I.
Before a notion or emergent perspective can take expressive form, a painter may need to revolve it in her mind for a long time. The Kunqu opera Peony Pavilion is a subject which Yao Yuan alluded to in a cardstock miniature several years ago. The picture shows only a hairpin placed at a slant, with dim haze encroaching from all four sides. The feel of this picture reminds me of a passage by the English critic Coleridge: “Suppose that a man who visits heaven in a dream is given a flower as proof of having been there, and suppose further that he wakes to find that flower still in his hand…”
It would be safe to say that the hairpin in Yao Yuan’s miniature is the residual evidence of a dream, and the dim haze represents the last shreds of that dream’s atmosphere.
Peony Pavilion is a woman’s erotic dream; it is also a dream of fluid movement through space-time. In the original play, Du Liniang experiences a three-part journey—through the human world, the underworld, and the dream realm. I surmise that the painter painted this miniature because she was struck by these layered dreams; however, she did not probe the subject further at the time. In that period she was more tempted by real-world landscapes and bird-and-flower scenes. As shown by her 2005 exhibition titled “Tracks Left in Snow,” she was bent upon revisiting the world view of the ancients: she traversed mountain terrain and emulated the brushwork of Hong Ren. She was especially fond of Huangshan after a snowfall, so the “hushed, lofty cleanness” and “unspoiled, bracing feel” of those mountains comes through in her works. Seventy-Two Scenes of Huangshan: A Portfolio is a distillation of her in-the-field experiences. What is more, she has a special affinity for the scenery of West Sichuan, which was the subject of her large painting “Snowy Mountains and Autumn Hues.” In these works she gradually shaped her own language and mode of presentation, especially the use of acute diagonals in her pictorial structure, which seems to carry on the craggy, eldritch quality of the Xin’an Painting School. At the same time, it fits with the skewed, precarious sense of modern aesthetics.
In my view, her mode of creative work is an ongoing pilgrimage to natural landscapes as sacred sites, in the spirit of old-time literati painters. Yao Yuan’s landscape painting can be seen as a remembrance and revival of this spirit. Such a pilgrimage has surely raised her to a higher plane of awareness as a painter. But precisely here it becomes obvious that contemporary ink painters have come up against a collective trap—“Bitter is the memory of our friend from Yunlin,/ For his charisma has left us in the dust.” (Shen Zhou’s inscription on “Folio for Reclining Travel”) Even in an era when material conditions were not yet transformed, our forbears were sighing because Ni Zan—that master who defined the zenith of literati painting— already appeared to them as a receding figure. That being so, in the midst of dealing with modern life, if one merely sinks into a morass of nostalgia and, in the name of pure landscape painting, pursues an arduous discipline of ink technique so as to recreate an ideal level of achievement, then the fallaciousness and danger of such a position are well summed up in these lines by Hong Ren: “With no home to shelter my dogged search for learning,/ Pressed by events, I betray my lifetime aims.” (“Poems in Heptameter”)
Ancient culture has by now become an image in a mirror: this is a historical fact we must recognize. Our take on classicism depends on our own modern setting and on our present awareness. An artist should learn to scrutinize everything from his/her own perspective and to engage in imaginative self-expression. Isn’t our separation from the landscape—from tradition in general—a predicament which deserves thematic treatment? What is more, a being full of passion and fantasy, in the short time of her existence, must surely engage with immediate circumstances of existence, even as she longs for completeness and communion across gulfs of time and space.

II.
This is precisely the intention put forth in “Garden Memories: A Startling Dream.” The title makes the subject matter clear. The scene “Startling Dream” in Peony Pavilion tells of Du Liniang, goes on a spring outing in a garden, falls asleep, and has a ravishing dream encounter with a lover she has never met. Upon waking from the dream, she does not know where to turn. The painter does not attempt to recreate this dream scene; instead, she presents a surreal vision not pinned down to a particular occasion.
In terms of actual viewing, the left-to-right development of the painting goes against the traditional line of sight, which runs from right to left. Perhaps this shows the subconscious tendency of a modern painter.
What first meets the eye is a garden wall, and our gaze follows this into a wintry, bleak, rain-obscured corner of a garden. The paving stones touch at irregular angles, as if ravages of time are reducing them to fragments. Beside the wall are two unoccupied stone seats and a dwarfish plum tree, of which we see only branches and no flower buds. Such bleakness does not pertain to a spring day of “blooms of lovely red and violet on all sides” as in the “Startling Dream” scene; rather, it is more like “slipping on wet moss, leaning against a tumbledown wall.” (Peony Pavilion, “Discovering a Scroll”) The season has been transposed.
Up to this point the brushwork is casual, apparently free-form, but precisely corresponding to light conditions of a damp, hazy winter day. Although means for expressing dreary scenes existed in the old days, and our painter may well have drawn on them, I am curious as to whether she might have taken a cue from the technique of Gerard Richter. That is to say, her long-term attention to modern art may have proved effective here. At any rate, the effect is just right. This shadowy scene is suited to remembrance and stray notions; at the same time it evokes a soul-summoning atmosphere.
Next in the line of sight is a rockery—an object which is of crucial importance in Peony Pavilion. As the text of the play makes clear, it is where the ecstatic dream-union takes place—“beside a plot of Paeonia lactiflora herbs, up against a taihu rock formation.” What is more, when Du Liniang surmises that her days on earth are numbered, she places a self-portrait in a small cave in the rock, hoping someone will happen upon it. One could describe such a miniature grotto as an intersection of past and future, a place of fantasy. Susan Sontag understood this to be a shared feature of gardens East and West, which offer to the eye “the most fascinating, the most refined and complex views.” (Where the Stress Falls, “A Place of Fantasy”)
As the eye moves further along, plum blossoms begin to show themselves. First comes a low branch, posed in a flirtatious come-hither droop, hinting at the profusion of a whole tree to come. Sure enough, next we see many branches lush with open blooms, extended in slanting lines, as if to offer their floral charms. It has never been a secret that floral sensuousness is linked with female sensuousness, that affairs of the flowerbed are linked with affairs of the heart. In modern art the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe have made this abundantly clear. In the progressive stages of this work by Yao Yuan, we now sense an atmosphere fraught with desire, so the next stage should bring us to a climax.
A scene of sexual coupling does indeed await us, but it is illusory. The picture shows a folding screen, slightly slanted, plunked down in the midst of this formal garden. Upon this painted screen the artist has managed to create a sense of depth, so that the screen appears as a doorway, and the image on it is the interior of a woman’s chamber, into which we can peer at the lovemaking that is underway. Stripped-off clothes lie messily on the floor, with embroidered slippers and a silk fan. As our gaze moves upward, a bed comes into view, which is where the loving couple should be sporting.
This voyeuristic focus turns out to be empty, like a trap set to make fools of us. The scene of intercourse is a bit further up, on a screen behind the bed. The device of a screen is employed a second time, this time as a screen within a screen, a play within a play. Through the transition of the two screens, the sexiness of this spring harem scene is diminished repeatedly. Instead of the wistfulness of “a dream that lingers somewhere near,” one senses illusion—“a feeling that will not stay, except in remembrance.”
Past the edge of the screen, our gaze comes to a modern-style courtyard. The background is a cold, clean-lined wall of square lattices. Beneath the plum tree in this courtyard is a modern female, looking like a Du Liniang who has yet to remove her costume. As the painter herself puts it, she is “floating on air, with a trancelike look on her face, as if she had taken a psychedelic drug. She floats in the air like a jellyfish floating in the ocean. She wears a finely patterned gown, as complicated as bridal lace.”
In the painting as a whole, a magical sense of space and time is achieved through displacement of screens. The scene painted on the screens is a bygone dream, but the Du Liniang in the courtyard is tied to the present. Present reality and dream figment, classical and modern images, intersect in the depths of the same formal garden, in the same picture, triggering our recognition and imagination. In fact this is the theme conveyed by Borges in his famous story “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “Time holds many series of events running counter or parallel to each other, or merging to become an intricate, endlessly expanding net.” This is an expanded notion of the now which embraces both past and future. The garden is like the labyrinth of time itself, filled with memory and imagination.

III.
And yet, this spatio-temporal displacement, or shall we say magical realism, is not an invention of modernism. In Wen Tingyun’s sensuous lyrics from the Song Dynasty, a screen often provides an illusory vision. The external landscape or interior scene shown on such a screen stands in a relation of displacement with the view through the widow. It increases the number of interfaces in a closed space, and by virtue of such layering, it lends an elusive, mysterious quality to the emotions of female subjects. Wen uses such imagery in a number of lines: “Firelight flickers on the layered ridges of small mountains.” “Above her pillow a mountain looms on the screen.” “Sad gazer from atop the gay-colored tower empty on the painted screen.”
Many old-time painters were aware of the possibilities of screens. In “Weiqi Match before a Folding Screen,” the weiqi [go] players on the bed are posed against a backdrop of mountains on the screen. This conveys their deep musings which seem to take them away to a remote setting. In “Night Banquet,” a conversion of temporal to spatial is accomplished by means of serial screens. The entire process of a banquet unfolds stage by stage, as if in the folds of a fan. The picture no longer represents a given space in a single moment: rather, it captures a process in time. Thus, in the world of art, the screen seems to have abandoned its literal function of partitioning and blocking: instead, it displaces and interjects, introducing alternative scenes and segments of time. It links up settings which were formerly non-contiguous. Not only that, many old-time four-panel screens showed seasonal depictions of the same scene. Though we are in linear time, we see spring, summer, fall, and winter before our eyes simultaneously, giving us a view of time as a whole.
Indeed, mere screens were put to such consummate uses that we cannot help exclaiming: Who would think that the ancients could be so “modern”!? From a contemporary art perspective, a painting style that conveys different time frames in one space would be traced to Cubism or Futurism. Time presented in contracted or dilated form would be traced to Bergsonian thought or to stream of consciousness in literature—Proust, Woolf, or Joyce. As for “displacement,” not only is it a widely used term in our modern critical vocabulary, it is also seen as a key rhetorical strategy in post-modernism.
This is an embarrassing fact to admit: without reference to illumination from the West, we seem incapable of noticing the lamps that have always burned brightly in our own tradition. However, if Western perspectives can help us to better appreciate the subtlety and loftiness of our tradition, so we can reconnect with it and play variations upon it, then borrowing is something to be glad about.

IV.
The relation of contemporary to classic feeds into Yao Yuan’s “anxiety” over the question of self-expression, and this shows her growing self-awareness as an artist. In contrast to the barrier which contemporary art has long posed against Chinese painting, Yao Yuan has always been curious and open enough to digest whatever nutrition she can glean from modernity, and to put it to work in her own projects.
Several years elapsed between her miniature of the hairpin to “Garden Memories: Startling Dream.” In the intervening period Yao Yuan gradually shifted her center of gravity away from classical forms and developed a painterly language that shows more personality. In her “Screen” series, she consciously used screens to juxtapose garden scenes with natural landscapes. (“Spring in Wuling”), or to combine disparate types of terrain (“Joy at Meeting” and “Qingping Music”) By the time she painted “Fairy’s Stance Remembered,” she was displacing features of old bird-and-flower painting into a present-day landscape. This was almost certainly a rehearsal for the treatment which appeared in “Garden Memories: Startling Dream.”
If we grant that the “Screen” series worked with juxtapositions of subject matter, we can make a further case that the “Gardens” series dealt with juxtapositions of visual language. In that group of paintings, named after gardens in Suzhou, she used fine-brush and free-form techniques within the same picture. Nimbly switching techniques between the open and filled-in areas of a scene made her language flexible and expressive.
The relation between formal gardens and natural landscapes has always been that of mirroring—from interior to exterior in the daily lives of the ancients. We can view a garden as “internal landscape” or “miniature scenery.” When Yao Yuan turns her gaze away from a distant natural setting and fixes it on a garden scene, she is in fact getting closer to a more formal treatment of language, and to her inner self. At the same time, miniature scenes and fantasy settings may perhaps correspond more closely, in a subtly faithful way, to the world we live in. Her “One Flower, One World” series savors just this kind of realization. The buddhas in their crumbling stone niches, when juxtaposed with flowers, show a time-defying equanimity that echoes the story of the Buddha “twirling a flower and smiling.” Mount Sumeru may be hidden in a mustard seed, or “an entire world reflected within a dewdrop.” The mustard seed or dewdrop represents the painter’s selfhood—her inner landscape and her dreams.
Now let us return to “Garden Memories: A Startling Dream.” Actually, we can use the old rhetorical scheme of “opening, development, turnabout, and resolution” to explain its structure. The shaded stone path is the “opening”; the rockery and blooming plum tree are the “development”; the screen is the “”turnabout”; and the modern courtyard is the “resolution.” An overview of the painting shows great naturalness of intergrading between open and filled-in areas; the same is true of the merging between different spaces, and the flow between reality and dream. Only the “resolution” part is relatively weak. Du Liniang’s expression and pose seem a bit stiff, as if in the grip of a ghostly premonition, and without the sense of renewal and buoyancy the painter intended to convey. One cannot help but find this regrettable. Nevertheless, the effect of this painting is enough to make a viewer’s heart pound. It gives a glimpse of a possible way of integrating the classical and the modern. Perhaps this painting marks the concluding treatment of a certain theme, but more than that it is a beginning. Through this painting a new space of expression has been opened.

Translated by Denis Mair

Note:
[1] Zhu Zhu is an eminent critic and curator based in Nanjing. His criticism has been published in many art journals, including Dangdai and Dongfang Yishu Dajia. A book of his critical essays has been published by Hunan Fine Arts Press [Artists Through the Eyes of a Critic, 2008]. Major exhibitions he has curated include “The Great Yangtze River Bridge”[White Canvas Gallery, Nanjing, 2007]; “Revolution and Rotation” [Qinghe Art Center, Nanjing, 2007]; “Origin Point” [Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2007]; “Artists through the Eyes of a Critic” [Shengzhi Art Space, Beijing, 2008]; “A Privately-Run Courtroom: The Art of Liu Dahong” [Beijing, 2008].