Popular wisdom about the typical characteristics of the Chinese mentality is doubly mistaken. When dealing with poetry and art, “Chineseness” is disturbingly realistic and mundane to the level of vulgarity and triviality, and often from the viewpoint of logic and rationality, it is incredibly annoying and pretentious. This is due to a popular western belief that the higher meaning of the physical world is obtained through the abstraction of it. For the Chinese, it is not a reductive distillation of nature via a single direction that extracts meaning. Rather, it is the dynamic exchange between the extremes of the real and unreal that electrifies meaning, poetic meaning most of all. Abstraction provided a great service to western science and the philosophy of discovery and to the subsequent manipulation of the order of things, whereas poetic hallucination has helped us to overcome sad feelings, bad luck and hard work. Is it that the goal of civilization is different for the west and east? While westerners discuss matters and memory, we Chinese follow “Yi Jing”. Yi translates as “imagination” and “Jing” refers to “circumstance”. The argument is that the ability to navigate between the real and the unreal is at the core of Chinese intellectual and artistic tradition. The notion of Yi Jing can be detected in all fields of creation, but it is the foundation for art dealing with the mountains and water. The mountains and water are not the only subject matters of Chinese art and the foundation of Chinese personality. They have to be perceived as unmistakably real so that the spirit of the creator and the observer can be uplifted without limits. By “real” I don’t mean replica of the earthly project but rather a projection of the personality. For instance, the ancient Chinese preferred paper as a medium to represent the mountains and water. It is two-dimensional and is always open to addition and juxtaposition. Through the free manipulation of realistic components, an imaginative circumstance (Yi Jing) can be brought forth. As regards a mountain-like building, I am reminded of a Chinese motto that says: “Intelligent ones live by water, benevolent ones live in the mountains.” I have no way of divining the true motive behind this project, but I am impressed how the mountain and water doctrine is being applied to these otherwise repetitive and dull modern housing slabs taking root all over Shanghai. To end my journey between the real and the unreal, let me point out that the physical being is never at the centre of Chinese Civilization. We believe they are temporary beings which will vanish sooner than expected. Permanence is not set in stone! Mountains move, water flows. As Confucius once said: “It is gone as it is.” Qingyun MA architect / cultural critic lives & works in Shanghai
