Page 39 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

Some of the most important of these ideas
appeared early and persisted for centuries; most
were altered in major ways over time; some died
out or were supplanted; others coexisted with
opposing but equally entrenched ideas.
The relationship between art and these diverse
ideas is just as complex. Religious and philosophical
traditions provided the occasions for creating many
objects later treasured as art. The finest examples of
jade, bronze, silk, and ceramics were frequently
made to be used in religious rituals. These traditions
also provided a significant share of the imagery of
Chinese art: phoenixes, dragons, cicadas, birds, and
other creatures of cosmological significance are
common decorative motifs; sages, filial sons,
Buddhas, bodhisattvas, immortals, demons, and gods
are frequent subjects of figure painting and
sculpture. Chinese discourses on aesthetics, personal
refinement, and the value of the past all influenced
which objects would be treasured and preserved.
Placing higher value on a sample ot handwriting
than on a finely crafted chair, for instance, owes
much to Confucian and Daoist ideas about self-
cultivation. But certainly it is not always the case
that the ideas are prior and the art an expression or
reflection of them; meanings can be created and
conveyed through objects independently of words
and texts. Sometimes it is the textual version that is
the reflection or rationalization of meanings created
by the deployment or decoration of objects. For
example, most Chinese explanations of the meaning
of objects buried with the dead probably should be
interpreted as after-the-fact rationalizations or
speculations.
commonIt is practice for art historians to relate the
objects they study to elements in Chinese
intellectual and religious culture. In this volume, for and people feel strongly the truth or beauty ot
instance, Elizabeth Childs-Johnson relates the
decoration of early jades and bronzes to shamanism,
Wu Hung relates Warring States and Han tomb
furnishings to ideas about post-mortem existence,
and Helmut Brinker places Buddhist sculpture in
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
the context of Buddhist teachings. In this chapter I
shall take a broader view and try to relate the larger
contours of the history of Chinese art to the larger
contours of Chinese religious and intellectual
history. I will do this by examining four complexes
of ideas that have particular bearing on Chinese
—art ideas about rulers, mountains, writing, and
icons. I selected these four not because they make a
nice Chinese-sounding set of "The Four Sacred
Things," but because they let me get at some key
tensions and contradictions in the layered traditions
of Chinese religious and intellectual thought. Other
ideas, ones associated for instance with the sage,
vital force, the cosmos, paradise, flowers, fate,
emotions, and so on, could have been added or
substituted. But the four discussed here are diverse
enough to show something of the dynamics of a
cultural framework in which inconsistent, even
contradictory, ideas interacted in fruitful ways. ' In
ordinary social life, the coexistence of ideas in some
way opposed to each other gives people room to
think for themselves and to maneuver against
others for personal advantage; in the sphere of art it
gives artists and patrons the freedom to pick and
choose elements that suit their moods or purposes
as well as to refashion them into something new.
When their work is most creative, it provokes the
rethinking of basic notions, thus altering the
intellectual traditions from which they drew.
Although we may feel strongly the urge to look for
key principles that bring clarity to the apparent
untidiness of Chinese culture, in my view we
actually gain a deeper understanding it we resist
that urge and strive instead to comprehend a
dynamic situation in which opposing ideas,
practices, and symbols run up against each other
ideas and things not entirely consistent with each
other.
THE RULER
Chinese ideas about kingship cannot be ignored by
the student of Chinese art. Much of Chinese art
was either made for kingly use or influenced by
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