Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society (review)

Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society is a set of five essays developed from papers presented at a symposium of the same name at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California-Berkeley, in March of 1996. The theme was the idea of Wen-hsin Yeh, who has also edited the volume and written the introduction. The participant-essayists represent the broadest range of fields in which the interrelation between landscape, culture, and power are addressed in current sinology. Moreover, each is a scholar who is extremely active in his or her discipline and who has dealt with one or more aspects of the subject in previous writings. Each essay stands alone as a contribution to its own field. At the same time, the collection in this book represents the best of interdisciplinary studies.

The success of the volume as a collaborative effort no doubt is largely due to Yeh, who, as she tells us in her introduction, framed the way in which she hoped the essays would address a potentially broad subject essentially unbounded by temporal limitations (the Song period to the present). Yeh seeks answers to two questions: what does an attention to space teach us about power relationships and the cultural dynamics that shaped Chinese society, and what is peculiarly Chinese about the function of space as a medium for the negotiation of power?

The first author, Martin Powers, explores these questions through Chinese landscape painting in an essay called "When Is Landscape Like a Body?" Using poetry, inscriptions on paintings, and writings by painters, mostly of the Song dynasty, Powers argues that the rise of the landscape as a subject in post-Tang painting was a reflection of social and societal change. He suggests that Song officials whose status and position had come by way of the civil service exam sought painting subjects that were different from those of the hereditary aristocracy of Tang China. He concedes that the subject matter of Tang painting was carried into the Song dynasty—but, he explains, in new contexts. The change had to do with what Powers calls a "gestural theory of pictorial expression." In the writings of the tenth-century painter-essayist Jing Hao and the eleventh-century essayist on painting Guo Ruoxu, the vocabulary of Chinese painting comes to include words like qi, feng, shi, and tai, which Powers translates as "character," "manner," "gesture," and "demeanor." Drawing from studies of British and other European landscape painting by J. Barrell, A. Bermingham, S. Daniels, and W.J.T. Mitchell, among others, Powers turns to the vocabulary of Song landscapists to explain his theory of the "body" of Song landscape painting, concluding that landscape can be a "site for negotiating cultural hegemony." Powers ends with a strong and specific conclusion, four features of the "competition between social groups" as it is "projected onto natural imagery": (1) Social and political discourse is opportunistic; (2) in China, discursive evolution was dialectical; (3) style can encode deep suppositions about identity; and (4) the fundamental rhetorical advantage offered by landscape was its lack of artifice. Those who have read Martin Powers are used to such bold ideas. Not all Chinese painting experts will agree with him, but they will find in this essay challenges to the study of Song landscape painting as it is customarily expounded.

In the second essay, Linda Walton investigates academies of the Southern Song as a means of understanding societal changes in the period. She sees the establishment and naming of academies in Southeast China as a direct result of the rise of Neo-Confucianism, specifically of the response of Neo-Confucians to the "sacred geography" of Buddhism and Daoism—for example, the Four Famous Buddhist Mountains and the Five Marchmounts. Even though feng and shan sacrifices at sacred peaks had been prescribed since earliest times in order to ensure the...