Wang Wei’s Villa

Dreams, Geography, Maps, and Wangchuan in the Picture

Text: Dai Guangyu

Rice paper is spread out on a huge table. Water, ink, and color are applied, as I lay washes down layer by layer, as in the case of heavy brush baking and dyeing. As I repeat the process, a clearly layered and recognizable landscape appears. Indeed, the landscape I depict is related to a legendary poet. The quietude and poetic lyrical nature of the work convey bits of illusion and transcendence in emptiness. Isn’t this the aesthetic mood of a poet’s creation?

Autumn Evening in the Mountains

After fresh rain in mountains bare Autumn permeates evening air

Among pine-trees bright moonbeams peer Over crystal stones flows water clear

Bamboos whisper of washer-maids Lotus stirs when fishing boat wades

Though fragrant spring may pass away Still here’ s the place for you to stay

The Deer Enclosure

In pathless hills no man in sight But I still hear echoing sound

In gloomy forest peeps no light But sunbeams slant on mossy ground

Su Shi said that there is poetry in Wang Wei’s paintings and painting in his poetry. This is not a false statement. However, what I aimed for in this painting is not only an artistic conception of a certain poem. I also wanted to excavate many layers of sense from the natural environment. The environment inculcated Wang Wei’s poetic sensibility, melding with his aesthetic spirit so that his mind could connect with the imagery, purifying his mind in the act of writing, transcending the ordinary world of thought. Exactly, it is no longer an isolated fact that Wangchuan, the location of Wang Wei’s secluded villa in the mountains, was featured in many of his poems, celebrated by those who came after him. Like the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming, “Picking chrysanthemums beneath the east fence. Carefree I see the south hills”, the idyllic idea-image of poetry is not only embodied in verse but resounds with passionate appeal. Therefore, “Wangchuan”, as an attribute of thought, has transcended the geographical concept of Wangchuan, and has advanced from the Wangchuan identified by the map and the Wangchuan inhabited by humans into dimensions of thought, aesthetics, and philosophy. This is a wonderful and promising realm of thought, perhaps a holy realm. How can it be generalized?

However, in the repeated explorations of the conceptualization of this site and idea-image, it seems that Wangchuan is being searched for in a dream, tossed and turned, and yet there seems to be a path to follow. The reality is that the geographically located Wangchuan has long since disappeared, not to mention the conceptual Wangchuan, as have both Wang Wei and Wang Wei’s thinking. People do not know “Wangchuan,” let alone need the “Wangchuan” shaped by poetry. The clarity and contemplation of the “The empty mountain is peaceful. Moonlight on the water ripples. ” (Nalan Xingde, Qing Dynasty) is not what modern people want. I read in a Japanese scholar’s monograph that Wangchuan was transformed by a social enterprise during reform at the end of the Cultural Revolution into a broken pond with no pine forests or lakes in sight. I am saddened that my spiritual place has been destroyed! Ideas have nothing to rely on in the world, which the uplifted soul finds oppressive. Once again, the spirit of “Wangchuan” is a symbol of thought, isn’t it? Therefore, when I paint Wangchuan, I give it a different power, to testify in a different direction, pointing towards, for example, the ecological environment (not just the humanistic environment at the level of thought). Now, the real Wangchuan can no longer be painted with the spiritual care of Wang Wei’s poem. I felt it would be a promising idea to transcend geography and use the German landscape as my model, a stand in for the old Wangchuan, so I selected the Bavarian Chiemsee, evoking “Wangchuan” scenery as if in a dream. This is more in line with the ideological quality of transcendental significance, isn’t it? I named this painting “Wang Wei’s Villa” to appropriately express the pain in my heart, and the sorrow that I feel for the loss of the true meaning of Wangchuan, the site of Wang Wei’s former home.

A beautiful landscape painting presented itself. As the giver of the painting, I did not hesitate to tear it into pieces. Yes, I tore it up. Was I mad? Not really. That was my plan all along, and more destruction was yet to come. Then, I colored the torn pieces as if the tearing had never happened. The torn image, redrawn, cut into countless small squares, lined up in order, and then pasted back onto the linen frame, piece by piece, without error (to restore the landscape to its original state). Well, Wang Wei’s Villa is finished, and the traces of damage are there forever. Almost everyone who has seen this painting says: it’s all about ‘the beauty of the broken,’ well done! I am not at liberty to say more when I hear people say so. I can’t say anything more, except that “On war-torn land streams flow and mountains stand. In towns unquiet grass and weeds run riot.” These lines still ring in my ears.

A beautiful landscape painting presented itself. As the giver of the painting, I did not hesitate to tear it into pieces. Yes, I tore it up. Was I mad? Not really. That was my plan all along, and more destruction was yet to come. Then, I colored the torn pieces as if the tearing had never happened. The torn image, redrawn, cut into countless small squares, lined up in order, and then pasted back onto the linen frame, piece by piece, without error (to restore the landscape to its original state). Well, Wang Wei’s Villa is finished, and the traces of damage are there forever. Almost everyone who has seen this painting says: it’s all about ‘the beauty of the broken,’ well done! I am not at liberty to say more when I hear people say so. I can’t say anything more, except that “On war-torn land streams flow and mountains stand. In towns unquiet grass and weeds run riot.” These lines still ring in my ears.

Critic Zha Changping termed this creative practice as “Dai Guangyu’s Broken Landscape Painting” in his monograph History of Chinese Pioneering Art Thought, Volume 1: World Relational Aesthetics, which doesn’t sound nice, but it hits the nail on the head. At the ideological level, the concept of ‘broken landscape painting’ first emerged during the Ming and Qing dynasties in the period of Ding Ge in works by Huang Zongyi, Gu Yanwu, and Wang Fuzhi. The pain of ‘broken mountains,’ ‘leftover water,’ and ‘broken shores’ is incessant and strikes the heart. The loss of mountains and rivers led to the mental trauma of the loss of “mountains and waters”, which tore at one’s heart and lungs. The intellectual world was particularly struck by drastic changes in thinking during the period of the Ding Ge. Thinkers took the lead in asking questions, inquiring into the significance of humanistic thought and the spirit of guardianship of the unavoidable to cleanse the centuries, and became the right way of thinking for the world to follow in its own thinking. Considering this, should we not, if our souls are not yet dead, continue today to ask questions?

Now, as an exhibited work in the Geographies of Feeling art exhibition, isn’t Wang Wei’s Villa an apropos interpretation of the ideological theme of the exhibition? If so, I will have a good laugh.

July 29, 2023

In Bavaria, at Lake Chiemsee.

Text: Dr. Sophia Kidd

 The Wheel River poems 《辋川集》, a series of call and response 5-word quatrains by Tang Dynasty poets Wang Wei and Pei Di have historically the subject of much discussion, both in and outside of China. Poets, painters, musicians, and scholars have long discussed not only these poems but also the landscape scroll painting 《辋川图》by Wang Wei, himself, on which the poems were inscribed. Octavio Paz (1914-1998, Mexican poet and author) authored a book with Eliot Weinberger ( 1949-, American author) titled 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei ( 1987 ), which is an interesting analysis of 19 translations of the single poem “Lu Chai” from The Wheel River Poems.

The Deer Enclosure

Empty Mountains: no one to be seen.

Yet—hear— human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight enters the dark woods;

Again shining on the green moss, above.

空山不见人

但闻人语响

返景入深林

复照青苔上

Translated by Gary Snyder, 1978

This can be true not only of translations from one language into another, travelling as it does in this case from one culture into another; but this kind of rewriting also happens when a poem travels from one period to another. Wang Wei’s poems have been translated into many languages, and his painting 《辋川图》 has been recreated many times. Dai Guangyu has recreated this painting not once, but twice, for this exhibition. Dai not only recreates this painting, but destroys it and recreates it once again, bringing to our attention a historical process of reimagining and recreating original events, poems, and paintings.

By Dr. Sophia Kidd