in progress, and as a result is more closely, more physically, in solved in what he does as an extension of himself.
What does this tell us about the enduring differences between Western and Eastern culture? Obviously, today the conventions of Western painting are deeply entrenched in East Asia, and anyway it is misleading to talk in terms of hard-and-fast differences. Cultures evolve and inter-blend. But while the idea that a painting should depict a three-dimensional space using fixed-point perspective no longer dominates the West, perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that as a result underlying assumptions have changed. Isn’t the Western model of the artist (which has been exported globally) still about ‘dominating’ the canvas? About ‘colonizing’ it with our subjectivity? Aren’t we still wedded to the idea of the artist as the exemplary individual whose will triumphs over adversity? Dont we still think in terms of adversaries, competitors, ‘hard-one images’, a whole rhetoric of ‘doing battle’?