A Guest Artist's Lecture--Art with Traditional Chinese Gardens
Last Monday, December 1st, we got a meaningful-- actually hard to understand at beginning-- lecture from Zhao Bing, a landscape architect from Nanjing Forestry University, with a brief introduction , principles of traditional Chinese garden designing, and a contrast of differences of Chinese--Oriental and Western idea.
Professor Zhao's impressive explanation on the irreplaceable factors of a Chinese gardens(the picture above) made us get interested in the ART of traditional Chinese architecture in Suzhou. The private gardens in Suzhou , or 'the oldest forest in city', are a perfect example of showing mild, leisurable harmony scenery --Both landscape and waterscape--in a noisy, bustling city. In Addition, they also showed the garden owners' simple and elegant sentiments and interests. 'What a
brilliant, magnetic historical POEM!' Professor Zhao said. Then, Professor continued his speech on particular features of Gardens in Suzhou. 'Maybe,' Professor said, 'the first thing which went over these garden designers' mind is : Use symbolization to represent the NATURE.' In order to prove this, he gave us a sentence from a poem' Got a hill for thousand-mile mountain range, have a spoon to imagine water in huge', which told us the designers used to make a small land(water)scape in the garden to represent the magnificent scenery through whole China. But although they used symbolization, the designing always went along in natural expressions. For example, if the a rockery is composed of many small stone stacked together,they should be stacked like natural rock vein patterns to MINIMIZE the ARTIFICIAL MARKS--just for being natural. Another example is, that the pools, streams, always have a connection to water body outside the garden, for make the waterscape lively--and then become LOVELY in a NATURE WAY.
Finally, Professor Zhao told us the main idea of traditional Chinese, or Oriental thought of expressing beauty for gardens. 'Can you find that you'd never enter a garden in Suzhou straightly and directly? That's one of the example of traditional Chinese culture.Chinese designers,not similar the Western thought of having a glorious,gorgeous, astonishing design, they want to make a gentle, comfortable image, but a profound meaning inside.'
This lecture was really meaningful to all of the students! That's a ironic thing because I became shamed throughout this lecture--I had very poor knowledge in this subject! Professor Zhao really remind me of that I should pay more attention on my native culture...Anyway, I can suck knowledge like a sponge at all time!
In addition, from the lecture on last Monday, now I realized that we need to try to comprehend the different concepts of value and outlook on life between China and the West, for becoming adaptive in both this two cultures. Isn't it perfectly right?
