<研究論文(原著論文)>Bifa Ji and Qizhi: Interpretations for Muqi and Contemporary Chinese Art

Abstract

Jing Hao’s Bifa Ji (Notes on Brushwork) applies the principle of qiyun (氣韻rhythmic vitality) to the painting of natural scenery. The usefulness of this text about shanshui (山水) aesthetics for contemporary artists and designers is an open question in China today. For Jing Hao, a painting exhibits qiyun by displaying an image that is authentic (眞 zhen), and an authentic image is alive and true to the vitality of nature after the artist passes qi (氣 spirit) through zhi (質substance). The image manifesting qi and zhi differs from all images that represent nature in terms of human perceptual experience of forms, patterns, objects, motions or material processes. To uphold Jing Hao’s aesthetic for artists and audiences today, I offer a comparative aesthetics that translates zhi in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s language for the first-dimension of the “surface of the visible” beheld by the painter. To build a case for translating Jing Hao’s shanshui aesthetics in this way, I consider accounts that Stephen Owen and Mattias Obert offer for Bifa Ji. By amplifying Jing Hao with novel language from Merleau- Ponty, I conclude that shanshui painting is about a direct personal acquaintance and uniqueness of corporal union with nature, for which analytic and pragmatist philosophies of art have no language. 1 Applying this experimental interpretation of Jing Hao’s aesthetics, I improve art historical accounts of Muqi’s Fishing Village in Twilight, a painting from the Southern Song dynasty. With images of emptiness that emphasize the visible, Muqi helps by showing: a viewer notices a paradigm for existence as a unique sentient being. Turning to contemporary Chinese art, I argue that the ink painter Jizi successfully synthesizes Jing Hao’s paradigm for contact with nature with the compositional power displayed in some cases of modern art. The question of whether Jizi’s paintings are shanshui ? raised by critics Yu Yang and Wang Duanting?is resolved. Jizi’s Dao of Ink Series shows how the intimate dimension of the visible unites the human individual with the universe as a whole. Jing Hao’s 10th century aesthetics encourages Euro-American philosophers to change their paradigm for contact with nature.