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 Hegels 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.
Hegels 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 Zans 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 Nis 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 Hegels concept of spiritualization
in art, the sensuous is spiritualized, i.e. the spiritual appears in
sensuous shape (44). If Ni Zans 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 artists 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 absolutes
developing consciousness itself (44). Ni Zans 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 Zans 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 artists style, personality and self-consciousness.