The Chinese Art Book: Music in Visual Art

Marquis Yi Bell Set, 433 BC

Dancing Figure and Musician, 2nd Century BC

Sound are longitudinal waves that propagate through air.  For those who are fortunate enough to have a sense of hearing and sight, we instinctively correlate the size and weight of an object to its sound.  We can feel the vibrations of the instrument as it moves through our bodies.

Some music in Chinese history was used for ritual and ornate state ceremony.  In this case, the bells in the picture above are black, heavy looking, and regular it its pattern and adornments.  Everything about this piece is deliberate and controlled.  They don't appear to be household objects, too heavy to be practical.  They appear to serve a grand purpose.  The size of the bells imply the sound carries over a large distance.  The picture above isn't from The Chinese Art Book, but there are also long wooden rods used to strike the bell.

The figures on the bottom are curvaceous and asymmetric, suggesting imbalance and movement.  I will assume for now that the figures are female.  The dance figure on the left has these long sleeves that accentuate her arms.  The movements are meant to take space with the purpose of attracting attention.  The figure looks as if she's mourning over a tomb, but it's a 25-stringed instrument that sits on the ground.  The position of her heads shows her direction of focus, and the hands are poised, ready to use the fine motor skills of her fingers to pluck complex chords and melodies.

The instrumentalists in the following video look dorky, but this is an accurate historical recreation of music from the Warring States period.  Ancient music sheets survived along with someone having the foresight to label each bell with its respective note.  The dance sequence is based on small models and historical painting:

I'm not sure what to make of these pieces.  I can only imagine myself an emperor of my court.  As all of my ministers are wining and dining in front of me, I am sitting on my throne, listening with my eyes closed as I consider the present moment of my empire.  I'm hoping no one assassinates me.

The Chinese Art Book: Text and Permenance

Diamond Sutra 868AD  

Stamping on Water, Song Dong, 1996

Note: The man is holding a seal carved with  "水," the character for water.

The Diamond Sutra is the earliest example of printed text that exists today.  This piece depicts a monk kneeling and prostrating himself in the front of the Buddha and enlightened deities.  The power of the written word derives from it's ability to create ideas that surpasses an individual's imagination.
Yet the written word on text is immobile.  It needs the human agent to influence action.

I find it ironic that the earliest published book is a Buddhist text because Buddhism preaches suffering from the attachment to identity.  The very nature of text is to identify and categorize.  Ideas of human beings are based on how humans relate the outside world to our own perceptions.  Buddhism claims perception in itself is a form of illusion, impermanent as nature erodes and constantly shifts identity.

When Song Dong attempts to imprint a human label onto nature, the label has no permanence.  The water has no ability to self identify, or hold onto such a label.  The liquid simply returns to it's original state and continues to flow.  Man cannot force nature to accept a label.

Song Dong's piece also shows how text relates to the flow of time.  Text will always be about recorded thoughts from the past.  Ink holds and maintains ideas when it attaches to paper, but the the of the present moment becomes the past.  The present in infinitesimally fleeting.  Nature needs no sense of self identity and continuously changes.

This contrast reflects upon the power and weakness of text.  If humans cling nurture the values of the past, text can multiply and remain within our social consciousness.  But just imagine what would happen if we placed The Diamond Sutra into the water.  Ideas that have life on paper would disintegrate into the impermanence of nature.  Perhaps we have to accept that even the grandest and deepest of human thoughts must dissipate into the constant shifting of nature.

The Chinese Art Book: Introduction

I remember one of my professors explaining how viewing cultural history from a chronological perspective generalizes the narrative as progressive, or future work "improves" from the past.  This isn't just a symptom of our capitalist society, where the passage of time provides growth.  It's also been used by Chinese dynasties to criticizes the flaws of the past.  Historical narratives written by dynasties tend to distort the narratives of its previous dynasty.  This doesn't mean that everything in the past must be inferior to the present, but we should at least be aware of such distortion trying to explain the values of a culture.

So the next thing I'll attempt is a series of art critique in The Chinese Art Book by Colin Mackenzie, Katie Hill, and Jeffrey Moser. Chinese art seems completely alien to the Western world because the viewer has to relearn all the historical context and baggage behind the art.  At least Western art is familiarized in our everyday world, like the mosaic in a church or lingerie on a billboard.  But why is Confucius on a can condensed milk? Question for the philosophers.

The Chinese Art Book does not place the pictures of artistic works in chronological order, rather each open page is a binary to the other side.  As the book jacket puts it, "The dialogue between each couple invites meanings that often go far beyond those of the individual works."
The next project I'll attempt on Blogger will attempt to figure out why The Chinese Art Book makes these binaries.  I will try my best to make these themes relatable to those unfamiliar with Chinese culture, but at certain point I'll have to delve into Chinese history.  Understanding Chinese culture is like trying to understand an episode of the Simpsons.  I remember showing The Simpsons to a guy from Shanghai, and I had to pause the video every 10 seconds because each joke derived from a unique aspect of American culture.  When a Westerner looks at Chinese culture, it's like a version of The Simpsons that lasted 3000 years.

My Tumblr thing was a complete failure.  It was boring and completely devoid of context.  Pandering to the internet crowd was pointless. Screw it, I'll write what I want. I want to do this because my bigger project involves delving into Chinese art, trying to pinpoint the artistic details that the Chinese saw in art.