YUAN ZHAO

Position Paper: Hegel�s Concept of Artistic Beauty and Chinese Landscape Painting

 

Still Streams and Winter Pines (Ni Zan, 1367)

Fishing Lodge (Ni Zan, 1355)

 

In Hegel’s aesthetic theory, artistic beauty is placed in a very high position, because the work of art is a sensuous expression or presentation of the spiritual and the inner feelings, and because “everything spiritual is better than anything natural” (34). In other words, a work of art, as the product of human creativity, functions ultimately to represent the development of human self-consciousness through its presentation of human thoughts and feelings, which gives the artistic work a spiritual dimension and makes it higher than natural objects that exist without any self-consciousness.

 

Hegel’s theory of artistic beauty can help us understand classical Chinese landscape painting, which emphasizes, in its unique way, the spiritualization of the sensuous that characterizes all artistic works. Ni Zan’s “Still Streams and Winter Pines” (1367) and “Fishing Lodge” (1355) are cases in point.

 

One of the “four masters” in Yuan Dynasty, Ni Zan (1301-1374) is representative of the “literati painting,” which occupies a dominant position in Chinese art history. In the two paintings above, the stream, water, mountains and trees are presented in the simplest or crudest forms of blackness and whiteness – actually blankness -- that characterize Ni’s works as being frugal, remote, cool, thin and even abstract. However, such otherwise derogative qualities of “plainness and blandness” turn out to be what traditional Chinese critics value most in his works, for they indicate a sense of purity, nobility and even strength achieved through the ideal of being “without flavor.” This kind of formal beauty could be best explained by Hegel’s concept of spiritualization – “in art, the sensuous is spiritualized, i.e. the spiritual appears in sensuous shape” (44). If Ni Zan’s sparsely populated pictorial world is an extreme case of “sensuous shapes,” then its (sensuous) blandness is redeemed precisely by its “call(ing) forth a response and echo in the mind from all the depths of consciousness,” which leads to the “satisfaction to higher spiritual interests” (ibid.). Such spiritual satisfaction consists therefore of readers’ response or echo to the formal beauty on the one hand, and of the artist’s inner world on the other -- his feelings and aspirations expressed by and motivating his brushwork and composition that eventually build into his personal style. As a result of such spiritualization, the reader experiences a sense of detachment from the scene he depicts and from all the rest, and a state “purged of all that is stimulating, all that invites sensory participation” (James Cahill, Hills beyond a River, 119).

 

But Hegel not merely considers it “the task and aim of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, and our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man” (51), he sees art as ultimately one of the ways in which “man plumbs the depths of the world and a phase of the absolute’s developing consciousness itself” (44). Ni Zan’s paintings provide ways to attain this phase by evoking a more universal sense of desolation, dreariness or even melancholy, which in a sense reflects the spirit of that historical era when the Mongolian Yuan dynasty was coming to its end and when native Chinese intellectuals, depressed by the chaos and troubles, turn to their culture to seek spiritual strength or balance. Thus in Ni Zan’s painting, while the sensuous shapes refine out of reality or substantiality, the artist introduces more cultural elements to make the pictorial space more substantial and expressive. In the “Fishing Lodge,” the vast expanse of water that separates the hills and trees is “figured” as a blank surface on which the artist writes a poem to balance the overall composition, thus making the emptiness or blankness a generative or creative space – his own cultural identity is engraved there in the form of more conscious verbal creation. Moreover, the vertical lines of the poem lend supports to the slender tree trunks so that the vast stretch of blankness in the middle of the painting will not become overwhelming.

 

This cultural consciousness spiritualizes the sensuous and cultivates a purely formal interest in literati paintings like this. While the diagonal parallel of the graded heights of the trees and the knoll slanting upward to the left help the eye to bridge the gap between the distant shore and foreground, the poem further completes this formal effort by filling up the space on the right. In creating a rhythmatic movement to alternate with the horizontal delineation of the shore and rocks on the top and bottom parts of the painting, these vertical lines of the poem contribute more to the overall harmony, or the appearance of the spiritual in sensuous shapes. Such abstract formal play of lines and basic ink color are more emblematic of the artist’s style, personality and self-consciousness.