In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan. Furthermore, we will discuss how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Following us on our different paths and trajectories through the five modules of the course, you will encounter many of the reasons why environmental humanities study projects which strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis, and how they go about it. Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world. You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module. THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE: Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings. Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects. Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment. Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India. Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.
Hometown Nostalgia
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Do curso por University of Zurich
Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition
1 classificação
Na lição
Entangled Landscapes - Chinese Garden Concepts and Global Environments
Having assessed China’s ancient and modern conceptions of landscapes, and how they moved between cultures, social groups and societies, we will turn to the concept of entangled landscapes in the second module. Here, we will evaluate representations and narratives that explore the agency, conundrums and possibilities of applied transcultural aesthetic (and functional) paradigms in national politics of garden and park design. In a first step, the traveling concept of the Chinese garden will help us to evaluate the cultural and geopolitical affordances of gardens between Asia and Europe that are very often intimately connected to utopian visions of the ideal community. Next, we will encounter two different examples of a Chinese garden that bespeak their original sociopolitical functionality and conceptual underpinnings as much as the changes of these same when travelling across time and space. Our third theme of hometown nostalgia will study the turn of artists and intellectuals towards imaginary gardens of the past in view of large-scale heritage demolition in China. Finally, we will probe into the history of rural reconstruction and encounter two successful approaches towards the re-/creation of sustainable landscapes.
Conheça os instrutores
Andrea RiemenschnitterProf.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies
In this lesson, we look at modern Chinese landscape discourses and
representations that go beyond the representation of ruins and debris.
Mourning the rapid extinction of all material remnants of
history and culture in their country including architecture and landscapes,
many artists and poets invoke the traditional culture theme of hometown nostalgia.
We will study their comments by linking them to
earlier, famous articulations of nostalgia that connected
the individual’s feelings of sadness and dissatisfaction with
the existing world with the themes of withdrawal and utopia.
The ancient town of Lijiang in Yunnan province has become a telling example
of what is currently happening to the few remaining clusters of old buildings:
the calm, elegant, and homely atmosphere of
architectural relics gets converted into touristic entertainment parks,
and so-called traditional culture shows, that have little to do with lived traditions,
and are added to the spectacle that attracts
huge crowds of Chinese visitors craving noisy entertainment.
As a consequence, contemporary poets and painters evoke, quote and
twist ancient nostalgic representations in order to express their concern.
No matter whether grounded in modern or pre-modern times,
nostalgia in some way or another mediates between
the imagined or real happiness of bygone days and
sorrow for what has been lost in one’s present life.
In ancient times, such expressions of nostalgia were predominantly
linked to one’s disconnection with the place where one’s family was staying,
and consequently, where one’s
longing imagination would fly to whenever it could be released.
Li Bai famously wrote in his poem “Quiet Night Thoughts”:
Shimmering moonlight in front of the bed,
Could it be frost on the ground?
I raise my hand to look at the bright moon,
Then lower it, thinking of my hometown.
Kunming’s poet, Yu Jian,
turns the subtle romance into a heart-wrenching plaint when he writes:
We've moved once again
The house is more spacious than the former one, more solid
But I can no longer use the word hometown
I can no longer see the bright moon in front of my bed
Displacement was a constant in pre-modern educated people’s lives.
This is why innumerable pre-modern paintings and poems speak about nostalgia.
Until 1905, when the traditional educational system was abolished,
young scholars aiming at a career as imperial officials
had to travel far in order to take the prescribed exams.
The canonized exam contents shaped
elite education and thus effectively integrated the state and society.
Yet, it also generated a collective mood of
melancholia among uprooted civil servants across centuries and generations,
because they all experienced loneliness and estrangement from their kin.
Once successful, the candidates went off to
fill a bureaucratic position that was assigned to
them according to their scores in the exams and their ensuing performance while on duty.
The positions were not permanent, and very often
the official’s household remained in
his hometown, while he commuted between his various appointments.
Only occasional visits to the family were
possible due to the enormous distances to be covered.
Homesickness faithfully accompanied the travelers.
On the image you see an official on horseback painted by Zhao Mengfu,
a painter who flourished during the short-lived
Mongolian Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Even for those who were lucky and made it right into
the center instead of serving in a place far away from the family,
there could be so much intrigue and corruption
that upright officials often preferred
to withdraw to their provincial homes on some pretext.
On the image we see several people approaching
a mansion by either crossing a bridge or traveling by boat.
It’s assumed that Guo Xi painted this landscape
around 1080 for a friend who retired from office.
All protagonists look as if they come
together for a farewell reunion to send their friend off.
The elite’s high degree of mobility contributed to the rise
of several prestigious literary genres that eulogize landscapes,
among them travelogues about real places and exile poetry,
evoking one’s hometown as an imaginary landscape.
The landscape of the mind in exile poetry did not
necessarily rest upon descriptions of the outer appearance of the place,
but was unfailingly laden with emotional intensity.
Li Bai’s poem “Quite Nightfalls“, which has been quoted before, is
a good example for the vagueness of this type of poetic place writing.
If an official was overwhelmed by his feelings of displacement,
loneliness, or world-weariness,
his desire to withdraw from politics would likewise be pronounced
nostalgically, no matter whether the place he
chose was his original hometown or a new refuge.
With time, withdrawal from office in mundane society developed into
an upright person’s respectable decision, reflecting his true nature,
spiritual longing, and ethical stance.
As early as in the 5th century,
probably around 405 – when he resigned from his last official position –
China’s most famous recluse, Tao Yuanming, wrote:
Come away home! Just bid farewell to the society of men.
Since the world and I cannot agree,
What more have I to strive after?
Joy will be found in the hearty talks with my kin,
Or delight in music and books that lighten my mind.
When the farmers tell me of the arrival of spring,
There will be enough to do in the western fields.
An experience of exceptional intensity was the fall of a dynasty.
Surviving officials, who normally would not serve
two dynasties, in this case felt obliged to withdraw
and, depending on the policy of the new regime, were even forced to hide in
some secluded place in order to protect
themselves and their families from being persecuted.
All of this produced an enduring cultural trend of aesthetic negativity.
Its core trope, ascetic renunciation, could be conveyed in images of dissolution,
or else by articulating one’s grief for the dystopian state of the human world.
The former worked with patches of emptiness in landscape painting that
resonate with a calligraphy technique called feibai or “flying white”.
The latter was turned into a signature mood in shuqing poetry,
the poetry of articulating feelings,
in this case of melancholia,
distress, and world-weariness.
Albeit quite differently formularized in Chinese than in Western art,
natural landscapes offered an ideal stage for such moods,
for example in paintings of desolate late fall or winter scenery.
Contemporary painter Qiu Shihua returned to this characteristic feature of
traditional landscapes, and drove it to perfection in
his white landscapes, where at first glance nothing can be seen.
Only when looking at the picture carefully,
the contours of landscape elements gradually become visible.
This example is one of Qiu Shihua’s less radical works.
Here, one can still easily discern
several scattered groups of trees that seem to be enveloped in heavy fog.
It is obvious that the painter has left abundant room for
a viewer’s journey through her own imaginary scenery that
would allow her to take the painted landscape as a point of
departure for where to reach her mind’s desired abode.
If the collapse of a dynasty is inscribed into landscape representation,
it is to be found on the other end of the nostalgia spectrum:
not a calm contemplation on worldly transience, as in the empty landscapes,
but rather disconsolate grief over the loss of an entire world.
This poetry of sublime shock and grief bewails ruins,
death, and the cruel fate of the impoverished or starving population.
Environmentalist cartoons and satirical comments on the web have
begun to link this classical theme to environmental incidents.
Apocalyptic horror and grief
moreover transpires in a number of works reflecting on a future when humankind
will be deprived of the planet’s common goods such as clean air, water, and soil.
Here is an example alluding to the classical novel
“The Dream of the Red Chamber”, wherein the heroine whose surname is Lin, or Forest,
repays a debt of tears to the hero, who in
mythical times when she was a plant and he was a rock,
had nourished her with a lifesaving supply of dew water.
On the cartoon the weeping figure, reborn hero
Jia Baoyu, repays his debt of tears to a chopped-down forest.
Thereby, the classical connections between human and nonhuman fates are
re-invoked in order to warn about the danger of ecological suicide.
Concomitantly, a new hype in avant-garde art and literature concerning
the most popular Chinese utopian text over the past roughly 1600 years can be observed.
The “Story of Peach Blossom Spring” was written in the year
421 by Tao Yuanming whom we have met before.
He wrote this text in a time of political instability and national disunity,
after a dynasty had been overthrown and he
withdrew from civil service to live in reclusion.
The story describes how a fisherman encountered
a steep valley with blossoming peach trees and
a narrow grotto, which led to a lively village that had been
completely sealed off from the outer world for several hundred years.
The fisherman was hospitably treated by the villagers and stayed for a while,
but finally decided to return home.
Upon leaving his hosts, he was told that it
was worthless to reveal his experience to the world.
He did not keep his word and immediately
reported the details of his encounter to his superiors.
From then on, many people vainly tried to find the village.
The story’s vibrant cultural afterlife amounts to a strong undercurrent of
utopian longing for a hidden ideal community
that can flourish independently from the state,
its rulers, and society.
It was reproduced and reinvented across many centuries and borders.
Here you see a Japanese Peach Blossom Spring painting.
It not only recalls the yearning for a better world in Tao’s original text,
but moreover explicitly alludes to the most famous Chinese renditions of the theme.
Since Tao’s utopian model community was located
in the past rather than in the time to come,
posteriority’s longing for it was, from the very beginning, suffused with nostalgia.
Avant-garde aesthetic reflections on
modern China’s numerous utopian experiments recently
began to concentrate on the intricate semantics of Tao’s extremely influential text.
Beijing-based multimedia artist, Qiu Zhijie
integrated the theme into his ongoing mapping project, and produced
at least one map entirely dedicated to the utopia of the Peach Blossom Spring.
On other maps he marked Peach Blossoms Spring as one among other utopian places.
Most remarkably, he curated an exhibition of
artworks addressing the textural layers of Tao’s story.
Together with a selection of his students’ thought-provoking
works of art pertaining to the theme,
the performance of the fisherman’s imaginary journey
was staged on occasion of the exhibition opening.
The most mysterious line from the original text served as the title of the exhibition:
“it is worthless to reveal the experience to the world.”
Semantically, it is not clear what is meant by the adverb,
but the English translation of the curated art exhibition’s title
successfully reproduced the linguistic ambiguity, rendering it as
"Somewhere Only We Know“.
This is also the title of a popular song by
the British rock band Keane that was released in 2004
and visually orchestrated for the music video in a nocturnal landscape.
Another famous artist, Xu Bing,
invented the portable Peach Blossom Spring garden that represents
a portable utopia similar to the concept of the portable homeland.
Designing miniature landscapes with a pond,
rocks, little clay figurines and buildings,
artificial peach blossom branches,
and illumination for parks in London and Beijing,
he was careful not to hide the technical origin of the special effects,
so as to stress its fake nature. Calling it “Traveling to the Wonderland”, he accentuated
the imaginary quality of the place and
the dreamlike experience of the fisherman as narrated by Tao Yuanming,
while at the same time hinting at the possibility to create
one’s own miniature utopian space wherever one may be dwelling.
The fusion of the themes of
hometown nostalgia, withdrawal, and utopia with environmental concerns has sparked
impressive creative energies and produced some of the most thought-provoking and
persuasive literary and art works in the contemporary East Asian cultural sphere.
It is remarkable that China’s earliest tale of utopia has successfully rendered itself to
centuries of cultural critique without ever
exhausting its reservoir of new interpretive possibilities.
If we want to look for a model of cultural sustainability,
Peach Blossom Spring certainly qualifies.
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