THE ROLE OF LANDSCAPE ART IN CULTURAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: CHINESE AND EUROPEAN COMPARISONS (part 1)

A study comparing the genre of landscape painting between East and West, the East is represented by China and the West is represented by some European countries, with the scope of consideration according to the historical length of countries-nations, the article provides an in-depth vision of the national identity in landscape art. The authors have thoroughly researched the field of landscape art, demonstrating art’s profound relationship with geographical, political and cultural contexts, as well as its connection to philosophy, in the case of China it is specifically way, philosophy of life. From there, readers can contemplate the deeper and broader national identity of arts in the world.

Abstract

The depiction of landscape in art has played a major role in the creation of cultural identities in both China and Europe. Landscape depiction has a history of over 1000 years in China, whilst in Europe its evolution has been more recent. Landscape art (shan shui) has remained a constant feature of Chinese culture and has changed little in style and purpose since the Song dynasty. In Europe, landscape depictions have been significant in the modern determination of cultural and national identities and have served to educate consumers about their country. Consideration is given here to Holland, England, Norway, Finland and China, demonstrating how landscape depictions served to support a certain definition of Chinese culture but have played little political role there, whilst in Europe landscape art has been produced in a variety of contexts, including providing support for nationalism and the determination of national identity.

Introduction

The concept of cultural identity commonly refers to a feeling of belonging to a group in which there are a number of shared attributes which might include, among other things, knowledge, beliefs, artefacts, arts, morals, and law. Ultimately, all culture is about the ascription of values and meanings to both tangible and intangible elements of human experience. National identity is seen as a specific form of cultural identity, in which political need adds an expedient element to the mix [1]. National identity exists in opposition to the identity of other political groups and is generally associated with a notion of territoriality. A shared language as the basis for cultural identity at the heart of a nation has been emphasized in the influential work of Benedict Anderson [2]. Many scholars have placed great emphasis on the role of literature in various forms, including poetry and drama, as contributing to the development of cultural identity, and literacy within a population facilitates the transmission of values from ruling classes or elite groups, and aids political projects. Such projects generally include the perpetuation of the underpinning ideology of the state itself and the sustainability of support for the state’s existence from the wider population.

It is the contention of this article that artistic depictions of the physical and cultural landscapes of a state’s territory play a significant role in the creation and perpetuation of cultural and national identities. Such depictions can be used as part of a political project, for example in the establishment of feelings of national identity where they can unite disparate elements in societies which cannot be brought together by other means, for example through a shared language. This argument is elaborated for the case of China as a whole and for a selection of states within Europe which together illustrate certain general patterns in the significance of landscape art in issues of identity in Europe, but which also show the influence of specific national circumstances.

It is salutary to note the coincidence in dates of the last great period before the present when these two major world regions both experienced internal cohesion. It is common to date a unified Chinese cultural identity to the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 AD), which saw the growth of the influence of Confucianism as a basis for social thought. This period overlaps with that of the Roman Empire in Europe and the wider Mediterranean world. Despite significant changes in the ruling dynasty, and even periods of ‘foreign’ rule (the Yuan dynasty, for example), key aspects of Chinese culture have remained remarkably consistent over the ensuing two millennia [3]: the dominance of the Han ethnic group; the continuity of a concept of an Imperial China under dynastic rule; the uniqueness and ubiquity of the written language (hanzi) among its intellectual classes [4,5]; continuous traditions of philosophy (and the occasional assimilation of newer elements); and continuities in the arts including poetry, painting, and the decorative arts.

The contrast with post-Roman Europe is profound. The high period of the Roman Empire had a very clear cultural identity, expressed through language (the use of Latin as a lingua franca), religion (the veneration of the Roman gods), law, the decorative arts, architecture and philosophy. At least for the élite, Imperial identity (as citizens of Rome) and cultural identity went hand in hand. However, after the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in 476 AD there was almost complete fragmentation of the previous Imperial realm. Roman culture, with the exception of the use of Latin, was significantly reduced in significance. The only significant unifying force became the progressive conversion of most of the peoples of the continent to Christianity, a process that took one thousand years.

Several scholars have examined the ways in which certain landscapes have had value attributed to them as elements in the establishment of cultural identity. These values are then seen as being passed from generation to generation and through diverse social groups through means such as education, literature and the modern world of marketing and advertising [6,7,8]. However, much of the commentary, for example by Ebbatson [9], on the importance of landscape has highlighted literary descriptions rather than other means of depiction. In this paper the emphasis is placed neither on landscapes themselves, nor on literary descriptions, but on artistic representations of the natural world and of landscapes and the contribution of such depictions to cultural and national identities. We consider a world of visible cultural artefacts derived at least in part from the human gaze on the landscape and the reflection of that gaze.

The Ancient Greeks handed down several views on the nature of art. Plato saw all arts as a form of imitation (mimesis), seeking to reproduce reality, whether in the theatre, in sculpture or painting. Pictorial artists, in this view, strive to produce the most realistic depictions of people, objects or scenery: in doing so they are effectively craftsmen and women. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw art as aiming at understanding the essence of existence, the dynamism of the subject matter, and thus producing an idealized view, reflecting more deeply on the spirit of nature. The Aristotelian view of art requires greater powers of creativity and reflection on the part of the artist.

In this article we contend that depictions of natural and cultural landscapes can serve the creation of cultural and national identity not solely through the faithful reproduction of what the artist can see, but can also derive their power from artists’ reflective engagement with the elements that constitute landscape and from subsequent depictions that are symbolist in kind. The dominant practices of art in China and in Europe have, over the last two millennia, taken divergent routes, particularly in the depiction of the natural landscape [10]. Chinese art has followed a more ‘Aristotelian’ path, whilst Western or European art has predominantly followed a ‘Platonic’ route, although with important exceptions. The result of these different evolutionary paths has been that Chinese landscape art has, for over a thousand years, played an emblematic role as a key element in Chinese cultural identity. By contrast, the depiction of landscapes did not develop until several centuries later in Europe and was not of general significance as a cultural symbol even then. But from the nineteenth century onwards, landscape art in Europe has played a role in the definition of national cultures and, increasingly, in national identity itself. The closing era for the discussion here is around the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911 and the First World War in Europe. Although there are manifest differences between the two world regions under consideration, we also suggest that there are certain commonalities.

Three substantial questions lie at the heart of this paper. Firstly, how, when and why did depictions of landscape emerge as central aspects of cultural identity in China? Secondly, in a Europe with a much more divided cultural history, how, when and why did issues of cultural and national identity incorporate or encourage landscape art? Thirdly, in what ways do the chosen subjects and means of landscape depiction compare between China and Europe; what have been the purposes of such art; and what have the legacies of such depiction been?

The Centrality of Shan Shui in Chinese Cultural Identity

A crucial note of caution about terminology is needed at the start of this discussion. The English term ‘landscape’ entered the language as a description of a painting of a tract of scenery, originally known as a ‘landskip’. Its meaning was then extended such that landscapes became seen as objective things in themselves and not just as artistic interpretations, and the word ‘landscape’ has become commonly qualified by adjectives such as ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, or by terms describing particular environments such as ‘desert landscapes’ or ‘mountain landscapes’. In what follows we adopt a broad understanding of the concept with particular emphasis on natural landscapes and rural landscapes in which human interference has had a transforming influence. The word ‘landscape’ is usually translated into Mandarin as shan shui but this is far from exact: shan shui actually means ‘mountain water’, and this terminology leads straight into consideration of the subject matter of the dominant Chinese depictions of nature. The earliest extant Chinese paintings, dating from the Han dynasty, depict human figures—mostly on funerary goods. But over successive centuries, the dominant subject matter changed such that for the past millennium shan shui art has dominated.

Such painting lies at the very heart of Chinese culture and is closely related to politics, philosophy, literature, and religion. Shan shui emphasizes the essential interaction between human beings and nature, with harmony being maintained if humans see themselves as an intrinsic part of nature. The earliest rituals of kingship in China involved the belief that the heavens meet the earth in the mountains, and thus it is to the mountains that the king must go to seek enlightenment and approbation. In this way, Chinese traditions parallel those of the Judaeo-Christian faiths in which prophets such as Moses and Elijah ascend mountains for divine guidance. An emphasis on mountains accords with Confucian views of the workings of destiny through nature. The centrality of nature in Chinese culture is manifest in numerous prose works from the past, and natural landscapes are also the subject of a significant body of Chinese poetry; for example, using a complex pattern of similes and metaphors predominantly relating to the natural world [11]. Calligraphic strokes can be interpreted as metaphors taken from the imagery of mountains and rivers. Similarly, there can be no understanding of Chinese urban planning from ancient times to the present without some knowledge of shan shui ideas and the associated geomancy of feng shui (‘wind water’). In total, the consideration of landscape reveals a complex world of cultural thought and influences that transcend any single field of human endeavour. Zong Bing (373–443 AD), one of the first to write about the depiction of landscape, wrote that “landscapes have a material existence, and yet also reach into the spiritual domain”, and, importantly, he saw the contemplation of landscape as transcending the religions and philosophies of China—Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Landscape has therefore been one of the principle themes of Chinese culture for many centuries.

One of the most striking features of Chinese painting is that the depiction of landscapes has become the major motif and has been so for nearly 1500 years. This contrasts with Western painting that was characterized by an emphasis on people right until the final third of the last millennium. The art historian William Watson [12] commented that while Chinese art paid attention to the natural world through landscape art, Western painting has been more attached to the human form: both are eternal themes that involve infinite varieties of human vision, sensation and response.

However, Chinese ideas on the depiction of landscapes have evolved through time, with particular changes in thinking and practices occurring through the Wei (220–264 AD), Jin (265–317), Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1279) dynasties. Ever since the preceding Qin and Han periods, the various peoples that make up the Chinese population have been unified in a single vision of society, with the removal of earlier ideas of divine rule; instead, the emphasis has consistently been on self-learning and fulfilment through reflection. During the Wei and Jin periods social ideas broadened into concern for the relationships of people within nature, these ideas being expressed primarily through poetry. This marked a revolution in Chinese thought, equivalent to the Renaissance period in Europe over 1000 years later. An emblematic painting of this early period is Luo Shen Fu Tu by Gu Kaizhi (Figure 1). This was a development of a long love poem, Luo Shen Fu, written by Cao Zhi in the middle of the third century AD. Around 100 years later Gu Kaizhi created a pure work of art on the same story. What is important is that in this panel painting there is no didactic message—it is purely aimed at creating a beautiful image in which figures are set in an attractive landscape [13].

This is not an isolated example. Painters of the Tang dynasty created many similar works, of which one of the most famous is a painting by Zhan Ziqian entitled Spring Excursion, executed in the late sixth century AD (Figure 2). This is normally regarded as the earliest example of true shan shui art—whilst there are a small number of very tiny figures in the work, the emphasis is on the mountains in the mist, the trees, the physical relief of the land in the foreground and the river across which a tiny boat is progressing. Other contemporary paintings take as subject matter groups of people making music in a forest, and scenes of physical labour. In each case the landscape setting plays an increasingly important role in the work.

Figure 1. Luo Shen Fu Tu—‘The Nymph of the Luo River’. By Gu Kaizhi. ca 390 AD.

Figure 2. Spring Excursion. By Zhan Ziqian. c 600 AD.

From the middle of the first millennium AD onwards, Chinese culture has emphasized the natural as a core concept and as the subject for a whole range of artistic interpretations, often with no hard division between the different arts—for example, painters often added poetry to their finished works. Concern for a concept of mankind in nature developed further with the argument that there is no distinction between mankind and nature and that everything should be regarded as part of the natural environment—indeed, that there should be no concept of ‘nature’ since to maintain such a concept would necessitate the existence of an alternative. This understanding differs fundamentally from that commonly found in Western societies where ‘man’ and ‘nature’ are seen as separate entities. From the Wei and Jin dynasties onwards, an all-inclusive idea of a natural world has become a, if not the, core element in Chinese culture, and the depiction of that world in various arts has become a means of representing the cultural identity of the Chinese Empire and all that it stood for politically, socially and morally, as well as aesthetically [14].

Early depictions of landscape in Chinese art were realistic, but over time styles changed and became more abstract. In addition, two different traditions emerged, relating to the culture of the Imperial palace on the one hand, and to the culture of the intellectual or ‘literati’ classes on the other. In both, however, the depiction of landscape remained at the heart of cultural identity.

Landscape depictions progressively became the dominant motif in painting, eclipsing portraiture. By the later Tang dynasty, these paintings were rich in colour and decorative in style. Later generations have labelled these works ‘blue-green shan shui’ and they have become particularly associated with the cultural taste and identity of the Imperial household. The use of rare painting materials, as well as other artistic artefacts, such as the use of gold, supported royal authority in indicating the higher plane inhabited by the Emperor and his family. From the Song dynasty onwards, colourful blue-green shan shui art was associated with the image of the royal family [15]. But Chinese cultural identity, whilst maintaining the emphasis on the depiction of landscape, and with continued interest in scenery, birds, flowers, mountains and water, became divided in two in terms of aesthetic attitudes—one surrounding the Emperor and the Imperial court, and the other associated with those independent of royal patronage. In effect, a separation developed between intellectual and official (or Imperial) positions regarding art and thus culture. Nevertheless, both artistic traditions held the depiction of the natural world as the fundamental symbol constituting the cultural identity of China. However, it would not be appropriate to label either of these as involving a ‘national’ identity: no concept of a nation is comprehensible for this period nor, arguably, until the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 with Russia when the Chinese Empire first formally acknowledged the existence of another sovereign state and thus, by implication, also recognized a cultural and political entity with different characteristics from those of China itself [16].

The development of a non-Imperial, or intellectual, cultural identity through landscape painting from the Song dynasty onwards involved the simplification of the materials used and a transformation in the representational qualities of the paintings created. Whilst Imperial taste remained wedded to a Platonic attempt to imitate the world around, non-Imperial art progressively adopted a more Aristotelian reflection of the inner workings of nature as experienced through the intellect of the artist. Throughout the later Tang and Song dynasties, Chinese culture outside the court paid increasing attention to the meaning and understanding of the self and the importance of self-cultivation [16]. This view was reflective of Confucian ideals which had come back into vogue during the Tang period. True shan shui art started to move away from attempts at realism, with pictures revealing a more abstract understanding of nature. In particular, it became the norm to produce ‘paintings’ without colour, the materials being used consisting simply of pen, brush, ink, and ink wash.

The initial focus of the viewer is not then on the imitative aspects of the work or its truthful representation of reality. Instead, the viewer undergoes a process of enhanced perception and cognition involving the intellects of both artist and viewer, leading into true abstract consciousness of the subject. In this new painting style, the artist creates pictures according to his or her (in practice always his) intellectual understanding of the natural world rather than seeking realistic reproductions of an actual scene. Art is produced in the studio, taking elements from the natural world but not attempting to reproduce their assemblage in any one location. The artist creates his own attempt at a beautiful and fitting composition of these elements, reflecting Confucian ideas on the search for harmony and virtue.

After the end of the Song dynasty (1279) the styles of painting (and poetry) associated with the literati classes gradually came to dominate over the aesthetic tastes of the Imperial court. In Europe, the history of art is closely associated with the history of the aristocracy (both secular and religious) until at least the seventeenth century and later in many areas. In China, the history of art becomes, from a much earlier period, the history of a class of scholars and the intelligentsia. In Europe, aristocratic patronage stressed portraiture (amongst the secular nobility) and religious imagery (among church patrons), whilst in China the long-standing position of nature at the centre of culture drove the practice of landscape depiction, whether in realist or more abstract styles.

The scholar, painter and art theorist Dong Qichang (1555–1636 AD), writing in the late Ming period, explicitly criticized court tastes and established, through his critical writings, a framework for the future depiction of landscape in Chinese art [17]. He delimited and defined what he termed as ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ schools of art (neither term being explicitly geographical) and determined the future of landscape depictions for the next three hundred years [18].

In simple terms, Dong Qichang’s Southern school (nan zong) consisted of intellectual or literati painting, while the Northern school (bei zong) reflected the aesthetic taste of the royal family. He regarded this Northern school as producing a series of artisan, rather than artistic, works produced for ‘consumption’ by others. In contrast, the Southern school of intellectual artists strove to make their work pure and noble, uninfluenced by commercial considerations. The preferred Southern school was exclusively concerned with landscape. In Dong’s writings there is almost no reference to people, flowers or birds, except those to be found within a landscape, and this omission is very deliberate on his part. The rendering of human figures or the naturalistic depictions of flora and fauna embody the practical values of art, and Dong regarded such works as purely secular and unworthy of an intellectual. The scholarly work that Dong Qichang advocated put total emphasis on the achievement of deep meaning through the aesthetics of pen and ink with the exclusion, as far as possible, of any narrative. In Chinese cultural views, the weaker the narrative the stronger the painting as a work of art. Such an argument contrasts strongly with Western artistic thinking at the same period.

The depiction of landscape through the idealized form of shan shui painting thus stood as an increasingly central aspect of Chinese cultural identity from the Wei and Jin dynasties through to the Qing (1644–1911 AD) dynasty. However, over this long period the philosophical basis for such depictions developed from the exemplification of the harmony of nature with mankind as a part of that entity, through to an emphasis on personal growth and intellectual development expressed through the skill of the artist in handling pen and ink to create an image of beauty and depth. The work of Ni Zan (1301–1374 AD) exemplifies something of the continuity in this line of thinking (Figure 3), involving shan shui images that could date from any period between around 1000 and 1850 AD (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Six Gentlemen. By Ni Zan. 1345 AD.

Throughout a period of over a thousand years, the depiction of the natural world lay at the heart of Chinese cultural identity, with the prestige of such art reflecting certain constants in Chinese philosophy and thought. The contemplation of the unity of nature, derived from Confucian thought overlain with certain concepts from Taoism, provided the mainspring of the self-awareness of Chinese society. However, for much of this extended period China did not have to confront the problem of determining differences between its own cultural identity and that of other societies or polities. From the seventeenth century onwards, however, China started to experience new cultural influences—for example in the arrival of Jesuit missionaries bringing with them Western art traditions. Until the nineteenth century, however, the dominance of nature in Chinese culture, and of the landscape motif in art, almost universally taken as classical shan shui painting, remained dominant elements in Chinese cultural identity.

During the nineteenth century the spectre of Imperial decline in the face of foreign powers, defeat in conflicts such as the Opium Wars, and increased contact with other societies, led to periods of anxiety over what was distinctive about Chinese culture—particularly in relation to that of a rampant West [3,19,20]. The later Ming and Qing dynasties were also marked by a diminution in the authority of a sequence of Emperors who were felt, in various ways, to be less effective than those of the past. In the search for a particularly Chinese version of modernity, other styles and motifs for art developed alongside the traditional depictions of landscape. Yet, it is remarkable that Chinese art of the past century still strongly references the shan shui paintings of the previous 1000 years. Since 1911 and the end of the Qing dynasty, China has undergone massive political upheavals—the establishment of Modern China, Maoism, and the contemporary post-Mao period. Painting has become a tool for specific purposes relating to politics and policies [21,22]—for example, the establishment of a specific Maoist style, or in tourism planning for rural areas. However, throughout this period the philosophy of shan shui has remained a continuing element. Ideas of the nation have become important, just as in nineteenth-century Europe, and have been promulgated through art. However, there has been a repeated recourse to the centrality of shan shui and the depiction of nature following a tradition that has played a major role for over 1500 years. The cultural identity of China could be taken as given throughout changing dynasties, and the occasional fragmentation and reunification of the Empire did little to alter the fundamental basis of a society and culture rooted in patterns of thought derived from Confucianism. Emperors of China had no need to seek to develop a distinctive national identity for their realm: it already existed in the taken-for-granted polity of the Empire itself. Since the ending of the Empire in 1911, the dominant elements of culture have actually changed little—the dominance of the Han peoples, the uniqueness of the language, philosophical traditions, historic products of the arts, and a common vernacular culture. National identity in China is an outgrowth of cultural identity rather than being dependent on a particular form of government [23].

(end of part 1)

References

Orchard, V. Culture as opposed to what? Cultural belonging in the context of national and European identity. J. Soc. Theory2002, 5, 419–433. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Verso: London, UK, 1983. [Google Scholar]
Meissner, W. China’s search for cultural and national identity from the nineteenth century to the present. China Perspect.2006, 68, 41–54. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef][Green Version]
Dong, H. A History of the Chinese Language; Routledge: London, UK, 2014. [Google Scholar]
Norman, J. Chinese; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1988. [Google Scholar]
Cosgrove, D. Landscape and the European sense of sight—Eyeing nature. In Handbook of Cultural Geography; Anderson, K., Ed.; Sage: London, UK, 2002. [Google Scholar]
Daniels, S. Landscape and art. In A Companion to Cultural Geography; Duncan, J., Ed.; John Wiley: Hoboken, NJ, USA, 2004. [Google Scholar]
Han, F. Cultural landscape: A Chinese way of seeing nature. In Managing Cultural Landscapes; Taylor, K., Lennon, J., Eds.; Routledge: London, UK, 2012. [Google Scholar]
Ebbatson, R. An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920; Routledge: London, UK, 2005. [Google Scholar]
Law, S.S.-M. Reading Chinese Painting: Beyond Forms and Colors, A Comparative Approach to Art Appreciation; Shanghai Book Traders: Shanghai, China, 2016. [Google Scholar]
Ye, J.Y. Gǔ Shī Cí Kè; SDX Joint Publishing Company: Beijing, China, 2018. [Google Scholar]
Watson, W. The Arts of China to AD 900; Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, USA, 1995. [Google Scholar]
Zhang, H. Jiě Xī “Luò Shén FùTú” dì Měi Xué Sī Xiǎng. Northwest Norm. Univ.2009, 5, 50–53. [Google Scholar]
Wu, X. Shān Shuǐ Zhī Jìng; SDX Joint Publishing Company: Beijing, China, 2015. [Google Scholar]
Vandier-Nicolas, N. La peinture chinoise à l’époque Song’. Civilis. Médiévale1966, 36, 513–532. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Keay, J. China: A History; HarperPress: London, UK, 2008. [Google Scholar]
Cahill, J. The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China; Columbia University Press: New York, NY, USA, 1994. [Google Scholar]
Shao, Q. Wǎn Míng Yǐ Lái Zhōng Guó Huà de Yǔ Jìng yǔ YǔYì; Shandong Fine Arts Publishing House: Jinan, China, 2012. [Google Scholar]
Clarke, D. Chinese Art and its Encounter with the World; Hong Kong University Press: Hong Kong, China, 2011. [Google Scholar]
Wong, A.Y. Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China; University of Hawai’i Press: Honolulu, HI, USA, 2006. [Google Scholar]
Gauché, E. Tourismification of a Shui village in the mountainous province of Guizhou (South China); imaginaries and the use of landscape for political ends. Alpine Res.2007, 105, 3. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef][Green Version]
Wei, N. Establishing a new scopic regime: The new landscape painting of Mao’s era. Stud.2017, 31, 894–917. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
He, B. Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China; Routledge: London, UK, 2000. [Google Scholar]