‘Leaping the fence’: transition between Garden and Landscape in Chinese and European Garden traditions.
Burwalls Conference Centre, University of Bristol
18-20 April 2008
Horace Walpole remarked memorably of the English landscape designer William Kent: ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. Yet the desire to establish a relationship between the enclosed and the unfettered – ‘garden’ and ‘landscape’ – has been a recurrent aspect of man’s encounters with nature across many cultures and over many different periods of history. Such general categories as ‘nature’, ‘enclosure’ and indeed the ‘garden’ are indeed free-floating concepts which need to be tethered down in accordance with the particular culture and context that may be under discussion.
This symposium focuses on two very different traditions, the Chinese and the European. In both cases, there are social, cultural and poetic factors, as well as purely physical barriers, that define the enclosure of land, and these serve to mediate the contrast between the garden and the wider landscape. Motion through the landscape, whether on foot or with the comforts of modern tourism, creates a exploratory momentum that transcends the static view. Mountains, rather than merely serving as a backdrop to the garden enclosure, are brought within their compass both in the form of representative rocks and through the poetic fictions of the garden owner. Traditions which lay store by the notion of the garden as a retreat from the world also offer a means of engaging with the practical issues of agriculture.
The papers delivered will not seek to make far-fetched connections, or indeed to establish oppositions, between Chinese and European practices. The approach will be broadly comparative. A major focus will be on the period of the Ming dynasty in China, and the Early Modern period (Renaissance and seventeenth century) which runs roughly contemporaneously in Europe. 16th-century Chinese wood-block prints of landscape will be discussed, as will the frescoes situated within, and representing, Italian villa gardens. The reception of Virgil’s Georgics in 17th-century English poetry from the period of the Civil War will be the subject of one paper, while another will analyse the gardens created by the retired late-Ming politician and poet Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646). More recent themes will be the discovery of the Lake District by 18th-century devotees of the picturesque, and the poetic constructions invoking landscape that anticipate Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta.
Speakers will include: Malcolm Andrews (Kent), Stephen Bann (Bristol), Eric de Jong (Wageningen); Alison Hardie (Leeds), Henry Power (Exeter), Denis Ribouillault (Courtauld) and Wang Yi (Chinese Academy of Sciences).
Discussants will include: Michel Conan (Dumbarton Oaks); Craig Clunas (Oxford), and Xin Wu (Bristol: Dumbarton Oaks).
A second conference on the theme of the Interlacing of Nature and Culture will take place at Dumbarton Oaks in May 2008. On this occasion the area of investigation will be expanded to encompass American, Asian and Ancient Mediterranean perspectives on the fusion of enclosed and unfettered nature.
The support is acknowledged of: Dumbarton Oaks (Garden and Landscape Studies section); BIRTHA (Bristol Institute for Research in the Arts and Humanities), the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition, and BICC (British Inter-university China Centre).
Programme
Friday 18 April
19.00 Welcome dinner
Saturday 19 April
9.15 Welcome
Chair: Stephen Bann (Bristol)
9.30 – 10.15
Denis Ribouillault (Courtauld)
Looking and Moving in the Landscape of
Renaissance Rome
10-15 – 11.00
Wang Yi (Dumbarton Oaks/Chinese Academy of Social Science)
The Relationship of Chinese Landscape Art
and Wood-block Art
from the late 16th century to
the early 17th century
11.00 – 11.30 COFFEE
11.30 – 12.15
Alison Hardie (Leeds)
The garden owner as farming hermit:
The ‘pastoral’ poetry of Ruan Dacheng
(1587-1646)
12.15 – 13.00
Henry Power (Exeter)
‘A table rase and pure’: The poetic
landscape of the English Civil War
13.00 – 14.30 LUNCH
14.30 – 15.30
Chair: TBC
Jiang Bo (Dumbarton Oaks/ Chinese Institute
of Archaeology)
The ‘Made’ Nature: a perspective on Tang Gardens
Xin Wu (Dumbarton Oaks/Bristol)
Landscape Tours and Garden Scenes at Yuelu Academy:
12th and 18th century
15.30 – 16.00 TEA
16.00 – 17.30
DISCUSSION
Chair: Craig Clunas (Oxford)
Sunday
20 April
Chair: Timothy Mowl (Bristol)
9.30 – 10.15
Malcolm Andrews (Kent)
Wilderness as Garden: The Picturesque and
domestication of landscape
10.15 – 11.00
David Hays (Dumbarton Oaks/Illinois
Champaign-Urbana)
Above, Beyond and Between: Spanning the
Natural Divide at Cardada
11.00 – 11.30 COFFEE
11.30 – 12.15
Stephen Bann (Bristol)
‘Little fields Long Horizons’: the poetic
prelude to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s gardens
12.15 – 13.00
Erik de Jong (Wageningen)
Creation at Teardrop Park:
A recent design by Michael van Valkenburg
Associates, New York City,
2004
13.00 – 14.30 LUNCH
14.30 – 16.00
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
Chair: Michel Conan (Dumbarton Oaks)