'Shan-Shui-Hua' - traditional Chinese landscape painting reinterpreted as moving digital visualisation

This paper is based on a practice-led research project and includes the demonstration of video art. It investigates how East Asian traditions of landscape art can be understood through reference to the condition of Western contemporary visual culture. Proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics the traditional concept of landscape painting ‘Shan-Shui-Hua’ is recreated in modern digital visualisation practice to explore form and question linear perspective that aims to represent realistic space. PERSPECTIVE AND TEMPORALITY IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE LANDSCAPE PAINTING The intended purpose and motivation of science and technological progress in our Western civilisation is mainly directed by achieving perfection in measuring and rendering the objective and accountable ‘truth’ of our world. With regard to the history of the development of visualisation tools this has continuously led towards the invention of hardware and software whose success is measured by its potential to render a more perfect representational image. The creation of real or hyper-real space is one of the main objectives in film and 3D visualisation practice. Based on the Renaissance tradition, achieving the effect of realistic space by the employment of linear perspective is a major preoccupation of Western visual culture. In the construction of a virtual 3D space the Cartesian grid is used to reconstruct this geometrical perspective, whereas Eastern culture has a concept of using multiple vanishing points that within which the creation of a realistic space is not one of its aims. So unlike the Western painting tradition, which under the strong influence of science emphasized proportion, perspective and realistic depiction of form, the Chinese artists never felt compelled to restrict themselves to this limited view. Because a painting is not a window, there is no need to imitate the mechanics of vision and view a scene from only one spot. Instead, they developed a more abstract and free spirited attitude towards art. ‘The Chinese artist inspects the world from unrestricted, shifting points of view and is essentially different from the strict and realistic western 'single perspective'. This unique feature enabled Chinese painters to free themselves from the limitations of human vision and permitted more freedom to improvise using ones imagination.’ [1] ‘And so like a century old guiding principle reads that the painter must have seen a landscape from several viewpoints in order to fathom its being, we find in one and the same picture several perspectives. One and the same figure is not rarely to be seen EVA 2008 London Conference ~ 22-24 July Christin Bolewski _____________________________________________________________________ 28 repeatedly in a scroll. We accompany it more or less in its migration. The artists of the traditional Chinese landscape painting do not show us a moment in time, but rather a time span.’ [2] Chinese landscape painting is called ‘Shan-Shui-Hua’ the three characters standing for respectively mountain, water, and painting. It is composed through a system of multiple vanishing points called ‘San-e-ho’, the three distances i.e. high distance, deep distance and level distance, also called distance stressing its height, its depth and its leveled broadness. (Many of these Chinese terms are rather ambiguous and not easily explained for our Western minds. They have multiple layers of meaning, with varying interpretations and without exact equivalents in other languages.) This was first established by the painter Kuo Hsi in his famous book 'Sublime notes by forests and rivers': ‘Mountain has three distances. Looking at the top of a mountain from its base shows distance stressing its height. Looking at the back of a mountain from its front shows distance stressing its depth. Looking at the mountain beyond from a mountain close by shows distance stressing its leveled broadness.’ [3] An artist can combine two or three expressions of distance in a single landscape. The composition of a hanging scroll usually places the foreground at the bottom of the scroll with the middle and far distances moving upward toward the top of the scroll. ‘Next to a mountain of great height he might place a valley, creating the illusion of immense depth. Or he might illustrate a panoramic scene with different expressions of space in different parts’ [4] ‘Early Spring’, done in 1072, is the most famous masterpiece by the painter Kuo Hsi and is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Northern Song ‘monumental landscape’ tradition. [5] (Image can be found at the website of National Palace Museum Taipei) Kuo Hsi arranged the main elements of the painting along the central axis of a vertical scroll. The composition combines the techniques of tall, deep, and flat distance to construct a full-scene landscape. So multi-perspective as well as temporality are important features for both East Asian aesthetics and the medium of film, and the Chinese horizontal hand scroll is referred to as the first motion picture: it unrolls in time and space and is enjoyed as a progression while the painting is revealed foot by foot. One could say that film montage, specifically ‘continuity montage’ the montage of time and space as an addition of shots taken from different viewpoints in a sequence, is assembled in a single picture; the temporal plain is composed within one image. Once the Russian avantgarde filmmaker Sergej Eisenstein was inspired by this commonality and by the Chinese open metaphorical language in the development of his theory of film montage. [6] He studied Japanese language and art and concluded that all the various branches of Japanese art were permeated by the same cinematic element, so that it was appropriate that the cinema should learn from other forms of Japanese artistic practice. Besides extracting techniques from Chinese characters and the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein had also drawn on traditional scroll paintings that fused in his mind a combined image of close-ups and composition in depth. He was saddened that the montage principles exhibited by the Kabuki plays and the Sino-Japanese ideograms had not been adopted within Far-Eastern cinema, which, in the end had embraced the 'revolting' aesthetic styles of American and European cinema. ‘SHAN-SHUI-HUA’ REINTERPRETED: THE DIGITAL VIDEO SCROLL EVA 2008 London Conference ~ 22-24 July Christin Bolewski _____________________________________________________________________ 29 From the perspective of a contemporary digital media artist and film maker it is very challenging to look once again closer to the relation between East Asian aesthetics and the medium film and to reconsider the early observation of Eisenstein in an approach to digital film practice and to apply it to the condition of digital visualisation technologies and to the constraints that these tools can impose on the structure of video. Confronting the tools of modern computer visualisation with the East Asian concept of the three distances of ‘San-e-ho’ creates an artistic artefact contrasting, confronting and counterpointing both positions. My video work ‘Shan-Shui-Hua’ is not the research of an art historian, it is an individual response as an artist and includes artistic freedom. The contemporary French philosopher Francois Jullien translates Chinese aesthetics for Western understanding. In his book ‘The detour over China’ (free translation of the German title ‘Umweg über China’) and other writings. [7] Jullien attempts to create a new approach to Western culture: A ‘local change of thinking’, a process of distancing from Western thinking as an effective strategy where Chinese philosophy functions as an ‘outside’ from which to see more clearly the values and preoccupation of Western culture. In the sense of Francois Jullien I make a ‘detour over China’. Emphasizing to some extent pictorial concepts and practical aspects of the Chinese painting process enables me to distance and to take a fresh approach to Western film and digital visualisation practice, but at the same time using software tools that generally have been devised to create 2D and 3D artefacts from a Western cultural perspective avoids the pitfalls of echoing and imitating Chinese landscape painting to closely. The concept of the three perspectives and the endless scroll are explored through digital filmmaking using the possibilities of 2D and 3D video compositing and animation tools or virtual camera, depths and particle